Hermetic Intoxication James Hillman

James Hillman, no livro "Revendo a Psicologia", assim define o psicologizar:

o psicologizar arquetpico significa examinarmos nossas prprias idias em termos dos arqutipos. Significa olharmos
para as molduras de nossa conscincia, as celas onde estamos sentados e as barras de ferro que formam as grades e as
defesas de nossa percepo. Ao re-visar, re-apresentar e re-ver o lugar onde j estamos, descobrimos a psique falando
imaginalmente naquilo que imaginvamos serem descries literais e reais. H um fator psquico, uma fantasia arquetpica,
em cada uma de nossas idias, que poder ser extrada com nossos insights.
Fiquemos com a imagem e nos perguntemos: quais so as celas e barras de ferro que no conseguimos perceber em nossa
vida psquica? Seja em nossos sintomas privados como nos sintomas da cultura? Se todo fenmeno sustentado em uma
fantasia arquetpica, trata-se de ir atrs dos fundamentos que servem de base para nossas idias, pensamentos, repeties,
medos, fixaes e e tambm nos fatos coletivos da vida cultural tais como primavera rabe, crise econmica, catstrofe
ecolgica, assuno do sujeito cerebral, a mais recente novidade no mercado das trangresses sexuais o lesbianismo
chic e tantos outros episdios da contemporaneidade.
Aqui o foco se dar sobre a primazia da vida tecnolgica e seus desdobramentos na cultura: digitalizao da vida afetiva,
descartabilidade das relaes pessoais, a noo de redes autnomas e a produo de narcisismos exaltados, velocidade e
"controle" do tempo e apagamento das distncias, etc...
Estaremos vivendo o que Hillman denomina de "Intoxicao Hermtica"?
Qual a fantasia arquetpica a sustentar estes fenmenos? Como retir-los de sua confio natural e relacionarmos com eles
a partir da perspectiva da psique? Porm, o objetivo do seminrio no examinar estas questes a partir dos arqutipos a
psicologia arquetpica no uma psicologia dos arqutipos, diz Hillman mas ir em busca das novas imagens de fantasia
que nos ajudem a re-imaginar tais desafios coletivos e individuais.
E mais, a pergunta a ser colocada : quais so as fantasias arquetpicas que imaginam a prpria psicologia arquetpica? Ser
que estas fantasias que regem a psicologia arquetpica multiplicidade, politesmo, metfora entre outras ainda soa potente
e vigorosa para os tempos atuais ou tornaram-se inadequadas e ingnuas?
Marcus Quintaes

Hermetic Intoxication James Hillman

Millennial Psychology
At the end of a century, a fin de siecle mood with its foretellings and
forebodings hangs over these last years of an eon that stretches
back to the beginning of our calendar. Yet, we must not forget that a"
millennial psychology is specific to a Christianized world. Mohammedans
have another myth affecting their calendars, as do the Jews.
The rest of this great globe filled with archaic and sophisticated tribal
peoples, nomads and pagans of all sorts, Hindu villagers in Bihar and
Mysore, the billions of bodies living in East Asia, in tropicalAfrica
and America all do not have the same millennial myths and millennial
psychologies. All these peoples may use our imposed calendar,
and though its dates have been missionarized if not by religion,
certainly by business their worlds do not threaten with an end of
time, because they do not date a beginning of calendar time with the
appearance of Jesus.
Millennial thinking about the end of the nineteen hundreds, the
end of time itself, belongs to our Western sacred book, and that final
chapter of fearful horror, Revelations, with its catastrophic vision
of world conflagration. This anxiety about the millennium and what
comes next is a Christian phenomenon, since much of official dogmatized Christianity belongs to this city, it is appropriate that we discuss
this theme in Milano. Constantine and Constantius (enemy of the pagan,

