SOUL AND PSYCHE
The roots of our Western thinking about the soul are buried in ancient Greek culture. It is difficult for us to imagine how the Greeks saw themselves at the time of Homer (about 800 BC). Like the tribal cultures we have been looking at, they did not have our modern sense of not being identical with our bodies. Whereas we feel that we have a personality, an essence—a soul—somehow located inside, or carried by, our bodies, they felt that their soul was dispersed throughout their bodies, or that each part of their bodies expressed a different function of their soul. Indeed, they did not have a word for a living body. They usually referred to it as “limbs.”1 The word soma (body) referred to a corpse. Only gradually did the idea of the soul withdraw itself from the parts of the body to one central point. And only gradually was that point deemed capable of separating itself permanently from the body.
To begin with, the Homeric Greeks thought we had two souls, psyche and thymos. Modern scholars at first associated psyche with the breath and thymos with the blood. But in his book The Origins of European Thought, R. B. Onians shows that the “breath-soul” is actually more appropriate to thymos, which is spoken of as feeling and thinking, as being active in the chest and lungs (phrenes) as well as the heart.2 Psyche, on the other hand, was associated with the head and acted as a sort of life principle, the force that keeps us alive.3 When we die, psyche leaves the body and lives on in Hades, the Underworld of death. Thymos, meanwhile, also leaves the body at death but it does not live on.
Greek thinkers continued to differ about the location of the soul in the body as much as our tribal cultures. Epicurus placed it in the chest; Aristotle, in the heart; Plato, in the head.4 But, more and more, psyche began to take precedence over thymos, so that by the fifth century BC it had come to include thymos, which was still vaguely located in the chest but no longer identified with the “breath-soul.” At the same time, psyche was thought of as more diffuse, mainly—but no longer exclusively—associated with the head.5 Already we begin to suspect that the soul is so difficult to pin down precisely because its own nature is to present us with differing pictures of itself.
There was disagreement, too, about psyche’s fate after death. For example, some said that it was a breath that dispersed in the air on the death of the body, whereas others thought that Empedocles was right: that the soul is a daimon that is reborn in other people.6 Most, however, continued to believe that the soul goes to Hades, where it flits about in the form of an eidolon, a “shade” or image, “the visible but impalpable semblance of the once living.”7
Even in Homeric times there is no sense in which psyche is responsible, as thymos is, for thinking and feeling. It is not concerned, that is, with consciousness either in life or in death. At least, it is not concerned with what we think of as ordinary daylight consciousness. Psyche has its own consciousness, not thymos’ “life-consciousness,” infused with warmth and feeling, but a colder, more impersonal “death-consciousness.” Psyche’s home is Hades, whose ruler (also called Hades, god of the dead) possessed a famous helmet. Enclosing the head—that is, the psyche8—it made the wearer invisible. This is a metaphor for the way the invisible soul hides a death-consciousness within life. Psyche is the perspective of death concealed within all living things, where death is not extinction but another, more profound kind of life.
According to Heraclitus (535–475 BC), we can take this insight a step further. Whatever thymos wishes for, he said, it purchases at the cost of psyche.9 There is a reciprocal, even antagonistic, relationship between our warm, waking, desiring conscious life and the life of psyche—which comes into its own in the dark, while we sleep, during dreams, after life. And just as our conscious wishes and desires sap the vitality of the unconscious psyche and cost the soul dear, so, conversely, psyche wishes to draw our conscious life downward, toward the deeper perspective of Hades. In fact, it was Heraclitus who first drew attention to that defining feature of soul that most concerns us here: depth.
“You could not find the ends of the soul,” he wrote, “though you travelled every way, so deep is its measure [logos].”10
The revolutionary idea that the soul is somehow at odds with the body, even opposed to it, was attributed to the followers of the legendary figure of Orpheus. No tribal member—no Homeric Greek—would have entirely separated soul from body. Even after death they remain tenuously linked. But the Orphics held that the soul was able to detach itself from the body and exist entirely independently. But where on earth did they get such an idea?
In The Greeks and the Irrational, Professor E. R. Dodds thought it most likely that they got the idea from the Scythians who lived to the northeast of the Black Sea, and the Thracians who lived on the East Balkan Peninsula. These tribes had in turn been influenced by the horse cultures of Central Asia and, even farther north, by the reindeer cultures of Siberia. They were influenced, in other words, by shamanistic cultures whose most striking feature is this: that the shaman enters a trance state and “flies” into the Otherworld, often carried Pegasus-like by a spirit horse or reindeer.11 He is no mere eidolon, or shadowy image, but his real self.
