Prelude to Hell on Earth 

Indeed. An essay is a trial whose destiny is unknown. My subject, the "Death Instinct" that leads to Hell on Earth, an instinct conjured by Sigmund Freud, is as dark as death yet I persist with the quest to discover whether or not it exists. My very persistence gives some evidence of its existence. And the longer I am set upon the path to hell, to look evil in its face, the more I feel compelled to continue to sweet victory, the end of bitter defeats, perchance in Vergil's "realms of Joy, his green delights of the groves of Bliss, his Halls of the Blissed. "

Of the death instinct Sigmund's harpies professed he had confessed no evidence therefor and that his dogged pursuit thereof had left him self-deluded in morbid hate for his race. The prospects for research do seem frightful. My fair-weathered friends, one by one or holding each other's sweating hands, have fearfully flown from me into the blinding light of positive mental attitudes, where they frantically flap their wings over hackneyed phrases simply to stay aloft for the time being - the ground looms in the gloom thereunder. Nevertheless I am compelled to withdraw to the very depths for ultimate victory or defeat, for I am as good as dead. I too left my Queen Dido's embrace behind - my fortune was assured if only I had remained where the getting was good and easy. But I set sail and I cannot go back: my past good fortune put herself to the sword - or so I would like to believe. Now I too can inquire and answer after her suicide, just as did Aeneas, son of the goddess of love:

"O Dido, unhappy one, was the story true
That was brought to me? They told me you had bidden
A sword conduct you to journey's end - and I -
Was I the cause of that? I swear by the stars,
By the Gods above, by whatever there is true
In the earth beneath to its deepest depth, I swear,
It was not of my own desire I left your land.
O Queen, it was the inexorable bidding of heaven
Which now has forced me to explore this wilderness
Of Darkness here, driving me through deep night,
And dank decay - what could I do but obey?"

(Virgil's Aeneid, Patric Dickenson's translation)

I would face the evil within, deep in the pits of despair, not because I love evil but because I would realize the good beyond. I for one suspect evil is not the mere absence of good. It is a wonder that a principle for good is proclaimed from the rooftops while a contrary principle for evil is utterly denied, especially since the evidence of the last far outweighs the former in our age of diabolical horrors; an age in which the mere absence of good is so obvious that we hate to induce any principle from its absence, for we love to hate. We would rather see violence run rampant in our news and entertainments; sex makes us uncomfortable and platonic love is all too boring. Yet he who ignores evil is good for nothing. Evil seems to lurk in the very heart of things, far beyond the reach of the state. Inquisitive souls descend into the cave-like tomb; the entrance emits exhalations so foul that "no bird could fly across its filty jaws...." (Vergil) Continuing on:

"...And there was the threshold,
The very mouth of Hell where Agony
and Remorse had laid their beds: there -
O horrifying sights! - lay wan Diseases,
Unhappy Old Age, Fear, Hunger that goads to Evil,
Despicable Want, and Sufferings and Death;
There Sleep, own-brother of Death, and Joy-in-Guilt,
And on the threshold of Death its herald War.
There were the iron cells of the Furies, there
Was raving Revolution, her snake-locks
Bound with bloodstained ribbon."

An ancient priestess takes Aeneas on a brief tour of further horrors, then leads him to the Groves of Bliss where he gladly encounters his blinded (for consorting with Aphrodite) father Anchises, who explains that the souls of countless tribes and peoples there who live like bees flitting from flower to flower around abodes of peace will be clothed in flesh again:

"...But father, truly,
Am I to believe that any of these souls
Go hence to the upper air and again put on
The shackles of the flesh? How could such an insane
Lust for the light delude these unhappy creatures?"
"Son, I well tell you and put your mind to rest."
Anchises then began his exposition:

The inquirer will find the mystery exposed in Book VI of The Aeneid. As for me, one way or another, with or without the Golden Bough, I would fain return to the future of the golden past repeated; to the age when sons loved their fathers; that is, to the Golden Age, before Pandora took the great lid off the jar, letting loose every conceivable mischief upon humankind - Hope remained behind. But Hesiod relates another story:

Or, if you will - I will sum you up another tale well and skilfully - and do you lay it up in your heart, - how the gods and mortal men sprang from one source.

First of all the deathless gods, who dwell on Olympus made a Golden Race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronus when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare the fruit abundantly and with stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich and flocks and loved by the blessed gods.

But after the earth had covered this generation - they are called pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds. givers of wealth; for this royal right also they received; when they who dwell on Oympus made a second general which was of silver and less noble by far..."

(Hesiod's Works and Days, translated by Hugh
Evelyn-White)

On the whole we now live in the Iron Age, the dark age of kaliyuga - the elephant stands on only one leg of Truth. The golden spirits have withdrawn pending the restoration of the Golden Age. Hesiod did sum up the ages "well and skilfully" as he promised, even though critics who understand the Greek language say his poetry is inferior by far to Homer's.

