Descent to the underworld psyche

The Greek underworld is not a metaphor for the unconscious. It is the other way around: the unconscious is where the underworld went when modernity stopped believing in it. Hillman makes this point with characteristic directness — depth psychology is where we now find "the initiatory mystery, the long journey of psychic learning, ancestor worship, the encounter with demons and shadows, the sufferings of Hell" (Hillman 1979). The descent, katabasis, is not a journey toward something better. It is a journey toward what is most essentially psychic.

The Homeric grammar establishes the structure. In Odyssey 11, the shades of the dead are eidola — phantom images, exact replicas of the living person but drained of thymos, phrenes, and menos, the organs of vital motion, breath-consciousness, and force. What remains is psyche alone. Achilles says it plainly: "in the house of Hades in some way psyche and eidolon are present, but phrenes are not there at all" (Sullivan 1995, citing Il. 23.104). The underworld is, in this sense, a purely psychic cosmos — the person stripped of everything biological, everything vital, everything that belongs to the dayworld's grammar of action and will. Burkert (1977) notes that the shades "flutter as shadows" and must drink sacrificial blood before they can recollect themselves and speak. Blood is what the dead borrow from the living in order to become temporarily audible. The nekyia — the blood-offering at the world's edge — is the ritual act that makes the unconscious speak.

What Hillman inherits from this grammar is a distinction that carries the whole weight of his revision of dreamwork: the difference between the underworld and the underground. The underground belongs to physis — roots, seeds, fertility, the chthonic in its Demeter-mode. The underworld belongs to psyche — shade, eidolon, ontological statement rather than vital potential. Conflating them, Hillman argues, collapses the imaginal into the biological and forfeits the dream's native register. The Jungian tradition, in his reading, tends toward this conflation: dark dream figures become earthy potentials awaiting integration, sexuality and aggression understood through vegetative grammar. Hillman reads them instead as shades native to Hades, requiring not integration upward but descent inward.

The load-bearing axis of this revision is what Hillman calls downward love — Eros with wings folded and torch inverted, placed "into the bed of Sleep, Death, and Dreams among the brood of Night" (Hillman 1979). Against the standard reading of Eros as the force that draws psyche upward toward integration and relational horizon, downward love names the erotic movement that carries the dream-ego into depth rather than toward resolution. This is not pathology. It is cosmological fact, recoverable from the ancient iconography that the tradition suppressed.

To go deep into a dream requires abandoning hope, the hope that rises in the morning and would turn the dream to its purposes. At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair. They cancel each other out; and we can move beyond the language of expectations, measuring progressions and regressions, ego strengthening and weakening, coping and failing.

This is the precise point where Hillman breaks with the compensatory model — and where the pneumatic logic of the therapeutic tradition becomes visible. The standard analytic move is to translate the dream upward: what does this image mean for my waking life, my growth, my development? That translation is itself a defense against soul, a refusal of the underworld on its own terms. The dream interpreted as message or compensation constitutes work against the dream, annulling its psychic specificity by converting it back into dayworld currency. Hillman's alternative is not romantic drift through images — he dismisses that explicitly — but a critical, imaginative engagement that resembles the dream's own work, meeting it in its native register rather than extracting it from there.

Jung had already transposed the Homeric nekyia into the analytic act itself. His gloss on his own engagement with the Miller fantasies is explicit: "like Odysseus, I have sought to allow this shade Miss Frank Miller to drink only as much so as to make it speak so it can give away some of the secrets of the underworld" (Red Book, 2009). The analyst's attention is the libation; the unconscious is the shade that must drink before it can speak. What Hillman does is radicalize this: where Jung treats the descent as a temporary consultation — the analyst goes down and returns with knowledge — Hillman insists the soul's native country is the underworld. Katabasis is not a heroic ordeal phase with a return. It is psychology's permanent orientation.

The philological ground for these distinctions is substantial. Rohde (1894) established that the Homeric psyche is "not of the slightest importance during life" — it appears only when death threatens, as the breath-soul that departs through the mouth or a wound and leads a twilight existence in Hades. Snell (1953) showed that Homer has no unified concept of the soul: psyche, thymos, and noos cover different territories, and psyche in the living person is almost entirely eschatological. Bremmer (1983) refined this further, distinguishing the free soul (active in dreams and after death) from the body-souls (thymos, menos) that give the living person vitality and force. The underworld is the domain of the free soul alone — the eidolon that looks exactly like the person but cannot be embraced, that moves like smoke or a dream.

What depth psychology inherits from this grammar is the recognition that the psychic is most itself when stripped of the vital. The descent is necessary not because suffering is ennobling but because the soul's logics of not-suffering — the strategies by which it attempts to remain on the surface, to translate every image back into dayworld use, to extract meaning rather than dwell in it — do not work. What the soul says in their failure is what the underworld has always been trying to say. The blood-offering is not a technique. It is the willingness to stop translating.

  • katabasis — the deliberate descent of the living into the region of the dead; structural grammar of the nekyia
  • nekyia — the Greek rite of summoning the dead to speak; Jung's name for the analytic consultation of the unconscious
  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and author of The Dream and the Underworld
  • underworld vs. underground — Hillman's load-bearing distinction between psychic depth and chthonic vitality

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
  • Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, 1995, Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say
  • Burkert, Walter, 1977, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical
  • Rohde, Erwin, 1894, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
  • Snell, Bruno, 1953, The Discovery of the Mind
  • Bremmer, Jan N., 1983, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 2009, The Red Book: Liber Novus