Orientation
Hercules strangles what he cannot understand. James Hillman calls him, across The Dream and the Underworld, “a killer among images,” a hero whose sanity requires that the image be made mad and then destroyed, and he traces this violence to a single Macedonian epithet, aretos, “the warlike,” which Hillman treats as the ground of his own attack on the heroic ego still ruling therapeutic culture. The name itself carries the wound: composed of Hera and kleos, Hercules is glory won through the goddess who persecutes him, a fusion Hillman reads, against Nilsson’s discomfort with it, as proof that the opposites are one rather than an embarrassing accident of etymology. That persecution multiplies rather than resolves; Hillman catalogues epithets, Aider, Protector-from-Evil, Victor, each a distinct mytheme rather than a single fixed character. Structurally he stands opposite Hades, whose passivity Hillman takes as the underworld’s rebuke to Herculean action, and he can only cross into the mysteries by submission to a doorkeeper god, Pylios, at the very gate he elsewhere tries to force. Walter Burkert pushes the figure further back, into hunter-culture shamanism, where descent to fetch the dead already belongs to the hero before Olympus claims him.
