When we search for the origins of concepts, notions and ideas, we turn to the ancient Greeks. But where did they seek their sources? In Homer. They never looked further back; they were neither able to, nor did they believe it necessary. The heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey viewed the world without illusions and faced up to its challenges without feeling sorry for themselves. To them the human condition was final. Ananke and her laws hung inevitably overhead, the course of life was already marked out and there was no way to change it in any circumstances. So they knew life without salvation, without rescue, without any hope of it recurring; “it is only because life is irretrievable ... that the glory of appearance can reach such intensity.” And that is why Achilles says:
Cattle and sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.
These lines, referring to the transience of life, its non-recurrence, have been much admired. They have lost none of their force over the centuries. Thus nowadays too, “whenever somebody who doesn’t belong to any creed refuses to kill, Achilles’s words live on in him.” But what about the soul? It flew away to the underground kingdom of the shades, from which there was no return. So when Odysseus goes to see Achilles in Hades, he tries to comfort him and lavishes words of admiration on him, saying that even in the underworld he “has preserved his ‘great power,”’ but Achilles replies:
O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying,
I would rather follow the plow as a thrall to another man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on,
than be a king over all the perished dead...
The Greeks of the Homeric era were not the first or the only people to wonder about man’s fate after his demise. Almost all human tribes have asked themselves, at an early point in their history, whether man’s conscious personality can survive after death. Almost all have answered in the affirmative. “On this point, sceptical or agnostic peoples are nearly, if not wholly unknown,” said the famous ethnologist J.G. Frazer. From the household items found in tombs we know that as early as the Neolithic era the citizens of the Aegean region felt that the human need for food, drink, clothing and even entertainment did not stop with death. There is no evidence to prove that some sort of theories about life beyond the grave lay hidden behind this practice. In the Balkans the custom of feeding the dead through tubes, which was just as widespread as in archaic Greece, survived almost to the present day.
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Homer uses two words to refer to the soul. Usually it is the thymos, which can be broadly defined as the seat of the emotions. Whereas he seems to ascribe the word psyche to man at the moment of his death, in his agony, when he is profoundly unconscious or his life is in danger. And so the only stated function of the psyche is to leave the body when life is extinguished. So what else do we know about the psyche ? It features as a character in an ancient myth that has survived to this day in the Latin version by Apuleius. In it, Psyche appears as a very lovely young Sicilian princess, of immense, enchanting beauty. Enraged by her loveliness, the furious Aphrodite sends Eros to punish her, but he falls madly in love with her instead. He carries her off to a wonderful palace in a flowery valley shielded by rocky crags and visits her by night. But he warns her never to try to find out who he is, because the sight of his face will be the beginning of her days of misery. Her sisters decide he must be a monster, a beast, as he will not let her look at him. Unable to conquer her curiosity, one night as Eros is sleeping, Psyche approaches him with an oil lamp. Dazzled by his unearthly beauty, she shudders and a drop of hot oil falls on his divine shoulder. The miracle vanishes, Eros disappears along with the fairytale palace, and the princess is left alone among the wild rocks. She roams the Earth, rejected by all, until Aphrodite catches her, imprisons her in her palace and sets her work beyond her strength. She takes vengeance on Psyche, “causing pain, distress and torment,” but Eros, who has not stopped loving her, brings her help and consolation. Finally Zeus takes pity on the lovers. He receives Psyche on Olympus, grants her immortality and celebrates her marriage to the god of love. And so Psyche had the features of the human soul: she was beautiful, curious and disobedient to a god. However, her difficult earthly wanderings came to an end in heaven, where love had taken her.
In the post-Homeric era the word psyche appears on the lips of the Greeks more and more often. It is the mental counterpart of the body, and at first it is not in conflict with it. It dwells somewhere in the depths of the organism, and from these inner parts it is able to address its owner in its own voice. In about the fifth century bc the meaning of the wor & psyche reaches a turning point and changes completely. Now man is endowed with a hidden “self” of divine significance. The body and the soul are now at two opposite poles. Through purification, the soul can liberate itself from the body and —as Pythagoras taught —be reborn in a new body. This was an absolute novelty, unknown to Homer’s heroes, an astonishing interpretation of life, a concept that has been defined as “a drop of alien blood in the veins of the Greeks.” Scholars have combed the horizon in search of the source from which this drop could have fallen. Many have looked towards Asia Minor and beyond, focusing their suspicions on the shamans. In the seventh century bc, when the Black Sea region opened to Greek colonization —writes the eminent expert on the ancient world, E.R. Dodds — the Greeks came into contact with shaman culture. So it may have been from the shamans that they got inspiration for new ideas about the soul that were alien to Achilles and his comrades. By this route some very powerful stimuli reached them that may have engendered the Pythagorean mysteries and enabled Plato to discover a world of ideas that one day, centuries later, would open up the afterworld: heaven, purgatory and hell.
