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Once More the Reality/Irreality Issue

A Reply to Hillman's Reply

Wolfgang Giegerich (Stuttgart)

Having taken a step or two beyond archetypal psychology, I have been waiting for some time for a reaction from my friend James Hillman, from whom I have learned so much and to whose work my own work, even if sometimes critical of his, will always remain deeply indebted. He had grown tired of intellectual argumentation, of the argumentative style of thought he so elegantly and cogently practiced in such works as Re-Visioning Psychology. So I am very grateful that he has overcome his reluctance and has gone into the fray once more, all the more so as his charges give me the opportunity to clarify some misunderstandings of my position that other readers of Spring might share with him.

I am, however, a bit surprised that his objections are in the line of the same old battle cries with which archetypal psychology in the early days set itself off from the more conventional thought patterns in Jungian psychology: literalism, fundamentalism, monotheistic vision, ontological fallacy, ego activism, etc. These fallacies are the elementary-school stuff of archetypal psychology. I would have imagined that Hillman would have credited my argument in "Killings" with more sophistication and complexity, since after all he himself, in the very same piece, attested to me, with extraordinary generosity, a "so thoroughly radical" mind. The old labels, I believe, no longer suffice against thoughts that have moved on into new horizons.

The difficulty with my paper on "Killings" is of course its shortness. It is 1) the condensation of 2) only one half of the argument presented in my book, Tötungen. In the first half of this book I talk about "Killings of the First Order" (of which my paper in Spring is an abstract); in the second I discuss under the heading "Killings of the Second Order" the historical process in which the soul (starting, for example, with the Old Testament prophets) turned against the very blood sacrifices previously cherished by her over centuries or millennia. In one incisive act of killing after the other (down, for example, to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution) the soul systematically brought about the destruction of the substance of the ritualistic cultures. Moreover, this entire book on killings was originally planned to be a chapter in another book written simultaneously, Animus-Psychologie, which expounds a theory of psychology based on the idea of the soul as the dialectical, self-contradictory syzygy of a) soul as anima and b) soul as animus. Jungian and archetypal psychology appear to have taken heed more or less of only one half of the whole syzygy, predominantly serving an anima cut loose from her own Other, the animus as logos and logic (whose first and most extreme phenomenological image is the killer of the anima, Bluebeard). Thus psychology tends to defend the virginal innocence of the anima and her imagination...

Being deprived of its larger context, such a short paper on such a vast topic lends itself to misunderstandings. The reader is likely to apperceive its ideas within the accustomed framework of early archetypal psychology and not within the horizon that they are conceived in. So the paper should actually be seen as no more than an appetizer for the first or both books. It should not rest on its own, unless the reader has the ability and the willingness to go to the trouble of reconstructing in his own mind, from the hints given, the implied framework that the two books spell out.

But let us look at Hillman's individual objections. I shall begin with the second, the ontological fallacy, because it is the most basic. Hillman claims that I elect one kind of real (i.e., "actual facts") from a whole range of reals (such as ideals, principles, metaphor, etc.) and privilege it over the others. However, this is not what I am doing. I am not talking about reals at all. My argument is not ontological; it is logical (psycho-logical). This is one of the essential moves I made some years ago: going beyond ontology to logic, beyond "Heidegger" to "Hegel." Of course, all the kinds of reals Hillman lists are reals. I have no problem with that. And Jung's insight that the psyche as fantasy creates reality every day is the premise from which my thought proceeds, just as is the other idea of Jung's that we are surrounded by psyche on all sides, and inescapably so. Up to this point there is no difference between Hillman and me. How could I, having learned my Hegelian lesson, wish to "get out of the mind" (p.7) to something "more real"?? And how could I hope to get there by means of big nouns ending in -keit, -heit, -tum (p.7), which openly show that they are abstractions and the inalienable property of the mind?

