The Secret History of the Soul : Physiology, Magic and Spirit Forces from Homer to St Paul [1 ed.] 9781443865937, 9781443848060

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The Secret History of the Soul

The Secret History of the Soul: Physiology, Magic and Spirit Forces from Homer to St Paul

By

Richard Sugg

The Secret History of the Soul: Physiology, Magic and Spirit Forces from Homer to St Paul, by Richard Sugg This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Richard Sugg All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4806-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4806-0

For Elizabeth, in memory of wild horses

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii List of Abbreviations .................................................................................. ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 8 The Soul at the Edge of History: Homeric Greece Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 The Hebrew Soul Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59 Plato and Aristotle Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 90 Soul and Spirit in the New Testament Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 122 Magic and the Materiality of Spirit in New Testament Culture Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 137 The Empirical Status of Pneuma in the New Testament Conclusion ............................................................................................... 201 Notes........................................................................................................ 228 Index ........................................................................................................ 292

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help with various linguistic questions I am very grateful to Stephen Pender, Patricia Fagan, and Daniel Abondolo. Thanks are due to Paul Hammond for reading and commenting on chapter three, and to Barbara Graziosi for answering questions on Homer. Thanks to Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars for her interest in and help with this project, as well as to Emily Surrey and Amanda Millar, and to Laura Summerton and Soucin Yip-Sou for their help with the cover image. I would like to thank Durham's English Studies research committee for financial assistance to cover indexing and cover image. Once again: the long process of research and writing was enhanced by the presence of numerous students and colleagues - for which, many thanks to my recent Americanists and Supernaturalists, and to Ash, Penny, Alison, Helen, Sam, Barbara, Jason, Dan and Marina.

ABBREVIATIONS The Odyssey Unless otherwise stated, all references are to: The Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray (London: William Heinemann, 1919). The Iliad Unless otherwise stated, all references are to: The Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray (London: William Heinemann, 1924). Plato Unless otherwise stated, all references are to: The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), and are given by title and section. Aristotle DA PA DMA GA Unless otherwise stated, all references are to: De Anima, trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957); Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (London: Heinemann, 1961); Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (London: Heinemann, 1942). ANT All references to New Testament apocrypha are to The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation, ed. J. K. Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

INTRODUCTION

As a child I was greatly diverted by a television adaptation of H.G. Wells's tale, The Invisible Man. Understandably, the filmed version of this story presented a very different dilemma from those usually accompanying page-to-screen transfers. Normally, the problem might be that you could see too much - or, at least, could see too definitely. In this case, the problem was that you could see too little. And yet the reality of the invisible man, to the childish mind, was never in doubt. Artful camerawork managed to set my own gaping eyes behind his. Warped and staccato movement along an otherwise empty path made it clear that he was there. At one point he was shot, and bled quite visibly. At other times - I seem to recall - his laboured breathing could be distinctly heard. And, of course, like ordinary people, the invisible man did things. He left his mark on the world around him. This book and its early-modern counterpart trace the life of one of the most important invisible beings in Western history. For about 1500 years the Christian soul was an invisible entity which dominated the lives of millions. It comforted or tyrannised; impelled to outward action, or quailed passively at the inward arrows of conscience. Before the (surprisingly recent) ascendancy of the brain, it processed data and knowledge. It underpinned all the complex dynamics of human physiology. It enjoyed an ambiguous, at times intriguingly elusive relationship with the self. The present book deals with the pre-history of the Christian soul. The Smoke of the Soul examines the fully developed (yet often problematic) soul of early-modern Christianity, focussing especially on Britain. The two works can be read together, and it is partly with this in mind that I begin, in The Secret History, with Homer. Here we meet notions of spirit force which are radically different from the dualism of the later Christian soul, in writings which nevertheless would be canonised by the Christian west as the dawn of its literary tradition. Examination of Homeric soul beliefs allows us not only to see how very different these were from fullydeveloped Christianity, but also shows some intriguing parallels with the nominally Christian works discussed in following chapters. Having briefly glanced at the powerful ideologies anchored in and catalysed by the later Christian soul, we have already admitted that it was at once invisible, and yet very far from imperceptible. My interest in this

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Introduction

perceptibility is as follows: I am not so much interested in what the soul made people do, as in what the soul itself could do. In what ways was it concretely, empirically apparent or felt, both within and outside the human body? My subject is not ethics, or abstract theologies of the soul. I am concerned instead with what might be called the science of the soul. In the period covered by this first book, both pre-Socratic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece made some impressive contributions to the kind of practical or empirically-based science which would later revive and flourish in Enlightenment Europe. (In the realm of medicine, indeed, the physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus are supposed to have reached (or descended to) a level of scientific ruthlessness which even the Marquis de Sade could envision only at the level of fantasy. Here condemned prisoners were vivisected in the cause of medical enquiry.1) To some extent this kind of science underpins my examination of the soul's concrete, sensual, dynamic and worldly powers. Yet the account is by no means dependent on that kind of relatively systematic or self-conscious form of science. We find this in Aristotle and in the Stoics; to some extent, even in Plato. Elsewhere, we find two rather different kinds of science. At one level, the pre-Enlightenment sense of 'science' (scientia) as knowledge matches awareness and ideas about the basic forces of human life. This knowledge is itself often marked by varying levels of empiricism in the world of Homeric epic or of Old Testament Hebraism. At another level, attitudes to the soul are frequently 'scientific' in a way which more narrowly resembles modern hard science. They are concerned with the body - with its concrete substance, fluids, and processes. And, in the world of the New Testament in particular, they are often related to, or definitely embedded in magical cosmologies. As Freud emphasised long ago, magic is at once like and unlike science.2 One way in which it is unlike is in its lack of a sufficiently complex over-arching theory. And yet it may be partly due to this lack that magically-based societies are so carefully empirical. Those who believe in magic like to see how its powers work. The less theory there is about this process, the more need there is for sensory evidence at the empirical level (it cures people; it moves objects; it seems able to transfer spirit forces from one place to another). In this sense, then, hard science does have something in common with the worlds of Homer, of Moses, and of Christ. The separate periods of these two books also share another important feature. In theory, dualism has been a persistent and predominant tenet of Christian belief. There are two lives; two levels of reality; there is a body and there is a soul. At the cosmic level, the hierarchy of this dualism is especially clear: there is your

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transient earthly life, and there is your eternal and real one. These points hold even for those unlucky beings who spend that real life in hell rather than in heaven. At the human level, the hierarchy is complicated by issues of human responsibility - what care does one take of the soul? how much does one chasten and deny the body? Yet even here the ultimate hierarchy remains clear. The soul is, again, real and permanent; potentially, it is also far better than the body. This ethical dualism should (in theory) have been echoed by a corresponding dualism of matter and spirit. The body was material, the soul immaterial. In reality, the early-modern soul was often part of a continuous, far more blurred and unstable relationship. The supposedly hard line between body and soul frequently wavered, shifted, or melted. When I began to probe into the oldest historical antecedents of the early-modern body-soul nexus, I had expected that I was going to find a synthesis of pagan and Christian elements. Again, I anticipated that this division (with Plato honorably excepted) would broadly equate to a division between monist and dualist attitudes. Time and again, I found things that were in fact very different. Prepared as I was for a specially alien cosmology in the time of Homer, I found myself repeatedly startled by just how alien its attitudes really were. Again: while I knew that the Old Testament was hardly a Christian record, I was struck by how thoroughly and deviously the Christianity of later epochs had distorted or buried Hebraic ideas of the soul. The same held for Aristotle; even, to some degree, for that supposedly arch-dualist Plato. But the greatest shock came with the New Testament. True, there was dualism of a kind. But most of it belonged to St Paul, and even that very rarely matched the bodysoul dualism of Augustine or Aquinas - Paul's main concern was with the urgently-felt opposition between this world and the next. Moreover, pneuma (spirit), the potentially metaphysical term which dominates these writings, was frequently a very dynamic, concrete, worldly and empirically verifiable thing. Far from being severely opposed to matter, it was often hand in glove with it. For many people in this context, it seems that spirit was really a superior form of matter - or a superior material agency - rather than something simply opposed to it. What I came to realise, then, was that it was not in reality a question of New Testament dualism, on the one hand, more or less perfectly synthesised with pagan monism or materialism on the other. Rather, in the area of body and soul, the New Testament - and particularly New Testament culture - was itself often essentially monist and materialist. Christ did not invent body-soul dualism, and here even the industrious St Paul could not take much credit. Long after the deaths of Christ, Paul, and

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Introduction

all his apostles, Origen (a man so pathologically hostile to his body that he was said to have castrated himself) began the task of establishing this seemingly 'Christian' tenet - one which would be reworked and worried over through the centuries by Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. My opening chapter begins with an animated body worlds away from the attitudes of Origen and his successors. In The Odyssey you might show your worth by cutting off someone else's testicles, but your own were highly prized. In this fiercely active and warlike culture, the soul (psyche) is a thing which belongs only to the next world. Homeric man has a psyche, but it is wholly unconscious until after death. And any value which it may have there is sharply undercut by the reduction and misery of the early Greek Hades. Here there is only a dry and pale remnant of earthly life. To be immaterial is to be diminished. The psyche is a reluctant custodian of this grey museum, preserving a vanished life in the thinnest and coldest of echoes. Indeed, it is no accident that the wretchedness of Hades seems strongly bound up with its stasis. For Homer, the forces of life are most powerfully real precisely when they are being lived. Not only that, but three of the most central terms relating to Homeric life and consciousness - phrenes, thymos, and menos - are all strongly marked by their persistent mobility. While the concept of nous offers perhaps the closest forerunner of an abstract 'mind', nous itself is only one part of a notably plural, at times fragmented picture of the human individual, in which different forces and impulses often jostle for supremacy. At another level, the Homeric world is quite basically unsuited to dualism. For this cosmology has not yet sharply split its perceptions and categories into the material and immaterial, the literal and the metaphoric. With the help of Ruth Padel's valuable study of mind and body in Greek tragedy, the chapter is also able to show how such attitudes partly persist into a later period of Greek culture. Chapter two brings us to the Old Testament. Here, at what would come to be seen as the very basis of all creation, the Hebrew account of man's formation by Yahweh is markedly different from the dualism of full-blown Christianity. In Genesis it quite definitely states that man becomes a living soul when Yahweh breathes into him. He does not 'get' a soul. And, as many other passages of these books show, he correspondingly never has a soul in the Christian sense. In life, the compound of body and spirit (Yahweh's breath or ruach) makes up nephesh. Nephesh is appropriately characterised by its sensuous or concrete qualities - desire, hunger, physical weariness, and so on. The Hebrew life-force, moreover, is not an individual soul during earthly existence. As in Homer, most of the Old

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Testament also fails to exhibit any kind of dualistic afterlife. There is only Sheol. Like Hades, this is a place of reduction and loss, of stasis and desiccation. It is marked by a pronounced lack of life. And the human lifeforce itself, absorbed back into the ruach of Yahweh at a person's death, is as impersonal and quantitative as a kind of vital gas. Chapter three finds us in the company of two honorary Christians. Having so stridently rejected Greek rational tradition, Christianity would later decide that it needed a more solid and impressive philosophical framework. But to get this in a suitable form, it naturally had to radically adapt - at times outrightly hijack - the thought of key philosophers. In reality, any dinner party composed of Plato, Aristotle and Origen would not have been a harmonious one. Plato himself was of course far bettersuited to Christian attitudes than was Aristotle. Yet even Plato had his weak points. His account of the body and the soul in Timaeus, for example, is relatively empirical and materially detailed. He shows some interest in physiology. Worse still, Phaedrus's account of the divine is intimately bound up with a yet more undesirable version of the body - here there is an evocation of homoerotic love which is strikingly sensual, even when it is not outrightly sexualised. Thirdly, although at times Plato seems to present a clearly bipartite dualism within the human individual, he at one point admits a dangerously ambiguous third term into this model. The 'spirited part' of the body is something which fails to clearly side with either its superior relative, reason, or its inferior one, desire. If Plato can be seen as a dualist who rashly admits some degree of uncertain mediation between body and soul, Aristotle might be viewed as an empiricist who makes some grudging concessions to dualism. Aristotle is a natural biologist and a reluctant dualist. He clearly has little time for those thinkers who 'only try to explain what is the nature of the soul, without adding any details about the body which is to receive it'.3 This itself comes from De Anima, thus warning us that even in potentially more abstract contexts Aristotle seems resolved to spite his sometime teacher. Indeed, even the famous wax-seal analogy which Christianity found so congenial an account of body-soul relations could be seen as an echo of the Old Testament, with its clear preference for an animated body over an incarnated soul. Perhaps most important of all is Aristotle's use of pneuma. Although at one point - in notoriously ambiguous phrasing - he gives this some association with the divine, pneuma is usually notable for its place within a continuous (potentially monistic) model of organic life. Here 'soul' is typically of interest as a source of vital heat, with lesser or stronger degrees of heat and ensoulment running down and up the continuous scale of existence, including both animal and human life-forms. Time and again,

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Introduction

Aristotle's attitudes to life, and his tellingly equivocal phrasing (humanity is perhaps only 'more divine' than the animal world) suggest a reluctant dualist at very best. Few things have proved so stubbornly resistant to historical treatment as the events and world of the New Testament. The first chapter on this period attempts to break up the mythic ossification of Christian accounts in two broad ways. First: it emphasises the predominant Greek cosmology within which these events occurred. For the Stoics, all life was material. The cosmos was a monist entity, and pneuma - its animating principle was indeed a superior form of matter, rather than a defiantly otherworldly spirit. Secondly, the chapter foregrounds the contingency of events and beliefs which were once fluidly undecided, rather than fixed in the theological stone of later eras. It stresses the vital role of Paul as the true founder of Christianity, and shows how Paul's aims and methods were very far from those of a systematic theologian. If events and their ultimate outcomes were fluid and undecided in the lifetimes of Christ and Paul, so too was the fate of the Christian soul. A statistical and thematic survey of the New Testament shows how effortlessly pneuma outstrips psyche. Even where the latter does appear, its sense can at times be ambiguous, if not outrightly Hebraic. At one point we find that pneuma and psyche feature in a descending spiritual hierarchy - one in which the two are broadly opposed in the same way that soul and body would later be. At another level, certain Pauline uses of pneuma have the conveniently vague and elastic qualities which 'democracy' or 'freedom' often exhibit in political contexts. Accordingly, pneuma can also be seen in these cases to fulfil quite worldly, pragmatic functions, often being central to Paul's radical drive toward a universal form of Christianity. Chapter five looks in detail at a world in which the supernatural was relatively natural for many people. Demons and spirit forces were ubiquitous. They were the causes of disease and the source of cures - as we see with particular clarity in the cases of the Gadarene swine and the Pool of Bethesda. Correspondingly, magic, in such an environment, was equally worldly. It was a profitable, at times competitive business. When the apostles persuade magicians to burn magical textbooks worth 50,000 pieces of silver, they show not only how profitable this art could be, but typify their role as a kind of new magical mafiosi, forcing out existing operators as part of their aggressive spiritual campaign. By carefully examining a number of relevant episodes, my final chapter shows that pneuma was the real force behind Christianity's success. In this world, spirit was not an ethereal idea. It was a potent,

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dynamic, transferable force, whose operations and underlying laws were often notably empirical, and on several occasions closely match the psychology of tribal or folk magic. These qualities are illustrated throughout Christ's career, from the moment at which this power is quite literally transferred to him at his baptism, to that when he breathes it out upon the cross. In between these two points, pneuma not only features in several famous miracles (the hem of Christ's garment; the healing of the blind) but is very deliberately transferred to the disciples. Consequently, they are able to rival, and in some ways surpass Christ's own cures. Paul in particular makes some strikingly concrete uses of pneuma - at one point transferring it to pieces of cloth which are then used to effect cures; at another seemingly darting it from his eyes to blind the rival magician Barjesus during a mission to Cyprus. Meanwhile, when we come to the very highest class of miracle - the raising of the dead - we find that local cosmology fails to recognise a clear division between life and death. In this, as in so much else, New Testament culture is at once very far from dualism, and surprisingly close to the thanatological attitudes of tribal or folk culture. By using these kinds of anthropological parallels throughout the two final chapters it is possible to significantly re-contextualise the potentially mythic events of the Testament. Ironically enough, the implications of such comparisons have formed a stubborn blind-spot amongst otherwise notably relativising anthropologists. When E.B. Tylor, for example, states that, 'among rude races, the original conception of the human soul seems to have been that of etherality, or vaporous materiality, which has held so large a place in human thought ever since', and that 'the later metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any meaning to a savage', he might well have been describing the role of pneuma and the theories of animation found in Christ's working environment.4 Once this kind of comparison becomes clear, we are indeed led to wonder if later Christianity may have opted for psyche partly in order to avoid the magical qualities of pneuma. We begin, however, in a world which had very different concerns. In Homeric and even in early-fifth-century Greece, there was a readily accepted traffic between humans and the emphatically plural world of the gods. Indeed, as Ruth Padel neatly puts it, 'in Athenian homes', invisible gods 'were a force as live and considerable as electricity in ours'.5 Recalling our pursuit of invisible and yet real forces, let us now see how such powers ebbed and flowed in the bodies of Achilles, Hector and Sarpedon, and in the tragic crises of later Greek drama.

CHAPTER ONE THE SOUL AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY: HOMERIC GREECE

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect. (John Fowles)

In the beginning was the word; and the word was breath. Breath and speech, breath and thought: from the India of the Vedas, some three millennia ago, to pre-Christian Rome; from the Ancient Babylonians to the Homeric Greeks; from the Book of Genesis to the Old Slavic tongues of Poland, Russia, and Slovakia, the same notions lie crystallised in the buried fragments of past languages. From the Sanskrit 'atman', the Latin 'fumus', Greek 'thymos' or 'psyche', Hebrew 'ruach', Arabic 'nafasun', and Old Slav 'dhuma', we find that terms denoting essential principles of life all derive from or relate to words meaning 'breath, 'blow', or 'smoke'.1 As we pursue the roots of Christian thought down into subterranean depths of the past, we find ourselves with just two reliable companions: the human body, and human language. And we have to treat even these two guides with caution. What looks familiar is often very strange. Secular as we may now be in many cases, the basic notions of Christian dualism, with its antagonistic forces of matter and spirit, have nevertheless saturated our thinking pervasively. From this perspective, it may be better to imagine the cosmology of the Ancient Greeks as that of another planet, rather than of another civilisation. Our investigations begin with the era of written history. Yet it was probably some time before this that many peoples began to note the basic mechanics and phenomena of breath as primary forces of life. In colder regions in particular, steam would have issued from the mouth or from a bleeding wound. To ascertain death, you might have sought out the slightest stir of respiration, felt perhaps on your own cheek, or seen to vibrate a leaf or feather.2 We cannot know just when this consciousness first developed. But we can certainly see it registered in some of the

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world's oldest sacred texts, the Vedas and Upanishads of Ancient Hindu culture. In the earliest of these Sanskrit writings, the Rig Veda (c.1200900BC), a hymn called 'The Funeral Fire' features an address to the corpse: ‘May your eye go to the sun, your life’s breath to the wind ... Take root in the plants with your limbs’.3 Here 'breath' is 'atman' – a word which would later come to mean something like ‘soul’. Nevertheless, as we will find in the case of Homer, what is essential is by no means automatically divine or immortal. The 'atman' at this stage does indeed seem merely to dissolve into air, rather than forming the core of some unique individual afterlife.4 Around the same time, in a notoriously opaque hymn 'The Riddle of the Sacrifice', we find evocations of a creation myth which broadly mirrors the chaos of Genesis, and which asks 'Where was the breath and blood and soul of the earth?’5 Moving ahead to the period around 800BC, we encounter a subtle change in the status of the soul in a much later Vedic text from the Upanishads.6 The hymn ‘What survives death?’ seems at first very similar to the earlier funeral song: ‘when man here is dead, if his speech enters into fire, his breath into wind, his eye into the sun ... his body into the earth…'. We now also read, however, that 'his soul [atman]' goes 'into the ether ... and his blood and semen are deposited in water'. The concluding words, 'what then becomes of this man? – Take my hand, my dear!’ warn us that even here there is no certainty as to a blissful afterlife.7 Yet undeniably there is now some sense of division between merely human, perishable 'breath' (again fled into the winds) and a separate, perhaps more privileged 'atman' or 'soul' (associated with 'the ether').8 We find that the human being comes over time to be split into two forms, one of which is more abstract, and can perhaps survive the death of the material body. This tendency is in fact repeated in Greek culture, as well as within that set of texts which are now regarded as the testaments of the Christian Bible. In a sense much of Christian history is a story of how, by prodigious mental effort, Christians kept that abstract element suspended, elevated over the body, until finally, some 1600 years after Christ, the gravity of the material world presently dragged it back to earth. In turning, now, to the epic deeds, furies and lusts of Odysseus, Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector we need once again to remind ourselves that the ferocious dualism of Christian culture was as yet undreamed of, and that abstraction in general was highly alien to the minds of Homeric poets.

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Homer The now mythic tales of the Odyssey and the Iliad arose, as A. W. H. Adkins emphasises, 'in a society of virtually autonomous small social units termed oikoi, noble households under the leadership of local chieftains, or agathos.9 The oikos was the largest effective social, political and economic unit'.10 In this world, democracy could not be conceived even by way of an absent goal or utopian ideal.11 Nor, it seems, could human rights. As Richard Broxton Onians notes, 'the noblest behave like savages in battle. Agamemnon, after slaying the suppliant son of treacherous Antimachos, cuts off his arms and head, then sends the trunk rolling … when Patroclus … falls, Hector strips his corpse and drags it along in order to cut off the head and give the body to the dogs of Troy'. After being hung up in an agonisingly contorted position, Melantheus is cut down by Odysseus and his men, who then '"cut off his nostrils and ears with the pitiless bronze, plucked out his genitals for the dogs to devour raw, and hacked his hands and feet with vengeful spirit" … When a city is taken, the men are slain, the children dashed to death or enslaved, and the women violently dragged away to serve as slaves and concubines of their married or unmarried conquerors'.12 Denying Hector's pleas for mercy moments before he kills him, Achilles is scarcely satisfied with mere slaughter. He briefly considers cannibalism ('Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now/to hack your flesh away and eat you raw'), and could perhaps be said to partially retain this fantasy when vowing that birds and dogs will eat his victim instead.13 From our point of view, such habits might summon up images of 'tribal' violence and barbarity, whether mythically distant, or as seen and related in recent years in and after the Afghanistan of the Taliban regime.14 The fact that such excesses were felt by Homer's peers to support rather than endanger the structure and customs of society (that they were in fact highly meaningful, rather than merely 'senseless') may only make them all the more strange to us.15 Rudely jolted to attention by this seeming contrast between savage war-crimes and the ambiguous prestige of epic canonical literature, we do at least start to suspect that we are entering a very, very distant land. As we probably begin to appreciate, the Iliad in particular is in many ways an intensely male culture. Perhaps less obvious, but vital to remember as we seek to plot a course down the centuries between matter and spirit, is this: the Homeric poems are tales not of merely exceptional human beings, but of godlike heroes - people suspended somewhere between the natural and supernatural worlds. Sarpedon, for example, is the son of Zeus, and

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Achilles the son of the sea-nymph (or nereid) Thetis, herself a daughter of the sea-god, Nereus.16 We need also to be aware of certain basic practical issues which can affect reading and understanding of Homer's work. Conveniently limited under the name of a man about whom we know almost nothing, the poems are of course the work of many anonymous story-tellers, having survived and mutated in oral versions for at least several decades before they were finally transcribed in the form now bequeathed to us.17 This could, on one hand, mean that in some ways the Odyssey and Iliad are indeed genuinely mythic works, insofar as they have distilled the general mentality of a culture, rather than the idiosyncratic talents of a single author. It also means that we should expect to find contradictions and puzzles as we seek to decode words already foreign to us, and perhaps further subject to internal changes of meaning across the long span of composition of the Homeric canon.18 These are some of the broad frames of reference for our enquiries, in a world which seems hardly less alien to the Greece of Plato than it does to that of Christianity or imperial Rome. As audiences crouched on the sand to hear tales of Odysseus and Circe, of Priam and Helen, mingling with the hiss of surf or shrilling of cicadas, most of the Old Testament had been neither lived nor written. Great Britain had no city worthy of the name, and, as far as we are concerned, European literature was entirely nonexistent. Hesitating on the shores of this terra incognita, we might understandably want to grasp the reassuringly familiar human body as a stable point of reference. We can do this, however, only if we accept that the Homeric body is in many ways just as strange as the mythic cruelty and heroism of Achilles, Hector and Odysseus. We may start off looking at something familiar, but it will continually and stubbornly mutate into something very alien. As Padel has so convincingly demonstrated, both body and consciousness are also still very surprising things in the tragic drama of the sixth and fifth centuries. In what follows I will draw at some length on her studies of this slightly later (but still pre-Platonic) material.19 I will work in this chapter with areas of the body, and with terms which in part refer to physiological processes or physiological energies. But before we move into these specific regions, we need to be warned about the intriguingly holistic and dynamic nature of Homeric consciousness. This warning can be stated in various ways. At one level, we need to try and free ourselves from a post-Christian sense of the abstractness of selfhood or consciousness; from that pervasive and enduring dualism which tends to insist on some kind of 'us' or some

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ultimate 'being' as independent of our bodies. The idea is still lodged in phrases such as 'I have a body'. We do not have bodies; we are bodies. Those Homeric terms - phrenes, psyche, nous - which very broadly correspond to something like 'mind' or 'soul' in many ways fail to match the post-Christian qualities associated with these two English words. Moreover, even where a term such as nous does achieve some degree of abstraction, we find that it can be subordinated to more rudely material forces, such as menos and thymos. If that first statement of caution concerns an abstraction which is in many ways religious, a second point touches on the habits of modern scientific culture. A basic question which recurs throughout the history of body-soul relations is this: where do people feel that they are in their bodies? For many of us, the answer is probably the heart or the brain. Modern medical science of course leans predominantly to a self or a mind located in the brain. Limiting ourselves for now to that organ, most of us will agree that this is the dominant centre of our thoughts. Yet even the most basic knowledge of biology tells us that the brain can never operate independently. When our body feels different, our brain thinks differently. (Consider, for example, the differences before and after: a large meal; sex; a run or a swim.) Obvious as this may seem, modern science predisposes us to think of the brain as an autonomous palace of rational and controlled thought, ruling over the potentially rebellious domain of feeling with necessary rigour. As we will see, Homer is arguably more honest about the open-ness of the mind to the more general flux of bodily energy. This modern sense of being able to neatly identify a human quality and a human organ links to a related habit. Partly because of the success of medical anatomy since the seventeenth century, many of us are powerfully influenced by the idea of 'cutting down' to a final truth or certainty. What is the 'real' material stuff underlying the misty vapour of emotions? This anatomically-inspired search for truth can operate on many levels, from the literal realm of medicine and pathology, through varying degrees of metaphor. The truth is 'buried', 'hidden'; as something unpleasant but undeniable, it must be unflinchingly pierced and excised by the cold surgeon of knowledge. Day after day, the word 'analysis' is used with immense authority, and with many of these associations. Semantically, it is closely related to anatomy, and the two were often used interchangeably in the early-modern period. For reasons both practical (anatomy is performed on dead bodies) and psychological (things are easier to understand and control when they are still) this desire to cut down to the knowable, definite underlying truth is one which works best with lifeless or motionless objects.

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As Padel has emphasised, the Greeks - both in and after Homeric epic did not think in terms of this hierarchy of truths (the smoke of emotion, we might say, rising from the foundational matter of the body's factory). For them, life and truth were not a question of cutting down to the basic physical reality of the material world. Padel notes, for example, that menos is a bodily force which in some ways behaves like a liquid, and which we may be tempted to further narrow down to blood. But 'if we say menos "is really" or "was once" blood, we impose our own story patterns and assumptions about mind ... "Really" implies that the physical is always present in, prior to, and more truthful than the abstract. "Was once" implies a whole mythopoeic narrative behind Greek words for "mind": that they "once" referred to physical organs "and then" developed more abstract meanings'.20 On one hand, then, we have to try not to abstract those conscious forces which, in Greek thought, were always caught up in the raw matter and raw movement of the human body. On the other, we must not overvalue or artificially stabilise those bodily organs or areas associated with Homeric consciousness. Metaphor is not to be easily tamed or explained away by its reassuringly definite location within the chest or the guts. We can begin to sum up this problem by saying that, for Homer or Aeschylus, the abstract and the concrete had not yet been separated. But here we are indeed only beginning to grasp the strangeness of that mentality. It might be fairer to say that the concrete and the abstract had not yet been invented. As Padel puts it, if we suggest that the Ancient Greeks '"blurred" distinctions we make between mind and body' we necessarily imply 'that the Greeks perceived two different things to blur, two meanings to slip between'. In reality, 'the distinctions and meanings are ours, not theirs'.21 One final caution is no less important. The Homeric body was always moving. Or rather: Homer was rather more ready to admit that bodies do move. Once again, the dubious modern status of the brain reminds us how we may often seek to deny that persistent fizz and pulse of chemical and organic life. The status of the removed, the calmly deliberating brain is all the more insidious just because its movement is not easily felt. We perhaps more readily accept that emotion, by contrast, is mobile and fluid. Yet we also often forget just how restlessly embodied emotion can be. This is ironic, given that the word's root stares plainly out at us: 'e-motion' is indeed something which moves us (or moves in us). It was not that long ago, indeed, that the word could refer to a purely physical movement of the body. In 1693, for example, the philosopher John Locke talks of moments when 'exercise has left any emotion' in a child's 'blood or pulse'.22 With all this in mind, it may now be better to imagine that the

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following journey through the Homeric body is more of a vivisection than an anatomy.

Phrenes and Thymos We begin with the chest. For the Homeric Greeks, the primary centre of this region seems not to have been the heart. The words kradie, ker and etor appear to be the closest terms for 'heart', and there is no shortage of these in the epics.23 Scholarly analysis shows, however, that these words were usually subordinated to other entities located in the chest: the phrenes, thymos and nous. As we will see, there is some limited parallel between phrenes and the heart. English renderings of Homer, however, can make him seem far more heart-centred than he actually was, given the sometimes loose translations which too often use 'heart' for these terms.24 Phrenes would come to mean 'mind'. The Greek is still embedded in certain English words, such as the now discredited Victorian science of 'phrenology'. With 'ph' altered to 'f', this Greek mind can also be found in the words 'frenzy' and 'frenetic'. This brings us a little closer to the Homeric sense - though even here we need to realise that such 'frenzy' was less likely to have negative connotations, being associated instead with heightened mental power.25 More broadly, 'Phrenes contain emotion, practical ideas, and knowledge. We ourselves think of these as qualitatively different things, but popular fifth-century thought did not. Phrenes are containers: they fill with menos, "anger", or thumos, "passion". They are essentially mobile, too, and they "tremble within". They are the holding centre, folding the heart, holding the liver'.26 Notwithstanding what has been said about the dangers of material reductionism, Padel's own description here does clearly indicate the middle regions of the human trunk. In this sense, she is at least broadly aligned with those who thought phrenes to refer to the diaphragm.27 But this question of internal specificity has been a vexed one. Since Justesen's claims in 1928, 'the phrenes have' - notes James M. Redfield - 'been (cogently) identified as the lungs'.28 Yet Michael Clarke seems to agree with Padel that this equation is too simplistic, and can significantly distort certain passages in Homer.29 There is some evidence which points specifically to the lungs. Caroline P. Caswell cites a reference to the phrenes '"around the soft heart"', adding that phrenes should 'properly [be] "close-knit"'.30 This latter quality, as we will see, matches the Homeric sense that phrenes contain something like breath. Padel herself quotes a late fifth century doctor's polemic on phrenes. While the doctor himself is attacking the (evidently widespread)

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15

notion of phrenes as some kind (or part) of 'mind', he simultaneously gives a sense of their anatomical character: '"if someone is unexpectedly overjoyed or upset', the phrenes leap and make the person jump. This is because of their fine texture and very wide extension in the body"'.31 This 'fine texture' could well match both Caswell's 'close-knit', and the relatively diaphanous quality of the lungs. Phrenes are referred to in ways which clearly imply that they are substantial, and yet also - like the lungs - vulnerable. In the first case, we have Achilles, remarking after his dream of the dead Patroclus that, '"there is in Hades a psyche and an eidolon, but no phrenes in it at all"'.32 As we will see, psyche and eidolon (image or shadow) are indeed more or less insubstantial remnants of the human being. Echoing the typical Homeric fusion of metaphoric and actual, Caswell notes that, when Agamemnon laments, '"I was greatly in error, having relied upon my wretched phrenes"', 'wretched' can be better translated as 'torn'.33 Padel supports this sense of vulnerability when she states that, 'like the heart, phrenes have receptor passivity, are acted on by feelings ... Something done "from the phren" is like something done "with the heart", done "sincerely"'.34 Onians, meanwhile, notes that in Homeric physiology the lungs were thought to absorb drink. Accordingly, to lose mental control, or to be outrightly drunk (in a period when 'drink' was almost always wine) was to have 'wet lungs'.35 Drink, for Homer, did not 'go to the head' but to the chest. Padel agrees that, 'from earliest lyric, Greek poetry assumes that wine goes into the lungs'.36 Here as much as anywhere we realise with a jolt how different Homeric consciousness was. If 'wet lungs' indicate drunkenness, then to at least some degree the lungs must be held to think.37 Viewing this matter from another angle, we can say that one might expect the lungs to be relatively dry by comparison with the heart. Clearly, even the most basic knowledge of anatomy (as obtained incidentally through observation of serious wounds, or during animal sacrifices) would show that the heart was less suitable as a repository of dry breath or spirit. The idea is later echoed by Heraclitus, who talks of the 'moist soul', and of how 'living properly causes one's soul to dry out ... One whose soul is moist, like a drunk or a sleepwalker, is unaware of where he is'.38 It is clear, then, that if we had to choose one area or set of organs, the lungs would be the necessary location. But both Padel and Clarke make strong cases for resisting such rigid specificity. Unsatisfactory as it may seem, we are obliged to accept a 'definition' (the very word is too definite in itself) which hovers close to the lungs, without securely and neatly settling in them.39 If this makes us feel somewhat at sea, then we have in

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fact gained a valuable sense of disorientation, and some degree of sympathy with the often turbulent, storm-tossed nature of Homeric and tragic consciousness. As Redfield puts it in the case of Homer, 'the notion of life which centres on the menos, phrenes and thymos is a notion of life centering on action'.40 What was thymos? It was the stuff of life, and the speed of life. At the level of the body, thymos in many ways behaved like breath.41 It was, we shall see, a far richer and deeper thing than breath alone. But we should remind ourselves at once that Homer celebrated heroic, violent military action as one of the highest of values. That is: while our opening discussion has shown how breath was often registered as something basic and integral to life, Homeric thymos unites that recognition with a more precise and emphatic valorisation of breath. Homer's attitude to thymos is not just a celebration of breath in its raw vitality, but a celebration sharply coloured by the tempestuous values of Homeric violence and heroism. This holds for the lungs as well as for the breath. Like the heart, and unlike the brain, the lungs could be felt. At moments of the greatest heroism, and of emotional or physical stress, they were keenly, perhaps painfully responsive.42 But the body is just one stratum of the densely multi-layered nature of thymos. It was also, Caswell emphasises, 'the most-used psychological term in Homeric diction'.43 Accordingly, its range of reference is at once richly varied, and immensely frustrating for a modern translator. 'Modern English can supply no better than a crude approximation, either linguistically or conceptually', for thymos partakes 'of the physical and the psychical' in a way that 'defies description but is also totally in keeping with the other glimpses of early Greek psychology revealed by Homeric poetry'.44 As Caswell further adds, 'the fact that thymos is the constant factor in passages describing a large number of emotions suggests that it itself is the neutral bearer of emotion'.45 Another way of putting this is to say that the one consistent factor in uses of thymos is bodily energy. Thymos unites the roles of blood, of breath, and of electrical impulse in order to transmit thought or feeling through the body. We have glimpsed the notion that thymos was contained in the lungs. Naturally, it could be felt to move whilst within that relatively limited space. But this containment was itself only provisional. We have also seen that, while the lungs should ideally be 'close-knit', they could (for example) be 'torn'. Restating that the relationship of thymos and phrenes 'seems to be that of contained to container', Caswell adds that, 'when the thymos is not contained in the phrenes, the intellectual function is impaired and the emotions become uncontrollable'.46 We still broadly echo this

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sense of psychic stability, talking as we sometimes do about the need to be properly 'centred in oneself'. Similarly, to be excessively nervous is to be full of violent (e)motion - at times, indeed, to the extent that this turbulence breaks the bounds of the body itself (sweat, urine, vomit, excrement). This sense of restless, more or less involuntary energy comes across in the case of a Homeric coward whose thymos will not remain fixed in his breast, and who '"shifts his weight from thigh to thigh, and from foot to foot"'; while '"within his chest his heart pounds greatly as he thinks of death, and there arises a chattering of the teeth"'.47 Here the fearful thymos is registered in a violent decentring which agitates the body, quite literally, from head to foot. Significantly, however, one does not have to be an outright coward to suffer something like this degree of inner turbulence. In Book XV of the Iliad, we are told that, on seeing Hector, the Danaans ‘were seized with fear, and the thymos of all men sank down to their feet’ (II, 127). At one level, this statement, taken literally, implies a rush of thymos to the feet something quite as physical as that rush of blood to the face which can be seen in blushing.48 At another level, we can infer that the Danaans feel physiologically decentred, effectively weakened by a kind of spiritual hollowness or vacuum at the crux of their beings. Thymos can also be seen as mobile - or at least unstable - insofar as it is clearly dependent on material nourishment. As Tamara Neale has emphasised, it has the capacity to feel hunger. In Book XIX of the Iliad Achilles' thymos has a 'hunger for blood'.49 Reminding ourselves that this is not mere metaphor, we can also find Circe entreating Odysseus and his men, ‘come, eat food and drink wine, until you once more get thymos in your breasts such as when first you left your native land of Ithaca’.50 One likely meaning of this is that thymos has been dislocated within the body (rather than having left it entirely). But it could also mean that it has actually been diminished in quantity. This would correspond to a person's real sense of gradations of hunger or fullness, of greater or lesser force of inner vitality. It may, then, have been the case that when thymos broke out of the lungs or phrenes, it did so not absolutely, but in varying quantities, depending on the extremity of the catalyst. At times, this impression of thymos as behaving like a physical quantity (it can be in different parts of the body at the same time; one can lose some of it, not all of it) helps us guard against a post-Christian sense of thymos as a soul or spirit. When we hear, of the nearly drowned Odysseus, that ‘he revived, and his thymos returned again into his breast’, we could easily assume that this means roughly 'returned into his body', in the way that a Christian soul might return to one wavering between life

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and death.51 In fact, it probably indicates a quantitative rebalancing within the body, thymos shifting into its natural centre, and being felt accordingly. In many ways, then, thymos seems to be an intrinsically mobile thing. It moves insofar as it shrinks or intensifies with hunger or satiety. It moves around the body (sometimes in or out of it). And it may also be right to sense that it often enjoys a kind of vibratory 'motion in stillness', simmering within the phrenes like milk in a saucepan. So, when the sleepless Agamemnon is looking over the night-time plains of Troy from beside his ships, we are told that he would frequently 'groan from the deep of his breast'. His 'phrenes trembled within him’ and ‘in his noble thymos he groaned mightily’ (I, 437). As well as showing us how misleadingly singular and static such uses of 'heart' can be, this strongly suggests that the thymos is felt to move in the way that phrenes are ('trembled'), despite the fact that Agamemnon is here more or less inactive. Little surprise, then, that semantically thymos should also be an essentially restless and dynamic term. Padel derives it from the Greek 'thuǀ, meaning "I seethe", used of an angry man or sea'.52 Also rooting it in this word, Caswell emphasises the senses '"to run, rush, flow"' - again highlighting movement, and here with verbs which variously suit either liquid or gaseous entities.53 In Homeric usage, thymos often has the motility of 'impulse' or the potential kinetic energy of 'will'.54 Odysseus, for example, tells Circe after he and his men have eaten and drunk with her that ‘my thymos is now eager to be gone’ (I, 393). In Book VII of the Iliad Zeus asks Athene, ‘Wherefore art thou come again thus eagerly from Olympus ... and why hath thy proud thymos sent thee?’ (I, 305). In a slightly more complex passage, Agamemnon tells an aged, veteran soldier: ‘old Sir, I would that even as is the thymos in thy breast, so thy limbs might obey’. The sense here is broadly 'the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, as confirmed when Agamemnon adds, ‘but evil old age presseth hard upon thee’ (I, 177). In this case thymos seems to have become a kind of disembodied, relatively impotent 'will' or 'desire'. Because the man is aged, it has lost its characteristic material force and dynamism.55 As something frequently defined by movement or the potential for movement, thymos (like breath) is well-suited not only to the speed of action and violence, but also to the speed of thought and feeling. In the latter case, we have the wrathful thymos of Achilles (I, 429), and the infuriated breast of Patroclus (II, 215); as well as the 'measureless griefs' of Thetis (II, 569). In terms of thought, the rapid motion of thymos is particularly well captured when a warrior, faced with a crisis of judgement, finds one thymos (impulse or decision) countered by another.56 If such moments seem hardly to correspond to the rational heights of

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Socratic dialogue, we must remind ourselves what 'thought' meant in this culture: 'the ruminations and deliberations of the Greek heroes are not those of a detached spectator, rather their intellectual reflections always take place in an atmosphere charged with emotions'.57 Little wonder, then, that a lot of Homeric thought took place, not in the brain, but in the lungs.