Shaman culture still exists in Siberia, among the Yakuts, and evidence of its existence in the remote past has been left over a vast area, stretching from Scandinavia right across the land mass of Eurasia, all the way to Indonesia. We are aware of it largely thanks to the Polish exiles who were sent to Siberia. As early as 1768 the tsar ordered ten thousand of the Bar Confederates — nobles who tried to defend Polish independence — to be conscripted into the
most distant garrisons on the frontiers of Siberia. The writings from Siberia of Bronislaw Pilsudski, brother of the Marshal, or of Waclaw Sieroszewski are real treasure-troves of information on the shamans, and to this day their observations are being continued by ethnologists based in Poznan. The world outlook of the shamans differs from the world view of sorcerers, magicians and enchanters, who can still be found in some places on Earth today. They all tried, or still try, to drive evil spirits out of the sick. But only the shaman followed the sick to a place where no one else even imagined it was possible to go.
At dusk, after separating the yurt housing the sick man from the rest of the universe by ramming poles into its outside with birds’ and horses’ heads stuck on top and tying young birches together with ropes made of horse hair, the shaman would drive away accidental spirits and summon good ones to his aid. Then, in a growing state of ecstasy and kamlanie, he would begin his negotiations with the spirits of disease for the soul of the sick man. Here is how Waclaw Sieroszewski describes the shamanic ritual of kamlanie-. “Total, agonizing silence — until suddenly, from God knows where, a harsh, fitful screech rings out, as piercing as the rasp of metal... and falls silent. Later again ..., a seagull cries pitifully, a falcon shrieks, and a curlew whistles ... It was the shaman screaming, modulating his voice; and then silence again, just a very faint trembling, like the buzz of a mosquito, shows that the sorcerer has started his music. The drum beat... increases, grows stronger, pauses, and once again ... breaks off. To the capricious thud of the drum, the wildest sounds fly past in zigzags: eagles cry, seagulls complain, black loons snigger, curlews squeal, and cuckoos cuckoo. As if all those flying near heaven had suddenly stopped, surrounded the sorcerer in a swarm and were accompanying him, warning the occupants of heaven of his march with their pitiful cry.” Amid this music, in a profound state of ecstasy, having negotiated the rate of
the sacrifice, the shaman did something highly original, unknown to any other healers and magicians: he followed the soul of the sick man into “the other world.” He raised himself to each of its successive levels, making an offering at each one, until finally he reached the right spot, where he exchanged the sacrifice for the soul of the sick man. He placed it in his ear and went back to Earth; his return manifested itself as an unconscious state of prostration into which he fell. As soon as he recovered consciousness, he would blow the soul into the crown of the patient’s head, or beat it into him with a stick.
We can find evidence of the shamans in the myth of Orpheus. He is a combination of a poet, a magician and a prophet. Like the legendary shamans of Siberia, he can control bird music and wild animals. Just like shamans worldwide, he visits the afterworld to recover a stolen soul. Finally, as a magic “self,” he goes on living in the form of a singing head that remains an oracle many years after his death. The myth of Orpheus was the inspiration for an entire cult, whose adherents believed that —like Orpheus —they would find the way from the world above to the underworld, and would manage to cheat death. In the Orphic mysteries they cut themselves off increasingly from the world of the senses, developing ideas about being cleansed of sin and about life beyond the grave. If, moreover, we remember that Orpheus’s motherland was Thrace, where the Greeks had their earliest contact with shaman culture, we are not surprised by Professor Dodds’s potent claim that Orpheus is a Thracian, mythical shaman or the prototype for a shaman. This myth about a man who sets off alone into the afterworld to recover the soul of a sick person makes a beautiful backdrop for medicine. Just like the mystery of katharsis. We can imagine that in ancient times, Greek genius made an unusual shift in concepts, “replacing”
shamanism with katharsis. Both are accompanied by psychological shock. But in order to restore health, to release someone from illness, you no longer have to break free of the body and fly into the unexplored world beyond. It is enough to free the body from evil, to purify it. If evil is located in the soul, art will bring katharsis, and if in a sickness of the body, medicine will bring it.
In the soul, our dream of immortality is reflected, as in a mirror. For this dream to come true, we would only have to revoke the irreversibility of time. In contemplating nature, the Greeks became convinced that it was possible, and that it did in fact happen. They saw the regular motion of the stars, the invariable cycle of days and nights, births and deaths, and animals behaving in the same way. In the eyes of those who had been observing nature for centuries it seemed to exist without time, “or at least to lack irreversible time.” It seemed unaware of a past that was lost and gone once and for all. This perspective shaped itself into the concept of eternal recurrence: the world is constantly returning to where it began, though great abysses of time separate these returns. Because the world has a finite number of particles, and thus also a finite number of systems, hence every system must recur an infinite number of times. This concept “took hold in European thought with astonishing staying power.” It appeared in the works of Plato, Epicurus and the Stoics, to survive for centuries and turn up in the work of Schopenhauer, who wrote: “We can compare time to an endlessly revolving sphere; the half that is always sinking would be the past, and the half that is always rising would be the future.” The highest point of the wheel was supposed to be the present, motionless, and always the same. A thoroughly original attempt to understand the contradictory, mutually exclusive concepts of eternity and transience was undertaken by Friedrich Nietzsche. And after ten years of thought,
out of the mountains, down to the people he sent Zarathustra, the advocate of eternal recurrence.
