MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Through Mythology We Walk Our Ancestral Past
Jungian & Post-Jungian Perspectives
Mythological studies unpacks the issues, concepts, and characteristics of the archetypes in the contemporary world. Soul-making allows us to express that relationship within our daily lives -- a process of continuous remembrance for the sake of tending the soul of the world.
Primordial Darkness
Through Mythology We Walk Our Ancestral Past
Jungian & Post-Jungian Perspectives
Mythological studies unpacks the issues, concepts, and characteristics of the archetypes in the contemporary world. Soul-making allows us to express that relationship within our daily lives -- a process of continuous remembrance for the sake of tending the soul of the world.
Primordial Darkness
We are doomed to die and we know it in every fiber of our being. It arouses the primordial imagery of darkness in our original nature that lies below our personality, introspective focus, and in the oceanic dissociation of our dark voyages each night.
Death welcomes everyone equally. Every culture lies about the possibilities of beating death through some sort of self-perpetuation. Yet, we are confronted with increasingly darker futures: population bombs, electrosmog, ecosystem collapse, and catastrophes like "insectageddon." We are ephemeral entities destined to expire. The bringer of death is crucial to all life. The philosophical path of wisdom urges us to practice dying. The Void awaits.
The Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue
Legh Mulhall Kilpin (1853-1919), "Gate of the Infinite".
“A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.”
--G.I. Gurdjieff, In Search of Being: The Fourth Way to Consciousness
--G.I. Gurdjieff, In Search of Being: The Fourth Way to Consciousness
Thanatos appears as a powerful, fierce-looking man with a shaggy beard, dressed in a dark robe, and armed with a sword. His shoulders may sport large wings.
"Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself….His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.”
~Hermann Hesse, Journey to the East
"Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself….His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.”
~Hermann Hesse, Journey to the East
Pre-Print, HOST OF MANY
Wrestling with Thanatos:
A Mythological Study
by Iona Miller
'The end of destruction is the beginning of
becoming. Everything on Earth must be destroyed,
for without destruction nothing can be created. The
new comes out of the old. … For man, time is a
destroyer, but for the Cosmos it is an ever-turning
wheel."
— excerpted from The Hermetica, the Lost
Wisdom of the Pharaohs
We are doomed to die and we know it in
every fiber of our being. It arouses the primordial
imagery of darkness that lies below our personality.
Every culture lies about the possibilities of beating
death through some sort of self-perpetuation. Yet,
w e a r e e p h e m e r a l e n t i t i e s d e s t i n e d t o
expire.Mythological studies help us ‘count the
ways’ that Thanatos embodies the natural
phenomena of psychophysical death and dying.
Extreme death anxiety is an essentially
thanatophobic response. We may feel hopeless,
unable to accept the fact of total surrender, yet only
such surrender leads to transformation. Dark and
scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. Belief
systems condition our perceptions, including the
breakdown and demise of the self.
∞ 174 ! ∞
Thanatos is death and chaos, unavailable
energy, the fundamental principle of emptiness.
Death was a subject for poets long before Homer
called him the brother of Hypnos in his epic
poem The Iliad. And it goes on long after the 19th c.
poem, Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant. This
meditation or contemplation on death was meant to
console humanity in its shared predicament. We
have one view of death from the outside and
another by seeing through the imagery of the Lord
of Death.
Are we defined by our maddest edges? As
unformed consciousness, Thanatos inhabits our
dreams as well, with images of death, torture,
mutilation, and rotting. Then in the morning we are
resurrected to a seemingly new life. It is the energy
we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of
time. It reaches our awareness through dreams
(Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination.
Now science speaks of the lethal dimension
as a natural phenomenon — entropy, the inherent
tendency for life to dissolve into the void. There are
many popular and heartfelt poems and tales of
death. Not only do we all die, we all have haunting
fantasies about death. They include the Art of
Death, conscious dying and overcoming the fear of
death. In this sense, Thanatos is our soul-support.
∞ 175 ! ∞
Deadline
Threshold events occur when unconscious
information arises within our somatic, emotional,
mental, or spiritual perceptions. Reflexive
pathologizing pulls us toward that psychic
borderland and dissociation. We tranquilize
ourselves with the trivial. Even politics are
dissociative, a fantasy version of reality --
especially the politics of actual and symbolic death
in war, medicine, and religion. At the liminal
threshold, body and soul are successfully reconnected.
In this liminal period, a person in a
passage ritual is ‘betwixed and between’
— structurally, if not physically, "invisible."
Psychologically, Thanatos correlates with
"ego death" — the death of the old self which
creates the conditions for rebirth. From death
sentence to death-sentience is a depth way of
making soul, seeing through, and imagining
metaphorical death. The myth speaks to anyone
who undergoes a transformation.
For the cryptic key, among our searching
questions we must ask what this particular image
has do with my death? Pathologizing feelings can
be a medicalization and commodification of
emotional pain. There is no cure for being on earth.
There is perhaps only a dark beauty in soul's
pathologizing nature in personal symptomology.
Repressed death-anxiety can reappear as
distorted cravings, such as morbid desire for fame
∞ 176 ! ∞
as symbolic immortality more likely to yield self
mortification. Meaning is what seems dead in the
wasteland of the alchemical mortificatio with its
darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, and
rotting. The richness of iterations allows systems as
a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization
and reorganization at all levels.
In alchemy, the images of figurative death
appear during the mortificatio operation, with its
primary agent fear. Symbolic death arouses
darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting,
penance, and abstinence — denial of the body.
Emotionally it means the primitive, violent
outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power
demands that must die for transmutation to occur.
Repetition of mythic elements, recitations of
life in the imaginal, is a feature of all fundamental
drives, even when overwhelming or disheartening.
Rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping,
crawling worms and snakes, and particularly
noxious odors like the stench of graves are classic
images. It is truly a journey through "the Valley of
the Shadow of Death."
The psyche depicts the decay of outworn
forms in preparation for new. Repetition is
compulsion, even among shattered disarray,
fixation, psychic inertia, morbid fascinations, shock,
disgust, and psychopathy. Compulsion is an
addictive pattern that rewards us with dopamine
release.
∞ 177 ! ∞
When it comes to compulsive behavior, we
know how we should behave, but we do what we
want usually based on how we feel. We don't have
fixed ideas; they have us. Primal urges supersede all
rules, doctrines, and morals with eruptions of
passions, emotions, and madness.
Psychic Presence
If personifying carries us into myth,
as James Hillman (founder of Archetypal
Psychology) suggests, this is especially true of
Thanatos, who enters our awareness as perhaps the
only ultimate truth. Our complexes appear as dream
people, a multitude of autonomous personalities
embodying our morbid preoccupation with the
possibilities of personal annihilation or the
ambiguity of a positive disintegration.
The compulsion to conquer death or nonordinary
dissociation is either for power or
transcendence. Death permeates or interpenetrates
our substance and psyche which mirror one
a n o t h e r . C a t a s t r o p h i c b r e a k d o w n o f
civilizations is repeated in the West . It can be
related to Thanatos as the wild psyche of
aggression/death, separation/risk, separation/
rebellion.
But Hillman claims, "We are composed of
agonies, not polarities." Death is not the
psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that
holds away death prevents life. When the physical
∞ 178 ! ∞
form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of
existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds
things in their form is the secret of death.
We play out those agonies as symbolic
enactment, meaning, and transcendence. The mind
provides metaphorical meaning for symbolic
sequences and ritual dramas that embody the
metaphor, which comes to the surface as everyday
behavior. The death we imagine is the one for the
life we imagine for ourselves while a new one tries
to enter. We can confess either our success or failure
to create an image of life after death.
