Genius

The genius is the Roman inheritor of the Homeric head-seated life-soul. Onians tracks the evidence through Latin poetry, ritual, and household religion: the genius is located in the head (Horace’s “a god for every head, a god changeful of countenance,” in unum quodque caput, voltu mutabilis, Onians 1951, p. 130); it is the source of procreation, strength, and selfhood; oaths and appeals invoke it by the head or, equivalently, by the knees, since the knees hold its concentrated life-substance: per tuum tegenium opsecro is functionally parallel to per tua genua te opsecro (p. 181).

The genius of the paterfamilias receives the rites of the family; the genius of Caesar became a state cult, received libation, and was explicitly addressed as pater patriae (p. 138). In the Parentalia the departed soul is called the genius of the dead person but, when disembodied and no longer procreating, is also named umbra and anima (p. 132).

The genius is the Latin form of the same archaic European conviction that the soul is distributed, holy, and localized in particular parts of the living body. It is a direct precursor of the post-Jungian daimon — the personified life-principle that speaks through a man and belongs to him without being identical to his ego. james-hillman on the soul’s code, on daimon, on the acorn that unfolds into the man, speaks in a vocabulary that Onians has documented as two thousand years older than Zurich.

Relationships

• psyche-breath-soul
• daimon
• knees-life-substance

Primary sources

• origins-of-european-thought (Onians 1951, pp. 130, 132, 138, 181)