A later poet, Empedocles of Acragas, was even more confident in his abilities than Hesiod. Empedocles informs us he had become an immortal god; that is, he had taken the full course around the wheel of rebirth, from One to many and many to One, and thus knew the Truth about the One, the golden Sphere of Love, and about the ulitmate destiny of the many divided by Strife (or Hate). As a matter of necessary course, whether they like it or not, the destiny of the Four Elements disaggregated by Strife is this: they shall be almost perfectly recongregated in Love's Sphere. Empedocles' Sphere is not the eternal, immovable Sphere of his teacher Parmenides, but is rather one pole of a cycle alternating between Love and Strife. The Sphere is equal on all sides and altogether infinite, hence can only be defined negatively except perhaps to say it is absolute Being - which is to say relatively nothing. Apparently Being or Nothing is not quite perfect, for Strife lurking within the Sphere moves the One back to many, producing a Vortex, dispersing the four elements, first of all, into quasi-chaotic forms such as volcanoes, floods, and weird monsters. Ultimately the elements will stand alone in Strife as Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. But not all is lost, for Love will eventually reconquer, although Hate will stand on the verge to once again reverse the loving reunion: "And as they came together/Hate began to take his stand on the outer verge," states Empedocles (Fragment 36). Here is William Ellery Leonard's translation (The Fragments of Empedocles) of Fragment 35, 'The Conquest of Love':

But hurrying back, I now will make return,
To paths of festal song, laid down before,
Draining each flowing thought from flowing thought,
When down the Vortex to the last abyss
Had foundered Hate, and Lovingness had reached
The eddying center of Mass, behold
Around her into Oneness gathered all.
Yet no a-sudden, but only as willingly
Each from its several region joined with each;
And from their mingling thence are poured abroad
The multitudinous tribes of mortal things.
Yet much unmixed among the mixed remained,
As much as Hate still held in scales aloft.
For not all blameless did Hate yield and stand
Out yonder on the circle's utmost bounds;
But partwise yet within he stayed, partwise
Was he already from the members gone.
And ever the more, and nearer, inward pressed
The gentle minded, the divine Desire
Of blamesless Lovingness. Thence grew apace
These mortal Things, erstwhile long wont to be
Immortal, and the erstwhile highways of new life,
And from the mignling thence are poured abroad
The multitudinous tribes of mortal things,
Knit in all forms and wonderful to see.

Empedocles was a religious man as well as a scientist. Today scholars still debate whether or not his science dovetails with his religion, and whether he saw a difference between the two and struggled to reconcile them. Aristotle mentions him in several of his books including Physica, De Anima, Ethica Nicomachea, and last but not least, in the book his successors entitled Metaphysica (because it came after the others). If we examine Aristotle's Metaphysics, we see it addresses various questions entertained by philosophers who seek wisdom for its own sake or just because they wonder. The metaphysical inquiry arises from the particulars of basic sensuous needs to relatively useful universals in terms of both needs and wants, and ultimately to the absolute universal, the first cause or prime principle: Being; or, if you will, God. Along the way we notice the development of a rudimentary metaphysics, of what we call natural science as opposed to religion. In the final analysis, metaphysics is the science of Being as Being. Since Man is at least part of the Cosmos if not its microcosm, the ideas of 'Being', 'thing', and 'necessity' are, as Avicenna noted well, sketched into the soul. Avicenna, reflecting on Aristotle's metaphysics, said: "Being cannot be commented upon except by the name Being, for it is the first principle of all comments. Hence we cannot explain it: but the concept is in the mind without any intermediary." (Najat)

Nevertheless, we can try. Aristotle recounts that the early scientific theories of the elements were insufficient to account for the manifestation of goodness and being in their being and becoming; for that a force was wanted. Anaxagoras came up with Reason, positing that Reason is the cause of order and beauty; others, taking the cue, wanted a force or cause of the movement. Love was proposed. Aristotle quoted Parmenides: "Love first of all the Gods she planned." He also quoted Hesiod's reference to Eros We note further that Hesiod's Eros subdues Reason; Reason has taken it on the chin for allegedly being a divisive force, the instrument of Strife rather than of Love, despite Reason's reputation for generalizing in the name of Being! Well, thought can kill or chill love, but it can also inflame the emotions. Reason is just a tool, or, as a Cynic once said, a dog tied behind a cart being pulled by a horse. In any case, if Love is the sole cause, there would be no motion; our Being would be good for Nothing, a big ball of wax, call it a Sphere if you like. Or, in more modern terms, absent the repelling cosmological constant Einstein posited (and later retracted, perhaps mistakenly) to force his equations to balance, a singular force of attraction would reverse the Big Bang and eventually cause the Universe to collapse into a black hole - interestingly enough, the explosive force would apparently still inhere to somehow casue the next big bang.

Aristotle, tracing the history of metaphysics, pointed out that Good was not good enough to explain the obvious contraries to the goods, namely the evils; whereupon Empedocles was the first to propose two principles, the bad and the good. It was this pre-Socratic choice which caused Sigmund Freud to admire Empedocles; Freud simply could not account for human nature by resort to his bipolar unitary theory of Love, therefore he proposed an indendent destructive force, or death instinct:

I am well aware that the dualistic theory, according to which an instinct of death or destruction or aggression claims equal rights as a partner of Eros as manifested in the libido, has found little sympathy and has not really been accepted even among psychoanalysts. This made me all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very ready to give up the prestige of orginality for the sake of such confirmation..."(Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

We turn to Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, where we discover that his concept of Eros and love was also not very well received, a least not by "educated" people.

