Only devotedly faithful attention can turn fantasy into imagination. This faithful attention to the imaginal world, this love which transforms mere images into presences, gives them living being, or rather reveals the living being which they do naturally contain, is nothing other than remytbologizing. Psychic contents become pow-ers, spirits, gods. One senses their presence as did all earlier peoples who still had soul. These presences and powers are our modern counterparts of former pantheons of living beings, of animated soul parts, protective household gods, and ominous daimones. These be-ings were mythical in that they were part of a tale or psychic drama. The same archetypal dramas are played in us and by us, and through us for our behalf, once the imaginal aspect of our lives and of life itself is given attention. Attention is the cardinal psychological vir-tue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention. There is a further consequent of the credit one pays to the im-ages of the soul. A new feeling of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance begins to spread and circulate. It isas if the heart and the left side were extending their dominion. Shadow aspects of the personality con-tinue to play their burdensome roles but now within a larger tale, the myth of oneself, just what one is which begins to feel as if that is how one is meant to be. My myth becomes my truth; my life symbolic and allegorical. Self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-love; more, one finds oneself sinful but not guilty, grateful for the sins one has and not another's, loving one's lot even to the point of desire to have and to be always in this vivid inner connection with one's own individual portion. Such strong experiences of religious emotion seem to be the gift again of the anima. This time she has a special quality that might best be called Christian and which only begins to reveal itself-this anima naturaliter christiana-after long attentive care has been given to much of the psyche that might not be Christian. The third step is gratuitous. It refers to the free and creative appearance of imagination, as if tire inner world now come to life begins to act spontaneously, by itself, undirected and even unat- 86 SOUL tended by ego-consciousness. The inner world not only begins more and more to take care of itself, producing crises and resolving them within its own transformations, but it also takes care of you, your ego-worries and ego-claims. This is the feminine Shakti of India at a higher state; it is also the nine Muses responsible for culture and creativity. One feels lived by imagination. (Insearcb, 118-120) Le work of soul-making is concerned essentially with the evoca-tion of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul. Since psyche is primarily image and image always psyche, this faith manifests itself in the belief in images: it is idolatrous, heretical to the imageless monothe-isms of metaphysics and theology. Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep significance transcending one's personal life. Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness.
— James Hillman
Hillman is making a move that looks like consolation but is actually something sharper: he is telling you that the images do not need to be redeemed — they need to be *attended to*, and attention itself is the act that transforms. The cardinal virtue here is not hope, not charity, not even courage, but the capacity to stay with what the soul produces without immediately converting it into a problem to be solved or a wound to be healed. Notice what that forecloses. The entire grammar of spiritual improvement — the sense that if I work on myself enough, clarify enough, ascend enough — quietly collapses when attention replaces aspiration as the primary act. You are not climbing toward something. You are staying with something.
The passage on self-forgiveness is the strangest part, and the most important. "Sinful but not guilty" — that distinction cuts across every therapeutic register that wants to resolve the shadow by integrating it, every spiritual register that wants to transcend it, every moralistic one that wants to correct it. The shadow continues to play its burdensome role; it is just now inside a *larger tale*, which is not the same thing as being healed. The myth of oneself is not a cure. It is a container capacious enough to hold what resists improvement. That is what "loving one's lot" means here — not acceptance-as-resignation, but a recognition that the particular shape of your suffering is yours specifically, not interchangeable, not improvable away.
James Hillman·A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman·1989