The theory, or rather fantasy of eternal recurrence is a comforting idea. These days, however, it does not have many adherents, and in the Christian tradition it met with determined opposition, from Saint Augustine, for example. So if not in eternal recurrence, where should we seek the fulfillment of the eternal dream that something more of us than just dust will remain? Something that never dies, that is stronger than death and that lasts forever. Like words enclosed in a hexameter, more enduring than bronze: “I shall not altogether die.” A strong conviction, repeated centuries later, in defiance of “desolate times”: “But that which endures the poets give.” They are the select few “who knew the secret of word spells, time-resistant forms without which ... speech is like sand.” What else might remain? The laws of nature, the great theorems of mathematics? And love. Because “the value of human life is measured above all by love. Love also determines a man’s saintliness to a fundamental degree.” That was said by the man at the news of whose death hundreds of thousands of people cried out: Santo subito! The rest of us try to find an anchorage (however slight the chances of success), a permanent element in what is granted us, what is closest to us:
And if indeed you should silently utter the same old words you always hide and burn, you won’t leave a footstep behind you, little man, but a point of light, the glimmer of a glowworm.
Where in our bodies was this personification of immortality supposed to be located? The Egyptians pointed to the heart, but the Greeks placed the soul elsewhere. They imagined it “in the form of a little doll, visible through the pupil of the eye, which as a result
they called the kore” In Greek kore means little girl, or doll, and also the pupil of the eye. How did the Greeks know that the pupil is the only natural window with a view of the brain, of its optic nerves? The image of a little girl has been permanently associated with the pupil of the eye ever since doctors started calling it the pupilla , which is the Latin for “little girl.”
Who first uttered the word kore ? Was it a father gazing at his daughter? Or a boy looking at his girlfriend? Or maybe it was a child, because there are words that may have fallen from the lips of children before entering the adult dictionary and taking up permanent residence there. That was apparently the case with the Latin equivalent of kore. The word pupa and its diminutive, pupilla, meaning a little girl or a doll, were first heard in the prattle of Roman toddlers. The same is true of papa as a name for a father. But in the case of kore there is no such conjecture. The word is very old, lost in the mists of time. It was on the lips of the Achaeans, and it was taken over by their conquerors, the Dorians. It appears very often in Homer. In pre-Homeric times it had not yet crystallized in a single form and was pronounced in several different ways. In its oldest form it took the phoneme “v” in the middle and sounded like kuor.v.e. The differences gradually faded out and the only versions to last were kore (;Koprj ) in the Attic dialect, kure (xcovprj) in the Ionian dialect and kora {jcwpa) in the Doric.
Only once did kore substitute for a proper name. It was given to a beauty without a name, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She was so admired and desired on Olympus for her loveliness that her mother decided it would be safer to move her to Earth. In central Sicily to this day they will show you the meadow where Kore and a group of other girls used to play and pick flowers. This sort of scene had irresistible charm for the gods; we only have to think of the rape of Europa, among others. This time the Earth opened, and out onto its surface drove a golden chariot harnessed to a team
of four black horses. Hades, ruler of the underworld, had come to kidnap Kore —who from then on bore the gloomy name Persephone—and make her queen at his side. Just before he arrived, a beautiful narcissus had bloomed in the meadow. Kore was gazing at the narcissus, which was also the name of the youth who became lost as a result of gazing at himself. Perhaps she thought she had found the ultimate vision. She stretched out her hand to seize it, but at that moment Hades emerged. A scream rang out. Was it just the scream of the kidnapped girl? Or also the scream of irreversible knowledge? Kore saw herself, double, reflected in the eye of Hades, whose name means “invisible.” From then on she was to become the pupil of the eye —and that was to apply to all of us. There she remained, in the eye that “pounced from the shadows to capture a girl and shut her away in the underworld palace of the mind.”
The rest of the story is well known. Demeter —the mater dolorosa of antiquity —wandered the world in a ragged dress, with her hair loose and scattered in ashes, searching for her daughter everywhere, but in vain. Then this goddess of the harvest, the patroness of farmers, caused a drought on Earth. Zeus gave way and ordered Hades to set Persephone free. In parting, he gave her a pomegranate, and she ate a few grains, not knowing that just this tiny morsel would tie her forever to the kingdom of the shades. From then on, every year, she had to return to the Underworld for six months. When she emerged in spring, the world decked itself in flowers, so great was the joy of Demeter, who had not forgotten her. And so they were parted and reunited, becoming more and more of a single being in two persons. It was a “drama of the reflection,” breaking free of the body, the Earth, and then recombining with its point of departure. It was a profound mystery. And for centuries the Greeks worshipped the reflected image, as in the pupil of the eye, that pervaded the entire enigma, in their most arcane Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated for the twofold goddess, Demeter-Kore.
