Underworld vs. underground

The load-bearing distinction that organizes The Dream and the Underworld. The underground is physis — roots, seed, vitality, fertility, the chthonic in its generative mode. The underworld is psyche — essence, shade, eidolon, the realm of ontological rather than vital statement. Hillman insists the two must not be conflated: “Because the underworld differs so radically from the underground, that which has its home there, dreams, must refer to a psychic or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones” (Hillman 1979).

Where classical Jungian practice tends to read dark figures in dreams as earthy potentials in the Ge or Demeter sense — sexuality, fertility, aggression, emotionality awaiting integration — Hillman reads them as shades awaiting recognition. “We will begin to find that dreams reflect an underworld of essences rather than an underground of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becoming” (Hillman 1979). The dream of decomposition is not compost; it is a dispatch from Hades. Demeter is not Persephone; the fertile mother is not her dead daughter.

The stakes of the distinction are hermeneutic. If the dream belongs to the underground, it speaks of life and may be pressed into the service of life — growth, development, integration. If the dream belongs to the underworld, it speaks of soul, and the attempt to convert its shade-images into dayworld nutriment is a category error. “At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair” — and therefore neither the rhetoric of progress nor the vocabulary of regression applies. The distinction is the foundation stone on which the book’s whole polemic against compensation stands.

Relationships

• dream-as-underworld
• hillman-dream-underworld
• demeter-persephone
• nekyia
• eidolon
• image-as-psyche

Primary sources

• hillman-dream-underworld (Hillman 1979, chs. “Psyche,” “Dream”)