We are all, in our most fundamental design, travellers upon a road that has no signposts, no maps, no obvious destination, and though we are all of us on this journey, almost none understand the journey, because nobody told us what it was for. Most of us pick up pebbles as we walk and assume, on the basis that this is what everyone else is doing, that this is the purpose of the journey. We keep going, walking, picking up pebbles, day after day. We will meet people, and sometimes people will join forces and both pick up pebbles. And because pebble collecting seems to be the most obvious occupation on the road, we assume that eventually, when we are too old and frail to continue, we will fall by the wayside with enough pebbles to prove that our journey was not a huge waste of time.
But what if there is a map? What if the map is simply encoded in a format that we do not immediately recognise? What if the map comprises what we infer from the signs, synchronicities, and sigils that unknown and mystic powers scatter in our path – should we only remember to look up from our searching for pebbles and take notice? This is precisely how the incarnated world works. Yet, the foremost tragedy of our age is not the madness of oligarchs, or even the seeming daily loss of innocence that the world presses upon us, but that so many have forgotten this sacred construct and spend their entire precious life searching the ground for pebbles, and failing to notice literally everything else.
On an allied note, yesterday I took a walk in the beautiful spring sunshine, with birds singing, the tall grass waving by the roadside, and passed three people looking at their phones – while they were walking.
All about us is this world of magic, which most of us studiously ignore. Instead, we live in a state of non-being, henpecked by parroters of empirical platitudes into severing the spiritual cord that binds us to the divine. This is a slow spiritual suicide. In this era of digitised siren songs – this silicon age where the allure of the glass tile of lost time that everyone has in their pocket curses us with oblivion – our souls lie shivering and forgotten in a spiritual barren. We move through our days strangely hollowed out, as if, in our haste to belong to the world of all the shiny things, we have misplaced the keys to our own depth. Thrown them away in fact, because our depth is dark and scary.
To grasp the gears of this inner famine, we must descend into the Night Sea once more, and revisit the psychological masterworks of C.G. Jung. His work serves as a reminder that we are far more than biological accidents or mere collections of cells and impulses; we are protagonists in a vast, mythic inner world, replete with seasons, weather patterns, and myriad paths – some leading to self-awareness and good character, and some to dissolution and madness. Jung glimpsed within the human directive, what he called, an “inner necessity” – in essence the acorn’s drive to become the oak – a journey he termed individuation.
Jung often expressed the concept of an “inner necessity” using the German word Notwendigkeit. In his essay The Development of Personality he argues that the process of becoming a whole individual (individuation) is a “vocation” that acts as an inner necessity:
“Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape… Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called.”
While almost anyone you ask will claim to be enamoured of discovering their life purpose, very few will actually stray very far from the safety of societal approval and identification with the crowd because the path of vocation, the pull of inner necessity, is so fraught with the risk of becoming an outcast. To walk the path, we find ourselves caught in the ancient, conflict between the tribe, which demands we conform to be allowed a seat by the communal fire, and the Self, which demands we stand alone outside in the chill of our own truth. To survive this dichotomy, we begin various tragic works of compromise: we build fortresses of ego, forge masks, ghost ourselves and others, and invent entire unrealistic personalities just to endure the gruelling tension between who we are and who the world expects us to be.
In short, we avoid the deep that is within us, desperately clinging to the shallows, never realising that we thereby condemn ourselves to insipid and unsatisfying lives.
The Hadean Stars and the Shadow Ocean
Jung was a student of the ancient languages of symbology and archetype, seeing in the stars a mirror of the shifting internal worldscape. To navigate this haunted topography, we invoke the four mythic operators of the Underworld – Pluto, Achlys, Ixion, and Orcus. These are not mere names from dusty mythology, but the inescapable psychological forces that translate our often chaotic and undignified struggle for authenticity into a beautifully illustrated treasure map of the soul. They represent the primary ways we handle the “challenge of being real.”
At first, the challenge seems so daunting and impossible that we try to avoid it entirely. Our first instinct is to hide it in the mist, and if that does not work, to inflate it into a falsehood so convincing that it is never questioned; but eventually, we must make a stark choice: the Shadow or the Shallow.
Before we can begin to understand the dark triad of Achlys, Ixion, and Orcus, we must first contend with the vast, swelling ocean that laps at their shores. On our map of the soul, that ocean is Pluto. While the other three are the specific manoeuvres we make to stay safe, to avoid the dread submersion into the terrifying deep, Pluto is the vast, unknown water itself that we must dare to swim in if we are ever to become real. It is the Shadow. In the Jungian tradition, the Shadow is no mere bag of bad habits or minor flaws; it is the great, unlit basement of the psyche – the “Not-I.” It is the subterranean vault where we have padlocked everything the conscious mind finds too jagged, too dark, or too wild to claim. As children, desperate for the warmth and the safety of the hearth, we learned to exile our primal rages, our quivering vulnerabilities, and our “dangerous” hungers into this deep trench. But the Shadow is not a graveyard where our darkness can simply be buried and left forgotten; it is a living, breathing kingdom of terrifying power. When ignored, it does not vanish – it grows vast and threatening, gaining the density and menace of dark matter, until we find ourselves anxious and afraid of what might befall us in the night hours.
