Downward love

Hillman’s name for the aspect of Eros that points not toward the horizon of the other but into the depth of the shade. Against the familiar reading of Eros as connector, libido, the principle of relation and ascent, Hillman invokes the ancient figure of Amor with wings folded and torch pointing downward — “this downward love appeared all through later antiquity as statues of Amor, wings folded, his torch pointing downward” (Hillman 1979). The same yearning, he argues, later becomes romanticism’s longing for dissolution and, in its literalized form, the suicidal love-pact.

The genealogy Hillman traces puts Eros “into the bed of Sleep, Death, and Dreams among the brood of Night” — not as pathology but as cosmology. Eros is brother of Hades (Schelling); child of Want (Plato, Symposium); son of Venus; and, in the context of dream and depth, the god whose arrow points into image rather than into body. “Modern statements about Eros, of which contemporary psychology is so romantically resplendent, carry no validity unless these statements be developed against one or another of the precise mythic contexts.”

The clinical consequence is a reading of apparently “morbid” attachment — to the dead, to the lost image, to the shade of what will not return — not as regression but as soul’s proper eroticism toward its own depth. The downward-pointing torch is not a figure of despair; it is the icon of a love that finds its proper object in the darkness where image lives. Where the Eros-Psyche tandem has been read as the ascent of soul through love, Hillman recovers the counter-figure: the love that descends, that seeks the beloved among the shades, that carries its light downward into Hades.

Relationships

Primary sources

hillman-dream-underworld (Hillman 1979, ch. “Psyche”)