SOUL AND WORLD-SOUL
According to his pupil Porphyry, Plotinus “was caught by a passion for philosophy” and studied in Alexandria before moving at the age of forty to Rome. During his life there he went to fight for the Romans in Persia, where he took the opportunity to study what the “magi and the Brahmans” believed.1
Plotinus was a Neoplatonist. That is, he took the dialogues of Plato as his starting point, and elaborated on them. We must remember that, for Plato, reality consisted of an ideal world of eternal Forms. This was the “intelligible” world known as nous. The Forms are the blueprints for everything that exists in this world. Every tree or animal, for example, is determined by, and participates in, the Form of the Tree or the Form of the Animal, which in turn contain the Form of the Oak, say, or the Form of the Mouse. Abstract concepts, too, have their Forms. We know that something is good, true, or beautiful to the extent that it participates in the Forms of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Indeed Plato sometimes calls this trio the ultimate reality; at other times he prefers a kind of monotheism whereby everything aspires to the Form of the Good alone.
Our world is not created by an all-powerful Judeo-Christian type of God, producing the universe out of nothing. It is made by a creator god whom Plato calls the Demiurge and who is more like an artisan: he looks into the intelligible world of the Forms and copies—crafts, molds, sculpts, and cobbles together—the whole of our universe from what he sees therein. Thus the world we call reality is in fact a replica, shadow, or mirror image of reality.
Having made the world, the Demiurge brings it alive, as if it were a great organism, by weaving throughout its fabric a soul. Plato called it psyche tou kosmou, the psyche of the cosmos. But we know it better—after the Latin Anima Mundi—as the Soul of the World.
Plotinus sometimes follows his Platonist predecessors in holding the view that reality consists of two worlds, the ideal world of the Forms (or nous) and the world of disorganized matter (our sensory world). The two are linked by soul, which also organizes the world of matter according to the Forms to make the orderly universe we inhabit.
At other times, he prefers the theory, adopted from Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, that soul does not so much bring together the two worlds but is the product of one—nous—and produces the other, our world. Each level of reality emanates from the one above as light emanates from the sun or heat from fire. All three levels ultimately emanate from a fourth: a God-like entity he calls the One.
Plotinus was not altogether satisfied with this hierarchical model of the cosmos. He sensed, perhaps, that hierarchies are always exactly that—models—and, as such, useful for picturing reality but also liable to distort it by being taken too literally and thus becoming rigid.
A more fluid, more dynamic—more realistic—way of envisaging the cosmos is to say that it consists of soul alone.2 Plotinus was the first philosopher to seize on Plato’s world-soul and make it “the cosmic force that unifies, organizes, sustains and controls every aspect of the world.”3 He even compares the motion of soul to a Shiva-like cosmic dance, in which everything is patterned, meaningful, and self-delighting. According to this model, soul is not generated by nous, generating our world in turn. Instead, the intelligible world of nous is simply a sort of refined, spiritual aspect of soul, whereas our sensory world is its material aspect—and the One is the unity of soul even as it manifests in all its multiplicity. Or, to put it another way, it is as if the whole cosmos is a single oceanic flow composed of soul-stuff. It is no longer seen as having four levels, each transcending the next, but as different images enfolded or immanent in each other, like a nest of Russian dolls. For example, the Form of the Tree is no longer transcendent, existing outside this world, but immanent in it as the inner ideal tree—its numen, or spirit, as the Romans would say: its dryad.
