James Hillman writes: “Soul making has as its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure…. In a curious way, you and I crown matter, have been crowning matter, many times, perhaps since childhood. Recall the stones…” (Hillman 1993, 261, 265). This reflection on what the soul wants begins and ends with stones, and in an elementary sensate engagement with matter. As a child, the discovery of stones filled me with an odd pleasure. I loved to play in the dirt and saw the dark earth as a cosmos teaming with life. And there were the stones—alive and yet dead; they were precious to me, and I reveled in their beauty and in their variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and textures.
I collected them and returned to this play daily. There was something enigmatic—foreign—about them; yet in some way, they were more intimate than the world of human discourse. With the stones, I was alone, yet not alone. They held a secret, and my secret was with them. As I grew up and this experience began to fade, I continued to have moments of reconnection with the place in my soul that was touched by them. I remember one night having a vision of being an anthropologist from another world in the future. I had landed on earth and was walking around; everything seemed new and interesting, particularly the stones scattered on the ground. They had a numinous aura, as if they were jewels lying there free for all to enjoy, an open treasure.
Over the years, I have continued to take pleasure in, and wonder about, stones. I would occasionally bring them home to set on a shelf or desk and enjoy their natural beauty that contained many memories from childhood and extended into a mystery that seemed to stand on a threshold between myself and some other, between life and the beyond, between ego and the unknown. In later years, as I developed an interest in alchemy, I was naturally intrigued by the fact that one of the most pervasive images of its goal was the lapis or philosopher’s stone, an image as compelling as the original stones of childhood and whose meaning remains elusive.
In his essay, “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal,” James Hillman asks: “Why the stone? What, in particular, does this image of the goal say to the soul?” (1993, 249). In this work, he sets out again to respond to the question: “what does the soul want?” He explicitly asked this question in his earlier work, Healing Fiction (1983, 83). The direction of my essay was inspired and given focus by Hillman’s work, which seem naturally linked and also bring the question of the soul’s desire to yet another level of articulation. Together, they form a matrix for the following reflection on psyche’s purpose.