Empedocles occupies a charged and contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing simultaneously as a pre-Socratic philosopher, a shamanistic wonder-worker, and a mythological figure whose personal fate carries symbolic weight across centuries. Dodds establishes the foundational interpretive framework, reading Empedocles not as a synthesizing rationalist but as a revival of the ancient shaman-type who combined scientific cosmology with Orphic religiosity, miraculous powers, and claims to divine identity — a tension the philosopher never resolved. Edinger, drawing on Jungian categories, extends this reading into psychohistory: Empedocles becomes a transitional figure between the mythological and scientific worldviews, whose double strand — Orphic looking-back and rational looking-forward — gripped Hölderlin, Arnold, and Nietzsche as they navigated their own age’s mythic collapse. His cosmological system — four rhizomata governed by Love and Strife — attracts Edinger’s attention as an early projection of the archetypal quaternity onto the emerging psyche. Rohde and Sullivan attend to epistemological and psychological detail: the role of phren, noos, and blood in cognition; the doctrine of metempsychosis; and the question of whether Empedocles employed the term psyche at all. Snell foregrounds his technical similes as evidence of a methodological transition from poetic image to proto-scientific analogy. The corpus thus frames Empedocles as a liminal, irreducibly dual personality whose cosmological, cathartic, and biographical dimensions each illuminate fundamental questions about psyche, soul, and cosmos.
If I am right, Empedocles’ represents not a new but a very old type of personality, the shaman who combin
Dodds argues that Empedocles is best understood not as a novel synthesizing philosopher but as a revival of the archaic shaman-type, combining magical powers with cosmological speculation.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
Each of these three poets perceived Empedocles as a transition figure who lived, as they did, between two different ages. Empedocles does have this double strand in his work: on the one hand, he looks back to the religious Orphic conception of existence; on the other, he looks forward to the rational scientific image of the universe.
Edinger establishes Empedocles as a psychohistorical pivot between mythological and rational-scientific worldviews, a doubleness that made him a magnet for nineteenth-century poets facing analogous cultural crisis.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Empedocles, who lived about 450 B. C., is a complex and mysterious figure, originally from Sicily, who combined the features of a rational philosopher with those of a legendary shaman or magician.
Edinger presents the defining characterization of Empedocles within the depth-psychology tradition: the paradoxical union of rational inquiry and shamanistic, Orphic mysticism.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis
The magus Empedocles is himself at once a diviner, poet, doctor, and leader of men. Thus he describes him-self as a theios aner, already freed from the mortal condition: “I am delivered, forever, from death, an immortal god revered by all.”
Vernant reads Empedocles’ self-presentation as theios aner — divine man — as structurally consonant with his cosmological doctrine of the soul’s graduated reincarnations toward divine status.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
In Empedocles’ philosophical myth we see the archetypal ordering principle of the quaternity functioning as a world creator. The quaternity stamps its fourfold nature onto the original undifferentiated stuff.
Edinger interprets Empedocles’ four-element cosmology as an early psychological projection of the Jungian quaternity archetype, ordering an originally undifferentiated psychic unconscious.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Of course Nietzsche must have known he was a classical philologist that Empedocles, the great philosopher, had chosen that form of death for himself: he jumped into the flaming crater of Aetna.
Edinger, via Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche, traces the volcanic-descent image in Zarathustra back to Empedocles’ legendary death, linking the philosopher’s end to depth-psychological symbolism of regression and transformation.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
Emped. himself does not use the word ψυχή at all in the fragments that have been preserved to us; and it is hardly probable that he himself would have used the term of the psychical faculties of the body even if he regarded these as gathered together to a substantive unity.
Rohde notes the philological paradox that Empedocles, so central to discussions of soul, apparently avoided the term psyche itself in his fragments, forcing later commentators to impose it upon his system.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Peculiar to Emp. is the attempt to give actual details of the crimes for which the spirits are condemned to ἐνσωμάτωσις; and also the extension of metempsychosis to plants.
