Bile occupies a peculiarly liminal position in the depth-psychological corpus: it is simultaneously a physiological substance, a cosmological principle of corruption and dissolution, a humoral determinant of temperament, and an alchemical impurity awaiting purification. Plato’s Timaeus furnishes the foundational medical ontology, presenting bile as old, decomposed blood that re-enters circulation as a corrosive agent capable, in sufficient quantity, of burning through the body’s very moorings and liberating the soul from the marrow. Commentators on the Timaeus elaborate a taxonomy of bile by colour—yellow, black, and a further ‘bilious’ variant—each corresponding to progressive stages of putrefaction. The humoral tradition, transmitted through Jonson and summarized by Place, assigns yellow bile to fire and choleric vindictiveness, black bile to earth and melancholy—etymologically melan-chole, ‘black bile’—thereby furnishing depth psychology with its persistent link between humoral physiology and psychological typology. Onians situates bile within the archaic Greek topology of the liver as the seat of deep emotion, noting that the liver secretes bile while functioning as the body’s principal blood-gland; anger, lust, and fear are felt there. McGilchrist presses this further, asking whether the medieval association of black bile, the spleen, and the left side of the body may illuminate hemispheric asymmetries. Hillman, working alchemically, reads the choleric humor’s yellowing as citrinitas—the intellectually fervent, emotionally saturated stage preparatory to rubedo. Across these registers, bile marks the dangerous boundary between nourishment and poison, health and dissolution.
bile, which is only stale blood, and which from being flesh is dissolved again into blood… if it have power enough to maintain its supremacy, it penetrates the marrow and burns up what may be termed the cables of the soul, and sets her free
Plato’s Timaeus presents bile as decomposed blood that, when overwhelming the body’s resistance, dissolves the soul’s physical anchorage in the marrow—the most radical medical-cosmological account of bile’s destructive potential.
, Timaeus, -360thesis
bile, which had its origin as old blood and is now dissolved back again into blood out of flesh… it penetrates to the substance of the marrow and in consuming it unlooses the soul from her moorings there and sets her free
Cornford’s commentary on the Timaeus confirms and elaborates Plato’s account of bile as the physiological agent of final dissolution, tracing its origin from aged blood back through decomposed flesh.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
an over-supply of blood of diverse kinds, mingling with air in the veins, having variegated colours and bitter properties, as well as acid and saline qualities, contains all sorts of bile and serum and phlegm
The Timaeus describes bile as one product of a broader process of humoral corruption in which decomposed flesh contaminates the blood, initiating systemic disease.
, Timaeus, -360thesis
when the flesh wastes and returns into the veins there is discoloured blood as well as air in the veins, having acid and salt qualities, from which is generated every sort of phlegm and bile
Plato establishes bile’s etiology as the product of wasting flesh returning to the blood, generating acid and salt qualities that disrupt the body’s natural order.
, Timaeus, -360thesis
The contrast is between the generic name ‘bile’, and these three names for the species… black, ‘bilious’, and yellow
Cornford’s philological commentary distinguishes bile as a genus from its three species—black, yellow, and a third ‘bilious’ variety—clarifying the taxonomic complexity of ancient humoral pathology.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Is there some connection between the melancholy tendencies of the right hemisphere and the mediaeval belief that the left side of the body was dominated by black bile? Black bile was, of course, associated with melancholy (literally, Greek melan-, black + chole, bile)
McGilchrist raises the possibility that the medieval humoral association of black bile with melancholy and the left-sided spleen may reflect genuine neurobiological asymmetries in the divided brain.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
not only does it secrete bile, but it is a huge blood-gland. From it, moreover, the blood passes on up to the heart… Thus before Homer’s day it might well be believed to send up to heart and lungs not only χολός but also blood and so θυμός
Onians demonstrates that the liver’s dual function as bile-secreting organ and blood-gland underlies the archaic Greek belief that it was the generative source of both bile and the life-spirit thumos.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
a change in humors from choleric to sanguine… So does citrinitas become the reddening
Hillman reads the alchemical citrinitas as a transformation of the choleric humor—bile-dominated, intellectually fervent, emotionally saturated—into the more balanced sanguine temperament that precedes rubedo.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
See Anc. Med. 19: ‘The bitter principle, which we call yellow choli…’ cf. the color and processes described in Pl. Ti. 82E–83D. Choli is cognate with German gelb, ‘yellow’
Padel’s philological note traces the etymology of choli (bile) to its color root, linking Greek medical usage of yellow bile to the Timaeus’s color taxonomy of humoral disease.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
black bile to earth; and yellow bile to fire. Each of these humors, in turn, was believed to be the cause of a psychological temperament… black bile sadness; and yellow bile vindictiveness
Place surveys the classical humoral schema in which black and yellow bile generate the melancholic and choleric temperaments respectively, noting Jung’s dissatisfaction with this framework for depth-psychological purposes.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
the king in his sweatbath ‘bathes and bathes again under the glass arch, / Till by the wet-dew he is freed from all bile’… The sweat is both the black bile that issues from the king (the impurity of the matter) and the sweet dew which washes the king’s body clean
Abraham’s alchemical dictionary identifies bile as the impurity expelled from the prima materia in the ablution stage, where black bile symbolizes the corruption that must be purged before transmutation.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
Biliary disturbances perhaps explain the use of stomachics, stomachor, etc., in connection with anger. In the Babylonian culture, to which Etruscan divination by the liver (followed by the Romans) seems to have affinities, the liver had great importance as organ of the mind
Onians connects biliary pathology to the semantics of anger in Latin and traces the cross-cultural significance of the liver—and by implication bile—as the organ of mind and passion from Babylonian through Roman culture.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the blood, the phlegm, the choler, and the melancholer (melancholy). They are called ‘humours,’ Asper explains, because they have ‘moisture and fluxure’
Miller, via Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, presents the four humoral fluids—including choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile)—as the physiological basis for a theory of dramatic character and comic genre.
, Achelous and the Butterfly: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Humor, 1973supporting
Plato agrees with the author of the treatise On the Sacred Disease (epilepsy) that it is an affection of the brain and caused by phlegm, to which Plato (or his source) adds a mixture of black bile
Cornford notes Plato’s attribution of epilepsy to phlegm mixed with black bile, linking humoral pathology directly to the most ‘sacred’ of ancient diseases.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The liver, hepar, is center of divinatory attention. It can be pierced by a sword and ‘approached by’ emotional pain. One feels anger in it, and fear
Padel situates the liver—the organ that secretes bile—as the archaic center of divination and passionate emotion in Greek tragic imagery, with anger and fear felt there rather than merely residing in it.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside
Hecuba may well have singled out the liver to cling to and devour as the source of Achilles’ χολός and perhaps also as the source of his θυμός
Onians interprets Hecuba’s desire to devour Achilles’ liver as recognition of that organ as the source of his choleric rage, directly linking bile (cholos) with the warrior’s animating fury.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside