As he lay dying fifteen years ago, James Hillman announced, while asleep, “The Scorpion begins today.” His astrologer son Laurence Hillman checked, and sure enough, the Sun entered Scorpio at 1:35 p.m. that day.
Even while unconscions in his final days, Hillman was still noticing the sky. How fitting, as he had spent his life arguing that the soul is not just inside us but that we are inside it.
Scorpio represents death, transformation, and the underworld. It seems appropriate that he passed away during this season.
Decades before he died, back in the 1980s, he was already thinking about his future resting place. He purchased two burial plots at a cemetery he selected because of its grove of trees. The burial site “was at the extreme edge of the cemetery, so close to the trees you could see their cut-through roots on the side of the waiting hole in the ground” (p. 623, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, volume 3).
When it came time to bury him in 2011, his family noticed he would face the road and be within view of a miniature golf course and a pizza joint. This wouldn’t be fitting for a man who considered himself a “renegade psychologist” and spent decades decrying the lack of soul in our buildings and surroundings. They decided to turn him so he would look out upon the grove of trees instead. “It seemed appropriate that his headstone would be facing in the opposite direction from everybody else” (p. 623).
For Hillman, death wasn’t a hard line. “The border between the dead and the living is not that sharp,” he said (p. 560). That fits Scorpio’s wisdom: death is transformation, not an ending. Bernardo Kastrup describes it in terms of seasons: “Our deaths are no more final than the autumn decay” (Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics).
Hillman was famous for his “acorn theory,” which holds that “each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived” (The Soul’s Code). This type of growth moves down, not up, and resembles an upside-down tree with its roots in the sky. In this story of his passing, we see how the acorn theory even applies to death. An acorn, after all, falls into and ends in the earth.
While reflecting on this, I recalled how, hours after my father’s passing in 2015, we came across sketches he had made many years earlier of the headstone he wanted. He chose his gravesite with as much care as Hillman did. His rising sign was Cancer, as was Hillman’s, and Cancer rising concerns itself with home, roots, memory, and how we will be remembered. In the end, our final resting spot tells the story of how we lived.
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Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
