THE BRONZE DOOR OF TARTARUS
By Claudio Simeoni
On 19th September 2006 an
article by James Hillman was published on Italian newspaper “La
Repubblica”, translated by Susanna Basso and entitled “The
importance of dreams”.
Hillman returned to the argument he began in
“The dream and the underworld” saying:
“The
difference between a coherent psychological theory and a coherent psychological
attitude is that the latter is, at the same time, more unambitious and more
audacious in praxis. With our perspective, dreams can belong to the theory we
like most (Freud’s, Jung’s, everyone else’s), because the
metapsychological narrations which explain dreams (their nature, function,
dynamic and symbolism) are irrelevant for the dream and its images”
The matter Hillman is dealing
with is living the dream instead of interpret it.
In christian education the
body with all its parts, the psyche and pulsions, is considered as separated
from the ego. That “I am”, expressed in a mental way, through the
spoken thought, separates itself from every part of the body and from every
physiologic pulsion, living its body and pulsions as they were apart from it.
Something apart with which it shares everyday conflicts. I use my leg to walk;
I use my brain to think. But when I walk it’s me that walks, I walk with
the whole self and though it’s the leg that makes the physical effort,
I’m all changing: I’m not the same I was before.
I am my leg, I am my heart, I
am my brain: I am the dream!
As I’m used to consider
my leg like an object apart from me that I use since it’s economically
favourable, so I consider the dream like an object apart from me and I look for
a favourable use of the dream in my everyday life.
In his article, Hillman points
very much his attention on resewing the individual with its body and the world
that surrounds it, according to the way the individual is living. This is the
psychic resewing of that separation produced by christianity in order to
dominate and control the individual: the individual trials its pulsions instead
of formulating strategies to satisfy those pulsions, of course within the
limits accorded by the society to what this individual belongs.
Hillman suggests seven ways to
relate yourselves with the dreams:
1)
Don’t
try to escape the dream.
2)
Resist to
the need of know the meaning of the dream and to the will to make it a prophecy
3)
Don’t
make efforts to relate the dream to the vigil and its worries;
4)
If you
really can’t avoid thinking the dream is talking to you, accept it like a
guest;
5)
Consider
that the dream is a whole and that every part of it must be traced back to all
the rest (of the individual, body and psyche);
6)
Let the
dream move you and if it doesn’t do this, change it into a fantasy;
7)
Let
yourself be overwhelmed by the dream. Take part to it instead of interpret it.
Essentially, what is Hillman
saying?
He says to people that they
have to live instead of cataloguing or describing.
Let’s try to translate
aiming at everyday life what Hillman wrote about the ways to relate with the
dream:
1)
Don’t
try to escape life, its contradictions, problems and challenges;
2)
Resist to
the need to know the “reason of life” or to wait for the
providence;
3)
Don’t
make efforts to submit everyday challenges to the wait for the providence;
4)
If you
really can’t avoid thinking of a providence, shift it to the
“then” and not use it “now”;
5)
Consider
your body and your existence as a whole. The body as a whole that represents
you and life as a series of choices, in which today choice founds the
possibilities for the choices of tomorrow;
6)
Let the
life enrich you and, if it doesn’t do it, seek challenge in your
existence;
7)
Let the
life overwhelm you. Participation instead of interpretation.
The dream as a world to live.
Why does Hillman draw these
conclusions?
Maybe he draws them from the
introductory part of the article in which he says:
“Let’s
start from ruins. Nothing is still standing. The formidable building built by
Freud in 1900 – his most voluminous writing – didn’t last
even a century. Ethnologist invalidated its pretence of universality; feminists
showed the misogynous faults running across its rock; Marxists demolished its
bourgeois touch, while social historians related the whole construction to the
19th century colonialism, so that contemporary ecologists could bury fragments
of Freud and start again from a new “natural” perspective that
considers the dream as the psychic reflection of world.”
As you can read, the ruins of
the psychoanalysis are the result of the need to trace everything back to a
sort of “utilitarian reality” for a everyday life that represents
the absolute reality in its description.
Hillman transfer this absolute
reality in dreaming.
The dream, Hillman says, is
another absolute reality, like everyday life, so you can’t do anything
but live it. Live it, like you live your everyday life, fully live it, not
interpret it. Live it for itself, instead of make it become a more or less
useful object for use in another reality.
We can’t do anything
else, says Hillman, since the great building made up by Freud collapsed when it
has been compared to everyday life of every single person.
What Hillman can’t do
is: RETHINKING OF MAN!
Let’s consider two
quotes from Hillman’s work “The dream and the underworld”:
“The
spiritual quality of the underworld emerges in the most clear way in
descriptions of the Tartarus, which, from Hesiod on, was imagined at the bottom
of the Hades, as a terminal chasm. The Tartarus was often compared to the
heavenly vault because it was as distant from the earth as the sky was from the
earth itself; he was personified as son of Ether and Earth, so a realm of dust,
a compound of the most material element and the most immaterial element.”
And:
“The first
distinction is between the green, flat land of Demeter, with all her activities
for the growth, and Gaea, who is the Earth under Demeter. This second level,
Gaea, can be imagined as the physic and psychic ground of an individual or of a
community, their “place on the earth”, with related natural rights,
rites and laws. Here Gaea is one of the foundations on which human life
depends, more than on the food and the fertility. Gaea represents rites and
laws that warrant fertility, a sort of motherly regulating principle, that
makes material fertility possible, becoming its spiritual ground. Then, under
these two levels, we have a third level, chthon, the deep world of dead. Of
course polytheistic mentality never divides so sharply these “levels”,
so in names and cults Demeter-Gaea-Chthon often merge.”
The world of darkness; the
world of Earth; the world of the sky.