Thymos and Homeric Cosmology If Homer's age tended not to distinguish between matter and spirit, the same also held to some extent for the relationship between human and divine. Just as the heroes of these epics are more or less godlike, so their deities have frequently been viewed as all too human in their lusts, furies and vices, notwithstanding their immortality and supernatural powers. In such a world, the supernatural is at least relatively natural. What does this conception of divinity mean in the case of thymos? Curiously from our point of view, thymos seems to in fact be both more physical (it is fed, feels hunger) and more supernatural than ordinary breath. The deities themselves have thymos. We have seen Zeus asking Athene, ‘why hath thy proud thymos sent thee?’ (I, 305). Elsewhere, the goddess Thetis complains, ‘I have measureless griefs at heart [thymos]' (I, 429). While we can assume that the thymos of the gods is greater than that of Homeric warriors, we also find that it is at times transmitted from the divine to the human sphere. When rallying the Trojans, Zeus states: ‘thereby I cause the thymos of each one of you to wax’ (II, 247); while elsewhere we hear how he ‘put thymos in the breast of Patroclus’ (II, 215).58 These two examples of divine inspiration are not very precise or immediate in their physical details (although in the second, thymos is characteristically put into 'the breast'). But it seems likely that in such cases Zeus is in fact transferring his own thymos, rather than more abstractly, magically conjuring it into the warriors' bodies. A more decisive instance offers us further evidence. In Book V of the Iliad, Sarpedon suffers a near-fatal injury. In the version given by Robert Fagles, we hear that Sarpedon's ... loyal comrades laid him down, a man like a god beneath a fine spreading oak sacred to Zeus whose shield is banked with clouds. The veteran Pelagon, one of his closest aides, pushed the shaft of ashwood out through his wound his spirit [psyche] left him - a mist poured down his eyes ... but he caught his breath again. A gust of the North wind

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Chapter One blowing round him carried back the life breath [thymos] he had gasped away in pain (5.793-802)

In this case various details indicate some kind of divine transfusion. First, we know that Sarpedon was indeed the son of Zeus; and secondly, as G.S. Kirk has pointed out, the reference to the oak of Zeus is also deliberate.59 Thirdly, we find that throughout Homeric literature thymos leaves the body at death.60 Sarpedon's thymos has in fact done this. Accordingly, it is returned by the medium of boreas, one of the divinely created winds. While Kirk himself agrees that ‘Sarpedon regains consciousness aided by the breeze', he considers it 'debatable' whether or not this 'literally restores his breath-soul'.61 We should at once remind ourselves that modern ideas of the 'literal' can be unhelpful or dangerous guides when dealing with Homeric thought. But other evidence suggests that the wind is indeed directly instrumental. To do justice to Kirk's uncertainty, it is necessary to see how Fagles' translation has played up some of the more concrete elements of the incident, and of the Homeric qualities of 'spirit' per se. Murray's much older version leaves some of these points relatively obscure: his goodly comrades made godlike Sarpedon to sit beneath a beauteous oak of Zeus that beareth the aegis, and forth from his thigh valiant Pelagon, that was his dear comrade, thrust the spear of ash; and his spirit [psyche] failed him, and down over his eyes a mist was shed. Howbeit he revived, and the breath of the North Wind as it blew upon him made him to live again after in grievous wise he had breathed forth his spirit [thymos]’ (II, 245).

Reading this, we see with especial clarity how Fagles' rendering has Sarpedon 'catching his breath' almost as 'literally' as one might catch a ball; that is, he catches something which is moving, and which is quite definitely carrying 'the life breath' which 'he had gasped away in pain'. We will see presently that the difference between psyche 'leaving' (Fagles) and merely 'failing' (Murray) is an important one. We can add that Fagles appears to have used an intriguing dash of creativity in equating the breath which Sarpedon had first 'gasped away' and the one which returns to him. In this version Sarpedon gets back exactly the same breath which he had lost. To understand the implications of that editorial decision we need to know more about the roles of both Zeus and the wind. In her impressively painstaking analysis of thymos in early Greek epic, Caswell illustrates at some length the repeated tendency to equate thymos with the winds. To the

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question 'what is thymos?' she finally responds: 'I submit that thymos is in fact the human counterpart of the winds, brought to animate the body by the winds as we see in the revival of Sarpedon, and carried away on the winds from the body once it has ceased to be able ... physically to continue breathing and to contain the thymos within the phrenes'. It can be argued that this kind of psycho-climatic holism broadly matches the Homeric unity of metaphorical and literal, or of the spiritual and the concrete (just as it matches that atman which at death was gathered into the wind). As Caswell also notes, 'this synonymity between the winds and thymos was buried gradually by the tendency of the language to specialize and draw distinctions between the cosmic and the individual levels. But because epic diction is conservative, it is still possible to discover the remnants of this relationship'.62 It appears that the relationship is particularly close in the case of Sarpedon's revival. Where does this leave Fagles? It might at first seem that it was not quite necessary for Sarpedon to catch his own thymos, given that the gods on other occasions transfer their thymos into humans, and that Zeus could have done this through the medium of boreas.63 But the passage may hint that Zeus's role was not so much that of supplying thymos; rather, he merely directs it - hence the one quite definite 'gust' which carries back the life breath. This would suggest that, while thymos can often be in the winds (and arguably therefore temporarily inseparable from them), humans (or even demi-gods) cannot utilise or manipulate it in the way that the gods can. In this sense, the gods tap spirit forces rather in the way that magicians seem to do in the New Testament. We can also add, then, that Fagles' rendering of those last three lines is apt in its sense of minimalist economy. As Sarpedon's thymos is still in the air, it is unnecessary for further spirit to be specially supplied by Zeus. This commonsense naturalism is also evident in the apparent theory underlying Sarpedon's revival. At one level, the description and explanation of the episode seem to acknowledge that his condition is unusual and dangerous. That is: in this kind of situation, warriors who were accustomed to ascertaining signs of life or death would believe that they saw something lacking, and would be similarly careful to notice whether it did or did not return. Setting aside the role of psyche for now, we find accordingly that Sarpedon has not 'lost his soul' in the way that educated Christians would later be held to do in the medieval or earlymodern periods. Rather, he has lost his spirit, and when he gets it back, he naturally recovers. His condition is dangerous but not terminal, serious but naturally reversible, rather in the way that a certain amount of blood-loss would be alarming but reparable in the era of blood-transfusion.

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We can underline two of these points by comparing the episode with the belief of certain nineteenth-century Russians. In their culture, a corpse was liable to be animated by a demonic rather than divine force, it being believed that 'vampirism could come about because the wind from the steppe had blown over the body'.64 At one level this shows a similar elision between natural and supernatural, via the demonic force carried in the wind. At another it shows a similar precision: Sarpedon was revived by 'the north wind', and the Russian corpse by 'the wind from the steppe'. But the cosmic naturalism of the Russian belief goes only so far. Even in peasant belief, Christian dualism is sufficiently influential to preclude harmless, ordinary, or divine spirits being transferred in this way. In such cases, re-animation is typically an evil and negative occurrence. Around a thousand years before Christian dualism began to seriously assert itself, we seem to find that Sarpedon could be viewed as dead, but not as 'very dead'. If this distinction at first appears implausible, we will see that it makes a good deal of sense in New Testament culture.65

Menos, Thymos and Nous Approached from a certain angle, Homeric menos can be a particularly misleading term. Prompted by etymology – from menos came mens, and therefore ultimately ‘mind’ – we may assume that here we have some kind of relatively abstract mental faculty. But that version of menos is a long way down an etymological and cultural line. Menos is in fact largely the opposite of what Plato and his descendants would think of as ‘mind’. A more helpful point of etymology, indeed, is offered by Paul S. Macdonald, who notes that the word’s verbal form, 'menomai', means to desire or crave.66 Walter Burkert provides a similar clue, reminding us that ‘mania’ also shares the same root, while underlining Homer’s lack of dualism when he observes that in Greek usage mania 'denotes frenzy, not as the ravings of delusion, but, as its etymological connection with menos would suggest, as an experience of intensified mental power'.67 This last word is a specially important key to Homeric menos. For menos is, emphasises Redfield, 'the most general Homeric word for vitality or energy’.68 Moreover, not only is it never used of mortal women in the Iliad, but it is a force of often raw vitality which man conspicuously shares with wilder or fiercer types of animal. In Iliad XVII, for example, Zeus 'breathed great might [menos] into the horses’.69 A little earlier, we find Menelaus telling Zeus, ‘neither is the spirit [menos] of pard so high, nor of lion ... as is the spirit of Panthous’ sons’ (II, 231-2). Here, given Menelaus' antagonism, we can reasonably suspect some negative overtone:

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Panthous' sons (Euphorbus, Polydamus and Hyperenor) suffer from a wild fury that is construed as subhuman rather than superhuman. A little more subtly, we find Zeus complaining to his son Ares that the latter ‘hast the unbearable, unyielding spirit [menos] of thy mother’ (I, 259). Ares' spirit seems to be one of stubbornness; again, more like a kind of brute instinct than a rational quality. Looking closely at Zeus’s remark and allying it with related evidence, we can argue that, ideally, menos should be governed, ruled, guided or moulded by thymos.70 That of Ares is not, and is therefore literally 'unyielding'.71 Similarly, horses - to whom menos is often attributed - are an archetype of natural energy which must be governed, 'harnessed', and indeed broken by the higher conscious powers of humankind. But menos is not merely a raw animal vigour. Echoing the cosmic holism seen in the case of thymos and the winds, menos is also linked with fire. 'The menos of the sun is its heat .... Fire has a menos'.72 It must, also, be fed with food and drink.73 For the link with fire not only reaches up and out to the sun, but dives back into the dark and active crucible of the guts. Menos is ‘organic fire, i.e. the metabolism … So long as the metabolic fire burns within him, the animal consumes food and air and converts them into organic substance and the menos that moves the organs'.74 Anyone remotely familiar with Plato’s insistence upon a mind poised wholly beyond the low flux and ferment of material process can quickly see how different this is from later conceptions of ‘mens’ as ‘mind’ – a point which is further underlined when we learn that menos can also be diminished by pain.75 Conversely, in the afterlife, menos is conspicuous by its absence; 'the dead are amenƝna karƝna, "heads without menos"'.76 The sense of menos as metabolic fire already gives the term a certain concrete precision; and this quality comes across in other ways. When Agamemnon, for example, ‘filled with menos, "his eyes were like to shining fire"'; and ‘at a moment of rage the fire within can actually be seen through the eyes’.77 The underlying material reality of this ocular fire is one which we will meet again in various forms and contexts. The fire of the eyes not only flashes, but quite often burns. Meanwhile, when Redfield states: ‘most commonly menos is aggressive energy, but it is also menos which enables a man to run away’ we may glimpse something like the finely balanced energy of human adrenalin, teetering – in our evolutionary conceptions – between rage and fear, fight or flight.78 Faced with these kind of physiological parallels, we might be tempted to closely equate menos with breath or blood. For Onians, menos was indeed 'fluid or gaseous', and 'he who has it "breathes it"'. Athene, for example, breathes it (and new strength) into Diomedes in battle.79 Onians

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also believes menos to be usually localised in the lungs or phrenes although it can occasionally be found in other parts of the body (such as the knees).80 Padel, however, counters this tendency toward positivistic equation. There may be parallels, but they are not ones which ‘underpin’ the surface appearance of menos. Such parallels are not foundational. Indeed, any architect or engineer would find that to their cost, given how crucially unstable menos is – both in itself, and in its relationship with thymos. For Padel, menos does indeed sometimes behave like a liquid, but it cannot always be viewed in this way. ‘Its function’ she claims, 'seems to be to fill things. When Agamemnon is angry, his "black phrenes fill around greatly with menos." Menos fills phrenes, soul, and thumos. The menos of thumos "boils", like cholƝ. Menos is often coupled in these contexts with thumos, but their relationship is mobile and inconsistent. Both can be taken as anger or as spirit, but one can act upon the other. Menos "seizes" and fills thumos’.81 This valuable summary can be read from the viewpoint of modern physiology. There is here, again, a strong sense of the chemical surge of adrenalin – something which violently and irresistibly invades (fills, seizes). At certain moments menos overpowers thymos, just as anger drives out reason, or instinct obliterates calm logic. Padel’s summary also helps us nuance and problematise the status of menos within its original Homeric context. In that realm a recurrent stock phrase (perhaps the kind of verbal formula useful to an oral story-teller's memory) is 'menos and thymos'.82 In Book XV of the Iliad Hector makes a speech to the troops by which ‘he aroused the menos and thymos of every man’ (I, 143).83 If we extrapolated from this a simple impression of menos and thymos as easily, co-operatively associated, we would often be misled.84 Here as elsewhere, Homeric consciousness is arguably more honest and accurate in its clear admission of the fragmentary, multiple, hostile nature of different elements of the human organism – countering the false unity we might derive from a single name and a single envelope of flesh and skin. Moreover, menos can be an unstable, ambiguously fractured entity even when used apart from thymos. 'Often it is impossible for a listener to know which way the breath of emotion is flowing ... When Homeric warriors "breathe menos" for example (as they often do) do they breathe it in or out? Sometimes several warriors together "breathe menea" ... Is each warrior breathing one menos, his own? Or are they all panting a series of menea (in which case, are some in and some out?)'.85 Padel summarises the distinctive Homeric status of menos (and the associated dangers of positivistically translating or fixing it) by means of

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an anthropological parallel: the Illongot ... a society of headhunters in the Philippines, have a word liget, which suggests energy and anger. It rises in the heart. For them, "motions of the heart are emotions". Yet liget attaches not so much to selves as to interactions. Chili pepper gives liget to a stew ... winds have more liget when obstructed. Liget is engendered between things when they meet and confront each other. It is also revealed in people when they pant and sweat ... It is dynamic, organic, chaotic violence, and also the stuff of life.

Padel adds that, while the anthropologist studying the Illongot at first just translated liget as "anger", they came to see that the word 'embodied a whole set of principles and connections underlying the entire way’ in which the tribe ‘conceptualized society, bodies, and world'.86 One way of paraphrasing this is to say that liget offered a particularly valuable window onto Illongot cosmology – an inference which warns us against trying to too narrowly fix or isolate the term.87 Like that of Homeric epic, it was probably a society which had little interest in pure abstractions. Another way of tackling the parallel is to recall Redfield’s statement: 'the notion of life which centres on the menos, phrenes and thumos is a notion of life centering on action'.88 That is: the Homeric use of these entities is again one which values communal action. It is thus no more interested in inert and isolated definitions than it is in an inert and isolated lifestyle. In saying this, we are obliged not only to perceive the distinctness of Homeric society, but to suspect the arbitrary valorisation of stasis and singularity which characterises post-Enlightenment attitudes to language, meaning and taxonomy. Often founded directly or indirectly on the model of morbid anatomy, such attitudes rely too much on their conveniently dead, separable, and passive subject matter. There are, however, two terms which offer us something approaching later ideas of ‘mind’ and ‘soul’. Nous, firstly, displays several qualities typically associated with Platonic or Christian notions of the mind. Unlike the potentially mobile thymos, nous ‘is always located in the chest’.89 While it is therefore centred and fixed in a way that other psychic elements are not, nous is also immaterial, insofar as it is not subject to material forces. ‘It cannot be struck or pierced or blown out of the body and there is nothing that even hints at its origin in the body'.90 At the same time, nous clearly contains thought: 'the unspoken word’, for example, ‘is concealed in the noos'; and while 'nous never behaves like a fluid’, it often ‘behaves like a vessel receiving emotion or sensation'.91 No less importantly, nous is a relatively detached form of knowledge.92 This aspect is underlined by the association of nous with sight. It is, argues

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Redfield, 'linked to recognition and responsive understanding: we might say that vision takes in the look of a thing, noos its meaning’.93 Paraphrasing this, we might see nous as a kind of second-order sight, lurking behind the eyes in the way that the cerebral cortex now does. But Homeric nous does not have the degree of detachment which later thinkers would imply when they linked sight and knowledge (tacitly privileging sight as something which lacks the sensual immediacy of taste or touch or smell, for example). Rather, as Redfield emphasises, when nous brings clarity, this clarity 'comes with the immediacy of vision'.94 As Macdonald adds, citing Snell, nous ‘is probably connected with the verb noein, which means "to know" or "to realise"’. And noein itself ‘is often conjoined with idein, "to see clearly"’, something which means not just visual perception, but also the mental act which goes along with that vision’ – hence a further link, between noein and gignoskein "to recognize".95 Just as thymos is sometimes able to check or control menos, so nous ideally governs thymos. As Onians puts it, nous 'is not identical in meaning with thymos but is rather something in, a defining of, this as for example a current in a sense consists of but defines, controls air or water. It makes the difference between uncontrolled and intelligent, purposive, consciousness'.96 Thus we find Nestor, rallying his charioteers and instructing them in methods of combat, after which he concludes that, ‘thus also did men of olden time lay waste cities and walls, having in their breasts mind and spirit [nous and thymos] such as this’ (I, 175). Here nous corresponds to strategy or judgement, effectively utilising courage and energy. Expanding on and nuancing this relationship, Redfield argues that, 'whereas thumos is the consciousness which the organism has of itself in the world, noos is consciousness of the world in which the organism is ... The duality of thumos and noos is ... not based on a distinction between emotion and reason or on a distinction between the particular and the universal. It is based rather on a distinction between the inner and the outer, between the expression of ourselves in the world, and the impression the world makes on us’. This distinction makes us realise why nous is ultimately not equivalent to Christian (and especially postEnlightenment) ideas of ‘mind’. For, as Redfield adds, as ‘a kind of metaperception’, nous ‘is a receptivity to meaning and as such is passive; there is no menos in noos'.97 Clearly this is already very different from the overweening energy and aggrandisement of Milton’s Satan, confident that ‘the mind is its own place’, or even of Marvell’s gardener, whose mind ‘creates, transcending these,/Far other worlds, and other seas’. Moreover, it is not merely a case of nous itself being passive, but a case of it being

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just one among various, sometimes conflicting, psychic forces. Ideally it should govern thymos. But the latter is, as we have seen, often an impulse which shades into compulsion. It is frequently implied, for example, that Achilles’ thymos stubbornly resists the guidance of nous. The passivity of nous gives us a point of connection to Homeric psyche. But before we reach this last (and potentially best-suited) candidate for some kind of soul, we must reconceive the area in which it was located. For, like so much else in the Homeric body, the head now appears a very alien entity.

Aion and Psyche Until reconsidered by Onians, the word aion, linked etymologically to aeon, had been thought to mean primarily '"period of existence"'.98 It could therefore have an associated sense of 'life', but only one denoting 'lifetime' rather than a principle of life or the stuff of life.99 Re-examining uses and contexts of aion, Onians convincingly showed that it frequently does mean something broadly similar to thymos. Like thymos, aion is said to leave the body at death. Discussing with Hector a coming battle, Priam talks of how the former might be 'reft of thy dear life [aion]' (II, 459). Elsewhere Sarpedon tells Hector: 'if need be, let life [aion] depart from me in your city, seeing it might not be that I should return home to mine own native land' (I, 245). An important difference is that aion is not said to fly away through a wound or be finally exhaled through the mouth. For Onians, aion is not a breath of life, but a vital fluid. Although particularly associated with the brain and spinal marrow, it was also thought of as the liquidity of the flesh in general. At one level, this was why the old were seen as 'dry'.100 At another, it meant that aion could melt into different forms. It was linked to sex: 'this liquid in the flesh was one with the cerebro-spinal fluid and the seed, the stuff of life and strength'.101 Aion could also refer to sweat or tears. We find this latter association when the nymph Calypso encounters Odysseus 'sitting on the shore … his eyes were never dry of tears, and his sweet life [aion] was ebbing away, as he longed mournfully for his return’.102 As Onians emphasises, aion tends to be linked not with any ordinary tears, but with those found in the context of sexual love.103 Although aion was associated with the head, it did not have anything like the status of the later 'rational soul'. Like early versions of atman, it was vital but material, and did not survive death. A very precise index of its materiality is afforded when Achilles expresses concern for the dead Patroclus: 'yet am I sore afraid lest meantime flies enter the wounds that the bronze hath dealt on the corpse … and breed worms therein, and work

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shame upon his corpse - for the life [aion] is slain out of him - and so all his flesh shall rot.' This fear is assuaged by a goddess, Thetis. Tellingly, her solution is in part a material one. We are told that she 'shed ambrosia and ruddy nectar through his nostrils' (II, 339). Onians, rendering 'shed' as 'dripped', confirms that she is not breathing in a vapour (such as thymos) but substituting one set of fluids for another.104 It is probably also significant that Thetis sheds these fluids through the nostrils rather than the mouth: they are evidently intended to reach not the heart or lungs, but the brain. Both the head and brain clearly had a high sacred status at this time. What we must realise, however, is that this status was not abstract or rarefied, but fused with the most emphatically corporeal aspects of the human body. The most important of these were not sweat or tears, but sex and generation. The brain was thought to be a continuation of the spinal marrow, and aion understood to flow from and through both these areas. (The link may in part have been based on sexual experience, given the way that orgasm registers in the head and brain as well as in the genitals.) The Homeric 'sexual brain' has also left its traces in both archaic and modern language: Ceres was the goddess of fertility (hence 'cereal') and we find her name tellingly lodged in words such as 'cerebral' or 'cerebrum'. Later, aion would come to mean 'marrow' (a word whose mingled physical and spiritual density persists conspicuously in the Old Testament); while Renaissance medical theory still recognised the gellid matter of the brain to be 'spermatic' in nature. From another angle, the youthful vitality of aion is underlined when Macdonald reminds us that it is not 'ascribed to older persons', it being 'only the young which possess its full power'.105 As Onians has pointed out, this peculiarly sensual brain, in which judgement and reason are inseparable from the raw juices of life, is neatly captured in the word 'sapient'. If we take this term, meaning 'wise', and crack it open, there spills out an essential fluid: 'sap' is in every sense nestled within it. In this context, we can further see how the word 'taste' could come to mean not just physical sensation, but also the power of discrimination or judgement.106 Considering aion in terms of this psycho-physical holism, two other points can be made about it. It is not clear from Onians' discussion just how aion as a fluid leaves the body if death is sudden and violent, rather than the long-term result of aging and desiccation. It could presumably be imagined to flow out from a wound along with blood; or be sweated away in the extreme physiological trauma of a warrior's last moments. But it might also have been believed that the material instability of aion (often thought of as 'melting') was relevant here. Hence aion could conceivably

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have been 'lost' not only as fluid but as breath, merging with thymos. A second point supports this possibility. Onians notes that aion was etymologically related to a word meaning 'quick-moving' - something which matches the physiological responsiveness of thymos as a register of emotional flux. Turning to the psyche, we find ourselves still in the region of the head. And we find, too, that a certain intriguing bridge between aion and psyche is available via the distinctively sensual and divine status of head and brain in Homeric culture. As Onians has shrewdly noted, sneezing was thought at this time to have prophetic significance. It was involuntary and violent, and was the only such spontaneous phenomenon (excepting nosebleeds) which was associated with the head, rather than with the lower orifices of the body: 'a sneeze would naturally be traced to something inside the head', and 'be regarded as a spontaneous expression of that something, independent of the body and the conscious will'.107 By way of concrete example Onians cites the passage in which Penelope wishes to Eumaios that Odysseus would return and take revenge on the suitors. '"So she spake and Telemachos sneezed loudly and around the roof rang terribly. And Penelope laughed and forthwith spake to Eumaios winged words: 'Go, I pray; call the stranger even to before me. Dost thou not see that my son has sneezed at all my words. Wherefore not unfulfilled should be death for the suitors"'.108 If we attempt - perhaps a little artificially - to consider sneezing as a purely material thing, we will probably note that it is also distinctive because it affords a sensation of relief: one connected with the violent swiftness of expulsion, and giving a definite feeling of pleasure. Even lofty-minded readers may thus be able to conceive how modern myths about sneezing and sexuality have come about. A sneeze is sometimes held, for example, to be 'one-eighth of an orgasm'. Or there is the notion at once whimsical and significant - that the nature of a woman's sneeze betrays the way in which she experiences orgasm.109 At first glance such beliefs have little to do with the prophetic sneezing of Homer. But in fact what we meet here is a specially good example of physiology as partially transcending time, and partially moulded by fundamentally different historical attitudes. The transcendent element in sneezing, across some 2800 years, is this: it tells the truth. This broadly transhistorical element quickly fractures once we come to realise that for Penelope, ultimate truth was divine. By contrast, for many of us in a post-Freudian era, sexuality and the self are factors which (consciously or otherwise) are often seen to constitute buried, private, foundational truths about an individual.110 In

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each case, however, the involuntary quality of sneezing is felt to give it a certain special authority. Narrowing our focus to the Homeric psyche, we can further see that it could be associated with sneezing not only for the above reasons, but because psyche is again linked to breath. Yet psyche differs crucially from thymos. Both leave the body at death; but whereas thymos seems to be destroyed (and to be shared with animal life-forms) psyche is a specially human entity which survives death, transferred to Hades, the Homeric underworld. The loss of psyche is almost always absolute, irreversible, and fatal. As Achilles observes: ‘by harrying may cattle be had and goodly sheep, and tripods by the winning ... but that the psyche of man should come again when once it hath passed the barrier of his teeth, neither harrying availeth nor winning’ (I, 411). Psyche's transference to Hades offers us the closest point of contact with much later Christian notions of the soul.111 We must realise, though, that the long historical persistence of psyche in post-Christian culture is in many ways misleading. Psyche in fact differs significantly from the Christian soul in a number of ways, the cumulative effect of which overwhelms these basic points of similarity. To take, first, one slightly ambiguous point of contrast: psyche is material. It is a kind of rarefied matter, but, as Adkins points out, is still 'composed of a very tenuous stuff', rather than being simply 'incorporeal'.112 This issue is ambiguous because Christianity itself was not always wholly clear or consistent as to the immateriality of the soul. What we can say is that Christians often sought to actively promote an immaterial soul, even if they could not always rigorously define or defend such an entity. Homeric poets did not. This may explain why psyche is often closely, perhaps synonymously, associated with the still more clearly material aion.113 Such materiality is more subtly implied by a famous instance in which Andromache swoons, seeming briefly to be suspended uncertainly between death and life: 'down over her eyes came the darkness of night, and enfolded her, and she fell backward and gasped forth her psyche'. As women throng around her, Andromache is presently 'revived, and her thymos was returned into her breast' (Iliad, II, 489-491). Here we notice that although the gasping out of psyche is first linked to her fainting, her revival is marked by the return of thymos. While we cannot be certain if this restoration of thymos is a cause of her recovery or an effect of it, it is certainly notable that Homer does not value the psyche sufficiently to give it clear priority, either here or in the broadly similar case of Sarpedon's near-death experience. Again, in each case there is a strong impression of psyche quite definitely escaping from the body through a precise exit,

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whether the mouth or the rupture of a wound. The latter site of escape is found elsewhere in Homer.114 This mode of death can be said to heighten the materiality of psyche simply because it subjects it more thoroughly to processes of physiology and to corporeal accidents. A psyche of this kind is less easily reducible to symbolism than one which is always breathed out through the mouth or nostrils.

Psyche in the Afterlife A second obvious contrast between Homeric psyche and Christian soul concerns their respective status in the afterlife. The latter might go to heaven or hell. The former could only go to Hades. Clearly, the fact that this was the 'underworld', and thus topographically linked to the later Christian hell, is already significant. And that impression is potently compounded when we realise that the Homeric hero was not liberated but diminished by death. Hades was desolate, mournful, a kind of entropic penumbrous half-life, whose inhabitants were aptly known as 'shades' or shadows.115 (It is not merely whimsical to note that in its lack of dynamism or energy Hades is almost less attractive than the fiery turbulence of the Christian hell.) Time and again the Christian soul is imagined as blissfully released from the prison of the body into its true home in heaven. And this was indeed perfectly logical, given that the pious individual would now enter their most real and expansive stage of life. Perhaps most importantly of all: they would be fulfilled. Compare this to the death of Hector in Iliad XXII: ‘Even as he thus spake the end of death enfolded him and his psyche fleeting from his limbs was gone to Hades, bewailing her fate, leaving manliness and youth’ (II, 481). Clearly, this conception of death once again reflects the noble values of heroic action and physical energy which pulse through Homer's epics. As Jan Bremmer points out, the Homeric dead are frequently spoken of as ‘“the wasted ones”, “the outworn ones”, or “the feeble heads of the dead”’.116 In various senses they seem to be no more than twodimensional.117 So, visited by the spirit of Patroclus, Achilles ‘reached forth his hands, yet clasped him not; but the psyche like a vapour was gone beneath the earth’.118 At first glance we may find this similar to later ideas of ghosts as airy, vaporous doubles of the living. But such ghosts seem to be only temporary, earthly versions of the dead. In Homer, the ghost is all that there is. Still more tellingly, in most cases the shades of the underworld cannot even speak unless a visitor from above gives them blood to drink, as Odysseus does for Teiresias and others in Book 11 of the Odyssey.119

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From a Christian viewpoint this is a shocking metaphysical inversion: the dead are implicitly just reduced, imperfect remnants of their former selves, and the psyche is dependent on physical matter (blood) rather than vice versa.120 This state of two-dimensional reduction is all the more starkly clear when contrasted with those enduring metaphors of depth which later thinkers accorded to the soul.121 Moreover, Michael Clarke goes so far as to argue that not only were the Homeric shades wasted and enfeebled, but that in fact they continued to waste away in Hades itself: 'loss of aion is progressive, continuing after death with the decay and putrefaction of the corpse'.122 Although startling to us, such an idea is still essentially logical. It simply extends the belief that aion diminishes in old age, carrying the loss over into death. If to us this seems a striking or bizarre leap, it is partly because both Christian dualism and scientific medicine have imposed such a sharp divide between life and death in more recent centuries.

Death and the Individual It is tempting to think that the final secret of the Homeric soul or self lies in the precise details of this grim afterlife, waiting to be decoded by a shrewd and patient eye. The truth, however, is that this lost soul could only really be known by those who lived around or before the time of Homer. Our perspective is necessarily always faintly baffled, that of the outsider, stumbling through the darkness of intervening centuries. At the same time, one facet of those later centuries does offer us a valuable point of contrast. When set against the Christian soul, the Homeric psyche shows a distinct lack of egotism. Homeric warriors certainly did insist that they must 'fight for' the psyche. But they seem, here, to have been fighting for something which underpinned the continued worldly existence they valued most highly. We can add, too, that they were not fighting for a uniquely personal self, but for an abstract entity - for something far more like life in general than 'me' as a self-assertive individual. These points are crucially illustrated by the fact that, as various scholars have emphasised, one was not conscious of the psyche during one's lifetime.123 It was not immediately felt. In this way it was very different from phrenes and thymos and menos (and from that soul which Renaissance Christians would later claim to feel within their hearts). Note, too, the gender of psyche. As seen in the case of Hector's death, when we find his psyche 'bewailing her fate', this feminine status is (for such a fiercely warlike culture) an indirect admission that the immortal soul is essentially passive and inert during life.124

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The question of egotism in Homeric culture has had an intriguing and controversial history. Examining both Homeric vocabulary, and pictorial images of Homeric individuals, Bruno Snell went so far as to claim that this culture did not have a word for 'body' (terms translated thus in fact meant 'limbs' or 'skin') and also lacked the notion of a unified human selfhood.125 These intriguing claims have been sharply disputed.126 Yet, for all the alleged flaws in Snell's arguments, it seems hard to deny that Homer's world lacked the impressive degree of cosmic egotism later found in the Christian attitude to the soul and the afterlife. It has been convincingly argued that the Christian afterlife is essentially a product of human egotism. Because our sense of individual self-awareness is so powerful, and so heavily mediates reality for us, we find it immensely hard to imagine it as utterly, permanently annihilated. By a deft metaphysical sleight of hand, Christianity slides from human self-assertion to cosmic truth without admitting the connection. We might therefore add that Hades does not simply lack energy, but more precisely lacks the energy of the self.127 Again: there does seem to be some vital grain of truth in Snell's dual claims about self and body. As emphasised, the Homeric body is very much an entity in process. It is open to the cosmos, at times specifically open to the sudden loss or injection of thymos or menos (an openness which persists in Greek tragedy, as Padel's title, In and Out of the Mind, so clearly indicates). As we saw in Padel's discussion of menea, this culture can blur the lines between self and other in a notably pre-Christian way.128 In many ways, Homeric man has a mentality remarkably like that found in primitive societies. He is fiercely tribal, concerned with the identity of a warlike clan rather than with his own personality or some higher cosmic ethical scheme. Some of the most meaningful acts he performs involve horrific violence or ritual sacrifice. Like primitive cultures, the Homeric Greeks had great difficulty conceiving of immaterial or invisible substances, and of abstractions in general.129 Even darkness or shadow, as Onians notes, 'was thought to be vapour and was not recognised as mere absence of light til a much later date'.130 (Compare the South African Basutos in the twentieth century, with their belief that, 'if a man walks on a river bank, a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water and draw him in'.131) As Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has pointed out, primitive tribes (as studied by anthropologists since the late nineteenth century) will often have a word for something like 'soul', but will disperse this term across animate and inanimate matter; and when asked to clarify it will resort not to verbal

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abstractions but to concrete objects, simply pointing at them as repositories of this basic spiritual force.132 (Compare, again, Padel's discussion of the 'liget' of the Illongot tribe.) Similarly, Homeric man will allow menos and thymos (and occasionally even psyche) to animals and to wind, and shares that tendency to be concrete rather than abstract: thymos and phrenes are felt, just here and right now in the swelling chest.133 There again, we no doubt expect the unexpected more readily from a culture which predates not only Christianity, but even Plato and Aristotle, so substantially. What is perhaps more difficult is to realise that the nominally Christian Old Testament was in many ways a very close relation of the heathen epics of Homeric Greece.

CHAPTER TWO THE HEBREW SOUL

As a child I often asked that hackneyed old question: 'Why does the Bible say "an eye for an eye" and "turn the other cheek"?'. I never got a straight answer. Only much later did I find out that this was because the solution was at once simple and embarrassing: the two different attitudes were not part of one Bible, but from two wholly separate books, reflecting two different faiths. Christianity had stolen the sacred book of the Ancient Israelites.1 The reasons for this, and the consequences of it, would certainly run to another book in themselves. Clearly the New Testament is very slight, physically and in terms of its mythic authority, when compared with a work spanning around one millennium, and almost four times as long.2 It is certainly worth adding that the theft of these rival religious documents (and by a religion which would come to be fiercely anti-semitic in later centuries) constitutes a piece of intellectual and cultural fraud effortlessly outdoing the imagined conspiracies of The Da Vinci Code. At present our precise concern with that great metaphysical robbery is this: we need to try and realise that, underneath the misleading adaptations and translations of Christian belief, the Old Testament presents a culture in many ways closer to Homer than to Origen or Augustine.3 To do this, we need to treat the Old Testament as a series of historical documents, rather than as some ahistorical revelation of absolute Truth. This attitude goes back at least to the Enlightenment, but made particularly valuable advances in the late nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries, with the help of archaeological discoveries and anthropological methods. Archaeology and philology have made clear just how long and complex the whole chronological span of the Old Testament really is. As with Homer, the roots of the Jewish epic narrative vapour away into the mists of purely oral tradition, perhaps as many as 1500 years before Christ. From the start of the tenth to the end of the ninth century the foundations of the Old Testament are laid, with the bulk of those books from Genesis to the first book of Kings appearing.4 Crawling down through centuries of telling and re-telling, of editing and synthesizing, the Testament finally

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draws to a close with the composition of its last canonical book, that of Daniel, around 165BC. Within that schematic frame, scholarship has identified numerous complexities. One part of a given book, for example, might in fact turn out to have been written in a quite different era to some of its other chapters. For this reason scholars tend to split the Old Testament not into its named books as they are usually accepted, but into four broad groupings, the J, E, P and D documents.5 These documents, reflecting historical order of composition, rather than traditional or thematic ordering, overlay the mythic ahistorical confusion of the Testament like a kind of rigorous scientific grid.6 The present chapter reluctantly adheres to the misleading general title 'Old Testament' - partly because it is now rather late in the day to impose a new label; and partly because, for later epochs, the Old and New Testaments did indeed comprise one holistic revelation of 'divine truth'. Even if we limit our interest purely to the span of composition (c.900165BC), rather than the events related, we find that we are dealing with a formidable sweep of time. In those 740 years Homer lived and died; the Greek oikos gave way to the city state of Pericles; the broadly scientific and empirical thought of philosophers such as Thales, Anaxagoras and Democritus was rejected by the idealising mentality of Plato; Alexander the Great rampaged across the globe, and the Romans not only built much of their famous city, but threw their imperial net across vast expanses of Europe. If we take that same 740 year span and project it forward, we find that in Britain it covers the period from Magna Carta to the end of World War II, and indeed very nearly stretches to the first moon landing. Faced with this daunting stretch of human experience, we need to try and contextualise the cosmology of the Hebrew world in two broad ways. On one hand, we have to approach it as an essentially primitive, highly alien mentality, far more akin to the tribal excesses of Homer than the nominally ethical or evangelical concerns of the Gospels. On the other, we need to see how changes naturally occurred across these long centuries, and how in certain of these we can perceive something approaching the mindset of Christianity. The bulk of this chapter will show how Hebrew conceptions of 'soul' differed radically from those of Christian thought. In order to contextualise this picture of a fundamentally ancient and alien culture, the two opening sections briefly examine the social structure and associated cosmology of Ancient Israelite life.