For me the problem of "reality" begins after one has understood that the psyche "fantastically" creates reality every day and that there is nothing that "is not real." Only then does my question arise, the question in which logical and psycho-logical status does something stand. When Hillman states that certain colleagues "kept a vision of ruthless truth alive during the Disney days of consumer health and happiness" (p.2) or when he says that the cry that went through antiquity at the beginning of the Christian era, "Great Pan is dead," was "simply a piece of Christian propaganda" and adds, "Tell a big enough lie and it becomes believable truth" (p.13), he is operating with the same logical distinctions between something being real and yet not real. The Disney days of consumer health and happiness and the cry, "Great Pan is dead," were ontologically speaking real. But with the words "Disney" and "consumer" in contradistinction to "ruthless truth" in the one case and with "propaganda" or "lie" in the other case he indicates that he denies them the logical status of truth or reality. Advertising, Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, bumper stickers, ideologies, plastic flowers are only too real (ontologically). But that does not mean that logically they are in the same status of realness as, for example, a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral. What is real in one sense can nevertheless be phony in another.

This takes me to the use of "Gods" in archetypal psychology. Could it not be that if you apply archetypal psychology's "seeing through" to the products of archetypal psychology itself you discover that some of its interpretations are not in the status of "ruthless truth," but themselves belong to a kind of Disney world? That the "Gods" seen by some psychologists in the phenomena of today are more like stickers pasted on the phenomena than a self-manifestation of the Gods in or through the phenomena? I think this is the case. Much of the talk of Gods seems downright phony to me. The phenomena of life are similar over the ages. Because of the formal analogies it is easy to interpret phenomena of our time in terms of the Gods that the Greeks would have seen in them. But in order to do so one has to have removed the present day phenomena out of the actual modern context that informs them and gives them their entirely different status.

Is it so implausible to think that psychology with its emphasis on images is an unwitting participant in, and contributor to, the powerful movement of Western mankind into the artificial world of advertising, museums, entertainment, tourism, Disneyland, Virtual Reality, only in a much more ennobled way and on a much higher intellectual level?

Hillman says, the Gods are immortal. I agree. But I take "immortal" to be an imaginal attribute of the Gods and not a literal fact, much as I do not think that two people who promise each other eternal love are exempt from possibly getting a divorce a year later nor that they are exposed as liars if they split up. Hillman is here himself guilty of a "misplaced concretism." Precisely because the psyche creates reality ever anew, it also creates its Gods, together with the entire world experience of a people or culture. But if this culture or people has gone under, its Gods with all their immortality have also gone under. When I say you cannot have Zeus without bull sacrifices, then I mean that Zeus is not a timeless "substance" with varying "attributes." The Gods are threads in the fabric called "nation" or "culture," they are images in the "poem" at large that the soul creates in and through a given historical culture (with all its customs, rituals, ideas, social and political organization, its style of economy, its state of technology, etc.). As you cannot remove an individual image from a poem and insert it into some other poem without distorting everything, so you cannot pull out the Greek Gods from the entire context of the "poem" called Ancient Greek Culture and insert them into the modern world. Or, you can do it, but then you reduce them, even while claiming that they are not mere allegories, to the status of allegories, quotations, "schöngeistiges Bildungsgut," abstract categories.... And at the same time you block the way to seeing and honoring the actual God or Gods of our time.

This is not to deny that there are archetypal dreams and other visionary experiences even today in which authentic images of the ancient Gods might appear. But then they appear only in the private, personal, subjective sphere of the modern individual, much like, e.g., the spinning wheel of old may reappear as part of some persons' private hobby, while it is clear that it cannot possibly be a real economic factor and a feasible means of production anymore. Those Gods are not part of our objective, public life and our official knowledge, as the Gods were in archaic and ancient times when "theology" and ritual permeated all of life, all of the State, all of the knowledge about the world. As Jung said, Zeus no longer inhabits Olympus, i.e., the real world. Hillman is probably right, the Gods still "inhabit our subjectivity and govern our acts," but what he forgets to add is that such Gods, that have receded into our subjectivity, are no longer Gods, but aufgehobene (sublated) Gods. The Gods in modern dreams are "abgesunkenes Kulturgut," just as our private, personal psychology in general is the soul's past history as sublated ("aufgehoben"), and in this sense it is logically not real. Psychology as the psychology of the subjective individual is eo ipso the attention to what is by definition obsolete (but nevertheless "real" in Hillman's ontological sense; by "obsolete" I do not wish to indicate that one should not attend to one's dream life and personal psychology, one's symptoms; I merely wish to express their logical status). The early Greeks did not have a private, subjective psychology, just as they did not have a division between work and spare time or hobby (they had slaves instead). These are acquisitions of the modern era and indications that our life has become logically much more complex.

I am very happy with Hillman's transposition of this discussion into the alchemy lab. But I see two problems with how he does it. The first problem is that he seems to restrict the alchemical lab to a reserved area. For me, the soul's main alchemy lab is history, the history of culture and of consciousness, the history of the soul. Yes, we think different kinds of thoughts and form different experiences of reality in different moments of the alchemical opus (p.9). This is exactly what I say about the Gods and the various distinct moments (eras) of history. In each fundamentally new age, the world is, as it were, created anew along with its Gods. Between the different phases, between the nigredo and the albedo in literal alchemy for example, there is complete death, everything being dissolved, decomposed, vaporized, burnt away. Why does Hillman want to retain an identity ("immortality") when he talks about the Gods, while otherwise insisting on a real difference in contents and form between the different moments of the work?

To be fair I should qualify that he does not want to retain the Gods in their same historical phenomenology and with the same old form of their cult. He only retains a—to my mind—abstract identity of, for example, Zeus, while readily declaring all of Zeus' specific attributes to be contingent (p.4), and this to such an extent that I wonder how one would know that the new "Zeus" is still Zeus. He could be anything, the way Hillman talks ("any damn way," p. 4). I still think that images or imaginal realities have their identity in their specific phenomenology; they are their phenomenology; they have not, in the style of the thought of traditional metaphysics, an identity behind their—then exchangeable—phenomenology. If their phenomenology is gone, they are gone too.

Why does he charge me with "monotheistic thinking" (p.9) even though it is my very contention that each different moment in history has its own and different Gods, truths, modes of being-in-the-world? As Hillman rightly noted, I used the past tense when talking about sacrifice and about the Gods. But the past tense not because I am "cutting myself off from them" (cf. p. 14), "cutting the human world from the Gods" (p.12), but rather because the opus proceeds via radical (logical, not always empirical) caesuras, as those between the nigredo and the albedo. The opus has cut (not me personally and subjectively, but) the consciousness of modern man at large objectively off from the Gods, including, I assume, that of Hillman and of W. F. Otto. The born-again pagan Hillman, however, seems to follow the Christian logic here: with W. F. Otto he thinks that the question "is not how did the Gods depart; the question is how did we lose sight of them" (p.12f.). In other words, we humans are to be blamed; it is our sin; we did not keep them enough in mind. It is not a fundamental change in the fate of the Gods themselves, not an alchemical transformation of the imaginal or logical "substance" of the world on the "metaphysical" or "archetypal" plane.

But Hillman knows better. He knows that today the "only one God left that is truly universal, omnipresent, omnipotent, observed faithfully in thought and action, joining all human kind in daily acts of devotion" is "The Economy" (p.16), or as I would put it, Money. This is exactly the insight to which my investigation took me in my two above-mentioned books, where also the job Hillman assigns to me, namely to search out the God in the disease and to "look into those feelings of despair with which his paper ends" (p.14), has already been done. But whereas I let myself "get placed" (in Casey's sense) in this new situation by the opus of the history of the soul, Hillman feels free to act as if the ancient Gods—Zeus, Hades, Hestia, Hermes, Dionysos and so on—were still alive, despite his insight.

