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The Soul''s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
The Soul’s Code
The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Random House, 1996) is Hillman’s late popular book and his most direct translation of a classical psychology into ordinary American speech. Its frame is the “acorn theory”: each life is formed by a particular image, “an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak’s destiny is written in the tiny acorn” (Hillman 1996).
The book’s governing citation is the epigraph from Plato’s Republic Book X — the myth of Er: “‘When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen’” (Plato, Republic X, quoted in Hillman 1996). The daimon is the image each soul was sent down with; character is the pattern the daimon demands. “Plato and the Greeks called it ‘daimon,’ the Romans ‘genius,’ the Christians ‘guardian angel’; today we use terms such as ‘heart,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘soul’” (Hillman 1996).
The book’s method is re-reading childhood not by the “either/or categories of genetics and environment” but by the shape of the calling. Symptoms become “clues to what the daimon demands.” The book treats both the extraordinary (Yehudi Menuhin, Jeffrey Dahmer) and the ordinary under a single classical thesis — that the life one is called to is given before, not produced by, the circumstances that appear to cause it.
The Soul’s Code is the clearest popular statement of the Platonic anchor of Hillman’s whole project: the myth of Er read as a psychology of calling.