Hillman is insisting that the underworld is not a place you visit from the surface — it is the inside of wherever you already are. When Hades shares his hat with Hermes, when his brothers rule sky and sea, the point is not mythological overlap but a refusal of the idea that depth is somewhere else. Every archetype has a face turned inward, a chthonic aspect that stops being about what stands over against what and becomes instead about what is moving within the thing itself.

This cuts against the most habitual move in psychological thinking — the move toward opposition, toward the dyad, toward meaning-by-contrast. Shadow against light, ego against unconscious, above against below. Those structures are useful, but they are surface structures, and Hillman is pointing below them. The underworld logic is not dialectical; it does not resolve into a third term. It simply goes further in.

What changes when you take this seriously is the reading of dreams, symptoms, figures of imagination. You stop asking what they are compensating for, what outer reality they are responding to, and you start asking what is happening internally to the image — what the image shows of its own underside, its own depth, the darkness already native to its form.