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The Soul's Code
In keeping with the specific archetypal figure of the puer, this theory is meant to inspire and revolutionize, and also to excite a fresh erotic attachment to its subject: your subjective and personal autobiography, the way you imagine your life, because how you imagine life strongly impinges upon the raising of children, the attitudes toward the s
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puer (short for puer aeternus, Latin for "eternal boy")
Hillman sees the puer not as a pathology (though some traditions, like Jungian psychology, do), but as a vital expression of soul. In The Soul’s Code, he suggests that the daimon, or guiding spirit within each person, often speaks through this youthful, sometimes otherworldly, part of ourselves. The puer may resist normal development—but it’s also the bearer of one’s calling or genius.
However, Hillman also acknowledges that the puer comes with a shadow—instability, fear of commitment, escapism, and refusal to age—which must be understood rather than condemned. (GPT)
The invisibility at the heart of things was traditionally named the deus absconditus, the “concealed god,” that could be spoken of only in images, metaphors, and paradoxical conundrums, gems of immense worth buried within giant mountains, sparks that contain the flammable force of wildfire. The most important, said this tradition, is always the lea
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Although the inner taste of the acorn may be nourishing, and communion with the angel sweet, the acorn is also bitter. It is astringent and tannic. It shrinks back; says no, as Socrates’ daimon only cautioned negations. Maybe that’s why actual acorns must be soaked and leached, boiled and blanched again and again, undergoing long softening before t
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In the acorn lies not only the completion of life before it is lived but the dissatisfied frustration of unlived life. The acorn sees, it knows, it urges—but what can it do?
James Hillman • The Soul's Code
“unlived life”
Then, and up into modern times in French and English poetry and painting, this Arcadia of the ur-acorn was the imaginal landscape of primitive nature, similar to Eden or Paradise, where the untrammeled natural soul lived in accord with nature. Therapy has transplanted Arcadia to childhood; the natural being, feeding on acorns, therapy has christene
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Your calling is your psyche’s first nourishment. Galen said that the Arcadians were still eating acorns even after the Greeks had learned to cultivate cereals. This is another way of saying that the support of the acorn precedes the practical civilizing effects of your natural mother, the mother world of Demeter-Ceres, the nourishing civilizing god
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The devotion to an altered state of mind propels puer fantasy toward altering the mind of the state by setting fires of rebellion. The calling from the eternal world demands that this world here be turned upside down, to restore its nearness to the moon; lunacy, love, poetics. Flower power, Woodstock, Berkeley, the cry of the students of Paris ’68:
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Not only a biography can be touched by an archetypal figure. There are archetypal styles of theories as well. Any theory that is affected by the puer will show dashing execution, an appeal to the extraordinary, and a show-off aestheticism. It will claim timelessness and universal validity, but forgo the labors of proof. It will have that puer dance
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puer vs saturn
The puer figure—Baldur, Tammuz, Jesus, Krishna—brings myth into reality. The message is mythical, stating that he, the myth, so easily wounded, so easily slain, yet always reborn, is the seminal substructure of all imaginative enterprise. These figures, like myths themselves, seem not “real.” They feel insubstantial; tales of them say they are quic
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