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In Greek or Roman written sources, including medical texts, it is not easy to find a precise description of the view, cited by Jan Parandowski, among others, that “the little doll” appearing in the pupil of the eye is the soul personified. Relatively closest to this concept are an extract from a discourse in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia and a passage from Pseudo-Plato’s Alcibiades. Pliny draws attention to the small dimensions of the pupil, which “do not permit the sight to wander at hazard and with uncertainty, but direct it as straight as though it were through a tube,” and a little further on he enthuses that “so complete a mirror, too, does the eye form, that the pupil, small as it is, is able to reflect the entire image of a man.” And as Socrates says to Alcibiades, the pupil is the part of the eye “that is noblest.” And if, as Socrates would have it, the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” can only be understood when it is translated into “Look at thyself,” in this understanding “the eye became the pupil for us all.” And the eye, if it “is to see itself, must look at an eye,” and “if the soul is to know herself, she must surely look at a soul, and especially at that region of it in which occurs the virtue of a soul.”
At the moment of death the soul was liberated from the cocoon of the body and flew away like a butterfly into the afterworld. This is how we see it on Greek cameos with portraits of the dead and on Roman sarcophagi. In Greek the word psyche also means a butterfly, to which Aristotle drew attention, and in Latin the word anima can be used to mean either the soul, or a moth or butterfly. Juliusz Slowacki saw the soul as a swallow taking flight from the eye at the onset of death, and prayed for intercession for it in these lines:
Or rather I shall say —as the dusk of this life draws nigh
The soul is like a swallow high above the Earth,
Succor the swallow as it flies from my eye
Gaze to the sunlight, heart full of mirth.
But doesn’t the soul “take flight” every night? Doesn’t it soar as the body sleeps? Doesn’t it liberate itself from the body, take off and break free? So is sleep, by setting the soul free, a paraphrase of death? The Greeks noticed this affinity. To them, Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death, were twins, the sons of the Night. They imagined Hypnos as a winged youth who touches the brows of the weary with a twig, or scatters poppyseed on them from a corner. Whereas they saw Thanatos as a boy holding the torch of life, extinguished and turned upside down. They were attached to each other as only twins can be. According to Jan Kochanowski, Hypnos, the mirror image of Thanatos, heralded his coming:
O sleep, that teaches all people to die And shows them the taste of the future life
The god of sleep had power over man, cutting down the victors and making no exceptions, not even for the noblemen of Dobrzyn, as Adam Mickiewicz jokingly testified in Pan Tadeusz:
On tankard, plate and sirloin in a heap,
The victors vanquished by Death's brother, Sleep.
If the soul is liberated from the body during sleep, through how many worlds does it wander, worlds that exist for a moment, before being forgotten forever? And would we like someone very dear to us to accompany us in these dream worlds, to be with us in a place where the real world no longer burdens us, where we sense the only opportunity to be fully united:
Take me into your dream Let me stay within it
Let me revolve inside it until I melt entirely underneath your eyelids.
Sleep also brings fears, or even terror. For me it was the return of my stage fright. The dream came to me long after I had stopped performing music in public and taken up medicine “for real.” It used to wake me up, terrified, covered in sweat. In the dream I came out on stage and sat at the piano, and then the auditorium went quiet, but I couldn’t remember the first note. In my short and far from successful musical career, this never actually happened. Of course, I made mistakes, I fluffed —as we used to say at school —on more than one occasion I bungled whole passages, but as for not being able to start at all, that never happened to me! Nor to any of the musicians I have known. Indeed, years later, when I mentioned this dream to the brilliant pianist Janusz Olejniczak, winner of the Chopin competition, he replied: “Do you know, I have exactly the same dream! I come out on stage and sit down at the piano, and then I notice I’ve got the wrong notes, a different score. I am unable to begin, and I wake up covered in sweat.” So I felt less alone with the stage fright that was torturing me in my sleep after all those years.
The god of sleep flew right around the world with the onset of night. How did he know its limits? “When does the night end and the day begin?” the tzaddik asked a large gathering of Hasidic Jews. And gave the answer himself: “When in the eyes of another man you see a brother.”
Heraclitus ascribed the role of the world’s first principle to the soul. He believed that one of its features was the logos , which surpassed it and was identical with the Logos of the universe. The Logos is
reason, the cosmic force, the divine law that unites all changeable objects and rules over them. In modern times Imre Kertesz referred to it in talking about the written word: “Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together” and ceaselessly goes on creating it. Heraclitus warned: “Of the soul thou shalt never find boundaries, not if thou trackest it on every path,” and in a footnote he specified: “so deep is its logos.” Does that mean searching for the soul is doomed to failure from the outset? Is it like hunting the Snark? An expedition in search of the Yeti? Aiming to achieve the impossible?