The flow is from symbol to myth, to
reinforcing ritual enactment, then back to human
awareness. Enacting myths helps the devotee to
consciously experience each symbol cycle and
reconnect with deep mind. Grasping one part of the
cycle takes us deeper into the unconscious mind and
psyche.
Embodied consciousness contains the
cosmos so that by knowing the body we know the
universe. The mid-point of behavioral restructuring
and transformation is an 'oceanic' altered state, as
some near-death experiencers (NDE's) report.
Rituals connect worship and grief so we become
more aware of life in the midst of grief. If we
transform our grieving hearts, we rediscover joy.
We cannot hope to outwit Thanatos by
feigning death, but we can get stuck in that practice.
Thanatosis is a defense strategy of certain creatures
∞ 179 ! ∞
in which they play dead. It resembles shock, with
cessation of voluntary activity, and a death-like
posture.
Depression arises when psyche is denied a
voice. Withdrawal leads to a kind of psychic death,
when what is needed is a withdrawal of
projections. The desire to 'see through' desire is a
modern rite that transforms awareness. Compulsive
projection does not recognize it is imagining and
literalizing the object of desire. Our pathology
is that we let Thanatos carry our shadow, the evil we
don't want to face, to maintain our ideal selfidentity.
At the same time we ignore or deny the
traces of our own disintegration. Myth is always a
narrative form. The archetype is an interpretive
paradigm, one perspective of many, fetishizing
dissociative states with morbid possibilities.
A morbid principle, Thanatos rests in the
chthonic dimension, a malignant archetype of the
underworld. When we imagine death mythically
and poetically, we imagine it not as it is but as we
fear or would like it to be. Archetypal psychology
claims pathological phenomena are inherent and
crucial constituents of psychic life.
We can explore the chthonic and mystical
aspects of tragedy, personal and collective. All
archetypes have their own way of leading into
death. The chthonic (underworld) dimension of the
universe is the deep and authentic essence of all
∞ 180 ! ∞
being, a pattern in the vision of symbolic images.
Archaic chthonic deities circle the wheel of life, the
primal forces of nature — death and fertility.
The chthonic fertilizes the soil of the dark
unconscious mind — the depth and darkness that
anchor our being in primordial ground. Far beyond
mere blood and soil is an arcane knowledge, based
on pre-philosophical experiences and wisdom,
practices, rooted in the ground where all things die
and decompose to rejoin the primal elements — the
dark, cold side of nature.
We descend into the underworld to engage
soul and find our essence beyond all ideologies. The
chthonic earth exerts an unconscious modulation in
subtle ways. The archetypal way is descent.
Hillman says, “Death is a metaphor for an entire
psychic change, a radical shift in perspective ….”
Our individuation is heading toward death.
We incorporate this awakening into our
awareness which informs us. Archetypes seek
actualization in the context of our environment and
degree of experience. The acquired mind is a
cultural product of the environment. Some tales
arise in specific locales, while others remain mute.
Malevolence is our collective shadow.
Examples of thanatos embodied in current social
behavior include dissociation, doomsday or suicide
sects, genocide, the war machine as death cult, and
numbness to ongoing mass extinction of species at a
rapidly increasing rate.
∞ 181 ! ∞
Soul comes with the presence of death. In
pathologizing events, people, actions, thoughts,
feelings, and circumstances are minimized. We
ignore, demean, compromise, deny, ostracize, and
devalue everything. That includes crimes, accidents,
chance, spiritual visitations, sensed presence,
positive disintegrations, dark nights of the soul, and
the madness that comes when the Muse speaks.
Hillman argued that the soul craves the
constant activity of “seeing through” … of taking
something “as it is.” Working into ever deeper
layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers
draw us in.
From an archetypal perspective, human
existence is mythic existence. Soul is the bottomline
dimension of death, darkness, and
w e akn ess. This is th e d e ep er s ens e of
meaningfulness — peripheral, inner, underworld,
soul-perspective or night-perspective emerging as
self-arising chthonic images. This generally taboo
process is a functional definition of soul, psyche, or
imagination.
Pathos
A rg u a b l y, o u r m o d e r n c u l t u r e i s
unconsciously obsessed with Thanatos, a secret
wish to self-destruct. This Lord of Death remains a
living presence in the archetypal field, whether we
are aware of it or not. Death will not be cheated.
The god is the symptom, with an autonomous
∞ 182 ! ∞
ability to pathologize. Negative and painful
experiences contribute to the development of the
soul. The suicidal urge is a metaphor for the end of
the self, says Hillman.
Pathologizing is a form of soul-making,
engaging emotional suffering and psychic
fragmentation in a culture obsessed with
maximizing emotional well being and wholeness.
According to Hillman, pathologization is “the
psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness,
morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in
any aspect of its behavior and to experience and
imagine life through this deformed and afflicted
perspective” (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology,
57).
H i l l m a n s a y s o u r s o u l i s l e d
toward knowledge of itself through death. “By
beginning with the symptom . . . pathologizing turns
the entire psyche upon a new pivot: death becomes
the center, and with it fantasies that lead right out of
life” (p. 111). Since soul-making is founded on
suffering and death, it is clear that new psychospiritual
experiences of reality require a
psychological dying.
Those driven by self-interest are destructive,
regressive, paranoid, and narcissistic. One aspect of
life is riven so that another aspect — the psychic
aspect of "death" — can reach awareness. We need
self-restraint to die to ignorance, to dissolve the
source of egoism, attachment and repulsion.
∞ 183 ! ∞
These desires sink themselves deep into the
discarded and devalued part of the unconscious,
seethe in the unconscious and come to a boil. No
matter how we try to repress them, they explode
outwards with a will of their own. Thanatos
symbolizes destruction of the rules that do not
encompass the repressed desires that lead to
friction, collapse, and imbalance.
Today the political fight for life is the fight
for Thanatos, much of which doesn't serve society.
When the dialogue stops, it becomes literal and
destructive — the overwhelming presence of death,
from species decline, to natural catastrophes, to
nuclear brinksmanship.
Many embrace a political stance that
embraces death. This is our tension-producing
conundrum that includes such harm as insect
apocalypse that leads to eco-system collapse. Life
can only be understood in terms of the soul's one
certainty: death. In Egyptian mythology, the
perennial struggle of the sun god Horus against Seth
depicts the archaic dynamics of Thanatos,
mimicked in nature and our nature.
This Death Drive is our compulsive desire to
engage in behavior that is risky, blatantly harmful,
and wrong. We disown it with defense mechanisms
forcing it down with repression and denial out of
mental awareness. The, the unconscious demands
resurrection from the literal to the symbolic. If we
are unable to present our aggression against the
∞ 184 ! ∞
outside world it is redirected and retreats into self
destructiveness.
Addictions and aggression are two
sides of the same coin.
Jung called compulsions the greatest
mystery of human behavior. It can be productive or
destructive, especially as personal or collective
Shadow. Destructiveness can become obsessive.
Jung's antidote was withdrawing projections,
overturning the ideological constructs which justify
animosity towards the Other, and recovering
wholeness by recognizing the disowned portion of
the Self.
Our brains reorganize based on our past
experience, emotional states, beliefs and
expectations. Erich Neumann called “psychic
gravitation” a tendency of the ego to return to its
original unconscious state. Psychic gravitation is
regression, sinking back into the unconscious.
