the pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and [psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus’ fragments (85): “. . . whatever it [Thymos] wishes, it buys at the price of the soul.” Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul. did not belong {or too} words added in the underworld. (Pg 42-43)
“What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. we are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it.” (Pg. 43)
The other side of the mysterious identity, of Dionysos within Hades, says that there is a zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. the realm of the dead is not as dead as we expect it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymus, body, or voice, there is hidden libido in the shadows. The images in Hades are also Dionysian— not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile. there is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that reveals and makes music. there is a dance in death. hades and Dionysos are the same. as Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own tragedy, Dionysos softens and rounds out Hades into his own richness. Farnell describes their fusion as a “mildness joined with melancholy.” (pg. 45)
To be raped into the underworld is not the only move of experiencing it. there are many other modes of descent. but when it comes in this radical fashion, then we may know which mytheme has encased us. we are dragged into Hades’s chariot only if we are out in Demeter’s green fields, seductively innocent with playmates among flowers. That world has to open up. When the bottom falls out, we feel only the black abyss of despair, but this is not the only way to experience even this mytheme.
For instance, Hekate was supposedly standing by the whole time, listening or watching. There is evidently a perspective that can witness the soul’s struggles without the flap of Persephone or the disaster of Demeter. In us is also a dark angel (Hecate was also called angelos), A conscious (and she was called phosphoros) that which shines in the dark. P(pg. 49)
These circular states of receptiveness, turning and running in the gyres of our own conditions, force us to recognize that these conditions are our very essence and that the soul’s circular motion (which is its native motion, according to Plotinus) cannot be distinguished from blind fate. It is as if the should frees itself not from blindness but by its continuing turning in it. Ultimately, if the spontaneous mandala heals, it does so because it compels a recognition of the limitation of consciousness, that my mind and heart and will turn only in a circle, and yet that same circle is my portion of an eternal necessity.
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