...We are of the opinion... that language has carried out an entirely justifiable piece of unification in creating the word 'love' with its numerous uses, and that we cannot do better than to take it as the basis of our scientific discussions and expositions as well. By coming to this decision, psycho-analysis has let loose a storm of indignation, as though it had been guilty of an act of outrageous innovation. Yet it has done nothing original in taking love in this 'wider' sense. In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the 'Eros' of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis... and when the apostle Paul... praises love above all else, he certainly understands it in the same 'wider' sense. But this only shows that men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them.

Psycho-analysis... gives these love instincts the name of sexual instincts... The majority of 'educated' people have regarded this nomenclature as an insult, and have taken their revenge by retorting upon psycho-analysis with the reproach of 'pan-sexualism.' Anyone who considers sex as something mortifying and humiliating to human nature is at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions 'Eros" and 'erotic.'

Freud, when remarking on Empedocles' metaphysical system, declared it to be a cosmic system applicable to both organic and inorganic existence, whereas the psycho-analytic system is presumably strictly biological. In any case, Freud employed the scientific metaphysic of his day, particularly the theory of Helmholtz, as well as mythology for his psychology. Man is a sort of electrical machine, but of course much more than that.

Empedocles' scientific account of the golden Sphere of Love is also extremely abstract, yet he has a personification of Love, a goddess of love for his Golden Age: "Nor unto them/ Was any Ares god, nor Kydoimos,/ Nor Zeus, the king of gods, nor Kornos, Nor/ Poseidon then, but only Kypris queen..." He speaks of the Eastern goddess unflatteringly identified in the Old Testament as the "queen of Heaven." The goddess Cyprus transmigrated from Cyprus to Greece, becoming altogether Greek. She is also known as Aphrodite. She is not a purely cosmic power like Eros. She is the erotic, embodied goddess of rapture. Her works are the pleasures of love; only Athena, Artemis, and Hestia can resist her charms - others dare not defy her. Aphrodite will willingly receive her lovers. She is not a dignified mother gracing holy matrimony; she has caused the doom of many a married women including Helen, the most beautiful woman on Earth. Her Graces or Charites add to her ensnaring charms. In fine, Aphrodite is the unadulterated attraction of erotic feminine beauty.

As far as Empedocles was concerned, the very same Aphrodite who causes human hearts to beat for one another causes the harmonious relation of Heaven and Earth. Hesiod informs us that Uranus, the god of Heaven, laid down upon Earth but his embrace was severed by Cronus; Uranus left his male member floating in the ocean; from its white foam the goddess Cyprus took form - she is the serene goddess of the sea. She landed first at Cythera then at Cyprus. Her every step caused the Earth to bloom at her feet. The geniuses of love and desire, Eros and Himeros, conducted her to the assembly of the gods. She is the sexiest of all goddesses, antipathetic to Athena (Minerva), gray-eyed, virgin-goddess of wisdom and of defensive warfare.

Aphrodite's friend is Ares, the god of aggressive war, with whom she frequently consults on the battlefields. If you honor her, you may be saved from battle and be swept up and taken to a bedroom. But too much has been said of Love and not enough attention has been given to Strife. It is ironic, is it not, how a study of darkness tends to revert to the light from which it descended? I declined into Hades believing the death instinct was the subject of my essay; now it appears that, although I was unconscious of it, the first and last cause of my search was rather the divine Sphere of Love circled by Aphrodite. "No man is aware of her as she circles round," Empedocles avers. In any case, Empedocles believes we are unable to apprehend the divine Sphere of Being, the bodyless body of the love-force, by ordinary means although it is apparently comprehended by Apollo: "One holy mind, ineffable, alone, And with swift thoughts darts throughout the universe." And, if I intuit the esoteric meaning of the following fragment (133) rightly, we are unconscious of the two instincts themselves:

We may not bring It near with our eyes,
We may not grasp It with our human hands,
With neither hands nor eyes, those highways twain
Whereby Belief drops into minds of men.

Empedocles, like Freud, was a frustrated monist whose desired single principle of Love did not account for Strife. Both obviously believed the presumption of contrary principles is more convenient to the understanding of the world than a single bipolar principle. The Unconscious wants a distinct devil. Freud wound up bowing to the popular moral conception of the Devil in Civilization and its Discontents:

The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an original bipolarity in its own nature... I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen manifestations of the destruction instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with eroticism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. (The desire for destruction when it is directed inwards mostly eludes our perception, of course, unless it is tinged with eroticism). I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged... 'Little children do not like it' when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to badness, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and to to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil... with His all-goodness. The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God... But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the wickedness which the Devil embodies. In view of these difficulties, each of us will be well advised... to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven of us."

Now, then, in retrospect I observe that I unconsciously avoided fully recounting Aeneas' vision of horrors at the beginning of this essay. Since I have neglected the Devil in this little descent of mine into Hades, I shall soon squint and see if the Devil is adumbrated by the hellfire.