The second problem with his alchemical analogy is that he lists only two moments of the alchemical opus and puts me into the first, the nigredo, and himself into the second, the albedo, even though he knows full well that the Work goes on, from the albedo stage into that of citrinitas, of yellowing. For Hillman is after all the expert on "The Yellowing of the Work" (see his paper on the subject in the Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress for Analytical Psychology in Paris 1989). I may be wrong, but in my estimation my work can be seen as belonging to the yellowing phase of the Work and not the nigredo—if one wants to use these metaphors. I do neither deny the validity of the truth of the nigredo stage nor the truth of the albedo stage. But can our thought stop there? My critique of archetypal psychology is, to stay within this metaphor, that it remains in the albedo state, enthralled by the anima alba and the innocence of her pure, untouched, unwounded imagination. My move from ontology and from a pure imagination to logic corresponds with the emphasis on the intellectual (logical) form or status that Hillman in his paper on the yellowing of the Work, relying on a statement by the alchemist Dorneus, correlates with the yellowing phase. Perhaps it becomes clear here what I mean when I say that I feel that the real challenge of my paper has not been met. What in my view goes beyond the albedo is in Hillman's interpretation of my view pushed back into, and held down in, the phase preceding the albedo. Then it appears that archetypal psychology, rather than being challenged, has long superseded the position I advocate and that I am a kind of renegade.

This is why Hillman assumes that the soul's fantasy activity, by which Jung says reality is created every day, is not enough for me and that I demand something harder, "an actual hard fact, like knives into animals" (p.8). This is all wrong. As I said, I am perfectly at one with Jung's idea of the world-creating fantasy. I do not, in nigredo fashion, play the knife and the blood against this creative fantasy (by the way: not the knife, but the axe is the instrument that figures in my paper). Personally I have no stake in them, and the "hard facts" that Hillman ascribes to me are obviously positivistic facts, which I abhor. I fully concur: sacrifices, if performed as positivistic hard facts, are "just another butchering or road-kill" (p.8). But this is not the sacrificial act I am talking about.

The question that arises for me in view of Jung's dictum is a very different one from the one that Hillman imagines as being my concern. It is the question how this fantasy activity has to be understood or in which way it occurs. Is it the pure, literal, free-floating fantasy activity as mental act or psychological function that has its own Other, act and fact, outside and vis-à-vis itself (which seems to be Hillman's position, at least in his response)? My answer is no. "Poetically man lives upon the earth" (p.12), yes. But does it have to be literal poems? I know it is an exaction: what I demand of the reader is to see the poem in sacrifice, nay, to see the sacrificial act as the poem, as poiesis. What I said about blood sacrifices demands of the reader to advance to a point of indifference, to the concept of something that as literal act is nevertheless in itself and at once imaginal or logical. In other words it requires him to comprehend the act of sacrificial slaughter as the form in which the very fantasy activity Jung speaks of originally manifested itself. Which is why I called it the primordial soul-making.

A positive act that is at once and in itself logical (non-positive) is of course a contradiction. It cannot be perceived or imagined (vorgestellt). It can only be thought. It needs the "labor of the Concept." As long as you imagine the act of sacrifice along the lines of perception and Vorstellung, you only stare at the bare literal behavior and its blatant cruelty, at the outrage that it represents. You never get into the inner workings, the poiesis, of the act. This is why I think psychology has to go beyond the anima alba's imaginal and proceed to the logical. Which would amount to a revolution of consciousness (and to a small revolution of archetypal psychology, too; one, however, through which it would not be destroyed, but truly come into its own).

But Hillman splits fantasy from act or fact. He can speak of "the imagination, the metaphor, the abstraction, of this act" (p.8, my emphasis), clearly showing that for him they are two. He gives "priority to the imagination of this act" (p.8). In my notion of the sacrifice there is no priority. The act is not "enacted," "transformed," "animated" by the imagination as a primary reality (p.8). Nor is it accompanied by fantasy. It is, this is my thesis, itself "world"-creating fantasy, itself an instance of the soul's logical life. And the further back you go, the less there is of a fantasy or imagination as an explicit mental act in addition to or independent of concrete acts. The way psyche created reality every day was through ritual, through actual behavior in gathering and preparing food, building houses, organizing society and relating to the natural world and to the dead.

