It has been some time since I last posted. In truth, I am pessimistic about sending yet another digital opinion down the firehose. I despair that mere words cannot arrest the forces unleashed and that we are like flotsam in a storm whose terrifying disturbance is still not spent. Words at a time like this seem enfeebled, and yet it is all we have—Peitho, the goddess of rhetoric, must somehow restrain Bia—violent force.
In this edition, I will share an extract from a recent paper that was a preliminary for my admission to a cluster of exams that constitute the propadeuticum examinations in classical Jungian training. I am delighted to announce that they went well, and I am now officially an advanced candidate—seeing analysands under supervision. I shall hang my shingle here.
The selection below mentions, in passing, Elon Musk as one avatar of the solar version of the Herculean myth.
The lesser-known second half of the myth—what transpires after the famous Labours have ended—sees Hercules’ fortunes reversed. Like the later Arthurian knight Gawain, another sun hero whose strength “waxes from midnight to midday and thereafter wanes”1, Hercules, in his post-apotheosis phase, has a spindle put in his hand and is made to prepare wool with female servants. It is as far removed from the ‘action figure’ habitus of the hero—as if a Marine in a pinafore were to be throwing porcelain on a potter’s wheel. More ensues, but from hereon, Hercules is in hock to a lunar syntax in which the stress falls not on eternal conquest but on eternal transformation. We can but hope.
Hillman on Hercules
In his The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman deals at length with Hercules but stops short of looking beyond the Labours. Up to this point, culminating in his rampage through Hades, in the last Labour, the bodies pile higher and higher. The word has got round—and down—that no hero has ever slew more monsters2 than he. Indeed, when Hercules appears, sword in hand, the much-feared guardian of the threshold, Cerberus, cowers underneath Hades’ throne. Charon, Medusa’s apparition, various eidola—all these forces!—can’t arrest his headlong march. Hades’ own cattle are butchered and the ribs of their herdsman broken. Finally, in the inner chamber, he readies a large stone to hurl at the King and Queen of the Underworld:
“Hades leapt up and ran away in one direction, his hound in another, but Persephone stayed where she was, face to face with the hero.”3
A détente is now brokered. Hades allows Hercules to capture Cerberus. He strangles the monstrous watchdog into submission and marches him back in chains to Eurystheus, beloved of vase painters. Cerberus, it is said, was either led back to Hades, or escaped and returned.
For Hillman, Hercules looms large in our Western self-concept. There are parallels, of course, with Christ4, but he extends the victory over the underworld into a direct comparison with Freud’s “muscular notion of ego”5 and ego-psychologies generally, which take the dayworld, the human, the hard facts—all solar values—as realities that trump “the animal powers of the imagination”. Our “mini-Herculean egos mimetic to that Man-God … insists on a reality that it can … aim an arrow at, or bash with a club.”
While Hercules might no longer only be the archetypal settler and husbandman6 and is equally found amongst the professional, managerial classes—described well by C.S. Lewis as “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices”7—the general attitude of resource extraction and power, of taking8, remains unabated. We can trace a direct line from our man-god to the Emperor Commodus (as Hercules), and Maximilian I (“Hercules Germanicus”), and Martin Luther (another “Hercules Germanicus”), and Henri IV (“Hercules Gallicus”)9, and so on, right up to our present day CEOs—even though the “divine portion is assumed wholly by the human” (Hillman), and now no longer in need of divine rights. All the same, in hoc signo vinces10 Wired magazine once described Elon Musk11 as “Hercules remixed”, and a Times of London article lamented: “Can our leaders find their inner Hercules?”
Another insight Hillman provides is into the nature of iconoclasm, for Hercules doesn’t recognise the autonomy of images12: Artemis’ sacred deer and boar, or Hecate’s hounds, or Hera’s wedding-present by Gaia, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are simply there for the taking in terra nullius13. One woman’s symbol is another man’s idolatry, or as Jung reminds us: “Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness...”14
Will [Hercules] lead us into war and fire? ~ James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Jung, Emma & Von Franz, Marie-Louise The Grail Legend.
And not only monsters: The wise Chiron is also fatefully wounded as an innocent bystander in the Labour known as The Boar of Erymanthos.
Kerényi, Carl The Heroes of the Greeks.
The classicist Richard Buxton references depictions of Hercules in fourth century CE Roman catacombs, inserted into scenes from the Old and New Testaments (in The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think). By way of John Robertson’s Christianity and Mythology, Jung also interpolates Hercules as a pre-Christian cross-carrier (CW5, ¶ 302n).
Freud’s famous dictum, a case in point: “Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”
Much of the Labours can be read as the agricultural domestication of the wilderness.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters.
“Ulysses and Aeneas...go down to learn from the underworld which re-visions their life in the upperworld. Hercules, however, goes down to take, and he continues with the muscular reactions of the upperworld” (The Dream and the Underworld).
Buxton draws these comparisons in his account of the political uses of Hercules. Luther, for example, was portrayed by Holbein as a Hercules bludgeoning Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Pope Leo X. Cleansing the Augean Stables, the fifth Labour, is a well- known political metaphor, but by far the most reproduced is the battle against the Hydra—a regular feature of propaganda posters on all sides in both World Wars, and still much in use as evidenced by a European Council on Foreign Affairs policy brief entitled: “Putin’s Hydra”.
In this sign thou shalt conquer. The instrumentalisation of symbols turn symbols into signs!
Musk describes himself thus: “Elon is Technoking of Tesla and has served as our Chief Executive Officer since October 2008 …” It is a long story—but if we circle back to that parvenu king, Eursytheus, “beloved of vase painters”, to whom Hercules’ masculine protest is in debt—we can also add the (Adlerian) observation that an inferiority complex is calling the shots.
“Hercules in Hades shows us that iconoclasm is the first move of murder” (The Dream and the Underworld).
The legal doctrine used to rationalise colonial conquest asserts that it is “nobody’s land” or a “territory without a master”.
CW6, ¶ 818.