The Siberian shamans had not read Heraclitus when they devised their methods of reaching the soul. The training took years on end. The pupil, carefully selected by the teacher, began living in isolation, performing painful, repulsive and shattering exercises in order to kill the instinct to run away from anything dangerous and terrifying. Extreme exhaustion led to the collapse of his former personality, because “the shaman must die in order to be born anew.” The central experience of this initiation was the disintegration of the body. So, for example, among the Eskimos a monstrous polar bear would devour the apprentice’s body in a dream, leaving nothing but bones “that then grew a new body around them.” And finally, after many years, once the pupil had conquered his own “initiation sickness” and cured himself of it, only then could he practice the art he had acquired on others. He was capable of seeing through matter and catching sight of the spirit that filled it. He could not only see “the other world,” but he could communicate with it. No one was as good as the shaman, “a seasoned expert on the topography of the afterworld,” at tracking a lost or abducted soul and battling with its kidnappers to regain it for the sick person. He did it in the state of ecstasy that he had learned during the long initiation process. There was a wide range of psychotropic drugs to help him, including hallucinogens, such as extracts of fly agaric or
bog bilberry, and especially certain varieties of bracket fungus. So too, three thousand years before Christ, the stimulating fruit bodies of a species of bracket fungus called Piptoporus betulinus (the birch bracket) were threaded on a piece of string and taken with him on his journey by Otzi, the man whose frozen remains were found not long ago in an Alpine glacier. He hadn’t had time to use them before his soul flew from his body.
The shamans came close to the essential experience that seizes a man when he is in a state of ecstasy. In these exceptional, privileged moments they tried to go beyond the apparent and accessible world, and to penetrate the hidden one, to tear down the curtain concealing all that is most essential. Plotinus knew about this, and referred to ecstasy, the height of rapture, a revelation, as the only way of merging with the absolute. It was not just a cognitive function, and “demanded not studying, but exercising the spirit ( askesis) and purification (katharsis).” For Plotinus had no doubt that there really was an existence more perfect than Plato’s ideas — the height of beauty, truth, goodness and unity —the absolute, or “The One” (to ev). Divine existence, we would say. The human “self,” hidden in the soul, is not inseparably divided from the eternal “self” present in the divine mind. This real “self,” the “self” within God, is also granted to me within me. And when the internal pressure intensifies, Plotinus taught, until ecstasy comes upon us, we identify with it, we become identical with it, its ineffable beauty raises us up and we are united with the divine thought that contains us. Then we experience an overwhelming sensation of peace, joy, happiness and contact with the ultimate meaning. And everything around us takes on unutterable beauty and perfection, and turns out exactly as it should be.
Seventeen centuries separate us from Plotinus. History has
carried us a long way from the wise man who died alone at his villa in Campania. Yet if we read the pages of his Enneads today, they still stir an echo in us. Henri Bergson wrote about this power to influence that the mystics have: “They ask nothing, and yet they receive. They have no need to exhort; their mere existence suffices.” By existing, they challenge us. Plotinus knew well that a man’s inner life will never be made whole: “it will never be pure ecstasy or pure reason or pure animality.” He encourages us to be open to transcendence. In the rare moments of inspiration and elation that he called “the escape of the recluse to the Recluse,” the soul of Plotinus turned to it, the One and Only that created our world. “Let then every man become divine and every man beautiful, if he wants to see God and beauty,” he wrote. “We are given the impression that this imperative of his is somehow connected by invisible threads with the ultimate mystery of the universe,” said Lev Shestov. Plotinus was to experience four ecstasies. After the first one he wanted nothing but to be in anticipation of the one and only voice. Perhaps this was comparable to the state we sometimes experience when listening to a rondo. The first time it appears, it is a dazzling theme. After a while it vanishes, leaving us enthralled. Now we are just waiting, with all our hearts and minds, for its return.
Mystical experience is a universal phenomenon. “Even if this phenomenon attains its plenitude only with Christianity, it nevertheless exists, in a highly authentic way, throughout human history. The Plotinian experience is one of the most remarkable examples of this.” He was one of the first in a long line of great mystics who described their revelations, including the following saints: John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila. They all presented us with their “most vital experience,
which tells the truth about oneself and the world, and has its origin in the depths of the human soul.” And the great female ecstatics! Whether in a state of rapture or in the depths of suffering, immersed in revelation, between ardor and the throes of death, mad, and yet fulfilled — for centuries they have not ceased to feed the imagination of painters and sculptors, “often less pious than their heroines.” The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, sculpted by Bernini, can be seen in a chapel in a small church in Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria. The chapel is built in the shape of a theater, with an audience consisting of the figures of the donors, sitting in the boxes, watching the scene being acted out before them, and which was described by the saint herself. Teresa is resting on a cloud; her mouth is part open and her eyes are half closed. Above her, with a slight smile that may be tender or cruel, depending from what angle you look at it, or perhaps simply mischievous, stands a very young angel holding up an arrow that he is just about to stab into her heart. He seems to be enjoying the saint’s state of ecstasy. Yet above all it is the face of Saint Teresa that has attracted our gaze for centuries — the face of a woman in elation, a woman anticipating, desiring, a woman in a state of celestial bliss.