By saying, "only when the imagination fully transposes the act of killing into sacrifice does killing become ritual..." (p.8), Hillman malgré lui and unwittingly posits a merely literal, positivistic act devoid of imagination as the primary reality, which then may or may not be secondarily transposed by the imagination into sacrifice. So "the tried and tired divisions of ... blood–real vs. metaphor–abstract" (p.15) that he attributes to me and explicitly fights against are somehow still operative at the back of his own thought. In my understanding such a merely literal, positivistic, naked act is only the late result of a long, long history, it is an outstanding cultural achievement and not a primary given. It needed thousands of years of "killings of the second order" (the work of the animus within the syzygy: separatio, abstractio, purificatio) to more and more strip the real (the act, the fact, the physis) of its inherent imaginal nature and to thereby slowly emancipate the world and man from the soul and from all "meaning," thus positivizing reality. Jung would have called this the withdrawing of the projection, but he also knew that in actuality there had been no "projection" onto previously bare facts, but that it all began with acts and facts that came as inherently soulful, poetic ones (even if they were not conscious in our sense). Early man, I claim, could hardly help but act poetically. Only we are emancipated enough (1) to conceive of strictly positivistic actions and facts and (2) to even come relatively close to actually performing such pure actions—at least at times (without, however, truly reaching this "ideal" of positivity).

Remember what Jung said about the African Elgonyi who performed a strange ritual of greeting the rising sun, by spitting into their hands and holding them up to the sun? He said that as it was impossible to get an explanation from them about why they did this, he realized that they indeed only know that they do it but not what they do; they see no meaning in their action. This too is literal behavior that is in itself meaningful and (psycho-)logical (non-positivistic; Jung interprets it as an unconscious, unspoken prayer) and is yet devoid of any prior, or secondarily transforming, or accompanying imagination. Because the act is the imagination to begin with.

Hillman says that what the Greek Gods asked for "was not blood; it was not to be forgotten" (p.5). Again, I think, he splits what inextricably goes together. For "not forgetting" did not call for mental remembrance, for a kind of meditation or an inner attitude. The primary way of not forgetting the Gods was the painfully correct performance of the (mainly sacrificial) rituals that were their due.

That I turned to sacrifice is therefore not due to any personal predilections of mine for hard facts and bloody acts. It was necessitated by intellectual demands:

#the demand to give proper attention and appreciation to a huge sector of psychological phenomenology that had hitherto been largely ignored or put down by psychology;

#the demand to go beyond the simple (undialectical) opposition of the literal-factual and the imaginal (with which opposition the imaginal itself was, malgré lui, literalized);

#the demand to give due credit to the weight of the imaginal as it is embodied ("constellated") in a specific time and place, and thus also to the psychological (not literal!) weight of irreversible time as such, to history, to actual situations (over against a platonistically conceived timeless imaginal, which would be a Cyberspace, VR, or Hessean Glass Bead Game version of it);

#the demand to bring home to the untouched anima, locking herself up in the albedo status, the awareness of the indispensible logical violence inherent in the soul as syzygy.

And I believe I was able to show (more so in my book than in the short paper) that and how the literal, brief and mute act of sacrifice, if seen from within, indeed contains in itself, or rather is, a rich world of imaginal (better: logical) life. When Hillman says that "without that vision which perceives myths in acts, sacrifice is merely a bloody mess" (p.12), I ask why does he not see that precisely what I am doing is perceiving and describing the myth in the sacrificial act, and why does he insist on reducing the sacrificial act to the status of a positivistic hard fact—or to the status of a mere tool for remembering the Gods (see below).

This takes me to Hillman's third accusation, the accusation of the fallacy of Lutheran concretism. Here I on the one hand plead "guilty" (except that I don't see it as fallacious), while on the other hand I point out that what is at stake here is not so much my concretism as that of the historical phenomenon of sacrifice itself, which I merely analyze. But be this as it may, let us look at what Hillman says. He refers to Jung's discussion of the difference between Luther's and Zwingli's views concerning the doctrine of transsubstantiation. For Luther, the body and blood of Christ were actually present in the Communion, while Zwingli conceived of the Communion purely symbolically. Hillman stresses that Jung emphasizes the word as sole vehicle of grace and not the physical ceremony, and he links this position with the albedo. He puts Jung, Zwingli and himself into one camp (that of the symbolical, spiritual, psychological interpreters) and Luther, Freud and me into the other, the concretist, physical and literalistic one.

