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Pneuma

Pneuma

Πνεῦμα — breath, wind, spirit. In the depth tradition it is the oldest Western name for the invisible animating principle that crosses, in a single word, the registers of physiology, cosmology, and theology. The chain runs Anaximenean aer, Stoic pneuma (graded hektikon / physikon / psychikon), Plotinian polemic (and the late Platonic ochēma-pneuma), Septuagintal ruach, Pauline Πνεῦμα Ἅγιον, Hermetic anima mundi, alchemical spiritus, Jungian spiritus mercurius and spirit-archetype.

The originating intuition is Anaximenes’ fragment B 2: “Just as our psyche, which is air, controls us, so breath and air encompass the whole world-order” (Sullivan 1995, p. 102). Edinger reads the symbol-complex this opened: “The connection aer—pneuma—psyche—zoe—theion remained a constant one… The symbolism here is basically air-breath-wind-spirit” (Edinger 1999, p. 21). Jung observes that in the centuries after Christ “the words nous and pneuma were used indiscriminately, and the one could easily stand for the other” (Jung 1958, par. 356) — and that the alchemists, taking pneuma and spiritus in “the original concrete sense of ‘air in motion’” (Jung 1967, par. 261), made of it the volatile principle of the work.

To think pneuma in Sebastian’s register is to keep the breath in the word — the physical fact (air enters; the dead release it) on which every later metaphysics has been a successive elaboration.

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