An account of the revelation experienced by Blaise Pascal has also survived to our times. He was thirty-one years old; it was Monday, 23 November 1654, in Paris. The time: between ten-thirty pm and half past midnight. That night he saw a great light and a blinding fire. For a long time he passed out, and as soon as he regained consciousness, he immediately wrote down his experiences with a steady hand, on paper. As he had a scientific mind, he began by stating the time and the place, as quoted above. Further on, after an address to the biblical God of the Old Testament, the style becomes telegraphic. Repeated several times over, the word “certainty” is
striking, and so are “joy” and “peace.” And a desire to forget about everything except God. He carried the note he had written in a state of revelation to the end of his life, sewn into the lining of his jacket. He was accused on more than one occasion of fundamentalism (a pejorative word in the era of globalization); of making a mockery of reason, which in fact he used to make some brilliant discoveries in mathematics and physics; of ruthlessness and of stripping everything bare. But he never forgot the moment that raised his soul and changed the world, and never let it slip into oblivion. Mad? Of course —in the sense of being different, of rejecting the world, which from then on ceased to exist for him. All that counted was the love he had experienced in his revelation.
Pascal had more luck with witches than with doctors. His sister Gilberte said he never knew a day without pain and suffering. In the first year of his life he was already racked with convulsions. The doctors were helpless, and finally his desperate father, who adored him all his life, thought he must be under a spell cast by an old hag whom his wife had refused a handout. Under the threat of the stake, the old woman admitted it. She offered to transfer the charm from the child to a black cat. She made a potion and prayed to Satan. The cat expired, but the child did not get better. Then, aware that the stake was getting closer, she made “a cataplasm of nine leaves from three different plants that were picked during a full moon by a seven-year-old child.” When she applied this cataplasm, the little boy was shaken with a terrible fit of convulsions, and sank into a state of catalepsy. The frantic father went for the witch with his fists flying. Just then the child awoke from his coma and smiled. The witch announced that he was cured. The attack abated, never to return.
Many times in youth and adulthood, Pascal was chained to his
IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL
bed by migraines and stomach pains. So it was in September 1647, when Descartes, on his way back from Sweden, stopped in Paris for three days before moving to Amsterdam for good. He had heard a lot about the young genius, so he invited him to come to see him. Pascal replied that he was feeling too unwell to go to the other end of Paris, which Descartes regarded as impertinence on his part. However, he would not wait, so the day before his departure he —the greatest philosopher in Europe — decided to go to see the young man of twenty-four. He found him in bed, and asked him detailed questions about the symptoms, not just to assure himself that his host really was ill, but also because he regarded himself as a medical man. Pascal did not give a single word in reply because he did not like to complain in front of strangers. Later on, he showed Descartes his arithmetic machine —the prototype of the modern computer —and some tubes for creating a vacuum. Descartes was so fascinated by the brilliant young man that the next day, before leaving, he visited him once again.
Both of these great mathematicians, by way of skepticism, attained diametrically different philosophical positions. Pascal reached mysticism, with an infinite predominance of the soul over the body, the soul in which the preternatural order is reflected in love. It was said of him that “never was philosophy deeper felt; it was not the result of a mighty inner struggle,” and so for all time he found people for whom he was a guide. Descartes, like no one before him, radically divided the world of thought from the material world, the soul from the body. He believed that these two separate worlds communicate with each other in the pineal gland, a tiny anatomical growth situated at the base of the brain, where the soul was supposed to reside. The pineal gland is a third eye. In bony fish, the oldest amphibians and the first reptiles, it remained in the forehead, enabling them to look upwards, and has been preserved in fossils. It exists to this day as a third eye in just one reptile, the
tuatara, a spiny lizard-like creature that lives on an island off the New Zealand coast. In all other ancestral species it disappeared in Triassic period and gradually became hidden deep in the brain. It has preserved its connection with the visual system, and especially at night it produces melatonin, a hormone that is involved in measuring out the rhythm of sleep and waking, and is also used nowadays to prevent jet lag after transoceanic flights. Descartes could not have known the pineal gland was the remnant of a third eye, and yet, like the Greeks, he located the soul in the eye, this time the third one!
Descartes was a dualist, and defended Christian views from increasing materialism. But the further development of human thought headed in this very direction. The philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors smashed the dualist concept that Descartes had artificially concocted with the help of the pineal gland, and started explaining all spiritual matters as material phenomena. In the sphere of philosophy the old order was reversed: philosophy became a science of pure thinking, only concerning itself with existences in so far as they are present within our consciousness, and not just insofar as they exist outside us. The whole great drama of the history of redemption disappeared in the Enlightenment mentality. As John Paul II wrote: “According to the logic of cogito, ergo sum God was reduced to an element within human consciousness; no longer could he be considered the ultimate explanation of the human sum. Nor ... the one who gives existence.... All that remained was the idea of God, a topic for free exploration by human thought.”