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Ancient History and Tribalism Anyone who ever attended Sunday School may still dimly recall that the Old Testament was frequently far more diverting, to the childish mind, than the New. This faint childish impression seems well captured by Mark Twain's belief that Hebrew Scripture was a mixture of 'noble poetry … clever fables ... blood-drenched history' and 'some good morals', along with 'a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies'.7 Much of the Old Testament deals with societies very much like those of the Homeric oikos: armed conflict is more or less a way of life, and the notion of enduring peace and stability scarcely comprehensible. We can further refine this general impression if we consider these Israelite narratives from an anthropological viewpoint. Let us take, first, the often hostile relations of the Israelites with other societies or tribes. These are fiercely tribal not simply in terms of material conflict, but because such violence both reflects and stimulates notions of one's enemies as intensely alien. It would probably be misleading to see this sense of otherness as an ethical or moral judgement; but it is equally important to realise that the conflicts of Ancient Israel were far from being purely pragmatic struggles for land and power.8 As with any small, closeknit, sharply-defined community (and perhaps especially in ones where communal identity must be actively defended) the violence inflicted on one's enemies is a crucially meaningful violence. It is used to simultaneously construct the inextricable identities of one's own tribe, and those to whom this is opposed. In warfare you do not simply kill your opponents, but ritually mutilate them by circumcision - as David does on a grand scale, when he brings the foreskins of two hundred slain Philistines to buy Saul's daughter, Michal, as a wife (I Sam. 18.25-27).9 This inter-tribal violence is indissociable from the tribal customs practised within one's own community. In certain sections of their Bible the Israelites insist obsessively on the vital importance of dietary regulations (Leviticus 5.2, 7.19, 11.4); notions of purity or contamination connected with bodily fluids or with death (Leviticus 15, Numbers 19); rules governing animal sacrifice (Exodus 34.25, Leviticus: 1, 3, 4); and the ritual circumcision of all male children (Genesis 17, Exodus 12).10 We can say three things about these intra-tribal customs. Firstly, they obliquely reenact constructions of identity and otherness which are visible across tribal boundaries. Those who violate sacred codes, or who suffer passively from 'impurity' (menstruating or recently-delivered women (Leviticus 12); those experiencing various kinds of contact with the dead) are physically set apart from the community - usually temporarily, but with the implicit

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threat of permanent exile.11 Secondly: many such rituals have an underlying structural logic. Although such logic will naturally vary in detail, it often follows certain basic rules, identifiable across both continents and millennia. As Howard Eilberg-Schwartz has argued in discussing the neglected tribalism of the Old Testament, distinctions between tabooed fluids and neutral ones seem to involve not attitudes to different parts of the body, but opposition between controlled and uncontrolled release of liquids.12 Again, impurity or other violation of tribal codes can be solved by forms of symbolic reversal: the uncontrolled bleeding of childbirth is opposed by the controlled and deliberate bleeding of circumcision.13 A third point, also elaborated by Eilberg-Schwartz, is that certain Israelite rituals are ultimately concerned with fertility: something naturally of immense importance to small, relatively isolated communities which are at once immersed in the natural world, and highly vulnerable to its uncertainties in a pre-industrial, pre-scientific era.14

Animism We can already see that (at least according to surviving evidence) the Israelites were in many ways far more tribal than Homeric warriors, insofar as their communal identity involved more complex social regulations.15 In order to extend this sense of an essentially primitive society (and to make comparisons with Homeric mentality) we need to consider the most fundamental 'soul-words' of the Old Testament. These are 'nephesh', 'neshamah', and 'ruach'.16 'Soul-words' is no more than clumsy, if necessary, shorthand for these Hebrew terms. As H. WheelerRobinson emphasises in his seminal work on this subject, nephesh in particular 'is not at all adequately rendered by "soul"'; and 'a falsely spiritual tone is given to many of the psalms by the rendering "soul" instead of "life".' 'Deliver my nephesh' in Psalm 6.4, for example, does not in fact mean 'Deliver my soul'.17 We will look in detail at these three words presently. To see their connection with primitive animism, we need simply to know that nephesh and ruach both meant something like 'breath' or 'wind', with a closely associated sense of 'life'.18 Just as Zeus would at times exert divine or spiritual influence through the wind, so Yahweh is understood to employ his ruach for various special purposes in the Old Testament. As W.E. Staples points out, it was by his ruach that God parted the waters of the Red Sea, so that Moses and the Israelites could cross it.19 Similarly, ruach was used to carry those clouds of locusts which ravaged Egypt in order to punish the Pharoah.20 This kind of idea, in which wind is typically both

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'natural and supernatural', may well seem quaint or fantastical to us (though it should also recall the cosmology of Homer, and in particular the peculiar status of thymos).21 It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that certain references to Yahweh's divine breath would later be conveniently interpreted as merely 'poetical' rather than actual; especially when, as in II Sam. 22.16, we hear of how '"the foundations of the world were laid bare by the rebuke of Jahweh, by the neshamah of the ruah of his nostrils"'.22 This kind of detailed anthropomorphism, where ruach is quite precisely snorted through the nostrils, might seem alien to the more distant and abstract God of later Christians.23 The fact remains, however, that if Christians will gloss this away as merely 'poetical', then God's primal breathing into Adam's nostrils cannot be accepted literally either. To do full justice to the distinctive animism of Ancient Israel, we need to recognise that this culture was of course not polytheistic but monotheistic. Unlike the Ancient Greeks, the Egyptians (or various primitive tribes throughout history) the Old Testament had only one God. To quote Staples' useful summary of its cosmology: 'pagan man believed all movements of air as well as of water, trees, etc, were caused by spirits. The Hebrews evidently believed somewhat in the same way, except that, to them, all the spirits were under the direct command of Yahweh'.24 At the level of precise linguistic detail, we find this apprehension of natural and supernatural totality (Yahweh's breath is in the wind, in humanity and in animals) registered in some of the most fundamental words that the Hebrew Bible contains. In Hebrew 'Yahweh' has four letters, with the word's highly sacred status often being designated by a related term, 'tetragrammaton'. As Raymond A. Bowman has pointed out, the root of the Hebrew tetragrammaton is in fact ‘hwy’: something which, like nephesh and ruach, can mean both wind and breath.25 Another way of describing animism is to say that, as we found in the case of Homer, it does not recognise the sharp distinction between matter and spirit which more 'advanced' societies tend to employ.26 We can see this animistic blurring of those categories at the mythic basis of the Testament. In Genesis 2.7 we are told, 'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul'. Nowhere is linguistic precision more vital than when focusing on this distant moment of creation. As Staples reminds us, God in fact inspired 'the neshamah of life', upon which man 'became a living nephesh'.27 Developing his warning that nephesh is simply not 'soul' in its later Christian sense, Wheeler-Robinson explains that the 'breathsoul' (nephesh) 'has no existence apart from the body'.28 This fact is vital for full understanding of Hebrew cosmology. Let us state the point

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polemically. To talk about this disembodied nephesh is as meaningless as for a modern atheist to talk about a distinct human 'breath' surviving independently of a body. To paraphrase Onians' relationship between nous and thymos: the two are as inseparable as a current is from air or water. It is appropriate, then, that Hebrew simply 'has no proper word for … body'. As Wheeler-Robinson argues, the language 'never needed one so long as the body was the man ... the Hebrew idea of personality is an animated body, and not an incarnated soul'.29 Unlike post-Christian individuals, those of the Old Testament were happy to be, rather than have, bodies.

Nephesh and Ruach As we now begin to realise what a pervasive role these two entities or concepts played in Hebrew thought, we will probably not be surprised to learn that scholarly analysis divides them up into a number of related senses. Wheeler-Robinson sees nephesh as having three broad meanings. It can simply mean 'life', as in the plea of a threatened Israelite captain: '"let my nephesh … be precious in thy sight"'.30 Secondly, nephesh can mean 'self' or 'I': compare '"many are saying of my nephesh, there is no deliverance for him in God"'.31 In neither case does the word here mean 'soul', or imply dualism between inner and outer.32 Finally, a third sense approaches nearer to later understandings of 'soul', in that it 'denotes the human consciousness in its full extent, as in Job 16.4: "I also could speak like you, if your nephesh were instead of my nephesh"' (356). Yet even here, everything hinges on what the Israelites understood by 'consciousness'. We need to remember that Hebrew consciousness was not equivalent with a Christian soul, or with some divine principle emphatically opposed to matter, or to life on earth. Turning to ruach, we find four semantic groupings. The term can mean 'wind', including the kind of wind which would later be viewed as more narrowly 'supernatural' or 'miraculous'. Closely linked to this is a second group, aptly labelled 'inspirational'. In such a case human individuals have ruach breathed into them by God in order to make them fit for unusual tasks. Thirdly, ruach can stand for 'the principle of life in both human beings and animals', as when, in Genesis 6.17, the coming deluge is expected to 'destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life [ruach]'. This third category looks very like the first sense of nephesh, and as WheelerRobinson points out, it was usually found 'in parallelism, explicit or implicit, with neshamah' and by extension with nephesh. Again, it is only with the final, fourth register of ruach that we encounter something more like the Christian soul - namely, a term indicating 'the permanent substratum

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or entity of man's own consciousness'. Tellingly, however, this distinct sense is only found in later parts of the Old Testament, thus representing a long-term historical development of a once very different concept.33 These three-fold and four-fold groupings are broad ones. Further senses can be identified within or across such basic divisions. Staples explains that nephesh can mean something like 'will' or 'desire' or 'intention', as in Gen. 23.8: 'If it be your nephesh that I bury my dead' (164). In Lamentations nephesh 'is the seat of appetite for food (1.11); it requires refreshing (1.16); it is afflicted (3.51); it retains memories (3.20); it is saved by prayer (2.19); it is poured out or dies (2.12)'. These relatively concrete senses are underlined by what Macdonald identifies as 'the most primitive meaning of nepesh' - one which is 'concrete and site-specific, the "throat or gullet"'.34 Similarly, we find that, 'in Canticles nephesh is always the seat of love', while it was nephesh 'that was capable of heroic action'.35 Clearly many of these senses closely echo the faculties accorded to thymos. This impression is strengthened by Staples' inference that nephesh can 'faint' from 'over-exertion or from lack of nourishment', and that 'the nephesh as the seat of desires … is a thing that can be acted upon rather than a thing that can act'.36 As with Homeric thymos, nephesh is a kind of emotional or volitional faculty, and one very much rooted in active physiology. And, as with that thymos which often came unawares, its origin lies not in one's controlling, unified self-hood, but elsewhere, and ultimately in the hands of a higher power. Faced with these parallels, it is tempting to then try and see 'ruach' as 'psyche'. The very fact that ruach occurs in the Bible only around half as many times as does nephesh (378 against 754) might seem to imply that ruach is a more elevated or privileged term, accorded a certain implicit sanctity.37 And yet, if we exclude for now Wheeler-Robinson's unusual post-exilic sense of ruach, we find that precise textual support for that Homeric-Biblical parallelism is extremely thin. Genesis 6.3 offers us the best possibility, when Yahweh reflects that 'My ruach will not dwell in man forever'.38 Even here, though, we need to bear in mind that the emphasis is more on Yahweh's ruach than on that of humanity - something which accords with the high number of instances in which ruach is the breath of His nostrils, wind, or a force bestowed on humanity for special purposes. Turning to other passages, we find that ruach can at times appear more like thymos than psyche. The Queen of Sheba, astonished at the opulence enjoyed by Solomon, feels that 'there was not in her any more a ruach'.39 Similarly, the ruach can be 'broken', cause the bones to dry up, or be revived by food.40 In all these cases it seems to have a physiological dynamism or instability much more closely resembling thymos than psyche.

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In reality, then, while there are a striking number of affinities between nephesh and thymos, Hebraic and Homeric soul-words can be more effectively compared if we recognise a broader and more fluid set of parallels. We seem, for example, to meet something quite close to the Greek concept of aion in the ruach of Job: 'And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me' (30.16).41 Similarly, as Charles Owiredu notes, death can be equated with loss of vital fluid - something again emphasised in Homer and often linked to aion.42 We can further note that ruach, like aion, could be implicitly melted (Jos. 2.11: 'Our hearts melted and there did not remain any more ruach in any man'); and that like thymos it could be stirred up and heated, as well as used to indicate anger.43 Finally, we have that use of ruach briefly touched on above: the fact that God would infuse his own (always more powerful) ruach into Israelite leaders in order to empower them for specially challenging tasks. 'When Yahweh wished to single out a man to do anything out of the ordinary, his ruach was clothed with the man … (Judg. 6.34); or his ruach was upon him … (Judg. 11.29); or his ruach impelled him (Judg. 13.25)'.44 (Compare the frequent use of thymos to rouse up and vitalise the heroic leaders of the Odyssey and Iliad.) To this we can add that enduring link between 'divine inspiration' and 'divine fury': the notion that an overwhelming sense of individual power (either physical or creative) must simply have come from somewhere else. This is interesting for at least two reasons. At a precise level, it matches the way that God's ruach, with its intense, even frightening potency, was often linked to anger or at least to physiological turbulence. Secondly and more generally, we might pause a moment to reconsider the seemingly mythic idea of Moses, Caleb, and others having the breath of God fired into them.45 Is this notion really all that bizarre or alien? All of us have met or will meet people who seem to defy many of the constraints and limits of humanity in general. These remarkable individuals might need very little sleep. They can go without food, or drink startling quantities of alcohol and remain relatively articulate. They tend also to have an unusual amount of what we still call psychic force. When they speak, at any volume, people listen. From their lips the plainest statements are weighty or compelling. These people may be tall or short, fat or thin. What they do seem to have in common is a kind of higher psychic pressure than ordinary mortals. This might sometimes have subtle but precise physiological indices: their very breath, for example, is expressed in speech with a far stronger tension or force. We quite definitely respond to this, even though we cannot so definitely measure such force in any scientific way. Across

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three millennia, then, both we and the scribes of the Old Testament are able to recognise those rare persons who are so undeniably and yet so mysteriously vital, and whose vitality pulses through and out of them like a specially urgent form of breath. The difference is that, where we are more likely to ascribe this in part to an unusual physiological make-up, the Ancient Hebrews would have apprehended a heightened physiological force derived from God.

The Hebrew Afterlife The preceding discussion should already have made it clear that neither the Old Testament nephesh nor ruach were equivalent to the 'soul' as later created by various generations of Christians. In Christian theological orthodoxy, you received a soul at some point between conception and birth.46 Theoretically, you could not have this soul conveniently 'topped up' by God at occasional intervals of crisis or challenge (although, for some Protestants, visits from the Holy Ghost did seem to offer broadly similar experiences).47 If any further evidence were needed as to the highly distinctive nature of 'life' in Israelite thought, then its conceptions of the afterlife seem to seal the matter beyond doubt. From a Christian viewpoint (and perhaps even from that of a modern secularist) Hebrew notions of death, if grasped in detail, seem to verge on the meaningless or incomprehensible. Grappling with those Ancient beliefs, we find ourselves tumbled into a bewildering psychological void, the most basic foundational components of our thought rooted up and cast away. Faced with radically different notions of individuality, and with a lack of even that seemingly axiomatic distinction between life and death, we are forced to realise that ideas we see as essential to 'human nature' were in fact invented, and that these inventions occurred after the bulk of the Old Testament had been composed. Any idea of a Christian heaven, in Israelite Scripture, is so clearly absent that it might indeed seem hardly necessary to address that issue at all. The Hebrew word for 'heaven' is 'shamayim'. Significantly, it occurs only as a plural noun. It frequently means just sky, with this often being indicated by the English 'heavens', as in Gen.1.1: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. A little differently, God and the angels are said to reside in 'heaven'.48 This implies at least some distinction between the visible sky and the invisible home of God and his servants. But the crucial point is that heaven, even in that sense, is only God's home; it is not the blissful afterlife reserved for the souls of the pious dead. The

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promise of a human paradise is scarcely ever made in the Hebrew Bible. Very occasionally, we find the issue obliquely hinted at. In chapter 28 of Genesis we have the famous vision of 'Jacob's Ladder', where Jacob's dream shows him a ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending the rungs. Ironically, however, even though Jacob has God promising him and his descendants numerous blessings during this experience, these do not include any assurance of eternal heavenly salvation (Gen. 28.12-17). Perhaps the strongest support for some kind of Christian heaven comes from Ecclesiastes. As we will see, this book itself is something of a special case, again occurring very late in the Bible's overall chronology (c.225170). Moreover, even taking the book in a purely ahistorical sense, a careful reader has to admit that its references are ambiguous, opaque, and arguably contradictory. We hear of a division between the wicked and the righteous, and of an associated divine judgement (3.16-17).49 Yet, while a post-Christian mentality automatically links this to heaven and hell, Ecclesiastes almost immediately undermines that possibility, insisting that both men and beasts 'have all one breath [ruach]; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast. All go unto one place: all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again' (3.19-20).50 Lines such as these unavoidably seem to disrupt a purely Christian reading of Ecclesiastes 12.7: 'Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit [ruach] shall return unto God who gave it'. We can fully understand this text if we set it alongside both Ecclesiastes' earlier, more gloomy statements, and in the context of the relation between Hebrew neshamah and nephesh. Humankind 'returns to dust' precisely because 'spirit' and 'matter' cannot survive separately: when the writer talks of the 'dust' of the body going to earth and the spirit to God, he is essentially stating a law of nature rather than an eschatology.51 'Spirit' or ruach simply could not survive anywhere except in a body of some kind, and the general body which receives it is that of God. There are two other ways of understanding this. One is to grasp the emphatic difference between a Christian soul and some Hebrew spirit. In one case we have an absolute sacred entity; in the other an at least partly material quantity. The second, related perspective is this: the ruach flowing back to God is indeed a purely impersonal thing, to be homogeneously subsumed within God's ruach as a whole. It is not, then, merely a question of 'not owning one's own soul' - an entity which finally belongs to God. For most of us even this idea is still inflected with Christian notions of the individual soul. Rather, one simply has a necessary quantity of divine breath in order to exist as a living being, and this returns to God without carrying or preserving one's unique, individual

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self, simply vapouring back after death, just as a kind of neutral gas might do.52 With these points in mind, we can instructively contrast Ancient Hebrew and Christian eschatology. In the earlier case, there seems to be some recognition of 'heaven' as a distinct sacred realm inhabited by God and his angels. In the latter, humanity has rather boldly gate-crashed this previously élite gathering. We are confronted, then, with a remarkable mythic leap. From this viewpoint one of the most startling things about Christianity is its arrogant assumption that human beings can share a sacred realm once reserved only for God and his servants. The implied egotism, or at least heightened individualism, of this changed attitude is itself far from accidental.

Sheol What, then, is the Hebrew afterlife? If we can begin to grasp its distinctive character, we will be able to further appreciate another way in which the 'soul' of the Old Testament differs radically from that of Christianity. Our starting point is the Hebrew word 'Sheol'. Simple as this might seem, we find that the term is peculiarly hard to translate without distortion: it seems to mean simultaneously 'grave', 'pit', 'abode of the dead' and 'death'. Before we begin trying to refine and untangle these different (and yet inseparable) senses, we can plainly state one basic fact: Sheol is not hell. This is obvious enough at one level from standard definitions. The OED's rendering ('the underworld; the abode of the dead or departed spirits, conceived by the Hebrews as a subterranean region clothed in thick darkness, return from which is impossible') is echoed and elaborated by Aubrey Johnson: 'once inside this foul region of virtual annihilation, the gates of the Underworld are locked fast upon one; and there can be no return to former conditions in "the land of the living", nor indeed any fellowship with Yahweh … for the most part it is a still and silent "land of forgetfulness", which even at its best is but a pale and gloomy reflection of the world of light and life'.53 Both these descriptions, and Owiredu's reference to the 'dry dusty abode of the dead', offer us something strikingly like the Homeric Hades.54 Sheol is emphatically a diminished form of life and not an elevated or fuller one.55 It hardly needs stressing that Sheol is not heaven. What requires a little more discussion is its relationship to later ideas of 'hell'.56 Translations do indeed often use this word, which in a variety of ways is highly misleading. One vital difference is that, on the whole, Sheol is not obviously a place of punishment. As Philip S. Johnston has pointed out, Yahweh's punishments tend to be applied on earth, and when these are

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fatal 'it is the immediacy of death rather than the fact of death which is the punishment'.57 Again, we might consider Johnson's phrase 'even at its best': this would look very odd if applied to the Christian hell as represented in Scripture, given that it seems to be - as the Americans might say - all bad.58 Sheol is certainly bleak and undesirable when compared with life. Crucially, though, this bleakness seems to be a neutral fact of nature, rather than the result of an aggressively ethical judgement. All of humanity, after all, goes to Sheol; neither the good nor the evil can escape.59 This brings us to another crucial difference between Sheol and hell. Once again, the Christian hell is part of an emphatic and deeply-cherished dualism. Accordingly, a single form of the afterlife, however miserable and poorly ventilated, lacks the potency of that stark opposition. Heaven and hell are mutually constructive entities. The closest that Sheol seems to come to that later sense of bitter loss is the fact that there can no longer be 'any fellowship with Yahweh'. This is interesting, in that Christians would frequently state that a sinner's sense of separation from God was the most awful punishment of hell (or, in later versions, that this separation was hell). For the Old Testament, however, the absence of such fellowship is coloured significantly by the fact that no one could expect to enjoy it after death. We will see in a moment that there are some complex psychological reasons why Sheol was not simply a Hebrew version of hell. Before grappling with these we need briefly to look further at the peculiar linguistic inscrutability of 'Sheol'. It is vital to realise that this single Hebrew word combines all the distinct senses into which it can be split by translation. As Owiredu points out, 'in a sense, the grave and Sheol are inseparable'.60 A little differently, Nico van Uchelen indicates that Sheol cannot simply mean 'hell' or even 'afterlife', when he remarks that, in Hebrew ‘a distinct word for “afterlife” ... was lacking’.61 Accepting that we are necessarily distorting the term, we can see some instances where Sheol looks more like 'death' than 'hell' or 'afterlife'. Perhaps most obviously, we have Jonah, trapped in the belly of the whale, and stating of Yahweh: ‘out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice’ (Jon. 2.2). Here a casual glance very readily suggests 'belly of death' to a modern reader. Again, in Proverbs 1.12 we have something which looks like Death personified, when the wicked are imagined as saying 'let us swallow them up alive as the grave [Sheol]; and whole, as those that go down into the pit'. Thirdly, Psalms 16.10 offers us a passage which can be startlingly contorted in translation. Rendered as 'my heart is glad … for thou dost not give me up to Sheol, or let thy godly one see the

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Pit', the verse conveys no more than 'you will not let me die'. Compare that to the version of the King James Bible: 'For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption'. The first part of this is most obviously misleading. But even the second, effectively Christianised by the earlier reference to a soul in hell, suggests eternal resurrection, rather than a mere temporary preservation of earthly life. We can begin to see, then, how distinct Sheol is from Christian eschatology, and how it might be falsely conflated with it. What we might not yet suspect is the peculiarly slippery Hebrew concept of 'death' itself. Although death was represented throughout the Old Testament as undesirable, there are reasons for thinking that it was not so fiercely opposed to life as in the thought of other cultures and epochs. As Johnson observes, 'the Israelite did not always think in terms of a clear-cut distinction between "life" and "death"'.62 In the broadest sense, we have seen that death was continuous with life, insofar as each person survived in the form of a 'shade' in the next world. Various subtle but intriguing details confirm this sense of a kind of reduced life, rather than an absolute extinction. We find, for example, that Israel's slain enemies will allegedly 'not lie with the fallen mighty men of old who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads, and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the mighty men was in the land of the living' (Ezekiel 32.27 RSV).63 Here ancient warriors are imagined as preserving a certain part of their earthly identity (swords and shields) down in Sheol. Perhaps still more revealing is the fact that Sheol, like Hades, is 'barred' or fortified (as in Job 17.16: ‘Who will see my hope? Will it go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust?’.) This seems to imply that the dead, diminished as they may be, are yet credited with the power to return to earth, and need to be actively prevented from doing so. In Homer certain shades do indeed seem to manage this temporarily; and on one notable occasion in the Bible, we find Saul resorting to the dubious art of necromancy, employing the so-called 'witch of Endor' to raise the dead Samuel, in the form of 'an old man … covered with a mantle'.64 Again, as Alan E. Bernstein notes, in the Book of Enoch it seems that some version of the slain Abel remains 'alive' in Sheol, given that he is heard calling for 'the extermination of Cain's seed from the earth'.65 A broad comparative way of understanding this seemingly elusive, hybrid form of death is offered by Homer. Jan Bremmer shows that the concept of Hades can be seen to change significantly even within the Homeric canon itself. Noting that ‘in late parts of the Odyssey ... we hear of Hermes as a guide’ to the underworld, Bremmer infers that ‘a guide

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suggests a difficult route’, and accordingly argues that ‘the world of the dead was [now] mentally dissociated from the world of the living’ - a fact which prompted ‘the need of a reassuring, knowing person’ to allay ‘anxiety about one’s own fate after death’.66 The Hebrew Sheol seems to echo that older Homeric Hades, where a guide was not required just because death had not been so sharply alienated from life. To explore this strange notion in one final way, we can reconsider the fabled desiccation of Sheol. As already suggested in the case of the similarly arid Hades, these Ancient underworlds lack even the negative energy of Christian hell, with its eternal fires of punishment. And this is of course no accident. The dead have been sapped of both vital breath and vital fluid - those earthly materials which are the fundamental source of life and energy. We have so far concentrated on ruach and nephesh as 'breath'. But in certain parts of the Bible nephesh is in fact said to be in blood also. As noted above, the Ancient Israelites adhered to very strict dietary regulations concerning purity and contamination. In both Deuteronomy and Leviticus we meet the insistence that 'ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life [nephesh] of all flesh is the blood thereof'.67 The Hebrews took this very seriously, and understood it very precisely. As Owiredu explains, an animal was not 'dead' until all its blood was drained away: 'an animal flesh, which still has its blood, is, in some sense, still alive'.68 In one way, this startling idea is arguably only a logical continuation of the Homeric belief that life was moisture - something which did indeed seem to diminish in an empirically visible way in the elderly, and which continued to do so after death. It might be objected that the blood under discussion here is merely animal blood. But we have in fact seen that ruach was infused into animal and human life at Creation, and that Ecclesiastes was not easily persuaded to privilege the latter over the former. Similarly, the very existence of the dietary rule implies that the blood/life is indeed sacred. What does this say about life in general, and the life of Sheol in particular? If we imagine a Hebrew priest studying an animal corpse, we might expect him to notice the blankness of the eyes, and the lack of any perceptible respiration or movement. (We might add that, especially in such a radically pre-scientific culture, these signs need not automatically imply that the animal retained no feeling or consciousness.) What, then, does he understand by life? At one level it must be simply the blood; at another it could be described as a kind of dormant potency within that fluid. Or, to put it another way, what we realise in this context is that nephesh has a kind of animate power beyond the individual, so long as any of it remains in the body. The implied

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impersonality of this power is further underlined by the impression that it is possible for someone else to consume it. In later, Christian belief, it was (at least officially) impossible to eat another person's soul. We have seen that the final separation of neshamah and body resulted in the destruction of a living being. But this meant just that: the loss of that special synthetic entity, 'nephesh', created when neshamah and body were fused. Meanwhile, ruach, as the vital breath of life, was held to return to God. We are thus able to grasp one more side of the bewilderingly multifaceted Hebrew force of life, when we realise that a creature does not so much give up its life as 'life' in a more neutral and impersonal sense. In keeping with the kind of primitive animism cited earlier, we find that 'life' seems to possess certain vehicles temporarily, in an almost parasitic way, before being recycled and reabsorbed in Yahweh. The distinctive problems of individuality in Hebrew culture will resurface toward the end of this chapter. At this point we need briefly to consider how Sheol began, for some Old Testament writers, to slowly shift away from a version of Homeric Hades, toward a realm at least partially resembling the Christian Hell.

Judgement and Eternal Punishment In his invaluable study of pre- and post-Christian afterlife, The Formation of Hell, Bernstein states unequivocally that the 'great theme of distinction in the afterlife occurs first in the Book of Ezekiel, composed between 598 and 586'. Now, 'for the first time in Hebrew Scripture' the underworld is 'more than mere death'.69 In chapter 32 Ezekiel insistently divides the Israelite dead from their enemies: 'There is Edom, her kings, and all her princes, which with their might are laid by [beside] them that were slain by the sword: they shall lie with the uncircumcised, and with them that go down to the pit' (32.29). As Bernstein shrewdly emphasises, it would be misleading to read this relatively isolated new sentiment as part of some grand evolutionary narrative, by which the most ancient strata of the Old Testament slowly mutate into the fuller truths of Christian Scripture.70 At the time of its appearance, this new attitude was only one voice among many, a fragmentary piece of a vast religious mosaic. Yet in the minds of later Christians, such changes (if acknowledged at all) were of course part of a teleology: a meaningfully progressive narrative journeying toward one ultimate divine goal. Before looking more closely at Ezekiel, and other related stages of the shift from Sheol to hell, we can briefly consider why this change came about at all, after so many centuries of an undifferentiated and bleak epilogue to human life.

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Reasons could no doubt be multiplied. Here I will take just two important factors, each of which can be considered in both historical and (modern) psychological terms. Firstly, then, we need to recall the emphatic tribalism of Hebrew identity, with its tautly interwoven mesh of laws and rituals. We saw that adherence to supposedly divine codes of behaviour essentially split into two elements. On one hand there were all those outside of Hebrew religion (whether active enemies or simply nonHebrews), and on the other there were those within the Hebrew community. The former were fundamentally and permanently alien, but even members of the latter could become potentially 'impure', and had to be ritually separated during that time. Interestingly, such impurity was usually not a matter of active wickedness but of basic necessity, involving menstruating or post-natal women, those who had contact with the dead, and so on. One important reason for making such impurity unavoidable must have been that it was in fact valuable. It served as an immediate, internal, and frequent reminder of more permanent aliens, and the threat of more absolute exile, and therefore as a vital everyday reaffirmation of Hebrew identity. It seems that over time, certain Hebrew thinkers became dissatisfied with the results of their careful adherence to divine law. Traditionally, Israel's enemies and those violating Yahweh's codes should have been punished (as, most notably, in the case of the Great Flood). This did not have to happen quickly, or even in one's own lifetime. But eventually there should be rewards and punishments visited on different tribes as a whole, and in the long term, the House of Israel should prosper, along with the added enjoyment of seeing others suffer. One vital element in such psychology concerns the idea of exile. In theory, those who do not keep Yahweh's commandments are already cut off from him. But their punishment on earth of course serves as a more definite proof of this sense of separation. Hell is essentially a solution to the perceived lack of punishment on earth. At one level, it consoles the indignant Israelites with the notion that punishment and 'justice' will come about ultimately. At another, it also reinforces a potentially threatened communal identity (without reward, are they really Yahweh's Chosen?) by dividing the Good and Wicked in the next world as well as this. (This division, of course, is far less emphatic than that of the later Christian afterlife – not least because these dead are divided within the same place, rather than far above and below.) Thus hell is at least partly an extension of the idea of exile - as Bernstein implies when he notes how 'the seekers of an alternative solution saw too many evildoers who were not cut off from life'.71

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Interestingly, we can see this development reflected in quite precise historical and even topographical formations of a new kind of Sheol. Bernstein points out that when Jeremiah (7.31-33) attacks the alleged child sacrifices made to a false god, Molech, he is referring to 'Ge-Hinnom', a specific valley or ravine just beyond the walls of Jerusalem.72 With Yahweh decreeing that the dead of these idolaters shall now be heaped up indiscriminately in the valley, we can see both precise incidents and a precise location merging with the older conception of Sheol as a pit - a conflation captured in the Greek transliteration of Ge-Hinnom as Gehenna, a word distinct, in Greek language Scriptures, from the older Hades, and sometimes still used in modern Bibles to mean 'hell'.73 A second broad reason for this changing afterlife was the growth of the new individualism (mentioned above in the context of ruach). As Wheeler-Robinson puts it: 'the Israelites seem to have been content with this shadowy "life after death" that was no life, so long as the idea of corporate personality enabled them to think of themselves as living on in their children or their nation'.74 Interestingly, we find this older notion of general identity both recognised and attacked in Psalm 49: 'Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names' (11). Adding that 'this their way is their folly' (13), the author of the Psalm neatly underwrites his quite radical claims for a special and particularised deliverance of the pious dead: 'God will redeem my soul [nephesh] from the power of the grave…'.75 Let us now turn from why to how. The movement from Ancient Sheol to the fiercely dualistic afterlife of Christianity can be divided into four broad phases. First, we have the new notion of post-mortem punishment. Secondly, we find certain cases in which this punishment is represented as eternal. Thirdly, there appears what will later be central to Christian thought: the idea of the resurrection of the body. And fourthly, partly allied to the notion of resurrection, we encounter a wholly new form of the afterlife, in the shape of something approaching the New Testament heaven.

Post-Mortem Punishment As Bernstein rightly emphasises, the assertions of Ezekiel, effectively dividing Sheol, are a crucial stage en route to the concept of punishment after death. 'There seems to be a special section of the underworld for the uncircumcised and, within it, a place for those slain by the sword, and these are separated by nation' (163). Here we already have three divisions.

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These are compounded by the fact that both Ezekiel and Isaiah also seem to spatially enlarge Sheol. The former consigns fallen enemies of Israel to 'the uttermost parts of the Pit' (32.24) while the latter taunts the king of Persia with the warning that ‘thou shalt be brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit’ (14.15).76 Sheol therefore becomes both deeper and broader, and is at once physically and morally stratified.77 Interesting as this spatial change may be for us, for contemporaries of Ezekiel and Isaiah the most crucial factor involved was that of shaming the dead. In Isaiah 14 we encounter Israel's dead enemies 'strewn about Sheol like carrion, under the bodies of the people they have slain (14.19). Newcomers to Sheol tread over them, lying about unburied'. Emphasising that 'throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, improper burial signified great disgrace', Bernstein rightly concludes that 'shame in death is the beginning of hell'.78 The power of shame was clearly attractive to Biblical authors denouncing their enemies. Hence we find Isaiah aggravating the lack of burial by his warning that ‘Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come, it rouses the shades to greet you ... Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, the sound of your harps; maggots are the bed beneath you, and worms are your covering' (14.11). Here we meet, perhaps for the first time, the faint stirrings of that subterranean energy which will later explode so luridly among the darting flames, twisting worms, and gnashing teeth of the Christian hell. The worms and maggots are the most conspicuous part of this relatively active shame-punishment. But such energy seems visible even in the way that Sheol is 'stirred up': now a place of disquiet and turbulence, rather than a place of rest, this altered netherworld vibrates uneasily with the projected anger of the righteous, piercing their vengeful thoughts beneath the earth in pursuit of their enemies. Again, we find shame pursuing those idolators we met in Gehenna, when Jeremiah has Yahweh warn that 'it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter; for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place. And the carcasses of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them away' (7.31-33). The degradation inflicted on bodies after death presents us with a first crucial element in the new 'division of Sheol'. Recalling how peculiarly inseparable the Hebrew body and Hebrew identity were, we can further appreciate how powerful this new ideological weapon must have been. Importantly, though, Sheol did not - for Ezekiel - include the element of eternal punishment. Indeed, we might wonder if the shame of the unburied was really quite a 'punishment' in the sense of all those later torments so actively and industriously visited by the fork-jabbing demons of the

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Christian netherworld. It looks, rather, more like one single act of abandonment, after which the dead are forgotten. By contrast, they are not forgotten by the Christian God as they writhe in hellish flames or dodge impish toasting forks, given that ultimately God has responsibility for this lively torture chamber, and keeps it perpetually in process. In the earlier Hebrew Sheol, God takes too little interest in the dead. In Christian hell, he takes far too much. Focusing on Ezekiel as the earliest instance of a changed afterlife, we can note two vital qualifications. One is that the statement concerning the uncircumcised and 'those slain by the sword' occurs 'in the context of a prophetic announcement to Egypt that Persia will destroy it like the other peoples it has conquered' - that is, in a typically violent, military assertion of Hebrew identity, crucially distinct from the (supposedly) more otherworldly morality of Christian piety.79 Related to this is the second impression, that in fact the shaming of the dead is tellingly similar to that shameful violence inflicted on enemy corpses above ground by Homeric warriors, rather than something with a sense of absolute moral distinction about it. Moreover, this shame is most obviously associated with the concrete entity of the body, rather than some kind of abstract entity such as the soul.

