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STEPHEN CAPEN: I think the first idea is that this is an astonishing measure of success for any writer, any creator of books, and I am wondering how you are handling this. You 've probably never had to face this before.

JAMES HILLMAN: Well, I certainly never had to face this before. I don't mind facing it at all, I've faced worse things. The extraordinary thing is that I could not feel any particular difference. It could be because of my age and not having a lot of ambition because it's rather useless to have ambition at my age. But the major effect was the enormous pleasure and joy it gave to so many different people -- from friends, family, people in the little town in Connecticut where I live. It just meant so much and people were so happy and it brought joy and brought a certain something.

Guilt by association, they have, well now there's a kind of success by association, and that's wonderful. I had no sense of the communal value of it, that's one thing. Another thing I didn't realize was that I have come out of the closet, because I've always lived my life private. I don't have my pictures on books as best I have been able to avoid, and so on. I've always just lived anonymously and done my thing and I realized this is like coming out of the closet. Now I have to face that I'm out there. I don't know yet what that means or how it works, I don't have any idea about that yet.

CAPEN: Fiction writers will tell you that when the work is done it's out in the world, and there's nothing you can do about -- its impact. It really takes on a life of its own. But I think the important thing about The Soul's Code, because of the nature of the book -- in dealing with character and calling, is what this means in terms of the resounding response to it. What are people hungering after that this book addresses?

HILLMAN: That's the question. And I think there is a paradigm shift. I think people no longer are satisfied by the idea of early history as causality, mothers as the fundamental childhood developmental psychology. It doesn't really make you find, doesn't help you find yourself or why you are here or what the meaning of your personal destiny is. It's all sort of derivative of things, you become as a result, so to speak.

And that whole model which we've been living for most of this century seems to dissolve -- it hasn't solved or helped really. That's the whole model of how we imagine ourselves and this myth, which is a universal myth, because West Africans have it and Mormons have it and Kabbalists and Buddhists and Hindus, it's a very widespread myth that the child enters the world with some kind of prenatal calling, a destiny could possibly simply be a new way of thinking about our lives that replaces the former paradigm.

And I think that is really what's happening. That's why it's instantaneously understood. And also because it's an archetypal myth -- it instantaneously satisfies something that genetic understanding and environmental understanding, you know, nature/nature, don't fulfill. We hunger for that. We don't have anything, it's only American psychology that hasn't got that myth, the myth of calling, destiny.

As I say, Mormons, West Africans, Buddhists, Hindus, Kabbalists all have that. The shamanistic cultures, the American Indian cultures all had this idea that you have a reason to be here. You are a unique creature and this is not just genetic, or where you are in your family, first son or third daughter, or something, all that kind of causal thinking drops away. I think it's something people can feel as--I hate the word--empowering, but at least affirming.

CAPEN: But you differentiate the ideas in The Soul's Code, the idea of the daimon, from predestination per se. That's something else again.

HILLMAN: Well, predestination is much more total, and in the Augustinian and Calvinist views of predestination it's very strict. There's no way out, your face is sealed before you get here and you are either in the elect or not in the elect and no matter what you do you can't get out of it. You're not part of it. It's like the book is written before you got here, including the day of your death and all the rest of it. That's not what this is.

This is a Greek idea where fate in the Greek world means "moira," and moira meant a portion, just a portion. So fate is a portion of your life. It's a part, like an invisible companion that doesn't determine every single move, whether you buy the Snickers bar or a Butternut bar. It does't determine every single moment of life, it simply is a portion that sort of guides, governs, inhibits, cautions, whispers, indicates more or less strongly, and can be involved in talent. It can show up as talent, it can show up as disorder. But it's only a portion, and that's different from predestination where everything is determined.

CAPEN: So I think the question that anybody who is interested in a book of this nature would raise is how this guiding force, the calling of the soul, the daimon, can be circumscribed. You cite some pretty dramatic incidents in the early lives of well known people in this book, but for the average person, they're wondering now what is he talking about? What is this "invisible" and how do I communicate with it?

HILLMAN: Well, the extraordinary people provide vivid examples and that's why they are in the book, not that we are all supposed to be extraordinary. The idea is that we have extraordinary images instead of the boring and tiresome case histories that we get in depth psychology or stories of marvels.

But an ordinary person. I'm thinking of the woman who is the caretaker of my ninety-nine year old mother. She's a Jamaican. She watched the Oprah show. She understood the thing completely, absolutely completely, and sat there when I was visiting my mother recently and explained to me that as a child she wanted to be a nurse because she wanted to give back to the people what her grandmother had given her. There's something about giving back to people and she wanted to be a nurse.

