Middle Voice

The middle voice is the third verbal diathesis of Ancient Greek, alongside the active and the passive. It names events in which the subject is implicated in the action without being its sole agent: events suffered, undergone, or enacted with the self as both source and scene. Peisomai — “I shall be persuaded / I shall suffer” — is a middle; so is gignomai, “I become.” The middle voice is not a grammatical anomaly; it is the native register in which much of Greek experience is reported.

For the Seba tradition the middle voice is load-bearing because the archetypal experience — being possessed by the god, moved by the daimon, taken up by the complex — is a middle-voice event. The active-passive binary of post-classical grammar abolishes exactly the register the tradition needs. See allan-middle-voice-ancient for the definitive modern study and peterson-abolished-middle-retrieving for the depth-psychological retrieval.

Relationships

• allan-middle-voice-ancient
• middle-voice-of-reverence
• peterson-abolished-middle-retrieving