The unseen realms

The phrase "unseen realms" names something the Western soul has circled for three thousand years without ever quite settling: the question of what exists when the visible world runs out. Depth psychology does not answer that question metaphysically. It answers it psychologically — which is not a lesser answer but a different one, and in some ways a harder one.

Begin with Homer, because the tradition begins there. In the Iliad and Odyssey, the dead descend to the house of Hades as psychai — breath-images, insubstantial as smoke or dream, stripped of phrenes, thūmos, noos, the organs of thought and will and passion. Achilles tells the living Odysseus what it is like:

"Do not try to make light of death to me; I would sooner be bound to the soil in the hire of another man, a man without lot and without much to live on, than ruler over all the perished dead."

The Homeric underworld is not a place of punishment or reward — that comes later, with Orphic and Platonic elaboration. It is a place of radical deprivation: the psychē survives as image, as recognizable form, but without the vitality the body gave it. Rohde observed that this picture effectively freed the living world from spectral interference — the dead, once properly cremated, were sealed away in Hades, and the living were no longer troubled by them. The unseen realm was real, but it was inert.

What Hillman does with this material is the decisive move in depth psychology's engagement with the underworld. He refuses to treat Hades as eschatology — as something that comes after life — and insists instead on its simultaneity with daily existence. Hades and Zeus are brothers; their kingdoms are coextensive, differing only in perspective:

"The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later. It is not a far-off place of judgment over our actions but provides that place of judging now, and within, the inhibiting reflection interior to our actions."

This is not a metaphor for depression, though it includes depression. It is a claim about the structure of psychic life: that everything moves toward depth, that the invisible connections beneath appearances are Hades' domain, that soul-making is inherently a katabatic process — a going-down. Dreams belong to this realm not because they are mysterious but because they are children of Night, affiliated with Sleep and Death in the oldest mythological genealogies. To work with a dream is to enter the underworld while still alive, as Odysseus did.

The pneumatic tradition — Plato, the Neoplatonists, the Christian mystics, and their modern heirs — offers a different account of the unseen. Here the invisible is not below but above: the realm of Forms, the intelligible world, the divine light. Corbin's mundus imaginalis occupies the intermediate position between these two registers, the ʿālam al-mithāl of Ibn ʿArabī and Suhrawardī — an ontologically real world of archetypal forms, neither sensory nor purely intellectual, where theophanies occur and visionary perception operates. As Corbin describes it, between the sensory universe and the world of pure spiritual lights there opens

"a mundus imaginalis which is a concrete spiritual world of archetype-Figures, apparitional Forms, Angeles of species and of individuals; by philosophical dialectics its necessity is deduced and its plane situated; vision of it in actuality is vouchsafed to the visionary apperception of the Active Imagination."

Hillman received this from Corbin directly, at Eranos, and it shaped archetypal psychology's insistence that images are not subjective productions but inhabitants of a real intermediate world. The imaginal is not the imaginary. But Hillman psychologized what Corbin kept theophanic — he routed the mundus imaginalis downward, toward soul rather than upward toward spirit, toward Hades rather than toward the divine light. This is where Hillman and Corbin part company, and where the pneumatic logic becomes visible: Corbin's imaginal world is ultimately a vehicle for ascent, for the soul's return to its angelic source. Hillman's is a vehicle for descent, for the soul's deepening into its own darkness.

Jung's contribution is the concept of the objective psyche — the collective unconscious understood not as a sociological average but as a transpersonal order that acts upon the ego with the dignity of an outer fact. The unseen realm, for Jung, is this: a psychic reality that was never subjective to begin with, whose contents arrive as autonomous figures, numinous images, dreams that carry the weight of something not manufactured by the dreamer. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the house dream that led Jung toward the collective unconscious descends through layers — salon, medieval ground floor, Roman cellar, prehistoric cave — each level older and less illuminated, until at the bottom lie skulls and broken pottery, the remains of a primitive culture. The structure is explicitly katabatic: depth as antiquity, the unconscious as archaeology.

What depth psychology refuses is the move that the pneumatic tradition keeps making: the move that treats the unseen as a realm of relief, of escape from the mess of embodied, suffering, desiring life. The Homeric underworld was not relief — it was deprivation. Hillman's Hades is not comfort — it is the perspective that strips away life's defensive identities and leaves only image. The unseen realms, in this tradition, are not where you go to stop suffering. They are where you go when the strategies for not suffering have failed, and what you find there is not transcendence but depth — the invisible connections that were always already present beneath the visible surface, waiting for the soul to stop looking away.

James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose The Dream and the Underworld remains the definitive depth-psychological reading of Hades
Henry Corbin — portrait of the French Islamologist whose mundus imaginalis shaped Hillman's imaginal psychology
Hades — the archetypal underworld as psychological realm, not eschatological destination
Mundus Imaginalis — Corbin's intermediate world between sense and intellect, the plane of theophanic vision

Sources Cited

Burkert, Walter, 1977, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical
Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
Corbin, Henry, 1969, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
Rohde, Erwin, 1894, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
Jung, Carl Gustav, 1963, Memories, Dreams, Reflections