Inner Wind

Caswell’s fourth chapter defends the claim that Homeric thumos is etymologically and semantically the inner wind of the living person. Plato already proposed the derivation of θυμός from θύω (“to rush, run, flow”) at Cratylus 419e; Caswell accepts the derivation and builds the full comparative philology (Caswell 1990, p. 51).

The vocabulary of θυμός systematically converges with the vocabulary of winds and storms. The verbs ἄημι (“to blow”) and ὀρίνω (“to stir, rouse”), the nouns ἄτη and ἄελλα, the adjectives ἀλληκτός and θυμοραϊστής all belong to the same semantic field. The cosmic counterpart of θυμός is θύελλα, the storm wind. Its Latin cognates are animus (“soul”) and anima (“breeze”), which are themselves cognates of Greek ἄνεμος (“wind”). Fumus (“smoke, that which is blown on a breeze”) belongs in the family by a semantic specialization that preserves the breath-and-movement kernel (Caswell 1990, p. 61).

The parable is cosmic before it is interior. Odysseus receives the winds from Aiolos in bags that must remain sealed; his companions open them and are blown off course. Caswell reads this as the cosmic-level statement of the intra-psychic structure: “θυμός, like the winds, becomes destructive and uncontrollable when not properly contained, blowing the individual figuratively or the ship literally off course” (Caswell 1990, p. 60).

The concluding formulation: “θυμός is in fact the human counterpart of the winds, brought to animate the body by the winds as we see in the revival of Sarpedon, and carried away on the winds from the body once it has ceased to be able, for whatever reason, physically to continue breathing” (Caswell 1990, p. 62). This is the philological ground under every subsequent tradition-claim that the soul is breath, that inspiration is literal in-spiration, that the psyche is animated from without.

Relationships

Primary sources

caswell-study-thumos-early (Caswell 1990)