The Discovery of the Body

The body, like the soul, is for Snell a historical achievement rather than a natural fact. Homeric Greek has no single noun for “the body” of a living person. Where the modern reader expects soma there are instead μέλη (limbs) and γυῖα (limbs as articulated joints), or finer designations — hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, thighs. Soma in Homer almost always means corpse: it is the body once the psyche has departed.

Snell’s formulation: “Homeric man had a body exactly like the later Greeks, but he did not know it qua body, but merely as the sum total of his limbs… body, soma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as μέλη or γυῖα, i.e. as limbs” (Snell 1953, p. 8). The discovery of the unified body and the discovery of the unified soul are complementary events in the history of the Greek-speaking interior — soma and psyche are evolved as a paired terminology, “more likely than not it was psyche which first started on its course,” with soma following as the term for the living body once the corpse-meaning had been displaced by the new word for the departing soul (Snell 1953, p. 16).

For the depth tradition the implication is precise: the modern Cartesian dualism is not a fall from a Christian unity nor a metaphysical mistake to be undone by somatic psychology. It is the late terminus of a Greek consolidation. Recovering the body as locus of soul — what Jung gestures toward and the embodied-consciousness tradition makes explicit — is, philologically speaking, a return through the consolidation rather than a leap past it.

Relationships

• bruno-snell
• snell-discovery-of-the-mind
• homeric-plural-self
• psyche-breath-soul
• somatic-unconscious
• embodied-consciousness

Primary sources

• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953, pp. 8, 16)