Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the GreeksRohde, Erwin
Religion
Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
Rohde, Erwin
Greece -- Religion
the latter is by no means the refuge of "spirit" and its faculties,
any more than the corpse is. It (the psyche) is described as being
without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind. All power
of will, sensation, and thought have vanished with the
disintegration of the individual man into his component parts. So
far from it being permissible to ascribe the functions of "spirit"
to the psyche, it would be more reasonable to speak of a contrast
between the two. Man is a living creature, conscious of himself and
intelligently active, only so long as the psyche remains within him.
But it is not the psyche which communicates its own faculties to man
and gives him capacity for life together with consciousness, will
and knowledge. It is rather that during the union of the psyche and
the body all the faculties of living and acting lie within the
empire of the body, of which they are functions. Without the
presence of the psyche, the body cannot perceive, feel, or will, but
it does not use these {6} or any of its faculties through or by
means of the psyche. Nowhere does Homer attribute any such function
to the psyche in living man: it is, in fact, only mentioned when its
separation from the living man is imminent or has occurred. As the
body's shadow-image it survives the body and all its vital powers.
If we now ask--as our Homeric psychologists generally do--which, in
the face of this mysterious association between a living body and
its counterfeit the psyche, is the "real" man, we find that Homer in
fact gives contradictory answers. Not infrequently (indeed, in the
first lines of the Iliad) the material body is contrasted,[2\1] as
the "man himself", with the psyche--which cannot therefore be any
organ or component part of the living body. On the other hand, that
which takes its departure at death and hastens into the realm of
Hades is also referred to by the proper name of the person as
"himself"[3\1]--which means that here the shadowy psyche (for
nothing else can go down to Hades) is invested with the name and
value of the complete personality, the "self" of the man. But those
who draw from these phrases the conclusion that either the body or
the psyche must be the "real man" have, in either case,[4\1] left
out of account or unexplained one half of the recorded evidence.
Regarded without prejudice, these apparently contradictory methods
of speaking simply prove that both the visible man (the body and its
own faculties) _and_ the indwelling psyche could be described as the
man's "self". According to the Homeric view, human beings exist
twice over: once as an outward and visible shape, and again as an
invisible "image" which only gains its freedom in death. This, and
nothing else, is the Psyche.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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