Hillman is not talking about death as the thing that comes at the end. He is talking about it as what the psyche stands on — the floor that gives depth its direction, its pull, its strange authority. When dream-work goes underground, it goes there not because darkness is poetic but because something genuinely chthonic governs the soul's deepest movements, and that something has been missing from above-ground culture for a very long time.

The exile he names is precise. Hades got distributed — split off into parapsychology, into theology's afterlife promises, into evolutionary biology, into the ethics of virtue and reward — anywhere, really, that keeps Death as subject matter rather than as a constitutive presence in psychic life. And the soul narrowed accordingly. When the underworld is only a destination, something you reach after the real business of living is concluded, you lose the depth register entirely. The dreams still know. They still move toward darker figures, stranger images, encounters that carry real weight and do not resolve into reassurance. The vaults are still there. What Hillman is insisting, quietly and without comfort, is that psychological life already lives on top of them — and that acknowledging this is not morbidity but the most basic form of honesty the soul can offer itself.