Orpheus, who was traditionally connected with Thrace, traveled into the Underworld of Hades, armed only with a lyre and his songs. Like the shaman’s sacred chants, they could charm the dangerous denizens of the Underworld and persuade them to release souls they had abducted. Orpheus sought the release of Eurydice, his wife, who had died of a snakebite. She symbolizes his own soul—which he retrieved from Hades, only to lose her at the last minute when he fatally looked back to make sure she was following him. (However, the earliest versions of this myth relate that he was successful in retrieving her from death.12)
Orpheus was the first Western shaman; and Orphism had a profound influence on Pythagoras, whom Dodds also calls the Greek equivalent of a shaman. His teachings and practices were in turn given philosophical expression by Plato, who thus combined the tradition of reason and logic with magical and religious ideas from, ultimately, Central Asia and Siberia. So real was the experience of the soul when out of the body that, for the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, the impermanent and corruptible body came to be seen as the “prison-house” or even the “tomb” of the immortal soul.13 This became one of Plato’s key doctrines. At the same time, the Underworld became less a shadowy grave of eidola than a realm more real than the everyday world.
However, the distinguished Egyptologist Jeremy Naydler takes a different view of how the Greeks arrived at this doctrine of the soul. He acknowledges Plato’s debt to the Pythagoreans but reminds us that it is by no means certain that Pythagoras was influenced by northern shamanic cultures. There is no tradition of his having visited there, for example. But there is a tradition of his having visited Egypt—for twenty-two years, according to Iamblichus—where he was said to have mastered hieroglyphs and to have been initiated into the mysteries of the gods.14 Pythagoras subsequently settled in southern Italy in the mid- to late sixth century BC, a region that had had links to Egypt for at least two hundred years. Plato established his own strong links with the Pythagoreans in this region, making three journeys there between 388 and 361 BC. He is also said to have visited Egypt once, or even twice, according to Diogenes Laertius and Cicero; while Strabo was shown by Egyptian locals the place where Plato stayed in Heliopolis.15 Thus Plato could well have derived his doctrine of the soul from the Egyptians, who had their own shamanistic tradition in which the soul existed independently of the body and was able to travel through the Otherworld.16
The Egyptians held a psychophysical view of the soul similar to that of the Homeric Greeks. The heart was their chief center of consciousness, whereas the belly was the center of “hot” or “cold” instinctive impulses. The limbs were the bearers of the will: strong arms or legs indicated the capacity to carry out one’s wishes effectively. Although the head was not the center of consciousness, it was most closely identified with the whole person. Just as the head, according to the Homeric view, carried the psyche as it traveled into the Underworld, so in Egypt the head wings its way through the Dwat—the Egyptian Otherworld—attached to the body of a bird. A human-headed bird is the hieroglyph for the ba, or soul.17
Like the psyche, the ba came into its own only when a person was asleep or dead—or in between: for example, in a trance state during initiation. The main thing was that the components of the body—heart, belly, limbs—“be stilled” so that the “soul-forces” that were normally distributed throughout the body “could be gathered into a unity and concentrated into the form of the winged ba.”18 According to Dodds, this is exactly what the Orphics did: they concentrated their psychic power to forge a unity of soul absent among the Homeric Greeks, for whom the soul was similarly distributed throughout the body. In this way they were able to experience the soul as an entity separate from the body. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates confirms Dodds’s view when he says that the practice of true philosophy demands katharsis, or purification, which “consists in separating the soul from the body and teaching the soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together from all parts of the body, and living so far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone and by itself, freed from the body as from fetters.”19
It has to be said that not everyone was a “true philosopher.” To become one required a high degree of initiation, just as it does for any shaman. This was also true of Egyptian religion: the operations of the ba took place in an esoteric, priestly context.20 Moreover, since the ba is usually depicted hovering over the inert body or loitering around the tomb of a dead person, its prime function might have been to see the body as inert or dead in order to know itself as independent of it. It provides us with firsthand proof, as it were, that although our bodies are subject to death and decay, some essential part of ourselves lives on.21 But the ba—it literally means “manifestation”—is not perhaps what we would understand by the word “soul” in its fullest sense since it seems reluctant to leave the body’s vicinity.22
The ba is only severed completely from the body when it becomes an akh, “which may be understood as the ba divinized.”23 The word “akh” has connotations of light, shining, illumination, and intelligence. It is like the inner core or higher manifestation of the ba. It is very like Plato’s idea that there is an immortal core to the psyche, which he variously calls logistikon, daimon, or nous.24 It is what I shall be calling “spirit.” We tend to use the terms “spirit” and “soul” interchangeably, but I shall be making a strong distinction between them later on. I will also be resisting the idea that spirit—like akh or nous—is “higher” than soul, and explaining that it is a characteristic of spirit always to project itself as “higher.”
We can attain wisdom only through the transformation of the ba into the akh because wisdom can come only by crossing the threshold of death and entering a state remote from the body. Plato agreed with the Egyptians: wisdom comes to one whose soul is free of the body’s opacity and can see into the reality of the Otherworld.25 This can be achieved by philosophers who “grow wings” and can therefore fly up to “the immortal region of the gods and, standing on the back of the universe, behold what lies beyond—the colourless, formless and intangible reality that only the nous is capable of perceiving.”26
The division of soul and body enabled a new kind of knowledge or, as Plato prefers, wisdom, through a mystical participation in a transcendent reality that paved the way for all subsequent mystical experience. Yet, paradoxically, the same division also led to an opposite kind of knowledge. By detaching us from the material world, it enabled us to develop that dualism out of which our modern scientific worldview was born.
