Innards as Kosmos

The governing physics of the tragic interior: the outer world and the inner body are made of the same fabric. Padel: “Greek notions of femaleness interact with the basic Greek principle that the outer world, the kosmos, is made of the same fabric and structure as the inner.” Theagenes in the sixth century matched different gods to different portions of the splanchna; Empedocles’s physiological and cosmological speculations share one vocabulary; Hippocratic medicine assumes that seasons, winds, and humors work inside as they work outside.

This is the philological basis for sympathy and for the later alchemical correspondentia — as above, so below. Storms in the sea are storms in the splanchna; waves of cholos rise because waves rise. Divine conflict in the outer multiplicity of gods produces inner multiplicity of damaged innards: “Heracles, Orestes, and Io go mad because they exist in a universe in which one divinity opposes another” (Padel 1992). The tragic protagonist’s disintegration is the cosmos’s disintegration taken personally.

For the Seba lineage, innards-as-kosmos is the classical root of both the Hermetic correspondentia and the Jungian synchronicity. The anima-mundi of the Neoplatonists and Renaissance alchemists — the soul of the world as continuous with the soul of the person — is the philosophical elaboration of what tragedy already assumed.

Relationships

• splanchna
• porous-self
• flux-of-feeling
• sympathy
• anima-mundi

Primary sources

• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1992, ch. 8)
• Empedocles fragments
• Theagenes (sixth century BCE)