Her mother wanted her to be a seamstress. The mother and the daughter were very good at sewing, making clothes, and she was in a conflict for a long time in her youth, in adolescence and all. She explained this whole thing to me about how her mother wanted her, and she began to do sewing, that's how she was making a living early on.

But one day she realized this is not what she's meant to do, and so she went into this kind of work of caring for people. And that's a very nice indication that anybody can feel. Then it doesn't even mean that you have to have a calling to do something, you can also called to be something. Goethe said about his friend Eckerman that he was born for friendship. You can just be born for doing what you do, and if you don't have a deep enough sense of what you're already doing you may miss that you are already living your calling.

I use the example of the tax collector. You work for the IRS. What could be more horrible?



"I work for the IRS. I was always good in numbers in school, people used to copy my homework and cheat during the exams by copying my papers. Then at home I used to do the family accounting of the checkbook or whatever it was. I could figure out interest rates. I was smart with numbers. So then I became an accountant. Then I worked for the IRS. But really I ought to be a poet. I really have stuff in me that matters. This doesn't matter."

Well, if you go deep enough into what it is to be an accountant you realize that some of the earliest records from Egypt are simply reports of how many geese or how many barrels of oil or whatever it is were given to the king. The accountant was a crucial figure to keep the Egyptian world going.

The financial tax collectors are all through Russian literature. They're in Colbert, they kept the French kingdom going. I mentioned the writing: Babylonian, more likely. The Egyptians had images of the tax collector sitting on the ground receiving the tax payments in goods. Very, very old art. So there's something archetypal for the sake of the community that goes with tax collecting. Now I'm not saying we should have more taxes, I'm not talking that way, I'm trying to say that whatever you are already doing and that is needed, what is needed of you, what do people want from you, that's a very important way of discovering what your calling is. What are you called to do by society? And that we forget, and we also forget that there's a depth in any kind of calling. That's why I mentioned this film Marty with Ernest Borgnine, where he's a good butcher. It's how he does it. He does it well. And then he takes pride in his doing of it.

CAPEN:: So in the culture that reveres celebrity, of Hollywood Babylon, one of the themes that keeps coming through your work and others, too -- I think John Beebe has addressed this issue -- is that the ordinary is such a powerful thing, such an important thing, and people are sorely distressed trying to escape that relegation of being ordinary all their lives. In one of your chapters you do something for mediocrity that I have never seen done anywhere, that is, to show the beauty of mediocrity.

HILLMAN: That's nice, thank you.

What you just said interests me a lot. It suddenly struck me that by sticking to the ordinary with devotion, which is a very old religious idea, you are more a rebel in society than you imagine. You are really a revolutionary because this is a society that wants the wealthy to run the country and the celebrities to be the only ones we read about or watch and are the model of how to be. Whereas to cling to the ordinary in a faithful way and with your character, so that it involves doing it according to your way, your style, that's a real accomplishment. And that's saying no to the whole bologna, which is really an act of courage.

CAPEN: The idea that you have to be in service is there. This is thematic with you, that a life really is useless and is missing a huge part of the picture unless you are in service to society, to others. Do you want to say more about that as part of character and calling?

HILLMAN: Well, I suppose that's something that I've felt more and more as I've gotten older. I don't know if I emphasized it as much earlier on in what I was writing. It's not in service to others only, it's in service to a larger vision of some sort so that it's in service to the cosmos, it's in service to animals, it's in service to the planet, it's in service to ideals. If it's only to others it becomes a little humanistic and practical and it isn't only that. There's an aspect of working, say, for a corporation, which you need to think about.

What am I in service to by working for this corporation? I think it's a way of thinking about what you're doing. I'm really in service to producing some products that I don't feel can really be justified. Or, I'm in service to the Pentagon. You know, one needs to think about what one is in service to, and that can lead to a lot of trouble.

But just the thought of what one is being in service to is what I think matters, especially today in an economy where production has become such a problem that we produce more than we can consume and are therefore forcing consumption on people like stuffing captured geese to build their livers. In other words, stuffing it down, stuffing consumption down their throats.

We are talking now at the Christmas season, when it is most clear. We have no trouble producing any longer, we have trouble consuming all that we produce. We are in an economy that is based on service now, the actual larger part of our economy is service, so service is something we need to think a lot about and think about our own lives in regard to. But I don't think it's only service in a Mother Theresa way, you know, "I'm doing good for other people." I only want to suggest that it's an idea that needs a good deal of thought.