Natural inertia causes certain contents of the
unconscious to remain unconscious and certain
contents of consciousness to become unconscious.
The death urge drives to reinstate something
that we never experienced, where we aren’t in the
world yet. It remains incomprehensible. Yet, an
unreal situation turns into the most real, because
final. InThe Soul's Code, Hillman suggests, "The
eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death
that sees through visible presentations to an
invisible core." (p146)
∞ 185 ! ∞
We erect cultural symbols of immortality as
a defense against the unbearable prospect. As is
often the case, it is not just about primordial sexual
perpetuation and death, but about power. Death
opens a portal of gravitas that can suck the living
into its embrace. Thanatos holds the key to that oneway entrance.
In a world of impermanence, we cower in
the face of death. Perhaps mass-scale cinematic
homicide, such as the 'John Wick' series or even
'Godzilla' (2019), is the 21st century version of
substitute sacrifice. Thanatos waits at the boundary
between self and others. Is it a grave transmutation
and catharsis of our own self-destructive urges?
A primordial entity, Thanatos is a chthonic
deity and sadistic principle always ready to drag us
into the underworld, yet demanding our respect as a
titanic force that pervades the cosmos from the Big
Bang to universal entropy.
Thanatos constantly resides between our
particles, in the gaps of our bodies. The process of
virtual photon annihilation at the sub-quantal level
of the absolute vacuum, the transience of quantum
fluctuation is more than a metaphor. It underlies our
existence.
Archetypal Psychology prioritizes soul and
soul-making, yet is full of the dark devotion we
reserve for our deepest obsessions and
compulsions. We thought to find an abomination
and found a God, spanning from murderous
∞ 186 ! ∞
aggression to nondual consciousness.
The impact of death links with the pull of
transcendence, the only cure for a homicidal animal.
We wrestle with pitiless death as we wrestle with
truth and ourselves. Humanity has always wrestled
with the eternal questions of the meaning of
existence. Camus suggests, "Men must live and
create. Live to the point of tears." Death is
surrounded by taboos on death denial, murderous
rage, self-harm, and moral shame or failure.
What Eros builds up, ruthless Thanatos tears
down, as a centrifugal force of destruction. How
many literary and cinematic monsters are
personifications of Thanatos? This is perhaps our
most compelling and frustrating relationship,
perhaps because of the certainty of its final
consummation. Naturally, we seek protection from
the ends of our hair to the tips of our toes.
Thanatos is our primal fear, our obsessions
with death, decay, and non-existence. We are all
stalked by the prospect of death. In classical Greek,
Thanatos personifies not only natural death but
violent death or assault, murder, and mortal peril. A
corpse is called thanatos. We can turn our own
thanatos energy outside or inward.
Death Wish
Hesiod identified him as the son of Nyx
(Night, son of Chaos) and Erebos (Darkness); his
twin is Hypnos (Sleep). Death and Sleep reside in
∞ 187 ! ∞
the Underworld. The image of Thanatos is dressed
in a black robe holding the fatal sword, or as a
w i n g e d s p i r i t , d e i t y , o r d a e m o n .
(Hesiod, Theogony 21 ff (trans. Evelyn-White)
[Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.]) The daemon can
incite ‘oblivion-seeking.’
He is also found in our subconscious
psychological impulses like the death-wish or
suicidal ideation. Desire for immortality is ego’s
narcissism, greed, denial, or bargaining with the
inevitable. The narcissistic personality is possessed
by Thanatos. We sense the undertow of his desire to
obliterate and annihilate in each and every moment
that must be unceasingly recreated.
Each new self-image faces a new form of
Thanatos and substitute sacrifice. Those who ‘know
the ropes’ make sure they don't accumulate around
their own necks. Who else would we seek to
assuage but our own self-destruction?
Freud made the counter-intuitive suggestion
that the death drive is not about survival, which is
after all about self-preservation but the quest of
finding the shortest path towards decomposition. He
calls the withdrawal of libidinal energy from the
world to an “apocalypse,” an “internal catastrophe.”
Weakened sex drives lead to strengthened ego
drives, especially the death drive. But, to quote the
movie Annihilation (2018), “It's not destroying; it's
making something new.”
∞ 188 ! ∞
And yet, we are warned that sacrifices to
this particular god accomplish nothing. That 'pull'
continually tears down our boundaries. So,
Thanatos is also transcendence and our capacity to
transcend illusory boundaries, which appear
unconsciously as a threat to physical mortality, the
'death' of the separate self sense. Our apprehension
is that he will strike and seize us.
The daemon can inform even a painful death
with some poetry and grace. Only this deep
background of death makes 'existence' possible. It
spurs the quest for deeper meaning. We grapple
with it constantly, wrestling with paradox which
will probably still leave us wounded.
Perhaps it is the only way to truly enter life.
Psyche represses what does not fit our notions of
god. Our ideal is of life lived up to death, the
ultimate dissociation of energy from the body. We
can serve conceptual fixations, a mania, or a god.
Jung thought our anxiety “always points out our
task.”Sticking to this archetypal task is not
essentially different from ritual or devotion. If the
view changes, the practice changes.
Wrestling with death forms the link between
psyche and soul, by confronting the god-images
directly. We can inquire into the esssentiality and
relative play of inherently paradoxical life-death. Its
absolute nature is uncontainable. The mind cannot
reduce it to solid terms but self-arising symbols
display it, challenging us to 'see through' death to
∞ 189 ! ∞
the silence that speaks.
Metaphorically and literally, death is a
hunter. We fear loss of control and betrayal by the
body as health or vitality deserts us and death
threatens. By wrestling with death’s presence,
we form the link between psyche and soul, by
confronting the god-images directly. We can inquire
into the essentiality and relative play of inherently
paradoxical life-death. Its absolute nature is
uncontainable. The mind cannot reduce it to solid
terms but self-arising symbols display it,
challenging us to 'see through' death to the silence
that speaks.
The reality of death’s presence is with us in
our day-to-day existence and our dream flesh, in
implications and unforeseen consequences. This
fleeting shadow may be a palpable entity perceived
from the corner of our eye in the gaps between
breaths, between life and death. The desire for death
is often symbolic for a death of ego consciousness
into imaginal or soul consciousness. In this sense,
there is no desire for life that does not include a
desire for death, since we die even as we live, a
total gesture of surrender.
The Mythic Present
Death is a muse that informs us that the
darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls.
Metaphorically, death and new life are always
emerging. As with liminality, much of the imagery
∞ 190 ! ∞
of individuation expresses the themes of birth and
rebirth.
Liminal spaces auger a rebirth. This changes
the vector of our lives from linear to circular, cyclic.
The circular movement of death and renewal is an
essential factor in human life. Life-Death-Rebirth is
the cycle of life, a universal archetypal pattern we
see in creativity, myth, dreams, and ritual.
Our human journey itself — collectively as
well as individually — is unknown, difficult, and
improbable. We step between the worlds and fall
into the magic, mystery and wisdom of the
unconscious. The soul bridge connects us to the
healthy consciousness of death and creative love, a
re-enchanted rather than a deadened reality.
Art, philosophy, and religion have always
been preoccupied with death in one form or another.
“Death is the translation of life into soul,” suggested
James Hillman in Animal Presences. We postulate
soul in special relationship with death. We live the
reality of the psyche in the death of the literal.
Death operates above and below human
existence. We can call soul a daemon, genius, or
muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any
conventional element for the abyss of the
transcendent imagination, which has infinite
aspects. Soul's intimate connection with death is our
true calling — self-determination — our fate.
