Gods as Diseases

Jung’s late formulation, drawn into archetypal psychology by Hillman, names the depth tradition’s reading of the modern symptom: “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” (Jung, CW 13, cited by Hillman in Peaks and Vales).

The image is exact. The temples are gone. The processions, the libations, the festal calendar that once held the gods in collective ritual no longer hold them. They have not therefore departed; they have descended. They appear now as bodily symptom and psychic affliction — Apollo as the compulsion to clarity and distance, Saturn as melancholic paranoia, Mars as the fight in the face of every conversation, Daphne-Diana as the suicide-by-naturalness of retreat into foliage (Hillman, Peaks and Vales).

The therapeutic consequence is the inversion of the standard contract. “Cure the symptom and lose the god. Had Jacob not grappled with the Daemon he would indeed have not been hurt, and he would not have been Jacob either” (Hillman, Peaks and Vales). The symptom is the form taken by what the tradition once called the daimon; the body is the temple in which the gods are now housed. To pathologize, in Hillman’s sense, is to recognize a god in the disease and to live the relation that recognition demands. The reading is grounded in polytheistic-psychology: monotheism in the psyche produces the singleness-of-vision that calls every other archetypal style “psychopathology.”

Relationships

• pathologizing
• symptom
• polytheistic-psychology
• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes
• daimon

Primary sources

• peaks-and-vales (Hillman 1975)
• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
• Jung, CW 13