James Hillman: The Gods of 42nd Street

Have the old gods truly fled? Can they really ever be gone?

I recently had a chat with occult scholar Christopher McIntosh about his new book The Call of the Old Gods, and this lecture from James Hillman came up in the conversation. I felt it was worth transcribing, as I think it speaks to what is going on in the culture at large —spiritually, psychologically and politically. — B

42nd Street, New York City circa 1972

There's a famous sentence of Joseph Campbell — I'm not referring to “follow your bliss” — that goes something like this. You know, when you wanna locate a quote, and it’s something you think you know very well, it disappears from memory, from the page, from the book, it's gone. This is supposedly a trick of Hermes who is the God who helps you find things suddenly and who helps you forget things suddenly, just as magically, and seems to take over more as you get older.

Anyway, the phrase or the quote says, the Gods are not in Greece or in myth books, or even in Campbell's books, but are right on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street waiting for the lights to change. They are facts of everyday life, not merely the glorious and frightening images printed so beautifully in Campbell's massive works. Books almost too heavy to lift appropriately, I guess, since Joseph Campbell did much of the heavy lifting that brought so much of the body or the corpus of exotic mythology back into our public discourse. He helped resurrect the gods into the facts of everyday life.

Now, there's a very old question that has haunted the people who are interested in myth, and that is “Have the gods truly fled?” There was a famous poem by Hölderlin about the gods have fled, and that this in a needy time, in a dürftiger Zeit even. Should this indeed be a time of need, a time of impoverished soul, does it necessarily follow that therefore, the gods have fled?

Can they leave the world at all? That's an even more necessary question. If they are the world, as the powers within its variety, how can they be separated from it? Are they not the immortality, the athnetos of the world, giving every item of this world its inherent transcendence, its sublime enchantment, imagination and beauty that is at once also fearful, cruel, enigmatic, and profoundly understandable.

Why has the modern age accepted the thesis that the gods can simply up and go? Certainly their absence, if that is the case, cannot be due to us, to our having deserted their groves and altars and failed their rituals and sacrifices and forgotten their mysteries. They surely cannot be that dependent on what we do or not do.

If that were the case, how could they claim their superhuman authority in the cosmos? If their presence or absence depends on our behavior regarding them, the gods of myth are really nothing more than what both orthodox religion or secular relativism and rationalism insists are fictions of human fantasy.

So the question turns again, who and what benefits from declaring the ancient gods dead or fled? Who wants them gone, and with their absence all pagan feeling, all pagan style of consciousness gone as well. One thing is sure, both historically and logically, the absence of the gods allows the world to become res extensa, as Descartes called it. A mathematical space, calculable forces adrift with the litter of soulless objects. All soul, all mind, or consciousness condensed inside the human brain, putting nature at the disposal of the human will.

The absence of the gods is not only an efficient secular convenience, an industrialist opportunity for exploitation, a hubristic inflation of mortal humans. Much more, the declaration that the Gods have fled is also a Christian convenience. Their absence leaves the world open with plenty of room for the presence of Jesus the Savior who gives his redemptive apocalyptic answer to the needy times. But who needs redemption, salvation, resurrection? Only the guilty and the dissatisfied.

There have been many scholars of religion and history of myth and literature, of arts and philology who have intimated the survival of the pagan gods hidden within the Christian mythos. Disguised presences, despite their official and evident absence, there have been as well many who have attempted the revival of the pagan gods by imitations, by invocations, and by interpretations.

“The Gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics in the world.” (CW 13)

Myself, I have followed a method that springs from two famous sentences, often used by and quoted from CG Jung. The first comes supposedly from Delphi. It is a saying, cut in stone and placed as the lintel over the front door of the house where Jung lived and worked for most of his long life. The sentence is “Called or not called, the God will be present.” Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. The second sentence from Jung, “The Gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or (often not included in this sentence, but from Jung) disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics in the world.”

The interiorization of divinity, the move from transcendence to imminence had already been argued by Spinoza, for which he was banned from the community. The move was further presented by Heinrich Zimmer, the Indologist, who said again, famously, “All the gods are within.” And Heinrich Zimmer was Joseph Campbell's first mentor to whom he apprenticed. These moves — Jung’s, Spinoza’s, Zimmer’s, are each different and different to Jesus' “The kingdom of God is within you.” The differentiation of kinds of imminence is not to our point here. But it is important to recognize the crucial twist that Jung’s psychology gave to the imminence of the gods.

They have been interiorized into pathology. Their myths live in our behaviors, irrepressibly demanding recognition and observances. They bear new names borrowed from the textbooks of psychiatry and abnormal psychology. Their refuge no longer the altar and temple fanum, the site of oracle and mystery cult. Instead, they inhabit the interiority of the psyche where they make themselves very present indeed as the powers in the background of the soul's infirmities. Since the repressed returns in the strangely inventive form of symptoms, after all symptoms are extraordinary inventions, the gods are indeed present, whether invoked or not, right on the corner of 42nd Street.

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Transcribed from “The Truth of Myth,” one of two presentations at the Mythic Journey Conference Celebrating Joseph Campbell’s Centenary, Atlanta, 2004 (I think).