Calling

Calling in the archetypal reading is not a pious metaphor for a preferred career but the technical term for the claim on a particular life made by that life’s own daimon — the figure Plato places in the Myth of Er as the genius each soul chooses before incarnation, who accompanies the soul into life to enforce the choice.

Hillman‘s The Soul’s Code (1996) is the mature statement of the doctrine in the archetypal register. Against the developmental model in which the person becomes themselves through accumulation of experience, Hillman proposes what he calls the acorn theory: the oak is in the acorn from the beginning, and the life’s task is not to construct a self but to respond to the pattern already present. The calling appears as symptom, as persistent preoccupation, as the thing one cannot stop doing even against ordinary prudence — and the work of the soul is to recognize it as the daimon’s speech. See hillman-souls-code.

Relationships

• daimon
• acorn-theory
• hillman-souls-code