Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire

"Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!" ~Amos Starkadder

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.
~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16

The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents.
~C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search Of a Soul

The attitude towards the unconscious defines an era, certainly an individual's conscious orientation. It's my focal point, my fascination. Originally, daemons were messengers, inter-mediators between man and deity, between time and eternity -- the inner dialogue of the mind. A thing expressed best in myth. Here, we go back to the early cusp of consciousness, when a Lucifer was truly a light-bringer:

Hades and Hephaestus: on the surface they are two very different gods with nothing to connect them. But the apparent gulf between them rapidly disappears as soon as we look a little more closely at what the second of these gods will have meant, not for us but for Empedocles. The mythology and cult of Hephaestus spread to the rest of the Greek world from the north-east Mediterranean, where he appeared to have associations with the subterranean—specifically volcanic—fire. His transference westwards to Sicily was evidently not via the Greek mainland, but direct. There, in Sicily, he took over the cult and attributes of an indigenous non-Greek god, Adranus: Adranus had his temple on the edge of Mt. Etna, with a sacred grove and a fire ‘that was never extinguished and never died down.’ It was here in the West—in Sicily and the surrounding islands—that Hephaestus’ connections with fire expressed themselves most overtly in the form of direct connection with volcanic fire. On Lipara he was the chief god of the island, and personification of the volcano; Themessa, between Limpara and Sicily, was known as Hiera because—at least in historical times—it was considered sacred to Hephaestus. On Sicily itself, and in the immediate vicinity of Empedocles’ town of Acragas, the was the ‘hill of Hephaestus’: a local cult center where the god was believed to make his presence under the hill known by extraordinary feats of spontaneous combustion. But above all Hephaestus was connected with Mount Etna, not just in Sicilian cult and myth, but in classical tradition right down to the end of antiquity. There, underneath the earth, was his home—and especially his workplace. The common reluctance to give this fact its due significance is a result of failing to appreciate that, in spite of Hephaestus’ formal inclusion in the Olympian pantheon, he essentially never lost his role as a god of the inner depths of the earth. In short, any seeming inconsistency in Empedocles’ referring to fire now as Hades, now as Hephaestus is itself just one more pointer in the direction of that underworld.

Hades and Hephaestus, the destructive and creative: to place these two aspects of Empedocles’ fire in their true perspective we need finally to set them against the background of the idea so common in antiquity, that the underworld is a place of paradox and inversion. In particular it is a place where polar opposites coexist and merge, and especially the place where the paradox of destructive force being converted into creative power is realized as its greatest intensity. Two thousand years of classical tradition relating to volcanoes—primarily Etna—and the underworld are summed up by Milton’s Lucifer: ‘Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire.’ This is not to quote Milton as direct evidence for ideas held by Empedocles but, once again, simply to emphasize the resilience and endurance of a tradition which classicists who treat Empedocles as a ‘philosopher’ ignore at their peril. Milton himself equated Lucifer with Hephaestus, and there was no shortage of descriptions in ancient literature of the extraordinary effects produced by Hephaestus as he works with the volcanic fire inside the earth. That this particular association of ideas was known to Empedocles is undeniable: to gain some impression of how important it was in shaping his cosmology, we have only to look at how he described the creation of the ancestors of men and women. On the one hand, the way in which he words his account of their formation inside the earth is plainly meant to invoke Hesiod’s famous description of Hephaestus creating Pandora. On the other hand, his image of humanity being spewed up by fire shooting into the sky is an obvious example of volcanic imagery. In Sicily, Hades and Hephaestus are two sides of one and the same coin: two aspects of the volcanic fire just inside the earth.

~from Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy Mystery, and Magic Empedocles and the Pythagorean Tradition

...in art Eros relates the parts to the whole - as a seamless web of relations and as unified vision. ~Maureen Roberts