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I have an ambivalent relationship with Jungian psychology. On the one hand I like Myers-Briggs personality types, but on the other I think that they tend to be too reductionistic.
So this week I was reading a book about mountain and desert spirituality, and I came across this passage:
To begin the path up the mountain, says Hillman, is to embrace the impulse of the puer aeternus, the childlike wonder that draws us ever upward to glory, like Icarus with his wings, Phaethon driving the chariot of the sun, Bellerophon ascending on his winged horse.
The author is referring to James Hillman, an “archetypal psychologist” who, like a lot of archetypal psychologists, de-emphasizes the particularity of a culture’s stories in order to play up the universal qualities of the human mind.
In this case, Hillman seems to think that the “childlike wonder” of these Greek heroes is what prompted them to fly upwards and, ultimately, to fall and be killed.
Puer aeternus is Latin for “eternal boy,” and refers to a character like Peter Pan, who did have a quality of childlike wonder.
However, Icarus, Phaethon, and Bellerophon are none of them Peter Pan.
Let’s start with Icarus. In the most famous version of his story, by Ovid, Icarus is given wings invented by his father Daedalus in order to fly from their prison in Crete to the Greek mainland. Icarus, though he is told by Daedalus neither to fly too high to the sun nor too low to the sea, nevertheless loses executive functioning and comes too close to the sun, melting the wax that holds the wings together. He plunges into the sea that is subsequently named after him, a victim of teenage immaturity and his father’s misplaced hopes.
The emphasis of Ovid is not on childlike wonder drawing us ever upward to glory; rather, it is on the father’s foreboding that something will go wrong:
So Daedalus teaches his son to fly
and fits the awkward wings to his shoulders.
Between the work and the warnings, the father’s
elderly cheeks flow with freely-shed tears,
and the father’s hands shake; he gives his son
a kiss not to be had ever again.
And once lifted skyward he fears for his
companion, like a bird whose fledgling chick
he coaxes out to try his maiden flight.
As a father myself who has seen his children drive off in cars by themselves for the first time, this resonates with me.
And I will say that as far as I know the ancient Greeks were not big on childlike wonder. They were very hard-headed, practical people who distrusted technology and thought it was a challenge to the gods.
As for Phaethon, his story feels less like childlike wonder and more like entitlement. The teen is a demigod, the son of the sun-god Helios, and one way or another, he feels he should be allowed to ride the chariot of the sun with its horses across the sky. The indulgent father gives in against his better judgment and the result is familiar: Phaethon can’t handle the horsepower, so to speak, and not only kills himself when he loses control of the chariot, but also scorches a good part of the earth.
“Hand over the car keys, dad!”
Little childlike wonder, lots of loss and regret.
Bellerophon, for his part, is a bit different from the first two. He is a glorious hero, the vanquisher of the monstrous Chimaera, the rider of Pegasus. But like Phaethon and Icarus, he is undone, not by his childlike wonder, but his desire to cross boundaries that have been set by others. Bellerophon is man outside the circle of family, so he doesn’t have a father there to try to stop him from doing something stupid.
The flight skyward to Olympus follows a predictable thematic path: the Greek hero thinks too much of himself and must be punished. This is classic hubris, an overvaluing of one’s individual worth, and it is Zeus and other divinities who enforce boundaries who crush this misguided way of thinking.
So my conclusion is that if you are searching for childlike wonder, ancient Greece is not the primary place to look.
In fact, the funny thing about the original quotation is that it claims that the puer aeternus is an archetype, a universal human quality or character, but all it takes for its examples are characters from one specific culture.
I think that if you’re going to talk about archetypes, you might want to use more diverse examples.
I wish I knew some other pueri aeterni besides Peter Pan. And I wish the whole concept was a bit less glamorized. It feels like it’s only the boys who get to be eternal children. As I have argued in another post, girls inevitably are steered toward marriage and child-rearing in nearly all cultures. Think about Wendy, the eldest in the Peter Pan story, who ends up being a kind of mother figure for the Lost Boys.
I do think boys need a way into adulthood that is less toxic and dangerous than war. I feel like with the making of war optional for boys in the US, some of them are being left to their own devices. Psychologically, it’s a tough slog.
That’s why it’s just possible that national service, but not necessarily military national service, might be something we could reinvent. Is there a way to help young men and women who are trying to find their way as adults by mandating that they help others for a year?
When I taught college, I was always gratified by those students who were coming back to school after a time away. They were more mature than typical undergraduates straight out of high school. They often knew what they wanted from school and valued what I was teaching because they had seen life without formal learning and formal learning had become more precious to them.
We could give choices. We could say, yes, you can go into the military. We could say, yes, you can be an aide in an elementary school or an apprentice to a government contractor.
I don’t know if it would work. But I think we definitely need to stop thinking that the puer aeternus is some sort of ideal to be preserved.