Eternal Punishment and Resurrection These impressions also fit with the temporary, rather than eternal, ignominy endured by a corpse which will presently be unrecognisable as an individual, or even as a member of a particular nation. Although Isaiah is again unusual in its apparent reference to resurrection (26.19: 'Thy dead men shall live … Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust…'), this seems as yet to be reserved for the blessed rather than for the damned. Eternity, that most terrible element of hell (not least because eternity cannot really be comprehended by the human mind) seems to have developed later than the first basic divisions seen above. Isaiah 66.24 states: 'And they [God's chosen] shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh'. Locating the Book of Isaiah on that chronological grid which necessarily fractures supposedly unitary sections of the Bible, we find that the three notions (of division in death, eternal punishment, and resurrection) are in fact separated by several decades. Chapter 14 is dated 550-539AD, and Chapter 66 450-445BC, with Chapter 26 falling between 380-350BC. Implicitly, then, resurrection is the most radical of these changes to

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traditional Hebrew eschatology. Outside of Isaiah, it has so far only been found in Psalm 49, probably composed some time between 520-400BC.80 It is worth adding that even those later chapters of Isaiah present very early examples of eternal punishment and resurrection. When first written or read, they would have been just two isolated opinions among many others. Some two hundred years after the latest sections of Isaiah, we encounter some of the best-known anticipations of Christian Judgement, in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel (168-165BC). 12.2 states that ‘many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’. Here we have eternity, resurrection, and a split between saved and damned which can be seen to imply a corresponding division between heaven and hell. Still missing, at this stage, is the rigorous Christian emphasis on all of humanity: as Bernstein points out Daniel has 'many' instead of the later Christian 'all'.81 Turning from the biblical canon to the Apocrypha, we meet similar developments in the second Book of Maccabees.82 Most obviously, we have an incident in which a mother and her seven sons are tortured and put to death for refusing to eat swine's flesh. Obeying their mother's wish that they remain faithful to their beliefs, the sons assert their hope of salvation as they suffer and die. The second states that ‘“the King of the Universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life”’; while the third, offering his tongue and hands to be severed, proclaims: ‘"I got these from heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.”'83 Far less oblique - and relatively thorough in its enumeration of fully Christian elements - is the apocryphal II Esdras 7.32-36: ‘and the earth shall give up those who are asleep in it ... and the chambers shall give up the souls which have been committed to them ... And the Most High shall be revealed upon the seat of judgement ... Then the pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight’. Here we have resurrection, judgement, and heaven and hell in stark opposition.84 This, however, is perhaps not surprising, as II Esdras is usually dated c. 90AD, and is notable for being the only Old Testament book to mention Christ himself.85 Interestingly, we can appreciate that stark opposition from another angle if we turn to perhaps the most remarkable piece of Old Testament Apocrypha – namely, the alternative Fall myth offered by the Book of Enoch.86 The mythic density of Enoch might in itself have been sufficient to cause its banishment from Scripture; at very least, one can see that it

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was both too like and too different from Genesis to be included in the canon.87 But there is another reason why Enoch might have offended those tastes which developed into orthodox Christianity: namely, that it in fact divided the afterlife too much. Enoch is taken by angels 'to see the boundaries of the universe' and witnesses '"the (ultimate) end of heaven and earth"'.88 This general location already conveys something far more otherworldly and grandly apocalyptic than Sheol. Moreover, Enoch then sees a total of six different regions: one for fallen angels, one for fallen stars, followed by four reserved for humans. These latter are the four interior corners of a mountain; and, as Bernstein notes, here we do seem to return to a space, or structure, more like the traditional realm of Sheol. The divisions contain, first, 'the souls of the righteous … around a spring of water in a lighted place'; second, sinners who 'await judgement in a place of torment'; third, 'those with accusations to bring against the sinners of olden days'; and fourth, the completely wicked, who will apparently suffer in this domain for eternity, being neither destroyed nor released at the Day of Judgement.89 It is worth noting that the presence of 'those with accusations to bring' could be seen to more forcibly emphasise the revenge-psychology embodied in hell. In Enoch's netherworld the long-suffering righteous not only expect the punishment of their enemies, but apparently see it, and may have even have some influence on the process of judgement. Beyond this, Enoch's version of the afterlife suggests two interesting ideas. First, we can see that this six-fold division essentially contains all the elements of heaven, hell, and Judgement as later elaborated by Christianity. Indeed, given Bernstein's astute inference that the first group of sinners is perhaps being tested, and will be ultimately saved or damned, depending on its passive acceptance or complaint, we perhaps even see some indirect foreshadowing of that later Purgatory so violently debated by Protestants and Catholics. Having noted that broad similarity, however, we must also admit that the regions which look most like hell are in fact those designed for the fallen angels and fallen stars (they are a 'prison' and are filled with fire).90 Here, then, we seem to find a negative echo of what has already been stated about the later Christian heaven. Just as it was a leap of the highest arrogance for humanity to invade a heaven once comfortably and thinly populated by God and his attendants, so it was - albeit more subtly - quite presumptuous to imagine that humans might usurp the spectacular apocalyptic regions inspired by the mythic transgressions of godlike creatures. Arguably, the 'democratisation of hell' is as implicitly arrogant as the Christian invasion of a heaven once reserved solely for God and his angels.

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Particularly when set against the sharply contrasted 'furnace of hell' and 'paradise of delight' found in II Esdras, Enoch offers us a behind-thescenes glimpse at a kind of evolutionary development of both Hebrew and Christian afterlives. It appears that the eschatology of Enoch was too complex for the taste of those who went on to plunder Hebrew sources for the foundations of Christianity. One can well imagine that a sharply asserted dualism of blessing and agony, pitched respectively high and low, in light or fiery darkness, would be far more easily sold to the mass of (often illiterate or poorly-educated) followers that Christians sought to attract in later decades.

From the Tribe to the Individual: First Glimpses of Christian Eschatology As various commentators have emphasised, the period of the Jewish exile and onward sees increasing disillusion with the traditional 'corporate' or tribal eschatology of Ancient Israel. In the words of Wheeler-Robinson: 'the rise of the new individualism with Jeremiah and Ezekiel gave birth to an acute sense of the problem of innocent suffering and the injustices of this life. In the Book of Job and some of the Psalms (eg 72), we see the struggle towards the hope of a new life that was life beyond death, but the faith was never explicitly reached'.91 The last words of this statement are important. Even where Hebrew notions of the afterlife can be seen to change, they are often notably far from the individualism of Christianity. In Ezekiel 37, for example, we have the famous vision of the 'dry bones' as 'resurrected'. While the notion of resurrection per se may well be significant, the passage is a symbol of the national revival of Judaism, rather than of individuals. Similarly, the early division of Sheol witnessed in Ezekiel and Isaiah is, as S.G.F. Brandon emphasises, essentially a division of national armies, rather than a punishment of 'individuals for personal sin'.92 Wheeler-Robinson agrees that bodily resurrection is still very much Hebraic in character at this stage: 'these beginnings of the Apocalyptic doctrine of life after death [Isa.26.19, Dan. 12.2] … take the form of a "resurrection", a bringing back to life of the body, the only real life which the Hebrew could conceive … It was because the Hebrew had never thought of a disembodied soul … whilst the surviving "ghost" afforded no sufficient basis in itself for real continuity of life'.93 Ultimately, resurrection would become thoroughly Christianised, and by the Renaissance could involve an obsessive insistence on God's regathering all the atomised fragments of your personal body. As Bernstein points out, a new force of individualism can indeed be seen as

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partly responsible for promoting the doctrine of resurrection during the transitional shift from the older to newer Hebraism. Resurrection became logically and ethically necessary in order to incorporate all those who had died before the rise of heaven and hell.94 In the older, corporate culture, this notion of responsibility toward individuals would simply have had no meaning. Turning back to those distinctive Hebrew forerunners of the later Christian soul, nephesh and ruach, we occasionally meet similar glimpses of individuation. We saw that for Homer there was a crucial division between the conscious thymos, and the psyche, with the latter being immortal, but wholly separate from living consciousness. Only with the merging of these distinct elements could an individual be aware of their soul. A similar duality prevailed in Old Testament notions of nephesh and ruach. Nephesh often corresponded to conscious feelings, while ruach was typically a far more impersonal force. However, as Staples points out, Proverbs 20.27 ('the spirit of man [is] the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly') may well indicate a merging of neshamah and ruach', via the equivalence of spirit and 'candle', 'and this tendency gains momentum in later usages of ruach in certain Psalms, the word becoming 'almost indistinguishable from nephesh and leb [heart] in Psalms 51.10, 31.5, 7'.95 Similarly, the older status of ruach as a divine force, emphatically belonging to and directed by Yahweh, shifts notably when Proverbs 16.32 claims that 'he whose ruach is without restraint is like a city that is broken down and without walls'. As Staples notes, 'either this idea was very late or it had only a fleeting acceptance, for it is only here that we can say definitely that man has control of his ruach'. That essentially Christian sense of definite personal responsibility for one's own soul is matched by the telling hint of individualism implied by 'without walls'. These (apparently desirable) boundaries appear to be those of a new, relatively isolated self-hood. Again, Staples sees nephesh as losing its physical attributes in I Sam., becoming a purely mental faculty; while ruach at times becomes notably independent from God in Ezekiel.96 These kind of changes are summed up by Wheeler-Robinson, identifying a particular new sense of ruach 'not as the wind of God, not as the spirit of God producing unusual results in men, not simply as the principle of energy or life in man (traced back to God), but as the permanent substratum or entity of man's own consciousness'.97 While there are 74 instances of this changed register, all, tellingly, are from the post-exilic period.98 Once again, it must be emphasised that we should not see these

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fragmented adumbrations of Christianity as part of any inevitable teleology. When they first occurred, such sentiments were only a few among numerous different voices scattered into the vast and diverse mosaic of Hebrew thought. Moreover, if Hebraism is set against Homeric cosmology, it seems hard to deny that Christianity was ultimately at least as indebted to the Homeric psyche as it was to nephesh or ruach. While this psyche could never hope to ascend to heaven, it was at least disembodied, and offered something more like a soul than the gaseous quantity provided by ruach. To understand how such raw materials were transformed into the remarkably durable entity of the Christian soul we need now to turn to a quite separate intellectual tradition in the history of Western thought.

CHAPTER THREE PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

Hints of Dualism Over a hundred years before the birth of Plato, Pythagoras (fl. 532BC) offers a view of the soul which is in many ways closer to Christianity than the stances of either Homer or the Old Testament. Perhaps most famously, Pythagoras believed not only in the sanctity of the soul, but in a kind of immortality. According to his theory of transmigration, an individual's soul would be implanted, at death, in another human being or in an animal. In terms of physiology, Pythagoras is notable for making a division of the soul which at least partly resembles that of later Greek philosophy, and the Christian tradition founded on Plato and Aristotle. 'Pythagoras taught that the soul was divided into three parts: into "nous", which we may translate as consciousness, phrenes, which we might call mind, and thymos or emotion'.1 While traces of Homeric attitudes are evident here, we can already see thymos losing something of the range of senses it once covered within the Iliad and Odyssey.2 Pythagoras also takes the vital step of dividing these life-principles across the species barrier. The first and last are common to humans and animals, but the second exists only in human beings. As C.R.S. Harris further explains: 'the principle of the soul or life was located in and moved from the heart to the brain; the emotional part existed in the heart, but both consciousness and mind were seated in the brain. And the senses were as it were "drops" of these, and reason or the mind was eternal and the rest mortal'.3 This very brief summary is interesting both in obvious and in more subtle ways. It displays the kind of heart/brain split with which we are now familiar, but which was viewed very differently by Christians just around three hundred years ago. Again, the mind is not only located in the brain, but is also immortal. At the same time, the division between heart and brain is partial, admitting a fluid interchange between the two. In one sense, this provides a neat solution to the potential problem of the time-honoured contest between heart and

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brain, with its associated implications of where we, as conscious individuals, feel ourselves to be in our bodies. In another, it indicates that the Pythagorean soul was also a physiological entity. Perhaps the least obvious feature of these lines is that implied in the notion of the senses as '"drops" of the three different forms of soul. This further shows that such a soul had a strong physiological role. More precisely, and most interestingly, it suggests a continuity of physiology and psychology.4 Alongside Pythagoras, probably the closest that we come to the Christian soul in the time before Plato is via the religious asceticism of the Orphic sects.5 Perhaps partly because they were so mystical and otherworldly, devotees of Orphism have left little in the way of their own writings. But from other sources we do know that they prized the soul as something which must be cherished and purified. Like Pythagoras and his disciples, Orphists were active in the sixth century, and in southern Italy rather than in Greece itself. As Werner Jaeger explains, 'Orphic religion' aimed to 'keep the soul pure and immaculate during its habitation in the body, in order to enable it to return to its divine home after death'. The fifth-century Greek poet Pindar (Jaeger adds) is the figure 'who is most fascinated by the eschatological myth of the Orphic religion'.6 From Pindar's second Olympian ode we learn of a dualistic afterlife which substantially predates those of Judaism or Christianity. '"Day and night the sun shines for the guiltless in the world beyond"', while '"the wicked suffer pain the sight of which none can bear"'. At the same time, the Orphic soul is strikingly similar to the Homeric psyche, in that 'it is not identical with the conscious life of man; we might call it the dream soul, because it is only in his dreams that man has any indication of its existence within himself'.7 Elsewhere in the sixth and fifth centuries we get the kind of glimpses of the soul afforded to religious mystics, and are obliged to decode them accordingly. As Bruno Snell astutely notes, when Heraclitus (a thinker active c.500BC) claims that, '"you could not find the ends of the soul though you travelled every way, so deep is its logos"', we have a new attribution of depth to the soul and human consciousness - one which, of course, will be extensively championed and explored in later epochs.8 Similarly, an anonymous fifth-century drinking song cited by Ruth Padel implies a growing sense of the 'inner man' as a meaningful concept, and one which in turn implies a moral hierarchy of inner and outer, surface and depth: to see what sort of man each person is, divide up (dielonta) his breast and look at his mind (nous) , then close it again,

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and think with an undeceiving mind (phrƝn) that he's your friend.9

Given the vital role played by magic in the worlds of Christ and St Paul, it is interesting to find that both 'Pythagoras ... and Empedocles (fl. 450 BC) may have been shamans. Both of them combined what we would today call science with an Orphic-style mysticism ...'. Both, equally, believed in a soul which existed before and after the body, and which could leave it during life. 'These ideas ... directly or indirectly ... seem to have powerfully influenced Plato and, through Plato, various church fathers ... It is ironic, perhaps, that ideas that eventually acquired such an impressive intellectual pedigree may have originated in the dark heart of shamanism, with its commitment to magic and the occult'.10

Plato These glimpses of dualism are certainly intriguing. For all that, when set in context, they remain relatively isolated and fluid attitudes. So we find that, in 399 BC, even Plato's teacher Socrates remains ambivalent about his fate as he consumes hemlock, following his condemnation by the Athenian state.11 He may enjoy some kind of after-life; he may not.12 It is with Plato (c.428-348 BC) that the history of the western soul reaches a definitive turning point.13 In dialogues such as Phaedrus, Timaeus and the Republic we meet a soul which is emphatically divine and immortal.14 Unlike the psyche of Homeric Greece, Plato's soul is a defining essence of specifically human existence, active in conscious life as the rational mind. Moreover, in the platonic theory of creation as a whole, there prevails a fiercely asserted dualism between the divine and the earthly. Although here we can see a philosophical element which will be especially valued by Christianity, it must be emphasised that Plato is in various ways far more insistently dualistic than mainstream Christian theology. At the same time, Plato's discussions of the divine, and of the human body and soul, are also more precisely physiological, corporeal and empirical than those of influential theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas. Plato's dualism is further complicated by the central relationship between human love and divine knowledge found in his thought. I will look first at platonic dualism, and then discuss the empirical, biological aspects of his philosophy. Finally, I will attempt to relate these two broadly opposing sides - what might be called the abstract and the sensuous - arguing that the two oppositions often blur together in ambiguous and intriguing ways. It should be stressed immediately that Plato's philosophy often treads

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an uncertain line between the mythic and the literal.15 At one level, Plato himself seems to explicitly admit the allegorical status of his pneumatology and eschatology. Toward the end of Phaedrus, for example, Socrates talks of 'poetical figures which I was compelled to use, because Phaedrus would have them' (257a). In Timaeus, the account of creation is described as one 'using the language of probability' (30b). Later on, we are told that: Concerning the soul, as to which part is mortal and which divine, and how and why they are separated ... if God acknowledges that we have spoken the truth, then, and then only, can we be confident; still, we may venture to assert that what has been said by us is probable, and will be rendered more probable by investigation. (72d)

As we will see, the ambiguity as to 'which part' of the soul 'is mortal and which divine' is a crucial and elusive issue. More broadly, the phrase 'will be rendered more probable by investigation' gives a provisional status to Plato's theories of creation. Like Aristotle (albeit to a much lesser extent) he seems to frame his discussions as an ongoing debate or inquiry, rather than a wholly dogmatic assertion of absolute Truths. In that respect, we need also to bear in mind that Plato's ideas are set out not as narratives, but as dramatic dialogues - formats which aim to raise questions as much as to answer them.16 These issues will be tackled in more detail below. What we can say at present is that Plato does seem to intend that his accounts of creation, and of the relations between human and divine, should be understood as essentially true (hence the confident 'will'), even if certain images used to convey his ideas are recognised as provisional and contingent. Clearly, these images are felt to be necessarily contingent halting, as it were, before the threshold of a divinity which is ultimately ineffable.

Dualism Plato's dualism is nowhere more visible than in his basic account of creation. Divine 'reality', that 'heaven which is above the heavens' (Phaedrus, 247b-c), is generally inaccessible. God, 'the very being with which true knowledge is concerned', is a 'colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind' (247c). The universe as we know it is a flawed and imperfect copy of divine reality, the best which God could achieve using material elements. Similarly, time itself is a flawed, worldly version of that more perfect state, eternity. Nevertheless, lodged within this corrupt realm under heaven, a divine principle pulses out from the

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core of created matter. The platonic cosmos is very definitely animated. The world is 'a living creature truly endowed with providence and intelligence by the providence of God' (Timaeus, 30b). In 'the centre [of the universe] he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it' (34b).17 Orthodox educated Christians generally marginalised or toned down Plato's insistence on the universe itself as an 'animal', and the idea is probably strange, if not bizarre, to many of us, notwithstanding the oblique modern echo found in ecological notions of Gaia theory. But in pre-Christian philosophy this notion was influential. Most importantly for present purposes, Plato's universal animism underlines the centrality and primacy of 'soul', even where this soul is occluded by earthly matter. Plato located the immortal part of the human soul in the head: 'First ... the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the universe, enclosed the two divine courses [of the soul] in a spherical body, that, namely, which we now term the head, being the most divine part of us' (Timaeus, 44d).18 The significance of the 'sphere' as divine is echoed by the shape of the brain itself. 'That which, like a field, was to receive the divine seed, he made round every way, and called that portion of the marrow, brain' (73c). The physiological models later adopted by Christianity implied a relatively continuous relationship between liver, heart, and brain. At a physiological, as well as a cosmic level, Timaeus adheres to a body-soul dualism which is again more pronounced than that of later Christianity. For, after God had sited the immortal soul in the head, certain lower deities 'constructed within the body a soul of another nature which was mortal', and 'subject to terrible and irresistible affections', such as pleasure, pain, fear, and hope (69c-d).19 Then fearing to pollute the divine any more than was absolutely unavoidable, they gave to the mortal nature a separate habitation in another part of the body, placing the neck between them to be the isthmus and boundary, which they constructed between the head and breast, to keep them apart. And in the breast, and in what is termed the thorax, they encased the mortal soul; and as the one part of this was superior and the other inferior they divided the cavity of the thorax into two parts, as the women's and men's apartments are divided in houses, and placed the midriff to be a wall of partition between them (69c-70a)

Nothing could be clearer than this. Admittedly, the mortal soul is itself subdivided, and the implicit gendering of its 'superior' and 'inferior' parts is certainly telling. But the most fundamental divide established here is undoubtedly that between the head and the remainder of the body. Accordingly, it can be argued that the most important split is twofold,

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rather than threefold.20 Plato talks quite definitely about 'the mortal soul', thus again dualistically opposing it to the immortal soul of the head.21 This division takes priority over the subsequent division between upper and lower thorax. Moreover, while he states that 'the midriff' was placed as 'a wall of partition between them', the most fundamental barrier is that between the head and the trunk of the body. This is signalled by the notion of 'pollution'. More subtly, we need to recognise that the head obviously looks separate from the rest of the body, whereas the trunk looks broadly continuous, despite its internal divisions. We will presently see why this nominally dualistic theory of human creation is problematic and ambiguous. What we need to appreciate here is how persistently and variously Plato's dualism stamps his notions of the human organism. Notice, first, that the platonic deity is responsible only for creating the brain and head, being concerned purely with the immortal soul.22 Secondly, we learn elsewhere in Timaeus and Phaedrus that this soul is itself not simply immortal, but also pre-existent, being incarnated in various material vessels at different stages.23 In both these senses, Plato is more sharply dualistic than Judaism or Christianity. The Hebrew God fashioned all of Adam, and in doing so infused a life-force into his material shell after that had been sculpted from earth. We have already seen that Hebrew soul-words imply a more holistic notion of creation than that of later Greek or Christian thought. This sense is reinforced when we trace that contrast down to precise creative details. Yahweh blew some of his ruach into man. For Plato, God and the lesser gods formed the body around a pre-existent soul. This distinction brings us to a third facet of platonic dualism. It is not quite accurate to say that there are souls 'in' the brain, heart and liver. Plato himself does not appear to say or even very clearly imply that, except in the case of the brain.24 Again, we seem to encounter a body built around the soul, rather than a soul injected into the body. This detail is important, because Plato's creation theory continually shows that the body, inferior and obstructive as it may be, is constructed around the divine soul, in order to serve it as effectively as possible. So, in addition to the isthmus of the neck as a protective barrier, we have the upper part of the mortal soul sited near the heart. This is done so that reason, located nearby in the brain, can at least partly restrain or discipline its inferior counterpart.25 Similarly, because the heart is known to be sensitive and subject to palpitations, the lungs are set by it so that, 'when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against a yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus become more ready to join with passion in the service of reason' (70b-d). Finally, we have the region of the liver. Plato makes it quite clear how

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brutish this part of humanity is. The gods contrived 'in all this region a sort of manger for the food of the body; and there they bound it down like a wild animal which was chained up with man, and must be nourished if man was to exist'.26 We can perhaps see a very broad agreement with Homeric consciousness, which fears emotional turbulence and disorder if thymos becomes decentred from the lungs (the bulk of which are situated above the liver). But – more obvious contrasts aside – we can suspect that for Plato the liver is particularly degraded by its rapid metabolic activities, being as it were an epitome of process and mutability, at almost the furthest possible remove from the timeless and static perfection of eternity.27 Despite its lowly status, the liver and its associated humoral physiology are again carefully designed to serve or protect the divine soul by effectively cleansing and restraining this region of appetite, desire and consumption (70d-71b). In this notion of creators artfully designing a body around the soul, working from an inner essence outwards, we encounter what might be called the primacy of the platonic soul.28 Further versions of dualism will be discussed in the context of love and knowledge. Here we can add just one more. Plato's emphatic distinction between time and eternity is complemented by similar oppositions. The divine is permanent and unchanging; the world is mutable and unstable (51e-52a). Once more, this is already familiar to us from Christian thought. But characteristically, Plato was more precise in his application of this idea. Hence he not only asserts that humankind in general is cut off from the divine through immersion in the flux of matter; but also implies that the young are especially prone to the damaging effects of physiological mutablity: 'by reason of all these affections, the soul, when first encased in a mortal body ... is at first without intelligence; but when the flood of growth and nutriment abates, and the courses of the soul, calming down, go their own way and become steadier as time goes on, then the several circles [of soul] return to their natural form' (44a-b).29 Notably, Plato does not simply adhere to dualism at a conceptual level, but pursues its implications quite rigorously - even empirically - through different features of human life as a particular biological entity.

Empiricism, Physiology and Sensuous Knowledge By comparison with the theology of Aquinas Plato offers some quite precise and empirically-grounded accounts of the human body.30 In Timaeus, for example, he argues that those areas of the body most closely linked to reason or soul are the ones least associated with fleshy matter.

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Hence the head is relatively thin-fleshed, while 'the thighs and the shanks and the hips, and the bones of the arms and the forearms', being 'abundantly provided with flesh' are 'destitute of reason'.31 He is sufficiently careful to except the tongue, given that in that case flesh is needed to give sensation (74e-75c). The senses in general are considered with respect to empirical details (as, for example, the fact that we cannot smell when we sharply draw in our breath (66e-67a)). Elsewhere in Timaeus Plato examines diseases at some length and with some precision, noting the mutability and flux of fluids, organs, tissue and humours (82a84c). 'The worst case of all', he emphasises, 'is when the marrow is diseased, either from excess or defect; and this is the cause of the very greatest and most fatal disorders, in which the whole course of the body is reversed' (84c). Plato is also relatively empirical or medical insofar as his physiology tries to show how life pervades the entire organism. So he tells us that The first principle of all [body] ... was the generation of the marrow. For the bonds of life which unite the soul with the body are made fast there, and they are the root and foundation of the human race ... in this seed [of the marrow] he then planted and enclosed the souls ... That which, like a field, was to receive the divine seed, he made round every way, and called that portion of the marrow, brain ... but that which was intended to contain the remaining and mortal part of the soul he distributed into figures at once round and elongated, and he called them all by the name "marrow"; and to these, as to anchors, fastening the bonds of the whole soul, he proceeded to fashion around them the entire framework of our body, constructing for the marrow, first of all, a complete covering of bone (73b-d).

For Plato, the marrow of the bones was roughly identical with the substance of the brain, also held to be a kind of marrow. One has to say 'roughly' because the 'round and elongated' marrow of the bones is said to contain only 'the mortal part of the soul'. At the same time, it would seem that one advantage of classing the brain as marrow is to allow a continuous link with the marrow of the spinal cord, and therefore also with the whole of the body. Again, insofar as the soul has physiological functions (and for Plato a key definition of soul is its responsibility for movement (Phaedrus, 245e-246a)) it would seem difficult to cleanly divide the marrow of the brain from that of the spine.32 As Onians has previously reminded us, the very concrete Homeric life-force known as aion would later transform into marrow, and in that older Greek model of human life, there was a specially strong link between the brain and sexual reproduction.33 A similar sense of complexity and pervasiveness is apparent when Plato explains the physiology of inspiration and expiration:

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These elements [fire and air] God employed for the sake of distributing moisture from the belly into the veins, weaving together a network of fire and air like a creel, having at the entrance two lesser creels; further he constructed one of these with two openings, and from the lesser creels he extended cords reaching all round to the extremities of the network. All the interior of the net he made of fire, but the lesser creels and their cavity, of air ... He let the lesser creels pass into the mouth; there were two of them, and one he let down by the air-pipes into the lungs, the other by the side of the air-pipes into the belly. The former he divided into two branches, both of which he made to pass out at the channels of the nose ... With the other cavity [i.e. of the greater creel] he enveloped the hollow parts of the body, and the rays of fire which are bound fast within followed the passage of the air either way (78b-e).

Typically, this account of breath is slanted toward the soul (hence the inclusion of both fire and air) but is also quite intricate, dynamic and empirical - noting, for example, how the system allowed one to breathe through the nostrils when the mouth was closed. In anatomical terms, the status of these 'creels' or networks, and associated cords, remains ambiguous.34 It is not quite clear whether a dissector would be able to see them, or if they refer merely to the function of 'fire and air' within the body.35 Interestingly, the disagreement among scholars as to how literal or metaphorical Plato is here echoes the similar debates as to whether Homeric phrenes really ‘are’ the lungs, or whether menos really ‘is’ the blood.

Eros and the Spirit-Matter Boundary These aspects of Plato's creation theory shift it away from the most unrelenting Christian dualism, insofar as they are relatively empirical and precise in their attention to biology and physiology.36 But for the distinctively platonic belief which offers the most important, and in fact most sensuous, bridge between the human and divine, we need to turn not to anything even remotely bordering on scientific empiricism, but to a certain highly specialised version of erotic love. Phaedrus offers us a famous image of the human soul - one which, again, is admitted as a necessary if slightly crude guide to an ultimate reality: the soul is 'compared to a pair of winged horses and charioteer joined in natural union'. One horse is 'noble and of noble breed', and is white, and 'the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed' and black (Phaedrus, 246a-b). Importantly, this image is not a tripartite division of 'man' and the two aspects of his soul, but a threefold split of the soul itself. As we have seen, real knowledge and truth are divine and therefore

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generally inaccessible to humanity. Yet Plato does concede that the soul, as something which once existed in a purely divine, unmediated, state, can in fact experience some 'memory' of this ultimate knowledge. On the whole, the material world is precisely what obscures mortal apprehension of this eternal truth. Surprisingly, however, there is one (at least partly physical) experience which in fact elevates the soul, and clarifies its view of spiritual reality. Ironically, this experience lies at a double remove from orthodox Christian notions of piety, involving both erotic and homosexual love: Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to the place from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less, save only the soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or of a lover, who has been guided by philosophy.37

For Plato, the divine can be obliquely viewed not just through material beauty, but through human, male beauty. This famous 'Greek boy' is certainly not unproblematic. The lover needs to be 'guided by philosophy' to avoid being dangerously misled by the lower, bestial desires of the black horse (250e). If sufficiently pure, however, 'when he sees the beauty of earth, [he] is transported with the recollection of the true beauty' (249d). In order to grasp the peculiarly sensuous quality of this 'religious experience' we need to set down Plato's rendering of the encounter at length. The pure lover, we are told, is amazed when he sees anyone having a godlike face or form, which is the expression of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the face of the beloved as of a god he reverences him ... then while he gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the whole soul - for once the whole was winged. During this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and effervescence, - which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth, - bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings, the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the sensible warm motion of particles which flow towards her, therefore called emotion, and is refreshed and warmed by them, and then she ceases from her pain with joy. But when she is parted

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from her beloved and her moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which the wing shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing; which, being shut up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery, pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the entire soul is pierced and maddened and pained, and at the recollection of beauty is again delighted ... (251a-d)

The dualistic or abstractive sides of this experience should not be overlooked. Nominally, it is the divine and purified soul that motivates and permits such an encounter. In theory one is essentially looking through the beloved, into that higher realm of which they are an earthly expression. Moreover, the scenario is exclusively male - partly because the divine soul is emphatically rational, and both reason and the highest form of soul are typically male preserves. Yet even the briefest glance at this passage conveys a powerful impression of dynamic sensuality. As the passage itself emphasises, emotion, here, is quite definitely 'e-motion'.38 For all the alleged centrality of the divine, this meeting is pervaded by various forms of corporeality. Perhaps the most obvious of these concerns the eyes. Again, these are instrumental because they have a specially privileged relation to the soul.39 For Plato, it is the soul which primarily effects vision. The eyes merely emit (and to some extent receive) visual rays, transmitted from or to the soul. Because of the spiritual primacy of the head, this is a relatively immediate operation. Similarly, the eyes are composed of a specially purified fire.40 And the eyes offer a relatively abstract form of contact with the world: they can grasp information without touching or feeling.41 It seems to have been Plato who first patented the peculiar epistemological privilege of sight, still so immovably wedged into our vocabulary today. Having said this, we nevertheless find that the eyes and the soul are here engaged in a remarkable kind of chemical exchange. As the lover 'receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms'.42 The 'wing', meanwhile, is perhaps the most teasingly ambiguous feature of Plato's spiritual eroticism.43 It occupies that special intermediate role, between body and soul, for which there would be many and varied candidates. Originally, the soul, in its pure, disembodied form, was winged. On earth, these wings seem not to have been quite entirely lost, so much as transformed and disabled. So, when 'transported with the recollection of the true beauty' the lover 'would like to fly away, but he cannot' (249d). And the wing, Plato emphasises, 'is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft' (246d-e). One crucial point to realise, then, is that when this 'effluence of

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beauty' moistens and warms the inner wing of the lover, it comes tantalisingly close to producing a physiological effect upon the human soul. At one level, this clearly is just what is happening. We hear that the whole soul is 'all in a state of ebullition and effervescence, - which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth'. It 'bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and tickling', with all this physical dynamism again recalling that ultimately physical root of human 'e-motion'. The vibrant, fibrous empirical texture of such descriptions can hardly be overstated. We are invited to all but feel the restless swelling of the shoots of the wing, forcing outward like teeth breaking through gums.44 Plato even imagines it as 'throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery'. What exactly does all this mean? What is clear is that there is a powerful physical reaction occurring in the body of the lover, beginning with that tellingly involuntary 'shudder' at the opening of the passage. We begin to stumble, however, as we try to gauge just how literally all this should apply to the soul. On one hand, the notion of a 'winged soul' seems to shift the discussion toward allegory. We find it difficult to believe that Plato might expect to see any trace of these wings if (heaven forbid) the lover were to be sliced open at that very instant. And yet in numerous other respects (references to heat, moisture, effervescence and 'particles') we sense a highly detailed and sensuous physiological trauma, centred on and permeating the divine soul. One way to approach this delicate puzzle would be to claim that such immediate physicality does in fact derive from sublimated sexual desire. The dominant note of all this corporeal tremor is, after all, undoubtedly erotic, rather than medical or scientific. Another valid solution might be to cite Jowett's still valuable caution as to the 'factual' status of much platonic imagery: 'Plato's account of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and partly literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between them, or say, "This is poetry, this is philosophy", for the transition from the one to the other is imperceptible' (III, 668-9). That final phrase in particular offers an apt echo of our central quest: to somehow tread in the uncertain zone between spirit and matter, and between truth and metaphor, without clumsily disturbing or damaging the shy fauna that inhabit it. The scope of the present discussion precludes a final answer to the question of Plato's exact meaning. What we can say with some confidence is that here we see an explicit overlap between earth and heaven, body and soul. It is surely significant that, in a philosopher as dualistic and abstract as Plato, we already find an example of body-soul continuity which is both ambiguous and potentially problematic.

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The Spirit-Matter Continuum For all its pervasive sensuality, the above passage does not offer us so much as an allusion to the heart. But other evidence suggests that it must in some way be implicit in that encounter. Given how variable and untrustworthy the heart was for Christian thought, it is perhaps not surprising that this organ should form the most slippery and inconsistent part of Plato's theory of the soul. We saw that in Timaeus the heart occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the divine soul of the brain. On one hand, the brain was deliberately separated from the trunk by the 'isthmus' of the neck so as to protect the divine soul. On the other, the brain was itself supposed to be able to traverse this gulf in order to restrain and partially 'spiritualise' the upper part of the mortal soul, associated with the heart. This crux might be resolved by arguing that the brain could act downwards, while the heart could not act upwards; but that notion is both inconsistent with the physiology of the lungs (which clearly do act upwards) and with the original need to protect the brain at all. Moreover, the problem recurs elsewhere in different forms. In the Republic, Plato decides that the ideal state should be composed of 'three classes, traders, auxiliaries, counsellors' (441a). In Book 4, he also seeks to establish that the human soul parallels this tripartite hierarchy: 'as the state was composed of three classes ... so may there not be in the individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason ...' (441a). We have, then, an ascending hierarchy of desire or appetite; passion or spirit; and reason. (For Plato, 'passion' meant feeling per se, rather than strong feeling in particular.) Plato carefully considers the possibility that 'spirit' (thymos) might potentially be classed with either 'desire' or with 'reason' - in which case there will in fact be only two rather than three parts of the soul. He argues on one hand that, 'when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him', claiming that 'in this struggle ... his spirit is on the side of his reason'. And it is allegedly unknown 'for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires when reason decides that she should not be opposed' (440b). On the other hand, it can certainly also be shown that spirit is separate from reason. For 'we may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough'. It is further argued that 'you may see passion equally in brute animals' (441a-b). Superficially plausible as these arguments for a tripartite psychology

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might seem in isolation, they do not easily hold up when set against other aspects of Plato's philosophy of soul. At the most basic level, they contradict the unambiguous claim of Timaeus, that the key division of the soul is between the 'immortal' part in the head, and the two 'mortal' parts of the trunk. Certain more oblique arguments also oppose the grouping of the Republic. One of these derives from Book 4's own claims in support of spirit's alliance with reason. It is alleged that when a man has done someone a wrong, his spirit will refuse 'to be excited' by any consequent harms done to him (the offender), as he recognises these to be just. By contrast, 'when a man thinks that he is the sufferer of the wrong, then the spirit within him boils and chafes, and is on the side of what it believes to be justice ...'. Accordingly, although 'passion or spirit appeared at first sight to be a kind of desire', it now appears that 'in the conflict of the soul spirit is arrayed on the side of the rational principle' (440b-d). Even if we leave aside the highly unstable or worldly qualities of thymos as seen in Homeric epic, there are at least three weaknesses in this argument. Most obviously, it is subjective, as indicated by the phrase 'what it believes'. Anyone with even slight experience of human disputes will realise that blame, judgement and responsibility are in reality very elusive and frustrating issues. That broad subjectivity filters down to two related problems. Secondly, Plato does in this case clearly admit that the spirit suffers strong feeling ('boils and chafes'). This generally seems to unfit it for impartial judgement, and quite specifically contradicts the requirement of Timaeus, that ideally the heart should not be subject to violent palpitations. And a third detail, though slight, also deserves recognition. If a central issue here is the impartial perception of justice, then why choose a situation in which oneself has been injured, rather than someone else? In the latter case, it would be far clearer that the spirit is indeed altruistically concerned with abstract justice, rather than particular personal grievance. Other difficulties arise if we link the charioteer and horses of Phaedrus with the tripartite soul of the Republic. The charioteer evidently corresponds to the rational, divine soul; the white horse to spirit; and the black horse to desire. Interestingly, this sequence does not so clearly contradict Timaeus' sharp division between head and trunk: the charioteer can reasonably be seen as separate, and the black and white horses at once partly united, partly distinct. However: the erotic encounter of Phaedrus implies that the charioteer has to restrain the desire of both horses. The black horse is certainly far more 'full of wrath and reproaches'. Nevertheless, even the white horse is 'overcome with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration' (254c). Setting this alongside the tremulous sensuality of the moistened wing and effervescent soul, we

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can again ask just how purely rational and abstracted the lover, or the white horse, actually are. Looking at the matter in evolutionary terms, we can say that, however much Plato might argue to the contrary, the aesthetic appreciation of human beauty finally has a sexual root. To be fair to Plato, we should recall that Timaeus in fact openly admits the uncertainty as to 'which part [of the soul] is mortal and which divine' (72d). But this would only seem to confirm the viability of our central argument. Ultimately, the relationship of body and soul is a highly blurred and problematic affair. To put it another way: it is not only difficult to be intellectually rigorous in this area; it is also psychologically difficult for humanity to accept the sharpness of such a division. As Hendrik Lorenz points out, 'many readers of the Republic have felt that Socrates argues for spirit as a third part of the soul simply because the ideal city he has outlined contains three classes of citizens (roughly speaking, philosophers, the military and businesspeople), and so he needs three corresponding parts of the soul'.45 Although Lorenz himself disagrees, that general critical view raises an interesting possibility. Is this intermediate zone - of spirit or heart - really more attractive than necessary? Does Plato in fact want that third term not as a tidy parallel to his theory of state, but rather because the dualistic severance between human and divine is often felt to be too harshly unacceptable, much as it may be said or thought to be correct and inevitable? Feeling is all too often able to convince us that what is emotionally desirable is also true. And so, ironically, we find that it is effectively the heart itself which has generated Plato's ambiguous idea of spirit. As the whole relation between beauty, truth and eros implies, it is hard to accept a purely abstract relation to the divine. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we might say that, for all his insistence on the distant, inaccessible nature of the divine, Plato cannot bear very much unreality. We find, then, that at the acknowledged foundations of western Christian thought, that central dilemma of spirituality is already present. For the divine to be divine, it must be special: disembodied, distant, inaccessible. And yet, once this sunderance has been achieved, the emotional yearning of humanity will continually seek ways to cross that supposedly absolute gulf between heaven and earth. Small wonder that the heart, often seen as 'deceitful and desperately wicked', yet also frequently held to contain the soul in its left ventricle, should be such an ambiguous and highly-charged organ.

