The Knees and the Marrow

Onians devotes a chapter (“The Strength”) and a substantial arc of the book to a claim that is, on first encounter, strange: the knees hold the life-substance, continuous with the marrow of the spine, continuous with the seed, continuous with the fluid of the head. When Homer says the knees are “loosed,” “impaired,” or “heavy” in exhaustion (Onians 1951, p. 187), the phrasing is not metaphor. The knees contain sucus — a generative fluid bound up with sexuality, strength, and the life-soul.

“Attention to the knees was, I suggest, an appeal to the genius in act as so often in word. With per tuum tegenium opsecro, etc., we may compare per tua genua te opsecro, ‘I beseech you by your knees to tell us’” (Onians 1951, p. 181). To grasp a suppliant’s knees was to touch the concentrated life-substance of the genius. Alcaeus’ version of Hesiod implies that the “liquid in the flesh is dependent upon that in the head and knees” (p. 193); the marrow-vat of Celtic myth restores life and strength (p. 193 n. 6); the marrow is “the marrow of men” (p. 222), identified with the life-substance itself.

The concept binds the archaic European anthropology into a single somatic circuit: head to knee to thumb to heel, carrying one continuous soul-substance through the body. The modern depth tradition’s recovery of the body as imaginal terrain — the body-as-soul of james-hillman and thomas-moore — walks the same circuit.

Relationships

Primary sources

origins-of-european-thought (Onians 1951, pp. 181, 187, 193, 222, 529)