The death we speak of in our culture is a fantasy of the ego, and we take our dreams in this same manner. Our culture is singular for its ignorance of death. The great art and celebrations of many other cultures-ancient Egyp-tian and Etruscan, the Greek of Eleusis, Tibetan-honor the underworld. We have no ancestor cult, although we are pa-thetically nostalgic. We keep no relics, though collect an-tiques. We rarely see dead human beings, though watch a hundred imitations each week on the television tube. The animals we eat are put away out of sight. We have no myths of the nekyia, yet our popular heroes in films and music are shady underworld characters. Dante's underworld was our culture's last, and it was imagined even before the Renais-sance had properly begun. Our ethnic roots reach back to great underworld configurations: the Celtic Dagda or Cerun-nos, the Germanic Hel, and the Biblical Sheol. All have faded; PSYCHE 65 how pale the fire of the Christian Hell. 72 Where have they gone? Where is death when it is no longer observed? Where do contents of consciousness go when they fade from atten-tion? Into the unconscious, says psychology. The underworld has gone into the unconscious: even become the unconscious. Depth psychology is where today we find the initiatory mys-tery, the long journey of psychic learning, ancestor worship, the encounter with demons and shadows, the sufferings of Hell.
— James Hillman
Hillman's observation cuts in a direction that popular grief-culture never quite reaches. The problem is not that we have become callous about death — if anything, we are saturated in its representations, anxious about its timing, therapeutic about its stages. The problem is that we have lost death as a *place* the psyche could travel to and return from changed. Egypt, Eleusis, Tibet — these weren't mourning cultures; they were initiatory ones. The nekyia was a journey with geography, with figures you could meet and be altered by. When that geography collapsed, death didn't disappear; it went interior, and depth psychology became the strange inheritor of the whole apparatus: the descent, the shades, the ordeal, the learning that only comes from sustained contact with what cannot be made use of.
What makes this uncomfortable is the implicit question it raises about why we evacuate the underworld so thoroughly. The hundred television deaths per week are instructive — they give death's form without its weight, the image without the requirement that anything in you be remade by encounter with it. That evacuation is itself a psychic strategy, recognizable the moment you see it: keep the representation, remove the transformation. The unconscious doesn't cooperate. What you refuse to observe as underworld becomes the underworld anyway, just without the initiatory structure that would make the descent survivable.
James Hillman·The Dream and the Underworld·1979