My PhD project (undertaken in the mid-to-late 90s) involved tracing a particular malady through various eras stretching back to the ancient world. The malady had many names

—

depending upon the era in which it was encountered

—but it’s main

subjectively reported symptoms stayed relatively constant across two thousand years. The malady was known to the Romans as

‘taedium vitae’

and to the early church

fathers of Christendom as ‘acedia’ (sometimes as

‘

tristitia

’

). To the humoral physicians and alchemists of the late medieval and early modern periods it was known

as ‘saturnine’ or ‘black melancholy’, also as ‘the spleen’ and ‘the hypp’.

During these eras

it also became associated with the ‘nigredo’ phase of what we might term ‘spiritual alchemy’ and

, in the popular imagination, with the symptomology of the so-

called ‘English malady’.

Later, during the Romantic period

, it was referred to a s ‘chronic ennui’

and by way of variations on that terminology it appeared in dozens of literary and philosophical texts. The sociologists of the modern era also rehashed the ancient list of symptoms when they discussed phenomena such as

‘disenchantment’, ‘alienation’, ‘anomie’

and so on. Existentialist philosophers and writers also discussed the problem, though again, a plethora of terms featured:

‘the sickness unto death’ (Kierkegaard), ‘nausea’ (Sartre), ‘the plague’ (Ca mus), etc. The symptoms

also appear in modern psychiatric diagnostic manuals, most obviously in relation to mood disorders like

‘depression’ and ‘bipolar

disorder

’

, but also in relation to a range of other self-destructive and addictive conditions. Given my study mostly focused on how the same symptoms were explained by specific systems of thought I did no t attempt to interpret post-modern manifestations of the malady in terms of ancient polytheistic approaches to mental illness. In part this was because chronic ennui/boredom

didn’t begin to appear in

literature, philosophy etc. as a condition until the time of the Roman Empire

—

Seneca, Lucretius and Petronius give us the first genuine descriptions. By this ti me classical polytheism was in decay

—

eventually to be replaced by Christianity in the West and Islam among the Arabs. This series of articles has been concerned with the figure of Hermes; specifically with his many mutations and manifestations (

including ‘

intensifications

’

) across the past 3,500 years. I want to suggest, however, that an archetypal understanding of the specific ways in which the chronic ennui cycle has manifested in our postmodern era might throw some light on both the kind of subjective maladies epidemic in our era

and

the more intimate aspects of the

Hermesian ‘intensification’

Western nations have been experiencing since the end of WWII. As with the previous article on postmodern manifestations of the Hermes

principle the Jungian terms ‘inflation’ (

i.e.

of an archetype) and ‘negative polarisation’ are relevant. I want to suggest here that aspects of Hermes’ social and cultural ‘inflation’ or ‘negative polarisation’ (see previous articles in

this series) can be transmitted to vulnerable individuals such that they develop illnesses/maladies that are, in some respects, unique to our era. In discussing

these maladies, however, I’d like

to simultaneously reassess certain arguments I developed in the late 1990s regarding the unique symptoms associated with post-modern forms of chronic ennui. From the perspective of archetypal psychology,

‘chronic ennui’

can be seen as the malady

par excellence

of social and cultural postmodernism. Following Hillman and others we can say that

symptom constellations emerge when particular archetypal energies are ‘denied’ or ‘repressed’