Peaks and Vales

Peaks and vales is Hillman’s working axis for the soul-spirit-distinction. Spirit ascends — to the mountain, the abstraction, the universal, the pure. Soul descends — to the valley, the particular, the messy, the embodied. When spirit is imagined as above human life, as fundamentally masculine, as abstracting and distancing, and as pure and uncontaminated, the soul is particularly denigrated. For soul is always in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in illness, and in the pain and confusion of love (Hillman 1989).

The axis is not a rejection of spirit. A split-off spirituality, with no influence from the soul, readily falls into extremes of literalism and destructive fanaticism — but the remedy is the conjunction, not the elimination, of the registers. Hillman acknowledges his own pneumatic inflection: the fiery sulfuric spirit that burns with passion, the bricoleur’s mercurial method that follows the gods wherever they go. The objection is to monopoly. To transcend the lowly conditions of soul is to lose touch with the soul.

The doctrine functions in the Seba Method as the standing critique of an unqualified ratio-pneuma. The pneumatic ratio is necessary; alone it is dangerous. Soul finds its enduring fixity in its salt, in the blood, sweat, and tears of ordinary life (Hillman 1989). The four ratios of the Method are held together precisely so that the peaks do not silence the vales.

Relationships

• soul-spirit-distinction
• james-hillman
• ratio-pneuma
• anima
• salt-alchemical
• archetypal-school

Primary sources

• A Blue Fire (Hillman 1989)
• Senex & Puer (Hillman 2015)