CAPEN: Yes, you made a crack about "the little Fausts" once who inhabit the corporate atmosphere. You vote with your dollars. as well. Harry Wu has written a book. He was in prison in China for quite some time and he's out and he's back in America. He lives in the south of San Francisco, in fact. He is leading a campaign to stop people from buying Chinese-made toys because his estimates are fifty million in forced labor camps now, and twenty million of those people disappeared. Astonishing figures Something of a spit in the ocean given the population of China, but an incredible thought.

If I could shift this: You speak in terms of the beauty of biography, all these years, about learning about people and being inspired by biographies. but you speak very, very little of your own. One has to read between the lines, look in very scant areas of things that have been written about you and by you to find anything out. But you grew up in Atlantic City, true?

HILLMAN: That's right. Sixteen years. Sixteen years in Atlantic City.

CAPEN: Now, when I think of Atlantic City I think of the Burt Lancaster/Susan Sarandon film, and by then it was a ghost town. But you were probably there during the heyday and yet the heyday was also enterprise built on making and producing nothing but money. The gambling halls.

HILLMAN: No, it was entertainment. Atlantic City has this double--what I find most useful in thinking about my life is that Atlantic City has two double aspects. One aspect, extreme extraversion. Two or three months of a million people from everywhere up and down the boardwalk, in the ocean, on the beaches, penny-ante games, gambling, shows, steel peir, Jimmy Durante--every kind of entertainment.

The shows used to open there, the Zeigfeld Follies used to open there, all the chorus girls, Miss America pageant. It was wildly extraverted.

Then comes September and the storms come, the northeasters, the ocean comes in and wipes it all out and you have about eight months of seagulls, grey beaches, introverted nothing, quiet, lonely, meditative absence, emptiness in the Japanese sense.

So this is very important to have those two parts of life and that was offered by Atlantic City.

Another aspect of Atlantic City is that it was a city in which the shadow was all over the place. In other words, on the one hand it was called the world's playground. This was in the twenties and the thirties. It was a family resort. Everybody could come and bring the children, come down for the day, go on the beach. When I was a child it was so Puritan that as a little boy I had to wear a top on my bathing suit. The little boys didn't even have bare chests, right? Puritan. Nobody was allowed on the beach after nine at night, there could be no hanky panky, it was all straight and clean.

Meanwhile, Ma Karpis and her sons, Pretty Boy Nelson, the whole gambling, crooked, corrupt crowd, the city was run by Knucky Johnson who was one of the big crook politicians of the time, there was bootlegging in the twenties. Do you see what I'm saying? We had this doubleness of American culture. So this is good psychology. Both of these doublenesses are good psychology. You learn about the hypocrisy and you learn about the shadow, you learn about extraversion and introversion. These were great virtues to grow up with.

That's biographical. And I was born in a hotel room.

CAPEN: Which hotel?

HILLMAN: Well, it no longer exists. It used to be called the Breakers Hotel. It was blown up one day. It had a magnificent copper, like French chateau roof, you know, those wonderful old buildings. So there's a bit of biography.

CAPEN: Along these lines, you discuss these phenomenal people in The Soul's Code, and their daimons. This concept of the invisibles. I am curious about when this concept, this idea was first known to you and whether you had this sort of calling when you were young.

HILLMAN: I did not have any special angel descend and walk in out of the closet at night or something and tell me who I was, or anything of that sort, but I was obsessed with my own little activities. I'll give one example that I have already given in a bit of biography.

When I was about fourteen I had a vast naval game. It was the beginning of the war and I made this large game with model ships. Now I made all these model ships myself, they were not out of kits. Balsa wood, you know, with pins for turrets and guns. I made my own battleships and aircraft carriers and all this kind of stuff and I had this big naval game I used to play with kids. I invented this game.

Now, I used to sit at my table obsessively with my little razor blade and scissors cutting out these little boats and gluing and pasting and putting them all together and so on and so forth. Now I never became -- see, this is calling -- I never became a naval architect, I never became a boatsman, or a sailor or a yachtsman, I never was engaged in anything that would be literally following that war strategy, boats, naval in any way.

But today, sixty years later, I still sit at my table obsessively cutting and pasting my books together. So something to do with the hand work is exactly the same. But when you are a parent of a child, you don't know, you think



"God he's fascinated with boats, this kid's probably going to become a sailor,"

Or a yachtsman or a fisherman. No way. No way. But something was in the calling.

