Puritan psychology

Dodds’s own term, introduced in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) to cover the archaic body of belief — emerging from Orphic and early Pythagorean circles — in which the body is a prison or tomb and the soul an occult self exiled from its true home. Dodds refuses to separate “Orphic” from “Pythagorean” on the available evidence:

I shall accordingly use the term “Puritan psychology” to cover both early Orphic and early Pythagorean beliefs about the soul. We have seen — or I hope we have seen — how contact with shamanistic beliefs and practices might suggest to a thoughtful people the rudiments of such a view. (Dodds 1951)

The doctrine has two forms in the ancient evidence Plato transmits. In the first, the body is the soul’s prison, where the gods keep it locked up until it has purged its guilt. In the second, perhaps traceable back to Heraclitus, the body is a tomb in which the psyche lies dead, awaiting resurrection into “life without the body.” What lies dead within the body, Dodds argues, is “neither the reason nor the empirical man, but an ‘occult’ self, Pindar’s ‘image of life,’ which is indestructible but can function only in the exceptional conditions of sleep or trance” (Dodds 1951).

Edinger treats Plato’s Phaedo as philosophic Orphism made differentiated: “Truth is in fact a purification from all these things” (Edinger 1999, citing Phaedo). For the Seba tradition, puritan psychology is the archaic ancestor of alchemical separatio and of the Gnostic doctrine Jung would read in CW 9ii — the soul as spark, the body as matter awaiting redemption. Plato’s teaching in the Phaedo, Dodds concludes, “is the main historical link between the Greek ‘shamanistic’ tradition and Gnosticism.”

Relationships

• dodds-greeks-and-irrational
• occult-self
• greek-shaman
• orphic-pythagorean-interior-turn

Primary sources

• dodds-greeks-and-irrational (Dodds 1951)
• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (Edinger 1999)