From the book "The Soul's Code : in search of character and calling." Copyright © 1996 by James Hillman. This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with Random House, New York, NY. Warner Books, Inc., New York, NY.
Chapter 2 Growing Down
The ladder whose ascent implies spiritual progress has a long pedigree. The Hebrews, Greeks, and Christians all gave special value to the heights, and our spiritually influenced compass of Western morality tends to put all better things up high and worse things down low. By the last century, growth became inexorably caught in this ascensionist fantasy. Darwin's thesis, 'The Descent of Man,' became, in our minds, the ascent of man. Each immigrant moved upward in social class as buildings moved upward with their elevators to more expensive levels. Industrial refining of buried minerals---coal, iron, copper, oil---increased their economic value and the financial status of their owners simply by raising these basic stuffs from below to above. By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliche. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.
Hasn't something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally we come into the world headfirst, like divers into the pool of humanity. Besides, the head has a soft spot through which the infant soul, according to the traditions of body symbolism, could still be influenced by its origins. The slow closing of the head's fontanel and fissures, its hardening into a tightly sealed skull, signified separation from an invisible beyond and final arrival here. Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.
The enormous difficulty small children have growing down into the practical, their tight won't-let-go grip, their fear, their strain to adapt, and their puzzled wonder over the little things of the earth around them show us every day how hard it is to grow down. Japanese ideas of caring for infants call upon the mother or caregiver to be present all the time. The child is to be kept close, brought into the human community because it has come from so far away.
Symbol systems like that of the zodiacal cycle in both Western and Asian astrology start headfirst. The most refined, the most subtle, is the last sign, of the Fish (West) and the Pig (East). The symbolic body-locus of this last sign is the feet. It seems the feet are the last to arrive. And they are the first to go, if we follow, for instance, the slow dying of Socrates. The hemlock poison he was required to drink first numbed and chilled his lower limbs, as if he began to be drawn away from this world feet first. To plant a foot firmly on earth---that is the ultimate achievement, and a far later stage of growth than anything begun in your head. No wonder the faithful revere the Buddha's footprint in Sri Lanka. It shows he was truly in the world. He had really grown down.
In fact, the Buddha had begun the process of growing down early in his life, when he left his protected palace gardens to enter the street. There the sick, the dead, the poor, and the old drew his soul down into the question of how to live life in the world.
These familiar stories of Socrates and the Buddha, and the images of astrology, give another direction to growth and another value to "down." For, in its most common usage, "down" is nothing but a downer. The soul has to drag its feet with doubts and second-guessing, if not symptoms, when pressed to accommodate itself to the upward push of career. College kids with bright promise sometimes suddenly find their "personal computer" is down. They fall off the fast track. They want to "get down." Or drinks, drugs, and depression set in like Furies. Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.
Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.
The Zohar, the main Kabbalist book, makes it clear that the descent is tough; the soul is reluctant to come down and get messed by the world.
At the time that the Holy One, be blessed, was about to create the world, he decided to fashion all the souls which would in due course be dealt out to the children of men, and each soul was formed into the exact outline of the body she was destined to tenant. . . . Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.
Yet often enough the soul would reply: Lord of the world, I am content to remain in this realm, and have no wish to depart to some other, where I shall be in thralldom, and become stained.
Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, would reply: Thy destiny is, and has been from the day of thy forming, to go into that world.
Then the soul, realizing it could not disobey, would unwillingly descend and come into this world. [Gershom Scholem, ed., 'Zohar---The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah' (New York; Schocken Books, 1963), 91.]
The Kabbalist tree, as first elaborated in thirteenth-century Spain, imagines the descending branches to be conditions of the soul's life, which becomes more and more manifest and visible as it descends. The lower it gets, the more difficulty we have grasping its meaning, according to Charles Ponce, a recent psychological interpreter of Kabbalah. As he says, the upper regions and symbols are not as occult as the worldly ones; "the legs remain a mystery." It's easy to see the ethical implications of this upside-down image: A person's involvement with the world gives evidence of the descent of the spirit. Virtue would consist in downwardness such as humility, charity, teaching, and not being "stuck up."