We all have a conception and preprogrammed notions of the inescapable and
∞ 191 ! ∞
impenetrable nature of death, whether right or
wrong. We don't only encounter Thanatos at the
time of our death. Some notions lead to unconscious
illusions, including the denial of mortality and false
assumption of immortality. We struggle with our
reactions to the reality of people passing away. We
confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal grief,
loss, shock, trauma, cares, diseases, age, dead,
hunger, want, death, disability, and catastrophe, war
and discord.
Our demons are the firewall of resistances,
instinctual impulses, and unconscious activated
complexes that overcome, impel, and possess us.
They include fear of dying, memories filled with
emotions, curious detachments, terrifying events,
overwhelming trauma, shattered beliefs, isolation,
dependency, betrayal, natural disaster, and
catastrophic disease.
Our answers come from the heart of life
itself and the dance of mortality. In engaging the
imaginal we are not struggling with ways to become
superhuman or immortal but with becoming more
fully human in a deeply connected, more-than
human world. It makes living more conscious.
An encounter with death is disconnection
from what we know to be true and safe in the world
— a suspension in the psychic darkness of limbo.
Our spirit may be a sustaining power through all the
witnessing of ruptures as we move between life and
∞ 192 ! ∞
death. It suggests that death is an event that is never
concluded.
Thanatos is always with us, informing the
mythic present, our behavior, and morality. Some
have suggested that death is the ultimate adviser, a
touchstone of what is essential in life. Our deep
nature includes not only a physical body but a body
of myths.
It includes the imaginal dimension of death
and dying, both personal and transpersonal. Depth
psychology suggests that the seeming irrationality
of myth arises from the same source as the
disconnectedness of dream. Both are universal
symbolic reflections of unconscious and repressed
fears and anxieties. Most of us experience
nightmares, anguish, fear of death and life. Trauma
is one of the ways that death pervades life.
This merciless specter is indiscriminate,
functioning at all scales of existence. We can see
him personified in everything from reckless thrill
seeking and raging aggression, from genocide to
the arms race, to mass extinction of species and
nuclear disaster, even the death of stars and
collisions of galaxies to galactic black holes and the
inexorable pull of the gravitational monster, the
Great Attractor.
The universe expresses creative and
destructive energies. Humanity and the cosmos
share the same creation mythos, which describes
our ultimate return. We may be enamored with the
∞ 193 ! ∞
idea we all spring from stardust, but that is not
significantly different from nuclear waste. We
spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death
reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul
through imagination and metaphor.
Psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible
yet primordial matrix. This existential Void is a state
of nothingness which feels different to everyone,
depending on their personal experience with various
aspects of death. We all wrestle with and obsess on
the notion of death. Our egos try to suppress such
notions, but when Thanatos arises from the
subconscious underworld, we are powerless in its
presence.
The Underworld
In the ancient texts, Hermes Trismegistus
explores the nature of death and the fate of the soul
which survives it. From our human point of view,
time is a destroying force, since we all age and die.
But from the cosmic perspective, it is an endless
cycle of death and rebirth.
We can participate in that eternal realm
through the inner quest, by learning to accept the
inevitable transitory nature of forms, including our
own. Death is just the discarding of the worn-out
body. According to The Hermetica, the end of
becoming is the beginning of destruction. There is a
primal instinct within us which yearns for that final
goal of life, that great moment when eternity yawns
∞ 194 ! ∞
wide to receive us.
O u r a p p r o a c h i s p h i l o s o p h i c a l ,
psychological, and devotional focusing on creative
and deconstructive acts. The essentially
unpresentable mediates our experiences and
reflective moments. This is a style of relating to and
engaging our thoughts and fantasies of death and
catastrophes for humanity.
Some may say that rationalization, fear,
resistance, escape, phobia, and ego-death paranoia
profane the sacred. But they are inherent to the
human condition and our madhouse of abstractions,
complexes and pathologies. What do we let die
within us while we live? After the turmoil and
pandemonium of ego-death we forge new
archetypal configurations with the collective
unconscious.
The existential phenomenology of death is
also a way of seeing and understanding without
interpretation, like death-bed visions and
apparitions. Such visions suggest that death is not
an extinction of life but the transition of life, a rite
of passage that should be approached consciously
and with dignity.
Death is an experience that must be
undertaken on its own terms. In the end it is fusion
with the great beyond, a non-dual experience of
merging with the cosmos. We lose our narrative self
and are just in the moment, flowing with reality.
Our energy pours back into the primeval expanses.
∞ 195 ! ∞
The death-rebirth sequence typically opens
us to the transpersonal domain with its virtually
infinite creativity. It reveals and unfolds our future
potentials. The key is surrender and dissolution of
boundaries, dissolution of the ego.
Rebirth, in the psychological sense, is
experience of the transcendence of life.
Transcendence is a natural progression from our
finite, mortal frame through space, time, and the
personal ego into infinite, immortal life beyond. We
find it in the breath inside the breath.
It gives us access to the experience of
Cosmic Consciousness. The experience may be
induced by ritual means, with or without direct
participation. It may be a spontaneous, ecstatic
revelation, or a subjective transformation only. This
expansion of boundaries is an enlargement of the
personality, bringing richness and depth to life.
Soul finds its expression through being a
metaphorical body, expressed in images beyond the
literal. The mind has a solidifying tendency it
mistakes for truth. A deepened and awakened
consciousness has a capacity to awaken the world
into its own being. Things look different from the
underworld when we give primacy to metaphor.
Among our ordinary experiences, it is a network of
meaningful relations, immersion in the universal
stream of consciousness.
Meditators are advised to "die daily,"
comprehending the illusory nature of time, space,
∞ 196 ! ∞
and ego as reality constructs. The primary nature of
consciousness is revealed. In experiential 'journeys',
transformation results from deepening within the
flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying
with more primal forms, and ultimately with
formlessness.
Through “creative regression," the generic
form of ego death, consciousness recycles,
recursively bending back upon itself. The direction
is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of
sequences from earlier life, conception and birth
experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and
physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic
perception, and quantum consciousness. As
consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is
the ground state of unborn form. The generic
purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied
being, precipitating communion with and repatterning by the Whole.
When all forms finally dissolve into
unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of
the natural mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the
womb of creation. The Oneness of all life and
existence is directly experienced through a variety
of transformations ranging from mineral, plant and
animal identifications to planetary and universal
consciousness.
∞ 197 ! ∞
References
The Hermetica, the Lost Wisdom of the
Pharaohs (Freke & Gandy, Tarcher, 1997).
Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology
Hillman, James. The Soul’s Code
Hillman, James. Animal Presences
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld
Hillman, James. Suicide and the Soul
Wrestling with Thanatos:
A Mythological Study
by Iona Miller
'The end of destruction is the beginning of
becoming. Everything on Earth must be destroyed,
for without destruction nothing can be created. The
new comes out of the old. … For man, time is a
destroyer, but for the Cosmos it is an ever-turning
wheel."
— excerpted from The Hermetica, the Lost
Wisdom of the Pharaohs
We are doomed to die and we know it in
every fiber of our being. It arouses the primordial
imagery of darkness that lies below our personality.
Every culture lies about the possibilities of beating
death through some sort of self-perpetuation. Yet,
w e a r e e p h e m e r a l e n t i t i e s d e s t i n e d t o
expire.Mythological studies help us ‘count the
ways’ that Thanatos embodies the natural
phenomena of psychophysical death and dying.
