Arcadia

Arcadia was discovered in the year 42 or 41 b. c. Not, of course, the Arcadia of which the encyclopedia says… But the Arcadia which the name suggests to the minds of most of us to-day is a different one; it is the land of shepherds and shepherdesses, the land of poetry and love, and its discoverer is Virgil.

Snell’s foundational argument that ‘Arcadia’ as a spiritual and imaginative concept is a Virgilian invention, wholly distinct from any geographical reality.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In Virgil’s Arcadia the currents of myth and empirical reality flow one into another; gods and modern men stage meetings in a manner which would have been repugnant to Greek poetry. In actual fact this half-way land is neither mythical nor empirical.

Snell defines Arcadia as a liminal imaginative space — neither pure myth nor empirical reality — that uniquely enables the Roman blending of divine and human registers.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Everything that we have so far remarked about Virgil’s Arcadian world may be summed up by saying that Virgi

Snell prepares to crystallize his argument that Arcadia is the spatial correlate of a newly discovered interior dimension of the soul — depth — first articulated by the early Greek lyrists.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This Arcadia of the ur-acorn was the imaginal landscape of primitive nature, similar to Eden or Paradise, where the untrammeled natural soul lived in accord with nature. Therapy has transplanted Arcadia to childhood.

Hillman reframes Arcadia as the archetypal imaginal landscape of primordial, pre-civilized soul-nature, and diagnoses how modern therapy has transferred this mythologem onto the developmental concept of childhood.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Nostalgia is archetypal. It touches the longing for Eden, for the ark, for the arcadia land of pastoral nature where the lion and the lamb lie down together.

Hillman identifies Arcadia as one node in a cluster of archetypal images of originary harmony with nature, linking it to nostalgia as an irreducible psychological force rather than a sentimental affect.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Once Virgil had placed his shepherds in Arcadia, it seems, it was but a short step to blend the bucolic with the mythical.

Snell traces the formal poetic mechanism by which Arcadia becomes the enabling condition for Virgil’s fusion of mythical shepherd-figures with contemporary persons.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Arcadian warriors carried the skins of wolves and bears instead of shields. This behavior, wild and primitive though it was, was enough to preserve Arcadian independence.

Burkert invokes historical Arcadia as a site of archaic animal-identification rituals linked to initiatory violence and sacrificial cult, providing a counterpoise to the pastoral idealization.

Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

quartus in Arcadia, quem Arcades Nómion appellant quod ab eo se leges ferunt accepisse.

Cicero records a tradition of an Arcadian Apollo associated with law-giving, attesting to Arcadia’s ancient role as the seat of primordial divine dispensation in the mythographic record.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →