The Place Where Hillman Dances

An essay which tries to dialogue with a dream, and ends up being written by it.

Dream, Dec. 28, 2009

I am upstairs and I hear a noise downstairs, in the house I currently live in. A is there, but I take
the lead in going downstairs to see who the intruder is. It is the estate agent and another,
familiar-looking man. "Who are you," I say in a stern voice, "and what are you doing in my
house?" The other man turns, and I see it is James Hillman. The estate agent says he is my
landlord, and he has a right to be in my house. I am not happy about this at all but I am excited to
meet him, and come down to welcome him as a guest. As I move into the same space as him I
wish I could be more welcoming but I resent the way he barged into my house. It feels like a
violation. He sidles up to me and starts feeling my arse, and steals a kiss from me while I'm doing
something else. I am very annoyed by this, especially as A is in the house, but I don't say
anything. We start chatting, and I ask him about his connection with M. I tell him I once analysed
with M. Ah, he says, so you will have had conversations with him that no-one else is privy to. He
seems more emotionally connected when discussing psychology, and starts to take an interest in
me. He says he has a 'couch' technique which involves me lying on a 'couch', a sort of slender
structure covered with black fabric, suspended about four or five feet in the air. The movements I
make while 'on the couch' determine my true desires in life. I agree, and make some elegant
dance moves, with my back supported by the 'couch' the whole time. He watches, but doesn't say
anything. After that, I watch him move around, and it seems that he is dancing, and that I have
seen him dance before. He is standing on one leg, and I want to ask him if I really saw him dance
before, on the Internet, or if I dreamed it. Also, I want to ask him if it's the same woman who did
the paintings for 'Animal Dreams', but I have a feeling it's a new wife, as she's quite young, so I
keep my mouth shut. Soon after that, I wish they would leave, but they don't, so I leave the house
and go to 'return home'. My route takes me through a seaside town which is 'Cyprus' but looks
like England. I am in my old car. I am still trying to get home via a circuitous route when the
dream ends.

I have been re-reading James Hillman's book, The Dream and the Underworld, and it has been
challenging for me as a pagan, because his underworld of the dream, and of the Greeks, isn't
quite the same as the underworld in a magickal, religious sense. It's metaphorical and psychical.
Hillman's perspective is radically valuable in the context of psychology, but the dream has put me
right on the complicated fault-lines between concept, belief, experience and metaphor.

In the world of paganism and magickal practice, magickal and spiritual entities are conceived of
as otherworldly, but real. This is what psychologists mean when they talk about the
parapsychological, as a place beyond what they think of as psychological, but which they can't
ignore because of certain experiences. Only the ones who have had such experiences tend to
refer to parapsychological, or 'psi', phenomena at all. In pagan and magickal practices of various
kinds, maps are often made, verbally or graphically, of planes, upper and lowerworlds, using
spheres, or trees or axes, stories told of entities met there, and encounters had. Spells, or verbal
formulas, may be exchanged. Entities are tested to see if they give the appropriate responses,
thereby establishing identity according to collective criteria. In The Dream and the Underworld,
Hilllman is very interested in topographical (and storied, formulaic, mythological) representations
of psyche and the gods (entities), but he seems to take them as metaphorical. For a psychologist,
this seems appropriate, after all. Magickal and pagan practices take them as representations of
worlds that are invisible, or other, or interior, or hidden (occult). They are not metaphors for
movements within the soul; rather they are landscapes through which the soul moves. One
possible reason for this is that esoteric practice is a cultural practice, albeit a non-mainstream
one, which doesn't privilege self-reflection over other modes of being, as modern depth
psychology does. For depth psychologists consider reflection to be one of the highest forms of
psychic functioning of which we are capable. Pagan and occult practice privileges various other
things, including good manners, aesthetics, contact with otherness, control over entities and
energies, dialogues leading to more information, healing, greater wisdom, either about
otherworlds or the material world. Some practices are more religious, in which the divine is
served and honoured in various ways by humans: others are more magickal, in which otherness
is manipulated or persuaded by humans who hope to achieve effects in 'this' world. One of the
roots of this way of being may lie, says a psychological, reflective approach, in the roots of
contemporary Western esotericism in a heroic, ego-driven way of approaching otherness. The
idea that the Industrial Revolution and its machinery produced industrious magickal practitioners
who applied the same methods of the age to its under-belly, the repressed feminine, returning as
hysterical patients, 'spirits' and 'psyche'.

There would be no need to put 'psyche' in quotation marks, were it not for 'psi' phenomena, about
which there is little consensus; about which we 'know' little. The unifying factor in all these fault-
lines--or, the place where Hillman dances--appears to be the unknown: the phenomena for which
we have no near-unifying explanation. From the perspective of the unknown, all the other 'things'
I have been talking about: 'psyche', 'spirit', 'otherworlds', 'underworld', are metaphors which carry
in part the unknown, seen by means of one or another image. The image unifies, remains
unknown, and we cannot know where it leads.

The beauty of 'psyche' as a perspective lies in its ability to take us back to the essences of things
(ie, to 'Hades'). But it is a perspective, and not a theory. It doesn't explain why people dream each
other's secrets, more or less factually. It doesn't explain why 'spirits' can tell you things about a
person that your ego couldn't have had access to, and quite possibly didn't want access to. It
makes no comment on our dayworld divisions and precisions, nor on 'violations' of them.
Likewise, the unknown makes no comment on our various metaphors, including that of the soul
and Hades.

I believe that a reflective capacity is only the best (most sensitively attuned, most we can be
when applied in the dark: when applied to that which we do not know; for which we do not have a
solid metaphor which can carry meaning over to other spheres of life without losing its sense;
which we cannot explain to others via the ego without the meaning losing its integrity in argument,
denial, intellectual challenge or backlash suppression. That which we do not know is that which
cannot be successfully brought into a strong-enough circle of consensus without losing its sense
of itself. To 'know' something, is to have a lasting metaphor about that thing which is also useful
to other people, ie, which isn't so open that it can't be communicated at all, and isn't so closed
that it is irrelevant to anyone else.

These are the conversations with M. to which others were not privy. They were conversations in
which dreams did much of the talking, as this dream is capable of saying, or rather, being, far
more than the essay which accompanies it can. Psi phenomena were also apparent. In part, our
conversations were a re-enactment of an encounter, driven by desperate love, with the unknown
that was a psychotic father. In part, they were much more than that, involving a deep encounter
with the land, people who lived in the land, houses set out in gardens, forests and fields, and an
ultimate sacrifice of the flowing energies of the dayworld quest to the land(lord) - giving rise to a
lifetime's work of reflection, integration and, of course, more dreams.

As for Hillman, I think I didn't want him in the house because he barged in, with scant concern for
dayworld proprieties. But also because he violated the sacred laws of hospitality, of Hestia.
Hestia and Hermes are something of a continuum, perhaps, like wave-particle duality. When
there is an emphasis on Hestia, then Hermes is repressed, and forces his way in. My objection to
Hillman's presence was the objection of the sacred laws of the hearth, of guest and host. What
the dream ego seemed to forget, was that the waking ego had ushered him in already, as a living
shade leaping once more, after many years, and after no time at all, from the pages of his own
book.

Luisetta Mudie is a freelance writer specialising in depth psychology, shamanism and the
imagination.