Their differences in style are no better illustrated than here at St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Moore, a former seminarian and therapist, has the gentle, reassuring manner of someone trained in gentleness and reassurance. He is 54 but is preternaturally young looking, his skin glowing and unlined. He doesn't so much lecture as evoke images of Aphrodite that seem to have just floated through his mind. These images suggest that each of us, in some of our most trifling moments, is in service to the goddess. He mentions associations with Aphrodite: flowers, smiles, gold. "Let's say you're walking down Madison Avenue and you're caught by a gold object -- that's so easy here. One of the great means we have of contemplation today is the store window."

When it is Hillman's turn to speak he doesn't evoke, he provokes. He is tall, thin, ascetic-looking at 69, with cropped white hair, a hawklike nose and deep creases across his temple which point like arrows to his penetrating sea-colored eyes. On stage, he is on the attack, working himself into a sweat, pacing, as he flips through a stack of stapled bits of paper. Hillman's subject is not beauty but pornography. His speech is about Aphrodite's reviled son, Priapus, the god best known for his grotesquely enlarged phallus, the god of exposure.

In his rat-tat-tat style Hillman leaps from politics, to personal addresses to the gods, to psychological analysis of current films, to etymological elaborations, to just plain talking dirty. Listening to him is like riding a great wave; just when you think you have caught the rhythm, you find yourself dumped gasping on the shore.

He scorns society's attempts to repress pornography, explaining that the imagination is more powerful than our rational beliefs. No matter what laws we enact ("Law is the myth of America. Lawyers are our priests") he says, the truths of human nature embodied in the myths will be played out over and over again, never losing their ability to shock. He cites an example: "The most recent case of Priapus, who was stocky, middle-aged, swarthy, was Clarence Thomas. There he was, uncovered on TV. It was an exposure. That whole myth reappeared."

At the end of Hillman's performance, Moore rejoins him on stage. Like a good student, he praises his master. Yet in his praise, there is an edge. (As the Greeks knew, sons are prone to knife their fathers.) "I've been doing this for 20 years, listening to this man speak," Moore says. "I remember having to respond to a talk so far beyond me, I didn't know what to do. I get so caught up, so mesmerized . . . I had a blank piece of paper for taking notes. But it stayed blank the whole time."

"THESE ARE THE THINGS I'VE written," James Hillman says, sweeping a hand across a long shelf of books in the office of his Connecticut house. There are nearly 20 books that he wrote or co-wrote, with titles like "The Myth of Analysis" and "We've Had a Hundred Years of Therapy and the World's Getting Worse." It seems an ironic monument to someone intent on dismantling ego, hero and self. After all, what is such a shelf if not a tribute to an ego-driven, heroic self-image? His answer is typically Hillmanesque, mixing metaphor and myth: He gets possessed by demons. "The demonic is something that is a taskmaster to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' "

He may never finish. This month Doubleday published "Kinds of Power: An Intelligent Guide to Its Uses," of which he says proudly, "There's not one practical idea in the whole book." Under way is a book for Random House that looks at individual destiny and re-examines the importance of childhood experiences.