Dryads are one example of what the ancient Greeks called daimons. They were held to inhabit the Soul of the World. They have some remarkable characteristics: firstly, they are always ambiguous, if not downright contradictory. They are both material and immaterial, for example, which is why anthropologists mislead us when they refer to the daimons as “spirits.” They are highly elusive, only caught in glimpses from the corner of the eye, if at all. They are shape-shifters. Fleeting, marginal creatures, they prefer to appear in liminal zones (limen = “threshold”) such as bridges, crossroads, and shorelines in the landscape; or in time, at dusk, midnight, the summer solstice, or Halloween; or in the mind, between consciousness and the unconscious, waking and sleeping. In fact, there’s no boundary the daimons do not straddle, including the boundary between fact and fiction, literal and metaphorical.4
Every culture has always had its daimons, from the Greek naiads, nymphs, dryads, and fauns to the Roman genii loci, who inhabit Nature, and the lares and penates, who inhabit households; from the pan-European fairies and elves, hulder folk and land spirits, to the Chinese kwei-shins and the Arab jinns.5 All of these are as likely to be mischievous as benign. The fairies are as famous for leading us astray or blighting our crops as they are for healing us or leading us to treasure—it may depend on how we treat them; for all cultures agree that, although we must keep a proper distance from the daimons, we must also pay them proper respect and attention, leaving food out for them and remembering them in our rituals. Much the same could be said of our relationship with soul. Christianity, unhappy as it is with ambiguity, divided and polarized the daimons into angels and devils. The act of polarizing made them literal beings, which daimons are not. They are real, and even, at times, physical—but, like soul itself, cannot be taken literally. Where it did not divide the daimons, Christianity tried either to cast them out—armies of friars were sent to exorcise the fairies from farms and dairies, woods and streams, as Geoffrey Chaucer describes in “The Tale of the Wife of Bath”;6 or to tame them—many a daimon of stream and rock and well was “christened” with the name of a saint or of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Paradoxical, elusive, borderline, shape-shifting creatures—we see how the daimons provide us with an outstanding metaphor for the nature of the soul (or, as we might now say, the unconscious psyche), which, as the Neoplatonists pointed out, they personified.
Perhaps their most crucial function was to act as intermediaries between this world and the Otherworld of the Forms. Socrates, Plato’s mentor, puts this vividly in the Symposium: we can have no contact with God or the gods, he says, except through the daimons, who “interpret and convey the wishes of men to the gods and the will of gods to men.… Only through the daimons is there conversation between men and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.”7 Anyone, he adds, who is an expert in such intercourse—we would call such people shamans, mediums, mystics, visionaries, poets, and even psychotherapists—is “a daimonic man” or woman. It is worth noting that the arch-daimon is Eros: Love.
The Neoplatonist Iamblichus (c. 245–326), who attempted a whole system of daimonic classification, recognized that soul itself does not relish hierarchical schemes of either the cosmos or the psyche, but prefers concrete images and, especially, personifications. He saw the intelligible world of the Forms, therefore, as the realm of the gods and the Soul of the World as that of the daimons. Just as we can never know the Forms in themselves but only as the images or objects they are the Forms of, so we cannot see the gods except through the appearance they take on. The daimons are exactly these appearances—the faces that the transcendent gods show to us. Proclus (412–485) tells us that they are a kind of “preceding retinue”8 of the gods: the aspects of the gods we encounter before we meet the gods themselves. This has important implications for depth psychology, as I hope to show. For now, I will merely emphasize the crucial role of daimons as Eros-like intermediaries without whom we cannot know the shining reality that lies behind this shadow world. “He who denies the daimons,” wrote Plutarch, “breaks the chain that unites men to the gods.”9
The Soul of the World has been banished from religion and philosophy, but like the daimons who are said to inhabit it, it simply shape-shifts and reappears in another guise. For example, it can be discerned in the way that ecologists have commandeered James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis” and made Gaia the animating principle, like a goddess, of an organic world. Its return can also be seen in Einstein’s remodeling of the universe, in which gravity is less like a force and more like a field. Not a field within space-time but a field that contains the whole universe including space-time:
The cosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as it ever stretches, from being wet in the water; it is at the mercy of the sea which spreads out, taking the net with it just so far as it will go, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place.10
In this metaphor, the sea can be read as the gravitational field in which our universe is extended like a net. But the image is not Einstein’s; it comes from Plotinus, and he is describing the way the universe is extended in, and embraced by, the Soul of the World—the model from which Einstein’s picture is unwittingly drawn. Nowadays, it is the World Wide Web, which is an unconscious attempt to reproduce, but in a literal fashion, the deep global intelligence of the world-soul.
In the history of thought, however, the two most important reworkings of the Soul of the World are the Romantic concept of Imagination and the concept of the unconscious, notably C. G. Jung’s collective unconscious, which I will address shortly.
