The Homeric Simile as Phenomenology

The Homeric simile is not literary ornament. When Homer says that Hector goes against his enemies “like a lion,” the comparison registers a real continuity: “the warrior and the lion are activated by one and the same force; on more occasions than one this force is expressly stated to be the menos, the forward impulse” (Snell 1953, p. 202). The animals of the Homeric similes “are not only symbols, but the particular embodiments of universal vital forces”; their distribution among species is a phenomenology of the powers that move men and beasts alike (Snell 1953, p. 202).

bruno-snell argues that this is the working method of an “earlier mentality” that has not yet abstracted quality from substance: “unaware of these distinctions, [it] is fully absorbed by the totality of the image, and is thus forced to describe peculiarities by means of comparisons” (Snell 1953, p. 203). The lion does not symbolise the warrior’s courage; the warrior and the lion participate in one menos. The natural elements function the same way: “wind and rain, sea and river … above all they are regarded as the conductors of fundamental forces such as are alive also in man. Indeed man realizes the forces within him most distinctly when he musters them to combat the corresponding forces outside him” (Snell 1953, p. 203).

This is the philological prefiguration of what Jung will name the archetype: a transpersonal pattern that appears equally in psyche and in nature, of which the mythic and natural images are particular embodiments. The simile is the Homeric way of seeing the soul: by referring it outward to the lion, the wave, the storm, the inner forces are made visible in their kindred forms without.

Relationships

• archetype
• homeric-plural-self
• thumos
• menos
• mundus-imaginalis

Primary sources

• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953)