Julian),- Ambrose, the great defender of the dogma,- and Augustine

himself taught here. If we wish psychologically to work our way
through the anxiety constellated by the end of this century, we do well
to begin in this particular place.
By situating the millennium within a global context, I am attempting
to make two psychological moves. Both derive from the foundational
work of C.G. Jung. The first move Jung called "relativizing the
ego," that is, by situating our Western concerns within the broader
context of world myths with many different calendars and dates and
ideas of time and eschatology, the Christian perspective becomes only
one among many, only relative rather than ultimate. As well, our futurism
projections about what lies ahead become statements of
a Western ego, casting its own shadow forward. As the ego does not
represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the
whole world.
The self-importance we give to our worries about the end of the
century and the futuristic projections we make about what will come
next, in fact the very agenda books we buy with dates already printed:
December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000 all this is relativized by
the awareness that these numbers have little significance when one
steps outside one's own fixations predetermined by the basic myth of
Christianized time-consciousness.
This inclusion of global variety is my second move. It derives from
Jung's notion of collective consciousness the attitudes, anxieties,
opinions, tastes, desires, habits of mind and heart that we all share.
They are in the air we breathe, the light we see by.
Basic to collective consciousness today is global awareness, multiculturalism, planetary thinking, multinationalism the sense that
all things private and personal and local are always being impinged
upon by what others are doing everywhere. The music on your radios
blows in from London recording studios, the bananas transport their
toxic insecticides and preservatives from Ecuador, the shrimp bring
with them Gulf of Mexico, as the computer chips import onto your
workstation molecules from Ireland, India, Texas, and Korea.
Multinational consumerism, tourism, and the worldwide web of Internet
communications are the,evident and superficial levels of this
collective consciousness, this glojbalism. Within it, and permeating
globalism as a subliminal mood, is asense of diffuse identity, an anxiety
about borderlessness, what we in clinical psychology refer to as
borderline personality disorders, panic attacks,- paranoid defenses, and
narcissistic rages. That is, diffuse borders and paranoid purisms, as well
as retreats into intense, isolated self-centeredness, worries about one's
immune system, with hatred for everything invasive (including immigrants),
a syndrome of characteristics owing to the loss of personal
certitude, self-definition and location within well-defined borders.
Globalism and Futurism translate in the individual to panic anxieties

and narcissistic retreats.

To find again these personal and local borders we sometimes revert
to hostile measures of exclusion. We try to resist the incursions of the /, %
Other into our private sphere. We join separatist movements, pledge l '
allegiance to cults where the Other merely mirrors me, thereby avoiding
the challenge of difference.
These regressive defenses against dissolution attempt to recapitulate
the older security structures of the ego, prior to its displacing and
deconstructing by globalism. These moves take political form in xenophobia,
ethnic cleansing, genocide, or in retreating to a Lombard
League with its echoes of earlier Italian and Mediterranean city-states,
or walls and fences at the U.S. border and the Israeli border. All these
moves attempt to achieve what Jung called the "regressive restoration
of the persona" or status c\uo ante, by means in the political sphere
of literal localism. We see this in Israel, in Chechnya, in Bosnia and
Croatia, in Cyprus, and among the Basques and Catalonians in Spain.
Enter Hermes
from the perspective of an archetypal psychology, the fascination
with exchange between peoples everywhere, the hyper-communication
of globalism, the emphasis on trade and finance, the instantaneity offered by electronics, the compulsion to travel all this indicates
the mythical cosmos of Hermes-Mercurius, the fleet-footed god with
wings on his feet, cap of invisibility, and winged thoughts.
Globalism feels like an overdose of Hermes, just as the age of reason
suffered from an overdose of Apollonic sunlight and an excess of
the normalizing rationality of Minerva. Or, for another example of
divine hypertrophy, the madnesses of Mars that so seizes a people that
any common man and woman can become an enraged killer.
As the century turns, a monotheism of Hermes holds us in thrall. Not
only his new instrumentarium, but the acceleration with which each
new generation of these tools and devices is developed obsolescence
within eight months, each device surpassed by increasingly expanding
improvements, ever wider reach, ever quicker connections.
A second area where Hermes rules is the marketplace the stockmarket place. Mutual funds, speculations in currencies, commodities,
futures, options, derivatives, hedges. The markets of the world connect
today by instantaneous communications, allowing for giant shifts
of money from one place to another, one currency to another, one
market to another. What once was chronic long-term investment is
now quick Hermetic turnover. The market as a game,- as we say "playing
the market."
These giant shifts of money are shadowed by giant scams and thefts,
by laundering and deceptions. Accounting systems can no longer keep