The idea that the chief faculty of the soul is not Reason but Imagination was vigorously promulgated in the second half of the fifteenth century by Ficino, who derived the notion from Plotinus. It was further expounded by Jacob Boehme in the early 1600s. He boldly asserted that Imagination is, like its root metaphor—the world-soul—the principle that holds everything together; but he added a Protestant spin: Imagination is the creative energy of God, by which He made the universe. Moreover, it was this primordial Imagination that had been embodied—made flesh—by Jesus Christ. Nearly two hundred years later “Jesus the Imagination” became central to the poetry and art of William Blake, who insisted that reality is above all imaginative—and not the gray, rational reality of orthodox mainstream thinkers such as Newton, Locke, and Hume.
The primacy of Imagination was the defining feature of Romanticism. It took on particular force in the late eighteenth century, at the time of Blake, because the exaltation of Reason during the Enlightenment was fast becoming an ideology—rationalism—that denied and even demonized anything it considered superstitious, murky, irrational, or even ambiguous, from dreams and daimons, to soul and imagination itself. All the English Romantic poets balked at this, the second generation of Keats, Shelley, and Byron no less than Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—who spoke for them all when he ringingly declared: “The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.…”12
It is difficult for us, as children of the Enlightenment, to grasp what he means. We think of imagination as something desirable in children but less so in adults, who have to “come down to earth,” “face up to reality,” and so forth. We think of it either as the pictures that come to mind when we daydream and fantasize; or as related to memory—the images of things we recall when they are absent. Either way, imagination is generally held to deal with things that are less than real and soon dispersed like smoke upon the cold breeze of “reality.”
But for everyone of a Romantic disposition, Imagination is reality itself. Like another world it has its own laws and denizens, its own spontaneous life quite different from ours, even if we picture it as being inside us. It is dynamic, daimon-ridden, and does not depend on us at all. On the contrary, it underpins all our perceptions. It generates myths. The universal stories that shape and govern our lives, as well as the lives of cultures and economies, are all born in the thunder of the Primary Imagination, of which our feeble imaginings are but echoes. Every tale we tell, yarn we spin, theory we hypothesize, has its roots in Imagination. It is synonymous with soul, which is nothing if not “the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy that mode which recognises all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”13
So jaded are we by an old materialism and an even older rationalism that we habitually denigrate imagination or damn it with faint praise, leaving it to excitable children, unrealistic poets, or unreliable storytellers. Yet its strangeness and beauty are still available to all of us, at every moment. For it is not only an Otherworld, but the reality behind this world. And because we participate in it spontaneously, we can see into it, not only in poetic trance, visionary journey, or lucid dream, but simply whenever we attend to the things of this world deeply, intensely, and selflessly. Whenever, that is, we imagine. Every little effort of imagination is supplied by Imagination itself and also is a means by which we can begin to enter fully and creatively into it.
The relationship between the Soul of the World and the individual soul is easy to put into words but difficult to picture: our souls are microcosms, miniature versions of the cosmos. We consist of levels of being that extend from the material body, through soul, to the intelligible level (nous) and finally to the One. The task of the human soul is simply to return from its exile in our shadowy, less-than-real material world to an ecstatic union with the One Source of all reality. It is a return because everything emanated from the One in the first place.
We can imagine the soul’s journey as vertical, traveling upward through the vast architecture of the macrocosm. Alternatively we can picture the journey as downward, into our own depths, where the ever-living Forms or gods dwell and, beyond them, the ultimate Unity. These journeys are of course not actual. They are metaphors for the transformation of the soul. They are not really “up” or “down”—these are only ways of speaking in order that we can produce images of the soul’s transformation. Soul is nonspatial14 but it always represents itself spatially, for example as “inside” us or “outside.” A concentric model of the soul might be more apt, perhaps, than the vertical. We can see the body as in soul, soul as in nous, nous as in the One. Soul is not, as we usually think, inside the body because, as Plotinus reminds us, the Greek meaning of the preposition “in” does not so much refer to a place as to being in something’s power. Body is “in” soul because it depends on soul’s power.15
So we have to make another leap of the imagination and picture the concentric model of the soul made dynamic and fluid, each of its levels co-inhering, to use an old theological word. Now we are no longer arranged hierarchically. We are all soul. It is just that each of us is an individual manifestation of the collective world-soul. Each of its levels is now a way that soul represents itself—now as an individual, now as collective.
