Hillman is pointing at something that ordinary life works very hard to avoid: the moment when the floor gives way. Not the moment before it, when you might still shore things up, and not the moment after, when you begin reconstructing a story about what happened — but the moment itself, which he names without flinching as Hades. The underworld is not a metaphor for sadness or difficulty. It is the actual structure of depth, the place psyche goes when it can no longer be held on the surface.

What Heraclitus gestured at — and what the whole subsequent tradition of logos-as-Word worked to close off — is that psyche is not something you possess or cultivate or strengthen. It belongs to depth the way Hades belongs to the invisible. The hole is not a wound to be healed. It is an opening. Hillman's insistence on the Underworld against every therapeutic instinct to bring the dreamer back up into daylight is exactly this: the going-down is not a failure of the going-up. It is where the pure depth lives that no ascent can manufacture. Whatever you are carrying that sent you to this passage, the question it is asking is not how to get back to the surface.