up with the fast moves of the bankers who handle millions and billions
of dollars per transaction. Governments cannot control the multinational
corporations or govern the fluctuations of currency, the price
of gold, and basic commodities, or the value and amount of their own
money supply.
Once Saturn ruled money. In the old books of symbolism, Saturn
was called a moneybags. He was depicted with a tightly closed purse
and declaredggHTor^n^jrnlnT'.Now, with this hypertrophy of Hermes,
money is no longer solid coin nor backed by gold, only words and
numbers, mere messages sent by electronic data processing and represented
by a little oblong of embossed plastic.
In many places where Hermetic finance has reached its apogee, the
fundamental importance of home and land have fallen to Hermetic
intoxication. The earth and its buildings that give stability and shelter
find their value determined by speculative development and mortgage
rates. Hermes, who himself has no resting place or permanent abode
One aspect of Hermetic intoxication deserves special psychological
attention. I refer to the appetite for information. If you recall, Hermes
was the messenger of the gods, and an indiscriminate messenger. This
because he carried all messages without actively entering into the content
of what he carried.,He had no opinions, values,- he made no editorial
comments,- he did not censor. His task was to make communication
possible, even communication with the realm of the dead and the
world below.
We may find Hermes as a painted and sculpted image in Greek pottery
and marble, in easy association with both Apollo on the one hand
and Dionysus on the other, with Aphrodite, and with Athene and
Artemis, with Zeus and Hades, and even Hercules, though Hermes
himself was not heroic by any means. Information takes no positions,
carries no grudge, and thus has no limits it is toujours disponible.
In a culture that has lost the gods, a culture from which the gods
have withdrawn, we have the messages but they do not carry the gods'
meanings. Mere "information." Yet, Hermes in his dutiful faithfulness
to his archetypal role, passes on the information, indiscriminately facilitating
the messages regardless of their content, which may as easily
be a blog, a joke, an ad, a sexual come-on, or a revelation of crucial
political significance. The word "information" itself has become so
inflated that it carries the code of an individual's DNA identity and
destiny. Not wisdom, not knowledge, not inspiration, not learning, not
comfort, not truth, not prophesy, not moral value or aesthetic beauty.
Instead of messenger of the gods, Hermes has become servant of
the Internet.
When we say, as in the popular guides to mythology, archetypal
psychology, and astrology, that Hermes is the "god of communication,"
we must recognize that communication cannot belong to only one god.

There are many modes of communication. For instance, there is the

connection wordless, intimate, and sensate between lovers, between
mothers and babies, between patient and nurse, between animals
and their caretakers. There is communication by means of the daily
delights of life: flowers, cooking, drinking together. There is communication
on the level of a Dionysian "participation mystique" when all
rock together at a large outdoor pop music concert, laughing together
joudre of falling in love with an utterly unknown person. There is the
gestural communication among warriors in formation, even between
enemies in the battling contests whether in warfare or on the football
field, and between a cruel Saturnian prison guard and his prisoners.
There is also the communication of teaching and learning, slow,
painstaking, and without the flash and fun of Hermes. Communication
also proceeds through art and craft, whether through a piece of
artwork that communicates by means of a spark that leaps from the
artwork into the eye and heart of the beholder, and then to his or her
hand to make another artwork.
Hermes, please, is not the only means of connection. It sins against
the pantheon of polytheism to assume that Hermes is the sole god
who governs communication. This monotheistic usurpation of all
these different modes into the Hermetic elevates the electronic media
to prime position in our instrumentarium. Moreover, this Hermetic
intoxication
gives an exclusive definition to communication, neglecting
the arts, the body, the subtleties of sensate silence. And this hypertrophy
of Hermes assumes that your PC, iPod, Blackberry, PlayStation,
Xbox, ATM, or whatever else has become your "server," have actually
become indispensable chirungas for "getting the messages," "keeping in
touch," "enabling" you to be in life and enjoy it. Besides, the degradation
of Hermes to convenient instruments of clever wizardry degrades
the god to a chip. And if the chip is programmed to work on the
1 -or-0 principle of either/or, then Hermes no longer is the god of "gobetween," of ambiguity, as the myths present.
To make this degradation clearer, let me use a parallel regarding
the hero. The ancient hero served the city,- in fact it was on the tomb
of a hero that an ancient city was founded. The original idea of hero
meant one who was between the human and the gods, and who helped
bridge the difference between the mortals and the immortals. Whether
mythical like Hercules and Aeneas or human like Alexander and
Julius Caesar, heroes were imagined to have a human and a divine parent,
thereby incorporating both natures in one figure. Jesus Christ is
imagined in this same archetypal pattern.
Now, as Holderlin, Rilke, and Nietzsche have said, the gods are no
longer with us; they have found this modern human world not quite
Instead, "all the gods are within," as Heinrich Zimmer said. They
have become psychologized, functions of the human psyche. So the