Rohde identifies Empedocles’ distinctive contributions to metempsychosis doctrine: the specification of moral crimes warranting reincarnation and the extension of transmigration to the vegetable world.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
phrenes, through a person’s listening, can become filled with learning that is based on sense perception. Phrenes, it appears, are connected with pondering or grasping what is heard. This may form a prelude to a deeper experience of what Empedocles is describing, to be discovered perchance with noos and with divine inspiration.
Sullivan analyzes Empedocles’ epistemological hierarchy in which phrenes receive sense-based learning as a preparatory stage before noos and divine inspiration can grasp deeper cosmological truths.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
Pausanias should therefore listen to the pistōmata, the trustworthy proofs, of the muse of Empedocles… he should keep secret the teaching thus revealed: he should “retain” it (stegein) in the depths of his speechless heart.
Vernant reads Empedocles’ instruction to Pausanias as a structure of initiatory secrecy and esoteric transmission, linking the philosophical poem to Orphic-Pythagorean mystery discipline.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
With these comparisons Empedocles walks in the footsteps of Homer who also bequeathed to him the literary form in which to expound his doctrine. But he limits his images to the area of the skills and techniques.
Snell argues that Empedocles’ restriction of similes to technical crafts marks a crucial methodological step from poetic imagery toward proto-scientific analogy in the history of European mind.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Empedocles adds to the intelligibility of the explanation by using for his illustrations things which man has made himself, or acts which man himself performs.
Snell interprets Empedocles’ technical comparisons as evidence that the philosopher grounded cosmological explanation in humanly reproducible operations, anticipating experimental method.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Empedocles was a true poet, not a philosopher who happened to write in verse.
Dodds insists on the genuine poetic and imaginative character of the Purifications, resisting reductions of Empedocles to a versifying rationalist.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
Empedocles of Agrigentum was a philosopher who flourished about 444 e.g. He was the first to establish the number of four elements. These were, he thought, acted on by two moving causes—love (combination), and strife (separation).
Hadot’s annotation identifies Empedocles’ canonical philosophical contributions — the four elements and Love/Strife cosmology — as background for Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic meditations.
, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 1992supporting
Empedokles did indeed distinguish between thinking and perceiving, but thinking (νοεῖν) was only a σωματικόν τι ὥσπερ τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι and to this extent ταὐτόν with it.
Rohde records the Aristotelian critique of Empedocles’ noetics: that his account collapses the distinction between thinking and perceiving by making both corporeal processes.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Empedocles continues to live in the collective psyche. Just as Thales shows up in Part Two of Goethe’s Faust, Empedocles shows up as a prominent figure in the work of three major poets of the nineteenth century: Hölderlin, Matthew Arnold and Nietzsche.
Edinger argues for Empedocles’ continued archetypal vitality in the collective psyche, evidenced by his persistent grip on major poets confronting the death of myth.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting
EMPEDOCLES of Agrigentum, fl. 5th century B.C., a philosopher, who first laid down that there were “four elements.” He believed in the transmigration of souls, and the indestructibility of matter.
The Meditations’ glossary entry gives a thumbnail identification of Empedocles primarily through his four-element doctrine and transmigration belief, confirming his canonical status as a reference point.
, Meditations, 180aside
Empedocles also used the traditional puros humniin image… On concreteness in Empedocles’ ideas about thinking, see Long 1966:266–73. Poroi as veins: Arist. HA 510A14.
Padel notes Empedocles’ use of the fire-in-blood image for cognition and his pore-theory of perception as part of an ancient Greek tradition of materially concrete thinking.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside
On the pistis of Empedocles, see Wilhelm Jacob Verdenius, “Notes on the Presocratics, VIII. The Meaning of πίστις in Empedocles.”
Detienne’s footnote points to Empedocles’ concept of pistis — trustworthy proof or belief — as a noteworthy intersection between his epistemology and the wider Presocratic discourse on truth and persuasion.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996aside