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Aristotle For centuries Aristotle dominated Western thought. From the viewpoint of a modern, collaborative intellectual culture, this extraordinary power of one solitary mind can seem astounding. But it is not entirely difficult to see how this eminence was achieved. Aristotle had something to say about almost everything, and he said it very early on. Combining empirical precision with some elastic general theories of both humanity and the wider cosmos, Aristotle attractively collapsed the world into one manageable library shelf. Accordingly, his diverse array of works (On the Soul; On Respiration; On Meteorology; Poetics; On the Generation of Animals - to name but a very few) became a kind of convenient worldly Bible, frequently plundered and reverently commented on by countless later authors. Like the Bible of the Christian religion, Aristotle would also come to mean very different things to different people. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a far more precise, concrete and empirical thinker than his sometime tutor, Plato.46 Most importantly for our purposes, Aristotle was a biologist. His writings in this area are remarkably extensive, careful, and painstakingly exact in their respect for material detail. Time and again Aristotle displays the mentality of a modern scientist in his refusal to apply misleading abstract theories to particular individual cases. This habit must have been fostered in part by his wide-ranging comparative anatomy: he wrote not only on the human organism but also on an impressive array of fish, insects, birds and animals.47 Aristotle was also essentially scientific in another vital respect. As Gad Freudenthal has convincingly asserted, Aristotle aimed not at the establishment of final and unassailable truths, but at the formation of 'a research programme'.48 Like a good scientist, he collected empirical evidence, and regarded any conclusions drawn from it as contingent and provisional. It was no small irony, then, that in the European Middle Ages Aristotle acted as one of the most fiercely anti-scientific and abstractive authorities of the classical tradition. His works certainly contained such elements; but these had to be torn from their original context and reapplied for specifically Christian ends in order to produce the dematerialised views of men such as Thomas Aquinas.49 My aim here is to first look at how Aristotle partly shares the abstracting, dualistic mentality of Plato, emphasising some of the key religious ideas which the former left to posterity. Secondly, we need to appreciate in some detail how rigorously, persistently biological much of Aristotle's thought was. Arguably, indeed, this biological side determined his notions of the soul, and particularly of body-soul unity. Thirdly, we

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will see how Aristotle's view of body-soul relations again presents a problematic continuum, rather than a safely dualistic, absolute split between the two areas.

The Abstract Soul We saw that in certain cases Plato, for all his inclination toward the primacy and immutability of the divine soul, often left body and soul, or human and divine, in a state of uncomfortable slippage or friction. By contrast, it might be said that Aristotle, though far more interested in this world in all its intricate physical complexity, finds himself obliged to talk of the divine and absolute, despite his own genuine (worldly) inclinations. The idea that Aristotle was indeed haunted by ghosts of Platonic idealism, which he banished partially but never completely, is thus not an implausible one. Aristotle certainly does seem to share some of Plato's basic ideas about the cosmos. He recognises three realms, ranked both ontologically and spatially. There is our own 'sublunar' region beneath the moon; above it that of the celestial ether; and finally that of the 'Unmoved Mover'. Like the Christian God, this mysterious creative principle is immutable and is placed, crucially, outside of the material cosmos, beyond the flux of time, motion, growth and decay. In various important ways, however, Aristotle's cosmology and pneumatology are not Christian. It is, for example, probably more accurate to say that, for him as for Plato, this last realm is more real, rather than spiritually (or even somehow ethically) superior in a Christian sense.50 Yet Aristotle left a philosophical legacy which - suitably adapted would be fiercely cherished by Christian philosophers. In De Anima (On the Soul) he gave a relatively abstract definition of the relation between soul and body. The two entities are broadly paralleled with form and matter. Matter itself, Aristotle explains, 'is not an individual thing'. 'Shape or form' organises matter and gives it 'individuality … Matter is potentiality, while form is realisation or actuality' (DA, 412a). This definition will become clearer when we look at its precise biological applications. It is already apparent that matter is subordinate to form. We can further note, first, that Aristotle equates form with reason, and, second, that form and matter are seen as 'male' and 'female' respectively.51 A crucial aspect of this theory is the ultimate inseparability of body and soul in organic life. As in Ancient Hebraism, one simply cannot conceive of a living, organised body without a soul. Without soul there may be inert, shapeless, inchoate matter (compare the primal chaos before God's act of creation) but there is not individual life. (A buried remnant of

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this older view survives in the words 'organic' and 'organised', both of which derive from the Greek 'organon', meaning 'tool' or 'instrument' things which give form.) Aristotle approaches this issue through a famous comparison. In his era (and much of subsequent history) images cut into metal would be used to stamp distinctive impressions onto wax: the original 'seal of authority' on official documents, or simply one's personal seal on a letter. And, according to Aristotle, 'one need no more ask whether body and soul are one than whether the wax and the impression it receives are one…' (DA, 412b).52 The analogy is certainly ingenious. Arguably, though, it sidesteps the question of body-soul relations by effectively presenting the reader with a fait accompli - or, we might say, halting us at a certain crucial frontier of knowledge, the shadowy border of the ultimate mystery of creation. Aristotle does not seem concerned with how this union came about. For all that, it is certainly not possible to overstate the longstanding religious and philosophical importance of Aristotle's general theory of form and matter. It was not only immensely durable, but also highly flexible, being used to explain a variety of relations between unequal opposites well into and beyond the lives of Marlowe, Donne and Milton. It may well be no exaggeration to say that the idea was as influential and as widespread, among educated Europeans, as modern notions of evolution. The religious and dualistic force of Aristotle's theory will be all too clear to anyone even slightly familiar with the Aristotelianism of Aquinas.53 But, as has been rightly said, Aristotle himself was no Aristotelian. Viewing the wax and seal analogy it in its original context, we can justifiably wonder how abstract or dualistic it really was. At least two important objections arise from within De Anima itself. First, as Richard Sorabji points out, 'it is not always noticed that [Aristotle] regards this definition as insufficiently informative. He calls it an "impression", or "sketch"…'.54 Typically, the 'theory' is again more in the nature of a provisional hypothesis, part of an ongoing, flexible research programme. Secondly, and more precisely: for all his explicit hierarchy of form and matter, Aristotle seems to leave soul and body in an ultimately ambiguous relationship. It appears that we cannot have body without soul, but arguably it may also be just as 'meaningless' to talk about soul without body.55 Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not seem interested in that preexistent, independent soul which, in Timaeus and elsewhere, was held to be the truest and fullest version of spiritual life. At one point he states that it is 'better for the mind to be without the body', but even here tags on the phrase 'as is usually said and widely accepted', thus giving the impression that he is reluctantly paying lip service to an idea which does not

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genuinely interest him.56 And again, the doubtful status of an independent soul reappears from another angle, when Aristotle refines his definition of 'actuality': 'the soul … is the actuality of the kind of body we have described. But actuality has two senses, analogous to the possession of knowledge and the exercise of it' (DA, 412a). One consequence of this is that the rational soul is most actual, or real, only when it is being used, or when it is most fully alive. This idea (while partially recalling the thymos or menos of Homer) is starkly opposite to that of Plato or of mainstream Christianity. For Aristotle, the soul is most 'real' when it is working in a living body; not when it has been 'liberated' from the constrictive prison of the flesh.57 Similarly, even in a relatively abstract work such as De Anima, Aristotle's dualism often appears to be carefully qualified, hesitant, or inconsistent. Early on he states openly: 'in most cases it seems that none of the affections, whether active or passive, can exist apart from the body' (DA, 403a). There is, however, one part of the soul which seems to be separated from matter to an unusually high degree.58 This is nous, or 'mind'. When Aristotle talks of the soul as 'form', and as (effectively) the seal set on the matter of the body, he uses the word psyche. For him this word seems really to be very close to 'life'.59 It certainly does not have the sense it would later acquire in Christian usage. It is nous which comes closest to resembling the incorporeal, divine, and immortal Christian soul. For mind, he states in a notoriously contested section of De Anima, 'when isolated … is its true self and nothing more, and this alone is immortal and everlasting … and without this nothing thinks' (DA 430a). 'When isolated' could possibly mean 'when separate from the body' and thus have a broadly Christian sense - as 'immortal and everlasting' undoubtedly does. Notice again, though, that the essence of mind is thought; there is no evidence for ethical concerns, or belief in judgement and salvation here. As we will see, even the limited dualism of nous is highly problematic.

The Empirical Soul We find, then, that Aristotle seems temperamentally unsuited to the most rigorous dualism, and that he can scarcely be held responsible for the use made of his ideas by Christian theologians. And we have noticed this without yet venturing into his most characteristic writings. As already emphasised, Aristotle seems to have been as interested in life in general as he was in specifically human life. His work is dominated by biology and zoology. Throughout such writings, he continually returns to precise material details. What does x look like? How does it differ from y? Little

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wonder, then, that scholars have seen the influence of the presocratics, those remarkably scientific, empirical thinkers, in Aristotle's work; or that his translator, W.S. Hett, should consider De Anima to offer a 'treatment more abstract than might have been expected from a biologist'.60 In truth, De Anima is more empirically rigorous than Timaeus, or than most of the Christian commentaries on De Anima itself.61 A substantial amount of the text is devoted to an account of the senses. And, when considering the notion that the soul is a kind of harmony, Aristotle cannot accept the idea at a purely abstract (musical or mathematical) level, but insists that one would have to have different kinds of 'harmony' for the physically very different parts of the body (DA, 408a). Similarly, as Jonathan Barnes points out, 'Aristotle does not condemn the search for a common formula for soul; rather, "it is ridiculous to seek the common formula … while neglecting the formula "proper to each particular type of soul"'.62 It is futile, in other words, to generalise at the expense of the particular. As these examples indicate, Aristotle can be seen as temperamentally empirical. His own father was in fact a doctor, and it has been argued that his biological leanings were instilled by an early acquaintance with medical science.63 Throughout his biological and zoological writings he shows careful respect for details of comparative anatomy. In De Generatione Animalium, for example, he notes how hedgehogs have their testicles inside their bodies because this speeds up the emission of semen this in turn being necessary because hedgehogs, on account of their spines, need to copulate standing face to face, and therefore to mate quickly (717b). Already quite painstakingly exact in his accounts of organic process, he will often vivify his descriptions with a concrete or homely illustration. 'Nourishment', for instance, 'oozes through the blood-vessels … just as water does when it stands in unbaked earthenware…' (GA, 743a). Similarly, Aristotle's choice of the heart as a primary spiritual and physical organ seems to have been determined not merely by interest in its symbolic or subjective aspects, but by the fact that it is - as he insists several times - quite obviously the first part of a foetus to be formed.64 Turning back to De Anima's relation between form and matter, it is hard not to conclude that even there we find an essentially biological theory of the soul. At one level, the definition is founded on, and derived from, the nature of organic life. At another, Aristotle's fascination with life as a whole inspires a definition which includes plants and animals. Shifting into explicitly biological territory - and focusing on the book Generation of Animals - we see that the most frequent use of the formmatter theory is a precisely biological one, concerned to explain the process of generation and organic growth: 'the female always provides the

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material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this ... is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes; that is what it means to be male or to be female' (GA, 185). For Aristotle, 'the female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; i.e., it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul' (GA, 175). Accordingly, 'the male always completes the business of generation - it implants sentient Soul, either acting by itself directly or by means of semen' (GA, 207). Although these startling notions of gender clearly have strong ideological components, we will see presently that Aristotle's presentation of sexual physiology is materially precise and concrete. Notably, even his analogies (as opposed to literal empirical descriptions) draw on exact physical processes. So, in a parallel which will echo down through centuries of Christian misogyny, we learn that in copulation across species, offspring can initially take after both parents; but 'as time goes on' they come to resemble the female - just as, 'when seeds are introduced into a strange locality - the plants take after the soil'.65 Women provide the basic material substratum for growth, but male reason and technical skill control and organise the produce of this human 'soil'. Still more precisely, the shaping of the formless female seed or menses is likened to the process of cheese-making: 'the action of the semen in "setting" the female's secretion in the uterus is similar to that of rennet upon milk'.66 This comparison noticeably shifts a potentially abstract theory to the level of sensuous particularity, thrusting material texture up close to the reader's fingertips.

Aristotle on the Body At this point we have the raw stuff of human life forming in the womb. Let us imagine that just now there is little more than a human heart, slowly pulsing in warm liquid darkness. For Aristotle, this is already 'en-souled'. Within the heart, there is a physiological agent called pneuma. It is this which mediates between soul and body. The heart is indisputably the primary organ in Aristotle's physiology. It is the seat of the vital soul, the source of the blood which forms all other organs, and the agent responsible for sensation. Where Plato's Timaeus set a definite barrier between the head and the trunk, Aristotle views the midriff as an appropriate divide between the heart and the regions beneath, protecting the heart from the excessive heat of digestion. The liver is also considered essential to all 'blooded creatures', as it helps turn food into blood. We now come, however, to a curious fact. For Aristotle, the brain -

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which we might expect to form the third and indeed highest member of an organic trio - is a relatively unimportant organ.67 In his biological model, it does not have a rational soul or spirit in it. Moreover, it seems to be degraded in Aristotle's view for three related reasons. It has no feeling; it has no blood; and it is cold (PA, 149-175). At one quite obvious level it is understandably marginalised, given Aristotle's insistence on the biological importance of heat and blood. More subtly, its lack of feeling or sensation may also have influenced Aristotle - if only unconsciously - given his temperamental fascination with sentient life. He indeed goes so far as to deny that the brain is connected to any sense organs - this issue being, as we will find, especially important in his physiology. What, then, does the brain do? Right into the seventeenth century, it was thought simply to help cool the potentially excessive heat of the heart. As with so many other medieval and early-modern beliefs, Aristotle was the chief source of this idea.

The Economy of Fluids As Freudenthal has valuably emphasised at some length, perhaps the two most essential elements of Aristotle's physiology are blood and heat. Types of blood differ. Writing some two millennia before the invention of the microscope, Aristotle shows an impressive observational rigour when he claims that blood contains fibres which determine its consistency. Thicker blood will have more, and thinner blood less. Thicker blood heats easily, but gives rise to individuals '"of a choleric temperament, and liable to bursts of passion"'. Thin or watery blood, by contrast, is associated with '"a deficiency of natural heat"' and with timidity. Accordingly, 'the best possible blood is at once hot and thin, conferring as it does not only courage, but … intelligence as well'.68 The thinnest, hottest blood is best because it produces the greatest intelligence. Once again, Aristotle pursues this argument with empirical thoroughness. The body is formed from blood, with the purest of this fluid producing the softer parts, and the cruder, more 'earthy' liquid composing 'bones and sinews and hair' (as well as 'nails and hoofs' and so on).69 Blood will therefore differ within individuals to some degree; but as noted also differs across different human or animal types. Perception and sensation, for Aristotle, involve a physical 'imprint' upon an organ. Accordingly, those organs composed from purer blood will be more receptive, and give rise to greater intelligence.70 Here we find ourselves scraping bare the sunken roots of familiar language: this is, quite literally, what it means to be physically and intellectually 'sensitive'.71 There is also a further grading

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of purity among the organs: those of the senses are purer than those involved in digestion, with the eyes, significantly, being the purest of all. Notwithstanding the ambiguous intellectual role of nous, it seems that Aristotle here unrepentantly fuses the particularities of organic matter with those thoughts and emotions which Plato and certain of his philosophical descendants wished to safely abstract into some non- or extra-physical region.72 The whole scheme is so far from the pre-existing 'forms' or 'ideas' that we could be forgiven for seeing it as a late revenge of pupil against his idealising master.73 The primacy of blood led Aristotle to claim that all other bodily fluids were just variations of it, altered by differing levels of heat or of pneuma. Thus semen and milk were forms of blood, while in certain animals even suet and lard had a supposedly sanguinary derivation (PA 651b). This notion already implies a further level of continuity between body and soul, given the intimate relations between blood, soul and heat. But the most important element in Aristotle's physiological economy was not a fluid: it was pneuma. In chapters one and two we examined certain pre-Christian forms of vital breath, such as atman, thymos and ruach. With Aristotle, we find the blueprint for the at once elusive and pervasive 'spirits' of fullblown Christian theology. The influence of Aristotle's biological theory, then, can hardly be overstated. If ever there was a breath that could turn the world, it was pneuma. Ironically, however, Aristotle himself seems to have had quite empirical, rather than religious, uses for pneuma. In dealing with this topic, we are particularly indebted to the painstakingly detailed reconstruction of pneuma achieved by Freudenthal. We have seen how Freudenthal emphasised Aristotle's desire for an ongoing 'research programme' rather than absolute finished theories. And pneuma seems to have been a result of Aristotle's careful scientific revisions. The soul as 'form' was held to shape, organise and define matter into living things.74 More precisely, Aristotle held this creative operation to be accomplished by vital heat. The literality of this belief was reflected in explanations of deformity: 'imperfect', unfinished, or 'monstrous' creatures resulted from a lack of sufficient heat.75 At a glance, it would seem that blood could easily carry vital heat from the heart through the body, but Aristotle generally held that nature designed each part for only one operation: the role of blood was to nourish the body. It was pneuma, therefore, which transmitted vital heat. 'Connate pneuma' was present from the very first in the heart of an embryo (necessarily, as it was required to form the raw matter of the female seed). Aristotle held pneuma to be heated air; and he also believed that a separate type of pneuma was breathed in by living creatures. Here

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we are concerned with connate pneuma - something which, importantly, could be transmitted, as a kind of soul-principle, from generation to generation, without any external influence.76 It has already been implied that pneuma was a product of Aristotle's empiricism, helping him to more convincingly explain the exact dynamic processes of life. Freudenthal further shows how minutely empirical Aristotle was in this area. His theory held that 'connate pneuma is naturally and constantly produced through the action of vital heat on the blood'.77 This process resembled the formation of vapour through boiling. However, 'Aristotle's theory assumes that the blood's pneumatization is a lasting state, not a circumscribed process of limited duration'. Why, then, did heated vapour not escape, rising in accordance with the very nature of heat? Freudenthal, noting that milk was for Aristotle a form of blood, plausibly argues that Aristotle had paid careful attention to the changes seen in heated milk. At a certain temperature range, ubiquitous bubbles would form, and remain in the milk, rather than evaporating as steam. It was in this way that pneuma would be produced by the action of heat.78 Having satisfied himself as to the possibility and necessity of pneuma as an agent of heat and soul, Aristotle proceeds to use it as a ubiquitous creative medium. 'Semen', for example, 'is a compound of pneuma and water (pneuma being hot air) … The cause of the whiteness of semen is that it is foam, and foam is white, the whitest being that which consists of the tiniest particles, so small that each individual bubble cannot be detected by the eye' (GA, 163-5). Moreover, 'it is clear both that semen possesses Soul, and that it is Soul, potentially. And there are varying degrees in which it may be potentially that which it is capable of being…' (GA 735a). This potentiality, and the 'varying degrees' of it are again dependent on heat. Equally, Aristotle's seemingly magical notions of spontaneous generation (the production of insects and even small animals from putrescent matter) were also in fact another version of thermodynamic reproduction. '"Animals and plants are formed in the earth and in the water because in earth water is present, and in water pneuma is present, and in all pneuma soul-heat is present, so that in a way all things are full of soul"'.79 Although we need to keep reminding ourselves that, for Aristotle, 'soul' means psyche, and therefore something like 'life', that last claim in particular is an important one. This, then, is the physiological role and status of pneuma. Before going on to consider some of the more interesting and problematic consequences of the theory, let us look briefly at the notably intermediate status of pneuma. Aristotle emphasises this clearly when he proposes that, 'it is probable that Nature makes the majority of her productions by means of

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pneuma used as an instrument. Pneuma serves many uses in the things constructed by Nature, just as certain objects do in the arts and crafts, eg, the hammer and anvil of the smith' (GA 789b). Once again, the tentative 'it is probable' reflects the habits of a cautious researcher. The analogy with tools, meanwhile, again recalls the shared root of 'organised', organic life. It should already be clear that, for all the potential dualism of the form/matter distinction, pneuma is a physical agent which frequently resembles 'form' or 'soul' in its powers and activities. Elsewhere, Aristotle significantly expands the intermediate nature of pneuma by shifting it from the natural sphere toward the divine. Aristotle's cosmos contained the sublunar region, including our world, and the realm of the 'Unmoved Mover', outside of material nature. Between these was the celestial ether. In De Generatione Animalium, having explained that pneuma is a special kind of heat (and not fire), and asserted its inclusion in semen, Aristotle suddenly makes a surprising statement. Pneuma, he says, 'is analogous to the element which belongs to the stars' - namely, ether.80 As Freudenthal emphasises, this claim has caused bafflement among scholars, and generated very different interpretations. Freudenthal also rightly stresses that Aristotle is indeed making an analogy, not claiming that pneuma is equivalent to the ether.81 Yet even as an analogy, the statement is highly significant. Here we have the first systematic attempt to situate pneuma in that fascinating and perilous zone between matter and spirit. Like the ether, it sits between the divine and the material.82 Moreover, Aristotle not only makes this comparison at a relatively abstract, conceptual level, but also seems to offer a far more empirical version of the parallel. 'So far as we can see, the faculty of Soul of every kind has to do with some physical substance which is different from the so-called "elements" and more divine than they are'. Pneuma, he says in De Motu Animalium, 'possesses weight as compared with the fiery element, and lightness as compared with the contrary elements' (DMA, 703a). This description is already telling in itself, given the way that it attempts to further nuance the intermediate status of pneuma.83 In the longer term, it may well have helped to support the belief that pneuma itself in fact was - like ether - a separate, fifth element, or 'quintessence'.

Body-Soul Continuity I have argued that Aristotle's physiology of blood, heat and pneuma effectively blur the body and soul together. Indeed, the very existence (or invention) of pneuma implies a desire to establish a closely continuous flow of body and soul. At perhaps the most general level, this continuity is

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evident in what we might again call the primacy of the soul. The soul is fundamentally responsible for sensation and for thought. As Freudenthal states, Aristotle asserts the '"sensory power of the soul as a single unit" … Because sense perception is a single soul-faculty, it must be centred in one bodily part, the heart. "Sensation proper occurs only when the stimulus reaches this centre; and unless it does so, the eye cannot see nor the ear hear"'.84 Despite what might seem to us the axiomatic link between sight, hearing, smell, and the adjacent organ of the brain, Aristotle insists that all these senses (and, perhaps more surprisingly, even taste) are all effected through a soul located in the heart. There is a clear continuity, then, between the soul, the body, and the senses (and, as noted, between soul, body and intelligence - a crucial point to which we will return very shortly). At another level, it is the soul which is responsible for biological continuity across the generations. Once again, it is Freudenthal who has ingeniously drawn out the detailed implications of Aristotle's theory of generation. The heart contains connate pneuma, and this is transmuted from blood into semen, with the semen then carrying pneuma, and the soul, into the new organism created by sexual reproduction. The first living part of that new organism is the heart, which is produced from the connate pneuma of the father, and which then uses that pneuma to form its own body.85 Later, it will repeat this process, which can, in theory, continue eternally. In one sense, this is striking because it offers such a direct and clear link between the soul and the physiology of reproduction. In another, as Freudenthal stresses, it could indeed seem to constitute a form of immortality or eternity for the soul.86 If this seems too impersonal for the tastes of a Christian culture, it may not have done to the Greeks (and certainly would not have done to the Ancient Hebrews).87 Centuries later, Britain's most eminent early-modern physician, William Harvey, seems to have this theory in mind when talking of the genitals. In this way, he says, humankind is 'by the string tied to eternity'.88 Let us imagine that a modern scientist were to consider this theory, and to accept most of its claims and elements. Let us also imagine that they take exception to one particular aspect. This would almost certainly be the soul itself. Adopting the classic scientific principle of minimalism, or explanatory economy, they would insist that the whole process can be effected by pneuma alone, without it needing to carry the soul.89 This point is valuable not because it offers a useful criticism of Aristotle (who, after all, simply used 'soul' as convenient shorthand for biological mysteries he could hardly have been expected to solve, some two millennia before the microscope.) It is valuable because it indicates that, at least potentially,

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such a theory is liable to collapse soul and pneuma into one single entity. This may, indeed, have seemed tempting to Aristotle himself, given his empirical leanings: he did after all have a much clearer idea of pneuma than of soul. He knew what pneuma was and how it behaved, which made it easier and more attractive to discuss. As we have already seen, Aristotle elsewhere seems to make varieties of intelligence dependent on the consistency of blood. Given that intelligence or reason were frequently held to be faculties of the soul, we can again argue for a seamless continuity between matter and spirit. Here Aristotle presents one version of a recurrent, dangerous possibility: the notion that the soul was blood, or that blood was sufficient to replace the soul. Even as late as the twentieth century, the scholar Friedrich Solmsen seemed to find the fusion of blood and intellect faintly heretical: How could a philosopher of Aristotle's standing and outlook sponsor a 'materialist' doctrine which made man's ethos and mind dependent on the composition of the blood - a doctrine on which Plato would not even waste a word of refutation?90

One other way of viewing Aristotle's psycho-physiological continuity is through the element of heat. Heat is not only a feature of life in general, but a feature of the soul. Hence one index of male superiority is that gender's supposedly hotter constitution. Female seed or menses is semen which lacks the soul-heat of its male counterpart, and female offspring are conceptions produced by insufficient heat. This kind of thermal hierarchy applies not just to men and women but to all of creation, and is interfused with Aristotle's ideas of intelligence. In Freudenthal's words: 'this physiologically-grounded construal of the scala naturae implies that the living realm is continuous: plot the scale of being against the vital heat, and you get a continuous curve'.91 It seems easy enough to make a definite break in that curve when differential heat produces such clearly distinct creatures as men and women. There again: the theory would also seem to allow for more subtle gradations among men themselves. Are some men more fully en-souled than others - at least by a few fractions, say, of one degree centigrade? And the same kind of slippery gradation could indeed be perceived if one shifted down the scale from humanity. Perhaps one of the more seemingly quaint outcomes of Aristotle's physiology of heat is the link with physical posture which Freudenthal draws out. It was humankind's greater bodily and vital heat which naturally drew the species upright, with its head nearer the heavens.92 And it may be this which Aristotle has in mind when he states that '"man alone partakes of the divine, or at any rate

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partakes of it in a fuller measure than the rest"'.93 Nothing could be further from the spirit-matter dualism of Plato or of Christianity than this implicitly continuous, carefully qualified scale of divinity. As suggested, Aristotle's psyche is not intended to resemble the immortal, divine, ethically-charged Christian soul. It is a principle of life one perhaps acknowledging the mystery of creation, but not necessarily wishing to actively mystify it. However, in the above statement Aristotle seems unavoidably to breathe some kind of divine force through all created life. He thereby implies that the psyche, which is common to humans, animals and plants, does indeed harbour varying levels of the numinous. Those Christians who later adapted Aristotle's original ideas of soul did not fully admit the distinction between the Greek psyche and its Christian descendant. While this was in one way convenient, it was also dangerous: the buried, pre-Christian features of the theory continually threatened to force their way to the surface, or indeed to fracture the new soul back into its component parts.

The Reluctant Dualist It should by now be clear that in numerous ways Aristotle wishes to fuse the body and the psyche. The physiological details set out above indeed seem a more than thorough response to those older theories of soul which are so indignantly derided at the outset of De Anima. It is 'absurd', Aristotle insists, that 'men associate the soul with and place it in the body, without specifying why this is so, and how the body is conditioned … these thinkers only try to explain what is the nature of the soul, without adding any details about the body which is to receive it' (DA 41-3). As K.V. Wilkes puts it, in most respects, Aristotle seems to be 'every physicalist's ideal role-model'.94 As we have briefly noticed, however, there is one exception to an otherwise persistently monist view of organic life. That exception is nous, or mind. Aristotle, Freudenthal reminds us, 'believes all soul-functions (except that of the nous) to hinge on vital heat as the underlying factor' (69, italic mine). In theory nous is not part of the spirit-matter continuity. It is not linked to a particular organ; it is supposedly eternal and divine, beyond the flux of crude perishable matter. Nominally, then, it seems to offer us the clearest version of the immortal Christian soul. And yet, time and again, discussions of nous reveal it to be severely undermined by contradiction, uncertainty or hesitation. The section of De Anima in which Aristotle attempts a (relatively) precise definition of nous has frequently been singled out as one of the most bewilderingly cryptic

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passages in his philosophy. 'If we have dualism here', Wilkes justly remarks, it is 'unlike any version of dualism with which we are now familiar'.95 As Barnes points out, even in this area, Aristotle only 'leans, hesitantly, toward non-physicalism'.96 So, when Aristotle says of nous that 'it seems to be a distinct kind of soul, and it alone admits of being separated, as the immortal from the perishable', he first carefully prefaces the admission: 'in the case of the mind and the thinking faculty [nous] nothing is yet clear' (DA, 413b). Elsewhere he uses similarly tentative phrasing, and appears to fall victim to some of the notoriously swampy terrain of the mind-body frontier. Mind or nous, he says, 'seems to be an independent substance engendered in us, and to be imperishable. If it could be destroyed the most probable cause would be the feebleness of old age'. However, 'old age is due to an affection, not of the soul, but only of that in which the soul resides … Thinking, loving and hating, are affections not of the mind, but rather of the individual which possesses the mind, in so far as it does so. Memory and love fail when this perishes; for they were never part of the mind, but of the whole entity which has perished. Presumably the mind [nous] is something more divine, and is unaffected' (DA, 408b). As with his opening 'seems', this last sentence is typically cautious and imprecise ('presumably'; 'something more divine'). And this view of the soul is also typically empirical. Aristotle has to admit that mental powers can weaken with age. Potentially, this could imply that the soul itself is subject to the weaknesses of the body. In response to this dilemma, Aristotle separates 'memory and love' from immaterial 'mind'. From a Christian viewpoint in particular, this notably diminishes the status and extent of the immortal soul. Although opinions on this question varied, many clearly felt, consciously or unconsciously, that the soul was a guarantee of a permanent individual self. This can hardly be the case if it is severed from the accumulated experience of one's life. Indeed, Aristotle - unlike his Christian commentators - may not have wished to argue for that kind of soul.97 Notice his phrasing: 'the individual which possesses the mind, in so far as it does so'. This could imply that the individual has not so much a soul, as some soul.98 We appear to hear an echo of the Hebrew notion of ruach, which guaranteed neither personality nor a blissful eternity, but simply earthly life in general.99 Another way of glossing the passage is to say that, where Plato tried to ally the intermediate 'spirit' of the feelings with the upper, immortal soul, Aristotle seems to emphatically shift 'memory and love' down, away from the highest form of mind. Even when Aristotle is not directly concerned with nous, a similar ambivalence toward dualism is often evident. In the passage where pneuma

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is shifted toward the ether, he first prefaces a distinctive 'so far as we can see' and even then only ventures to argue that pneuma is 'more divine' than the traditional elements. Discussing semen, he appears to become yet more plainly contradictory. The 'physical part of the semen … when it is emitted by the male, is accompanied by the portion of soul-principle and acts as its vehicle. Partly this soul-principle is separable from physical matter … partly it is inseparable' (GA, 173).100 Accordingly, when T.H. Irwin observes that, 'although [Aristotle's] soul is a substance distinct from the non-organic body ... it is not immaterial (if being immaterial excludes being composed of matter)' he is being at least as clear as the Stagyrite himself.101 What is the answer to all this puzzling equivocation? I suggested earlier that Aristotle was in many ways temperamentally empirical, but that the culture of his time (and in particular the influence of Plato) left him with a lingering sense of duty toward the divine. Both this general impression, and all the particular points of weakness and qualification in his dualism, suggest that Aristotle's notions of the divine human intellect are something of an unwilling afterthought - that they are, indeed, at least partly dutiful. His remarks on nous, as Michael Frede convincingly argues, 'raise the question whether in the end Aristotle himself does not feel forced, after all to reintroduce a separate subject in the form of the intellect to account for thought … They raise the question whether Aristotle is not all along wavering about his account of the soul as the nature of a certain kind of body'.102 This statement has two important implications for the present discussion. First, as that telling word 'reintroduce' hints, there is a sense that the soul has to be furtively added into the human individual. It is something extra, rather than something biologically or philosophically integral. (Compare, especially, that primary, platonic soul around which the body was built.) Secondly, the sense that Aristotle 'feels forced', and that his attempt is not intellectually convincing, present us with something akin to a kind of 'leap of faith'. Both these factors will be repeated at key moments in the later history of the soul, and most especially during periods of intellectual crisis. To summarise: we can draw four broad conclusions from the preceding arguments. One is that, at the very foundations of Christian thought, we find an irreparable fissure in the philosophy of body and soul: a final inability to persuasively reconcile physiology and dualism. This problem had beset Plato to some extent, but was naturally more severe for Aristotle, who had the courage and the inclination to engage with empirical details to a far greater degree. Secondly: while Aristotle's ideas are themselves

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subject to internal problems, his system necessarily becomes far more insecure once it is readapted for Christian purposes. In that case, it is rather as if the Church Fathers and successive theologians had taken from Athens some quite well carved but slender wooden pillars, and used them as the foundations for a colossal palace of steel and granite. A third point is that Aristotle, as he frequently implies, and Freudenthal further asserts, is indeed undertaking 'a research programme'. Crucially, this research, like all good science, is ongoing and provisional. Christianity managed to suspend this empirical and scientific research programme for almost fifteen hundred years. Once it was restarted by men such as Pietro Pomponazzi and the anatomists of the Italian Renaissance, the Christian soul would necessarily shrink and wither in the cold, unfriendly light and air of a changing intellectual climate.103 A fourth point is more subtle, but no less important. What Aristotle shows is that many thinkers, however much they might theoretically adhere to dualism, had a certain psychological or emotional yearning for a more precise, organically integrated version of the soul. Aristotle himself was hardly typical of the Christian dualism that followed him. But it is clear that certain Christian thinkers also (if unconsciously) found dualism too harshly divisive. If orthodox theology insisted on a stark black and white, the human mind (or heart) often preferred to work with varying shades of grey. This final point leads us on to a related but distinct strand of Greek thought. For the Stoics, there was one very simple solution to the metaphysical dilemmas which beset Aristotle. The soul was a principle of life, and integral to the body; but, at the same time, it was equally mortal, and there was no need whatsoever to produce sophistical accounts of its relation to that body: for both entities were entirely material.

CHAPTER FOUR SOUL AND SPIRIT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

... all things are full of soul.1

Christianity has been remarkably successful in obscuring the audacious theft of Jewish Scripture. This act, after all, stole not just words and ideas and events, but in a sense all the lives of those numerous generations involved in the span of Old Testament history. Yet there is one other daring historical smash and grab raid which has gone still more thoroughly unnoticed by the relevant authorities. Christians stole not just the ancient narratives of Jewish faith. Ultimately, they also stole Christ. As Karen Armstrong persuasively argues, Christ was a Jewish prophet, concerned with Jewish audiences and Jewish salvation. While ‘later Christianity would present him as coming down to earth to save the world … the Jews were expecting a Messiah who came only for the Jews’. Christ himself ‘preached only to the Jews; the later idea that his mission was also for the Gentiles was … wholly due to Paul’. Even Matthew, indeed, is happy to have Christ state contemptuously that one must not throw the spiritual food of Jewish children ‘to the [Gentile] dogs’.2 Accordingly, Christ's death was vital to the formation of Christianity as it existed in and after the lifetime of Paul. Christ did not need to die for humanity's sins. He needed to die so that his life and teachings could be rewritten and democratised presented and sold to a non-Jewish audience for whom he himself had never intended them.3 As we will see in following chapters, certain key events were recreated or re-interpreted early on, by the Gospellers (though they themselves had already been converted to a new, post-crucifixion interpretation by the earliest Christian author, St Paul). Later, faced with the kind of raw clay which Yahweh had pummelled and animated one morning back in Eden, Christian thinkers from Origen to Aquinas effortfully shaped, sculpted and polished up the arguably rather unpromising materials offered by Mark, Luke, Matthew, John and Paul. Where was the soul in the New Testament? To put it another way: where was the pronounced body-soul

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dualism of the Church Fathers and the Middle Ages? As following pages will show, it had yet to be invented. True, there was much dualism as regards this world and the next (though that itself, circa 60AD, was very different from later eschatologies). But, as two recent commentators note, 'even in such central concerns as whether each human is endowed with an immortal soul, Scripture is ambiguous'.4 In this chapter I will try to get behind the fossilised surface of the New Testament, recovering something of the living reality of the worlds of Christ and Paul.5 Various commentators have of course emphasised the historical unreliability of the New Testament. The gospels were written quite a long time after Christ's death. They and Paul are often unconsciously distorting events or deliberately arranging material to form a symbolic rather than realistic picture. As Raymond Martin and John Barresi have recently stated, 'virtually all academic historians ... agree that many of the events depicted in the New Testament are fictitious'.6 Yet Armstrong, who similarly recognises that 'the New Testament writers did not feel themselves bound by historical accuracy', adds that the gospels 'have a truth' of their own; for 'they reflect the way the early Church was thinking about itself in the first century, and the way it saw Jesus'.7 In the following chapters I will argue that – especially when read against the grain, and in the light of folk or tribal customs and beliefs – the gospels also show us how thoroughly pre-Christian Christ's environment really was, in its attitudes to miracles, demonology, and magic. In the present chapter I want to show how both the Christian soul, and the Christian body-soul relationship, were as yet uninvented or unfixed. Both pneuma and psyche had a surprisingly wide range of meanings in the gospels and the letters of Paul. These were often far from dualistic, sometimes closely echoing the beliefs of the Ancient Hebrews. Where dualism did exist, it was frequently pneuma rather than psyche which took priority. We have seen that the heroes of the Odyssey and the Iliad, and men such as Moses and Ecclesiastes were more or less unable to comprehend either cosmic or personal dualism. Even Aristotle was, at best, a kind of reluctant or uncommitted dualist. Perhaps more surprisingly, the New Testament offers us a similar reluctance and lack of commitment. Dualism is at times absent, at times inchoate, at times ambiguous. In any case, anything like the emphatic black and white of later body-soul theologies is always entangled with the very different views of earlier Greek and Jewish thought. The following chapters compound this sense of a world before dualism, showing how the 'miraculous' use of pneuma by Christ and his disciples is often essentially monist, worldly, empirical and concrete, rather than otherworldly and

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abstract. Precisely because the status of body and soul is so elusive or fluid in these documents, we will need, before treading the dust of Jerusalem and Joppa, to try and grasp the dominant cosmology and anthropology within which Christ and his followers were working.

