James Hillman/ The Dream and the Underworld:

                 The upside-down experience described in the Egyptian underworld is nowhere better displayed than in the circuses. There everything seems concentrated toward one aim: turning the natural way of things topsy-turvy, an opus contra naturam that overcomes gravity and establishes a thoroughly pneumatic world. The elephant rises on two hind legs or stands on a ball filled with air. One man holds up eleven others above his head. Another piles more and more household trivia vertically upward, all on the point of one chair leg. The human fly walks upside down and nothing falls from the juggler's hands. The human canonball shoots through the air and human birds perch on the highwire or swing through space from the trapeze. Beasts leap through fire. The horse is white and goes around a ring.
                Meanwhile, the clowns with whites faces of death, mute like souls in the underworld, making stange music, falling down and coming apart, always too slow and forgetting, repeating the same mistakes, on the edge of diarrhea (q.v. ), hold the reflective mirror up to life by mimes of our upper-world behavior.
                Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space ( q.v. ), the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performance of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.
                In the dreams and imaginations of therapy the upside-down motif occurs more frequently than one might expect. We need only to look for it. A man is turned upside down in an elevator. His feet are now higher than his head. His head now takes a lower place and yet becomes the base for his feet. What now goes on in his mind is his new standpoint and it is the standpoint of below. This happens in an elevator, confirming Heraclitus, who said that the way up and the way down are the same. Another man dreams of standing on his head after three precise sommersaults. Later, he tells me that he then tried it and experienced blood rushing into his ears. He had never imagined his head with blood in it before; now it became a blood-filled organ, red red, round. He began to think of thoughts, that were both rebellious and also like obscene pranks. The passionate intellect was coming to him through the clown.
                A woman, doing an initial active imagination, meets a monkey hanging by his tail. It explains to her that it is right side up in its world and that she has to learn to move this way too if she wants to be with the monkey. She feels frightened and un balanced. This seems the way to craziness-but it is such a joke. Another woman dreams of a circus clown descending from the high wire. He descends upside down, supported by a guide line at his Achilles heel. The way of descent is the way of human frailty. What is weakness to the hero is the support system to the clown: the most tender spot is guide when one is upside down.
                As I write this, there is a movement afoot shown images from my practice, to say nothing of those by Fellini and the arts, towards clowns, mimes, and circus. Like smalls boys we want to run away and join the circuse, but identification with the clown is miming the mime. Heraclitus (frg, 130, Freeman) warned about this, supposedly saying, "It is not proper to be so comic that you yourself appear comic." To enact the clown literalizes the guide to the underworl. The comic spirit can take us there, but we are not the guide-not Harlquin, Trickster, or Hermes Psychopompos, not even a clown. The comic spirit masquarades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do need to put on a white face.
                The matter is not one of becoming a clown of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream worls in and watching it turn ordinary objets in amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughters.
                We follow the clown into the circus by entering a perspective of rebellion against the dayworld order; rebel without cause or violence. Turning topsy-turvy, we deliterize physical law and social convention in the smallest things that we take for granted. Through him we enter the perspective of the fantastic soul, clown as depth psychologist. Imagine Freud and Jung, two old clowns.