Trusting in the guardian spirits for children

“Just look at the evidence,” James Hillman writes. “Of the 57 million children (under fifteen years of age) living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. One of every six children is a stepchild, and half a million make their ‘homes’ in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents in the United States die from suicide than from cancer, AIDS, birth defects, influenza, heart disease, and pneumonia combined. Each day, at least 1 million ‘latchkey children’ go home to where there is a gun.

“Besides these children who find their way into sociological statistics, there are those in treatment for attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, obesity, defiance, bulimia, depression, pregnancy, and addiction.

“Gross economic injustice and political passivity are responsible for the plight of children. But also I accuse the parental fallacy of sponsoring this negligence. Parents’ deficient attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make a world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilization straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parent task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child, you must bear witness first to your own.

“If today our civilization is turning toward the environment to stave off ecological disaster, the first step of this rapprochement is to cross the threshold of the parental house into the home of the world. We are parented by everything around us—if ‘parenting’ means watching, instructing, encouraging, and admonishing. Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.

“The more we cling to the overriding importance of parents and the more cosmological power we accord them, the less we notice the fathering and mothering afforded by the world every day in what it sends our way. The world affords nesting and sheltering, nourishing and quenching, adventuring and playing.¹ The world is made less of nouns than of verbs. It doesn’t consist merely in objects and things; it is filled with useful, playful, and intriguing opportunities. The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, but sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding. The world is buzzing and blooming with information, which is always available and never absent.

“Children recognize this nurturance and instruction offered by nature. According to the observations of the brilliant pioneer of ecology Edith Cobb, the imagination of children depends wholly on this contact with the environment.² Imagination does not grow all by itself in the household, or even out of imaginative tales told by parents. Children are ‘by nature’ at home in the world; the world invites them to grow down and take part.

“The more I believe my nature comes from my parents, the less open I am to the ruling influences around me. The less the surrounding world is felt to be intimately important to my story. So the coming ecological disaster we worry about has already occurred, and goes on occurring. It takes place in the accounts of ourselves that separate us from the world by attaching us to parentalism, the belief that what’s out there is less of a factor than my close family in the formation of who I am. The parental fallacy is deadly to individual self-awareness, and it is killing the world.

“Psychotherapy compounds this fault. Its theory of developmental damage owing to the family actually turns the patient away from everything else that might give comfort and instruction. To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch.

“By leaving the actual world out of its main theoretical constructs, psychological theory imagines that world out there as objective, cold, indifferent, even hostile (therapy as protective refuge, consulting room as sanctuary). Thus the world receives the projection of the bad mother, the killing mother, which its theory has invented. Of course there are demons out there to be propitiated. Disasters lurk, but these powers behind the door and in the bush are also ancestors, not merely germs, spiders, and quicksand. As we have misplaced the cosmological parents, so we have lost the ancestors too. The parents have swallowed them up.

“‘Ancestry’ in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as ‘Ancestor’ and an altar home built for them, away from the home you inhabit. Ancestors are not bound to human bodies and certainly not confined to physical antecedents whose descent into your sphere was allowed only via your natural family. Only if a member of the natural family (itself not always determinable), say a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt, is worthy enough, powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, may he or she become an ancestor in the sense of a guardian spirit. To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead—that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.

“Without a sense of ancestors, what can we propitiate as having a direct and controlling influence over our lives, but our parents? We take literally the commandment to ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ which shows decency and kindness. But let’s not forget that the fifth Commandment, along with the ones preceding it, aims to eliminate all traces of pagan polytheism, in which ancestor worship is essential. The text makes it clear that these ‘parents’ are not just human Mom and Dad. They have huge powers and are to be honored as guarantors of fate, ‘that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee’ (Deut.5:16) Like ancestor spirits, they are protective guardians of a long life, bearers of good fortune, and nature spirits inhabiting the land itself. By command, henceforth and forever more, the parental fallacy is established.

“The primordial spirit world has been reduced to the all-too-human concrete statues of personal figures. This reduction by official religion of that splendid archaic menagerie of ancestors has taken centuries. We call it civilization. ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ yes, indeed; but do not confuse them with creator-destroyer gods, or with ancestors. It is laborious to ‘work through’ the ‘parent-problem’ because it is not a mere logical error or misplaced concreteness, or a difficult step in a therapeutic process toward individual self-determination. Working through the parental fallacy is more like a religious conversion—out of our secularism, out of our personalism, out of our monotheism, developmentalism, and belief in causality. It requires a step backward into the old connection with invisibilities and a trusting step out and over the threshold into the rich profusion of influences afforded by the world.”³

¹ Hillman credits J. J. Gibson’s psychological school at Cornell University for this insight.

2 Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (Spring Publications, 1993).

3 James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 63-91.