[Cally Conan-Davies]

I wish Mark could be here today.

[R. Nemo Hill]

"We must reverse our usual procedure of translating the dream into ego-language and instead translate the ego into dream-language. This means doing a dream-work on the ego, making a metaphor of it, seeing through its "reality." Let us then suspend an entire series of ego-operations, the ego-work, the modes by means of which the ego has been approaching the dream and performing its translations. These are causalism (seeing dream sequences in causal connection); naturalism (assuming dream events should accord with the upperworld of nature); moralism (seeing moral positions in the underworld and the dream as compensatory expression of self-regulatory conscience); personalism (believing the realm of the soul to be concerned mainly with personal life); temporalism (connecting dream events with the past or the future, either as recapitulations of what happened or foretellings of what is to come); voluntarism (seeing the dream in terms of action which requires a response in actions—"dreams tell us what to do"); humanism (that the dream is primarily a reflection of and message for human affairs); positivism (reading the dream as a positing, a positional statement, to which positive and negative judgements can be applied); literalism (taking any dream or aspect of any dream with singleness of meaning, thus forgetting that every bit of the dream, including the dream-"I", is a metaphorical image).

As the ego sees a set of pejorative factors at work in the dream (regression, distortion, displacement), so the underworld perspective sees a set of pejorative attitudes (humanism, personalism, literalism) at work in the ego. It is these attitudes which must first be suspended before we can approach the dream in an altogether new style."

(James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld)

[Cally Conan-Davies]

" Death in the soul is not lived forward in time and put off into an 'afterlife'; it is concurrent with daily life as Hades is side-by-side with his brother Zeus. The richness of Hades-Pluto psychologically refers to the wealth that is discovered through recognising the interior depths of the imagination."
Revisioning Psychology, p.207.

What a wonderful list of 'isms' that is, Nemo! Oh, when I first read that, my heart danced!

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Mark says,

"He spent so long in the Underworld, he probably feels quite at home there."

[R. Nemo Hill]

No doubt.
"The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul..." (Andrei Tarkovsky)

[Cally Conan-Davies]

"Soul-destroying is soul-making." James Hillman.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Initiation


Who says the myths are only myths? No more
Will I blaspheme the Gods as others do,
Who laugh because they have not felt the awe
And shock of being dragged into the blue.

Persephone, I was a type of her,
So innocently gathering the flowers,
Enjoying all the easy joys that were
As if forever in my fields and bowers.

I gathered up the violets of love,
Weaving them with lilies of romance,
And there was not a hint of cloud above
To mar the idyll of my languid dance.

But then one afternoon the cool wind fell,
Bringing down the silence on the trees,
And from the earth there rose a certain smell
Of sulphur that evoked a strange dis-ease

Which turned into a rising rumbled sound,
And then I felt the earth begin to beat
Breaking up beneath me as the ground
Revealed the empty space of my defeat.

And so I came to know the realm of death
Where every thing and person was a shade
While still my heart was beating and my breath
Affirmed that I was living, and afraid.

Now I must describe my greatest shame,
To tell how I was held against my will
And I was forced and broken, stripped and shorn
And ravished on the filthy floor of hell.

But let me say that here I learned to love,
Because I saw the truth that he loved me.
And with this love I let the world above
Go on without me, and this set me free.

Returning to the motherland I knew,
Of flowers and light, it is a different place;
A gem set in the velvet blackish blue
I carry in my eyes with Hades' grace.

Mark Allinson (inspired by, and posted in honour of, James Hillman)

[R. Nemo Hill]

Until Persephone has been raped, until our natural consciousness has been pathologized, our souls project us as literal realities. We believe that human life and soul are naturally one. We have not awakened to death. So we refuse the very first metaphor of human existence; that we are not real. We refuse to admit, too, that human reality is wholly dependent on the realities that take place in the soul.....humanism's psychology cannot hold onto this shadowed vision of man and rather exhorts him to make himself, to build a reality out of ego or self, countering his frailty. It turns away from the myths that give our unreality a significant context. Ignoring the mythical nature of soul and its eternal urge out of life and toward images, humanism's psychology builds a strong man of frail soul trembling in a valley of existential dread.

(James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld)

[Cally Conan-Davies]

"...we are not real."

Oh, Nemo...isn't that a 'real leaf'...

love all ways

Cally

[Andrew Frisardi]

Hillman is very well known and appreciated in Italy, and all his books are easy to find in Italian translation. Somewhere in Re-Visioning, I think it is, he says that his Archetypal Psychology had switched from the Teutonic style of Freud and Jung to make an "olive oil psychology" adapted to the Mediterranean south. I've always gotten a kick out of that characterization. He and his friends once had a conference at the old Medici villa in Careggi, where Marsilio Ficino and his group used to meet. Botticelli's and others' art got a lot of its impetus from the Ficino group. Hillman and the Dallas Institute are at least as descended from that as they are from Jung and Freud, and Hillman was a true friend of artists and writers, as well as being a gifted writer himself.

I don't know many names, but I do know a lot of American poets have drawn on his work -- Rita Dove is one, as well as of course Robert Bly.

Nemo, my copy of Re-Visioning is completely falling apart I've read it so much.