Myth of Er

The closing myth of Plato’s plato-republic (Book X, 614a–621d). Er, a Pamphylian warrior, is killed in battle but returns to life on the funeral pyre and reports what he has seen: the disembodied souls journey to a meadow where they are judged, then to the spindle of Necessity where the Fates spin out the cosmos, and finally to the place of choosing, where each soul selects the life it will live next. The choice is free; the consequences are not. Souls who chose hastily — the soul of Odysseus, weary of glory, chose “the life of a private man who had no cares” — bear the lives they pick. Then they drink of the river Lethe and are reborn, remembering nothing.

The myth is the anamnesis doctrine in narrative form, joined to the divine-madness doctrine of the soul’s wings: the soul has chosen, before its incarnation, the life that becomes its fate, and the recollection of that choice is what rises in the moments when the soul recognizes its own destiny. james-hillman‘s acorn theory in The Soul’s Code descends directly from this myth: the daimon selects the life and accompanies the person through it; what looks like vocation is the soul keeping faith with a choice it made before it forgot.

The myth is also a structural ancestor of the Jungian distinction between the ego, which lives in chronological time, and the Self, which stands in the relation to time that the choosing soul stands to the life it has chosen. Edinger reads the ego-self-axis as a contemporary articulation of the same architecture: the ego must remember, in each moment of choice, the larger Self whose choice is being enacted.

Relationships

• daimon
• anamnesis
• ego-self-axis
• individuation

Primary sources

• plato-republic (Plato, c. 380 BCE)