Poetized State of Mind

The psychic condition Havelock names as the necessary medium of oral-encyclopedic culture. Before the alphabet, the Hellenic community preserved its canon — warfare, statecraft, genealogy, divine manners — in metrical formula, for unversified speech did not survive. Preservation required performance. Performance required that reciter and audience alike sink their individual awareness into the pattern being enacted. “He sank his personality in his performance. His audience in turn would remember only as they entered effectively and sympathetically into what he was saying” (Havelock 1963).

This is not metaphor. It is the phenomenology of a specific cultural medium. Havelock describes the re-enactment as proceeding “with lips, larynx, and limbs, and with the whole apparatus of their unconscious nervous system.” The whole community is, in his phrase, held in “a formulaic state of mind” — a condition of rhythmic identification with homer and the heroic exemplars. Psychologically, it is “an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification”; mechanically, it is “a continual repeating of rhythmic doings.”

The concept is load-bearing for the Lineage because it specifies what plato had to silence. The psyche-as-thinking-organ that emerges in the Republic cannot coexist with the poetized state of mind. The reflective interior requires detachment from the acoustic stream; self-scrutiny requires a pause the rhythmic medium does not permit. Havelock’s phrase thus describes the psychic condition Jung’s tradition calls participation mystique in its oldest historically datable form — the undifferentiated matrix from which the ego had not yet extracted itself. What erich-neumann names uroboric, Havelock names formulaic.

Relationships

Primary sources

havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)