When Marsilio Ficino began to translate the newly discovered Neoplatonist writings into Latin, making them available to fifteenth-century western Europeans, he was struck by the grandeur of their conception of the human soul. As a model in miniature of the cosmos, it is “the greatest of all miracles in nature,” he wrote. “All other things beneath God are always one single being: but the soul is all things together.… Therefore it may be rightly called the centre of nature, the middle term of all things … the bond and juncture of the universe.”16
Ficino is contemplating with amazement how we contain the immensity of the world-soul, a whole “inner” universe whose study would become depth psychology. But we must remember, too, that we are also and paradoxically contained by the world-soul, like droplets in the ocean. This is the vision of traditional cultures whose members see the world-soul “outside” themselves as an ensouled Nature in which each person is only one soul among many.
For Plotinus, “the” soul does not always need the definite article because it is at root the world-soul.17 It is the source of life not just in the body but in the whole universe. It goes without saying that it cannot die. By the same token it cannot come into being. Soul has always been, and always is, in its own timeless and nonspatial realm. The Neoplatonists thought it irrational of Christians—with whom they agreed about the omnipresence of the divine and the immortality of the individual soul—to believe that this soul exists after death without also believing that it exists before birth.18 This discrepancy led to differing beliefs about how we acquire knowledge.
Aquinas followed Aristotle in thinking that we know nothing until experience informs us. Our souls come into the world like blank slates on which the data received through our senses writes. John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) made this doctrine central to the Enlightenment; and it remains, I suppose, pretty much the modern orthodox view. Plato and his followers, however, tell us that the soul carries into the world knowledge of the eternal Forms it had before birth. It is just that it forgets this knowledge in transit. However, by the exercise of what Plato calls anamnesis, or recollection, we know truth when we see it. Learning is less about cognition than recognition—something we hear or read about strikes us immediately as true, as if we had always known it but were only now remembering.
Just as soul is both individual and collective, it is also paradoxical in relation to the body. It is both continuous with the body, yet also discontinuous, since it can leave the body and live separately from it. As we have seen, traditional cultures simply accept this contradiction. But Western culture has seen it as a problem that needs solving. For instance, in the Middle Ages, the rational soul was thought to be fixed to the body gumphis subtilibus, “with subtle little nails” called “spirits.” But this picturesque solution still clashes with the perennial conundrum: if the “spirits” are material at all then both ends of the bridge, as it were, rest on one side of the chasm; if they are not, then both rest on the other. No matter how finely you attenuate materiality it remains material until, at some point, it is not. Conversely, no matter how gradually spirit is made denser there is the same point of discontinuity.19
As I write, teams of subatomic physicists in an underground complex bigger than an inverted cathedral are firing up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the hope of discovering the legendary Higgs boson. This highly elusive “particle” will explain why the universe has mass. For what is missing from the scientific model of the universe is the thing that turns particles into matter; or, rather, that gives matter its mass—without mass there would only be radiation, only particles moving at the speed of light. The Higgs boson (or “God particle”) is thought to be able to congeal these particles into the substantial bodies the universe seems to contain.
We have here the latest attempt to solve the problem of the relationship between the immaterial and the material—what was traditionally called spirit and matter. It is the same problem on the macrocosmic scale as, on the microcosmic, the problem of the relationship between soul and body. We may call the latter the mind/body or mind/brain problem, just as we might call the former the matter/energy problem, but it is the same old problem in modern dress.
We can of course “solve” the problem by abolishing one side or the other of the equation. Philosophical materialists, for example, simply do away with soul: everything is only matter; we are only our bodies. On the other hand, those of a spiritualistic or theosophical disposition see the universe as a wholly spiritual phenomenon consisting of many “planes” that “vibrate” at different rates. The lower the rate of vibration, the denser the level until, at the lowest rate, the material world seamlessly appears. This is a metaphor essentially drawn from sound. A similar metaphor was favored by the Orphic tradition and enthusiastically taken up by the Romantics: the material universe is a harmonious resonance of a prior spiritual Platonic world in the same way that certain strings on an instrument resonate in harmony with other strings that have been plucked. Plotinus used a similar analogy to explain how the changeless soul nevertheless effects changes in the body. Soul is like a perfect piece of music and the body is like a stringed instrument. When the music is played, it is not the music that moves but the strings—whereas the strings cannot move unless the music directs them.20
For his description of the macrocosm, however, Plotinus usually employed, as we have seen, a metaphor drawn from light. Light does not vibrate or resonate, but emanate. Thus the whole cosmos emanates from the One. Discontinuity between levels is brushed over by the continuity of emanation that somehow, at its farthest reaches, gives rise to the material world. These metaphors are not causes. They are imaginatively satisfying but not mechanically so.
