Echoing James Hillman's open-minded approach to psychology, heavily influenced by Jung but wholly open to Freud, and peppered with personal twists, Hill considers the image of the nuclear bomb, and the mythical patterns that its creators and their society - our society - seem to have found themselves enmeshed in as the actual nuts-and-bolts-and-plutonium bomb arose from the wider, deeper dream of the Bomb.
Hill's thesis is both stark and sophisticated. The central contention is that the Bomb has constellated, brought to a head, the core mythical conflict of Western civilisation. Looking behind and before St. John's Revelations, with its final conflict between Beast and Messiah, to Babylon's "primordial dragon" Tiamat and her death under the blade of the "municipal god" Marduk, Hill finds here a root expression of the conquest of nature, the progressive split between civilisation and wilderness. The Beast - dark, chthonic, ravenous, destructive and polluting - is defeated and held in abeyance by the Messiah - from the sky, illuminating, sharp, wielding technology. Sensing some alchemical telos in our history, a cosmically apt collision of warring principles, Hill sees in the Bomb's image - the detonation, the mushroom cloud and the aftermath - an uncanny fusion of the Messiah and the Beast. The Beast and the Messiah have merged in a "terrible koan" that has begun to unravel the fabric of Western culture.
Such a summary does little justice to Hill's thesis, which relies on patiently traversing a tightrope between literalism and runaway fantasies. As with Norman Brown and James Hillman, both enemies of the tendency to literalise and draw simple parallels between psychic and social realities, both scholars careful not to fly away into reality-denial, Hill's arguments are put forward as much in their form as their content. Gracefully dancing around the pitfalls of seeing with a metaphorical eye, he manages to convey a position that is keenly aware of the bomb's reality in the world, and passionate about defusing its proliferation, yet at the same time deeply committed to the ways of the dream - shifting, ambivalent, multiplicitous, imaginal and charged with numinous potential.
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