But I think this "purely symbolic conception" of the Communion with a merely "'spiritual' partaking of the body and blood" (p.10, quoting Jung) is psychologically untenable if taken as a paradigm for ritual as such (even though it is psychologically real inasmuch as we moderns have to think so). It reduces Communion to a mere memorial service. It is a fallacious view of ritual, as the results of this view show. Jung describes these results with great honesty in his Memories from his own experience of the first Communion he participated in: "nothing had happened... nothing at all had happened. ... no trace of God... there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words. I had observed no sign of 'communion,' of 'union, becoming one with...' With whom? With Jesus? Yet he was only a man who had died 1860 years ago." The man Jesus had a relation to God, to be sure. "(B)ut what was the purpose of this wretched memorial service with the flat bread and the sour wine? Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal experience for me. It had proved hollow; more than that, it had proved a loss" (p. 54f., Vintage edition. I changed the misleading translation 'a total loss' to 'a loss').

"No more than words". A hollow Erinnerungsfeier (memorial service). This is what inevitably results if you follow the Zwinglian course, where the word as literal word (cut off from the concrete) is the sole vehicle of grace. If Hillman says that the Gods want to be remembered and that "Rituals help remembering; that's all, but that's plenty" (p.13), I contradict with Jung and say that that is nothing, hollow, even a loss. It is at best Hollywood, a folkloristic show, a circus. And it is a castration of the very notion of ritual. Intact rituals are not Erinnerungsfeiern, not a kind of "aide-mémoire." They are (one form of) the fantasy activity by which the psyche creates (not just remembers) reality every day, including above all the reality of the Gods. And why does Hillman charge me with a "reversion to Protestantism" (p.17) while considering himself a pagan? His Zwinglian position is much more one-sidedly protestant than mine, and his view of ritual as a memory support (i.e., a mere sign, not truly symbolic) is certainly not in accordance with the pagan view (which, as Jung said, was wholly concretistic and wholly symbolistic, much like the Roman Catholic and Luther's views of the transsubstantiation).

If all that rituals do is to help remembering, then they are something like the fingers little children use when counting or calculating, no more. When they are old enough, they do not need the sensuous help of their fingers anymore because their mathematical operations will have become independent of the outside world and will have receded into the interiority of their (individual, subjective) minds (intellect, Understanding). The same thing happens with the relation to God and with the imagination if ritual is conceived as no more than a visual aid to remembering. The fantasy activity of the soul recedes into our private subjectivity. Not forgetting the Gods is then no longer an "objective" and public act. It is (ego-)psychologistically my (each person's) imagining, my skill of imagination, my exercising a mental function. But this mind as my private subjectivity is not Hegel's mind and not Jung's psyche, not the fantasy activity that creates reality every day. As a psychological function or faculty it (together with its products) belongs to our personal interiority and is in a similar status as is, in ethics, a mere good intention.

Here I have to remind the reader that I said the concretism that prevails in my analysis of sacrifice is not my concretism, but the one of the phenomenon. And that takes me to the first fallacy I am charged with, that of the historical model, which I will discuss briefly in conjunction with the accusation of my allegedly "activist and humanistic approach to the Gods," my "return to the standard standpoint of the ego" (p.11). These charges do not stem from my writing, but from Hillman's reading. Nowhere for me is the sacrifice of the ancient cultures a model for the present. I use the past tense because I consider the sacrifices as a mode of the past, absolutely passé, obsolete. I expressly state that we cannot even wish to return to them. Nowhere do I suggest that history could answer our questions. Nowhere do I ask for an observance of the Gods "by a mimesis of the past" (p.3) or "call for something concrete, like killing of animals" (p.16). I have no interest whatsoever in "what ought to be rather than where we actually are" (cf. p. 14), which I consider to be a foolish and meaningless concern. I do not have a "Romantic longing to reverse history" (p.17) or to "restore" (p.16) anything or to "return to the worship of the spear, the ax, and the hunter/warrior" (p.5). It is preposterous to imply that I could be the one who would say: "what are we doing about it; let's do something; get out the knife" (p.11). I am not calling for anything, I have no "programs" (p.16). Or, my program is the non-program of simply knowing, comprehending (begreifen) and putting into words what is and what was. I mean a comprehending that implies at once our being comprehended and penetrated by that which is to be comprehended. This is what I meant with "to suffer uncompromisingly" (which Hillman obviously took as personal emotional suffering, while I mean logical suffering: initiation).

