James Hillman on Animals: A Correspondence

HILLMAN: Where I am in sympathy with both bioregionalism and reinhabitation as you have described them, we have to face a very simple fact: contemporary consciousness is thoroughly urbanized and technologized. Nature is no longer adequately imagined as the Great Mother who sustains us; instead, she has become a very fragile, endangered old lady, a senile case who has to be protected and preserved. The Twentieth Century seems to have ended the rule of Nature and replaced it with the rule of Technology.

So, the issue today is double: both maintaining what we can of nature and extending the soul into technology. Here, I follow my friends Robert Sardello and Wolfgang Giegerich, who are attempting to re-vision the urban and the technological in terms of the Incarnation, the word becoming flesh, the flesh of the material world, actual things—from ashtrays and flush-toilets to the nuclear bomb.

As long as the sacred and the soulful are exclusively and sentimentally limited to natural things, then all other things, like freeways and towers, become Satanic or soulless. This division will kill us: it is the old Christian division between the realm of Christ and that of Caesar. Every effort has to be made to face the realm of Caesar, the cities, and to rethink them in terms of the anima mundi which encompasses all things, constructed and natural.

Once we can see with an animated eye and read buildings for their psychic import, and trust our eyes, we will not have such extreme opposition between urban and rural. It is not that freeways and towers as such are wrong, but the arrogance, paranoia, and speed which they embody. They merely concretize and exhibit massively those qualities of soul which appear as well in human beings and in natural objects.

We need desperately not to harden the lines of confrontation between advocates—developers and conservers—but rather to soften the frontiers in our thinking about where the soul is located. Until we recognize soul in man-made things, and not only in snail-darters and whooping cranes, we condemn freeways and towers into being forever monsters without souls. So, of course they cannot help but have a deleterious effect on their environment and will continue to be erected as Satanic demonstrations.

JS: In several of your books, you have characterized the turn to the East, the return to the land, the return to the primitive, and the turn to animals as wrongly chosen directions. You say that these ways fail to recognize that which is most alive and resourceful in our Western consciousness, namely, the archetypes/divine persons of first the Greek experience and then other Western experience still alive in our own. You add that in turning toward animals, there is a risk of barbaric animality.

As I understand what you are saying, this is because the absence of imagination, of images, psyche, the imaginal, the failure to give their due to the divine persons who are alive in our experience as Western people is connected with the harm that we visit upon nature. We are like Ajax slaying animals, because we are not sufficiently imaginal.

Our idea, however, as advocates for animals, is to turn toward the animal through caring, through appreciation, through respect and reverence for other living species, even through a recognition of our shared identity with other species. We turn toward animals as toward others having rights. We turn as humans do to one another, in the common community. We also turn as a shapeshifter, exploring empathetically and imaginatively, and then ethically, this larger sense of kind. We return to animals, seeking to critique our present in terms of what we once were and, hopefully, will continue to be, even more so.

Will you comment?

HILLMAN: When I made those remarks against returning to animality, I meant only one thing: our becoming non-verbal, grunting goofs—”Animal House.” I was using the term “animality” in the usual, insulting sense: dumb, brute, wild. I was addressing that style of simplistic therapy that has given up on language as expression of soul and calls crawling and screaming “reconnection with the animal body.”

When patients are urged to wriggle like a snake or hug like a bear, they are encouraged to be as ugly and violent as only humans can be. These therapies do not notice the beauty of actual animals and that reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and humorous place in the psyche. Thus, these therapies I was condemning, in the name of finding the animal soul, actually re-enact our Western tradition’s contempt.

Besides, giving up on language betrays our own human nature. I think that the human form of display, in the ethologist’s sense of “display,” is rhetoric. Our ability to sing, speak, tell tales, recite, orate is essential to our love-making, boasting, fear-inspiring, territory-protecting, surrendering, and offspring-guarding behaviors. Giraffes and horses display through posture and coat; we display through speech.

This sense of “animal” I therefore heartily endorse, as you know, for instance, from my recent seminars with Gary Snyder, Gioia Timpanelli, and Robert Bly, and also from my lectures on the subject going back to the sixties, all of which have been aimed at evoking the animal as psychic presence. I have been trying to foster self-recognition of human being as animal being.

JS: Bioregionalists and reinhabitants have noticed that indigenous peoples, who resided in their natural region usually for a long time, had become shaped by their place into people whose relationships with the natural world were respectful and more reciprocal than we find ours to be. Immigrants, most of us, by contrast, were shaped physiographically elsewhere than where we now are.

Our escalating assault on nature derives from our being transients, from our being in a place we do not recognize, and from the compensative efforts we make to live as if we were in that other place we came from. We modify the geography here which we do not recognize, try to shape it like the old, or simply root it up or pave it over, so that at least we can fantasize the old defensively against the earth voices of a place unfamiliar to us.

Reinhabitants seek instead to recognize place as this place, with its specific character, seek to live here. The animals, plants, rocks, and waters of this place are specific. Considering now San Francisco Bay, the life of indigenous people in this place, under its influence, shaped by it, gave rise to divine persons, Kuksu and possibly Coyote among them, who are exquisitely appropriate to nature and the potentialities of human life here.

Attempting to approach these local figures through study and through the imitation or even enactment of the rituals of peoples for whom these figures were alive, is one way of tuning in to the actual nature of this place, of learning to see, even to see through the pavement. They are figures of regulation, offering the suggestion of limits within which to live.

Acquaintance with these local persons is held by reinhabitants to be a highly important factor in contending with those forces which are destroying this place. The recommendation to turn away from the attempt to become acquainted with these figures appears to recommend giving up this means of finding out where we are. Ajax, slayer of animals, mistook the scene. Hercules does not appropriately relate to where he arrives, in the Underworld.

It would be held that Dionysus, for example, is disoriented in Shasta (northern California), though perhaps less so than Ajax, and offers not much contact with the actual place. By knowing him one rather knows Greece, which is just the trouble, for the Greeks and other figures of the immigrant traditions are perhaps present as pioneers and forty-niners too, even if we can agree that the eternal nature of a god does not permit him to be other than his character, though it be changeable, indicates, no matter where he is.

By attending to the persons of Western consciousness, it would seem, what one gets are visions of the City on the Hill (San Francisco) or the Athens of the West (Berkeley). But are these notions sufficiently ecological to remain humane? At the very least, the persons of our Western imagination would seem to be well advised to themselves become reinhabitants through acquaintance with the ancient figures of this place. Being precise in their mythic structures, however, can they be so polytheistic?

HILLMAN: “To see through the pavement”—what a lovely metaphor! Who could be against it?

Yet, I hear the voice of Gaia in your question. You see, from the perspective of an archetypal psychology, every position presents the voice of a “God,” an imaginative trope that governs the viewpoint. The emphasis on geography and physiography, on earth, plants, rocks, etc., seems to bespeak the perspective of Gaia (who today is tending to replace old Jahweh with a new and fanatical monotheistic consciousness).

The danger of this perspective—which is, nonetheless, very appealing—is that it, too, becomes a literalism; i.e., Dionysus has meaning only in Greece, whereas if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you must see through the literal pavement into the literal Native American myths and styles, for they once literally inhabited that soil. Reinhabiting could become a kind of imitatio Christi transferred to an imitation of pre-white culture.