The Stoics Aristotle clearly found pneuma attractive for various purposes in the realm of biology. Beyond this sphere, he even went so far on one occasion as to analogise pneuma with the celestial element, ether. But in decades before, and centuries after Aristotle's lifetime, a powerful Greek philosophy invested this magical breath with far more pervasive and unambiguous powers. For the Stoics, pneuma was the root of all life. As S. Sambursky has emphasised, the Stoic cosmos was essentially biological. Pneuma permeated all of it, and was responsible for the nature and behaviour of both organic and inorganic entities. 'The cosmos is formed and ruled by forces which activate matter in a similar way to the activation of the living body by the soul'.8 Pulsing through all the known universe, pneuma was a highly dynamic as well as potent medium. It was used synonymously with air, but was clearly something more than air in a modern scientific sense, more closely resembling the ruach of the Old Testament. Pneuma was matter in its finest possible state. At the same time, it was also wholly indivisible from matter. Fragments of this cosmic pneuma were present as the basic essence of life not only in humans, animals and plants, but even in wood and stone. Pneuma was responsible not simply for organic life as we know it, but also for the cohesion of matter. Invisibly vibrating through all of nature, it acted as a force of living tension.9 From our point of view, the most important thing about Stoic pneuma is that it underpins an unusually continuous theory of Nature. At one level, it is a continuous medium which explains the interaction between all bodies and phenomena (such as, for example, the relation between the moon and the tides). There is no void or vacuum in the Stoic universe. At another, the apparent divisions of 'life' on earth (stones, plants, animals, humans) are in reality only stages along a pneumatic continuum. Stones are invested with the lowest or weakest form of pneuma, known as hexis. That of plants is called physis, and that of animals psyche. Humans contain all these types, and add a fourth, the rational soul (nous). These different levels of pneuma are not merely a semantic convenience. Beneath the names, there lie varying levels of tension or heat. As Sambursky explains, 'difference between soul and organic life [was] merely the result of the

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variations in the composition of the pneuma’, that of nature being moister and colder than the relatively dry, warm pneuma of the soul.10 As this statement implies, the Stoics adhered to that theory so familiar to students of the Renaissance. There were four basic qualities: hot and dry, and cold and moist (respectively identified with fire and earth, and air and water).11 But these were not the only explanatory mechanism behind different entities or life forms. The idea of tension (Greek tonos) was central to this graded scale of existence. In the words of John Sellars: 'all existing things involve the two principles of matter and pneuma and the qualities within any existing thing are owing to the tension (tonos) of the pneuma in it. Different degrees of tension will generate different qualities'.12 Turning to human life in particular, we find that, for the Stoics, 'there exists a centre of perception and consciousness, the "ruling part of the soul"'. Known as the hegemonikon, this central processing unit 'is located in a defined part of the body' and 'is in control of the five sensory organs, the generative part of the body, and the faculty of speech'. Effectively coordinating stimulus and response, motor function, consciousness and human will, the hegemonikon functions more or less identically with the Christian soul of Renaissance physiology. Not only that, but like many later Christians - and like Aristotle - most Stoics locate it in the heart.13 We can see that in various ways both the Stoic cosmos and its individual members resemble those ideas of body-soul unity and of life in general developed by Christianity in its more advanced stages. Glancing back to the Old Testament, we notice how the Stoic soul, as a fragment of a kind of world-soul, echoes the way that Hebrew souls derived ultimately from the general ruach of God and his universe. Ultimately, however, the differences are far more important than the similarities. Firstly, Stoicism does not have a God in anything like the Christian or even Hebrew forms. The cosmos itself is held to be conscious and rational. It is also referred to in Stoic writings as 'god'. But this deity is not individualised.14 It does not judge, and it does not reward or punish. It is not set over against either humanity or the cosmos. It does not live outside some corrupt, perishable human realm: there is nothing outside the Stoic cosmos.15 Underlining a point which may already be obvious, we can add that the emphatically continuous Stoic system is thoroughly monist, rather than dualist. Everything in it, including pneuma, is material. Sellars therefore appears justified in arguing that the Stoic God is more or less equivalent with the more clearly impersonal concept of 'Nature'.16 Having said this, we must also note that Stoic cosmology involved a term which later carries over into the centre of Christian theology. Pneuma was also referred to as the 'Logos'. The clearly non- or pre-Christian character of Stoic cosmology is

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replicated at the level of individuals. Stoic pneuma as found in humans is 'life or soul-substance, yet never with a definitely individual or psychical or religious sense'.17 This Stoic soul is both material and mortal. Not only that, but its nature means that at death it is in fact destroyed before the physical body. It hardly needs stating, then, that the Stoics conceive of no kind of afterlife for distinct individuals. Plain as this may be, it can be further illustrated by the fact that there is no such thing as disembodied pneuma: 'it is never to be found alone as nothing but a creative principle'.18 To put this another way, it again resembles ruach, insofar as it cannot exist independently of the body animated by it. The Stoic soul, then, is essentially biological rather than religious. Beyond accounting for life per se, its primary role is to effect the cohesion of human or non-human entities. The element of Stoicism which is probably now best-known is its ethical philosophy. The ideal Stoic individual will live virtuously and rationally, even in the worst of political circumstances. A particularly famous example is found in Seneca, the Roman philosopher who committed suicide when he fell foul of the unstable and tyrannical Emperor Nero. At a brief glance we can see how Christianity could draw on this kind of ethical position. What we must realise, however, is that especially in its earlier phases - the ethics of Stoicism were in one crucial way directly opposed to the dualism of Christianity. The ideal Stoic might mentally detach himself from the political culture of his immediate environment. What he did not have to do was to reject all the created material world. On the contrary: a key maxim of Stoic ethics was the idea that you should 'live according to Nature'. This did not involve that typical 'leap of faith' seen in advanced forms of Christianity. Rather, it was simply the logical outcome of Stoic cosmology. The highest, rational element of the Stoic soul was part of the pervasive pneuma of the cosmos as a whole, and accordingly the 'ideal of the Stoic wise man is to put himself in harmony with this cosmic principle [of pneuma] by living according to nature (or reason)'.19 In one sense, this position is no more self-righteously ethical than that of a scientist who decides that she should live her life in obedience to the law of gravity. In another, it again typifies the thoroughly continuous quality of the Stoic universe. True, the good Stoic has to attune themself to the most rational part of the soul. But they do not then have to psychologically hurl this atom of virtue across the corrupt expanses of the material world, into the safe arms of a deity poised up in the radically opposed zone of the Christian heaven. To live according to Nature is necessarily to live according to reason and to god.20 This brief summary risks distorting Stoicism into an overly simple or

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homogeneous philosophy. The Stoic theory of pneuma was in reality developed over a lengthy period of time. As Sambursky explains, 'the main body of the continuum theory was developed already by the older Stoics, particularly by Zeno and Chrysippos, i.e. in the fourth and third centuries BC. The most important later addition to the doctrine was made in the first half of the first century BC by Poseidonius in his cosmic interpretation of the pneuma and the concept of sympathy'.21 Pneuma had also been known in various forms long before Zeno of Citium (334262BC), the official founder of Stoicism. It was supposed to have been mentioned by the Greek poet Xenophanes (c.570-478BC), and can definitely be attributed to the playwright Aeschylus (born c.525 BC). As meaning the breath of man or animal, it was used by Euripides, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes.22 Perhaps the most significant early use in this context derives from the pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaximenes, who states that 'as our souls, being air, control us, so wind and air encompass the whole world'.23 It is equally important to see how Stoicism began to change many generations after Zeno. As Sambursky indicates, Poseidonius (c135c50BC) seems to have shifted away quite significantly from the stance of his predecessors. Although Poseidonius' extensive writings are now lost, quotations from them suggest that he was significantly influenced by Plato.24 He believed that the soul was pre-existent, and may also have believed that the souls of the virtuous did enjoy a form of immortality, returning after death '"to the aethereal regions of the Upper Cosmos whence they came, where they spend a happy immortality contemplating the workings of Divine Reason"'.25 Similarly, Poseidonius took a more dualistic attitude toward both the human individual and the cosmos. J.M. Rist notes that he tended to emphasise the divide between the superior and inferior parts of the human soul, while the belief ascribed to him that 'without the soul the body is matter, useless and defiling flesh' gives an especially strong ethical slant to such dualism.26 At the wider level of creation, he is also alleged to have separated God from Nature.27 Keimpe E. Algra emphasises that the precise extent of Poseidonius' influence remains debatable. Unlike the Christian writers and thinkers of later centuries, he also had 'a passion for detailed empirical research’.28 If his belief in the immortality of the soul has been truly ascribed, it is nevertheless some distance from the heaven of Christian eschatology, and there seems to be no evidence at all for any conception of hell. Bearing these qualifications in mind, it is nevertheless hard to deny that Poseidonius' imputed ideas correspond to more general changes in the character of Stoicism, in the decades before the life of Christ. As

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Sambursky points out, 'from the first century BC on, the centre of gravity of Stoic teachings shifted decidedly to ethics'. Rist, similarly, goes so far as to argue that Poseidonius' ‘emphasis on the dualistic tendencies in Stoic physics' was 'in many ways fatal to Stoicism', adding decisively: 'it is no accident that most Stoicism after Poseidonius tends to degenerate into mere moralizing'. As Rist further emphasises, the ‘psychological dualism' of this thought 'could be used very differently from the way in which Poseidonius used it’ - a conclusion which chimes with the claim that Poseidonius was in fact an influence on the Christian St Luke.29 A notably atypical Christian attempt to reconstruct the Stoic cosmology of New Testament culture has recently been made by the theologian Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Whilst we will have more to say about this book below, we can here quote Engberg-Pedersen on preexisting neglect of the topic: 'Rudolf Bultmann - the most distinguished New Testament scholar of the twentieth century - famously argued that in order to make use of the New Testament texts in our own time, one had to discard the ancient worldviews reflected in them, since these had been completely overturned by the achievements of modern science'.30 The motivation for this touchingly sterile, woefully ahistorical stance is nicely captured in the telling phrase, 'make use of'. In order to 'make use of' the New Testament - rather than historically 'making sense' of it - Christian theologians have had to rip these texts from their organic roots and leave them dangling in some artificial vacuum, safely abstracted from the embarrassing particularities of their local origins. With this in mind, let us first briefly attempt to set the potentially mythical figure of Christ into some kind of living and realistic environment.

The World of Christ Amidst the heat and glare of the Middle East a young Jewish man cast out a flood of charisma and of memorable sayings, along with a number of miracles. He endured a horrible and iconic death, evidently rose again from his tomb, and finally disappeared into the heaven that he is supposed to have been promoting in these few hectic months in Jerusalem and Galilee. The world was changed forever. Try for a moment to unimagine every church or cathedral you have ever seen, every Christian wedding ceremony or funeral, every piece of Christian literature, every painting of saints, infant Jesus, virgin Mary, crucifixion... Every heretic or witch who was burned, hung, tortured, mutilated or left to rot in the indescribable foulness of a medieval or Renaissance prison. Every Christian war that shook and scarred the landscapes of France, Holland and Germany as

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Protestants fought Catholics on the battlefields of post-Reformation Europe. Without that one curiously powerful, fervently egotistical young man, none of this would have existed; none of it would have happened.31 In reality, Christ did not quite come from nowhere. For many of those who heard of him or met him he was simply one more possible candidate for the long-awaited Messiah of Jewish apocalyptic literature. We have already seen that, shortly before his arrival in a Bethlehem stable, Old Testament thought had begun to evolve quite radical new attitudes to the afterlife and to the individual believer. The world of the Middle East and the Mediterranean was opening up, simmering, ready for something new. But Christ could not change the world merely by slotting himself into a more or less accepted role within Jewish prophecy. By definition, Jewish religion was highly exclusive, being in many ways essentially tribal in its attitude to outsiders. If part of Christ's success depended on existing strains of Hebrew thought, much of it also depended on somehow synthesising the conflicting philosophical traditions of Greek and Jewish culture. And, as with any good celebrity, this synthetic ability was partly mental, partly charismatic. Christ's success depended both on his beliefs and on his immediate physical presence. Finally, however, it was not just the remarkable qualities of Christ himself which led to the pervasive sweep of his strange new creed. It is true that he had the special genius of the populariser: '"somehow he was all things to all men and broke down social, political and religious barriers"'.32 But there is very good reason for thinking that Christ alone would not have sufficed to spread Christianity over thousands of miles and some 1500 odd years. In his original milieu he was just one prophetic figure among many. He did not commit his teachings to writing, even in the form of letters. He did not travel. If he performed miracles - well, so had Moses in his way, and so did Christ's sometime contemporary, Apollonius of Tyana.33 And the crucifixion? The later iconic power of this event is one of the most ironic strokes of genius accomplished by Christian propagandists. At the time, such a mode of death would have been no more remarkable than the numerous public hangings of Europe prior to the twentieth century. After the Spartacists' rebellion was defeated in 71BC, the Romans crucified some 6,000 slaves along the typically long straight thoroughfare known as the Appian Way.34 How memorable should one eccentric Jewish prophet be, set against these living walls of agony?35 Not only that, but crucifixion was at once relatively common-place, and undoubtedly shameful.36 The Jews – Armstrong emphasises – had a particular horror of crucifixion; anyone who they sentenced to death would

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be stoned instead.37 And for many decades afterwards the original converts to Christianity reeled at this horribly unexpected fate of their supposed Messiah. It took a very long time for the crucifixion to be softened and widely accepted in the Christian imagination. In the first or second centuries, the last thing most people wanted was to see or wear iconic reminders of the brutal and ignominious death suffered by their supposed deity. Even as late as c.312 AD, when Constantine became the first Christian emperor, it was (in the words of Michael Grant) ‘embarrassing, to say the least, that God’s own son had been subjected to this humiliating end’. Accordingly, not only did ‘contemporary Christian art avoid ... the whole question’ but it was also ‘for this reason [that] Constantine abolished crucifixion as a punishment’.38 In the non-canonical Acts of Peter, Simon Magus seeks to discredit Christianity by asking an assembled crowd, 'Men of Rome, is a God born? Is he crucified?' - adding, 'Whoever has a master is no God'.39 Looking at Christ's now iconic death from another angle, it is not wholly implausible to point out that he was lucky to have been crucified at all. More than one author has entertained the possibility that he was indeed put to death by mistake, at a time when Roman authorities were overstretched and therefore relatively careless in their application of justice.40 Beyond this notion of mistaken execution, we have the more particular issue of jurisdiction and associated forms of capital punishment. Most of Christ's preaching and healing occurred outside the limits of the Roman Empire: he had to come into Roman-controlled Jerusalem in order to receive the Roman sentence of crucifixion.41 For all the devious Christian insistence that it was really the Jews who secured Christ's crucifixion, Christians were also lucky that he was not sentenced to death by the Sanhedrin. If he had been, he would indeed have been stoned to death – a fate which would have posed some interesting challenges for later Christian iconography. Certain other historical accidents were crucial to the long-term success of this upstart cult. As S. G. F. Brandon has emphasised, it was 'owing to the disappearance of the Mother Church of Jerusalem in the overthrow of the Jewish national state by the Romans in AD 70' that 'Paul's version of Christianity became the established form of the faith'.42 The destruction of the Temple and its aftermath opened up a fertile space for the new variant form of Judaism. But Christ was not the only person suited to fill this space.43 Christ himself was only the raw material, to which there must yet be added years of obsessive evangelising, and a powerful talent for both literary rhetoric and eclectic philosophical opportunism. If St Paul had choked on a fish-bone and died in 45AD, I would probably not be writing

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this book at all, and no one would know what a pope or a crucifix was.44 Like so many great celebrities of more recent times, Christ owed his lasting worldwide success not merely to his own talents, but to the extraordinary zeal, energy and genius of his manager, Saul of Tarsus. As with many naive young rock groups, the manager chose Christ, rather than vice versa. Paul never met Christ, who had been dead some months when the former experienced his famous conversion on the road to Damascus. Few theologians or biblical historians would dispute Paul's status as the most important early propagandist of Christian belief. It was over a century ago that the theologian William Wrede described him as 'the second founder of Christianity'.45 If we take an agnostic or atheistic viewpoint, it is only too plausible to see Paul as the first, rather than second founder of the new faith. This - as we will see in detail in following pages - is Armstrong's view, and one with which A.N. Wilson agrees: 'Paul may be said to be the inventor or founder of the Christian religion'.46 Mixing theology and history, we might indeed say that, if Christ was the Son of God, St Paul was his illegitimate brother. Paul had that peculiar zeal of the convert, the born-again, the enlightened sinner desperately trying to make up for lost time and lost conscience. In his youth he had been one of the narrow-minded, meanspirited Pharisees of the established Jewish church. He openly admits to having persecuted the early Christians, and that he stood guarding the coats of those who stoned to death St Stephen, the very first Christian martyr, in 34 or 35 AD.47 After his conversion, Paul proceeded to overcompensate for this false start with a vengeance. In terms of sheer energy alone his work on behalf of Christ is hard to over-estimate. He tirelessly restated and re-angled Christian teachings for numerous different audiences. In addition to the epistles now canonised within the New Testament, he wrote others since lost. Despite these losses, his surviving contribution to the Bible remains the largest of any author save St Luke.48 It seems safe to assume that, when not writing his canonical letters, Paul spent virtually every waking moment thinking or talking about Christianity. He slogged in person across the blazing dust of the Middle East, visited several parts of mainland and island Greece, and may even have made an evangelical visit to Spain.49 At one point he describes quite unambiguously how 'of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one', how he was 'beaten with rods ... stoned', and suffered three shipwrecks: 'a night and a day have I been in the deep'. In Damascus he narrowly escaped arrest by being lowered from a window in a basket, and he more generally risked 'perils of waters, perils of robbers ... by the heathen ... in the city' and in the wilderness.50 All this itself is said in order

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to galvanise his Corinthian brethren during their own struggles and fears.51 But Paul's formidable energy (probably equivalent to that of a particularly active prime minister or president) is just one element of his final legacy. Perhaps the two most important things about St Paul are this. He was an immensely gifted rhetorician, and he was utterly, unashamedly opportunistic.52 Both these points are crucial to understanding the status of the New Testament soul. In general terms, the history we have so far charted shows us that the historical Christ was an underdog in both political and philosophical terms. As a lone figure confronting the might of the Roman Empire, he broadly resembles Mahatma Gandhi, pitting himself against the much later but similarly powerful forces of imperial Britain. Yet Christ's intellectual foes were arguably as great as his political ones. He was frequently attacked by fellow Jews. Meanwhile, in the eyes of Graeco-Roman culture in the time of Pilate and Tiberius, he may well have looked like just one more in an anonymous cluster of essentially Jewish apocalypticists, demanding repentance and prophesying the imminent end of the world. To be successful, the teachings of Christ had to take account of the dominant Greek culture which was broadly shared by Greeks, Romans, and (to varying degrees) other subjects of the expanding Roman empire. As David E. Hahm emphasises: 'for half a millennium Stoicism was very likely the most widely accepted world view in the Western world', being, indeed, arguably 'the ancient counterpart of our current, popular, scientific world view'.53 In this respect, the use of Greek as the language of the New Testament was certainly a significant step. For all that, if this book remained too thoroughly Jewish for the tastes of Gentile groups, it would essentially still be speaking another language. It was here that Paul made a particularly vital contribution to early Christian evangelism. Although he remained in many ways Jewish until the end of his life, Paul succeeded in straddling the potential gulf between the Jewish and Greek (or Hellenistic) worlds.54 To return to those two precise claims: Paul was a gifted and flexible writer, and he was highly opportunistic. (Even the name under which we now know him was a concession to his Graeco-Roman audience, which would evidently have responded less favourably to someone named Saul, as he had been at birth.55) Paul seems to have had a certain ambiguous poetic gift. Like many of the greatest poets (or lyrical prose writers) he appears at times to have let the words write him. Believing that he really was the mouthpiece of God, why should he not simply allow rich streams of language to flow through him, without too rigorously analysing their definite meaning? Yet this poetical quality was only one side of Paul. In

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other ways he had to be relatively calculating in order to appeal effectively to different groups. Perhaps needless to say, his opportunism was in no way that of the self-centred politician or materialistic businessman. Rather, Paul's opportunism was all the more powerful just because he so passionately believed in the ultimate truth of what he was preaching. Armed with that final inner core of unshakeable certainty, he could happily be all things to all people in perfectly good faith. So long as he insisted on certain basic tenets of his new faith (Christ's redemptive death; the resurrection of the body) he was otherwise free to win converts in any way he chose. There is no question about Paul's sincerity as one of the most zealous converts of his day. He not only devoted much of his life to this cause, but finally sacrificed it when the Romans beheaded him some time after 60AD.56 But if we are to successfully understand the peculiarly hybrid, at times frustratingly elusive nature of soul and spirit in his works, we need to bear in mind two further points. One is that Paul was not just deliberately flexible in pitching his beliefs to the tastes of various audiences. He also seems to have essentially felt his belief as much as he thought it. In one sense this is arguably the very nature of Christian 'faith': the believer simply knows, in some uncertain but powerful corner of their heart or mind, that this is true. To put this another way, Paul, ingenious though he was, was not a rigorous or systematic philosopher in the way that Aristotle before him, or Thomas Aquinas after him, were. In many ways the feeling of his belief over-rides the need to intellectually prove that belief.57 Secondly: Paul's writings have not just an immediate personal urgency, but a quite literal historical urgency. He very definitely believed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in perhaps just a few years, and certainly within the lifetimes of himself or his contemporaries. In his letter to the Corinthians he insists that 'we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed' (I Cor, 15.51). That is, some of those now alive will be translated into heaven without having first died. Similarly, writing to the Thessalonians he tells of how 'the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout ... and the dead in Christ shall rise first'. After this, 'we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord' (I Thess 4.16-17). This belief was shared by other biblical authors.58 But in Paul's case it is especially important. The large proportion of Scripture composed by Paul was written under the shadow of final cosmic apocalypse.59 Fervently believing that the material world was about to end, Paul was unlikely to feel that he needed to carefully assemble a rigorous, consistent,

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tightly-riveted theological structure.60 Given Paul's enduring influence, it is no small irony that these passionate writings, originally designed to sustain the weary faithful just a few months or years longer, and deriving much of their coherence from Paul's own dynamic personality, should ultimately form the basis for some 1500 years of intricately sterile theological speculation.61 As Armstrong neatly expresses it: 'the paradoxes that he imposed on his converts were the paradoxes endemic to a time of crisis: Paul believed he was living in the "last days" of the world. Two thousand years later the paradoxes have hardened into the Christianity we have today'.62 Let us now try to melt the more solidly frozen, mythic elements of Christianity into something approaching the fluidity of history. Before the schematic theologies of the Middle Ages, the soul existed in a fragmentary and confused condition, glimmering uncertainly through the contradictions of the Gospels, and the opportunistic rhetoric of Paul of Tarsus.

The Tentative Soul and the Active Spirit Psyche Parallels with Old Testament Usage Any child who had paid the most cursory attention to sermons or Sunday schools would be able to tell you that the soul was a very important thing to Christians. The same could be said for any half-intelligent student of medieval or Renaissance literature. Strangely, however, when we come to that most sacred document, fervently upheld as the source of all truth by both Protestants and Catholics, we find that the word 'soul' is used very little. If we stick to the original Greek term psyche, we find that it occurs just 74 times, compared with the 345 uses of the Greek 'spirit' (pneuma).63 Moreover, armed with the range of meanings that Old Testament scholars have shown to cluster under the Hebrew term nephesh, we find that, in a number of cases, the New Testament psyche does not clearly indicate anything like the standard 'immortal soul' later so central to Christian theology and finance. So we find Christ telling his audience 'in your patience possess ye your souls' (Luke 22.19). There is no reference in surrounding verses to heaven or hell. Given that Christ might have talked of cleansing or purifying one's immortal soul (as in I Pet 1.22) it is not unreasonable to assume that this line has something of the sense of a modern exhortation to courage and self-sufficiency, as for example 'hold onto your selves'. The tone is broadly

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similar when Christ tells the disciples, 'learn of me ... and ye shall find rest unto your souls' (Matt 11.29). When Peter's epistle talks about the 'eight souls' who were saved in the ark (I Pet 3.20), and Acts about Joseph's kindred as numbering 'threescore and fifteen souls' (7.14), the most likely translation seems to be just 'individuals' or 'persons'.64 Elsewhere soul is used in contexts which suggest something like the Old Testament nephesh, a word which could mean roughly 'will' or 'desire'. This is perhaps most obvious when Matthew cites the prophecy of Isaiah concerning a saviour. Here we have God himself stating, 'behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased...' (12.18). Here 'my soul' is broadly equivalent to 'I' or to a Hebrew version of 'my self'. Typically, however, that self is slightly dislocated from the speaker, at least by modern standards.65 It is by no means merely whimsical to wonder if God should actually have 'a soul' in the later Christian sense. If he did, we might have to infer that he was himself somehow a potential object of judgement. The verse also makes us realise that New Testament authors can at times quite exactly transpose Old Testament terms and concepts into their work, especially when they are concerned to show the fulfilment of Israelite prophecies. If they do so overtly on occasion, it is very possible that they are also thinking in such terms elsewhere. The slippage between Old and New Testament souls is particularly notable in Christ's parable about the folly of the rich man. Pleased with his worldly prosperity, the latter reflects complacently: 'And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years: take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry'. But God 'said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?' (Luke 12.19-20). These verses are intriguingly ambiguous. Most obviously, the word 'soul' is essentially Old Testament in verse 19 (as in 'I will say to my self'), and potentially New Testament in verse 20. One has to say 'potentially', because even verse 20 could be taken as 'this night you will die, and then your worldly goods will be of no use to you'. This seems to be literally the case in the version of the parable found in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. It reads simply: ‘There was a rich man who had considerable wealth. He said, “I will use my money to sow and reap and plant and fill my warehouses with fruit so that I will lack nothing.” Such were his intentions. But in that night he died. He who has ears, let him hear’.66 Here we have the soul-parable without a soul. Thomas's version reminds us with special clarity that we should not automatically assume the tale to imply judgement or punishment, or any kind of individual soul (as opposed to the general ruach which will flow back to

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God at the man's death). Even if we do assume punishment, then the sudden-ness of death exactly matches Philip S. Johnston's point about this kind of end being a typically Old Testament form of divine retribution.67 In such a context 'my soul' looks remarkably like nephesh as the seat of desire. At the risk of distorting the passage slightly, we can say that the rich man is eminently 'self-satisfied'. And, reading in the light of New Testament eschatology, that quality is clearly opposed to the properly selfdenying psychology of the ideal Christian. But the most interesting point about the verses in their New Testament location is that even here we cannot help but sense how new and potentially incomprehensible Christ's teachings still are. From Christ's viewpoint the rich man seems to be either wicked or at least wrong; from that of Ancient Hebrew Scripture he is neither. He is simply using the word 'soul' in one of its various senses, and it would be perfectly plausible for him to use it in other, more pious, ways as well. Having said that, we can certainly see that a specially alert and fervent disciple would read the passage in terms of a worldly/heavenly dualism, and with a keen sense of God's ultimate judgement upon the individual soul. They would very probably be quick to compare it with a passage such as that from Matthew chapter 16, where Christ, having made the typical demand that his true follower should 'deny himself' adds that 'whosoever shall lose his [worldly] life for my sake shall find it' presumably in heaven (16.24-5).68 'For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'69 Following this tellingly Christian assertion of individual spirituality ('own soul') we meet the familiar warning that God 'shall reward every man according to his works'. A similarly clear sense of the soul as the locus of judgement, and as an ideally other-worldly entity, occurs in Hebrews, where we hear of salvation as a hope which 'we have as an anchor of the soul' (Heb 6.19), and where the readers are exhorted to remember that 'we are not of them that draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe unto the saving of the soul' (Heb 10.39).70 Again, given that it is Paul speaking in II Cor 1.23, we can be fairly sure that his oath is of the utmost sanctity when he says, 'I call God for a record upon my soul'.71 It remains clear, however, that the New Testament psyche cannot be generally squared with the soul of later Christianity. It often lacks the ethics, the immateriality, the abstraction or the dualism of its successors in following centuries.

Psyche and Pneuma If we look at psyche and pneuma together, usages can be similarly a- or

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un-Christian. Just what, for example, should we understand by Mary's words, after an angel has explained the virgin birth to her? Rather than indignantly asserting her 'right to choose' she allegedly (in the words of Luke) exclaims, 'My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour' (1.46-7). The one thing we can gauge is that soul and spirit are separate. Yet in Hebrews it is also made clear that the line between them is a fine, and perhaps quite uncertain one: 'For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow' (4.12). By implication these two faculties or entities are potentially inextricable from a human viewpoint. Mary (or Luke) may indeed be using them in the kind of rather loose rhetorical formula whereby Homer would so often speak of 'strength and spirit' or 'mind and spirit' (menos and thymos; nous and thymos).72 A broadly similar type of phrasing is found when Matthew has Christ give his first commandment as 'thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind' (22.37), while Mark adds to this semantic cluster 'and with all thy strength' (12.30).73 At the end of the first book of Corinthians, ambiguity gives way to outright inversion. Here Paul unmistakably renders the relationship of soul and spirit as one of inferior and superior. Discussing the resurrection of the dead, he explains: 'It is sown a natural body, and it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul [psyche]; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit [pneuma]. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy, the second man is the Lord from heaven' (I Cor 44-7). These lines present an emphatic, ascending hierarchy of soul and spirit. The broad parallels alone make this very clear: soul is associated with the 'first Adam', a mere man, and spirit with 'the last Adam', Christ. Not only that, but 'soul' seems here to be the lower half of a dualism between nature and spirit. Ironically, the later polarity of 'body and soul' is here expressed as 'soul and spirit'. Applying that parallel to verse 45, we seem to find that (in good Hebrew fashion) Paul indeed does not credit Adam with an immortal soul. Adam's 'living soul' implies nephesh, or 'living being' and appears to be broadly equivalent to the lower forms of soul as agents of life in Stoic cosmology. Potentially, the life force of Adam's soul is no more exalted than that of an animal. From one angle, it is unsurprising that the Jewish Paul understands Genesis in its original, distinctly Hebraic sense. From another, it is highly significant that the

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'founder of Christianity' recognises crucial nuances which later Christians would overlook for so many centuries afterwards.74 We can see how the relatively low or uncertain status of the New Testament 'soul' offered potential problems to later Christian epochs if we glance ahead to the intriguing reflections of the seventeenth-century minister, Richard Sibbes: ‘if our spirits were in the heart and soul of another man, in the breast of another man, we should know what another man thinks: if a man had a spirit in another man’s spirit, surely he would know all his thoughts and all his affections’.75 This is essentially plausible in terms of that era's ideas of physiology and of the soul and spirits. But it is not identical with Sibbes's biblical source text, I Corinthians 2.11: 'For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God'. There it is typically spirit which enjoys the greater metaphysical privilege. By contrast, Sibbes implicitly makes his 'spirit' a servant of the soul in which it has to be lodged in order to perform such an operation. The sacred spirit of Corinthians is demeaned to the level of physiological intermediary.76 Setting such instances against the relatively low number of cases which clearly or probably signify something like the 'soul' of later Christianity, we already have a picture very different from that of Medieval or Renaissance theology.77 And this view is problematised still further when we consider the dominance of 'spirit' within the books of the New Testament.

Pneuma Parallels with Homeric and Old Testament Usage As with psyche, certain New Testament uses of pneuma can often appear to hark back - most obviously to the Old Testament, but occasionally also to the world of Homer. If we recall, for example, the sense of thymos as 'impulse', we can see some similar moments in canonical and extracanonical Christian writings. In Acts 13.4 the 'Holy Ghost' (pneuma) sends the apostles to Seleucia; while in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, 'the Spirit came upon Myrta so that she said, "Brethren, why are you alarmed at the sight of this sign?"'.78 As with certain Homeric uses of thymos, these impulses cross the divide between human and divine. Similarly, both thymos and nephesh appear (at least from a modern viewpoint) to straddle the boundary between mental and physical, or

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physical and spiritual. They have many emotional components (will, desire, and so forth) but are also bound up with the essential persistence of life in biological terms. More precisely, both can feel hunger.79 Thus, when II Cor 7.13 states that Titus' 'spirit was refreshed by you all', it is possible that the spirit is physically refreshed in the way that thymos and nephesh could be.80 The same is true of certain non-Pauline texts, such as II Tim 1.7: 'For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love'. We will see presently that a 'spirit of power' was very real and forceful in its effects. And the verse from Timothy shares not only the partially material qualities of thymos or nephesh, but their role as fluid vehicles of different emotional states: 'fear ... power ... love'. This side of the parallel is one which has a more or less universal resonance. At times emotions can be hard to divide. But at others we have a sense that the negative energy of fear can be changed into the positive energy of excitement or of love. In a precise chemical sense this is perhaps best illustrated by the way that high levels of adrenalin (as experienced, for example, in an examination or an interview) can produce either paralytic terror or a valuable surge of creative energy. Less obviously physiological is Bertrand Russell's enduring remark, that it is often much harder to feel love for other people, rather than fear of them. In all these cases, we might imagine a kind of 'law of conservation of emotional energy': fear pushes out love, or vice versa. Hence the tendency to cluster these emotions, under 'spirit', or thymos or nephesh, is still comprehensible from a modern point of view. Again, both ruach and pneuma share certain important qualities. They are not only integral to human life, but they can be suddenly injected into people (or at least intensified). They can also be used as vehicles of God's power. In the Old Testament, Yahweh would sometimes use ruach to specially empower one of his chosen agents. In Exodus, ruach takes the form of an east wind which plagues Egypt with locusts (10.13-20).81 In the New Testament, this spiritual agency operates mainly (though not exclusively) through Christ. An important link between the two books is stated in chapter twelve of Matthew's gospel, which depicts Christ as fulfilling one of the prophecies of Isaiah: 'Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgement to the Gentiles' (12.17-18). Here pneuma is the chief agent of Christ's power and holiness, operating as a direct successor of the ruach to which Isaiah originally referred. Even before Christ's birth, we find pneuma acting very much like ruach, when Mary enjoys the doubtful privilege of unsolicited pregnancy: 'And the angel ... said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and

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the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God' (Luke 1.35). The word 'overshadow' may now register rather loosely or abstractly. We might recall, however, that in the time of Homer even a shadow was a physical thing. Moreover, in Acts 5.15, 'they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid [them] on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them'. Here a shadow has a quite definite physical power. Similarly, the virgin conception is brought about by very definite material processes and agents, involving not only the Holy Ghost, but the quasi-magical power of the Almighty. We might further ask if this 'holy rape' was rather too magical (or at least Hebraistic) for the tastes of other apostles. Matthew gives the story in far more euphemistic and general form, simply having an angel reassure Joseph that the child 'conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost' (1.18-20). Meanwhile, for all the fame and importance of this enduring Christian tenet, neither Mark nor John mention it at all. Hardly less famous than the Virgin Birth is the apostles' inspired moment of polyglot preaching: 'suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting, And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance' (Acts 2.2-4). In one sense the divine wind sent for a special purpose clearly matches ruach. In another, the verses also recall the tendency of some Stoics to identify pneuma as a kind of divine fire. In either case, pneuma here is once again an active agent, which catalyses quite tangible results at one exact moment. These results indeed seem to bear out Paul's claim that 'diversities of gifts' might arise from 'the same spirit' (I Cor 12.4), with a multitude of different languages now being heard by the assorted bystanders.82 Even those who are sceptical ('Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine' (2.13)) clearly register some very clear physical change in the apostles. Not only that, but Peter, in rebuking these onlookers, recalls a prophecy that God should 'pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh' (2.17, italics mine) - thereby further linking Old and New Testaments, and giving the claim an impression of sensuous physical process.83 Elsewhere we find Peter's first epistle referring to Old Testament prophets who were imbued with 'the Spirit of Christ' (I Pet 9-11); while something like ruach is evident when Philip, having baptised a eunuch met on his travels, is whisked away by God: 'And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the

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eunuch saw him no more...' (Acts 8.36-39). At II Thess 2.8 Paul prophesies that 'then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of his mouth'. This is a broadly opposite version of ruach carrying away Philip, although one whose Old Testament qualities are more forcibly underscored by the phrase 'Spirit of his mouth' (compare for example both Genesis, and II Sam. 22.16: '"The foundations of the world were laid bare by the rebuke of Yahweh, by the neshamah of the ruach of his nostrils"'). The Priority of Pneuma over Psyche It has been claimed that Paul was a dualist in his cosmology and eschatology, but a monist in his anthropology.84 We will see in following pages that, whilst there is considerable evidence in favour of this second point, Paul's cosmology was itself far more monistic than has been traditionally recognised. It is worth wondering, at this point, if Paul's own personal psychology was itself already so dualistic as to preclude or discourage the need for a more artificially imposed body-soul dualism. As A.N. Wilson succinctly puts it: 'to say that he was self-contradictory is an understatement. He was a man who was fighting himself and quarrelling with himself all the time; and he managed to project the warfare in his own breast on to the Cosmos itself'.85 Moreover, where there is evidence for some degree of anthropological dualism, the soul is often excluded from the opposition. If an intelligent Martian examined the New Testament early in the second century AD, they would be far more likely to understand a human dualism between body and spirit, rather than between body and soul.86 Perhaps most obviously, we find Galatians warning that 'the flesh lusteth against the Spirit [pneumatikos], and the Spirit [pneuma] against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other'.87 Again, Paul asks the Corinthians: 'Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?' (I Cor 3.16). He then makes it very clear that the body, as God's temple, can be all too easily tainted by human failings: 'If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy' (3.17). This statement matches Paul's generally well-known antipathy to sex something viewed as a regrettable compromise even between husband and wife.88 Here as elsewhere, we must bear in mind that 'spirit' means some spirit, not a spirit - an idea for which Paul was of course well-prepared by his Jewish upbringing, which made him familiar with ruach as a quantitative form of spirit force. The question of plurality versus singularity comes through elsewhere

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in Paul's writings. I Cor 5 offers an especially clear problem for later generations of Christians. Denouncing those members of the Corinthian congregation accused of enjoying unnaturally close relations with their mothers, Paul warns the responsible members of the flock to 'deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus' (5.5). Here there is some dualism; but it is by no means straightforward. Given that Paul then goes on to exhort, 'Purge out therefore the old leaven' he seems by this to mean 'excommunicate'. Such an interpretation fits with the phrase 'the spirit' (as opposed to 'his' or 'her'). The aim is to conserve the collective pneuma which God has bestowed on the church of Corinth. Accordingly, many Bibles would later falsify this verse, translating it as 'hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord' (ISV).89 At one level, it is important to note that the original Greek implies very little concern for the ultimate fate of any incestuous individuals handed over to Satan (a gentleman whose care of human souls was always reputed doubtful in Christian tradition). The point is to purge the congregation as a whole. Moreover, for all Paul's tendency toward loose rhetorical constructions, it is very possible that here he intends this conservation of spirit to be understood literally. To save some spirit (rather than a soul) is meaningful in the context of the Old Testament, and therefore to Paul himself. But it was also potentially meaningful to a Greek community, familiar with the Stoic idea of pneuma as a general, impersonal, pervasive life-force. For the Corinthians, 'some' pneuma made much more sense than 'a' pneuma - a construction rather like 'a milk' in modern English usage. In that same chapter of Corinthians Paul seeks to assert his authority from a distance by claiming to be one who is 'absent in body, but present in spirit' (I Cor 5.3). The dualism of this is clear enough. What is perhaps less obvious is that the line is not necessarily just a metaphor. PostEnlightenment scientific culture has made us inclined to view this kind of phrase as vaguely metaphorical; but during the early spiritual fervour of Christianity, such a statement may not have been intended thus. For Christ and his disciples, and for Paul, spirit was often transferable. It could enter or leave the body of an individual. In Jewish belief, it could not usually survive for long without a body of some kind. But in Stoic belief, it could. Pneuma pervaded the whole cosmos. Later generations of Christians roughly took the Jewish position: you could not live without your soul. Paul, however, could still survive without some of his spirit. If this already supports a literal interpretation of the verse, we should also remind ourselves of its context: 'For I verily, as absent in body, but present in

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spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed'. Does Paul believe that his judgement has more validity if his spirit really is present at the scene of the crime? We have noted that he was nothing if not opportunistic. And it is also significant that he uses 'as though' only with reference to 'I'; in the case of his spirit he does not qualify the alleged presence in this way.90 One of the most persistent and clear-cut forms of New Testament dualism is the opposition between worldly 'law' and other-worldly truth. We saw earlier that Hebrew religious rituals had a kind of tribal obsessiveness with concrete forms of 'pollution', and similarly concrete remedies of purification. And it is here that Paul, though in some ways still a Hebrew, turns emphatically away from the customs of his native religion. In chapter three of Corinthians he insists that 'the epistle of Christ' is 'written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living god; not in tables of stone but in fleshy tables of the heart' (3.3).91 By opposing the once supremely authoritative stone tables of the Ten Commandments to the new Christian laws of the heart, Paul implies another level of opposition - that between inner and outer. Here the private individual becomes a site of absolute truth, relatively disconnected from worldly knowledge and custom, and (at least potentially) far more closely linked to God. We will return to this changing status of the individual and their inner world in a few moments. But just what does Paul's split between 'law' and 'spirit' really mean? When, at Cor 3.6, he states that 'the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life', we hear a sentiment which has proved remarkably enduring, and which has a powerful (if elusive) resonance beyond purely religious circles. Even today, an atheist might well appeal to the 'spirit of the law' over the 'letter of the law'. In doing so, they may be seeking to privilege the general sense of the judicial law (or some other code of rules) over particular passages. They may also be implying that this general sense is somehow greater than the sum of individual parts. If so, they still share something of the New Testament's frequently mysticising uses of 'spirit'. Another way of putting this is to say that the 'spirit of the law' is relatively abstract. We should note, however, that Paul's use of abstraction is very much a product of his environment. A chief aim of his new spirit is indeed to absorb the older, individual and concrete religious habits of the Israelites into a general new scheme of salvation. The concrete must now give way to the abstract. Take, for example, the New Testament's attitude to the Hebrew custom of circumcision. In Romans chapter two it is emphasised that the uncircumcised can be more righteous than the circumcised, and that true Jewishness is not 'outward': 'he is a Jew, which is one inwardly;

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and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God'.92 This 'spiritual circumcision' is found again (though without explicit reference to spirit) in Colossians, where Paul talks of 'the circumcision made without hands', achieved by 'putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ' (2.11).93 Earlier in the same chapter Paul has repeated the notion of being with the Colossians 'in the spirit' (2.5). More subtly, spirit seems to be active here as a principle of life: 'And you, being dead in your sins ... hath he quickened ... having forgiven you all trespasses' (2.13, italic mine).94 Moving beyond Paul himself, we also find chapter nine of Hebrews explaining how the Old Testament sacrifices 'stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances' (9.10). Stressing that the particular sacrificial 'blood of bulls and of goats' has now been superseded by Christ's sacrifice, the author goes on to ask: 'How much more shall the blood of Christ ... purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?' Just how abstract Christ's new sacrifice is must remain a slightly vexed question. We must remember that in later centuries some Christians understood the ceremony of the Eucharist to merely symbolise it, while others insisted that they were really drinking and eating the Saviour's blood and flesh in the form of wine and bread. Nevertheless, in the context of that original opposition between Old and New testaments, there are two levels of abstraction. First, one is not going to smell Christ's blood in the way that a priest would repeatedly do, each time he made an animal sacrifice. Second, Christ's sacrifice as a physical, historical event (rather than as some kind of symbol or rite) occurs just once, and is thereby sufficient for all future time. The Universal Spirit At one level Paul's quest to move beyond the rigid tribal codes of his native Judaism can be seen as a shift from the concrete procedures of a quasi-magical psychology to the abstract truths of religion.95 It also involves another, no less momentous change. As indicated above, part of Paul's peculiar genius was his ability to transform Christianity into a universal religion. Writing to the Corinthians, he talks of the famed adventures of the Israelites, yet claims: 'all our fathers were under the cloud and all passed through the sea; And all were baptised unto Moses' (I Cor 10 1-2, italics mine). In Colossians he proposes that 'Above ... there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free but Christ is all, and in all' (Col. 3.11). Here especially the radicalism of his stance cannot be overstated. To include

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Barbarians and Scythians, the fundamental others of civilised GraecoRoman culture, was a very bold step indeed. Perhaps aware of this, Paul often tends to shy away from such precisely political or ethnic language, toward a conveniently abstract rhetoric of religious and spiritual unity. So he tells the Corinthians that 'there are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit' (I Cor 12.4). Accordingly, 'to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; To another faith by the same Spirit ... To another the working of miracles ... to another discerning of spirits' and so on (12.8-10).96 Here in particular Paul seems to rework the existing cosmos of the Stoics. The pneuma or logos held responsible for producing and sustaining different forms of life now becomes an individually judging God whose single spirit bestows various gifts on different individuals. The unity of physics has become a unity of ethics. Such uses of spirit have an implication which resonates far beyond the times of Zeno or of Christ. When the Philippians are told to 'stand fast in one spirit' (Phil 1.27) or the Ephesians that 'through [Christ] we have access by one Spirit unto the Father' (Eph 2.18) pneuma is being invoked as something which is at once real (as real, for example, as Christ, who is a vehicle of it) and yet sufficiently abstract to rise beyond the petty differences of humanity. At a political or social level, such statements broadly echo what George Orwell once said about 'democracy'. It is highly convenient for politicians not to define this word too precisely, because if they did they would be obliged to stop using it in many contexts. So for Paul 'spirit' often works rather like a national flag: it is at once iconic and extra-rational, means very different things to different people, and yet at the same time bestows a certain potent illusion of unity and identity.97 Take for example I Tim 4.1: 'Now the Spirit [pneuma] speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils'. This claims a definitive authority ('speaketh expressly') whilst at the same time making it hard for a critic to deny what this spirit has merely spoken, rather than written. The use of abstraction is all the more striking given that the verse might easily have read 'God speaketh...'.98 Although Paul himself is probably always sincere in his claims about the spirit, and is nominally concerned with a spiritual and other-worldly community, it is hard not to feel that at certain moments his use of pneuma comes close to Orwell's sense of 'democracy' in political rhetoric.99 Consider the already slippery fifth chapter of I Corinthians. Here Paul prefaces his request for the delivery of the offender to Satan with the verse: 'In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered

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together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ' (I Cor 5.4). At one level this seems to further confirm that Paul's spirit really is there among the Corinthian brethren. No less importantly, it also implies an artful elision between Paul's spirit and the power of Christ, thereby gaining for him a certain ambiguous authority.100 This authority depends in part upon the peculiarly concrete and dynamic status of pneuma in Greek culture, circa 50AD. Interestingly, the translation of this verse offered by the International Standard Version ('When you are gathered together in the name of our Lord Jesus and my spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus are present') seems to compound the elision, removing the distinction provided in KJV by commas, and arguably blurring Paul and Christ closer together through its use of 'and', rather than 'with'. This is notable, given that originally the text of the New Testament had no punctuation. It is also notable given the seeming discomfort which 5.4 could inspire in certain other Christian translators. Hence the modern King James Version actively attempts to reassert division between the power of Christ and the aggrandising spirit of Paul: 'in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with my spirit; also, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ'. Interestingly, it seems that the peculiarly flexible, pervasive, sometimes ambiguous roles of pneuma in the New Testament mirror the at once elusive and integral role of liget within Illongot society. As we saw in the opening chapter, this term was a peculiarly important part of Ilongot cosmology. Pneuma, admittedly, has associations which take it beyond everyday earthly life. For all that, as we will see at length in the following chapters, pneuma also resembles liget in that it is often best illustrated in highly concrete terms, or in the empirical relations between spirits and people, spirits and animals, or spirits and objects. We find, then, that the New Testament offers us far less on the literal 'soul' (in semantic terms) than we might expect. We find too that the far more popular 'spirit' of this Greek text cannot easily be reduced to the kind of body-soul (or spirit-matter) dualism of later epochs. Before turning to some of the more intriguing case studies of soul and spirit in this work, let us reconsider two key elements of Christian dogma. One is the dualism between heaven and earth; the other the cosmic importance of the Christian individual. When we look at early Christian dualism, we should bear in mind that it was essentially far less strenuous or severe than that of the Medieval or Renaissance periods. As we have seen, Paul and his followers clearly believed that the end of history, the Second Coming, and the final

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Judgement were imminent. Hence, although the early establishment of such dualism was itself a remarkable achievement, the accompanying psychology was very different from that of later Christians, who had far less confidence in a relatively swift fulfilment of their hopes. Why does this matter? We can reasonably infer on one hand that the earliest Christians were less likely to feel that recurrent yearning of later generations - the need to somehow close or lessen or blur the gap between body and soul, spirit and matter, heaven and earth. And we can equally see why later Christians felt the need to soften or cheat the harshest extremes of dualism, given that it was now operating in a very different context from the one originally intended by Paul and his initial followers. In the earlier case it was harder to establish dualism; in the later one it was in some ways harder to live with it and to sustain it.101 In Armstrong's words: 'During crisis, paradox is the order of the day. Only when paradox is extended indefinitely, in this case for two thousand years, can it become schizophrenia. Without realising it, Paul bequeathed to Christianity its schizophrenic perspective'.102 We then come to the ambiguous status of Christians as individuals. We have already seen that they should ideally be self-denying, unworldly, and so forth. But if this makes them appear 'self-less', we should bear in mind that individuality is often relative. If we consider Christians from a longerterm historical point of view, they are notably far more egocentric than the Homeric Greeks, the earlier Israelites, or the Stoics. Among other things, they have effectively gate-crashed the once cosily private heaven reserved for God and his angels. They have convinced themselves that each human being has the power to decide their own fate in the afterlife, thus condensing a scarcely conceivable force and expanse of destiny within the febrile cavities of a single pious heart. In many ways, then, Christians are radically individualistic. Paul himself was a figure of extraordinary vitality and dynamism. Consciously, the usual Christian sleight of hand occludes and demeans all this forceful personal energy and drive: the worldly is set below the unworldly, man below God, and so forth. But unconsciously, that energy is felt and enjoyed nonetheless. Recalling Wilson's analysis of Paul, we have to admit that a man who projects his own psychic warfare onto the cosmos itself ranks high in the annals of egotism. We can see this dramatic psychological shift neatly summed up in I Corinthians. 'If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy' (3.17). At one level this offers a symbolic reworking of the older, far more communal Judaism. Now the most sacred temple is that of the newly empowered human individual, rather than the actual temple of religious meetings and rituals. But notice, too, how the presence of pneuma in this

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temple ('the Spirit of God dwelleth in you...') gives that shift a literal, all but biological validation. What did it feel like to be inhabited by this breath of God? It is probably impossible to disentangle cause and effect in such a subjective area. A certain pressure of mental and spiritual energy (the kind enjoyed by any person, religious or not, at certain times) might have seemed to attest to the presence of this pneuma at the level of physiology. Yet equally, pneuma helped to fuel both mental and physical energy through its role as an idea. Whether or not the new believers consciously realised it, they were caught in a kind of virtuous spiritual circle. In emphasising the relation between pneuma and the individual, what I want to stress are the particular historical conditions of early Christian evangelism. Christians were personally dynamic, yet politically powerless. Belief in the ethical and cosmic significance of pneuma allowed them to rechannel energies that could not easily be utilised in worldly causes. When Ephesians 6.12 claims that 'we wrestle not against flesh and blood' but against 'spiritual wickedness in high places' we are witnessing a very real and far-reaching attempt to shift the grounds of human power struggles. Indeed, in just about every sense, we are witnessing an attempt to pitch these struggles into a whole new dimension. Listen to the exchange between Pilate and Christ, just before the crucifixion: 'knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee? Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above'.103 The psychology of early Christian martyrs was in part very similar to that of modern religious suicide bombers. They believed enough to die for their belief. While Christians did this passively, the effect achieved by examples of seemingly impossible courage was immense.104 The whole vast shimmering expanse of heaven, stretching mentally across all eternity, and historically across almost two millennia, was generated in the bloody or fiery crucibles of single human bodies and their individual, highly spectacular deaths. To this day, every astute politician who wields the death penalty acknowledges this when they admit their reluctance to 'make a martyr' of the most fiercely demonised rebel or terrorist. But the horror of those outward torments was only the surface expression of this at once marginalised and potent Christian psychology. Extraordinary forces pulsed within. 'Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day' (II Cor 4.16). Christ had written his new laws somewhere in this privately empowered region, as Peter recognised when he celebrated the 'hidden man of the heart'.105 If ever there was a breath that could turn the world, it was pneuma. And if ever

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humanity discovered a continent to rival the newly-landed expanses of the Americas in 1492, it was when the very first Christians, trembling, alone and indomitable, ventured down into the shadowy and limitless jungles of the inner man. Here you could fall through depths without end, rise into the company of angels, lose yourself amidst the serpentine involutions of doubt and faith, truth and error, prayer and conscience. Mocked and persecuted by the outside world, wavering between fear and excitement, these pioneers voyaged through realms so new and strange that we can perhaps best grasp them as akin to the drug experiences of the 1960s, or to some of the more bizarre and hazardous adventures of science fiction.106 Through all this, they were sustained by the breath of God. It is hard to overemphasise the importance of this remarkable psychic state. No egotist is more powerful or dangerous than the ones who convince themselves that they are merely vehicles for higher forces of righteousness and destiny. Witness Paul: he could never have felt that he was merely projecting his own mental turbulence outward. For him, rather, greater powers were rushing in, catching him up into the quickening vortex of inexorable fate and judgement. It is striking how many of these key points can be detected merely in I Corinthians 5.4. 'In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ' (I Cor 5.4). Here it is peculiarly hard to disentangle Paul's egotism, his apocalyptic urgency, and his opportunistic use of pneuma as a means of imposing authority. The first is unadmitted but secretly satisfying; the second both prompts the drive to purify the community, and assists the cosmic expansion of the evangelist's self; while the third is at once an expression of that self, an external source of psychic fuel, and a means of imposing the ego in a seemingly valid and necessary way. Once again, the intertwined feeling and meaning of pneuma combine in a kind of virtuous circle.

Troels Engberg-Pedersen on Paul and Pneuma As noted in opening pages of this chapter, Engberg-Pedersen's recent book on Paul is a strikingly rare attempt to resituate the 'founder of Christianity' in his original Stoic cosmology. Just because this discussion is so unusual, I want briefly to summarise some of its most relevant arguments about the role of pneuma in Paul's anthropology and cosmology. An agnostic or atheist is necessarily bound to disagree with Pedersen at a quite basic level, given his desire to reconcile the re-historicised Paul with a more or less conventional Christianity. But in a sense, what is most valuable about Cosmology and Self is the fact that at least one Christian account so

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closely supports the centrality of pneuma for which this and following chapters argue. For all the traditional dogma which might prompt a Christian to ignore a fully Stoicised pneuma in favour of the much later 'soul' of that faith, Pedersen readily admits that 'once one has become attuned to it, one will find the pneuma everywhere in Paul, even where it is not actually mentioned'.107 '"Paul's theology is constrained by his physiology"'.108 These words, quoted by Engberg-Pedersen from his fellow theologian Dale B. Martin, are at once unusually honest and subtly slanted. The statement is essentially true, but the use of the word 'constrained' necessarily sets that theology against a potentially less constrained, implicitly truer worldview namely, that of full-blown Christianity. Yet Engberg-Pedersen does convincingly show how, in several texts, Paul's theology is enabled by his largely Stoic, pneumatised physiology. Recall, for example, the seemingly slippery lines which Paul addressed to the Corinthians on the topic of sexual misdemeanours at I Cor 5. I argued there that the potentially baffling notion of delivering over a miscreant individual to Satan, so that spirit may be saved, referred in fact to the collective spirit of the Corinthian congregation. Engberg-Pedersen also thinks that this is 'probably' the correct interpretation of the verse (5.5). But it is his reading of verses three to four which is most interesting. I suggested that, when Paul depicts the Corinthians as 'gathered together', with 'my spirit', and when he presents himself as 'absent in body, but present in spirit', he may well mean it literally. Engberg-Pedersen agrees: 'Paul apparently took it that he might be present in Corinth with his pneuma and that the effect of that would be that when the Corinthians and Paul's pneuma were formally gathered together, they would decide what Paul had himself already decided as if he were present, namely, to exclude the offender'. And he then goes further: 'moreover, these things would happen by means of the letter in which Paul states his view of the matter ... he saw his letter writing as a bodily practice through which the pneuma might (once more) be transmitted to his addressees'.109 Engberg-Pedersen is frustratingly vague about the more precise mechanics of this transfer. This, again, is probably because he is approaching the question from an ultimately Christian standpoint (compare, for example, his evident regret that 'none of us could conceivably believe that we would actually be sending our pneuma to somebody else by means of a letter'.110) If he were to compare the epistolary transfer of pneuma with the evidently very real transfer of spirit forces made through the 'aprons and handkerchiefs' that Paul uses for proxy healing (Acts 19.11-12; see below, chapter six), then he would be

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able to notably strengthen what is already a broadly plausible argument. Despite this, Engberg-Pedersen is still able to thus illuminate Pauline selfhood in a way which is potentially acceptable to Christians and atheists alike. For we can, in this light 'better understand why the Pauline self ... feels so strongly present in his letters. His theory of his own letter writing may well have contributed to a style of writing that made that self be most vividly present'.111 One other precise argument in favour of this theory would be that Paul saw himself, as a converted Christian, possessing not just a body and soul, but part of God's own pneuma.112 Given that Stoicism held higher levels of pneuma to be associated with higher levels of rational ability, and that letter-writing was itself a rational activity, we can further see how the mechanics of such a transfer could be understood by Paul and his correspondents. And this interface between Pauline and Stoic anthropology leads us onto the fullest, most holistic version of that juncture, as outlined by Engberg-Pedersen. As he explicitly states, the 'triadic anthropology' of I Thess 5.23 (with its pneuma, psyche, and soma) corresponds clearly to 'the Stoic idea of the human being as consisting of body and soul ... interfused with one another', and also sometimes 'in certain special people: the wise ... overlaid with a portion of God's own pneuma (that is, "soul-pneuma" of a particularly high degree of "tension") in such a way that when the pneumatic souls of such people are separated at death from the body, these souls will live on as stars in heaven until the conflagration'. This intriguing sketch is nuanced - with reference to I Thess 5.23 - when EngbergPedersen sees Paul as 'praying' that 'this bit of pneuma may gradually inform [the Thessalonians'] souls and bodies more and more so that at the parousia of Christ each of them will eventually stand blameless', with the body 'completely transformed into a pneumatic body'.113 Here in particular we see Paul able to turn the distinctive Stoic worldview to his advantage. Stoicism's continuous spectrum of material refinement is arguably bettersuited to his purposes than a black and white form of body-soul dualism: it allows for a more nuanced, more sensuously concrete ethical transformation, in which the individual is understood as changing their whole body, rather than merely purging or intensifying the quality of their soul. Paul, then, in several key texts - including I Cor 15 - 'is ... presupposing the specifically Stoic idea that the heavenly bodies that are situated at the top of the hierarchical scala naturae are distinctly made up of pneuma'. Turning to Romans 8.19-22, with its hope that 'the creation itself will also be set free from its bondage to corruption', EngbergPedersen finds 'a closely comparable idea in Stoicism: that of the conflagration ... when everything in the world - including the earth with all

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its heavenly bodies - will be transformed into the single, 'uppermost' element of pneuma, which constitutes the essence of God himself'.114 Thus, 'Paul's idea of the ... transformation ... of individual bodies of flesh and blood into pneumatic bodies should be understood on the model of the Stoic idea of the transformation of the whole world into (pneuma and) God at the conflagration'. Engberg-Pedersen then backs this up, by citing I Cor 3.12-15, where Paul has the Christian individual 'saved, but only as through fire'.115 We find, then, that not only the basic forces of human animation, but the ultimate crisis of apocalyptic revolution, the Day of Judgement itself, both derive from Stoicism. The difference is that, when the Christian world burns to the sound of angelic trumpets, pious individuals will essentially be shifted up, to a new level, that of eternal, post-resurrection salvation. In the original version, individuality had very little place, and destruction of the cosmos simply preceded a new cycle of creation, not a fundamental shift of eschatology. One final way of viewing this interface is offered via Romans 8. As Engberg-Pedersen plausibly argues, Paul's references - in verses 1-13 - to that 'spirit of life in Jesus Christ' which 'hath made me free from the law of sin and death' can indeed be seen to describe a quite definite 'influx of material pneuma'.116 Extending this claim, we can see how statements such as, 'to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace', or 'the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God...' (8.6-7) present a broad echo of the Stoic formula which we extracted, in opening pages, from its cosmology as much as from its ethics. The wisest, most rational individuals seek, as far as possible, to 'live according to nature'; that is, to ally themselves with its highest, most pneumatic level, expanding and intensifying the pneumatic element which distinguishes humans from lower levels of creation. One key difference is, of course, that the Stoics see as this part of a continuous, monistic spectrum of creation, whereas in Paul that cosmology is allied with a ferocious eschatological dualism.117 Another is that the pneuma of the individual becomes an external gift of Christ or God, rather than an immanent feature of nature per se. At one level, it is hard not to feel that Engberg-Pedersen deserves credit for bravely facing something so persistently ignored or distorted by Bultmann and numerous other Christian theologians.118 (In a quite basic sense, what he is arguing is that it is not possible for Christians to believe everything in the Bible.) At another, it is equally hard not to feel that he can manage this only by continuing to ignore the wider role of pneuma beyond Pauline sections of the New Testament. As we will see in chapters five and six, there are several occasions on which its status and behaviour

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would be far harder for a Christian theologian to even partially recover for conventional piety. Where, then, was the Christian soul at the time of Christ or of Paul? Clearly, it was not easily compassed within the word or the idea of psyche. We can add that the soul at this time could not be reduced into any one term or thing. But if we ask what was doing the most vital psychic and spiritual work at this time, the answer is surely: pneuma. Here as elsewhere, it is the breath that turns the world. Across history and across continents, numerous societies have believed in the power of hidden but active forces. Commonly, such spiritual agencies are not simply good or bad. Most basically, they are powerful. That power can easily slide from positive to negative, and is feared or respected accordingly. Slanting such psychology a little, we can see that Christ, Paul and the disciples had sufficient potency to convince many of their ability to heal. For others, they were sufficiently powerful to be a threat, and this threat itself was great enough to lead to their deaths in some cases. At this stage, then, pneuma does much of the work of the soul. It is mobile, potent, transferable - invisible but often highly concrete or immediate. It is linked to the forceful new individualism of the Christians, but can by no means by reduced to it, or bounded within that nascent self-hood. The New Testament soul is closely associated with a powerful form of energy. In this sense it remains very much an embodied entity. And we will now see that pneuma was, in a number of often surprising ways, very much a thing of this world.

CHAPTER FIVE MAGIC AND THE MATERIALITY OF SPIRIT IN NEW TESTAMENT CULTURE

It started with magic, and it ended with magic. At Christ's birth, a key event was the visit of the Magi.1 Just before his death, he instituted the famous ritual of the Eucharist. As Wilson points out, for all its later potency as a Christian phenomenon, in context this rite 'smacks strongly of the mystery cults of the Mediterranean'.2 Morton Smith, meanwhile, goes further when emphasising how the Eucharist would be falsely theologised or linked to the Old Testament by later commentators. 'When such window dressing is stripped away, what remains is an absolutely primitive figure: a magician-god who unites his followers to himself by giving them his body and blood to eat and drink'.3 There again, we could just as easily ignore the beginning and end, and focus on the zenith of Christ's fame and popularity as a miracle worker. Time and again, Christians who are challenged about the basis of their faith will revert to these events as a seemingly final, indisputable atom of proof. True, other faiths have Scriptures; but Christianity has (or at least had) miracles. Even those highly sceptical of Christ's supposed divinity will readily concede his outstanding reputation in this area. 'Through all antiquity', states Smith, 'no other man is credited with so many [miracles]. The Gospels contain well over 200 items about Jesus that directly involve something miraculous. By contrast, the Moses of the Pentateuch can boast only about 124', and Apollonius of Tyana (a figure who once rivalled Christ's powers) 'around 107'.4 Smith adds that, 'in most miracle stories no explanation ... is given; Jesus simply speaks or acts and the miracle is done by his personal power'.5 In a significant number of cases, however, this relatively absolute ability is replaced by acts which are more or less clearly magical - either in themselves, or in the way that they are interpreted by Christ's contemporaries or biographers. Moreover, as Smith and his forerunner, John M. Hull, have both stressed, certain evangelists appear to have deliberately softened or omitted magical details in particular accounts.

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Like the soul of Homer or of Aristotle, New Testament miracles are very often a thing of this world. Depictions of miraculous events frequently show respect for the concrete, the tangible, and the empirical.6 After looking at the magical context of Christ and his immediate successors, I will go on to look at those magical events which foreground empirical and physical traits. I will then look particularly at cases in which pneuma plays a significant role. I will end by examining the raising of the dead, and finally the death of Christ himself. Throughout, I will offer anthropological comparisons (from primitive societies, from the earlymodern period, and from modern folklore) which show that many key episodes of the New Testament were founded on quite basic laws of magic and of the spirit world. The resultant picture will reveal how, like the soul with which it was so intimately bound up, pneuma was in many ways emphatically monist and concrete, rather than dualist and abstract.7

The Pre-Christian Environment of the New Testament Christ among the Magicians 'Jesus' (states Wilson) inhabited a world which was utterly different from our own ... For the Jews and Pagans and Christians of the first century CE it was axiomatic that an epileptic was possessed of demons, that the way to cure deafness or palsy was to drive the demons out. Their universe was of a different composition from ours'.8 Like Wilson, Smith agrees that the Palestinian worldview was 'wholly mythological'. There were many gods though they were, for the Jews, all ultimately under the sway of Yahweh.9 There was a heaven, reserved for supernatural beings, and an underworld, 'to which most of the dead descended'. Most important in the present context is Smith's further assertion – that between these realms and earth there was 'a constant coming and going of supernatural beings who interfered in many ways with human affairs. Sickness, especially insanity, plagues, famines, earthquakes, wars, and disasters of all sorts were commonly thought to be the work of demons'.10 Within this radically pre-scientific and pre-Christian environment, Christ is not Christ as he would later be known. He does not sit at the top of a spiritual and ethical hierarchy, absolutely distinct and unchallengeable. Rather, he is in many ways a familiar type. His qualities are 'recognisably those of a first-century Galilean hasid. He is comparable to other hasidim, who also went about healing the sick, casting out devils, controlling the weather, and quarrelling with the religious hierarchy in Jerusalem'.11 Well into the second century AD, the disdainful Roman

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writer Lucian caricatured that '"expert in exorcism" who, with many demoniacs "falling down moonstruck and rolling their eyes, their mouths full of foam" before him, takes them "in hand and sends them off in their right mind, ridding them of their great troubles - for a huge fee"'. When citing this, Smith emphasises that 'Lucian was caricaturing a type, not a man'.12 That impression is sharply compounded when Smith reminds us how closely Christ's words could echo those of undisputed contemporary magicians. John 10.36, for example, has 'I am the son of God', while one of the period's magical papyri has 'I am the Son of the living God'. Again, John's 'I am the one come down from heaven' (6.51) is directly matched by the magical, 'I am the one come forth from heaven'.13 Similarly, 'of the three oldest representations of the crucifixion, two are on magical gems and the third probably refers to Christian magical beliefs'.14 Like his nominal father, Yahweh (whose name on extant, mainly pagan, magical papyri, outnumbers all others by three to one), Christ was important to many not for ethical reasons, but because he was useful.15 Like the Yahweh of the papyri, he was one among many useful names or figures. Related to such perceptions are two arguments made by Smith. First: Christ's ethics and his miracles (including healing) were originally perceived as separate.16 Such a perception is consistent with that New Testament culture in which relatively pragmatic beneficiaries of miraculous healing might simply take the cure, and ignore the ethical teaching. Even if they were ostensibly 'converted' by Christ or his disciples, they may have been merely acknowledging the natural power of this new cult, rather than any abstract religious creeds. Second: there is the seemingly fickle attitude of that crowd which turned against Christ just before his crucifixion, deciding that the murderer Barabbas should go free, rather than Jesus himself. This behaviour was, for Smith, 'not improbable if he had formerly won its support by a reputation, which his arrest discredited, for miraculous powers. The reports of the mocking presuppose expectation of miracles and attest disillusionment. Was such ridicule invented by Jesus' worshippers? Hardly'.17 Similarly, the rival magician, Apollonius, could be seen by some as a more impressive figure just because he did manage to vanish from the courtroom as his accusers were attempting to try him.18

The Pool of Bethesda Even those very hazily familiar with the Bible stories of their childhood tend to recall Christ's words to the severely crippled man lying prone on

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some kind of rudimentary mattress: 'Rise, take up thy bed, and walk'. But the precise context of this incident is generally forgotten or neglected. This neglect itself may not be merely accidental. Once again, we find that most of the evangelists failed to recount the story at all.19 It appears only in that notably anomalous, atypical gospel narrative left to us by John.20 Why was it otherwise ignored? Judge for yourself: 'Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had' (John 5.2-4). Among these hopefuls Christ encounters 'a certain man' afflicted by 'an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie ... he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me' (5.5-7). It is after this that Christ gives his famous command, and the lame man miraculously obeys. If this episode was neglected by biblical authors for a precise reason, then that reason may well have been this: while Christ was performing miracles of a supposedly unique and superlative nature, local Jews were able to avail themselves of wholly separate (but equally effective) curative sources. The pool of Bethesda was crowded because it worked. Whether or not the evangelists were discomforted by this, it is interesting to see just how this healing site operated. The water stirred; an angel had therefore visited it. At this point (perhaps with somewhat unseemly haste) there was a scramble to be first into the freshly inspirited waters. The victor in this eminently un-Christian competition would then be cured, but no one else received any kind of second or third prize. Two key points are evident here. First: the tale gives us a startling glimpse of what (from a modern scientific viewpoint) is a highly superstitious culture.21 Summarising the archaeological history of Bethesda, Joachim Jeremias has convincingly argued for a particular location, the Pool of Siloam. This lay south of Jerusalem, and was later to house a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.22 Examination of this site and its relation to local water sources suggests that the pool of Bethesda was affected by an intermittent spring - something remarked by a French pilgrim in 333 AD, and still active in the mid-twentieth century.23 Distant as we are from the sick men and women crowded around the pool in the first century AD, we can now begin to gain some idea of what they experienced. The water here behaved in an unusual way. Whether or not there was exactly a whirlpool

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effect, the surface probably pulsed or bubbled in a way that could not easily be dismissed as the effect of wind. This phenomenon was at once unpredictable, and inexplicable in purely natural terms. And yet, even in stating this last point, we significantly distort the attitude of an ordinary Palestinian Jew to such matters. True, they could discriminate between the natural and the supernatural. But the balance between these two spheres was then very different. They would not trouble to look very far for a natural cause in such cases, given how accustomed they were to seeing or inferring the supernatural. The water gulped or spat. Though nothing else had been seen, all those looking on believed that an angel had entered the pool. This brings us to our second point. The observers now believe that there is a spirit in the waters. This spirit has miraculous powers. But they can only be utilised by one person. It is here that we most clearly see the fiercely empirical (and, we might say, commonsense) character of magical belief. The cure involves one definite thing, and therefore only one person can use it. That spirit (or, as we have come to expect, some spirit) leaves the angel, and enters the pool; it then leaves the pool, and enters the sick person. After that, the pool is again empty and impotent.24 The pool of Bethesda was, of course, a specifically Jewish phenomenon. Nominally, Christ was opposing to such magical habits his radical new source of healing power: namely, faith. We will see that in fact 'faith' can be subtly misleading in such contexts. In the present context, the specially Jewish character of this healing site is important, just because it shows us that Christ and followers were working in a world that was eminently receptive to the magical or miraculous. But it must also be stressed that Bethesda could have its counterparts very much later. In the 1870s, the Reverend Francis Kilvert kept a diary, much of it devoted to his life in what is still a relatively remote rural area: the village of Clyro and environs in Radnorshire, near Hay on Wye, just at the border of England and Wales. Spending most of his life as a curate, Kilvert had a close relationship with many ordinary, uneducated (often very poor) parishioners. The Clyro blacksmith, William Powell, told Kilvert of how he had once bathed in a circular well crossed by an iron bar which the bathers held on by. Every morning there was a scum on the surface of the well which could be lighted by a match. The thing was to get in to the waters first every morning, for then the waters were most powerful to heal. So people used to rise very early and each tried to be first to get into the water. As when the angel troubled the pool of Bethesda, "whosever then first stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had".25

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Powell assured Kilvert that this water had cured his bad foot. Even if Powell had been recalling an event from some years past, we can still confidently say that miracles were alive and well in Protestant Britain in the nineteenth century.26 Or rather, magic was alive and well, for all the strictures and the educated disapproval of theologians. For what theologians or privileged clergy tended to forget in such an era was that working men and women were not given to abstraction. Prayer was all very well. But there was something rather more convincing and more satisfying about empirically evident processes of cause and effect. From Bethesda around 30 AD, to Wales around 1850, very similar basic principles apply. There is something odd about the water.27 (In the latter case the oddity is perhaps still more immediately tangible, given that the unusual chemical layer on the well could actually produce flame.) And the special power which it accordingly seems to hold is not an absolute, inexhaustible one, but something which in part obeys recognisable laws of nature. It can be used up. Although, in 1850, it would not obviously be used up by just one person, the Victorian belief in a quantity of power is of course consistent with New Testament attitudes to pneuma. We cannot deny that the pool of Bethesda came first. Whatever poor country dwellers did not know (about theology or hydro-chemistry), they did tend to know their Bible stories. Powell and the other afflicted bathers may have been influenced by Bethesda's emphasis on 'getting in first'. But that orthodox biblical precedent hardly shifts the affair from magic to religion. If William Powell's attitude to the well was in some degree magical, then he was almost certainly in the majority. Many of those living around Clyro (Kilvert included) believed in fairies at this point, and would describe them in quite surprisingly exact detail.28 Those who had linen stolen were capable of using magical techniques of detection (such as the key and Bible) dating back to the medieval period, and which left Kilvert himself open-mouthed with incredulity.29 Studies of medicine and folklore strongly suggest that, for all Kilvert's astonishment, this mingling of magic and religion was in fact the dominant attitude of most uneducated Christians - in many areas well into the twentieth century.30 Thus much for the uneducated countryfolk of nineteenth century Wales.31 What else does the pool of Bethesda say about Christ's working environment? When Christ and his followers began their healing campaign, they were doing so in an atmosphere that was in many ways ideally predisposed to believe in them. Indeed, in such a culture, the big difficulty was not to persuade people that magical cures were possible, but to convince them that yours were at once different in kind and in degree, thereby attesting to claims that Christ was the Messiah (and/or the Son of

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God).32 This was probably no small task. Beneficiaries of cures might well be grateful, and they might well be impressed. But that was not the same as thinking that the new healing man was of divine origin. To grasp this kind of point more fully, we need to see just what a thriving and essential enterprise magic was in New Testament Palestine and the Mediterranean world.

