Respecting the power of the call

James Hillman writes: “Crooks and criminals, sadistic guards and serial rapists—all the creatures large and small of the underworld—did their souls descend from the lap of Necessity? Can the acorn harbor a bad seed? Or, perhaps the criminal psychopath has no soul at all? In reply to this question of the bad seed, a question which asks about nothing less than the nature of evil, we shall inquire into that figure who was the ultimate criminal psychopathic murderer of modern times, if not of all times: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).

“One major drawback to this concentration upon the worst is that lesser crooks and smoother murderers slip by. By looking closely at Hitler, we may miss the demon closer to home. Faceless corporate boards and political administrators make decisions that wreck communities, ruin families, and despoil nature. The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accouterments of high station in the political, legal, religious, and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy.

“The habits of Hitler, reported by reliable informants and assessed by reliable historians and biographers, give evidence of an identification with or possession by his daimon. The principal difference between Hitler’s possession and that of others lies in the nature of his personality and the nature of the daimon—a bad seed in a personality that offered no doubts and no resistance. “I go the way that Providence dictates for me with all the assurance of a sleepwalker,” Hitler said in a speech in 1936.

“Hitler’s call gave him the self-appointed right to be a sleepwalker outside the human world. Outside also means transcendent, where the gods themselves live. Hitler’s certitude also confirmed his sense of always being right, and this utter conviction utterly convinced his nation, carrying it forward in its wrongs. Absolute certainty, utter conviction—these, then are signs of the demonic.

“We begin to see how power corrupts as the guiding whisper becomes a demonic voice obliterating all others. The seed comes with sure and uncanny knowledge. But while a god is omniscient, a human becomes a know-it-all, and so Hitler had no use for exchange with others. There was nothing they could teach him. To show this omniscience he memorized masses of facts—locations of regiments and reserves, displacement and armature of ships, kinds of vehicles—all of which he used to overpower his questioners and embarrass his commanders. This information ‘proved’ his transcendence and disguised his lack of thought and reflection and his inability to hold a conversation. The demonic does not engage; rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth.

“Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgment may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.

“The daimon’s transcendence places it outside time, which it enters only by growing down. Hitler felt himself trapped by time. He ignored the day’s division into light and darkness, drawing shades in daytime and burning lights all night. The kingdom he was erecting on earth would last a thousand years, he said and the figures with whom he identified were of another era: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Christ. Insomnia was one of his major symptoms. This timelessness of the acorn and its push to make everything happen at once indicates possession by the daimon, daimon becoming demonic. The appreciation of everything having its season, of giving time and having time and taking time, does not apply to the Bad Seed, which promulgates manic inflation that brooks no interruptions (Hitler’s invention of blitzkrieg and his fury at anything blocking his way), and that demands impulsiveness and hurry.

“Finally, this evidence of direct demonic intrusion, perhaps the devil himself: ‘A man in the closest daily association with Hitler gave me this account: Hitler wakes at night with convulsive shrieks. He stood swaying in this room, looking wildly about him. It was he! It was he! He’s been here! he gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible.’

“In the last scene of the tragedy Othello, when Iago is revealed to be the malicious cause of murders and the destruction of Othello’s noble and gullible character, Othello asks him: ‘Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body?’ Shakespeare has Iago reply: ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know.’ These are Iago’s final words, and they leave interpreters guessing about his motives. But this statement by one of Shakespeare’s arch villains is not enigmatic at all. Iago says, in essence: ‘You already know, Othello. In the lines just preceding you have already twice named me a devil.’ Iago made tragedy out of nothing—as if sport, a game. The Bad Seed takes pleasure in malice, enjoying destruction.

“Without a profound sense of psychopathy and a strong conviction that the demonic is always among us—and not only in its extreme criminal forms—we hide in denial and wide-eyed innocence, that openness which also opens wide the gate to the worst. Again: Note how political tyranny lives on a gullible populace, and how a gullible populace falls for tyranny. Innocence seems to ask for evil.

“Thwarting the Bad Seed begins with a theory that gives it full recognition. So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insist upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic endowment, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity. It drives toward the light; it will be seen; it asks for its place in the sun.

“Above the world is where M. Scott Peck places some of his patients who have in common a condition Peck calls ‘evil.’ He uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme willfulness. The rigid frame enclosing his vision does not allow Peck to see the daimon in the demonic. A deep-seated Manichaeism divides Peck’s world into saints and sinners, saved and damned, healthy and sick. ‘Evil is the ultimate disease . . . the evil are the most insane of all.’ By means of a psychiatric diagnosis the moralist can place a patient among the damned.

“A logic that so radically divides good and bad can offer only the same old standardized recommendation we’ve heard for centuries in the Christianized West: Fight the good fight. Peck calls it ‘combat.’ Therapists will be in the front lines of this fight because of their capacity for and training in love. ‘I think,” Peck asserts, ‘we can safely study and treat evil only through the methods of love.’

Hillman responds: ‘Love’ is surely the most omnipotent word in current usage, since the Christian God himself is defined as love. It can do all things. I would insist, however, that it can do very little with ‘evil’ unless this ‘love’ first recognizes the soul’s call within the bad seed. Love may be less an exercise of the will in an act of combat and more an exercise of intellectual comprehension of that daimonic necessity that calls above and beyond the world to the sinner as to the saint. I am claiming that the acorn theory allows a wider comprehension of the Bad Seed than the diagnosis of evil does.

“Prevention, as I understand it,” Hillman writes,” may neither restrict nor admonish. It has to address the same seed, the same call, and invoke the same invisibles that are claiming the price of life itself. The most immediately dangerous of all invisibles is the explosive charge in the seed, its obsessive, compelling potency, like Hitler’s raging obstinacy. Before dismantling the bomb or isolating it in solitary confinement, we may need to lengthen its fuse.

“Effective rituals begin as downers, with mourning. Even if there is no remorse about vicious acts, there can be increased awareness about the demon that prompted them. Hitler only followed the demon, never questioned it, his mind enslaved by its imagination rather than applied to its investigation. After the downers comes not repressions disguised as conversion and born-again reform but that turn toward community service we can witness every day when ex-cons take to the schools and grow down into the kids’ worlds, explaining how the Bad Seed works, what it wants, what it costs, and how to be smart. Mentoring juveniles as a regular repetitive service of dedication is also a kind of ritual.

“Finally, prevention of the demonic must be based in the invisible ground ‘above the world,’ transcending the very idea of prevention itself. Prevention requires not combat but seduction, inviting the daimon in the acorn to move out from the hard-shell confines of an only-bad seed, so as to recover a fuller image of glory. For what makes the seed demonic is its single-track obsession, its monotheistic literalism that follows one prospect only, perverting the larger imagination of the seed toward serial reenactments of the same act.

“My notions of ritual suggest ways of respecting the power of the call. They suggest disciplines imbued with more-than-human values, whose rituals will be touched by beauty, transcendence, adventure, and death. Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed. Yet we must also have rituals of recognition that give the demonic a place—other than prisons—as Athena found an honored place for the destructive, blood-angered Furies in the midst of civilized Athens.

“These rituals of societal protection take the demons in. They see the daimon in the demon. And these rituals sharply contrast with current ideas of prevention, which, following Hitler’s own preferred methods for purifying society, would eradicate the Bad Seed.

“Public programs are being proposed to test schoolchildren for their ‘genetic predispositions,’ to uncover potentials for crime and violence in terms of character traits and personality, ‘weeding out’ those who show such factors as ‘early irritability and uncooperativeness.’ These traits indicate not mainly crime, but that genial exceptionality on which a whole society depends for leadership, invention, and culture. Besides, once sorted out, on what compost heap would the weeds be thrown? Or would they merely be ‘improved” and rendered compliant by drugs to which you may not say no, or kept in privately owned, for-profit penitentiaries exempt from labor laws and minimum-wage scales?

“For adequate rituals we substitute rigidities and formulaic fixes like ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ Without exorcisms that attempt to separate the Devil and the daimon, we have only eradications that get rid of both. Rituals not only protect society from the demonic; they also protect it from its own paranoia, from falling prey to its own obsessive and vicious measures of purification, that ever-present American myth: the return to innocence in a Puritan paradise.

“Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other,’ where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.”¹

“A society that willfully insists upon innocence as the noblest of virtues and worships innocence at its altars in Orlando and Anaheim and on Sesame Street, will be unable to see any seed of any kind unless it be sugar-coated. Like Forrest Gump eating chocolates and offering sweets to strangers before he ever looks into their eyes, stupid is indeed as stupid does. The idea of the Bad Seed, the idea that there is a demonic call, should startle our native intelligence, awakening it from the innocence of our American theories so that as a nation we can see that evil is attracted, belongs with, innocence. Then we might finally recognize that in America, Natural Born Killers are the secret companions of, are even prompted by, Forrest Gumps.

 “The capacity to deny, to remain innocent, to use belief as a protection against sophistications of every sort—intellectual, aesthetic, moral, psychological—keeps the American character from awakening. The American character remains blind to the fact that the virtues of mediocrity—those pieties of disciplined energy, order, self-control, probity, and faith—are themselves messengers of the devil they would overcome.”²

1 “A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, an inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love.” James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 247.

2 Ibid., 214-270.

Fate or Calling?

James Hillman writes: “The Greek idea of fate is that: Events happen to people. But fate causes only events that are unusual, that oddly don’t fit in. Not each and every thing is laid out in a superior divine plan. The Greek word for fate, moira, means a share, a portion. As fate has only a portion in what happens, so the daimon, the personal, internalized aspect of moira, has only a portion in our lives, calling them but not owning them. Moira derives from the root smer or mer, meaning to ponder, to think, meditate, consider, care. It is a deeply psychological term, requiring us to scrutinize events with respect to the portion that comes from elsewhere and is unaccountable, and the portion that belongs to me, what I did, could have done, can do.

Fatalism holds that everything is predetermined. “It’s all in the stars; there is a divine plan; whatever happens, happens for the best in the best of possible worlds (Voltaire’s Candide). Catching the sly winks of fate, however, is a reflective act. It is an act of thought, while fatalism is a state of feeling—abandoning thoughtfulness, details, and careful reasoning.

“The acorn seems to follow just this sort of limited pattern. It does not indulge in long-term philosophies. It excites, calls, demands—but rarely does it offer a grand purpose. The pull of purpose comes with force; you may feel full of purpose. But just what it is and how to get there remains undetermined. Purpose does not usually appear as a clearly framed goal, but more as a troubling, unclear urge with a sense of indubitable importance.

“Let’s say the acorn is more concerned with the soul aspect of events, more alive to what’s good for it than to what you believe is good for you. This helps explain why Socrates’ daimon told him not to escape imprisonment and execution. His death belonged to the integrity of his image, to his innate form.

“What matters is not so much whether an interference has or does not have purpose; rather, it is important to look with a purposive eye, seeking value in the unexpected. The purposive eye starts from the assumption that events can indeed be accidents. The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.

“Wisdom in Greek is sophia, as in our word ‘philosophy,’ love of wisdom. Sophia had a most practical meaning, referring originally to the crafts of handling things, especially to the helmsman who steers the boat. The wise one steers well; the wisdom of the helmsman shows in the art of making minor adjustments in accord with accidents of water, wind, and weight. The daimon teaches this wisdom by constant appraisals of events that seem to pull off course. This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in.

“This idea of continual, moving adjustments is nothing new or strange. As far back as Aristotle the soul was conceived to be both the form and the motion of a body. The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms—image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character—stays true to form.

“A serious accident demands answers. What does it mean, why did it happen, what does it want? Continuing reappraisals are part of the aftershock. The accident may never be integrated, but it may strengthen the integrity of the soul’s form by adding to it perplexity, sensitivity, vulnerability, and scar tissue.

“Remember Plato’s tale: The goddess Ananke, or Necessity, sits on her throne amid the Fates, her daughters, companions, and aides. But it is she, Ananke, who establishes that the soul has selected for its lot to be necessary—not an accident, not good or bad, not foreknown or guaranteed, simply necessary. What we live is necessary to be lived.

“When something doesn’t fit, seems odd or strange, breaks the usual pattern, then more likely Necessity has a hand in it. Though she determines the lot you live, her ways of influencing are irrational. That is why it is so difficult to understand life, even one’s own life. Your soul’s lot comes from the irrational principle. The law it follows is Necessity, which wanders erratically. Little wonder that we readers are drawn to biographies and autobiographies, for they offer glimpses of how irrational Necessity works in a human life. Although Necessity’s rule is absolute and irreversible, this determinism is indeterminate. Unpredictable.

“By claiming that Necessity has laid its hand on each of the decisive moments of my life, I can justify whatever I do. It appears as if I can slip the harness of responsibility—it’s all in the cards, or the stars. Yet this unyielding dominatrix of a goddess makes me quaver over each decision, for there is no predictability in her errant irrationality. Only in hindsight can I find certitude, saying it was all necessary. How curious that life can be foreordained, yet not foretold.

“Then where are the errors? How can one go wrong, and why feel guilty? If all that happens is necessary, what about remorse?

“Since necessity incorporates whatever decision I make as necessary, then necessity must be imagined as an inclusive principle that adjusts the image of each life to include all its actions one by one, whatever they may be. We are still collared, but the collar is adjustable. Necessity’s yoke produces the feeling that we are always somewhere caught, somehow a victim of circumstances, longing for liberation. I may know that what had to be, had to be, yet nonetheless I feel remorse. Necessity, says the remorse, too, is necessary as a feeling and belongs to your yoke, but it does not refer to what you actually might or should have done otherwise.

“To understand necessity in this way makes mistakes tragic, rather than sins to be repented or accidents to be remedied. It takes a large heart to accept the tight collar. Most times we reject the odd irrational events that come down on us. Most times we try to ignore disturbances—until the heart calls our attention to them as possibly important, possibly necessary. The mind is the last faculty to submit, and there is usually a tug-of-war between the heart’s calling and the mind’s plan, a conflict within each human replicating Plato’s two principles of nous and ananke, reason and unreasonable necessity.

“Sure, the mind can postpone the call, suppress, and sell out. You will not therefore necessarily be punished and damned. The daimon is not necessarily a pursuing demon, a Christian hound of heaven. Revenge is not one of Necessity’s daughters. Necessity, in fact, refers only to that which could not be otherwise, or that which you could not escape. Escape is not a sin, because Necessity is not a moralist. Escape can belong just as well to your soul’s lot and its pattern, as can facing the music and taking the arrows in the chest

“The truer you are to your daimon, the closer you are to the death that belongs to your destiny. We expect the daimon to have prescience about death, calling on it before an airline flight or during a sudden attack of sickness. Is this my fate, and now? And when the demands of our calling seem undeniably necessary, again death appears: ‘If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die.’ To be the calling or not to be, that still and again seems to be the question.

“Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daimon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, and prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditionings and genetic determinants; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influences on our fates don’t hold a candle to the power of death. Death is the only complete necessity, that archetypal Necessity who rules the pattern of the lifeline she spins with her daughters, the Fates. The length of that line and its irreversible one-way direction is part of one and the same pattern, and it could not be otherwise.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 155-213.

"There is soul stuff out there."

James Hillman argues: “The individual identity of each human person is not only an article of religious faith or an axiom of the Western mind. Human individuality is also a statistical quasi-certainty. Each of us has the capacity to generate 10³⁰⁰⁰ eggs or sperm with unique sets of genes. If we consider 10³⁰⁰⁰ possible eggs being generated by an individual woman and the same number of sperm being generated by an individual man, the likelihood of anyone else with your set of genes in the past or in the future becomes infinitesimal.

“Moreover, genetic research itself warns that the genes cannot be grasped by simplistic explanations. The timing of their interventions occurs in spurts and lags, their interrelation with environmental circumstances is infinitely involved. So research since the 1980s has focused more and more on separate lives, behavioral differences, nonshared orientations, or what you and I would call individuality.

“Behavioral science concludes ‘that human pairing is inherently random.’ It retreats to the statistical luck of the draw to account for the most important choice of all, because psychology as a science dares not imagine what it cannot measure.

“We can, however, read the recent research as support for the autonomy of the genius. Its fire lights up precisely the companion required, for better or worse, for long term or short, convincing me that this other is a one-and-only and this event is unique. The other styles of loving charted in the research—sharing, caring, practical commitments, and libidinal intimacy—are less selective, less personal. They do not insist upon this particular partner who embodies the image I carry in my heart.

“Without that sense of fate in the choice, the romance of the love doesn’t work. For this sort of love is more like a daimonic inheritance, a gift and curse from the invisible ancestors. The categories of nature and nurture do not reach into the heart or see through its eye. That is why we have had to add to our examination of genetics and environment this coda on love.

“The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone. It is a meeting of images, an exchange of imaginations. When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity.

“The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.

“The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us? The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia—that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-supporting system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.

“As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts’ (T. S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world.”

 

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 128-154.

Christ as a bridge

James Hillman writes: “There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us. Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed. So the rationalized mind prefers the chasm to the bridge; it likes the cut that separates the realms. From inside its concrete debunker, all invisibles appear the same—and bad.

“According to the teaching of St. Paul, discrimination of the spirits is a sign of true spiritual consciousness. You have to be able to tell one invisible from another. One method the Catholic Church used for refining this discernment is its proliferation of official angels and saints. The variety of figures showed many qualities, a host of different natures and areas of operation. (The more recent rationalized church has been downsizing the invisible realm, submitting its imagination to historical criteria. Every invisible saint had to have a visible forebear with a historical pedigree. So we lost St. Christopher and others who were ‘sheer myths.’)

“Then in the kingdom (or is it a mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Hölderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Søren Kierkergaard. Not even that will do for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand; the greatest bridge, some say, ever constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.

“Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ deaf and dumb and dead consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.

“Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge), because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. Centuries of huge and vicious debates have attempted to split the unity by coming down on one side or the other: Jesus is really a divinely inspired but visible man; Christ is really the invisible God borrowing human shape.

“Some glue, some independent link was required to hold these two theological incommensurables together, a third term that was different from the other two and that could join mortal and immortal. This third person, Christian theology named the Holy Ghost. But this figure, too, belongs among the invisibles, which still tilts the balance away from the world. So the debate goes on, as it should, because the relation between these two terms gives rise to metaphysical speculation and religious practices that keep the problematic idea of the invisible from slipping away. Besides, the debate gives rise to this chapter’s focus upon the often strained relation during school years between the invisible acorn and the life of the person with whom it lives.

“The great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles attached, the gods smiling and pleased: to invite them to remain by propitiations and rituals; by singing and dancing, smudging and chanting; by anniversaries and remembrances; by great doctrines such as the Incarnation and the little intuitive gestures—such as touching wood or by fingering beads, a rabbit’s foot, a shark’s tooth; or my putting a mezuzah on the doorpost, dice on the dashboard; or by quietly laying a flower on a polished stone.

“All this has nothing to do with belief and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 97-127.

Intuition sees through the visible to the invisible

James Hillman writes, "The traditional mode of perceiving the invisible and therefore of perceiving the soul is intuition. Intuition also includes what I have called mythic sensibility, for when a myth strikes us, it seems true and gives sudden insight. In psychology intuition means ‘direct and unmediated knowledge,’ ‘immediate or innate apprehension of a complex group of data.’ Intuition is both thoughtless and also not a feeling state; it is a clear, quick, and full apprehension, ‘the significant feature being the immediacy of the process.’ Intuitions ‘occur to a person without any known process of cogitation or reflective thinking.’

“Our perceptions of people are mostly intuitive. We take them in as a whole—accent, clothes, build, expression, complexion, voice, stance, gestures, the regional, social, and class cues—all delivers itself at once, as a full gestalt. Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning. Mystical thinking attributes this forcefulness, which produces my insight, to a power in the thing. The power in the thing establishes the reality, even the physicality, of the invisible.

However, “Because intuitions are clear, quick, and full, and therefore so convincing, they can be wholly wrong, missing the mark just as quickly and completely as they can get it right. Jung, who placed intuition (with thinking, feeling, and sensation) among the four functions of consciousness, made a major point of intuition’s need for its brother and sister functions. But Jung’s ironic realism regarding intuition was not shared by the idealist strain of intuitionist philosophers.”*

“Intuition is also called upon for explaining creativity and genius, the inexplicable accounted for by a process that is itself inexplicable. But the idolization of intuition neglects especially its darkest shadow, the intuitive opportunism of the sociopath, and the clear, quick and full seizures of the psychopathic criminal whose unmediated and self-evident propositions produce wholly arbitrary and casual deeds of violence, without logic, feeling, or appreciation of real facts.

“Intuition may propose a way, but does not assure right action or even accurate perception. Our mythic sensibility may pick up the authentic tidings of inward things, but only checking the facts, looking back at tradition, thinking carefully, and valuing by feeling can assure authenticity. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has used these methods for testing intuitive claims of sanctity and examining miracles.

“This excursion on intuition was necessary for three reasons. First, we needed an acceptable term for the kind of perception that sees mythically, that sees through the visible, and that claims insight into the invisible. We needed to make psychologically plausible the idea of mythical sensibility, equivalent to that of math and music so that reliance on myth in this book may carry conviction. To grasp or be grasped by myth you need intuition. The relevance of a myth to life strikes like a revelation or a self-evident proposition, which cannot be demonstrated by logic or induced from factual evidence. The best evidence is anecdote, the telling example that lights up an obscure idea in a clear intuitive flash.

“The second reason for this excursus was to show a common function at work in the three bridges, math, music, and myth, and also in the realm of aesthetics or beauty. It is intuition that gives them each their instantaneity and sureness.

James Hillman writes: "The third reason takes us again to biographies and to a terrible tension between intuition and tuition in many exemplars of the acorn. Emerson wrote: ‘We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition whilst all later teachings are tuitions.’ Emerson opposes the two, seeing intuition as not-tuition. Insight and learning, the heart’s imagination and classroom study, do not have to be opposed. Nevertheless, Emerson correctly intuited that strong division in many of the eminent who chose intuition over tuition. They quit school; they hated it; they wouldn’t or couldn’t learn; they were thrown out; their teachers walked out on them: intuition at war with tuition.

“Not every child will profit from missing school, but for us who watch over them and supposedly guide them, this door to the invisible factors at work in their disorders must be kept open, just in case it is an angel knocking and not merely a malady.

“Remember Jung’s remark: ‘The Gods have become diseases.’ To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere. It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it; otherwise the child is simply stupid, willful, or pathological. Even in the sciences, you only begin to see the phenomenon in the sky or under the microscope if someone first describes what you are looking for; we need instruction in the art of seeing. Then the invisible becomes suddenly visible, right in your squinting eye."

*“Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Schelling, Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred North Whitehead ennoble it one way or another as an axiomatic and quasi-divine gift that is, as well, a philosophical method of knowing truth.” James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 99.

Having faith in the "invisibles"

James Hillman writes in The Soul’s Code: “A passion to cage the invisible by visible methods continues to motivate the science of psychology, even though that science has given up the century-long search for the soul in various body parts and systems. When the searchers failed to find the soul in the places where they were looking, scientistic psychology gave up also on the idea of the soul.

“Great philosophical questions turn on the relations of visible and invisible. Our religious beliefs separate heaven and earth, this life and the afterlife, and our philosophical thinking cuts apart mind and matter, all of which forces a chasm between the visible and the invisible. How to bridge the chasm? What means are there for transporting the unseen into the seen? Or the seen into the unseen?

“There are three traditional bridges: mathematics, music, and myths. The equations of math, the notations on a musical score, and the personifications of myth cross the limbo land between two worlds. They offer a seductive front that seems to present the unknown other side, a seduction that leads to the delusional conviction that math, music, and myths are the other side. We tend to believe that the real truth of the invisible world is mathematical and might be put into a single unified field equation, and/or that it is a musical harmony of the spheres, and /or that it consists in mythical beings and powers, with names and shapes, who pull the strings that determine the visible.

“The three modes transpose the mystery of the invisible into visible procedures we can work with: higher math, musical notations, and mythical images. So enchanted are we by the mystery transposed into these systems that we mistake the systems for the mystery; rather, they are indications pointing toward it. We forget the old lesson, and mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself.

“The long-lasting and ever-renewing vitality of myths has nothing factual behind it.” But, “Usual life, too, is backed by invisibles, those abstractions of high-energy physics that compose all the visible, palpable, and durable stuff we bump into; the invisibles of theology we kneel to; the invisible ideals that take us to war and death; the invisible diagnostic concepts that explain our marriages, our motives, and our madnesses. And what about time; has anyone seen it recently? All these invisibles, which we take so for granted, seem much harder and firmer than the flimsy fantasies of myth.

James Hilllman, The Soul’s Code, 92-96.

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.