Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Binding’ operates on at least three distinct registers that regularly intersect: the cosmological, the magical-religious, and the juridical-psychological. Onians furnishes the most sustained treatment, tracing the concept from Homeric peirata—cords of fate spun and held by the gods—through the defixio traditions of classical antiquity, in which literal bonds served as instruments of sympathetic magic aimed at enemies, lovers, and the dead. For Onians, binding is not merely metaphor: in archaic thought it is almost coextensive with causation itself, since to fix a thing in place, whether a yoke-pole or a human destiny, is to bind it. Benveniste introduces the juridical dimension, showing that religio itself may derive from ligare, ‘to bind,’ and that the oath (horkos) instantiates a binding declaration whose violation releases malevolent power against the swearer. This juristic sense extends into Roman nexus, the ‘bound man’ of debt, and into the very grammar of vowing and loosing. Kerenyi and Vernant provide mythological texture—the bound Hera, the capturing net of Ares—while Fogel introduces a somatic register in which psychological coherence itself is understood as a ‘periodic binding of things together.’ The key tension throughout is between binding as constraint (fate as imprisonment, sin as fetter) and binding as constitutive structure (the cosmos held together, the self organized). This ambivalence makes the term irreplaceable for depth-psychological reflection.
binding was almost coextensive with fixation or fastening, and, when better methods were devised, the term would naturally be extended to cover them
Onians argues that in archaic culture binding was the paradigmatic act of securing or joining, its conceptual range subsequently expanding to encompass all forms of fixation.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
Love above all minor πάθη is felt as a bond. The goddess herself bound Tibullus: ipsa Venus magico religatum bracchia nodo perdocuit
Onians demonstrates that in Greco-Roman antiquity erotic experience was conceived through the same idiom of binding operative in fate and defixio magic, with Venus herself figured as the binding agent.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
mighty Ἀνάγκη holds it in bonds of the πεῖραρ which encloses it around … Moira has bound it to be whole and immovable
Onians reads Parmenides’ Necessity and Moira as cosmic binding agents whose peirata-cords constitute the ontological structure of reality itself.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
This sense of a binding is also a sense of powers that bind and so became ‘religion’. In our own land for Britons and Angles and Saxons in Christian times sin and debt were bonds.
Onians traces the semantic transformation by which the archaic experience of being bound by divine or cosmic forces became the psychological and moral content of religio, sin, and debt.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The man under obligation for debt was described as ‘bound’ (nexus) … damnum … in origin meant ‘binding’ and, according to the thought traced, restriction, ill-fortune.
Onians reconstructs the Roman juridical vocabulary of debt and loss as a direct extension of the archaic concept of binding, showing that nexus and damnum encode a metaphysics of constraint.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
One of these alternatives is represented by Cicero, who attaches religio to legere ‘gather, collect’, and the other by Lactantius and Tertullian, who explain religio by ligare ‘to bind’.
Benveniste surveys the ancient and modern controversy over whether religio derives from ‘gathering’ or ‘binding,’ a dispute with direct consequences for understanding the psychological structure of religious obligation.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973thesis
A girdle might be used magically to bind an enemy for Death or to bind oneself with wisdom and long life. In the other form of the image there is the same twofold potentiality.
Onians establishes that binding in archaic magical practice carried a constitutive ambivalence: the same act that cursed could also consecrate, depending on direction and intention.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the potential malediction which specifically defines the binding declaration of the oath … Latin sacramentum ‘oath’ underline the potential malediction which specifically defines the binding declaration of the oath.
Benveniste shows that the oath is fundamentally a binding declaration whose power resides in the malevolent force it releases upon perjury, linking juridical and magical registers of binding.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
πεῖραρ is always qualified by some genitive: ὀλέθρου … θανάτου … νίκης … What lies ‘upon the knees of the gods’ is the fate that the gods spin.
Onians analyzes the term peirar as a cord-of-fate always bound to a specific outcome—destruction, death, victory—establishing the linguistic basis for binding as fateful determination.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
each of these factors holds the others in place, giving each a certain type of meaning in relation to the others, as if the process of living requires a periodic binding of things together
Fogel transposes the archaic concept into somatic-psychological terms, proposing that psychophysical coherence depends on a recurrent integrative binding that gives relational meaning to disparate experiential fragments.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
Zeus had set his wife to hang on a golden cord between Heaven and Earth in punishment … I shall shortly mention another occasion on which Hera was bound—this time by Hephaistos, in revenge
Kerenyi presents mythological instances of divine binding as punishment and revenge, illustrating the coercive, punitive register of binding within Greek religious imagination.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
bond: round the earth as … ‘woof of war’, 355–6 … use of magic in battle-rites, 361 … ‘coil of war’, 388–9
This index entry clusters the motifs of binding—cosmic bond, war-woof, battle-magic—confirming the thematic centrality of binding across Onians’s entire comparative analysis.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside
The purpose is not merely to acquaint the gods with the text of the undertaking by which one binds oneself.
Benveniste clarifies that the oath formula before divine witnesses is itself an act of self-binding, not merely notification, reinforcing the reflexive structure of juridical binding.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside