World-Soul

In Plato’s plato-timaeus, the Demiurge — looking to the eternal forms-eidos — fashions the cosmos as a living being possessed of soul (psychē tou kosmou) and intelligence. The world is one whole living animal, ensouled throughout. The world-soul is constitutively intermediate: “he made a mixture of the indivisible and the divisible, thus producing a third form of existence” whose nature is “independent of the ‘Same’ and the ‘Different’” (Jung 1958, citing Timaeus 35a via Cornford). It mediates between the realm of Forms and the realm of bodies; it is the living principle of the cosmos’s intelligibility. The human soul is a microcosmic recapitulation of this cosmic soul: reason in the head, thumos in the chest, appetite below the diaphragm — each part placed in the body to reflect its relation to the body of the world (Cornford 1937, on Timaeus 30b, 69d–72d). The “highest form of Eros, the passion for divine wisdom and immortality,” has its seat in the brain, “at the head of the column” (Cornford 1937).

Aristotle takes up the Timaeus as a program of ascent: man should “achieve immortality and do what man may to live according to the highest thing that is in him; for little though it be in bulk, in power and worth it is far above all the rest” (Cornford 1937, citing Nicomachean Ethics X.7). The rational soul is “something within him that is divine” — a fragment of the world-soul that the human carries. plotinus makes the world-soul his third hypostasis — Psychē, proceeding from Nous as Nous proceeds from the One (Enneads IV).

The Platonic anima mundi is the direct ancestor of the Renaissance hermetic and alchemical anima mundi — the soul of matter, the mercurial spirit pervading creation, the spiritus mundi of the Hermetic Asclepius — and through that lineage of Jung’s claim that the unconscious is not contained inside the human skull but is, in some sense, the world’s own depth. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis rereads the concept as the psychological ground of the coniunctio — the marriage of soul and matter that is the alchemical and individuational aim. james-hillman‘s recovery of the anima mundi in archetypal psychology is definitive for the contemporary Lineage. Reading Adolf Portmann alongside Jung and Corbin, Hillman argues that “the animal’s inwardness is afforded by its self-display — that is, it presents itself as an image affording intelligibility to its surround” (Hillman 1983). The anima mundi is not a hidden essence behind the visible world; it is the intelligibility of the visible world, the soul that is in appearance — the direct inheritance of the Timaean claim that the cosmos is zōon emphychon ennoun, a living, ensouled, intelligent being. Soul is not in us; we are in soul.

Relationships

Primary sources

plato-timaeus (Plato, c. 360 BCE)
enneads (Plotinus)
Psychology and Religion: West and East (Jung 1958)
Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Hillman 1983)