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Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Splanchna

Splanchna

Σπλάγχνα — singular splanchnon — names the general collection of inner organs: heart, liver, lungs, gallbladder, and the attendant blood vessels. In the tragic Greek inherited from Homer this is the seat of feeling, thought, character, and prophecy. “Psychology in tragedy’s world has practically nothing to do with the head” (Padel 1992). What happens inside a person happens here.

Splanchna feel. They feel pity, anxiety, fear, grief, love, desire. They soften in worry — Menelaus “will soften his splanchna” when his daughter is at risk. They grow hot and taut in vehement feeling. When the erinyes chase Orestes, his splanchnon “pants with many labors.” But splanchna can also read as character: it is unfair, Padel notes, to dislike someone before one has “clearly learned their splanchnon.” The word hovers between organ and disposition, and the hovering is the philological point — the fifth-century Greek did not yet draw the line we draw between literal organ and figurative feeling.

Splanchna are made of the same fabric as the physical universe: “They also match and mirror qualities of the divinity that runs and pervades that universe” (Padel 1994, p. 48). In the sixth century, Theagenes of Rhegium matched gods to parts of the splanchna: Apollo the gall, Dionysus the spleen, Demeter the liver. Extispicy — divination by inspection of animal entrails — assumed that “gods took an active interest in innards” (Padel 1994, p. 17). Aeschylus’s Prometheus taught mortals to watch for “the splanchna’s smoothness, what color a gall vessel should be to please gods; and the liver lobe’s dappling symmetry.” The innards receive “the image-impress of gods. They reflect what gods want to be” (Padel 1994, p. 17). “The splanchna do not speak in vain, heart circling beside the truthful phrenes in prophetic spirals” (Aeschylus, quoted in Padel 1992). The body is where gods communicate, in beast and in self.

In Homer and in the tragic tradition that inherits him, human splanchna are the corresponding site in mortals. “Homeric gods put or throw ideas and feelings into human innards” (Padel 1994, p. 17). When the tradition, from Snell onward, asks where the inner life is located in the Homeric body, splanchna together with phrenes and thumos compose the answer. For Seba, splanchna is the classical root of thumos as the body’s affective knowing — the ancient seat of what Jungian thought names the feeling function.

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