Pre-Homeric Magic Stratum

In the closing pages of his Homer chapter Snell concedes — and the concession is theoretically load-bearing — that “Homer’s view of the human soul has its roots in such a ‘magic’ stratum. For it is only too obvious that psychic organs such as the noos and the thymos, incapable as they are of spontaneous thought or action, are at the mercy of wizardry, and that men who interpret their own mental processes along these lines consider themselves a battleground of arbitrary forces and uncanny powers” (Snell 1953, p. 22).

This is the depth tradition’s foundational sentence in philological dress. The pre-Homeric Greek experiences inwardness as the meeting place of organs that do not initiate and powers that do — winds, gods, daimons, the dead. The Olympian religion of Homer is for Snell a partial domestication of this stratum: “The heroes of the Iliad, however, no longer feel that they are the playthings of irrational forces; they acknowledge their Olympian gods who constitute a well-ordered and meaningful world.” Homer civilizes the magic stratum without abolishing it.

The depth tradition reads this with a different valence. What Snell calls the magic stratum is what Jung calls the autonomy of the archetype and what the archaic remnant tradition documents as still operative in the modern psyche. The “battleground of arbitrary forces and uncanny powers” is not a primitive past Europe outgrew but the perennial substrate on which the consolidated ego builds — and against which, in dream, possession, complex, and breakdown, the ego perennially struggles. Snell writes the obituary; the depth tradition writes the resurrection.

Relationships

Primary sources

snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953, p. 22)