The main trouble with the whole spirit/matter, soul/body problem is that it is not soluble. It is what used to be called a mystery. It is a modern error to take mysteries literally—that is, to turn them into problems that then have to be solved. We cannot solve mysteries—we can only enter into them; and then it is we who are solved or dissolved—transformed in such a way that we see the “problem” quite differently, as a delightful paradox, for instance, like the traditional cultures who are unworried by the contradiction between soul and body.
The attraction of the Christian treatment of the soul’s relations with the body is that it recognizes the discontinuity between them, notably at death; but it also resists separating them. It insists that the soul passes into immortality accompanied by a resurrected body. “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body,” thought St. Paul. But what is a “spiritual body” if not a contradiction? To say it is pure spirit is to deny the body; and to say the body is literally resurrected is to lapse into absurdity, something that does not deter fundamentalist Christians. St. Paul’s spiritual body can only be something like the “subtle body” proposed by many Neoplatonists. In his attempt to bridge the gap, Proclus, for example, suggested that we have two “vehicles” of the soul, one of which is immortal while the other perishes.21 But no matter how we multiply subtle bodies—some theosophists claim at least seven, including the etheric, astral, and spectral bodies—discontinuity has to occur at some point.
It is easy to predict that the physicists will in fact “detect” the Higgs boson. But its nature will remain a mystery. It will be highly elusive, shape-changing, mediatory, and, like all “virtual particles,” ambiguous—not quite matter, not really energy; sort of there but also not there. It will be, in other words, a daimon, which will retreat at the speed of light into mystery just as we seem able to pin it down.
Western philosophy does not on the whole subscribe to metaphors of vibration, resonance, and emanation—it remains steadfastly materialistic—but it does favor the principle of continuity, expressed in the old scholastic doctrine that “Nature makes no leaps.” There is to be no abrupt transition between different orders of reality, whether between the spiritual and the material, or between species and genera in our modern theory of evolution. There must always be a Higgs-boson-like intermediary. This principle is derived from Iamblichus, whose Law of Mean Terms emphasized the role of the middle term between two extremes. The example he gives is that of daimons. Indeed, soul itself—the realm of the daimonic—is such a term since it both links gods to men and also sets them apart, at the proper distance from each other. In this way the transcendence of the divine was guaranteed while, at the same time, the gulf between us and the gods was prevented from becoming unbridgeable.22
Like the daimons, soul observes both continuity and discontinuity. It does not have to be either connected or opposed to the body because the body is its outward image. Like all images it is definite and concrete, but that does not mean it is literal. It is the distinctive perspective of modernity to identify the physical with the literal. This makes of the body an intransigent, opaque lump when really it is fluid, transparent, and subtle. It can be imagined differently—as a rich storehouse of metaphors. All the body’s moods, exaltations, sensations, ailments, and symptoms can be read, not just physically or organically, but metaphorically as well. I can even envision someone imaginative enough to deliteralize their own body altogether, to blur its borders, to make it transparent to soul and thus free of the literal constraints of our Newtonian world. Such a person would apparently defy the laws of space, matter, time, and causality as we do in dreams. They would be able to levitate, for instance, or walk on water; see into the past or future; effect things acausally by healing the sick, for example, or even feeding a multitude with a few loaves of bread. But, of course, all such marvels are routinely attributed to saints, sages, and shamans, and even to ordinary people in heightened states, such as the distraught mother who lifted the bus off her crushed child.
On the other hand, it is part of soul’s self-imagining also to present itself not as an image of the body but as separate from the body. We need not, however, take this literally either. Soul cannot be identified with any literal perspective. Its separateness from the body is a metaphor for its reluctance to be defined and pinned down in any single image. As the very thing that sees through everything else, soul is not itself anything. It takes on the coloration of whatever image is currently embodying it. The very word “soul” is an image for itself, which, in itself, is “empty,” like the Tao, drawing its substance from whatever forms it assumes. We do not have to choose between continuity and discontinuity because there is no contradiction soul cannot, like its daimons, overcome simply by shifting our point of view.