THE primary rhetoric of archetypal psychology is myth. Here, the path had already been pioneered by Freud, Jung, and Cassirer (Avens 1980), and, of course, by a tradition of mythical thinking going back through the Romantics and Vico to Plato. This move toward mythical accounts as a psychological language locates psychology in the cultural imagination. Secondly, these myths are themselves metaphors (or, as Vico said "metaphor ... is a myth fabula in brief" Scienza Nuova, par. 404), so that by relying on myths as its primary rhetoric, archetypal psychology grounds itself in a fantasy that cannot be taken historically, physically, literally. Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all "archetypalists," the myths themselves are understood as metaphors - never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. "Myths do not ground, they open" (Hillman 1979a). The role of myth in archetypal psychology is not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of possible behaviors or to circumscribe the forms of transpersonal energies (in the Neoplatonic sense), but rather to open the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection. We may thereby see our ordinary lives embedded in and ennobled by the dramatic and world-creative life of mythical figures (Bedford 1981). The study of mythology allows events to be recognized against their mythical background. More important, however, is that the study of mythology enables one to perceive and experience the life of the soul mythically.
— James Hillman
Hillman's insistence that myths do not ground but open is a precise argument against the way the tradition has mostly handled them. Since Plato, mythical material has been pressed into service as metaphysics — the stories become illustrations of eternal categories, and the categories become leverage against the mess of particular experience. Neoplatonism is the polished version of this move: divine figures as transpersonal energies, the soul's task as ascent toward the forms that organize them. What Hillman is refusing, quietly but completely, is that redemptive grammar. When myth grounds, it anchors the soul to a stable architecture above the fray. When myth opens, it does something far less comfortable — it returns the soul to its own dramatic entanglement, without the promise that the drama resolves upward.
The phrase "embedded in and ennobled by" is worth pausing on. Ennobled is not transcended. The ordinary event is not lifted out of itself; it is deepened into a story that has been lived before, by figures large enough to hold its full weight. Mythology as Hillman reads it is not an escape from experience into meaning — it is a way of perceiving the experience as already mythic, which is a different kind of attention entirely, one that leaves the suffering intact while expanding what it can be heard as.
James Hillman·Archetypal Psychology·1983