immortals
The term ‘Immortal’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct but interweaving axes. In the Greek religious and mythological scholarship — Rohde, Nagy, Burkert, Vernant, Otto — immortality functions as a structural counterpart to the hero’s mortality: it is precisely the mortal’s susceptibility to death that makes the promise of posthumous translation or apotheosis culturally and psychologically potent. Here the immortal is not a given but an achievement, granted by divine favor, enacted through lamentation, epic kleos, or literal bodily translation to Elysium. In the Platonic tradition, immortality shifts inward: the soul’s deathlessness becomes a logical entailment of its self-motion (Phaedrus) or its irreconcilable opposition to death (Phaedo), and the rational psyche alone qualifies as the truly divine and undying element. Neoplatonic voices — Plotinus above all — press further, arguing that life self-springing cannot be destroyed, making the soul’s immortality an ontological necessity rather than a mythological reward. The Indian traditions accessed through Aurobindo and the Upanishads universalize the term: Brahman is declared ‘the immortal’ root of all worlds, and liberation consists in realizing that identity. Psychologists such as Rank and von Franz read immortality symbolically — as the unconscious drive to form an indestructible subtle body — while Hillman subjects technological fantasies of bodily perpetuation to ironic critique. The central tension running through all these positions is whether immortality names a metaphysical fact about mind or soul, a cultural-symbolic aspiration encoded in heroic narrative, or a projection of the ego’s refusal to accept finitude.
The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases also to live.
Plato’s Phaedrus grounds the soul’s immortality in the logical argument that self-motion, being its own principle, can neither begin nor cease, making the self-moving soul necessarily deathless.
, Phaedrus, -370thesis
What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a value, one in which there is a life self-springing and therefore not to be destroyed?
Plotinus argues that the soul’s immortality is an ontological necessity because its life arises from within itself and is not adventitiously imported, unlike the heat of fire into matter.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Then the soul, as has been acknowledged, will never receive the opposite of what she brings. Impossible, and Death. Then the soul, as has been acknowledged, will never receive the opposite of what she brings.
The Phaedo establishes the soul’s immortality through the argument that whatever brings life to a body cannot itself admit death, making the psyche categorically opposed to its own negation.
, Phaedo, -385thesis
Its pure root is Brahman the immortal, From whom all the worlds draw their life, and whom None can transcend. For this Self is supreme!
The Upanishads identify Brahman as the immortal ground of all existence, such that realizing this Self places one beyond the domain of death entirely.
, The Upanishadsthesis
Its pure root is Brahman the immortal, From whom all the worlds draw their life, and whom None can transcend. For this Self is supreme!
Echoing the Katha Upanishad, this passage presents Brahman as the immortal cosmological root whose realization liberates the knower from the cycle of embodied existence.
, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualitythesis
Upon having their lifespan cut short by death, heroes receive as consolation the promise of immortality, but this state of immo[rtality is structurally remote from the immediacy of death].
Nagy demonstrates that in archaic Greek poetics immortality functions as a compensatory promise granted to heroes whose mortality is definitive, establishing a structural tension between death’s immediacy and immortality’s remoteness.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
The nous of the dead is not living, but immortal, and can perceive once it has gone into the immortal aither.
Burkert traces how post-Homeric Greek thought, drawing on pre-Socratic and mystery traditions, relocated immortality from the whole person to the divine intellective element, identified with aither.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis
I am delivered, forever, from death, an immortal god revered by all.
Vernant’s analysis of Empedocles reveals how the magus-philosopher could claim personal immortality by completing the cycle of expiation and reintegrating with the divine — collapsing the mortal/immortal boundary through philosophical-religious practice.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards — even when they are not only called immortal, but actually ‘gods’ — they are reckoned as men who have become immortal or godlike.
Rohde establishes that Greek heroic immortality was always conceived as translation of the whole person rather than survival of a disembodied soul, keeping it firmly within somatic categories.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
It is the peculiar property of divinity, as Plato clearly expresses it, to live for ever in the indivisible unity of body and soul.
Rohde invokes Plato to articulate the Greek theological principle that true immortality requires the indestructible unity of body and soul — a standard that mortal rulers appropriated as ideological claims.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Traditional Hellenic poetry makes the opposition immortality/death not only remote/immediate but also artificial/natural.
Nagy identifies in Hellenic poetics a systematic coding of immortality as cultural artifact opposed to the natural process of death, with epic kleos functioning as the technology of artificial perpetuation.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals.
Rohde documents the Homeric precedent of bodily translation as the earliest Greek conception of individual immortality, reserved for divine favorites rather than universally available.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
the goddess in question is not some derivative Dios thugater but Eos herself. The only surviving attestation of her taking a direct part in epic action is the Aithiopis, where she translates her dead son Memnon into a state of immortality.
Nagy’s analysis of Eos and Memnon demonstrates that even within epic action the goddess of dawn can effect immortalization, linking the solar cycle to the theme of heroic apotheosis.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
our calling the armor of Achilles ‘immortal’ is not a case of forcing an interpretation. The epithet ambrota ‘immortal’ is actually applied to the teukhea ‘armor’ of Achilles.