And there are other stories of that sort that show the literal understanding of a child's behavior is not necessarily the revelation of what's going on. Do you see what I mean? I told one other story that's similar.

When I was a sophmore in high school we had geometry class and I was pretty good in geometry--not in albegra, but geometry. One day I went up to the teacher and I asked her why does it all come out right? I mean as long as you have 360 degrees and you have these right angles and the hypoteneuse -- of course it comes out right -- but why does it have to be these degree numbers, I mean why couldn't it be some other system?

She said well, this is the way geometry is, it's based on these Euclidian principles, that's it. I was questioning the archii, the archetypal base, a seeing-through geometry and asking a question about, well sure it all works, but what's underneath that makes it work?

So I was already thinking archetypally. I didn't know that then, but I was actually, if we had been in Greece, I was asking for the archaii, as they call it, the root principle of geometry, not theorems. Yeah, once you set up the root principles in this form, a 360 degree circle and so on, it's all going to come out. But how come that system? So that was already the way my mind was working. Now if I had been a parent of this child I would have said first of all you're questioning authority, you're going to be a rebel, or you're a skeptic, or you're a troublemaker, or I-don't-know-what. Do you see what I mean? It's hard to read in the child what these curious moments reveal. But they do reveal. And looking backward you pick them up much more easily, you begin to see how it all works or you see the destiny in some way. So for adults today they need to look backward at their dysfunctional and peculiar moments.

CAPEN: Or perhaps even where people get stuck in the everyday routine of things that they keep obsessively repeating, that maybe in the cutting and pasting of balsa-wood ships there's an artist in there somewhere that can expand out into writing or something else. But they're stuck in that spot.

HILLMAN: That obsessive quality. You see, we call it obsession, but it's also devotion.

We have bad language for what goes on. If we were in a tribe the elders would be watching. This boy keeps looking at the monkeys--we're in a Brazilian fantasy now--this boy keeps looking at the monkeys, he can see a monkey that nobody else can see in the trees, but we don't know. But that means this boy would even change his name in some way. The elder would see that particular talent, that particular obsession, that gift, and he might become an important hunter or a shaman. There would be a noticing of qualities. We don't notice now.

We put a child through psychological tests to find out what he can do or can't do. We don't notice the peculiarities and value them as indications. And if you remember in the book, I show how many important people, or people who became useful to societies, writers and scientists and so, had trouble at school. Big trouble in school. Failed school. Were thrown out of school. Because I think the daimon would not allow them to comply or adapt, that there was too much danger, that they would lose their calling. Because what is it that kept the kid, produced that tremendous resistance? Do you realize how hard it is for a child to fail? To not comply? I mean I don't think the child wants to be a stubborn and dyslexic and impossible and all the rest of it, it's something that we don't understand that refuses, something in the child refuses. And as long as we see that as sick or pathological we don't pay adequate attention to it.

CAPEN: I think this book probably will scare a certain sector of our society. It's obviously scared some of the critics for the larger newspapers in this country. In an interview I heard with you in San Francisco on radio, one woman called and she said, this sounds like a load of crap from the middle ages ,and a short time later I thought, well, a lot of it takes it roots in the middle ages, first of all -- but how did you react to that? People getting scared and attacking?

HILLMAN: Well, this is good American stuff, I'm glad she said that because first of all she believes in progress, that's number one, and this is basically a book that revives an ancient myth.

And as I said earlier this myth is very well known everywhere and it's only American psychology that doesn't include it. And so she's right to say that. From her perspective we don't need myths anymore, we have science, we have the genome project. Once we map all the genes in the body we will realize that there are genes that determine and govern everything.

That's one of the fantasies going on now. It's part of the fantasy we get every ten to thirty years about scientific progress that we will understand everything through material events. Genes or brain levels of serotonin or what the medulla is doing or the hypocampus is doing. I mean this is a basic fantasy that continues, and unfortunately it doesn't leave you satisfied with why the hell you are here and what your life is about. You're simply told how you work on a microscopic level, but you are still left with your emotions, your feelings, your thoughts, your ideas, your patterns, your behaviors, your quest after meaning and what you're here for, your destiny.

Besides this is not a theory, it's a myth, therefore there is no argument. Lovely to present a myth. And basically it's a myth. Now you can't argue with myths. You can just throw them out or you can say "that's useful." You can't prove it or disprove it, that's what's lovely. Theories you have to prove or disprove or argue about. You can't argue about a myth.

So I would suggest to the woman well if you don't like it you don't have to bother with it for a minute. I mean I couldn't argue with her about that. And I don't worry about whether a thing is medieval or Greek. Or worry more about ideas that are immediately now because those are the ideas that are brand new and we don't understand the myth in them, we tend to believe them, like the genome project or the Big Bang.

And I wonder about the gene thing anyway because, after all, supposedly only 3 percent of our chromosomes differ from chimpanzees. Ninety seven percent of them are the same, and yet look at the unbelieveable differrence! So there must be other factors. I don't know what they are. I don't know what they are. The myth says that, you know, we have some sort of a destiny to us. I find that myth, in an American sense, pragmatically useful. It opens things up for us. So it's not a matter of whether a thing is true or false in the myth, it's what does it do for you? Now for this woman it evidently upset her. Whether that upset is good or bad, I don't know.

CAPEN: This book is one of the loudest pleas to hear, see, delineate somehow what your child may be moving toward, what he needs, although you've said a lot of this is largely up to a mentor, not the parents. This is very much what this book is about. Deep impressions. Are kids much closer to the Self, as a rule?

HILLMAN: I don't know about that. I don't use the word Self, so I don't know what they're closer to, but maybe they're closer to the daimon. And this daimon is too big a burden for children to carry, too, and the daimon doesn't want to be treated as a child. This comes up again and again in the book.

For example, the Nobel prize winner in biology, Barbara McClintock, didn't want tools that were children's tools. She wanted her father to give her real tools. She was five years old and she didn't want a kid's hammer and a kid's saw. And Yehudi Menuhin didn't want a child's violin with metal strings, he wanted the real thing even though he was only four years old.

Why? Because the daimon knows what it needs and the child is not up to the task. You feel that when you are a kid. You fall in love as a little child just as strongly as you do when you're twenty or forty. You have ideas of God and death and disaster and catastrophe fantasies of that sort that are just as strong as when you are sixty. I mean it's there. So much of it is already there. Children ask more theological questions than twenty year olds. You know, who is God? Why did he make black flies?

CAPEN: Then you go on to talk about the areas where the daimon is most present and where it reaches the flash point is in love matters, why we fall in love. Is there anything that causes more problems than this?

You've addressed this in the past, in talking about pathos -- "the blue romantic flower of love...senseless individuation adventures...mad wanderings after impossibilities ...all so that we may go on loving."

These beautiful images, just extraordinary. Maybe we can leave it at this point: falling in love with somebody who is impossible to love for reasons of social pressures or the demands of the world. What of the daimon here?

HILLMAN: I don't know what I can say about that. It's an extraordinary mystery why two people get together and it's one of the most crucial factors in one's life and certainly gives you the feeling of fate: this woman is my fate, or it's my destiny to be with him. I don't understand it. People use the word fate and destiny more here than almost anywhere else. And then when you try to read the psychological literature on it, and there is more and more of it, that kind of falling in love becomes un-understandable, I mean we don't have a way of grasping it.

So I've tried to say in this chapter where the love is discussed that this would be a display of how this myth works in our life. And the acceptance of this falling in love and this other person is part of, it gives you the feeling that you're accepting your destiny. And when you have that idea, it helps you with the relationship. You realize it's not just her and me, maybe there's another factor in here. Maybe the soul wanted this even though it's absolutely impossible, who knows what it is. Now that's of course medieval in a way, so that woman caller would be right. She might be thinking: well, if it isn't working, drop it, let's get on with life.

You've read in the news recently about the parents who had three children and they realized they weren't really very good at parenting, they had given it a shot and they put their three children up for adoption because they said they tried to be parents, they did it as best they could, they weren't really that good at it, and so they wanted to get on with their lives. That's the contemporary way of imagining, no destinal aspect at all, that maybe it wasn't that they were there because their children had chosen them to be the parents. I suggest that in the book, you know, that the souls of the children particularly picked these two people, they got together only for the sake of the children, but they weren't willing to serve anything.

Now, of course, some people feel they're not good parents, but this book also emphasizes that parents aren't the whole bag for children. I mean children have crazy uncles and strange neighbors and the peculiar cop on the beat or odd people that are very important in their fantasy life, and parents shouldn't stand in the way of these figures that activate the child's own fantasy of what life's all about, of what they might become. The odd member of the family who is hardly around and maybe in jail and might be talked about captures a huge fantasy for children and opens the door to "maybe I'll be like that or maybe I'm more like Uncle Jack than I am anybody else." Many of us remember that -- that odd person.

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