hero becomes internalized as a psychological component, re-named

"the ego," that figure in the psyche who leads the way, decides the
course of action, and overcomes the monsters of unconsciousness. But
this hero, without ithe gods, without the limits Met by them, is merely
secular ambition, careerism, brutal strength, misogyny, and an enemy
of nature. Ego incorporates all the qualities of the ancient hero, but
has lost His raison d'etre the service to the gods, the founding of
civilization,
and the bridging between human life and the transpersonal
myths and values. Nothing remaining but the overweening heroic
pride, the egotistic hubris of Western secular culture.
Drawing the parallel with the hero as secular ego, we find that
Hermes has become secular messenger. No longer of the gods, and
instead infiltrated with the monotheism that has lost its viable credibility
as lord of all domjnion. The former Omniscience has become
the overall broadband reach,- Omnipotence, the virtual reality that can
stimulate all things,- and monotheism's divine Omnipresence, the instantaneity of ethereal connections and satellite photography that can
observe and map every phenomenon of the planet.
Hermetic intoxication may also delude us. After all, wasn't Hermes
the master of deception? He is a thief, a conniver, a trickster, a surreptitious
nightwalker. Is it Hermes who suddenly drops the call, makes
the computer not function, neglects to back up what I just wrote, finds
ways to infiltrate bugs and viruses that destroy whole programs and
irreplaceable data banks? Perhaps it is Hermes, the god of merchants,
who convinces the consumer that one needs more capability, faster
processing and more peripherals than one will ever use, selling us the
latest software before we have fully utilized what we already have. Is
it Hermes who inspires young hackers to penetrate corporate secrets,
police files, government records, science labs, and to steal information
or jam the hard disk and magically transform the precious into
the senseless.
Perhaps it is Hermes who invented identity theft, stripping us
of our collective cover, leaving us as a nameless, naked soul. As he
leads souls (psychopompos) to the underworld, perhaps he makes use of
psyche, a psychologist, whose main instruction is ambiguity, duplicity
like the twin serpents entwined on his staff. Is he undoing our egoidentity for the sake of the soul which is often only experienced first
through loss.
A great question haunts me: If my mythical diagnosis is correct
and Hermes is the god in the disease, then could Hermes be playing
a computer/video game with the whole world? Is the future necessarily
electronic, the New Age an information age of media, e-mails,
spin, infotainment, virtual reality, cyberspace? Or could we be caught
in a Hermes game ... I do not mean the games the computer plays,
but is Hermes, by means of the silicone chip, playing games with our
human civilization?

These suspicions come to mind. That they come to mind is further

indication of the presence of Hermes/Mercurius, for deceit is as
much his business as is business. We are suspicious not because we are
Luddites and against technology, we are suspicious because part of
hermetic awareness is to be awake to deception. Simul similibus curantur-.
Like cures like. To catch Hermes is to catch a thief and not only to
catch a quick flash of inspiration.
Because Hermes' interactive devices facilitate the mating game of
Aphrodite and the tactic of war, the calculations of construction and
agriculture, the connections among family, the solitude of Saturn, providing
even Jovian enjoyments, no other principals impede Hermes'
dominion. With the whole wide world available to you individually,
personally, by yourself alone, intoxication follows. One click and I am
turned on, the epicenter of a worldwide web.
Google, Internet Archive, Wikipedia resurrect the ghost of ancient
Hermeticism, that vast collection of occult wisdom literature, mnemonic
images, symbols, and magical practices aimed at the mastery
of all knowledge.1 Its followers from Renaissance Italy to Elizabethan
England attributed the teachings to Hermes himself, or to another god
of world-knowledge, Thoth of the Egyptians. By means of allegorical,
symbolic, and mathematical reductions, hermeticism sought to transpose