Extreme death anxiety is an essentially
thanatophobic response. We may feel hopeless,
unable to accept the fact of total surrender, yet only
such surrender leads to transformation. Dark and
scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. Belief
systems condition our perceptions, including the
breakdown and demise of the self.
∞ 174 ! ∞
Thanatos is death and chaos, unavailable
energy, the fundamental principle of emptiness.
Death was a subject for poets long before Homer
called him the brother of Hypnos in his epic
poem The Iliad. And it goes on long after the 19th c.
poem, Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant. This
meditation or contemplation on death was meant to
console humanity in its shared predicament. We
have one view of death from the outside and
another by seeing through the imagery of the Lord
of Death.
Are we defined by our maddest edges? As
unformed consciousness, Thanatos inhabits our
dreams as well, with images of death, torture,
mutilation, and rotting. Then in the morning we are
resurrected to a seemingly new life. It is the energy
we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of
time. It reaches our awareness through dreams
(Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination.
Now science speaks of the lethal dimension
as a natural phenomenon — entropy, the inherent
tendency for life to dissolve into the void. There are
many popular and heartfelt poems and tales of
death. Not only do we all die, we all have haunting
fantasies about death. They include the Art of
Death, conscious dying and overcoming the fear of
death. In this sense, Thanatos is our soul-support.
∞ 175 ! ∞
Deadline
Threshold events occur when unconscious
information arises within our somatic, emotional,
mental, or spiritual perceptions. Reflexive
pathologizing pulls us toward that psychic
borderland and dissociation. We tranquilize
ourselves with the trivial. Even politics are
dissociative, a fantasy version of reality --
especially the politics of actual and symbolic death
in war, medicine, and religion. At the liminal
threshold, body and soul are successfully reconnected.
In this liminal period, a person in a
passage ritual is ‘betwixed and between’
— structurally, if not physically, "invisible."
Psychologically, Thanatos correlates with
"ego death" — the death of the old self which
creates the conditions for rebirth. From death
sentence to death-sentience is a depth way of
making soul, seeing through, and imagining
metaphorical death. The myth speaks to anyone
who undergoes a transformation.
For the cryptic key, among our searching
questions we must ask what this particular image
has do with my death? Pathologizing feelings can
be a medicalization and commodification of
emotional pain. There is no cure for being on earth.
There is perhaps only a dark beauty in soul's
pathologizing nature in personal symptomology.
Repressed death-anxiety can reappear as
distorted cravings, such as morbid desire for fame
∞ 176 ! ∞
as symbolic immortality more likely to yield self
mortification. Meaning is what seems dead in the
wasteland of the alchemical mortificatio with its
darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, and
rotting. The richness of iterations allows systems as
a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization
and reorganization at all levels.
In alchemy, the images of figurative death
appear during the mortificatio operation, with its
primary agent fear. Symbolic death arouses
darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting,
penance, and abstinence — denial of the body.
Emotionally it means the primitive, violent
outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power
demands that must die for transmutation to occur.
Repetition of mythic elements, recitations of
life in the imaginal, is a feature of all fundamental
drives, even when overwhelming or disheartening.
Rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping,
crawling worms and snakes, and particularly
noxious odors like the stench of graves are classic
images. It is truly a journey through "the Valley of
the Shadow of Death."
The psyche depicts the decay of outworn
forms in preparation for new. Repetition is
compulsion, even among shattered disarray,
fixation, psychic inertia, morbid fascinations, shock,
disgust, and psychopathy. Compulsion is an
addictive pattern that rewards us with dopamine
release.
∞ 177 ! ∞
When it comes to compulsive behavior, we
know how we should behave, but we do what we
want usually based on how we feel. We don't have
fixed ideas; they have us. Primal urges supersede all
rules, doctrines, and morals with eruptions of
passions, emotions, and madness.
Psychic Presence
If personifying carries us into myth,
as James Hillman (founder of Archetypal
Psychology) suggests, this is especially true of
Thanatos, who enters our awareness as perhaps the
only ultimate truth. Our complexes appear as dream
people, a multitude of autonomous personalities
embodying our morbid preoccupation with the
possibilities of personal annihilation or the
ambiguity of a positive disintegration.
The compulsion to conquer death or nonordinary
dissociation is either for power or
transcendence. Death permeates or interpenetrates
our substance and psyche which mirror one
a n o t h e r . C a t a s t r o p h i c b r e a k d o w n o f
civilizations is repeated in the West . It can be
related to Thanatos as the wild psyche of
aggression/death, separation/risk, separation/
rebellion.
But Hillman claims, "We are composed of
agonies, not polarities." Death is not the
psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that
holds away death prevents life. When the physical
∞ 178 ! ∞
form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of
existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds
things in their form is the secret of death.
We play out those agonies as symbolic
enactment, meaning, and transcendence. The mind
provides metaphorical meaning for symbolic
sequences and ritual dramas that embody the
metaphor, which comes to the surface as everyday
behavior. The death we imagine is the one for the
life we imagine for ourselves while a new one tries
to enter. We can confess either our success or failure
to create an image of life after death.
The flow is from symbol to myth, to
reinforcing ritual enactment, then back to human
awareness. Enacting myths helps the devotee to
consciously experience each symbol cycle and
reconnect with deep mind. Grasping one part of the
cycle takes us deeper into the unconscious mind and
psyche.
Embodied consciousness contains the
cosmos so that by knowing the body we know the
universe. The mid-point of behavioral restructuring
and transformation is an 'oceanic' altered state, as
some near-death experiencers (NDE's) report.
Rituals connect worship and grief so we become
more aware of life in the midst of grief. If we
transform our grieving hearts, we rediscover joy.
We cannot hope to outwit Thanatos by
feigning death, but we can get stuck in that practice.
Thanatosis is a defense strategy of certain creatures
∞ 179 ! ∞
in which they play dead. It resembles shock, with
cessation of voluntary activity, and a death-like
posture.
Depression arises when psyche is denied a
voice. Withdrawal leads to a kind of psychic death,
when what is needed is a withdrawal of
projections. The desire to 'see through' desire is a
modern rite that transforms awareness. Compulsive
projection does not recognize it is imagining and
literalizing the object of desire. Our pathology
is that we let Thanatos carry our shadow, the evil we
don't want to face, to maintain our ideal selfidentity.
At the same time we ignore or deny the
traces of our own disintegration. Myth is always a
narrative form. The archetype is an interpretive
paradigm, one perspective of many, fetishizing
dissociative states with morbid possibilities.
A morbid principle, Thanatos rests in the
chthonic dimension, a malignant archetype of the
underworld. When we imagine death mythically
and poetically, we imagine it not as it is but as we
fear or would like it to be. Archetypal psychology
claims pathological phenomena are inherent and
crucial constituents of psychic life.
We can explore the chthonic and mystical
aspects of tragedy, personal and collective. All
archetypes have their own way of leading into
death. The chthonic (underworld) dimension of the
universe is the deep and authentic essence of all
∞ 180 ! ∞
being, a pattern in the vision of symbolic images.
Archaic chthonic deities circle the wheel of life, the
primal forces of nature — death and fertility.
The chthonic fertilizes the soil of the dark
unconscious mind — the depth and darkness that
anchor our being in primordial ground. Far beyond
mere blood and soil is an arcane knowledge, based
on pre-philosophical experiences and wisdom,
practices, rooted in the ground where all things die
and decompose to rejoin the primal elements — the
dark, cold side of nature.