Christianity adopted the Greek division between soul and body. For Christians the soul is our most treasured possession. It determines us as individuals. It is immortal. We are made in the image of God and, if we truly repent of our sins, our souls will go to heaven. We have Christ’s assurance for this when He tells the repentant thief who is crucified next to Him that he will go to heaven that very day. Christ, however, was not a theologian. We learn from Him no technical details about the soul. He prefers to talk in parables and to describe the Ground of Being—God—in personal terms: we are in the same relation to God, He says, as children are to an exacting but always loving father. No one can come to that Father in heaven except through Him, Jesus Christ, who is “the Way, the Truth, the Life.” Our task is to have faith in that fact, and to love God, our neighbors, and even our enemies.
The reason that I am not going to linger over Christian doctrine is, firstly, that this is not a book about theology but about psychology in its original meaning, as the logos of psyche. Secondly, whatever is most profound in Christian thinking about the soul comes from the Greeks. The early Church Fathers, such as Clement, Origen, and Augustine, were all Platonists. Thirdly, as a monotheistic religion, Christianity has a tendency to concentrate on spirit at the expense of soul. The first theologian, St. Paul, whose epistles are the earliest writings in the New Testament, mentions spirit (pneuma) countless times, but soul (psyche) only four times. This foreshadowed the official declaration of the Church Council of AD 869 that we are composed of a material and an immaterial part; but that the immaterial part is spirit, which thereafter subsumed soul, losing that essential distinction I will insist on later.27
When soul did reestablish itself it was not in its former preeminent position among the Platonist Church Fathers; it was through the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose theology is still pretty much that of official Roman Catholicism today. He did not derive his view of the soul from the Platonic tradition, but from Plato’s pupil (but not his follower) Aristotle: the soul was the entelechy, or “form,” of the body. For Aristotle, this meant that the soul is inseparable from the body and therefore mortal. Although Aquinas agreed that the soul is indeed the form of the body, he also thought that it does not depend on the body for its existence and that it survives death. A body without a soul, he reasoned, would be formless, not a proper body at all; and that is why the body disintegrates after death.28 Conversely, although the soul survives death, it is not properly a human soul without a body. Therefore, some sort of body has to accompany the soul into the afterlife. In other words, Aquinas did not finally resolve the problem of the soul’s relationship to the body. Even the doctrine of the immortality of the soul did not become Church dogma until the Lateran Council of 1513.
Aquinas also took on Aristotle’s belief that plants and animals have souls. The way the soul was pictured from the Middle Ages onward was as a threefold substance. We contained both the “vegetable soul” of plants and the “animal soul,” but we also had our own unique kind of soul—a “rational soul.” That is, we did not have three souls but, rather, the rational soul managed in some way to embrace the “lower” forms of the soul and to remain a unity. It was this rational soul that, after the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, enabled philosophers to quietly begin doing away with the word “soul” and to promulgate instead the idea that our highest faculty is merely rational. Indeed, their elevation of Reason during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment not only dropped the old association with soul but also led to a rationalism that denies soul altogether.
Meanwhile, the great Platonic tradition centered on the soul—to anticipate the next chapter—had also been excluded from Christendom. In my book The Philosophers’ Secret Fire I describe how it had flourished among the Neoplatonist and Hermetic philosophers who lived alongside Gnostics, Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics—and Christians—in that melting pot of cultures and religions based around the Hellenic city of Alexandria. Then, when in AD 330 the emperor Constantine declared that Christianity was to be the empire’s official religion, this “soul” tradition became suspect, even heretical, and either disappeared or was forced underground. Most of its writings, including much of Plato and Plotinus, was lost until the Renaissance a thousand years later. Indeed, their rediscovery provided the impetus behind the Renaissance, which was a rebirth of classical learning. So exciting and fruitful was this rebirth of the “soul tradition” that Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine who translated so many of the rediscovered texts, began to think of synthesizing a whole new religion out of Hermetic philosophy, Neoplatonism, alchemy, and the Jewish Kabbalah, with the aim of overcoming the destructive schism in Christianity between the Catholics and the new Protestants. His scheme was taken up with missionary zeal by his pupil Pico della Mirandola and by Giordano Bruno; and, in England, by the intelligentsia who surrounded Sir Philip Sidney—not the least of whom was the Renaissance magus par excellence, John Dee.
When this project was defeated by the rise of the new scientific method in the seventeenth century, our tradition was once again pushed underground, only to resurface in a different guise—as the Romantic worldview that sprang up among such German thinkers as Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and Goethe and was eagerly espoused by English poets, especially William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Submerged once again by the weight of nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalism and, equally, scientistic materialism, its latest incarnation was another exercise in shape-shifting: the depth psychology initiated by Sigmund Freud and elaborated by the great Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung.
So what are the basic tenets of and beliefs about the “soul” of this tradition? To answer this question I will take a representative figure: the leading Neoplatonist, Plotinus (AD 204–270), whose works opened the way for St. Augustine—that great lover of the soul—to be converted to Christianity.