the physical world into mental space. Data becomes message,- the
world is angelic,- the cosmos hermetic, that is, sealed until disclosed,
and the disclosure was also the world's redemption through knowledge.
Does this motive still lurk in our contemporary intoxication?
Vet, even while Hermes gives this miraculous access, what does he
as well take away? Remember, Hermes is god of both finding and
losing; of giving and stealing.
Imagine a party. A dinner party, a dancing party, a birthday party.
, Dressing and fashion and interior decoration, anticipation before the
event and gossip after the event,- imagine the cooking and serving, the
wine and the flowers, the bodies and their motions, the flirtations and
seductions, the sudden encounter with an old friend, or an old enemy,then think, too, of the subtleties of gesture and language, the tones of
voices and peculiarities of speech, regional dialects and little phrases.
The perfume.
At the computer an extraordinary array of sophisticated social skills
that have taken centuries to elaborate no longer play any role whatsoever.
One of the most Hermetic figures of our day, Brian Eno, who has
taken part in so many levels of media invention and performance, and
thinking about it, said: "The trouble with the computer is that there
isn't enough Africa in it." Body. Rhythm. Soul. Social Ceremony.
Civilization depends on its Africa, on the social skills that belong with
communication unless communication be merely dots and dashes sent

over a Marconi telegraph. Communication is multileveled interaction, a

complex impinging of souls, not merely interactive messages. Moreover,
communication is ultimately for the sake of knowing - knowing not
only the message, but also the sender and the receiver who the other
is and what bearing the message has specifically for you.
A message is an angel from the Greek aggdos (message), through the
Latin and theological meanings of a divine message. The angels were
many,- they had particular names, shapes, depictions. A true message
announces something, reveals something, alters something,- it brings
knowledge of high significance. The voice of the angel was shattering,
a trumpet blast, a whirl of black wings in the night. What cellphone
can transmit an angel?
Is there a cure for Hermetic intoxication? What can free us of this
addiction to instant access and delivery, this delight in the invisible
passage of anonymous words through the air, this privilege of possible
connection to everyone anywhere?
Neither his father Zeus nor his brother Apollo could truly tame
Hermes,- he deceived them both. Nor could the goddesses, nymphs,
and humans with whom he mated change his ways. With these many
female figures he produced offspring, but his copulations did not result
in coupling. Only one of all the mythic figures appeared as his
counterpart: Hestia. In the Greek world, and then the Roman where
Mercurius was paired with Vestia do we uncover an answer.
The Focus of Hestia
efore we begin to talk about Hestia, we should toast her: Before
any event, the old Romans said: Vestal, as we, raising our glasses
say: salud, kampei, cheers, prost, sante, I'chaim . . . She came first, before
Zeus, before Hera, Gaia, Demeter.
In other words, first one must be focused, at home in oneself, present
here and now. Focus, our word in English for the concentrated attention,
the interest that warms to life all that comes within its radius,
originates as the Latin word for hearth. And hearth was Hestia. The
place where the home fire glowed was Hestia. This Focus was not her
symbol,- it was Hestia herself.
The name Hestia/Vesta probably derives from the Indo-European
vas, "inhabit." Another derivation, according to philologists, is from the
root, "essence." In short, she is not only "in," as inside the home or in its
hearth. She is in the focused intensity and warm interest that we call
attentive consciousness. And, like Hermes, she is a quality of mind, an
invisibility. He is invisible in his quick passing, "the Hermes moment,"
she is invisible as consciousness itself. If Hermes brings possibilities to
mind, Hestia centers them and gives them focus. Elemental mercury
scatters everywhere into a million bits, whereas salt, her elemental
stuff, is the alchemical principle of fixation and immutability.