How can we see the soul, if only for a moment? Where should we look for it? Lie in wait for it as it leaves the body? After all, Achilles spoke of that moment, and Slowacki wrote about it. The curiosity
of Frederick II, son of King Roger, the hero of Karol Szymanowski’s opera, was legendary. We do not know if he based his plans on Achilles’s words; certainly not on Slowacki’s. This powerful ruler of the Norman state of Sicily reportedly gave orders for a man to be shut in a barrel and starved to death, because he wanted to see the soul departing. History is silent on whether or not he succeeded. After the Enlightenment the issue seemed simpler. Indeed, matter turned out to be all, and everything was made of it, including the soul. And so the soul must have a mass; it must be subject to the laws of gravity and be possible to weigh. So reasoned Duncan MacDougall in 1901, a doctor at the city hospital in Haverhill, Massachusetts. As a man of action he soon stopped philosophizing and got down to work. He used a crane scale, on which he placed a bed with a dying man in it. For four hours he took meticulous measurements. He observed the patient carefully until the man emitted his last breath. And at that moment the beam of the scale dropped; the body had lost weight! He repeated his experiment four more times — always with the same result. However, when dogs were used instead of people, the result was unambiguously negative. Only people, but not dogs, suddenly lost weight at the moment of decease. If it was the soul flying from the body, then it “weighed as much as a slice of bread.” MacDougall kept the results of his observations secret, but as rumors of his astounding research spread, he was finally prompted to publish in a medical journal a work entitled The Soul: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance. Despite this rather pompous title, the work is striking for the precision of his observations, his solicitous control of the conditions for the experiments, and his cautious reasoning. Some say that even today it should be put through the rigorous filter of the review process and see the light of day again. An independent confirmation of the results would be expected, of course. To which MacDougall would
surely have referred to the results of observations made by a Californian high school teacher, who thirty years later conducted an analogous experiment on mice. As they expired, the unfortunate mice did not lose weight. Ah, but they were mice, not people. He would also surely have referred to recently mooted suggestions that convection currents could provide a partial explanation for his insights. To the ultimate accusation of exuberant originality, MacDougall could have said that five thousand years before him the ancient Egyptians wrote about weighing the soul, which was located in the heart, after death. To be pure, a heart tossed on the scales at a posthumous trial before Osiris had to weigh less than the lightest feather. “Otherwise, it was immediately gobbled up by a monster waiting by, and the Egyptian’s life beyond the grave ended in eternal ignominy.”
Reducing the soul to a material substance and trying to capture it on a scale are derivatives of the Cartesian doubt that has accompanied us for the past four hundred years. For many long centuries before then, the world was full of evidence of God. God was nearby and present within our souls, where He manifested Himself simply as the truth. And so Saint Augustine could say: “Do not come out into the world, return to yourself, the truth lives inside a man. And he added: I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Absolutely nothing.” After Descartes there was only the God of rational religion, the God of people of the Enlightenment, a high-ranking officer in the moral police,” who deserved nothing else “except the coup de grace that Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Freud later delivered him.” Human reason had emancipated itself and ceased to need — so they said — this crutch, this working hypothesis. The nihilism that Nietzsche was the first to perceive on the threshold of Europe entered by the front door. Right at the
end came the Marxist utopia, the ultimate version of the Enlightenment belief in progress and heaven on earth, prepared by the powers of reason. Confidence in the meaning of the whole of reality was deeply disturbed, and the world became more and more empty and difficult to understand. The French thinker Pierre Delalande, invented by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel The Gift , says: “In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors.” This means we are incapable of looking outside worldly life to see what is in the world beyond. It also means we can only see ourselves.
Even assuming that is the truth, a great deal depends on what sort of look we aim at the mirror. As in the story about the dog that runs into a series of rooms with walls entirely covered in mirrors. The only door slams shut behind him, and there he stands, surrounded on all sides by dogs —his own reflection in the mirrors. He bares his fangs, and so do they. He flies at them, and they fly to him. Faster and faster he races, louder and louder he barks, foaming more and more fiercely at the mouth —until finally he drops dead of exhaustion. But what if he had wagged his tail instead of baring his fangs?
The earthly home, in which we are surrounded by mirrors —what an extreme limitation of perception! Like an exaggerated parallel of the modern world, constricted by science. Like summoning up the Land of Ulro —the sad land of the imagination that has been disinherited by science, where objective necessity reigns and it is impossible “to credit marvels.” The loss of the miraculous is connected with the progress of rationalism since the Enlightenment era. Of course, it is not about condemning the Enlightenment, or a return to the alleged idyll from before the scientific and technical revolution, nor about contrasting faith and reason. Such attempts, already made on more than one occasion, were a failure. Czeslaw
Milosz believed that rescue might come not from accusing science, but from an entirely different image of the body and the world than the one offered us by eighteenth-century science and its offshoots to this day.
So in losing the “second space,” in liberating ourselves from tradition, we would at the same time lose our sense of existing meaning-meaning that cannot simply be decreed according to our own will.
And what about the soul? What happened to it in the world that had lost its “second space” and become like the Land of Ulro? Here is how Adam Zagajewski answers this question in his poem entitled The Soul.
We know — or at least we have been told — that you do not exist at all, anywhere.
And yet we still keep hearing your weary voice — in an echo, a complaint, in the letters we receive from Antigone in the Greek desert.