Nagy shows that the Iliadic tradition extends the attribute of immortality to the hero’s divine equipment, making the mortal/immortal tension visible in the very objects Achilles wears and loses.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
the heroes, better and more just than the men of bronze, set everything back on course … gods and goddesses still came to mix with mortals and to engender, at the meeting point between the two races, demigods (hemitheoi), whose existence proves that the separation between mortals and immortals was not as unbridgeable then as it is now.
Vernant locates the heroic age as a liminal historical moment when the boundary between mortals and immortals was permeable, with the demigod as the living symbol of that porosity.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
The imagination of Greek poets or Greek people never gave up the alluring fancy of a distant land of blessedness into which individual mortals might by the favour of the gods be translated.
Rohde traces the persistent Greek fantasy of Elysian translation across multiple epic cycles as evidence of an enduring desire to imagine selective escape from death’s universality.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
the Taoist religious philosophy influenced Chinese alchemy to conceive of its goal as the creation not of gold, as in Western alchemy, but of the immortal body.
Von Franz contrasts Eastern and Western alchemical goals to show that the ‘immortal body’ was the explicit telos of Taoist practice, with a parallel subtle-body doctrine implicit in Western alchemy’s resurrection symbolism.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
The belief, however, that immortality when it was miraculously bestowed by the favour of heaven upon certain individual men, was absolutely conditioned by the non-occurrence of death, i.e. the separation of the psyche from the visible man.
Rohde establishes the Homeric theological axiom that genuine immortality requires the soul’s retention within the body — death being precisely the disqualifying event — thereby sharply differentiating Greek from Platonic conceptions.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
when he uses psuche in this sense, the sense of that in us which is divine and immortal, he does not think it likely to include the thumos and the appetites, but only our strictly rational element, the logistikon.
Hobbs clarifies Plato’s restricted use of ‘immortal’ as applying only to the rational logistikon within the tripartite soul, excluding the spirited and appetitive elements from the domain of deathlessness.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
It is an old argument, at least as old as myths and stories about mortals who become immortal, and the immortals who fall in love with mortals.
Nussbaum invokes the structural symmetry of myths about mortal-immortal exchange to argue that human value is inseparable from finite temporal structure, making immortality a transformation rather than a fulfillment of human experience.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Thirty thousand — that is, innumerable immortal Watchers over mortal men wander invisibly in the service of Zeus over the earth, taking note of right and wrong.
Rohde reads Hesiod’s daemon-souls — the immortalized dead of the Golden Age — as a decisive departure from Homer, establishing the idea that the dead can attain an active immortal existence as moral overseers.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
the raising of a mortal maiden, the daughter of mortal parents, to immortal life, and not to religious veneration which could not have made itself very apparent to the maiden relegated to the distant Tauric country.
Rohde analyzes the Iphigeneia myth as a paradigm case in which translation to immortal life is categorically distinguished from posthumous cult veneration — physical continuation being the defining feature.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
in man while the life-soul, the psyche, is the divine, the immortal, factor, the thumos is mortal.
Onians traces the archaic Greek anthropological division by which the psyche alone carries divinity and immortality while the thumos, bound to blood and breath, shares in mortal dissolution.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Immortality. There’s no fundamental reason why the breakdown of cell structures is inevitable. There’s no reason death should happen.
Hillman cites technocratic fantasies of engineered immortality to subject the contemporary flight from aging and death to psychological critique, implying that the abolition of mortality would eliminate the very conditions of meaningful character.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
immortalization by the thunderbolt is the fate of Herakles: as the hero is smitten by Zeus, he is elevated to Olympus as an immortal god.
Nagy catalogues the thunderbolt as a recurring mythological instrument of violent immortalization, in which divine destruction paradoxically elevates the hero beyond mortality into Olympian status.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
A simple imitation of the same legend in a purely human setting is the story of Kleitos, a youth of the family of the seer Melampous, whom Eos has carried off for the sake of his beauty that he may dwell among the gods.
Rohde documents the Homeric pattern in which divine erotic desire for a mortal effects that mortal’s translation to immortal existence, establishing beauty and divine favor as the operative conditions.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
They rank neither with mortals nor with immortals.
The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite introduces a liminal category of mountain Nymphs who occupy the threshold between mortal and immortal, suggesting that the boundary between the two conditions admits of intermediate degrees.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside
the lovely gifts the gods gave Peleus the day they led you, an immortal goddess, into a mortal’s bed.
The Iliad frames divine gifts bestowed at the marriage of a mortal and an immortal as inherently double-edged, encoding the mortal/immortal divide within the hero’s very origin and equipment.
, The Iliad, 2023aside
The physical being could only endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption could be overcome and at the same time it could be made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer to each change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person.
Aurobindo frames physical immortality as a potential future achievement of evolutionary spirituality, contingent on overcoming material dissolution through supramental transformation of the body.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside