Padel on Porous Innards as Kosmos

Padel‘s In and Out of the Mind extends the plural-self thesis into the tragic idiom and makes a claim about cosmology that is load-bearing for depth psychology. The splanchna — the phrenes, the liver, the heart, the plural dark organs — are divinatory: Theagenes in the sixth century “matched different gods to different bits of splanchna” (Padel 1994, p. 48). “Splanchna are made of the same fabric as the physical universe. They also match and mirror qualities of the divinity that runs and pervades that universe” (Padel 1994). The innards are not only inward; they are the place where the cosmos writes itself. “Multiplicity, concreteness, darkness” are the core attributes of Greek inner equipment (Padel 1994, p. 18).

This is why the plural self in tragedy is simultaneously an interior plurality and a cosmic plurality. “In the Iliad, disunity among gods has a fatal effect on human bodies and lives. In tragedy, divine conflict has a fatal effect not only on bodies and lives, but also on minds. Heracles, Orestes, and Io go mad because they exist in a universe in which one divinity opposes another” (Padel 1994). The porous-self is isomorphic with the polytheistic cosmos: the gods divided against themselves divide the interior in kind.

For the Jungian and Hillmanian inheritance, Padel’s formulation underwrites polytheistic-psychology as more than a metaphor: the plural gods are not added to the interior by a literary convention but found there, in the organs themselves, as the concrete testimony of Greek phenomenology. The psyche as anima mundi — soul as world-soul — is already Homeric if one reads splanchna as the site where cosmos and interior communicate.

Sources

• ruth-padel: “splanchna are made of the same fabric as the physical universe”
• homer: disunity among gods → disunity in splanchna
• padel-out-mind-greek: multiplicity, concreteness, darkness as core attributes