archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Hades (Bolen)

Everything of worth is kept below, behind a helmet no one sees him wear.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Hades, one of the eight god patterns of Gods in Everyman (1989) and the third of her three father gods: the inward, unseen man of a rich interior life, and, in her reading, the underworld itself as an image of the unconscious.

Bolen’s Hades is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of the dead. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the last of three father gods, after Zeus and Poseidon, and her chapter title gives its domain as the realm of souls and the unconscious. The man in whom Hades predominates, as Bolen describes him, lives inward: he is reserved, solitary and little noticed, with deep feelings he rarely shows and an inner world of images that matters more to him than outward success. One of her headings calls him “the invisible man”, with an inadequate persona: the Hades man who has no acceptable answer when asked what he does. The god left his realm rarely and had no children, and Bolen reads both facts as part of the pattern.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.

Public domain · Dickinson, The Chariot (Because I could not stop for Death) (1890)

Death comes as a courteous driver of a carriage who is never in a hurry, the abductor’s chariot with all the terror turned into civility.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 4 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Hades and Persephone

    Homeric Hymn 2, to Demeter (Evelyn-White, 1914), -600

    The lord of the dead carries the maiden off in his chariot, the founding image of the underworld taking what it wants.

  2. Jung’s example

    The helm of Hades

    Homer, Iliad V, -750

    Athena puts on the helmet that makes its wearer unseen, which is the god’s own gift of invisibility.

  3. Jung’s example

    Orpheus before the king of the dead

    Ovid, Metamorphoses X (trans. Brookes More, 1922), 8

    Pluto, unmoved by every other plea, cannot refuse Orpheus’s song and lets Eurydice go on one condition: the stern ruler below who can still be reached.

  4. a later reading

    The Chariot

    Emily Dickinson, Poems (1890), 1890

    A reader’s image: death as a courteous driver who never hurries.

The wider sky

Where the Hades (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 8 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twistWolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'dBy nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;Make not your rosary of yew-berries,Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth beYour mournful Psyche, nor the downy owlA partner in your sorrow's mysteries;For shade to shade will come too drowsily,And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

Public domain · Keats, Ode on Melancholy (1820)

The poem warns against the drowsy pull of Lethe and nightshade, the ruby grape of Proserpine, naming the underworld’s temptation to numb rather than to feel.

Nobody invites him upstairs, and he has stopped waiting at the door.

He knows the dead by name, and the buried things in the living.

A whole kingdom, held by one man who is rarely seen.

The deep layer · what was written

Hades (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Hades is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of the dead. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the last of three father gods, after Zeus and Poseidon, and her chapter title gives its domain as the realm of souls and the unconscious. The man in whom Hades predominates, as Bolen describes him, lives inward: he is reserved, solitary and little noticed, with deep feelings he rarely shows and an inner world of images that matters more to him than outward success. One of her headings calls him “the invisible man”, with an inadequate persona: the Hades man who has no acceptable answer when asked what he does. The god left his realm rarely and had no children, and Bolen reads both facts as part of the pattern.

The figure has two further layers that set it apart from the other gods. Bolen treats Hades the place, as well as Hades the person, as an archetype: the underworld is her image for the unconscious, a realm most people enter involuntarily, and which a culture that ignores it meets only by descent. And she reads Hades the abductor of Persephone as the incestuous shadow of Zeus. Two exclusions apply. This is not Hades the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Persephone, who became queen of the underworld.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 5 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), the last chapter of part II, “The Father Archetype: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades”. The chapter follows the book’s standing order, the god, the archetype, the man, his difficulties and ways to grow, and adds two sections on the god’s wider meaning: “Hades and Dionysus” (p. 102) and “Hades (the Place) as the Archetype of the Underworld” (p. 108). A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths are public domain and thin, which suits Bolen’s reading of an unseen god. Hesiod calls him “strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth” (Theogony 455) and describes his echoing halls and their hound (767–774). In the Iliad he takes the darkness below as his lot (15.187–193), Athena borrows his helmet to make herself invisible (5.844–845), and Agamemnon calls him the one god utterly ruthless and so most hateful to mankind (9.158–159). The abduction that founds Bolen’s abductor section opens the Homeric hymn to Demeter:

I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess—of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus the loud-thunderer. — Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7th–6th century BCE), ll. 1–3, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The hymn’s detail that Zeus gave his daughter away is the ground for Bolen’s heading: Hades acts out what the sky father permits. Her section on Hades and Dionysus takes its thread from Walter F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult (1933; English 1965), which quotes Heraclitus’s saying that Hades and Dionysus are the same. Bolen’s Hades also has a near contemporary in archetypal psychology. James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld (1979) had read every dream as a step into the underworld, called the dream-ego and the waking ego shadows of each other “as Hades is the brother of Zeus”, and spoke of a “Hades of incomparable intelligence” beyond the destroyer and lover (as excerpted in A Blue Fire, pp. 242–243). Bolen’s use of the god is gentler and more personal: Hillman’s Hades is a perspective on all psychic life, hers is also a kind of man.

The debate

The roster places Bolen’s Hades nearest the shadow, and Bolen herself puts the two together, writing that Poseidon and Hades are “shadow aspects of Zeus”, the parts of the father archetype that men in power suppress or ignore. The comparison needs care. Jung’s shadow is the part of a person’s own character that the ego refuses and then meets, projected, in others; it has a specific content and is the first thing to be faced in analysis. Bolen’s Hades is something else on each of her three levels. As a type of man he is closest to what Jung called introversion, the orientation of a person whose interest flows towards the inner object; as a place he stands for the unconscious as a whole, the collective as well as the personal; and as Zeus’s shadow he is a relation between two gods, a cultural claim about what patriarchy pushes underground. Only the third uses the word in anything like Jung’s sense, and even there the content is a god’s, not an individual’s.

The criticism of the book bears on this figure in two ways. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) argued that Bolen identifies the gods with personality types when “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17); her Hades, who is at once a man, a realm and the unconscious, shows the slippage they meant. Hillman’s own stance cuts the other way: gods, for archetypal psychology, are “adjectival” rather than substantive, qualities in experience rather than kinds of people (A Blue Fire, p. 42). Shepherd Bliss (1989), reviewing the book for Yoga Journal, noted that Hades is the least personified and least known of the gods, which may be why the chapter leans so heavily on the place rather than the person. Publishers Weekly (1989) dismissed the whole system as “at least as simplistic as sun-sign astrology”.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Hades as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Introversion has a large research literature in personality psychology, but that work measures a trait dimension and makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are mythic: the abduction of Persephone, the invisible helmet, the god who left his realm almost never. She notes that a Hades man may recognise himself in the writings of Jung and the analytical psychologists, or of poets such as T. S. Eliot. Later popular writing on her types has assigned the label to reclusive public figures and to fictional loners and lovers who carry someone below, as in a 2023 Mythic Beast essay and a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast. Except for Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

  • Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapter 5, pp. 102, 108; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
  • Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
  • Hesiod, Theogony 453–456, 767–774; Homeric Hymn 2, to Demeter, ll. 1–32. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Homer, Iliad 5.844–845, 9.158–159, 15.187–193 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
  • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. CW 6. Definitions, “Introversion”.
  • Otto, W. F. (1965). Dionysus: Myth and Cult (R. B. Palmer, Trans.; German 1933). Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20891-0.
  • Hillman, J. (1979). The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row. Pp. 102–103, 130–131, 133, 200, as excerpted in T. Moore (Ed.), The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (Routledge, 1990), pp. 242–243. ISBN 978-0-415-05303-7.
  • Hillman, J. (1981). Psychology: monotheistic or polytheistic? (1971, with postscript). As excerpted in A Blue Fire (Routledge, 1990), p. 42. ISBN 978-0-415-05303-7.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
  • Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
  • [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
  • Marrick, L. (2023, 1 September). The Hades archetype. Mythic Beast. https://mythicbeast.substack.com/p/the-hades-archetype
  • Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0236, “Gods in Everyman: The Father God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0236-gods-in-everyman-the-father-god-archetypes/

Leaving

From too much love of living,From hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.

Public domain · Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine (1866)

The poem thanks whatever gods may be that the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, the quiet end of the kingdom where nothing more is asked.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◐ ShadowThe face we never show to the world.Return to the void