Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘cord’ is not treated as a simple anatomical or material term but carries a dense symbolic charge rooted in archaic thought about fate, binding, and the ontological tethering of beings to one another and to cosmic forces. Onians’s excavation of Greek peirata (πείρατα) and related spinning imagery establishes the cord as the primordial figure of fate: the thread spun by the gods is simultaneously a bond, a measure, and a limit. The cord that the Fates spin is identical with the cord that fetters—victory, death, and destiny are all conceptualized as things wound, knotted, or loosed. This double nature—cord as connective lifeline and cord as constraining bond—runs through the ritualistic binding imagery Onians documents in mystery cult practice (the krokokon thread, the tainia about the waist of initiates). Neurobiological writers such as Kandel, Craig, Damasio, and Fogel employ ‘cord’ in its anatomical register—spinal cord as the primary conduit of sensory and motor information—yet the structural function is homologous: the cord mediates between periphery and center, body and brain, organism and world. The depth-psychological tension between cord-as-fate (archaic, symbolic) and cord-as-neural-pathway (modern, functional) constitutes the term’s peculiar status in this concordance: a figure that binds cosmological and somatic vocabularies across millennia.
What lies ‘upon the knees of the gods’ is the fate that the gods spin (Qeol iir^KXcoaav). Treipcrra should, we might now suspect, be related to the spinning
Onians argues that the Greek peirata—cords or bonds—are the material form of fate as spun by the gods, grounding the concept of destiny in the image of a literal thread.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
In Latin we find not only the fates spinning or winding, e. g. sic volvere Parcas, but also human beings might ask to suffer their old fate again, wind it again.
Onians demonstrates that in both Greek and Latin traditions fate is conceived as a cord wound and rewound, so that reliving experience is figured as re-spooling the thread of destiny.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
Evil is a fetter upon a man and its removal an unloosing and unbinding.
Onians establishes the complementary archaic image of the cord as a bond of evil or misfortune, whose psychic resolution requires the ritual act of unbinding.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
peirap, like Latin licium, is used as well of the woof-thread which binds the warp as of a bond about the body.
Onians extends the cord’s semantic range to include the weaving metaphor for speech and song, showing the cord as the structural element that binds both textile and discourse into coherent form.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
in the Samothracian mysteries a Tocivicc was used and was usually put round the waist of the initiate
Onians documents the ritual cord or band as the central instrument of initiatory binding in the mystery cults, physically enacting the cosmic bond between mortal and divine realms.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The spinal cord contains the machinery needed for simple reflex behaviors… by examining the spinal cord, one can understand in microcosm the overall purpose of the central nervous system.
Kandel presents the spinal cord as the foundational conduit of sensory-motor integration, whose structural logic mirrors in miniature the organizing principle of the entire nervous system.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
The nerves from the spinal cord to the proprioceptors for stretch and to the spinal cord from the motor neurons used to activate muscle contractions—compared to the small, slow and unmyelinated interoceptive neurons—are fast, large, and myelinated.
Fogel distinguishes the spinal cord’s proprioceptive pathways by their speed and myelination, situating the cord as the structural arbiter between fast somatic and slow interoceptive information streams.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
the axons from all three groups cross to the contralateral side of the spinal cord at the same spinal level as the cell bodies
Craig specifies the spinal cord as the site where sensory axons cross contralaterally, making it the anatomical locus of the body’s bilateral integration of interoceptive and nociceptive signals.
, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2015supporting
At lower levels in the brain stem and all the way from the bottom of the spinal cord upward, segment by segment, we encounter the entry points for all the other nerves which carry s[ensory signals]
Damasio describes the spinal cord as the segmental entry point through which the entire bodily state is progressively conveyed upward to consciousness-constituting brain regions.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
All interoceptive fibers go to the same place in the spinal cord, from whence they project to a common location in the brain stem, and from there to a common set of brain regions.
Fogel notes the spinal cord as the convergence point for all interoceptive pathways, underscoring its role as the body’s primary relay junction for self-referential physiological signals.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009aside
vertebrates have a ventral heart and dorsal nerve cord, whereas arthropods have a dorsal heart and ventral nerve cord
Thompson invokes the nerve cord as the axis of dorsoventral body-plan organization, noting that its positional inversion across phyla reveals conserved structural logic beneath morphological difference.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside