Snell and the Classical Charter of Polytheistic Psychology

Chapter two of The Discovery of the Mind — “The Olympian Gods” — is the philological charter for what the depth tradition will call polytheistic psychology. Snell’s observation is that in Homer “every new turn of events is engineered by the gods… For human initiative has no source of its own; whatever is planned” is twinned with a divine motive (Snell 1953, pp. 29–30). The Iliad opens with Apollo’s plague; the Odyssey opens with the assembly of the gods. Two dramas are acted simultaneously, “the one on a higher stage, among the gods, and the other here on earth.”

Snell himself reads this developmentally — the Olympians are a step away from a more chaotic magic stratum and toward Greek rationality. Hillman and Kerényi read it valuationally: the simultaneity of divine and human causation is not a primitive failure to localize agency but a precise phenomenology of how psychic life is actually experienced. The ancient is not a past from which Europe escaped but a description from which Europe should never have departed.

Hillman’s archetypal psychology — soul as polytheistic, the gods as forms of being rather than literary characters — takes the Snellian observation and refuses the developmental story. Where Snell sees a stage to be transcended, Hillman sees the perennial structure of the imagination. The thread between them is the same set of Homeric texts; the disagreement is whether what those texts describe is something Europe outgrew or something Europe needs to remember. The depth tradition stands with Kerényi and Hillman against Snell’s progressive reading even as it accepts Snell’s philological evidence.

Sources

• bruno-snell: in Homer “human initiative has no source of its own”; every act is twinned with a divine motive (Snell 1953, pp. 29–30)
• james-hillman: the polytheistic structure of soul is the perennial structure of the imagination, not a developmental stage
• karl-kerenyi: the gods are personified powers; Hermes guides the soul as the soul guides itself (Kerényi 1944)