Hillman's wager here is more radical than it first appears. Turning to mythology, ritual, and epic as the ground of human nature is not a turn toward the poetic as decoration or consolation — it is a refusal of the entire explanatory project that would locate the soul's truth in biochemistry or social conditioning or behavioral sequence. Those frameworks share a common structure: they promise that if you get the mechanism right, the suffering becomes intelligible and therefore manageable. Hillman denies the premise. The soul does not bottom out in a mechanism; it bottoms out in image, in story, in the figures that keep returning whether or not we summon them.

What this demands of the reader is harder than it sounds. We are accustomed to reaching past image toward cause — asking what the myth *means* in terms of something else, something more solid, more clinical, more actionable. The poetic basis of mind refuses that translation. The myth is not a symbol for the biochemical event; the biochemical event is, if anything, a trace of the myth. Cassirer, Kerényi, Neumann — the names Hillman clusters here — all share that commitment: the imaginal is not secondary evidence for some deeper reality. It is the depth.