Throat

In crossing to vishuddha, 'one should even admit that all one's psychical facts have nothing to do with material facts. For instance, the anger which you feel for somebody or something, no matter how justified it is, is not caused by those external things. It is a phenomenon all by itself.'

Hillman, reading Jung, identifies the vishuddha throat-centre as the psychic threshold at which affects are recognized as autonomous imaginal phenomena entirely independent of external causation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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the Throat-centre (Vishuddha-chakra) and (3) the Brain-centre (Sahasrāra Padma). Of these, two are of chief importance: the Brain-centre, sometimes called the Northern Centre, and the Heart-centre, or Southern Centre. These two constitute the two poles of the human organism.

Evans-Wentz locates the Vishuddha throat-chakra within the Bardo Thödol's tripartite psychic-centre schema, identifying it as the intermediary between the heart and brain poles of the human organism.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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The mouth was equipped by our makers for its office with teeth, tongue, and lips arranged as now, for the sake at once of what is necessary and what is best. They devised it as the passage whereby necessary things might enter and the best things pass out; for all that comes in to give sustenance to the body is necessary; but the outflowing stream of discourse, ministering to intelligence, is of all streams the best.

Plato's Timaeus construes the oral-pharyngeal passage as a dual-directional valve serving both material nutrition and the logos, grounding the throat's symbolic duality in cosmological anatomy.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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grief is weeping. In its full-blown expression, weeping entails a flushed face, nasal congestion, constricted pharynx, punctuated exhaling, vocalized wailing, and the shedding of tears. Pharyngeal constriction is typically described as either 'a lump in one's throat' or feeling 'choked up.'

Lench identifies pharyngeal constriction—the somatic 'lump in one's throat'—as a defining physiological component of grief's full bodily expression, linking affect directly to throat sensation.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting

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The windpipe, or trachea as it is termed by physicians, has an orifice attached to the roots of the tongue a little above the point where the tongue is joined to the gullet; it reaches to the lungs, and receives the air inhaled by breathing, and also exhales it and passes it out from the lungs; it is covered by a sort of lid, provided for the purpose of preventing a morsel of food from accidentally falling into it.

Cicero's physiological account presents the trachea as an architecturally purposive structure mediating breath and sustenance, establishing the throat as a site of natural-theological design.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting

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the body were suffering from dropsy, for it to experience the dryness of the throat that usually communicates the sensation of thirst to the mind, so that, as a result, its nerves and other parts would be so disposed that it would have something to drink, thus making the disease worse.

Descartes uses throat-dryness as the paradigm case for demonstrating how somatic sensation misleads the mind, situating the throat at the problematic boundary between mechanical body and perceiving soul.

Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting

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when the tongue presses the food into the throat, the air underneath is squeezed out towards the roof of the mouth and then helps to thrust the food

Plato's Timaeus, via Plutarch, describes the throat's mechanical role in swallowing through pneumatic displacement, integrating it into a broader theory of elemental flux within the body.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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ordinarily the psyche leaves the body through the mouth (II. 9.409) or through a wound (II. 14.518; 16.505), i. e. through an aperture of the body.

Snell notes that in Homeric psychology the psyche departs through the mouth—implicitly the throat—establishing the oral-pharyngeal passage as the soul's threshold between life and death.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside

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MHG krage 'neck, throat, collar', ME crawe 'crop, craw (of a bird)' (which may contain *gWroi'-), and OIr. bragae 'neck', MW breuant 'windpipe' from PCl. *brag-, PIE *gWroi'-

Beekes' etymological analysis traces Indo-European and Pre-Greek roots for throat and windpipe terminology, illuminating the ancient linguistic field around pharyngeal anatomy.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside

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