The Tree of the Kabbalah repeats two of the most enduring creation myths of our civilization, the biblical and the Platonic. The Bible reports that God took six days to make the whole cosmos. The first day, as you will recall, God was busy with huge abstractions and higher constructions such as separating dark and light, getting his basic orientation. Only toward the end of the process, as it moved downward during days five and six, do we get to the multitudes of animals and to the human being. Creating progresses downward from the transcendent to the teeming here of immanence (Latin: immanent- ‘remaining within,’).
Plato's tale of descent is the Myth of Er which I shall condense from the last chapter of his Republic:
The souls are all hanging around in a mythical world, having arrived there from previous lives, and each has a lot to fulfill. This lot is also called a portion of fate (Moira) that is somehow representative of the character of that particular soul. For instance, the myth says the soul of Ajax, the intemperate and mighty warrior, chose the life of a lion, while Atalanta, the fleet young woman runner, chose the lot of an athlete, and another soul chose the lot of a skillful workman. Ulysses' soul, remembering its long life of trials and tribulations, "and tired of ambition, went about a long time seeking the life of a private man of no business, and with difficulty found it lying somewhere, neglected by the rest.
"When all the souls had chosen their lives according to their lots, they went before Lachesis [lachos = one's special lot or portion of fate]. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the genius [daimon] that had been chosen." Lachesis leads the soul to the second of the three personifications of destiny, Klotho (klotho = to twist by spinning). "Under her hand and her turning of the spindle, the destiny of the chosen lot is ratified." (Given its particular twist?) "Then the genius [daimon] again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos [atropos = not to be turned, inflexible] to make the web of its destiny irreversible.
"And then without a backward glance the soul passes beneath the throne of Necessity," sometimes translated as the "lap" of Necessity.
Precisely what a "lot" (kleros) is imagined to look like does not come clear from the text. The word 'kleros' combines three closely connected meanings: (a) piece of the earth, like our sandlot, car lot, empty lot, which expands to mean (b) that "space" which is your portion in the overall order of things, and (c) an inheritance, or what rightfully comes down to you as an heir.
I understand these lots in the myth to be images. Since the lots are each particular and encompass a whole style of fate, the soul must be perceiving intuitively an image that embraces the whole of a life all at once. It must be choosing that image which attracts: "This is the one I want, and it is my rightful inheritance." My soul selects the image I live.
Plato's text calls this image a paradeigma, or "pattern," as translators usually say. So the "lot" is the image that is your inheritance, your soul's portion in the world order, and your place on earth, all compacted into a pattern that has been selected by your soul before you ever got here---or, better said, that is always and continually being selected by your soul, because time does not enter the equations of myth. ("Myth," said Sallust, the roman philosopher of paganism, "never happened but always is.") Since ancient psychology usually located the soul around or with the heart, your heart holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it.
Unpacking the image takes a lifetime. It may be perceived all at once, but understood only slowly. Thus the soul has an image of its fate, which time can show only as "future." Is "future" another name for fate, and are our concerns about "the future" more likely fantasies of fate?
Before the souls enter human life, however, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting) so that on arrival here all of the previous activities of choosing lots and the descent from the lap of Necessity is wiped out. It is in this condition of a tabula rasa, or empty tablet, that we are born. We have forgotten all of the story, though the inescapable and necessary pattern of my lot remains and my companion daimon remembers.
The greatest of all followers along the Platonic line, Plotinus sums up the myth in a few lines: "Being born, coming into this particular body, these particular parents, and in such a place, and what we call external circumstances . . . form a unity and are as it were spun together." Each of our souls is guided by a daimon to that particular body and place, these parents and circumstances, by Necessity---and none of us has an inkling of this because it was eradicated on the plains of forgetting.
According to another Jewish legend, the evidence for this forgetting of the soul's prenatal election is pressed right into your upper lip. That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips. That little indentation is all that is left to remind you of your preexistent soul-life with the daimon, and so, as we conjure up an insight or a lost thought, our fingers go up to that significant dent.