We descend into the underworld to engage
soul and find our essence beyond all ideologies. The
chthonic earth exerts an unconscious modulation in
subtle ways. The archetypal way is descent.
Hillman says, “Death is a metaphor for an entire
psychic change, a radical shift in perspective ….”
Our individuation is heading toward death.
We incorporate this awakening into our
awareness which informs us. Archetypes seek
actualization in the context of our environment and
degree of experience. The acquired mind is a
cultural product of the environment. Some tales
arise in specific locales, while others remain mute.
Malevolence is our collective shadow.
Examples of thanatos embodied in current social
behavior include dissociation, doomsday or suicide
sects, genocide, the war machine as death cult, and
numbness to ongoing mass extinction of species at a
rapidly increasing rate.
∞ 181 ! ∞
Soul comes with the presence of death. In
pathologizing events, people, actions, thoughts,
feelings, and circumstances are minimized. We
ignore, demean, compromise, deny, ostracize, and
devalue everything. That includes crimes, accidents,
chance, spiritual visitations, sensed presence,
positive disintegrations, dark nights of the soul, and
the madness that comes when the Muse speaks.
Hillman argued that the soul craves the
constant activity of “seeing through” … of taking
something “as it is.” Working into ever deeper
layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers
draw us in.
From an archetypal perspective, human
existence is mythic existence. Soul is the bottomline
dimension of death, darkness, and
w e akn ess. This is th e d e ep er s ens e of
meaningfulness — peripheral, inner, underworld,
soul-perspective or night-perspective emerging as
self-arising chthonic images. This generally taboo
process is a functional definition of soul, psyche, or
imagination.
Pathos
A rg u a b l y, o u r m o d e r n c u l t u r e i s
unconsciously obsessed with Thanatos, a secret
wish to self-destruct. This Lord of Death remains a
living presence in the archetypal field, whether we
are aware of it or not. Death will not be cheated.
The god is the symptom, with an autonomous
∞ 182 ! ∞
ability to pathologize. Negative and painful
experiences contribute to the development of the
soul. The suicidal urge is a metaphor for the end of
the self, says Hillman.
Pathologizing is a form of soul-making,
engaging emotional suffering and psychic
fragmentation in a culture obsessed with
maximizing emotional well being and wholeness.
According to Hillman, pathologization is “the
psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness,
morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in
any aspect of its behavior and to experience and
imagine life through this deformed and afflicted
perspective” (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology,
57).
H i l l m a n s a y s o u r s o u l i s l e d
toward knowledge of itself through death. “By
beginning with the symptom . . . pathologizing turns
the entire psyche upon a new pivot: death becomes
the center, and with it fantasies that lead right out of
life” (p. 111). Since soul-making is founded on
suffering and death, it is clear that new psychospiritual
experiences of reality require a
psychological dying.
Those driven by self-interest are destructive,
regressive, paranoid, and narcissistic. One aspect of
life is riven so that another aspect — the psychic
aspect of "death" — can reach awareness. We need
self-restraint to die to ignorance, to dissolve the
source of egoism, attachment and repulsion.
∞ 183 ! ∞
These desires sink themselves deep into the
discarded and devalued part of the unconscious,
seethe in the unconscious and come to a boil. No
matter how we try to repress them, they explode
outwards with a will of their own. Thanatos
symbolizes destruction of the rules that do not
encompass the repressed desires that lead to
friction, collapse, and imbalance.
Today the political fight for life is the fight
for Thanatos, much of which doesn't serve society.
When the dialogue stops, it becomes literal and
destructive — the overwhelming presence of death,
from species decline, to natural catastrophes, to
nuclear brinksmanship.
Many embrace a political stance that
embraces death. This is our tension-producing
conundrum that includes such harm as insect
apocalypse that leads to eco-system collapse. Life
can only be understood in terms of the soul's one
certainty: death. In Egyptian mythology, the
perennial struggle of the sun god Horus against Seth
depicts the archaic dynamics of Thanatos,
mimicked in nature and our nature.
This Death Drive is our compulsive desire to
engage in behavior that is risky, blatantly harmful,
and wrong. We disown it with defense mechanisms
forcing it down with repression and denial out of
mental awareness. The, the unconscious demands
resurrection from the literal to the symbolic. If we
are unable to present our aggression against the
∞ 184 ! ∞
outside world it is redirected and retreats into self
destructiveness.
Addictions and aggression are two
sides of the same coin.
Jung called compulsions the greatest
mystery of human behavior. It can be productive or
destructive, especially as personal or collective
Shadow. Destructiveness can become obsessive.
Jung's antidote was withdrawing projections,
overturning the ideological constructs which justify
animosity towards the Other, and recovering
wholeness by recognizing the disowned portion of
the Self.
Our brains reorganize based on our past
experience, emotional states, beliefs and
expectations. Erich Neumann called “psychic
gravitation” a tendency of the ego to return to its
original unconscious state. Psychic gravitation is
regression, sinking back into the unconscious.
Natural inertia causes certain contents of the
unconscious to remain unconscious and certain
contents of consciousness to become unconscious.
The death urge drives to reinstate something
that we never experienced, where we aren’t in the
world yet. It remains incomprehensible. Yet, an
unreal situation turns into the most real, because
final. InThe Soul's Code, Hillman suggests, "The
eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death
that sees through visible presentations to an
invisible core." (p146)
∞ 185 ! ∞
We erect cultural symbols of immortality as
a defense against the unbearable prospect. As is
often the case, it is not just about primordial sexual
perpetuation and death, but about power. Death
opens a portal of gravitas that can suck the living
into its embrace. Thanatos holds the key to that oneway entrance.
In a world of impermanence, we cower in
the face of death. Perhaps mass-scale cinematic
homicide, such as the 'John Wick' series or even
'Godzilla' (2019), is the 21st century version of
substitute sacrifice. Thanatos waits at the boundary
between self and others. Is it a grave transmutation
and catharsis of our own self-destructive urges?
A primordial entity, Thanatos is a chthonic
deity and sadistic principle always ready to drag us
into the underworld, yet demanding our respect as a
titanic force that pervades the cosmos from the Big
Bang to universal entropy.
Thanatos constantly resides between our
particles, in the gaps of our bodies. The process of
virtual photon annihilation at the sub-quantal level
of the absolute vacuum, the transience of quantum
fluctuation is more than a metaphor. It underlies our
existence.
Archetypal Psychology prioritizes soul and
soul-making, yet is full of the dark devotion we
reserve for our deepest obsessions and
compulsions. We thought to find an abomination
and found a God, spanning from murderous
∞ 186 ! ∞
aggression to nondual consciousness.
The impact of death links with the pull of
transcendence, the only cure for a homicidal animal.
We wrestle with pitiless death as we wrestle with
truth and ourselves. Humanity has always wrestled
with the eternal questions of the meaning of
existence. Camus suggests, "Men must live and
create. Live to the point of tears." Death is
surrounded by taboos on death denial, murderous
rage, self-harm, and moral shame or failure.
What Eros builds up, ruthless Thanatos tears
down, as a centrifugal force of destruction. How
many literary and cinematic monsters are
personifications of Thanatos? This is perhaps our
most compelling and frustrating relationship,
perhaps because of the certainty of its final
consummation. Naturally, we seek protection from
the ends of our hair to the tips of our toes.
Thanatos is our primal fear, our obsessions
with death, decay, and non-existence. We are all
stalked by the prospect of death. In classical Greek,
Thanatos personifies not only natural death but
violent death or assault, murder, and mortal peril. A
corpse is called thanatos. We can turn our own
thanatos energy outside or inward.
