Eros Psychopompos

The tradition’s second face of Eros — Eros as guide of souls to the underworld, not only the life-god of the Symposium but the death-god of Orphic iconography and later antiquity. Hillman retrieves this face against the Freudian split of Eros from Thanatos.

“By not inhibiting the death, Socrates’ daimon acted in accordance with eros psychopompos, the ‘Eros with crossed legs and torch reversed… the commonest of all symbols for death’ in later antiquity and in Orphic thought. Eros leads the soul, not only as the Freudian life-instinct separated from and contrary to Thanatos; Eros is also a face of Thanatos, has death within it (the inhibiting component that holds back life), and leads life into the invisible psychic realm ‘below’ and ‘beyond’ mere life, endowing it with the meanings of the soul given by death” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 1972).

Eros is the figure who carries the soul across thresholds, and some of those thresholds are final. The daimonic structure of the Symposium — Eros as bridge between mortal and immortal — is here taken seriously in its downward direction. To fall in love is already a small death; to die is Eros’s final service. The “inhibiting” face of Eros is what holds a life from mere appetite and orients it toward what it cannot have in this world.

The concept marks the overlap between Eros and hermes-as-leader-on: both are psychopompos, both are threshold-figures, both mediate between what lives and what is beyond life. Classical iconography makes this explicit: the sleeping or torch-lowered Eros on sarcophagi is not a sentimental image but a theological one.

The concept names what Jung’s Eros/logos polarity cannot say: Eros has death within him, not as opposite but as face. This is what keeps the tradition’s Eros from becoming the commercial love of the twentieth century.

Relationships

Primary sources

The Myth of Analysis (Hillman 1972)
plato-symposium (Plato, c. 385 BCE)