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The place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy,
reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor
spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both...lmages of the
soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyche, in the Greek
language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a
particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche...This
relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with
the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon.
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light,
there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches.
Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-'straight, knife-sharp,
powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms,
order, and clear distinctions..
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of
intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with
natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological
insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them
into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of
experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in
circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring
labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words
as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of
phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is
vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the
spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of
passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous
treasury -- to use an image from St. Augustine -- a confusion and richness,
both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look
up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what
is above is always superior.
-- James Hillman
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