Tartarus

Tartarus occupies a distinctive stratum in the depth-psychological corpus: it is simultaneously a cosmogonic abyss, a penal underworld, and an alchemical residue, and each register carries separate psychological freight. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the earliest canonical source, Tartarus is the primordial chasm beneath earth — as far below the ground as heaven is above it — enclosed by bronze walls and triple night, the prison into which the Titans are hurled after their defeat by Zeus and the Hecatoncheires. Plato’s Phaedo elaborates a moral geography in which Tartarus serves as irremediable destination for the incurably wicked, with a secondary function as purgatorial passage for those whose crimes, though grave, admit of expiation. This bifurcation — permanent confinement versus temporary purgation — recurs in depth-psychological readings as an image of the distinction between what is genuinely irredeemable in the psyche and what is merely in need of suffering. Liz Greene reads the imprisonment of Kronos-Saturn in Tartarus as the mythic archetype of compulsive repetition and the shadow’s deepest stratum. Abraham’s alchemical dictionary isolates a separate, material usage: Tartarus as the hardened wine-stone or calx deposited in vessels, the prima materia in its most concrete and recalcitrant form. The term thus marks, across the corpus, both the psyche’s outermost limit of containment and its most intractable residue.

In the library 13 passages

The vanquished were enchained and thrown into Tartaros, which is as deep below the earth as the earth is below the sky. An anvil dropped from the sky falls for nine nights, and on the tenth it reaches the earth; and likewise it falls nine nights and days from the earth, and on the tenth day it reaches Tartaros.

Kerényi presents Tartarus as the cosmogonic antipode of heaven — a measurable extreme of cosmic depth functioning as the ultimate containment of the defeated Titans.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951thesis

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bound them in bitter chains when they had conquered them by their strength for all their great spirit, as far beneath the earth as heaven is above earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth. Round it runs a fence of bronze, and night spreads in triple line all about it.

Hesiod’s primary account establishes Tartarus as the most remote and enclosed stratum of the cosmos, defined by iron containment and impenetrable darkness — the mythic prototype for depth psychology’s image of the absolute unconscious.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700thesis

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those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes — who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like — such are hurled into Tartarus which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out.

Plato positions Tartarus as the realm of absolute moral irremediability, distinguishing permanent confinement from purgatorial passage and thereby providing depth psychology with a template for what cannot be integrated.

Plato, Phaedo, -385thesis

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those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes — such are hurled into Tartarus which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not irremediable — these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year.

This parallel Phaedo passage confirms Plato’s dual topology of Tartarus: absolute imprisonment for the irredeemable, and temporary immersion as purgation for those capable of eventual release.

Plato, Phaedothesis

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In punishment for his sin against the gods, Tantalos was confined for eternity in Tartaros, the darkest abyss of the underworld. There he was stood in a pool, with the water reaching his chin; he was tormented by thirst, but could not drink, for when he bent down, the water disappeared.

Greene reads Tantalus’s confinement in Tartarus as the mythic image of the ego’s eternal proximity to satisfaction without the capacity for it — a psychological state of permanent unfulfillment generated by the sin of hubris against the gods.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis

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Jupiter seized control and locked his father in Tartarus, the darkest region of the underworld, under the guardianship of Pluto to keep him out of mischief.

Greene uses the imprisonment of Saturn-Kronos in Tartarus as an astrological-psychological figure for the compulsive, shadow-ridden dimension of the Saturnian complex consigned to the deepest underworld under Plutonian supervision.

Liz Greene, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, 1976supporting

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Tartarus is bordered by a bronze fence, a three-lapped necklace of night ‘shed’ round it. The Titans are ‘hidden’ there ‘under misty dark’ where ‘are the springs and termini of dark earth and misty Tartarus.’

Padel situates Tartarus within the Greek imagery of consciousness and its loss, reading its enclosure by night and bronze as the spatial counterpart of the psyche’s darkening in death, faint, and unconsciousness.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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First there was Chaos and night and the dark abyss and the second Tartarus, but earth and air and heaven did not yet exist. In the immense clefts of the Erebos — that is, the deeper abyss — night with her dark wings gave birth to a wind egg.

Von Franz draws on the Orphic cosmogony to position Tartarus as a pre-cosmic generative abyss co-present with Chaos and Erebos, from which Eros and the first divine generation emerge — making it a source of psychic potentiality rather than merely a place of punishment.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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I’m going to take you and throw you into black Tartarus, into a hopeless darkness. What a terrible end! And neither your mother nor your father will bring you back to the light of day!

Kerényi’s translation of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes presents Tartarus as Apollo’s threat — a darkness from which no divine rescue is possible — underscoring its function as the ultimate negation of the light of consciousness and divine relation.

Kerényi, Karl, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944supporting

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Martin Ruland’s Lexicon of Alchemy defines ‘Tartarus’ as ‘Calculus of Wine, called Wine-stone by similitude, the stone or deposit which cleaves to the sides of the vessels’.

Abraham documents the alchemical usage of Tartarus as a material residue — the hardened precipitate clinging to the vessel — which in the alchemical-psychological tradition figures the most recalcitrant, earth-bound stratum of the prima materia.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting

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We are accustomed to think of the Titans as criminals, rebels against high heaven condemned for their sin of hubris to languish in Tartarus. It is well to look at things from the other side, the side set before us in the Prometheus of Aischylus.

Harrison challenges the moralistic reading of Tartarus as mere punishment by urging attention to the Promethean perspective, implying that what is confined in Tartarus may carry legitimate, if dangerous, energies requiring revaluation.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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Tartarus, 299

Havelock’s index entry situates Tartarus as a Platonic conceptual marker within the context of his analysis of Plato’s epistemological and mythological vocabulary, without independent elaboration.

Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 1963aside

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