As I wrote in Ixion (p.127-8)
“…the Pluto directive is amorphous and formless… it is the primordial murk of the collective unconscious, and the fuel of compulsion. The critical tenet is that Pluto darkens, debases, and above all, drives those points to which he is aligned and, like the Lord of Hades travelling abroad, he wears a cloak of invisibility. Pluto is impalpable and imponderable. Ixion and Orcus are not this way. They are distinct and discernible in their own right; they require no mirror to reflect them.
Therefore, one must see them as Hadean demesnes, like occult kingdoms on the shores of the dark, restive waters of Tartarus, rather than the protean water itself of that Stygian realm, from which grow the fantastic psychological thickets of each person’s fears and unknown drives, and their most secret inner visions. Pluto is fuel for the vast engines of human fear and craving, and as it becomes refined, for creativity too.
The terra firma of Ixion and Orcus is entirely another place, as distinct as the land from the sea. The Orcan caves and oubliettes, the Ixionic spires and minarets, these are Hadean architectures, whose mortar is rendered eternal by the waters Plutonic, and whose enclaves are made shadowy and impenetrable by the eternal gloom of Hades.”
With the introduction of Achlys, my thoughts have been refined, and I see Orcus as a separate, almost aspirational function. Pluto, however, remains foundational and acts as the “volcanic” pressure of these buried things. If the Shadow is the dark, amorphous matter of our unlived lives, Pluto is the astrological symbol for that same force: the power of the underworld, the energy of transformation through decay and rebirth. On its own terms, Pluto is overwhelming; it is the “Dark Night of the Soul” where the ego feels it might be swallowed whole by the vastness of its own hidden nature. This is why we employ the agents of the dark arts, Achlys and Ixion – to keep from drowning in the raw intensity of our own depth.
Achlys and Ixion: The Dysfunctions of Avoidance
Achlys represents the “Mist of Non-Existence” and the strategy of the subtractive distortion. When a child perceives that their inherent vitality or loudness is a threat to their survival within the family tribe, they perform an ontological surgery. They do not merely become quiet; they subtract pieces of their soul from their public presentation. The Persona becomes the Self minus the vital parts that feel “unsafe.” A person shifted too far toward Achlys may seem prosaic and inoffensive, someone who never takes a stand and has no edges. This is the psychological “mist” manifest. They solve the problem of social rejection by offering nothing to reject. If you are not “there,” you cannot be shunned. The Achlysian type becomes a ghost, if not in their own reckoning, in whatever demesne in which their childhood authenticity was met with frostiness and contempt.
In Eliot’s 1925 poem, the Hollow Men exist in a dead land, a cactus land where they lean together like scarecrows. They are not evil in the grand, dramatic sense; they are simply stuffed with straw rather than soul. They have suppressed their Shadow (Pluto) so thoroughly through the mechanism of Achlys that they have no weight left.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.”
This is the psychological hiding in the mist of Achlys made manifest. To be “hollow” is to live a life of avoidance. These figures avoid “eyes” (the gaze of Truth or the Divine), they avoid “Death’s dream kingdom,” and they avoid the risk of direct action. In Jungian terms, they are trapped in a Negative Persona. They have become so adept at not being anything objectionable that they have ceased to be anything at all.
At the opposite pole, we find Ixion and the Additive Distortion. In myth, Ixion was a king whose entitlement led him to attempt the seduction of Hera, only to be tricked by Zeus into coupling with the cloud, Nephele. From this unholy union came the Centaurs – monstrous, hybrid beings, whose tendency to wildness, drunkenness and debauchery was legendary. Psychologically, Ixion is the strategy of surviving the world by becoming more than one truly is. While Achlys hides, Ixion performs. If the inner world feels empty or fragmented, Ixion does not try to heal the fragment; he tries to cover it with a neon sign. He adds traits, narratives, and signals that are not grounded in the actual Self. This is the person who is always on display, the one whose life is a gallery of curated triumphs, the eternal reveller, influencer, and superachiever who flies high on glittering wings. The Ixion type hopes that if they shout their identity loud enough, no one will hear the whimpers of the shivering, lonely child they have abandoned.
Both Achlys and Ixion are defensive strategies against the Shadow. They are the “Hadean architectures” we build to stay dry from the restive waters of Tartarus. However, because they are built on a denial of the raw material of the soul, they are inherently unstable. They are ontological cowardice – attempts to bargain with life to stay in the shallows, where it is safe. But the deeper waters have unsuspected tides and currents, and eventually, we are pulled in.
The Architecture of the Ashlar and the Mystery Work
To understand how we move beyond these dysfunctional coping mechanisms, we must look to the practical aspect of the “Mystery Work.” Here, the individual is seen as a block of stone – an ashlar – of which the Temple of Selfhood is built. The newly admitted neophyte is as a “Rough Ashlar,” squared but not yet trimmed or polished. This represents the state of the average human: possessed of a soul, but one that is jagged, unrefined, and largely hidden behind the masks of Achlys or Ixion.
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