The ancient mystery traditions, spiritually oriented psychologies such as those of Carl Jung and those contemporary spiritual traditions that seek to revive the ancient mysteries have in common a desire to understand the deeper, ‘truer’ nature of the individual. Common to all three is the idea that our surface ‘everyday’ personality is only a small part of us. Hidden in the depths, often envisaged as the watery depths, is a part of the personality that is not the product of our biology or of societal conditioning but is a seed of individuality that endures beyond bodily death and indeed pre-exists the body. This core can be termed ‘transpersonal’, a part of us that touches on eternity. To pursue the water analogy, in the language of myth this deep core may be symbolized as a fish within the depths of the ocean, a symbol found commonly in ancient myth (Jung [1945/54] 1967c: para. 408). In Irish tradition, the fish is the salmon, which swims from its spawning ground in freshwater rivers thousands of miles to its ancestral ocean feeding grounds until, possessed by what to the ancients was a mysterious knowledge, it returns once more to the place of its spawning to begin the cycle again.