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Double motivation

Double motivation

Double motivation names the Homeric grammar in which a mortal acts and a god acts through the mortal at the same time, and the mortal remains responsible. Arthur Adkins’s classic formulation: “Even when the gods are expressly said to ‘put might (or fear) into’ a man, he remains responsible for his actions” (Adkins 1960, “Will and Compulsion”). At Iliad 13, Idomeneus attempts to excuse Greek failure as the will of Zeus; Poseidon replies that whoever ceases to fight of his own accord will become food for the dogs. The tide may be against one; still one must keep swimming. No fighting nation, Adkins observes, could permit divine determinism as a blanket excuse: “it supplies nothing but a justification for cowardice.” The Homeric characters themselves distinguish empirically between divine and ordinary causation: Nestor advises Agamemnon on tactical arrangements by which he may discover whether his failure to take Troy is “the consequence of a divine decree or of his men’s cowardice and ignorance of war” (Adkins 1960). Dodds reinforces the structural point: “Ate in Homer is not itself a personal agent” but names the inner event the hero undergoes when a god has reached into his phrenes (Dodds 1951, p. 6); the man whose phrenes are filled remains the subject of the action that follows.

Ruth Padel elaborates the anatomical grammar. Homeric gods reach into the body: “Homeric gods put or throw ideas and feelings into human innards” (Padel 1994, p. 17). The splanchna — entrails, organs of feeling — are the site where divinity acts on the human. This is not metaphor in the modern sense. Emotion or inspiration is, at one level, “divinity’s active interest in the entrails” (Padel 1994, p. 17). The same innards that register feeling register, simultaneously, the incursion of the god.

This grammar is the Homeric root of what the Lineage will later name the daimon and what Jung will name the complex and the archetype: the interior force that acts on the ego from a place the ego did not make and does not fully govern, and from whose action moral life nevertheless proceeds. The depth tradition’s entire doctrine of possession — of the god who seizes, the complex that grips, the archetypal image that compels — begins in this Homeric joint agency.

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