Synopsis: The Enterprise comes upon an ancient spaceship disguised as an asteroid, populated by inhabitants who do not know that their world is not a planet.
In this post, I want to discuss a concept from depth/archetypal psychology that I have not written about before. It comes from James Hillman’s New York Times Bestseller The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. It is the acorn theory, which is that just as an acorn has all the information it needs to become a tree, we each have an inner daimon that contains all the internal knowledge that we need to become who we are meant to be in the world. The daimon contains so much awareness that before our birth it chose our parents that it believed we needed in order to mold ourselves into who we are meant to be in this life (1996).
What has me thinking of this is a scene toward the end of “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” where Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy and Natira, the High Priestess of the Fabrini people who live in the spaceship, say their goodbyes. During the episode they have fallen in love, but each knows that they need to be true to their inner daimons for their lives to have meaning. This is quite a common trope in dramas, when two lovers must part in order to be true to their callings in life, but I never understood why this happened so well before this.
At the beginning of the episode, we learned that McCoy is facing a terminal illness and initially agreed to stay with Natira, to live out the remainder of his days no longer alone; but when it comes down to staying with Natira or remaining with the Enterprise, in the end he knows that his mission in life is to try to find a cure to his disease and expand medical knowledge in the universe. And although Natira has learned from McCoy, Captain James T. Kirk, and Mr. Spock the truth about her world, she knows that she cannot leave her people to be with McCoy, she must be with them when they do reach their new world. This ending is bittersweet, but there is a scene earlier in the episode, when Natira learns of McCoy’s illness and tells him that she would be happy to be with him whether it was an hour, a day, a month or a year. And perhaps that was all their love was meant to be. Perhaps both of their daimons knew from the onset that they were fated to have a deep love for another, and that this love would cause them to understand their place in the universe and give them the strength to act upon that knowledge.
Reference:
Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. Grand Central Publishing.
Original post created 16 March 2021
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