The word “soul” is rarely heard nowadays among biologists or doctors. You would seek it in vain in the indexes of bulky volumes of psychiatry, or even psychology, not to mention internal medicine. Perhaps it appears in the occasional historical footnote. The word, as if mindful of its own nature ... has evaporated. The “soul” has been replaced by the “self” and the “conscious self,” or the “conscious mind.” And at this moment the domain that from the start had always belonged to the philosophers began to shift towards the biologists and doctors. The majority believe that the conscious mind is located in the brain. Attempts have already been made to locate it within its defined structures. The mystery of the conscious mind has attracted some of the most brilliant intellects. It presents a challenge for those who have already reached the heights
in other spheres of science, crowned with the Nobel Prize. And so Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, or Gerard Edelman, who discovered the structure of immunoglobulin, have dropped the interests that took them so high to devote all their time to understanding the “self.” But the “self” remains impenetrable and elusive, even though interesting new attempts to encapsulate it keep appearing. Some, like Christof Koch, seek consciousness in the material of the brain, in neurobiology, while others, like Douglas Hofstadter, deny its ontological reality and regard it as an illusion, “a mirage, a myth,” generated by the complex machinery of the brain, accessible only at the highest level of thought, just as we can only comprehend the concept of pressure and temperature at a level of io 23 molecules, but not at the level of a single molecule. One of the more isolated views is held by British mathematician Roger Penrose, who says that these attempts are premature, because understanding the functions of the brain must be preceded by a revolution in physics, in comprehending the deepest structures of the world. Not even the greatest optimists imagine it would be possible to see the “self” with the use of stunning modern brain imaging techniques, even though they show how individual clusters of gray cells light up like colored islands in the dark ocean of the brain when they start to solve a task, when they listen, or count —in short, whenever they think.
However, is it right to narrow spiritual phenomena down to the conscious mind? After all, following the example of ultraviolet rays, “which are a light that possesses no brightness at all,” very many spiritual phenomena “lack the glow of the conscious mind.” The discovery of the unconscious mind is often ascribed to Freud, and yet long before him philosophers such as Aristotle or Schopenhauer referred to our unconscious desires, Goethe and Schiller
KORE
sought the sources of literary creativity in the unconscious mind, and from the mid-nineteenth century onwards doctors, including some Polish ones, have devoted close attention and numerous treatises to it. Freud, however, made it the central idea in his teaching, and his originality relied on creating the concept of the displaced unconscious mind. The unconscious mind consists of urges and desires of which the ego rids itself by pushing them into oblivion because they conflict with reality and cause pangs of conscience. Once displaced, they are inaccessible to the cognition. The unconscious mind is “radically indifferent to reality,” said Freud; logic is alien to it, as are the principles of non-contradiction and temporal sequence. Displacement concerns above all experiences with a sexual tinge from the period of early childhood. We are accustomed to calling the conscious, rational part of the psyche the “ego,” our “self.” It represents a relatively thin surface layer above the depths of the unconscious mind, which Freud called the “id.” There is tension between them, a conflict, the “id” puts pressure on the “ego” —as if from below —with its blind urges. The conflict is revealed in our dreams, slips of the tongue and muddled memories. “One’s own self is extremely well hidden from one’s own self,” said Nietzsche. According to this dictum we remain unrecognizable to ourselves, and our life is ruled by uncontrollable forces, hidden desires and passions. Yet we know a few things about ourselves that we cannot tell anyone. We realize that the person we keep quiet about is genuine —we are he or she. And the portrait that the world reflects back at us is just as much us as our inner image of ourselves, the one we never breathe a word about all our lives.
The concept of the conscious mind also creates “deep epistemological problems” and an evolutionary paradox. For if we accept, as the substantial majority of scientists do, that the experiences of the conscious mind originate in their entirety from present and past events, provided by way of the neurons, then every component of
IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL
the conscious mind — and thus every shape, color, sound, thought, memory, intention, etc. —arises exclusively on this path. And so, if no magical transformation of all this information occurs in the brain, the conscious mind does not bring anything new to what the brain already contains. From this paradox the eminent Oxford neurophysiologist and former head of the Medical Research Council, Professor Colin Blakemore, concludes that “consciousness itself
cannot have evolved by Darwinian selection_Being conscious is
an epiphenomenon.”
One of the most famous American neurologists, Antonio Damasio, reckons there is a special center within our brains. It is not made up of cells that receive impressions from the surrounding world, transmitted by the senses. Instead it is formed by cells that receive signals coming from inside our bodies, including its furthest, deepest regions. These signals are transmitted along the nervous system or through the blood, like hormones. They are the basis for a special, moving map of the body that arises in the main center. The center in question is our “self,” trapped as it were in the brain; it is the observer of events being played out on the stages of our inside, and the recipient of the feelings that accompany them. It passes them through the filters of the memory with which it is endowed. But isn’t this image familiar to us from somewhere already? Isn’t the “self,” the spectator with an extensive memory shut inside us, by chance a little girl? The same Kore whom, as the Greeks believed, can be seen through the pupil of the eye? She listens to what we have to tell her, she reads the letters Antigone writes to us, and she smiles when she sees how our thought has come full circle in search of the soul, in order to reach her at last.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo Summer, 1563
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