But from which perspective are
we looking at it?
I list these three worlds from
the point of view determined by the fact that my feet are on the ground. There
has been a time of my existence when the world that today I call “the
world of the earth” was my mother’s womb where I lived my present.
Outside my mother’s womb there was the dark Tartarus. I knew the
Tartarus. In fact, worries, fears, joy, tensions and pleasure came from my
mother and these was the answers the Tartarus solicited from her.
Then the Tartarus swallowed me
and I died. My lungs filled with air and now I watch the sky and I’m
afraid of the darkness which belched me.
Little Demeter, Persephone,
looked after me, while from the Hades I was rising to the Earth. She prevented
me from turning back to regret what I was leaving.
Now I live between the earth
and the sky and the death of physical body is waiting for me.
A little Demeter accompanied
me in my mother’s womb, but what does Demeter want from me when she asks
me to plough three times the land?
Demeter is the growth.
Persephone led the foetus to become a child, Demeter leads the man to become
something else.
But that “something
else” not only have to come into existence, but have to grow and invade,
little by little, the whole human organism and, above all, have to find a
mediation between itself, improving its power through Demeter, and human reason
which is preparing to die with the physical body.
Freud ends his work “The
Ego and the Es” (1922) by writing, quite perceiving something he
can’t focus:
“The Es, to which we return at the end,
doesn’t have instruments to show love or hate to the Ego. It can’t
say what it wants; it didn’t succeed in forming a unite will. Eros and
death pulsion are struggling inside it; we saw how pulsions of both organize
their defence against each other. We could represent this situation as the Es
would be submitted to the will of silent but strong death pulsions, which look
for peace and try to silence the turbulent Eros, according to the pleasure
principle; but we don’t want to underestimate so much the role fo
Eros.”
Apart from Freud’s description,
it’s a struggle for the death of the physical body and for the birth of
SOMETHING. Something the man constructs ploughing three times the land, his
life, as Demeter asked; as Eros imposed!
And from this point of view we
must consider the dream.
The dream works as a mediation
(or ground for a possible mediation) between what the human being gives birth
to and constructs, by ploughing three times his own everyday life, and his
necessities of growing, perceiving, intuiting, intervening in the world in
which reason is the absolute master.
The dream is a psychic ground
in which what grows, generated by human activity, can live and act without
interfering with reason.
It’s the other, growing
inside us: the other that, like our leg, is us, expressing ourselves in a
necessity.
The other, perceiving a world
of emotions, can’t intervene, if not occasionally, in the world of
description, shape and quantity.
The other growing inside us
perceives the world in a way that reason can’t know. But not a different
world: this world, through phenomena that reason ignores.
So the dream becomes a ground
for mediation between the world perceived by our growing-inside-us self and the
world of reason where we act, think, describe.
When our growing-inside-us
self must intervene, intervenes through intuition, that useful brainwave that
comes to the Consciousness when there is a subjective need.
The three ancient worlds that
Hillman describes are the three worlds of life phases, in which actions, acting
and living in the present time construct that our self prepared to face the
world coming after the death of the present one. That is because I don’t
die: the world where I live dies. The world of reason. The limits in which I
exert my perception. Like when I was a foetus.
I come from a darkness, I live
in a present, I go towards a light!
In the dream we pass the
barrier of Hades:
“Round it runs a fence of bronze, and night
spreads
in triple line all about it like a neck-circlet, while above
grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea.
There by
the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds
the Titan gods are hidden under misty gloom,
in a dank place where are the ends of the huge
earth.
And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed
gates
of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it
on every side”
Hesiod,
“Theogony” 726-733; Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White
It’s the barrier Zeus
put between the world of reason and the world as perceived by our
growing-inside-us self.
In dreams the images of reason
met the perceptions of our growing-inside-us self.
In dreams the our
acting-in-the-present self met our growing self in order to act in the future.
Our present self, thanks to Demeter, goes towards death; our self growing
inside us goes towards birth.
So we can grasp the meaning of
Freud’s intuitions inside the struggle of the individuals to remove the
“truth” of their present and found their future. We understand why
the psychoanalysis castle collapsed: the intuitions were genial, but they were
inside a christian cultural model, a monotheistic one, trying to found a new
and different “truth”.
From this point of view: THE
MAIN THING IS TO LIVE!
To live in everyday life.
To live in the dream.
To live with passion and
commitment in everyday life allows us to construct our growing-inside-us self;
to live with passion, fantasy and participation in the dream allows our
growing-inside-us self to become stronger and stronger and to interact with the
world where we live.
And when our growing-inside-us
self interacts and harmonizes with reason and reason, for a moment, abandons
the control on the individual, what Hillman calls Human Beings’ need
emerges: IMAGINATION!
Imagination is the mediation an individual can do
between the world that the reason describes and the understanding of the world
by our growing-inside-us self. With this mediation, the dream is the moment
when our growing-inside-us self expresses itself and reason’s imagination
is the moment when this self works together with reason in managing the
individual’s everyday life.
Hillman is right:
THE MAIN THING IS TO LIVE!
TO LIVE WITH PASSION, TO LIVE
WITH PARTICIPATION for all the time we can steal to great Zeus, in order to be
powerful when we’ll face the bronze doors closing the way to the Hades.
Will we be strong enough to
open them?
Marghera, 20.09.2006
ABOUT FOUNDATIONS OF PAGAN
POLYTHEISTIC RELIGION (WORKS IN ITALIAN)!
Claudio Simeoni
Mechanic
Apprentice Sorcerer
Keeper of the Antichrist
Piaz.le Parmesan, 8
30175
Marghera - Venezia
Italy
tel.041933185
E-mail claudiosimeoni@libero.it