Death Wish
Hesiod identified him as the son of Nyx
(Night, son of Chaos) and Erebos (Darkness); his
twin is Hypnos (Sleep). Death and Sleep reside in
∞ 187 ! ∞
the Underworld. The image of Thanatos is dressed
in a black robe holding the fatal sword, or as a
w i n g e d s p i r i t , d e i t y , o r d a e m o n .
(Hesiod, Theogony 21 ff (trans. Evelyn-White)
[Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.]) The daemon can
incite ‘oblivion-seeking.’
He is also found in our subconscious
psychological impulses like the death-wish or
suicidal ideation. Desire for immortality is ego’s
narcissism, greed, denial, or bargaining with the
inevitable. The narcissistic personality is possessed
by Thanatos. We sense the undertow of his desire to
obliterate and annihilate in each and every moment
that must be unceasingly recreated.
Each new self-image faces a new form of
Thanatos and substitute sacrifice. Those who ‘know
the ropes’ make sure they don't accumulate around
their own necks. Who else would we seek to
assuage but our own self-destruction?
Freud made the counter-intuitive suggestion
that the death drive is not about survival, which is
after all about self-preservation but the quest of
finding the shortest path towards decomposition. He
calls the withdrawal of libidinal energy from the
world to an “apocalypse,” an “internal catastrophe.”
Weakened sex drives lead to strengthened ego
drives, especially the death drive. But, to quote the
movie Annihilation (2018), “It's not destroying; it's
making something new.”
∞ 188 ! ∞
And yet, we are warned that sacrifices to
this particular god accomplish nothing. That 'pull'
continually tears down our boundaries. So,
Thanatos is also transcendence and our capacity to
transcend illusory boundaries, which appear
unconsciously as a threat to physical mortality, the
'death' of the separate self sense. Our apprehension
is that he will strike and seize us.
The daemon can inform even a painful death
with some poetry and grace. Only this deep
background of death makes 'existence' possible. It
spurs the quest for deeper meaning. We grapple
with it constantly, wrestling with paradox which
will probably still leave us wounded.
Perhaps it is the only way to truly enter life.
Psyche represses what does not fit our notions of
god. Our ideal is of life lived up to death, the
ultimate dissociation of energy from the body. We
can serve conceptual fixations, a mania, or a god.
Jung thought our anxiety “always points out our
task.”Sticking to this archetypal task is not
essentially different from ritual or devotion. If the
view changes, the practice changes.
Wrestling with death forms the link between
psyche and soul, by confronting the god-images
directly. We can inquire into the esssentiality and
relative play of inherently paradoxical life-death. Its
absolute nature is uncontainable. The mind cannot
reduce it to solid terms but self-arising symbols
display it, challenging us to 'see through' death to
∞ 189 ! ∞
the silence that speaks.
Metaphorically and literally, death is a
hunter. We fear loss of control and betrayal by the
body as health or vitality deserts us and death
threatens. By wrestling with death’s presence,
we form the link between psyche and soul, by
confronting the god-images directly. We can inquire
into the essentiality and relative play of inherently
paradoxical life-death. Its absolute nature is
uncontainable. The mind cannot reduce it to solid
terms but self-arising symbols display it,
challenging us to 'see through' death to the silence
that speaks.
The reality of death’s presence is with us in
our day-to-day existence and our dream flesh, in
implications and unforeseen consequences. This
fleeting shadow may be a palpable entity perceived
from the corner of our eye in the gaps between
breaths, between life and death. The desire for death
is often symbolic for a death of ego consciousness
into imaginal or soul consciousness. In this sense,
there is no desire for life that does not include a
desire for death, since we die even as we live, a
total gesture of surrender.
The Mythic Present
Death is a muse that informs us that the
darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls.
Metaphorically, death and new life are always
emerging. As with liminality, much of the imagery
∞ 190 ! ∞
of individuation expresses the themes of birth and
rebirth.
Liminal spaces auger a rebirth. This changes
the vector of our lives from linear to circular, cyclic.
The circular movement of death and renewal is an
essential factor in human life. Life-Death-Rebirth is
the cycle of life, a universal archetypal pattern we
see in creativity, myth, dreams, and ritual.
Our human journey itself — collectively as
well as individually — is unknown, difficult, and
improbable. We step between the worlds and fall
into the magic, mystery and wisdom of the
unconscious. The soul bridge connects us to the
healthy consciousness of death and creative love, a
re-enchanted rather than a deadened reality.
Art, philosophy, and religion have always
been preoccupied with death in one form or another.
“Death is the translation of life into soul,” suggested
James Hillman in Animal Presences. We postulate
soul in special relationship with death. We live the
reality of the psyche in the death of the literal.
Death operates above and below human
existence. We can call soul a daemon, genius, or
muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any
conventional element for the abyss of the
transcendent imagination, which has infinite
aspects. Soul's intimate connection with death is our
true calling — self-determination — our fate.
We all have a conception and preprogrammed notions of the inescapable and
∞ 191 ! ∞
impenetrable nature of death, whether right or
wrong. We don't only encounter Thanatos at the
time of our death. Some notions lead to unconscious
illusions, including the denial of mortality and false
assumption of immortality. We struggle with our
reactions to the reality of people passing away. We
confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal grief,
loss, shock, trauma, cares, diseases, age, dead,
hunger, want, death, disability, and catastrophe, war
and discord.
Our demons are the firewall of resistances,
instinctual impulses, and unconscious activated
complexes that overcome, impel, and possess us.
They include fear of dying, memories filled with
emotions, curious detachments, terrifying events,
overwhelming trauma, shattered beliefs, isolation,
dependency, betrayal, natural disaster, and
catastrophic disease.
Our answers come from the heart of life
itself and the dance of mortality. In engaging the
imaginal we are not struggling with ways to become
superhuman or immortal but with becoming more
fully human in a deeply connected, more-than
human world. It makes living more conscious.
An encounter with death is disconnection
from what we know to be true and safe in the world
— a suspension in the psychic darkness of limbo.
Our spirit may be a sustaining power through all the
witnessing of ruptures as we move between life and
∞ 192 ! ∞
death. It suggests that death is an event that is never
concluded.
Thanatos is always with us, informing the
mythic present, our behavior, and morality. Some
have suggested that death is the ultimate adviser, a
touchstone of what is essential in life. Our deep
nature includes not only a physical body but a body
of myths.
It includes the imaginal dimension of death
and dying, both personal and transpersonal. Depth
psychology suggests that the seeming irrationality
of myth arises from the same source as the
disconnectedness of dream. Both are universal
symbolic reflections of unconscious and repressed
fears and anxieties. Most of us experience
nightmares, anguish, fear of death and life. Trauma
is one of the ways that death pervades life.
This merciless specter is indiscriminate,
functioning at all scales of existence. We can see
him personified in everything from reckless thrill
seeking and raging aggression, from genocide to
the arms race, to mass extinction of species and
nuclear disaster, even the death of stars and
collisions of galaxies to galactic black holes and the
inexorable pull of the gravitational monster, the
Great Attractor.
The universe expresses creative and
destructive energies. Humanity and the cosmos
share the same creation mythos, which describes
our ultimate return. We may be enamored with the
∞ 193 ! ∞
idea we all spring from stardust, but that is not
significantly different from nuclear waste. We
spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death
reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul
through imagination and metaphor.
Psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible
yet primordial matrix. This existential Void is a state
of nothingness which feels different to everyone,
depending on their personal experience with various
aspects of death. We all wrestle with and obsess on
the notion of death. Our egos try to suppress such
notions, but when Thanatos arises from the
subconscious underworld, we are powerless in its
presence.
The Underworld
In the ancient texts, Hermes Trismegistus
explores the nature of death and the fate of the soul
which survives it. From our human point of view,
time is a destroying force, since we all age and die.
But from the cosmic perspective, it is an endless
cycle of death and rebirth.
We can participate in that eternal realm
through the inner quest, by learning to accept the
inevitable transitory nature of forms, including our
own. Death is just the discarding of the worn-out
body. According to The Hermetica, the end of
becoming is the beginning of destruction. There is a
primal instinct within us which yearns for that final
goal of life, that great moment when eternity yawns
∞ 194 ! ∞
wide to receive us.
O u r a p p r o a c h i s p h i l o s o p h i c a l ,
psychological, and devotional focusing on creative
and deconstructive acts. The essentially
unpresentable mediates our experiences and
reflective moments. This is a style of relating to and
engaging our thoughts and fantasies of death and
catastrophes for humanity.
Some may say that rationalization, fear,
resistance, escape, phobia, and ego-death paranoia
profane the sacred. But they are inherent to the
human condition and our madhouse of abstractions,
complexes and pathologies. What do we let die
within us while we live? After the turmoil and
pandemonium of ego-death we forge new
archetypal configurations with the collective
unconscious.
The existential phenomenology of death is
also a way of seeing and understanding without
interpretation, like death-bed visions and
apparitions. Such visions suggest that death is not
an extinction of life but the transition of life, a rite
of passage that should be approached consciously
and with dignity.
Death is an experience that must be
undertaken on its own terms. In the end it is fusion
with the great beyond, a non-dual experience of
merging with the cosmos. We lose our narrative self
and are just in the moment, flowing with reality.
Our energy pours back into the primeval expanses.
∞ 195 ! ∞
The death-rebirth sequence typically opens
us to the transpersonal domain with its virtually
infinite creativity. It reveals and unfolds our future
potentials. The key is surrender and dissolution of
boundaries, dissolution of the ego.
Rebirth, in the psychological sense, is
experience of the transcendence of life.
Transcendence is a natural progression from our
finite, mortal frame through space, time, and the
personal ego into infinite, immortal life beyond. We
find it in the breath inside the breath.
It gives us access to the experience of
Cosmic Consciousness. The experience may be
induced by ritual means, with or without direct
participation. It may be a spontaneous, ecstatic
revelation, or a subjective transformation only. This
expansion of boundaries is an enlargement of the
personality, bringing richness and depth to life.
Soul finds its expression through being a
metaphorical body, expressed in images beyond the
literal. The mind has a solidifying tendency it
mistakes for truth. A deepened and awakened
consciousness has a capacity to awaken the world
into its own being. Things look different from the
underworld when we give primacy to metaphor.
Among our ordinary experiences, it is a network of
meaningful relations, immersion in the universal
stream of consciousness.
Meditators are advised to "die daily,"
comprehending the illusory nature of time, space,
∞ 196 ! ∞
and ego as reality constructs. The primary nature of
consciousness is revealed. In experiential 'journeys',
transformation results from deepening within the
flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying
with more primal forms, and ultimately with
formlessness.
Through “creative regression," the generic
form of ego death, consciousness recycles,
recursively bending back upon itself. The direction
is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of
sequences from earlier life, conception and birth
experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and
physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic
perception, and quantum consciousness. As
consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is
the ground state of unborn form. The generic
purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied
being, precipitating communion with and repatterning by the Whole.
When all forms finally dissolve into
unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of
the natural mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the
womb of creation. The Oneness of all life and
existence is directly experienced through a variety
of transformations ranging from mineral, plant and
animal identifications to planetary and universal
consciousness.
∞ 197 ! ∞
References
The Hermetica, the Lost Wisdom of the
Pharaohs (Freke & Gandy, Tarcher, 1997).
Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology
Hillman, James. The Soul’s Code
Hillman, James. Animal Presences
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld
Hillman, James. Suicide and the Soul
thanatos
Wrestling with Thanatos
by Iona Miller, 2019
"People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491
The Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue
HADES is a symbol of the incredible, fathomless depths of the psyche. The true nature of all things is hidden in these depths of the unconscious. We must penetrate this depth dimension and discover what is hidden there. The Roman correspondent for Hades is Pluto, whose name means "wealth."
This indicates the buried treasures existing in the depths of the psyche and experience of this realm of the underworld. We have an invisible connection to the underworld, which is Hades himself. When Hades appears in the upperworld, he is frequently experienced as a vile violence, as in the case of Persephone's rape. Hades hides invisibly in things.
Death is always immanent. He required no cult worship from mortals, because he already possesses the riches of the depths of experience. The final act is always his, in any event. The final purpose of every soul involves "devotion" to Hades, in a psychic sense.
Most experiences are attributed only a relative significance when they are related to the personal experience of death. Even in life, most people are obsessed with death. Hades is the unknowable goal underlying all human experience. To put events into the perspective we will have on our deathbeds shows the meaning for soul inherent in these events.
For a long time now I have felt the Void, but have refused to throw myself into the Void. I have been as cowardly as all that I see. When I believed I was refusing the world, I now realize I was refusing the Void. Until now, my suffering consisted in refusing the Void. The Void that was already within me." --Antonin Artaud
...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy —that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death] (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
“The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.
I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.
It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself… What do we know of it?
Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our friend, our closest friend, perhaps our only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy
Bio:
Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist, and multimedia artist. Her post-Jungian articles have appeared in several Neos Alexandrina devotionals, and elsewhere. She has taught personal mythology, mythological studies, and self-exploration for decades. She serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, and the Board of Directors of Medigrace, Inc. https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/
by Iona Miller, 2019
"People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491
The Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue
HADES is a symbol of the incredible, fathomless depths of the psyche. The true nature of all things is hidden in these depths of the unconscious. We must penetrate this depth dimension and discover what is hidden there. The Roman correspondent for Hades is Pluto, whose name means "wealth."
This indicates the buried treasures existing in the depths of the psyche and experience of this realm of the underworld. We have an invisible connection to the underworld, which is Hades himself. When Hades appears in the upperworld, he is frequently experienced as a vile violence, as in the case of Persephone's rape. Hades hides invisibly in things.
Death is always immanent. He required no cult worship from mortals, because he already possesses the riches of the depths of experience. The final act is always his, in any event. The final purpose of every soul involves "devotion" to Hades, in a psychic sense.
Most experiences are attributed only a relative significance when they are related to the personal experience of death. Even in life, most people are obsessed with death. Hades is the unknowable goal underlying all human experience. To put events into the perspective we will have on our deathbeds shows the meaning for soul inherent in these events.
For a long time now I have felt the Void, but have refused to throw myself into the Void. I have been as cowardly as all that I see. When I believed I was refusing the world, I now realize I was refusing the Void. Until now, my suffering consisted in refusing the Void. The Void that was already within me." --Antonin Artaud
...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy —that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death] (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
“The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.
I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.
It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself… What do we know of it?
Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our friend, our closest friend, perhaps our only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy
Bio:
Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical hypnotherapist, and multimedia artist. Her post-Jungian articles have appeared in several Neos Alexandrina devotionals, and elsewhere. She has taught personal mythology, mythological studies, and self-exploration for decades. She serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, and the Board of Directors of Medigrace, Inc. https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/