Free-Soul and Body-Soul

A typological distinction the Swedish historian of religion Ernst Arbman drew from comparative ethnography and which Jan Bremmer applied systematically to Homer in The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (1983): the free-soul is the soul that exists as a unitary entity of the person, becoming active especially when the body is inactive (sleep, swoon, death) and surviving death; the body-souls are the multiple powers that animate the living body and dissipate when life ends. Caswell adopts the schema as the framework for her semantic analysis: “Bremmer has found that the characteristics of ψυχή fit Arbman’s definition of the ‘free-soul,’ and that ψυχή became the soul of the dead. In relation to ψυχή, then, θυμός, μένος and νόος correspond to the body-souls, as opposed to the free-soul of the living” (Caswell 1990, p. 8).

The textual evidence is concentrated at the moment of death and the moment of swoon. At Iliad V.696–698 Sarpedon falls into syncope: his ψυχή leaves him, and Boreas — the North Wind — returns him his “wafted-away” θυμός; ψυχή departs and θυμός returns. At XXII.466–475 Andromakhe swoons at the sight of dead Hektor: again ψυχή wafts away “like smoke,” and revival comes when “her θυμός is gathering back into her φρήν” (Caswell 1990, pp. 12–14). At death proper, the θυμός “flies from the limbs” and ceases to exist as an entity; only the ψυχή crosses to Hades, where, Akhilleus notes, “there are no φρένες in it at all” (Iliad XXIII.103–104, cited at Caswell 1990, p. 17).

The framework matters for the Lineage because it organizes the philological evidence in a form already congenial to the depth-psychological reading. The body-souls — θυμός, μένος, νόος, the phrenes — are the plural, partially-agentive faculties whose health depends on containment and whose failure is the hero’s tragedy. The free-soul, psyche, is what survives the body’s dissolution and is, in the post-Homeric tradition, what migrates, is purified, and is rejoined to the One (Plotinus) or judged (Plato, Republic X). The two soul-types are not in competition; they are different jobs the unified post-classical “soul” was eventually asked to do.

Relationships

• psyche — the free-soul
• thumos — body-soul, dissipates at death
• noos — body-soul, the perceptive faculty
• psyche-breath-soul — the breath-character of the free-soul
• homeric-plural-self — the plural self the body-souls compose
• homeric-psychology
• jan-n-bremmer — the Arbmanian framework’s importation into classical philology

Primary sources

• caswell-study-thumos-early (Caswell 1990, pp. 8, 12–14, 17)
• bremmer-early-greek-concept (Bremmer 1983, pp. 54–58)
• iliad (V.696–698; XXII.466–475; XXIII.103–104)
• odyssey (Homer)