Hillman is drawing a line that most depth psychology quietly erases. The hero's night sea-journey is still developmental — still structured by the logic that if you go down far enough, survive intensely enough, you come back fortified, tempered, ready. The heat in that logic is not incidental; it is the mechanism. Suffering becomes productive, descent becomes tuition, and the underworld is justified by what it gives back to life above ground. That is a specific fantasy — not wrong, but worth naming for what it is.

The *nekyia* does not run on that grammar. Coldness is not a lesser heat. It is the absence of the teleological pressure that makes heroic descent bearable: the pressure that says something will come of this, that the soul is being shaped toward future use. In the zone Hillman is pointing at, the soul goes below that justification entirely. There is no return not because the journey fails, but because return was never the structure. What the psyche encounters in genuine underworld work cannot be cashed out for ego's purposes — not as strength, not as wisdom, not as readiness. The cold is exactly the place where the fantasy of productive suffering stops working, and the soul is left with what was always there underneath the heat.