I do not want to cure or change anything—because I rely on the idea that the true alchemical opus is not my doing but the objective psyche's (i.e. history's) doing. Therefore no "complaint," no "bemoaning," no "decrying" (p.5), and no "Europessimism" (p.17) or "despair" (p.14), just as no optimism either. Optimism and pessimism belong to the mode of wishful thinking. All these subjective feelings and interests have no place in the work of a psychologist and thinker if he stays professional. His job is no more and no less than, as Hillman put it, to stare into the shadow in our times without offering false hopes, and to undertake, with respect to what he sees there, the labor of the Concept, or to comprehend, in the comprehensive sense of comprehending explained just now. This is therapy: the knowing and attending to the truth of the age and the God in its depth.

It is Hillman who cannot let the dead Gods rest in peace but wants to resurrect them—or "to re-connect the Gods to the facts" (p.16). When I speak in the past tense, quite willing to let the dead bury their dead, it is his need to immediately apply the ideas about the past to the present by asking, "What about soul-making now? Must the same literal blood be shed as was supposedly shed in ancient Greece and Palestine?" (p.4). It is he who says, "Yes, culture today, here, Western, at close of an eon, requires rituals indeed" (p.4). I could never say this, because I believe that our God, Money (Hillman: The Economy) does not require rituals nor imagination. According to my analysis this God is the manifestation of the Christian God as spirit, even if only in His first immediacy (that is, still positivized). Rituals and the imagination still remain "natural" in contrast to the logos nature of this God. They are indeed totally inadequate for Him. He requires the Concept, the psyche's intellectual activity (cf. Plotinus!). True rituals (as opposed to Erinnerungsfeste, anniversary shows, formal ceremonies) are a thing of the past. The logic of our modern consciousness simply does not allow us to bring and hold our thoughts together and to perceive the concretistic and the symbolistic or the sensual and the spiritual as One, which would be a prerequisite of true rituals. And personally, as a member of the modern world and for our time, I do not adhere to what Hillman calls Lutheran concretism at all.

It may be noted here that by Money I do not merely mean literal money. I mean Money as the prevailing logic of our modern and post-modern world. The logic of "money" pervades everything. It shows in tourism, consumerism, advertising, the Entertainment industry, in the economy, in the entire sphere of communication and the media, in post-modernism, in architecture, in our being-in-the-world, in the formal logic governing our Understanding (the logic of which Marx said that it is the money of the spirit).

It is Hillman who has a program and wants to revalue something that has lost its value and wants to apply the knife: to apply it to "the God for whom they [scil. the animals] are already dying, The Economy. Only deicide can revalue what the animals are already performing. Only taking down the dominant God can release the soul to be made again by poiesis and release the animals from only secularized slaughter" (p.17). Is this not the activist ego speaking? Is this not forsaking "where they [scil. the Gods] actually are" in favor of "what ought to be" (p.14)? And what hybris to even think that we could bring down the dominant God, especially when this God is such a truly universal, omnipresent and omnipotent God as The Economy! Hillman decides that The Economy is the wrong God and privileges the Greek Gods surviving only by means of his exercizing a (free-floating) imagination. He does not allow himself to "get placed" by the opus into the observance of that God that happens to be truly ours, whether we like it or not. On the contrary, he elects—against the dominant God, Money—alternative Gods that are "probably the only powers in the whole wide world who haven't got a cent" (p.17), Gods that admittedly "were never local," "never autochthonous" to his continent (p.17f.), which to my mind makes them utopian, unreal, Disney Gods. The Christian God as Money, however, despite His universality and utter abstractness is truly local, because He has a firm place in the soul of us all (particularly also in the collective soul of American civilization at large). And as Jung insisted, real Gods are always specific and local, whereas all the other Gods (like those of India or China, but we can also say of ancient Greece) are merely contents of our learning for us (cf. his letter to Neumann, 5 Jan. 1952).

But as long as the Christian God is in his Money form, He is, even though He is really ours, nevertheless not real God. In His form as Money He is, to be sure, already a manifestation of His negativity or His purely spiritual or logos (no longer natural, imaginal) nature. Everything "natural," all values, rituals, "natural" Gods, all meaning and traditions have been and are being emptied out, alchemically decomposed and evaporated into "consumer goods," that is to say into advertisable and marketable images (ideas, ideologies, opinions, programs, so-called rituals as memorial services and shows, faiths, "information") so that they lose the logical status of ontological substances, the status of being something in their own right. For example, when you seem to be buying actual food in the supermarket today, you are in truth, namely logically, buying the abstract idea of a healthy diet. Everything is fundamentally spiritualized. By God's having revealed Himself to be Money, it has objectively come out into the open that He can no longer be imagined but can only be thought (logic! Labor of the Concept!). But since, as Money, this negativity is itself still positivized and not released into absolute negativity, He is an un-God; and since under His dominance, the decomposition of all reality into the pure spirituality or abstractness of commodities stays itself absolutely concretistic, He must be considered the God of irreality (Virtual Reality). This is why He does not yield any feelings of holiness and no meaning.

I would say that reality (actuality, Wirklichkeit in Hegel's sense, not Realität) is where the world-parents Heaven and Earth are at once separated and united, to inappropriately express a logical relationship in mythological terms. This was the case in the world informed by sacrifice. The logic of money, however, is determined by the separatio alone; absolute abstraction from everything earthy or concrete and absolute positivism. Even the very Earth and the body have become abstractly spiritualized: a "green" or "feminist" program, respectively. Our reality happens to be irreality or Virtual Reality, our real God the irreal but positive God called Money.

Is my holding my place within this contradiction and under the dominance of this God "Protestantism"? Sure. But what can I do about it? Protestantism—as Capitalism and monotheism (in their present, most advanced state)—is that moment of the opus that we today find ourselves in. We cannot choose the moment of the Work we want to be in. When, e.g., in fact in the nigredo, then my total commitment has to be to it... We have to take the Work up in that moment that it happens to be in and into which we happen to have been placed by it. This moment (whichever one it may be and regardless of whether we intellectually or emotionally agree or not) has to be fulfilled, to be lived to the fullest, to be exhausted: by comprehending and "suffering uncompromisingly" its logic or truth, so that the Work can move on. It does not have to be corrected nor fought against by means of such helpless ideas as that of a deicide of The Economy, nor complemented by the polytheistic Gods of an imagination that is no longer in touch with, nor solely informed by, what is actually going on (the real God and Corbin's imaginatio vera are objectively in the real, e.g., in the disease, the disease's imagination, not subjectively in our imaginings). That there were other moments and Gods before and that there might be other moments and Gods later is of no concern while we are in this, the present moment. History, the past, helps only to bring out in bold relief what we are not and where we are not. But as such it may also serve as a via negativa to seeing where we do have our place and our truth.

As I was writing this reply, it became obvious to me that the accusations that Hillman had raised against me in one respect, I returned to him in some other respect. This shows two things, I believe. It shows first how amazingly close our respective views and styles of thinking are, because we both work with the very same categories and have the same concerns. And it shows secondly that there is a real, a fundamental difference, because we each locate or attach our concerns so to speak crosswise, always there where the other does not. In my Animus-Psychologie, I spoke of the syzygy as the "unity of the unity and the opposition of the opposites." Could it be that it is the syzygy that manifests itself in our strife, at once uniting and dividing us with/from each other?

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