Images such as these fill the mind with lovely speculations, and have for centuries. Why is She called Necessity and why does He pay so much attention to sea monsters and creeping things one whole day before getting to humankind? Are we best because last? Or are we least, like an afterthought?
These cosmological myths place us in the world and involve us with it. The cosmologies of today---big bangs and black holes, antimatter and curved, ever-expanding space going nowhere---leave us in dread and senseless incomprehensibility. Random events, nothing truly necessary. Science's cosmologies say nothing about the soul, and so they say nothing to the soul, about its reason for existence, how it comes to be and where it might be going, and what its tasks could be. The invisibilities that we feel enmeshing our lives with what is beyond our lives have been abstracted by the cosmologies of science into the literal invisibility of remote galaxies or waves. They can't be known or perceived, because they are measured by time, and our lives are mere nanoseconds in the vast panoply of science's myth. What's the purpose of anything?
These "invisibles" of the physical universe can't be known or perceived, only calculated, because they are light-years away and because by definition they are indeterminate. Here it is worthwhile noting that some ancient philosophy considered the indeterminate (apeiron) to be the basis of evil. Explanation by the physical sciences of the ultimate origins of and reasons for our life may not be such a good way to go. Any cosmology that begins on the wrong foot will not only produce lame accounts; it will also lame our love of existence. The creation myth of random events in unimaginable space keeps the Western soul floating in a stratosphere where it cannot breathe. No wonder we look to other myths, like that of Plato's Er, the book of Genesis, and the Kabbalist Tree. Each of these gives a similar mythical account of how things are: They found us in myths, and the myths unfold downward into one's personal soul. No wonder, too, that Plato says this about his "fable": " it may preserve us, if we are persuaded by it."
Stardom 1: Judy Garland
The descent into the world may be painful and costly. Costly, especially, to the family. The price of calling is often paid by the very circumstances in which the acorn has taken root---the body, the family, and the immediate participants in the life of the calling, such as husbands and wives, children and friends, collaborators and mentors. Often the demands of the calling ruthlessly wreak havoc on the decencies of a well-lived life.
Of course, not only the eminent are called. Who doesn't feel the pressure of taking on too much and going too far, whatever the profession? All of us worry that we could still have done more---another vegetable for Thanksgiving dinner or another half hour on piano practice or on the exercise machine. The addiction to perfection is another term for the call of the angel. The voice that cautions speaks only part of the daimon's message. Another part calls to the ideal. So the blame placed on modern stress, money needs, superego commandments, and dreadful deadlines tries to reduce the archetypal nature of the indefatigable inhuman angel and its relentless claims. Though everyone feels at times the press of calling, it is in the exaggerated life of celebrities where these demands are most apparent and best documented.
Riches and acclaim never compensate; stars always seem displaced persons, always needy, estranged, haunted by an unspoken tragedy that is blamed on parents or betrayals in love, on ailments or forced inhuman schedules. The blame belongs to the angel, to the difficulty of the inhuman attempting to come down into the human. Addictions that keep stars estranged and "out of it," suicide attempts, and early death may result from the incommensurability between calling and life. In a well-measured world of human convention, how can I live the ahuman demands of what I am called to do?
To show the difficulties of growing down, I want to contrast the stories of two of the most widely recognized exceptional talents in show business. We'll begin with Judy Garland, or Frances Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who entered our world June 10, 1922, by means of a show business family that promoted her almost as soon as she could stand up. Garland's calling announced itself when she was two and a half. As Baby Gumm, she joined her two older sisters onstage. Then solo, she sang "Jingle Bells" to an audience that roared approval, brought her back again and again, to which she responded by singing and ringing her bells louder and louder. Her father had to haul her offstage. Immediate rapport. Immediate fans.
Baby Gumm had already seen an act of the Blue Sisters, three girls between the ages of twelve and five; "When the youngest Blue Sister started to sing, alone, the Gumms could all see how this was really going to send Frances into a fit. And it did. She sat transfixed. When it was all over, she turned to Daddy and---I'll never forget it---said, 'Can I do that, Daddy?'" Garland's sister Virginia reports that "even in her two-year-old head, she already knew exactly what she wanted."
