Poros occupies a distinctive position in the depth-psychology corpus as a figure of cosmological and psychological abundance — the divine personification of resource, passage, and fertility who, in Plato’s Symposium, fathers Eros upon Penia (Poverty). The term carries two registers that the corpus consistently interweaves: the mythological figure who represents plenitude and the way through, and the linguistic-somatic root (poroi) denoting channels, routes, and pores within the body and cosmos alike. Kerényi treats Poros as ontologically prior to Eros, arguing that the more world-encompassing a divine figure is, the higher its status in mythological genealogy — Poros, possessing all positive qualities that Eros will inherit, is therefore more ‘real’ in the Platonic sense. Lacan, reading the Symposium structurally, mobilises Poros against Penia to illuminate the paradox of love as giving what one does not have, and deploys the myth to read Claudel’s dramatic theology. Jung’s alchemical texts retain the bodily sense of poros as a passage through which transforming substances penetrate matter. Padel anchors poroi in the pre-Socratic and medical tradition, where channels regulate inner flux. Beekes provides etymological grounding, tracing πόρος to the Indo-European root meaning ‘to carry across.’ Together these voices establish Poros as a liminal term bridging cosmogony, eros theory, somatic imagination, and alchemical penetration.
If Eros is a reality—and for Plato he is, as he is for anyone who has experienced him—then Poros, who has the positive qualities of Eros, is even more so.
Kerényi argues that Poros is ontologically superior to Eros because, as the principle of abundant resource encompassing the cosmos, Poros is more fully real within Plato’s mythological hierarchy.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944thesis
The myth of Poros and of Penia is reborn here under the form of spiritual blindness… it is not his Poros, his resources, his spiritual riches, his superabundance, nor even…
Lacan applies the Poros/Penia myth to Claudel’s drama, arguing that what love demands is not an offering of resources or superabundance but something else entirely, thus reactivating the Platonic mythologem in a psychoanalytic register.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
By the late fifth century, a key word is poroi, ‘routes, channels, ways, crossings’: the word that gives us ‘pores.’ Poroi provide ‘ways’ into, within, and out of the body.
Padel establishes poroi as a central term in Greek somatic and psychological thought, functioning as the structural channels through which inner substances flow, linking the cosmic figure of Poros to the physiological imagination of the tragic self.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
this intermediary which in the Platonic discourse, is called doxa, true opinion in so far no doubt as it is true, but in a way that the subject is incapable of accounting for it
Lacan’s analysis of the Symposium’s middle ground between knowledge and ignorance frames the conceptual space in which Poros and Penia generate Eros as the daemon of intermediacy.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth
Jung’s alchemical commentary uses poros in its somatic-material sense — as the passages of the earth that must be opened for transformation — extending the term’s range from mythology into the alchemical psychology of penetration and impregnation.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
so that the youth easily entereth in through the pores, and instantly shaketh the foundations of the earth, and raiseth up a dark cloud.
A second alchemical passage in Jung employs poros as the channel of spiritual penetration into matter, reinforcing the connection between the mythological Poros as abundant passage and the material pore as site of transformative entry.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
Gr. πείρω < *per-je/o-, πόρος < *por-o-, πορθμός < *por-dhmo-. The old meaning ‘to carry over, ferry over’ is still found in Greek in πόρος, πορθμός.
Beekes provides the etymological grounding for Poros, tracing it to the Indo-European root *per- meaning ‘to carry across,’ thereby revealing that passage and resource are linguistically unified in the term’s origin.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
πόρος (poros), 29, 348
Onians indexes poros as a significant term in his study of European thought about the body and mind, situating it within his analysis of bodily channels and passages at specific locations in the text.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside
πόρος [m.] => πείρω.
Beekes cross-references πόρος to the verbal root πείρω in the etymological dictionary, confirming the term’s derivation from the IE root of passage and penetration.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside
it is around this ambiguity that there is precisely going to pivot the wedge-like attack on the problem by Socrates… Diotima introduced her dialogue with him.
Lacan’s account of Diotima’s entrance into the Symposium contextualises the broader discourse in which the myth of Poros and Penia will be articulated, providing the structural setting for the mythologem.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015aside