Psyche as Breath-Soul

In Homer the psyche is not yet the thinking, feeling, perceiving soul of Plato. It is the breath-soul, the life-soul — that which leaves a man at death ut’ oneiros, “as a phantom such as is met in a dream,” and persists in the house of Hades as an eidolon (Onians 1951, p. 95). Perception, thought, and feeling in Homer are not the work of psyche but of thumos, phrenes, and ker in the chest.

Onians tracks the transition in detail: “The psychē gradually ceases to be merely the life or life-soul which it was in Homer and Hesiod, etc., and begins to be conceived of and spoken of as concerned in perception, thought, and feeling, which had formerly passed as the work of thumos, phrenes, and ker in the chest” (p. 116). The Pythagorean Hippo of Samos, fifth century, fixes the new location: the psyche is the brain and the fluid in the head, “generative water” (hydōr gonopoion, p. 118).

The Homeric psyche inhabits the head — the seat of life, of seed, of the genius in Roman inheritance (pp. 96–122, 185). It is holy; oaths are sworn by it; at death the head is veiled. When post-Homeric psyche absorbs the chest-faculties, it carries forward the breath and the generative fluid of the older scheme. Jung’s psyche, the totality of conscious and unconscious contents, descends from the post-Homeric unification — but its ancient residue, still audible in the word, is the breath.

Relationships

Primary sources

origins-of-european-thought (Onians 1951, pp. 95, 96–122, 116, 118, 185)