Garland believed her calling "was inherited. Nobody ever taught me what to do on stage. . . . I just did 'what came naturally.'" Remembering her initial "Jingle Bells" performance, she compared the rush onstage to "taking nineteen hundred wake-up pills." Garland of the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall was already there in two-year-old Baby Gumm.
Her own explanation of "inherited" means less literally genetic (as we shall come to see in chapter 6) than innate, given "naturally," like her daimon and its calling. A thousand manipulating fathers cannot yield one Mozart any more than can the pushiest mother in the world produce one Judy Garland. I would rather attribute the startling magnetism of Frances Gumm, age two and a half, in Grand Rapids, to the acorn of Judy Garland awakening onstage, an acorn that "chose" exactly those show business parents and sisters and circumstances for beginning its life on earth.
But that life took its toll on Frances Gumm. Growing down followed a suffering course, a course that also followed an orbit among the "stars." One after another, the big names of show business who sang, danced, and filmed with her, and who reviewed her, gave her immense tribute. . . . . "All my life," said Garland of herself, "I've done everything to excess."
But below her yawned the snake pit: ambulances to the hospital, stomach pumps, blackmail, throat slashed with broken glass, stage fright, shouting matches in public, pills by the handful, a bad drunk, promiscuous sex, sequestered salary, turned out in the street, bleak despair, and paralyzing terror. The descending part was aging, embodied, entangled, and dying.
pick up again on p. 52:
The usual way of coming to terms with the tragic messes of Garland's life is to accuse "Hollywood" and its pressures of agents, studios, and pseudo-realities. Only this can explain how a star so gifted, who "had it all," could "sink so low."
I would rather see each of these sinkings as attempts at descent, at misbegotten ways of growing down. It is as if the world that she never reached kept pulling her into it by means of its usual instruments: sex and money, dealers and lovers, brokers and contracts, marriages and failures. Down, down, even to testifying in a murder trial and her final scene of death on a toilet during the night of June 21--22, the apogee of the solar year, its brightest moment and shortest night.
Where most of the population never "make it" in the Garland sense and dream lifelong of becoming stars, or just of touching one once, the reverse in Garland's case is striking. She wanted to enter the regular world, to live with a man in a stable marriage, to have children (she had three, but in her forties said, wistfully, "I suppose it's too late for me to have another child"), to have friends and not only fans. What kept her going was none of these normalcies, but the ruthlessness of her calling, which opposed them.
The standard modern dilemma of home versus work, family versus career takes on in Garland's case the archetypal dimension of a cross, preventing her calling from growing down into life. The vertical dimension stretched between hellish suffering and heavenly miracles, unable to settle into the flat and level of the daily world. Her star was never quite born. Hollywood magnified the calling, demanding that her life comply wholly with her otherworld's acorn, for which Hollywood acts as collective agent. It expected her life to take car of itself. But Frances Gumm did not know how to keep house, be married, raise children, cook a meal, or make anything with her hands. She could not even find the right clothes to put on. James Mason, who was her leading man in 'A Star Is Born,' said at her funeral: "She who gave so much and richly . . . needed to be repaid, she needed devotion and love beyond the resources of any of us." An inhuman demand: the need of the inhuman for a human world.
Garland gave this account of the dilemma her acorn posed: "Maybe it's because I made a certain sound, a musical sound, a sound that seems to belong to the world. But it also belongs to me because it comes from within me."
We are back to a general principle: The heart's image requires efforts of 'attachment' to every sort of anchoring circumstance, whether these anchors be the loyalty of friends, the stability of contracts, the reliability of health, the schedules of the clock, the facts of geography. Because "the sound seems to belong to the world" and comes through as an invisible gift, there can never be enough world in which to sink its roots. Why do stars "sink so low"---becoming commercial face-lifted drunks, sex freaks, religious paranoids? Are these not desperate attempts to touch the common ground? Every symptom is a compromise, as Freud saw. Symptoms attempt the right aim but accomplish it in the wrong way. The heights seek the depths; one way or another they want to come down, even if by suicide, by ruinous contracts and bankruptcy, by entangling emotional messes. No soft landings. "The middle road was never for her," said Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli at the funeral.
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