With Hermes' expansion and placelessness in mind I ask you now to

hear these attributes and habits of Hestia.2 For instance: ancient judges
wrote down at the end of each day all things germane to a criminal
case and left the writing on Hestia's "altar." Hermes too had a connection
to writing but Hestia's writing is exact record-keeping, pinning
things down. She governed contracts,- Hermes made deals.
Hestian consciousness circles around itself. It goes nowhere, intends
nothing outside of itself. So, Hestia was always seated on circular
elements, and the places where she was worshipped were always
circular.
In Plato's Phaeirus, when the eleven gods travel to Olympus, Hestia
"alone abides at home." To her is attributed the invention of domestic
architecture. Not only the house, the place, the absence of movement
but as well the family: the life and law of the clan. The only actual
service performed in her honor was the family meal. The Homeric Hymrt
to Hestia says that "Without you, humans would have no feasts."
How different from Hermes, always moving, no images of him sitting
down and passing time with family, sharing food with others. With
the laptop, cell phone, iPo,d, and TV come grabbing a bite, slurping, and
snacking on the run. Hermes goes to the restaurant with the world in
his bag.
So it was to Hestia that one went for sacred asylum, where one
could find refuge and stillness.
Supposedly, the combination of a fixed stationary electronic screen
inside your home and its worldwide reach replicates the Hestia-Hermes
union. A common altar,- a focusing hearth. Inside and outside joined:
supposedly, as you sit there, you serve this ancient pair equally.
This argument omits the deeper sense of Hestia. She becomes merely
a fixed service station for Hermes, as if the wife who maintains the
foyer so that the husband can fly in and out between appointments.
She has no value in herself,- a mere servo-mechanism. The PC notion
of Hestia omits the disciplined devotion to inwardness, less to message
than to meaning, less to connection outward than to the processes of
inwardness themselves, their virginal uncontaminated nature.
Only those processes that have no direct functional use, those that
make no connections, communicate nothing, but come before all possibilities
the inwardness of focused life that cannot fall to the seductions
of outward temptation, that purity, that askesis even, of disciplined
attention, self-enclosed as the circle offers the gravitas and
The fact that the Internet, or its equivalent in each country and
system, quickly became a pornography exposition and that it is used
for many sorts of "virtual" sexual interactions gives further evidence of
its solely Hermetic association. Hermes of myth had a strong sexual

component. The cock and the ram were especially his animals. He was
configured primordially as a phallic herm.
When we look at the carved images of Hermes, we see his sculpted
head sometimes with its cap of invisible winged thoughts above, and
his well-defined member below. Between head and phallus only a
stone slab. The mind and the sex two great generative and autonomous
powers,- but the body of inwardness, of reception and digestion,
the heart and stomach and gut, all this is blank. Or, sometimes his
body is presented as a very slim, very unwounded youth. Hermes, an
adolescent hacker?
That the Internet became so quickly sexualized makes it easier to
understand the puritanical moves to put controls on cyberspace programs
and on television. The censoring against "virtual sex" and the
sexual content of television show again the counterweight of Hestia to
the lascivious side of Hermes, where communication and connection
also mean intercourse.
Hestia, it is said, is "immune to Aphrodite's power and to Eros's
arrows." And it is said, "Sexuality must be hidden from Hestia." Her
servants, the Vestal Virgins, could be put to death, and were actually
buried alive, if they gave off one sign of Venusian allure with their
eyes, their gestures, even their dress or their walk.
When Hermes and Hestia are not in a sympathetic rhythm, then
they push each other to extremes. Sexuality becomes a major area of
their contention, and puritanical asceticism rigidly overrides the fantasy
and freedom of desire.
Our electronic generation has already discovered its need for Hestia
and puts into practice each day, along with its worldwide hermetic
intoxication, deliberately dull and repetitive activities of quiet and intense
focusing gymnastic exercises on aerobic machines, isolated
jogging with earphones, as well as Zen, Taoist, Yoga, and other centering
rituals of meditation. These behaviors provide counterweight,they offer a Hestian antidote to the Hermetic addiction. We move
and Hestia, much as soldiers and sailors used to move back and forth
between battle station and whorehouse, between Mars and Venus.
Therefore, deep, prolonged psychotherapy (which I have previously
raised questions about) can serve as a Hestian ritual for holding
Hermes within the here and now. Classic psychotherapy as proposed
and practiced by Treud and by Jung was consistently located in one
physical location (Bergstrasse in Vienna and Seestrasse on the lake of
Zurich). This long-term, ongoing discipline, interminable and without
future, introverted, slow, careful, and intensely focused on inwardness
becomes, in this quick digital age, more necessary than ever before.
Here and Now
Iwant now to explore with you another aspect of millennial psychology,

