Every descent in that list carries a specific economy of loss and return: Orpheus goes for love, Aeneas for counsel, Dionysos for whatever the living city needs from its dead. Even Hercules submits to tasks that the underworld sets. What none of them do is cancel the underworld's authority. The price of going down is that you have to reckon with what is there on its own terms — Eurydice cannot be rushed, Teiresias will not be hurried, the shades will only speak after they drink.

Christ's descent breaks that grammar entirely. The harrowing of hell is not a negotiation; it is a conquest. Death is declared defeated, the underworld retroactively demoted to a holding pen that the resurrection empties. Hillman's care in placing this at the end of the list is diagnostic: the Christian economy does not simply add one more descent myth — it restructures the meaning of descent itself, turning what was a necessary confrontation into a problem already solved. This is the pneumatic ratio at full extension. Suffering is real only provisionally; transcendence annuls it from above. What gets lost in that economy is exactly what the other descents preserve — the underworld's capacity to be genuinely other, genuinely resistant, a domain that gives back something true precisely because it cannot be conquered.