Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Volume 6: Mythic Figures, 2007
Joanne H. Stroud
Introduction
James Hillman brings an uncommon acuity to the current study of mythology. He explores how ancient myths can provide insights for present day issues: “I am attempting to show how antiquity can be relevant to the life of the psyche and how psychic life can vivify antiquity.” The focus of these papers, then, is not to offer a better understanding of the classical, academic structures of myths. Nor is the intention to provide personal help that these larger-than-life archetypes can offer as models for personal development, or, on the other hand, to warn against shadow characteristics that cause obsessions and behavior problems. Instead, Hillman links myth to history and daily events. He reminds us of deeper connections: “Besides our aim of tying a human mess to a wider myth, we are attempting to connect present experience to historical culture.”
   The primary reason, Hillman explains, that Greek mythology has relevance, especially for Westerners, is: “They [the Greeks] had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as such — instead, depth psychology and psychopathology. Therefore, … psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress.”
   Hillman teaches his readers how to regain the mythical perspective so lacking in our current all-too-literal approach to both friends and foes — black versus white, good guys versus evil empire. We fail to see our own shadows while refusing to see a stranger’s virtue. Hillman applies the wisdom of myth which demonstrates that what we consider positive casts shadows just as the darkness has its redeeming light. Hillman’s work demonstrates the verity of this principle, which is like the image of the curving, interpenetrating symbol of Yin and Yang in Chinese thought.
 
  Hillman asks: “Have the gods truly fled?” Or are we just not able to see them? His implication is that they are still there for us to see. Other eras could rely on original myths to ground both the perspective of the individual and national ambitions. In the narratives of myth we are shown the unexpected, unforeseen consequences of even the most noble intentions, because “each god is a way in which we are shadowed.”
 
  In most past and some present cultures, myths provide explanations for the mysterious. With most of the gods of mythology dead or unavailable to us, we have insufficient containers for the numinous. Hillman proposes that “Mysteries are best accounted for by myths.” Without these supporting vessels, we begin substituting for the worship of the gods the worship of fame — film personalities, athletes, and rock stars. In America in particular, we have developed to a considerable degree the craven adulation of transitory celebrity.
 
  Another of our current excesses is the one of excess itself, too much of everything. We need to recall that the most famous of the Titans (the predecessors of the Olympians) was Prometheus, who not only gave mortals the gift of fire but also taught them to circumvent the allegiance of the gods. Our society has become subject to the dangers of an expanded Prometheism, of a kind of titanism unknown in past ages. In “… And Huge Is Ugly,” an appropriate title, Hillman points out: “We are not Titans nor can we become titanic — only when the gods are absent can titanism return to earth.” He follows with this question: “Do you see why we must keep the gods alive and well? Small is beautiful requires a prior step: the return of the gods.”
 
  During the twentieth century, beauty almost became a bad word, or at least one that we were embarrassed to use. As a result of the scientific revolution, even the body became an object to be perfected. Hillman wryly remarks: “Remember, social Darwinism says survival of the fittest, not of the loveliest.” Like Sir Herbert Read, the English art critic who wrote an important analysis of the way in which beauty has disappeared in art, Hillman addresses the loss of that quality in our society in general. His chapter on “Pink Madness or Why Does Aphrodite Drive Men Crazy With Pornography?” helps to explain why we have so little of beauty and so much pornography in our culture. It began, like all splits in the personality that we blame on Descartes, with the wedge between head and heart, or between the thinking brain and natural instincts. It is a split that has yet to be healed. Hillman prompts us to remember: “Pornography is where the pagan gods have fallen and how they force themselves back into our minds.”
 
  In the chapter on “War, Arms, Rams, Mars,” Hillman speaks of the power of Mars, which should not be forgotten. In the same instance he says that “we have lost the overwhelming essence of war, now more of a nightly news event than any kind of heroic undertaking.” He includes this provocative warning: “We do not know much nowadays about imagining divinities.
 
  We have lost the angelic imagination and its angelic protection. It has disappeared from all curricula — theological, philosophical, aesthetic. That loss may be more of a danger than either war or apocalypse because that loss results in literalism, the cause of both.”
 
  Even though “psychoanalysts are the myth-preservers in our culture,” Hillman brings to our attention the shocking fact that the very practice of psychoanalysis is based on what he calls “the myth in the method.” By this he means that the founding myth of psychoanalysis can hold its practitioners in the binds of its inevitable end. Hilllman’s psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis is instructive. While Freud highlighted the myth of Oedipus as a way into understanding the central dynamic in family relationships, the Greek tragedy bearing his name also gives insights into the life of the city. Self-knowledge, to the extent possible, is a noble achievement, but “To find one’s father and the truth of oneself is not enough.” The whole emphasis in analysis is on a search for identity, the uncovering of one’s early life with parents, which limits the psychoanalytical method to an ongoing Oedipal approach. Hillman further declares: “Whatever
myths may operate in the psyche, whatever contents we might disclose, as long as our method remains search for self, these other tales will yield only Oedipal results because we turn to them with the same old intention.” And therefore this method of attempting cure is doomed to recurring tragedy. Even though it sounds as if there is no way out, for Sophocles, the tragedian, the city, “the polis, is central to the play.” Hillman shows us this pathway: we have learned that substituting another myth or any number of myths will only lead back to Oedipus because of the analytical method. Fortunately, the very same myth offers us a way forward. Freud stops in Thebes, with the Tyrannus. Sophocles dreams the myth along, as Jung advised us all to do. Let us move then from Freud to Jung by going with Oedipus to Colonus, the second Oedipus, written by Sophocles in his nineties, soon before his death in this same city, Colonus.
 
  Whether as a psychologist, or equally as a participant in any exchange, we are called to examine our culpability, our blindness to the contributing part we play. It is not an acceptable excuse to be unaware. However, even this move toward awakened consciousness is not the ultimate one. With increased self-knowledge, the movement is back into the world. Hillman reminds us of what Jung always says: that the rocky path of individuation leads to the return to the world, where our talents ultimately need to be engaged. Hillman’s final word: “Unless we let go of subjectivism, how will the soul ever return to the world, to things as they are so that they receive the attention they need from us? There are other pursuits, other urgencies than those of Self. What is it to make beauty? To serve my city? Be a friend, die with dignity, love the world, remember the gods?”
 
  In the chapter on Orpheus, Hillman reveals an abiding interest in the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who could expand and bring together multiple associations for even a simple image. Hillman speaks of an “‘Orpheus complex,’ to use the language of Gaston Bachelard,” that connects or disconnects us to the environment. Hillman, always concerned with words, remarks that Orpheus “may be present in their [environmentalists’] ideals, their practices, but lacking in their language.” In this case, “If environmentalism does not awaken nature’s sublimity, its beauty and its terror, if rocks and trees do not speak, they themselves become mere objects, not ensouled subjects with whom the human is bound.”
 
  I cannot resist adding that the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, of which Hillman is
a Founding Fellow, is engaged in a twenty-five-year love affair with Gaston Bachelard, having sponsored the translation of seven, soon to be eight, of his works from French to English. Hillman was also a keynote speaker and major contributor at two conferences on Bachelard at the Institute.
 
  Hillman succeeds here, as usual, in provoking the reader’s imagination. With his multifaceted
perspective and his metaphysical wit, his work has influenced a number of thinkers and spawned an important school of thought.