Hillman is not offering consolation here. The movement he traces — affliction to complex to archetype to God — is not a ladder out of suffering but a ladder into it, a deepening of what the symptom already is. The affliction does not dissolve when you find the God inside it; the God arrives precisely as the affliction, and the two remain identical. Ares is not the meaning you extract from rage once rage has been managed. Ares is the rage, unmanaged, in its full unreasonableness.

What makes this difficult is that we habitually read "God" as release — as the pneumatic moment when the wound opens onto something larger and we are, finally, lifted. That reading is available and wrong. What Hillman means is closer to the Greek *daimon*: something that will not be domesticated, that claims you without asking, that is recognizable precisely because it returns regardless of what you do about it. The affliction that keeps coming back despite your work on it, your insight into it, your hard-won understanding of its origins — that persistence is not your failure to heal. It is a presence insisting on its own reality. The question the passage actually asks is not what caused this suffering, but who is it that will not let you go.