Psyche is the last of these words [thumos, phrenes, kradie, etor, noos, psyche] to come to have ‘space’ inside it. This is due, I think, to the fact that psyche or livingness did not lend itself to a container-type metaphor until the conscious spatialization of time had so far developed that a man had a life in the sense of a time span, rather than just in the sense of breath and blood. But the progress of psyche toward the concept of soul is not that clear at all.
For, more than the other hypostases, psyche is sometimes used in confusing ways that seem on the surface to defy a chronological ordering. Its primary use is always for life, as I have stated. After the Homeric poems, Tyrtaeus, for example, uses psyche in that sense (Fragments 10 [φιλοψυχεῖτ, l. 18] and 11 [l. 5]), as does Alcaeus (Fragment 77B [?]). And even as late as the fifth century B.C., Euripides uses p289 the phrase “to be fond of one’s psyche,” in the sense of clinging to life (Iphigenia at Aulis, 1385). Some of the Aristotelian writings also use psyche as life, and this usage even extends into much of the New Testament. “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his psyche for his sheep” (John, 10:11). Jesus did not mean his mind or soul.
But in Achilles’ dream at the beginning of Book 23 of the Iliad, the psyche of the dead Patroclus visits him, and when he tries to hug it in his arms, it sinks gibbering into the earth. The grizzly scenes in Hades in Books 11 and 24 of the Odyssey use psyche in a similar way. The term in these instances has an almost opposite sense from its meaning in the rest of both Iliad and Odyssey. Not life, but that which exists after life has ceased. Not what is bled out of one’s veins in battle, but the soul or ghost that goes to Hades, a concept that is otherwise unheard of in Greek literature until Pindar, around 500 B.C. In all the intervening writers we have been looking at through the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., psyche is never the ghost-soul, but always has its original meaning of life or livingness.
No amount of twisting about in semantic origins can reconcile these two gratingly different significations for psyche, one relating to life and the other to death. The obvious suggestion here is that these alien incongruities in Homer are interpolations of a period much later than the ostensible period of the poems. And indeed this is what the majority of scholars are sure of on much more ample grounds than we can go into here. Since this meaning of psyche does not appear until Pindar, we may be fairly confident that these passages about Hades and the souls of the dead abiding there in its shades were added into the Homeric poems shortly before Pindar, sometime in the sixth century B.C.
The problem then is how and why did this dramatically different concept of psyche come about? And let us be clear here that the only thing we are talking about is the application of the old word for life to what survives after death and its separability from the body. The actual survival, as we have seen in previous p290 chapters, is not in doubt. According to the theory of the bicameral mind, hallucinations of a person in some authority could continue after death as an everyday matter. And hence the almost universal custom of feeding the corpses after death, and burying them with the appurtenances of life.
I am unable to suggest a truly satisfactory solution. But certainly a part of it is the influence of that towering legend-laden figure of antiquity, Pythagoras. Flourishing around the middle of the sixth century B.C., he is thought to have traveled, as did Solon, to several countries of Asia Minor, particularly Egypt. He then returned and established a kind of mystical secret society in Crotona in southern Italy. They practiced mathematics, vegetarianism, and a firm illiteracy — to write things down was a source of error. Among these teachings, as we have them at least at third hand from later writers, was the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. After death, a man’s soul enters the body of a newborn infant or animal and so lives another life.
Herodotus has been flouted for saying Pythagoras learned this in Egypt. But if one agrees with the theory of the bicameral mind, the origin of soul transmigration in Egyptian ideas is not difficult to trace. I suggest it was a Greek misunderstanding of the functions of the ba, which, as we saw in II.2, was often the seeming physical embodiment of the ka, or hallucinated voice after death. Often the ba had the form of a bird. Greek, however, had no word for ka (other than a god — clearly inappropriate), or for ba, indeed no word for a ‘life’ which could be transferred from one material body to another. Hence psyche was pressed into this service. All references to this Pythagorean teaching use psyche in this new sense, as a clearly separable soul that can migrate from one body to another as could an hallucinated voice in Egypt.
Now this does not really solve our problem. For there is nothing here of dead strengthless souls wailing about in a netherworld, guzzling hot blood to get their strength back — which is p291 the lively scene added into the Odyssey as Book 11. But the psyche here is somewhat the same, a something of a man which leaves the body at death. And what the Hades view of psyche may be is a composite of the Pythagorean teaching with the older view of the buried dead in Greek antiquity.
All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do. The word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun.
But the matter does not stop there. In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions.
So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.