Christianism closed the underworld

Hillman’s historical-polemical thesis, advanced in the “Barriers” chapter of The Dream and the Underworld, that the Christian appropriation of classical eschatology did not preserve the Greek underworld but eliminated it — and that this elimination is the unnoticed substrate of modern dream hermeneutics.

“Christianism, in a two-sided masterstroke, both did away with the underworld and horrified it as the perpetual alternative to the Christian path. Christianism or underworld: one had to choose, and who would choose the horror?” (Hillman 1979). The displacement is lexical as well as theological: “the word psyche gives way to pneuma.” What was once a third term — the realm of eidola, shades, essences, neither heaven nor hell but the place of soul — becomes unthinkable. Dreams, which had been nekyia-events in the Homeric and Orphic reading, become either demonic temptations or pneumatic revelations. The verb to dream does not appear in the New Testament; dream appears three times, all in Matthew. Even Pilate’s wife’s dream, which bore upon Christ’s own fate, “was not listened to” (Matt. 27:19).

The thread’s consequence for Sebastian’s recovery work is structural. Two millennia of reading dreams as pneumatic rather than psychic have shaped the Freudian and Jungian inheritance more deeply than is usually registered. When Freud reads the dream as a message from the id to be translated into waking speech, and when Jung reads the dream as compensation from the unconscious to the conscious, both are — in Hillman’s diagnosis — operating within the Christianized binary that admits of demonic and pneumatic dream but not of psychic dream proper. The underworld as a third term has been foreclosed.

Sources

• james-hillman: “Christianism and the underworld fell into opposition — material, functional, and logical”; psyche gives way to pneuma; dreams become demonic or pneumatic but not psychic.
• hillman-dream-underworld: the “Barriers” chapter is the sustained argument; Matthew’s three dream-mentions and the unheeded dream of Pilate’s wife are the key textual data.
• psyche-breath-soul: the lexical displacement — psyche supplanted by pneuma — maps onto the broader Greek-to-Christian shift the thread tracks.