The Origins of European Thought

A near-encyclopedic philological inventory of the body-seated psyche of archaic Europe. Onians proceeds organ by organ, substance by substance, moving from the lungs to the heart, the liver, the head, the knees, the marrow, tracking how Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poets, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Virgil, Horace, the Roman religious record, and early Hebrew and Celtic sources located mind, feeling, life, and fate in particular places in the body.

The book’s central demonstration is that the Homeric man is not a unified subject but a field: thumos, phrenes, ker, kradie, and menos occupy different stations in the chest; psyche resides in the head as breath-soul and source of generative life; the knees and marrow carry life-substance continuous with seed; moira is a thread spun and woven, aion a fluid. The unified post-Homeric psyche of Plato and the fifth-century philosophers absorbs the functions of this older distributed scheme — a transition Onians tracks in philological detail (p. 116).

Later chapters extend the inventory to Roman genius and numen, to the Hebrew ruach, to Celtic marrow-beliefs and the Grail, and to the fate-imagery of Platonism and Orphism. The book closes on time and necessity: the spindle of Ananke, the threads of the Moirai, the weft of war.

The book is cited directly by james-hillman in Mythic Figures on the myth of Er and the spindle, and supplies the philological substrate that much of depth psychology’s organ-imagery and complex-theory rests on.

Concepts introduced or developed

Cited by

james-hillman