one that follows logically upon what we have already said regarding
Hestia and the significance of place. The desire for place, the retreat
to homeground, the search for sanctuary what the Jungians call the
temenos or vessel of containment suggest a radical alteration in our
thinking and feeling, one that elevates place as a refuge against time.
By place I do not mean space. Let us be clear. Since Newton and
Descartes, and especially since Kant, we have conceived a world built
upon two principles, space and time. Both are abstractions without
palpable contents, sheer vast containers of emptiness without meaning
or value, without qualities or differences in themselves. The one
like a universal room into which anything can be located by means
of geometric coordinates,- the other, an endless river of discrete units,
each exactly equal to the next, mere contiguous ticks of an invisible
tyrannical clock.
Yet now at this millennial turning, we observe our world engaged
in vicious struggles about place. People the world over are ready to
lay down their lives for particular places, the suburbs of Sarajevo, the
rocky villages of Chechnya, city districts of Belfast, blocks of Los Angeles,
Kurdistan, Chiapas, trans-Jordan settlements. Of course this is
not only a phenomenon of today. Wars over territory are archaic and
animal. I am suggesting, however, that these current battles belong to
our current symptoms, and it is always to the symptoms that psychology
looks for where consciousness is emerging, where paradigms are
The symptoms of ethnic cleansing and racial hatred (xenophobia) say
"preserve the purity of this place." Allow no alien gods be honored here.
Xenophobia is monotheistic in its psychology and literal in its belief in
turf, soil, home and Hestia. We may understand its protests best if we seek
their mythical roots, and hear their claims as archetypal expressions.
Within the construct of the Hermes-Hestia pair, ethnic cleansing,
the extermination of native populations and the demolition of houses
and scorching of soil in a frenzy of self-protection are excesses of Hestia
paired with the excesses of Hermes worldwide web of cyberspace
and globalism Hermetic communications, where anywhere is
everywhere, and the very idea of place has become irrelevant.
As Hermes can go mad with hermetic intoxication when severed
from Hestia, so a monotheism of Hestia becomes only fanatical purity,
fanatical devotion, the single-focus upon home, homeland, and family
relations. No contacts with others,- they become an evil empire, an axis
of evil. Communication becomes contamination. No nuance, no ambiguity,
no Hermes. "Robert McNamara reported that during his seven
years as Secretary of Defense there were not even seven minutes of
direct communication between Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and
President Ho Chi Minh."3 Under Hestian notions of purified security,
Hermetic diplomacy is allowed only through back-door channels, illicit,
unscrupulous, undercover and stealth spying. Hestian defense of
the "good old local ways" provides a gated barricade against the onrush
of a miscegenated multicultural fantasy of the future. The symptoms

of ethnic cleansing, tribalism, and xenophobia attempt to hold back

this "future." They affirm "place" as protection against the changes that
come with "time." They reassert the primacy of place over time as the
most important ruling principle for ordering existence. They try to
put an end to time.
And this end of time is precisely what our current millennial
anxieties are about. We imagine an end of time in a literal and spatial
manner, a giant cataclysm affecting the whole earth, a global epidemic
like ebola and AIDS, warming of the ice caps and flooding, nuclear
winter, ozone depletion, universal cancer, universal famine, a universal
gaseous night.
I am therefore suggesting that the return to place frees us from the
desolation of spatial thinking and, the anxiety of time. In fact, we may
then deliteralize the Christian "end of time" and its terrifying sadistic
vision of Revelations into a metaphor. "Yes, time comes to a stop as the
millennium ends - not literally,- the old clocks will continue their little
mechanical circles and the calendars continue tti> have their pages torn
off and thrown away. But where we are, and its effects on how we are,
becomes the essential consideration of a life. For each place will reveal
its local determinants, the gods and daimones of the place, whether as
a, bioregion, as a deposit of tradition, as an architectural composition,
as a landscaped mood, a psychic climate. The place you are becomes
the essential truth of a life, rather than getting on and moving forward..This psychological way of an "end of time" promotes an ecological,
embedded way of life, and one that is also animistic and polytheistic.
It also returns Hermes to the pantheon from which he seems to have
sprung free and detoxifies that inflation of one god above all others.
The hypertrophy of Hermes fills our days with hurried anxiety, fearing
to fall behind. We seem never able to catch up,- time is so fleeting, life
so fast. We cannot be where we are and instead live in a future, our heads
leaning forward, our feet trying to wear his airborne sandals. So we live
our schedules, not our days,- our appointments and not our rhythms.
The shift of paradigm from time to place, this restoration of Hestia
as first among all gods and goddesses, would naturally affect all
therapy because the soul would no longer be measured by the time
of the body and the time of the world stages of growth, age in
years, our generation, and our period in history. The soul's symptoms
of slowness, such as depression, resistance, forgetting, repetition, fixation,
could be revalued as rejections of time, motions away from the
pressures of time and into the stability of place.
One of the major maxims of the Renaissance was, "Look back to see
forward." It was also expressed as retrocedens accedit, advancing by
retreating.
When Brunelleschi designed the dome of the Florentine cathedral,
he looked back to move forward, saying "Not even the ancients raised
a vault so enormous as this one will be." His notion of progress was

governed by ideals of the past, not fantasies of a future, utterly new and
independent of precedent.
the future, but the projections forward of these archetypal patterns.
Thus, when Futurology reports hope, progress, and greening, and supports
these optimistic prognostics with evidence from space science,
biotechnology, lowered rates of infant mortality, more cell phones,
refrigeration, longer life expectancy, new ecological awareness we
believe we see reality. We imagine these are the determining facts.
But the reality lies in the eyes that see, not in what they see. For
precisely the eye of the Futurologist, informed by another archetypal
more Saturnine vision, looks into the future and sees doom and gloom,
destruction of habitat and species, floods and famines, civil insurrections,
terrorism and plagues a world described by the great saturnine
pessimist Thomas Hobbes as a war of "all against all," and human
life as "nasty, brutish and short."
We look back to gain information about the archetypal forms of
our insights so that we may understand that all futurisms are fantasies
no matter the evidence4. Because present trends are multiple and
contradictory, extrapolations from them into the future can lead only
to multiple and contradictory predictions. No single vision can prognosticate.
Objective realities beyond here and now remain unknown
and cannot be known, for that is the meaning of the word "future":
that which is not and cannot be stated in the present tense. There "is"
no future. Future is merely another name for unconsciousness in the
mirror of which we see our own subjective proclivities.
Tending as Continuing
It is time to conclude. Time still urges and pushes and presses,- we
are still in this millennium. Time would move us quickly along,
force us out of here, away from this place, so that we may go to
another place, a bar, a cafe, a bed.
, Or maybe Hestia is calling us home. \
So, I shall conclude by saying once again: millennial thinking
about the future is an archetypal fantasy. This fantasy seduces us
from confronting two fundamental facts of all human existence, of
all cosmic existence. First, any actual moment occupies an actual
place,- and second, life depends on a deep faith in existential conti4 For five radically different projections of the future, see my Kinds ojPower
(New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 226-32.
nuity. Futurism escapes from the first, always leaving here for elsewhere,and futurism denies the second, by evacuating the certitude
of the actual with speculations about a vague and vast unknown.
For the great catastrophe that the future brings is not the future

as such, but the effect of Futurism on present life, how it turns attention
from what is to what is not, drawing focus from the daily
bread and salt and water of the actual to the unknown and conjectural,
thereby negating Hestia, and making us all "homeless."
I have been doing my utmost to restore the centrality of Hestia
who can locate us, wherever we may be, in concrete physical life. The
hearth is wherever you are actually focused, as hers was also in the
midst of the city, in the Prytaneion, or common city hall. For whatever
the century on the calendar and the time on the clock, this time always
takes place somewhere in a bed, at a table, in an office, on a street.
We are all homeless when living only in space and time,- and no one is
homeless when Hestia is present. She gives each environmental situation
a sense of being here, Da-sein.
The certitude of the actual that it is because it is here, and given
an eternality that cannot go away and is not subject to time is similar
to what George Santayana, the old Spanish philosopher who lived his
last days in "the eternal city," calls "animal faith." It is that feeling in our
bones that the earth is beneath my feet, that the sun sets this evening,
that the world whether fearful, tragic, unjust, or senseless nonetheless
does not go away. This animal faith is like the consciousness
of animals themselves who have no futurology. Instead, their possibilities
of existence are always grounded that the air is there for the
bird's wing, the water there for the fish's pleasure. This ground is always
"here," not virtual but utterly here, allowing us the possibility to
live at all, allowing us to sleep at night knowing the sunrise will find
us in the same place, allowing us to tidy up with faithful gestures of
animal certitude after disaster, to bury the dead and serve the mourners
a warm and friendly meal.