The Business of Magic Four cases from the Acts of the Apostles are particularly instructive in this respect. The first is that of Simon Magus. Chapter eight tells of how 'there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries' (8.9-11). Now, however, they switch allegiance: 'But when they believed Philip preaching the things of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women' (8.12). After this, 'Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done' (8.13). Soon after this Peter and John arrive, and bestow the Holy Ghost on various people by laying on of hands. Simon now responds to what he has seen with an ambiguous kind of complement: 'he offered them money; Saying, give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost'.33 What was actually happening here? We can see at once that the tale reinforces the idea of Christ as just one of many magical healers in the period. Indeed, Smith notes that Simon, like Christ, may also have been a disciple of John the Baptist.34 But it takes a little more scrutiny to realise just how the biblical version of events significantly skews and colours them. Take, first of all, the supposed conversion of Simon. At one level, baptism was hardly a life-changing leap of faith in such a context. It was already familiar from the activities of John (and especially so to Simon, if he had actually been one of John's followers). Moreover, what did Simon really 'believe' (8.13)? He was evidently persuaded that the apostles were powerful and effective: hence his seemingly comical attempt to buy the power which they possessed. There is no reason to infer that his 'conversion' was ethical or 'spiritual' (in the more abstract Christian sense of the term). This impression is supported, most clearly, by Simon's subsequent attempt to buy the powers of the apostles. When Peter derides

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Simon for believing 'that the gift of God may be purchased with money' he is probably imposing on Simon a belief which he did not have. Simon saw that something striking happened to those touched by the apostles (again, empiricism is the rule here). He therefore naturally assumed that the apostles had the power of a spirit - not of the singular and absolute God. For this indeed is what the Greek actually says: pneuma, not 'Holy Ghost', or even 'Holy spirit'.35 Once we realise how flagrantly an exact term can be rewritten in such a case, we can look with healthy scepticism at certain other details. The very first words of the incident, for example, in verses 9-11, present us with a figure who uncertainly combines evil and charlatanism. Simon is someone who had 'bewitched' the Samaritans with 'sorceries'. Reading this now, it is easy to forget that it was the disciples who looked strange in saying this, not Simon in being accused of it. In such a context, to 'accuse' someone of witchcraft and sorcery was rather like 'accusing' a modern GP of practising medicine. Sickness and medicine were spiritual or demonic matters. By definition, they were cured by sorcery, magic, or spirit-manipulation. And, for all their bias, the apostles do also make it clear that Simon had for some time been a highly successful and esteemed healer ('they had regard ... of long time' (8.11)). Like Christ, he was held to be 'the great power of God' - something which, in context, probably just meant that he could tackle the demonic forces held responsible for sickness. There are, naturally, various ways of looking at this story. But whatever we think of Simon's seemingly crude offer of money, we need to be aware of one key element of the tale. The attempt to buy the apostolic power shows us that magical healing in this culture was sufficiently popular to be a viable commodity. (In that sense, it roughly corresponds to the astrology of Shakespeare's day, which provided comfortable incomes for men such as Simon Forman.36) From Simon's point of view, the apostles were business competitors, intruding on what had previously been a wellearned personal monopoly. They were a kind of unwanted and aggressive magical mafia. They did not convert Simon, so much as defeat and displace him. Hence he presently sought to tackle the problem in terms familiar to him: a straightforward practical offer of money. This is not to say that he was purely materialistic or fraudulent. To even consider his practice in this sense is to misunderstand the status of spirit magic.37 It was in many ways a thing of this world. It was judged on visible successes. By definition, a fraud could not have made any money at all. Again, however high-minded and disinterested the apostles may have been, we cannot ignore the possibility that they displaced Simon partly because they did not charge anything for their services. This is an

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important point. For, as Smith reminds us, 'Doctors were inefficient, rare, and expensive. When a healer appeared - a man who could perform miraculous cures, and who did so for nothing! - he was sure to be mobbed. In the crowds that swarmed around him desperate for cures, cures were sure to occur'.38 That is: such cures are, from an agnostic viewpoint, partly a matter of statistical probability. The larger your client list, the more likely that some psychosomatic cures will follow. And your client list is going to be larger if you happen not to charge your patients. It must be added that a Gospel now excluded from the official New Testament canon gives a very different impression of the rivalry between Simon and Christ’s apostles. In the Acts of Peter, accounts of an ongoing magical competition between Peter and Simon show us not one neat clean victory and conversion, but a far more untidy sequence of defeat and recovery, in which the watching crowds play a very fickle role indeed (at one point hurriedly gathering wood to burn Peter after he has supposedly lost a magical contest with Simon). Whatever Christians may say about the extra-canonical status of this source, it is hard to ignore the fact that it is itself strongly biased towards both Christianity and St Peter.39 Another incident pointed out by Smith offers us a case in which the apostles similarly disrupted an existing business arrangement.40 This time, however, they were far less successful. Preaching and baptising in Philippi, they encountered 'a certain damsel possessed with a spirit [pneuma] of divination'. This young woman (evidently a slave girl) had for some time 'brought her masters much gain by soothsaying'. Smith infers that the woman was 'subject to fits', and that the typically magical culture of the region made it easy to present her (perhaps sincerely) as a soothsayer or fortune-teller. The young woman becomes converted to the disciples' teaching, and follows them persistently for some days, proclaiming them to be 'servants of the most high God' (notice, incidentally, that this last phrase is consistent with the Jewish plurality of gods under Yahweh). Presently, however, Paul 'being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour' (Acts 16.17-18). To the woman's masters, this was not a cause for gratitude. They took Paul and Silas to court, where 'the multitude rose up against them: and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them' (16.22). Rather conveniently, the remainder of the chapter contrives to leave this matter behind, lost under the dazzling glow of yet another timely miracle. Having been well beaten, jailed and stocked, Paul and Silas have the prison fall down around them due to an earthquake, but refuse to escape, thus prompting the grateful jailor to become one more of their

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converts. Impiously lowering our gaze to more worldly matters, we can prise a number of intriguing details from this affair. First: the apostles here succeed spiritually (or magically) but fail socially. At one level, they fail because here they meet people (notably, Roman citizens (16.21)) more powerful than Simon. At another, they also seem to rouse relatively spontaneous anger or fear amongst the magistrates and the attendant crowd. We will have cause to recall this latter point: people who can command or manipulate spirits in this way are powerful, and - potentially dangerous.41 The spirit, after all, was not destroyed, but merely removed (as the text in fact says): where, then, had it gone? From being known and contained (and profitable) it had been unleashed and made unpredictable, a natural source of anxiety. We seem too to catch a glimpse, in verses 17 and 18, of the particular nature of the slave girl's condition, and of Paul's attitude to it. Smith believes her to be subject to fits of some kind. And Paul's exorcism appears to broadly confirm this inference. That is to say: Paul turns on her without any obvious reason. If she was really singing their praises day after day, then what exactly was wrong with the spirit which compelled her to do so? One possibility is that the way she did this was disturbing. Yet it appears that her customers had been more positively impressed than negatively intimidated or discomforted. Paul reacts differently. Why? Here we meet a more subtle form of monopoly or displacement. The slave girl is special, and highly conspicuous as a vehicle of spiritual power. In this sense she threatens to colour attitudes to the supposed spiritual uniqueness of the disciples. Paul therefore eliminates this threat by the exorcism, and in doing so provides an ostentatious display of spiritual superiority. To put it another way, Paul and the apostles are licenced to spread the word of God: a slave girl is not (particularly in the eyes of that arch-misogynist, Paul.) Knowing Paul, we would be unwise not to also suspect some degree of egotism (or, at very least, spontaneous bad temper - the kind of outburst which might afflict any modern celebrity, stalked noisily by an overzealous fan in hot and dusty conditions.) And egotism is certainly evident in the third case of displacement. Shifting back slightly to Acts 13 we find Paul and Barnabas preaching on Cyprus. Reaching the town of Paphos, they are allegedly summoned by the island's governor, Sergius Paulus, who 'desired to hear the word of God' (13.7). Paulus is the patron of a Jew, Barjesus, described by Acts as 'a certain sorcerer, a false prophet' (13.6). Barjesus is clearly powerful. He stands between the disciples and the Roman governor, supposedly 'seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith' (13.8). For Barjesus, matters no doubt looked different. His power is

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threatened by rival sorcerers - though he may also sincerely believe in his power, and construe that of Paul and Barnabas as fraudulent or evil. If he had the latter view, he was quite correct. For, having abused and slandered Barjesus, Paul then goes on to blind him (albeit, only 'for a season'). We will have more to say about this piece of Christian zeal shortly. What concerns us here is that, once again, Christ's mafia have achieved another coup - both political and propagandist. But their success depended strongly on two basic factors. One: the governor was already predisposed toward magic; hence his patronage of Barjesus (and his evident desire to hear the speeches of these new magicians). Two: he was probably impressed by a striking and tangible piece of magic. When verse 12 says that he 'believed' and was 'astonished at the doctrine of the Lord' we need merely infer that he 'believed' Paul to have considerable power (and that it was only this which deterred him from arresting the miscreants for assault).42 Our fourth case underlines the extent and value of the magic business with especial force and exactitude. In Acts nineteen, we hear of how Paul successfully preached for two years, 'so that all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks'. Perhaps more importantly, Paul then goes on to work what appears to be an unusually high number of miracles. Local responses to these wonders vividly illustrate the pre-existing magical and animistic traditions of Judaic culture. 'Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. And many that believed, came, and confessed, and showed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver' (19.8-19). At a certain level, all this could well be true.43 If the possession was essentially psychosomatic, then so would the cure be.44 The patient allegedly believes in Jesus and Paul. It was owing to such confidence that Paul and associates could effect psychosomatic cures elsewhere. By contrast, the patient is insufficiently impressed by (or afraid of) Sceva's sons, and so derides and attacks them. The general fear which then falls on

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the Ephesans may well echo that which seemed to possess the hostile crowd in Philippi. Once again, we need to try and overcome our amusement at the Jews' seemingly childlike attempts to use the name of Jesus. Their attitude was that of the majority. On one occasion it was indeed that of Christ himself. In Mark 9, the disciples tell Christ of a man 'casting out devils in thy name'. Jesus responds, 'forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me' (9.38-9). Jesus' name, moreover, was also ‘used in spells as the name of a god’. And so too were those of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Solomon - the last two being themselves famous as magicians.45 Christ's name, then, was one useful name among many. It was not the only name, not automatically ranked at the summit of a supernatural hierarchy. The seven sons were in good and substantial company in taking this attitude.46 And the sons were similarly reasonable in their failure to understand (or tolerate) the disciples' magical monopoly. In Acts nineteen we witness a power struggle over the right to make use of a valuable religious agent. In this sense, the disciples are simply a rival group of healers, seeking to patent and monopolise the name of Christ. As stated earlier, they present themselves as exclusively licenced to use this name and its associated powers.47 From an agnostic viewpoint, they are essentially using magic against magic, and flourishing such incidents as the failed exorcism, employing them as potent weapons in a campaign which mingles religious propaganda and spectacular magical showmanship. Part of this public relations triumph involves an early instance of something at which Christianity would excel in later centuries: the burning of books. We need to pause over this particular bonfire for two key reasons. First: as Smith has rightly argued, this kind of destruction was a vital part of Christianity's long-term success. It not only rewrote events and beliefs in various ways, but sometimes outrightly annihilated them. By comparison, the blaze in Ephesus was small when set against the mass destruction of rival, supposedly magical or heretical texts after the pivotal conversion of Constantine in 325 AD.48 It hardly takes a vast leap of imagination to see the implications of this kind of activity. For all their overpowering faith in the righteousness of God's word, Christ's followers evidently felt that many would be easily tempted by the words of other creeds, if such dangerous texts were left intact.49 The bonfire of Ephesus also offers us an intriguingly precise material index of the region’s magical culture. For the total cost of these blazing magical works comes, we are told, to 'fifty thousand pieces of silver'. This was a lot of money. Recalling that Judas needed only thirty pieces of silver

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as an incentive to shop the son of God to the authorities, we can further note Smith's estimate of the sum, circa 1978: he puts it at roughly 320,000 US dollars.50 Although we have no idea how many books were burned, we can reasonably infer that each one was probably highly valued. Putting this another way, we can further conclude that magicians could make a good deal of money. To buy such a book was either a bold material investment for those less well off, or a further acquisition on the part of those already well-paid for their magical services. It is not unreasonable to suspect that these four incidents are just a few of many. As Hull remarks, 'the early history of the struggle between the followers of the Baptist and those of Jesus is similar no doubt to the struggle between the Simonites and the Christians, and the clash between the church and magic in general, i.e., a superior power swallowed up and negated an inferior one'.51 But even these four episodes alone give us a strong idea of just how pervasive magic was in New Testament culture. For many, it was a business. From our point of view, it was surprisingly hard-headed and worldly. It was a trade which could be learned, or at least transferred - hence Simon's quite shrewd attempt to try and buy their 'trade secret' from the apostles. As Smith puts it, 'magic was a technique which could be taught (as can hypnosis, acting, and pharmacology, probably its most important ingredients)'.52 From another angle, the various laws against certain magical practices shed their own distinctive light. Slaves who 'consult [magicians] about the life expectancy of their masters' would be crucified.53 The very fact that this habit was sufficiently widespread to incite such a deterrent is itself intriguing. There is a sense of magic as a first (rather than last) resort in numerous everyday dilemmas. (And again, the parallel with early-modern astrology is relevant: people would once commonly resort to astrologers when seeking to locate lost or stolen property.54) On the other hand, the ubiquity of magic could at times prompt its opponents to be tolerant of something simply too pervasive to be wholly eradicated. Hence Constantine, when imposing laws against magic in 318, was forced to exclude '"remedies sought out for human bodies" or grape-growers' spells against hail'.55 Just what did magic, spirit/s, and the supernatural mean to people in this kind of environment? Needless to say, we can never fully know. But one thing we should now be able to grasp is that magic was serious. In certain ways it was rather like modern science: its adepts were often respected, perhaps affluent. And both they and those watching them had considerable respect for empirical evidence. We can add that non-adepts were probably more easily awed or terrified by magic and the spirit world

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than were magicians themselves. We have seen that the manipulation of spirits could provoke fear (and we will see it again shortly). But there is perhaps a certain paradox lodged within that fear. Spirits were to be feared precisely because they were so real; so ever-present, mobile, tangible, powerful and unpredictable.56 (And in this sense their invisibility probably made them more alarming, but no less real.) Anyone who nowadays claims to fear ghosts does not fear them in the same way that Palestinians or Greeks feared spirits 2000 years ago. They are unlikely to fear ghosts when in company, or in broad daylight - or if they have a fever or epilepsy. It seems, then, that spirits were feared rather in the way that one might fear powerful human enemies. For many people, they were frightening, but they were not uncanny (and quite literally so, given one sense of that latter term: 'partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar'.57) Accepting that we are, ultimately, trying to enter a psychological space now largely extinct from the world, we can at least draw a comparative conclusion about the status of pneuma and attendant phenomena in New Testament life. In such a world, the supernatural was relatively natural. We will see in a few moments that its powers might sometimes obey natural (or at least commonsense) laws. Before moving on to these detailed case studies of the behaviour of pneuma, we need to briefly tackle the question of how Christian magical habits (those of Christ, the disciples, and Paul) have been either distorted, obscured, or outrightly denied. Smith makes it quite clear that, 'since the magi had distinctive ethical and eschatological teachings, the fact that Jesus had similar teachings would not have prevented his being thought a magus'.58 Once aware of this, we are likely to recall that those magi so highly valued (and advertised) by Christian tradition were not only a very positive sign of reverence for the newborn Christ, but were indeed also generally known as 'the three wise men' (rather than, say, 'the three cunning charlatans'). Moreover, given that magic was in some ways broadly equivalent to later forms of experimental hard science (in its empiricism, its respect for the tangible and concrete, and in its pervasiveness, both practically and as a field of explanation) it is not surprising to find that such a ubiquitous phenomenon had, in the period, its own important internal subdivisions. There were, in such a context, significant distinctions between higher and lower types of magic or magicians. Accordingly, when faced with the charge of magical practices, Christians 'attempted to refute the accusation by reducing "magician" to its lowest possible meaning and arguing that this meaning did not match Jesus. By this manoeuvre they misrepresented the sense of the accusation'.59

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Besides this general tactic, we find that there are particular attitudes on the parts of the four evangelists. They 'could not eliminate Jesus' miracles because those were essential to their case, but John cut down the number of them, and Matthew and Luke got rid of the traces of physical means that Mark had incautiously preserved (eg 7.33, 8.23)'.60 We will soon see in considerable detail how such distinctions work out in particular cases. Here we can emphasise the arguable priority of Mark's gospel, and hence its probable closeness to original, non-Christian perceptions of the miraculous. We can note the instructive example offered by Smith: at the end of Mark's gospel, the risen Christ 'promises his believers immunity from snakes and poison' (16.18). 'Spells against snakes, scorpions, and poison', Smith points out, 'are frequent in the magical material'; and we should further note how this magical power lies cheek-by-jowl with the same verse's promise of healing powers ('they shall lay hands on the sick...').61 We can also nuance the magical ranking of the disciples, taking account of Hull's view that Luke, 'more than any other evangelist', saw 'ordinary life as penetrated by diabolical agencies'.62 Let us now, however, turn to those particular miracles which most clearly illustrate the magical nature of early Christianity, and the very worldly or naturalistic habits of pneuma. We begin with the occasion of Christ's baptism - an event which appears to be a more than symbolic prelude to the Saviour's public career.

CHAPTER SIX THE EMPIRICAL STATUS OF PNEUMA IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The Dove This final chapter looks at those miracles (of Christ and his followers) which most clearly illustrate the magical nature of early Christianity, and the very worldly or naturalistic habits of pneuma. It looks, too, at the notably concrete role of pneuma just before and during Christ's death. We begin, however, slightly before the start of Christ's spectacular career. 'If we, with modern and prosaically "scientific" eyes had seen the things which were seen and heard by the disciples of Jesus, we should have seen quite different things. At his Baptism, for example, in the River Jordan, we should probably have seen merely a bedraggled young man emerging from the water; but the eyes of faith saw the heavens open, and the Holy Spirit of God descending on Jesus in the form of a dove'.1 A.N. Wilson is surely right as to the highly variant perceptions of 'us' and 'them'. Here as elsewhere, we have to remind ourselves that we can never fully recover that lost vision of Christ's early followers. But we can certainly gain an instructive idea of how they 'saw' this event and its consequences, taking the word in its common sense of 'understanding' or 'interpretation'. Several pieces of evidence suggest that they apprehended a quite definite, and at least partly material, causal link between the Baptism and Christ's later miraculous powers. Here are the key verses as given by Mark. John tells those he baptises that 'there cometh one mightier than I' and that: 'I indeed have baptised you with water; but he shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost'. Presently Christ himself comes to be baptised by John, and 'straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved son. And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness' (1.7-12). Even if we merely cast a sceptical eye over this alone, we can quite quickly see that we are in the kind of territory which

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sustained the miraculous pool of Bethesda. There, the water gulped or pulsed intermittently, and the angel had entered it. Here, Christ allegedly 'saw the heavens opened'. That is, they are not just inferred to open, in order to let the dove pass down; but some kind of visible alteration is supposed to occur. What did Christ see? The climate of the region was surely far more stable and consistent, day to day, than that of (say) the Western isles of Scotland. The change must have been small, perhaps minute. We would very possibly have seen nothing (or thought nothing of it, which amounts to more or less the same thing.2) Again, we would probably have seen a dove, not a 'Spirit like a dove', or even 'a spirit which we knew to be a dove'. We are not concerned here with the voice of God, identifying Christ as his son. But we can be fairly confident that, had that Old Testament prophecy (now heard to be fulfilled through Christ) been worded differently, then it would have been heard (and reported) differently in the Gospels. I emphasise this point because there is another vital facet of Hebrew belief which may well have conditioned perceptions of Christ and the dove. As we have seen, Yahweh was known to give extra ruach to those chosen for specially strenuous tasks. For some of those who saw or heard of the baptism, it could naturally have been viewed in this light. Even without the parallel offered by ruach, there are several reasons for believing that Christ was held to get his miraculous powers at just this moment. The dove was not merely a sign. It was also a tool. Admitting the period's very different sense of 'material versus spiritual', we can say that Christ is materially different after the infusion of pneuma. He has been supercharged with a force whose powers he begins to demonstrate very soon after the Baptism. Variations between the Gospels help us to make more sense of this basic point. Recall that Mark has just 'the Spirit'. It was only Matthew and Luke who altered this to 'Holy Spirit' or 'Holy Ghost'.3 In a quite subtle but important sense their rewriting (augmented by hundreds of years of Christian ideology) has succeeded in distorting Mark at an all but subliminal level. When he writes of 'the Spirit' he does not necessarily mean anything like 'the Holy Ghost' or 'the Almighty'. He is more likely to mean 'the power', 'the force', or even something like 'the current'. A second basic point is underlined with extra clarity if we consider the very different attitude of John's Gospel. As Smith emphasises, 'John, for whose theology of incarnation the story was an embarrassment, turned the whole thing into a vision reported by the Baptist'.4 In most later Christian theology, it is generally stated or implied that Christ is simply born with his divine powers or qualities. He was always the Son of God, and always

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had special attributes. In this sense John has triumphed over his three rival Gospellers. Contrasting Mark and John, we find the difference especially striking: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God ... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us...' (John 1.1, 1.14). To paraphrase a little bluntly: where John has Christ as a piece of God, Mark and others have Christ being given a piece of God at a particular moment. And both John and Mark have these differing sources of power established at the very start of their respective Gospels. This - they imply - was how Christ became Christ. For John there was a kind of absolute and abstract decision; for Mark, Matthew and Luke there was a necessary and definite moment of infusion or inspiration. God had to do something as well as deciding something. Something happened, then, for a quite precise reason. Let us say a little more about the role of the dove and of magic in this event. At a general level, we should remind ourselves that, weather aside, few things are so universally dominant in the folklore of superstition as birds. They can signal death or calamity by their cries or by their behaviour. In Rumania c.1919 the cry of an owl foretold a singular death; in London in 1593 the appearance of a heron atop St Peter's church in Cornhill caused the multitudes to fear an imminent outbreak of plague.5 Birds are conveniently free, mobile, ubiquitous, visible, and reasonably unpredictable; they are therefore well-suited to those on the lookout for omens. More particularly, we find one featuring in a magical ritual strikingly similar to the occasion of Christ's baptism. What were Christ's contemporaries really thinking as they saw him briefly pass under a faint shift of light and a foraging pigeon? Some may have been thinking of this kind of formula for attaining the power of a spirit: 'Having sanctified yourself in advance and abstained from meat and from all impurity ... go up on a high roof'. You should then pray at sunset, wearing a black band over your eyes. At sunrise, burn frankincense and recite a spell. 'While you are reciting the spell, the following sign will occur: A hawk flying down will stop [in the air] in front of you and, striking his wings together in the middle [in front of his body], will drop a long stone and at once fly back, going up into heaven'. Much else is required, after this first sign, in order to finally acquire 'an attendant deity'. But if you are successful, you will then have innumerable powers including, we might note, that of walking on water. Summing up the key parallels, Smith (to whom we owe this formula) emphasises the 'initial purification', the bird as first supernatural manifestation, the power of miracles, and the consequent worship of the magician as a god.6 We might immediately object that the Baptism of the Gospels is very

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much less ritualistic or detailed. Smith, however, believes that these differences are at least partly a result of the evangelists' desire to obscure the magical context of the event. He indeed argues that the baptism 'must have been accompanied by prayers and thanksgivings (possibly also by hymns) and effected with some regular form of actions and formula of words'.7 It would also be fair to add that the gospels are often relatively sparse in their style and their use of details. Here they may have omitted some details which would be specially interesting to students of magic.8 We will see very soon how Christ's new powers were spectacularly attested for many miles beyond Jordan. At this point we should just briefly note what Mark tells us later in chapter one. The newly-empowered Christ has already roused wonder by his teachings in the synagogue when he is confronted by 'a man with an unclean spirit', who 'cried out ... saying, What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. And they were all amazed...' (1.23-27). Following a common order of most to least magical, Mark is here first, with Matthew a distant third, offering a much more brief and generalised account of Christ's teaching and miracles. In second place, Luke is very close to Mark, but is less rapid in his narrative movement between Baptism and the exorcism. This is important because Mark's more compressed version accentuates the impression of closely related cause and effects: Christ gains the power, and very soon after performs a highly public miracle. But in both Mark and Luke, there is a clear sense of someone achieving a supernatural cure as a kind of vivid and concrete demonstration of their powers. 'Convulsing', the sick man has some kind of seizure (Luke here reads), 'And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him'. Convinced of Christ's power ('I know thee ... the Holy One of God'), the man suffers a forceful psychosomatic crisis, and both he and those watching feel the demon to have left him. As Naomi Janowitz points out, this kind of tactic was part of the magician's stock-in-trade: 'sometimes the daimon was commanded to speak as a way of demonstrating both his presence in the human body and the practitioner's control over him'.9 To more fully understand Christ's first recorded encounter with pneuma (excepting, perhaps, the immaculate conception) we need to step back slightly, to a shadowy but intriguing period, situated just between the Baptism and the start of Jesus' brilliant career. Mark tells us that, after the voice has spoken at the River Jordan, 'immediately the Spirit driveth him

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into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him' (1.12-13). As stressed above, for those who believe in them, spiritual forces such as pneuma are, at bottom, powerful. Their power means that they are taken seriously, for it can slide easily from good to bad. To put it another way: such power is not something that can be easily manipulated or tamed. Accordingly, it here controls Christ, rather than vice versa: he is 'driven' out into the wilderness. Luke softens this slightly - using 'led' - but still hints at a crucial element of this incident: namely, compulsion. (We can again compare pneuma, in this respect, to thymos, which often seemed to act as an impulse, but also to be something which the subject could not in some cases - very easily resist.) In this case as in so many others, pneuma does something quite definite. While this fits with the general cosmology of a highly in-spirited culture, the evident compulsion also fits with the implicit psychology of the wilderness period. That is: Christ's behaviour looks compulsive because it is. He is in a genuine state of psychic crisis. In the expanded versions given by Luke and Matthew, he is tempted at length and in specific ways by 'the devil' (probably something more like 'a devil' in context, though Mark does have 'Satan' here.) He fasts for forty days. When he is hungry, the devil challenges him to turn a stone into bread. He offers him all the kingdoms of the world, and asks him to throw himself from the temple so as to demonstrate that angels will save him. From one angle, we can see here that Christ himself, in his contemporary sphere, is at this time a victim of possession. Like those other supposed demoniacs, he has at least two voices fighting within him at once. From our point of view, we must try not to clumsily impose ill-fitting categories such as 'nervous breakdown'. But it is hard not to notice how the prolonged fast so closely matches the modern psychology of anorexia. Here, in a state of immense personal chaos and powerlessness, is something that one can control, over which one can have a certain power. Refuse to eat; control the body. These points are important, because they suggest that - however the evangelists may slant matters - Christ is not shamming. If we shift back to the power of pneuma for a moment, we can now also grasp another possible role for that potent spirit force. Is Christ given that extra dose of spirit just because he will need it during the stresses experienced in the wilderness? Interestingly, this could apply quite precisely in the cases of Luke and Matthew. At a quick glance, their versions offer a Christ who is noticeably more in control, seeming to continually counter the devil with rational or scriptural arguments. While this presentation is almost certainly

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misleading, it nevertheless fits the specific Stoic idea of pneuma: a force which, in its highest, human form, is closely associated with reason. Pneuma has thus sharpened Christ's rational powers, as well as those of endurance and courage. There is a clear general sense, then, that pneuma impels or compels Christ, and that it offers him various powers of physical and psychic resistance. Smith also detects in this incident a quite particular parallel. Those two verses from Mark, he argues, fit 'the pattern of a magician's life, especially a shaman's. Compare Eliade's report that a shaman, at the beginning of his career, commonly "withdraws into solitude and subjects himself to a strict regime of self-torture". He is supposed to be tested, subjected to terrible ordeals, or even killed by evil or initiatory spirits, but is helped by friendly spirits who appear in the form of animals'. Echoing the sense of spiritual compulsion, Smith adds: 'the statement that the spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness accords with rabbinic reports of demonic compulsion and suggests that Jesus was "possessed", although elsewhere it is claimed that he "had" the spirit'.10 Here Christ abruptly breaks through the abstract layers of myth and emerges as a figure credible within the more or less universal anthropology of magic and shamanism.11 Luke also implies one further detail. He tells us: 'And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season. And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about' (4.13-14). These two verses may be merely compressing various detailed events and impressions. But if we read them as gospel, they do seem to imply that Christ's new spiritual power is evident before he does any miracles. At one level, this supports Smith's arguments: what Christ had gone through was a familiar type of initiatory ordeal. Those around him knew it and understood it; and they had particular expectations of him, accordingly, when he emerged from it. At another level, it reinforces the sense that Christ seemed different. He radiated a certain forcible psychic energy. Recall the idea of those prophets specially charged with extra ruach by Yahweh. We will all have met people who help to explain that impression: people who do seem to have superabundant vitality, personal presence, magnetism... This now seems to hold for Christ, returned from the wilderness. He was not shamming. For him all this was real, and his conviction helps to convince others. Hull shades in another fascinating possibility when he states that, 'the power comes upon Jesus particularly after his successful struggle with Satan'.12 That is: for all the polished rhetorical combat offered by Luke and Matthew, in its original context Christ's struggle was not a moral or ethical

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(or even philosophical) affair.13 It was a battle for raw spiritual energy. Psychologically, Christ felt 'empowered' because he had come through a prolonged mental struggle.14 Cosmologically, he had used the initial injection of spirit to take over, tame, and absorb another spirit power, the devil with whom he wrangled (perhaps for forty days and more) in the wilderness. We must bear in mind that for some this seizure of power could have been quite concrete, literal, and quantitative: not unlike the extra strength of a cannibal who eats a warrior's heart, or a vampire who gulps down healthy blood. From another angle, it is interesting to see the victory as one more version of the magic mafia: once again a rival power has been ousted and subordinated, and valuable propaganda has accrued in the process.

The Role of Spirits in Exorcism We have seen that spirit powers, whether good or bad, were pervasive in New Testament culture. Arguably they were relatively natural for many. We have just seen that Christ's first recorded cure was an exorcism. By looking in a little more detail at the period's attitude to exorcisms, we can see, first, how quite specific techniques were used to overpower or expel bad or unclean spirits; and also, second, how magicians (including Christ) were held to use spirits in order to effect these and other cures. Opening the Gospels at random, one has a good chance of stumbling upon one of the many exorcisms of Christ's healing career. Matthew tells of a man thought to be blind and dumb because he is 'possessed with a devil', and Christ is understood to cure him by casting out this spirit (12.22-24). Matthew talks of 'many that were possessed with devils' and of how Christ 'cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick' (8.16). Recounting the same episode, Luke talks of how, at sunset, 'all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God' (4.4041). In each of these last two cases, phrasing is slightly unclear: are the 'sick' the same people from whom spirits are cast out?15 This would certainly fit the prevailing popular notion that numerous diseases (besides those involving obvious personality disorders) were held to be the result of demonic forces.16 Here and elsewhere, it is also clear that the voices of the sick very easily become the voices of demons.17 It may well be that ideas of spirit invasion were particularly attractive in cases of lunacy, or other conditions which radically affected ordinary consciousness: epilepsy, fainting fits, comas.18 But the gospels make it

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clear that most - if not all - illnesses or disabilities were generally held to have spiritual bases. Thus Luke 13.11 reads: 'And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up [herself]. And when Jesus saw her, he called [her to him], and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity'. For all that we have discovered thus far, we may still need to remind ourselves how dominant and real magical explanations were in this context. Before an advanced state of micro-biology and germ theory, this was a natural and valid stance toward illness. To talk about 'a spirit of infirmity' was very much like talking about a particular type of virus or cancer. That kind of subtle shift of register is evident in Acts 10.38, where we hear of how Christ healed 'those that were oppressed of the devil'. At one level, it should now be reasonably obvious that 'the devil' in such a case could not easily be equated with 'Satan'. Even where that actual name was used, it had nothing like the singular absolutism of later Christianity. Perhaps a little less obvious is that 'oppressed of the devil' could, in context, be a figure of speech roughly equivalent to 'a devil' (just as we now talk more or less interchangeably of 'a cold' or 'the flu'). As Hull has emphasised, fevers were also popularly attributed to spirits. 'Categories of fever spirits were numerous in the ancient world'.19 Fevers are said to be particularly susceptible to psychosomatic cure, and we will see below that the deaf, mute, or blind could also be cured by suggestion.20 A moment's thought shows us, then, that those who put their faith in the pool of Bethesda, in Christ, or in other magicians (such as Simon Magus) were again shrewdly pragmatic. Faced with precious little else in the way of affordable, institutional, or advanced scientific medicine, they seem to have hit upon something which was effective at two levels. Most obviously, genuine belief in spirits and demons meant that there could be genuine psychosomatic cures. More subtly, it meant that both the sick and the well had gained mental and explanatory control of otherwise thoroughly elusive and unpredictable forces. In some cases, indeed, they had far more power than the deferential patients of our own scientific era. At times the dominant spirit beliefs of New Testament culture are suitably filtered by the different stances of the three synoptic gospels. Smith notes, for example, the episode in which Peter's mother-in-law is cured of a fever (Mark 1.31). Luke, typically, 'understood this as an exorcism and made it more vivid, "he rebuked the fever and it left her"’.21 Conversely, when Christ tells of an exorcised demon returning with seven others to a victim's body, this seems to be literal for Luke, but is rendered into a parable by Matthew. As Hull points out, Luke's 'actual description

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of behaviour and reactions ... of varieties of evil spirits' was probably more faithful to the beliefs of both Christ and those around him.22 But what is more notable is that, despite their differing stances, all three of the synoptic gospels frequently reveal the typical recourse to spirit beliefs in everyday life. While it is Luke who, when Christ returns after death, has the disciples 'terrified and affrighted', supposing 'that they had seen a spirit' (Luke 24.37), it is Matthew who tells of how, witnessing Christ walking on water, they believed that it was 'a spirit [devil]', and 'cried out for fear' (14.26). Spirit powers, then, were commonly active in Christ's working environment. They were not only plentiful, but were carefully divided into a quite complex array of different types (one caused certain conditions; another feared certain things, and so forth). If your relative lay shivering with fever on their bed, then there was a spirit inside them, inches away from the damp cloth you held to their forehead. In these senses, spirits were real. They were things of this world. Those points hold too for the way in which spirits were conquered or expelled by magicians. Smith details several points concerning the psychosomatic nature of magical cures. 'Jesus' first reported cure (as distinct from exorcism) is of a fever [Mark 1.30]; cures for fever are particularly frequent in the magical literature cited; the condition often has psychological causes and responds readily to suggestion'.23 Hull notes similar arguments regarding trauma among soldiers, who can accordingly suffer stammers, or even deafness and muteness.24 Smith elsewhere cites the widespread advice to 'miracle workers', that 'all commands given with perfect confidence will be obeyed'.25 Here we clearly meet a more general trick of authority and power: one well respected by the police, schoolteachers, and trainers of animals in the present day.26

Magic and the Dead One other possible strategy is particularly notable. In Mark 3, during Christ's early fame as a miracle worker, certain of his friends 'went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself. And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils'. Presently, Christ warns them: 'All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation'. This, Mark adds, had to be asserted 'because they said, He hath an unclean spirit' - that

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is, that he used an unclean spirit - such as Beelzebub - rather than using the Holy Spirit to effect miracles (3.21-30). Apparently focussing on the phrase 'beside himself' and the accusations as to the unclean spirit, Smith infers from this passage that 'Jesus' exorcisms were accompanied by abnormal behaviour on his part. Magicians who want to make demons obey often scream their spells, gesticulate, and match the mad in fury'.27 This possibility is apparent, Smith believes, 'in other forms of the charge against Jesus: in John 7.20 and 8.52 for instance, ‘when the crowd says to him, "You have a demon," they mean, practically, "You're crazy"; but compare John 10.20 where they distinguish the states, "He has a demon and [consequently] is insane'.28 Such an inference does seem to fit the idea that Christ was 'beside himself', and would also fit the theory of psychosomatic cures ones effected, in part, by intimidation of those suffering from mental illness or other suggestible conditions. More recently, Justin J. Meggitt has argued that the seeming puzzle of Christ's execution (if he was really a political threat, then why were his subversive followers not also crucified?) can be explained by Christ's madness. Amongst other things, Meggitt cites the strikingly similar case of a known lunatic, Carabas, who was mockingly given the 'insignia of kingship' and a royal bodyguard; adding also (a propos of the crown of thorns) that, 'the crown in the first-century world could carry something of the symbolic resonances of the dunce's hat in Victorian England, and was part of the cultural construction of insanity'.29 We have, of course, already glimpsed that perilously fine line between possessing and being possessed - a struggle which seems to have underlain Christ's wilderness battle with Satan. While the gospels represent Christ as having been triumphant in that struggle, we must realise that such perceptions are subjective and unstable. Summing up the conflicting opinions of Christ's followers and other - probably more representative contemporaries, Smith states: 'particularly interesting is the final saying attributed to Jesus, that blasphemy against "the holy spirit" is unforgiveable [Mark 3]. The "holy spirit" is the spirit by which some Christians thought Jesus did his miracles, the blasphemy is calling it a demon, and the saying shows that at least some Christians were willing to admit that Jesus did "have a spirit", but insisted that it was a (or "the") holy one'.30 Elsewhere, in Mark 8, Christ asks the disciples, 'Whom do men say that I am?', to which they respond, 'John the Baptist: but some [say], Elias; and others, One of the prophets' (8.27-8). Certain magical papyrae of the period show that the magician did indeed hope to 'become' the spirit or demon whom he invoked: '"enter my mind and my thoughts for all the time of my life and

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perform for me all the wishes of my soul. For you are I and I am you"'.31 Such beliefs have important implications for the nature of spirit or spirits. Most obviously, they dramatically alter the status of Christ the miracle-worker. From being son of God, a supremely exceptional individual, he becomes merely a vehicle for spirit forces which lack such absoluteness, and which are notably impersonal, mobile, and transferable. As Smith further explains, it was conceivable that the spirit attributed to Christ had in fact been transferred from John the Baptist. Struck by the occasional identification of Christ with John, the scholar Carl Kraeling realised that Christ 'was called "John" because it was believed that he "had", that is possessed, and was possessed by, the spirit of the Baptist'.32 Smith goes on to cite the especially clear belief of Herod, as recorded by Mark: 'And king Herod heard [of Christ]; (for his name was spread abroad:) and he said, That John the Baptist was risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him. Others said, That it is Elias. And others said, That it is a prophet, or as one of the prophets. But when Herod heard [thereof], he said, It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead' (6.14-16).33 (As in other passages concerning spirit or demons, 'he' seems here to be roughly synonymous with 'his spirit'.) It is surely no accident that this vital hint as to the magical basis of Christian miracle occurs in Mark. Moreover, as Smith and others have indicated, the belief of (the educated, if wicked) King Herod was founded in a pervasive and consistent notion of spirit forces.34 That is: 'it was generally believed that the spirit of any human being who had come to an unjust, violent or otherwise untimely end was of enormous power. If a magician could call up and get control of, or identify himself with such a spirit, he could then control inferior spirits or powers'.35 Similarly, Janowitz notes a belief that 'the untimely dead, including children, were destined to roam the earth as trouble-causing daimons'.36 Some time between the second and fourth centuries AD, a writer known as Pseudo-Clement of Rome linked this idea to the powers of Simon Magus, who supposedly claimed: '"I have summoned up with unutterable conjurations the soul of a pure boy who was killed with violence, and made him my assistant. It is through this soul that everything I order is accomplished"'. Simon went on, in this account, to explain that, '"a man's soul takes second place after God, once released from the darkness of its own body. As soon as it is free it possesses foreknowledge"'.37 Much later, a young virginal boy might still be employed in necromancy. Cellini, for example, took a live one with him for an eventful night of hell-raising in the Coliseum, in 1532. But a closer parallel is found in the Paracelsian medicine of Northern Europe, from around the

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seventeenth century onwards. For over two hundred years, educated doctors and their patients made routine use of corpse medicine: flesh, fat, blood or bone was applied topically or swallowed for a range of accidents or illnesses. Such remedies were often known as 'mummy' because they initially used the bodies of ancient Egyptians. But Paracelsus and his followers presently took to using material from those very recently dead, recommending ‘the cadaver of a reddish man (because in such a man the blood is believed lighter and so the flesh is better), whole, fresh without blemish, of around twenty-four years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moon’s rays for one day and night, but with a clear sky’.38 This preference for a young man, killed violently and therefore prematurely, was repeated time and again in Paracelsian remedies and official Pharmacopeias.39 At first, the parallel might seem to end there. Magic in Christ's era uses a prematurely killed soul; the medicine of Milton's time uses a prematurely killed body. But there is considerable evidence to show that, in the latter case, the flesh itself was valued because it was held to be peculiarly saturated with the power of the soul.40 In accordance with the idea that the body's vital force smouldered slowly away after legal death, Paracelsus insisted that, 'if doctors were aware of the power of this substance ... no body would be left on the gibbet for more than three days'.41 This span seems to imply a body which was not yet noticeably affected by putrefaction, and which was thus held to retain the potency of its soul. Moreover, as Jole Shackelford has pointed out, Paracelsians believed ‘all living beings' to have 'a foreordained life span’. Accordingly, the remainder of that span could effectively be drawn from the prematurely slain corpse.42 Armed with this parallel, we can turn back to the apparent beliefs of Magus and others, and ask why such spirits were held to possess their 'enormous power'. Two millennia on, we are likely to imagine, first, that these restlessly earth-bound spirits were somehow angry, unquiet, or vengeful. But in doing so we probably risk imposing an essentially postChristian mindset onto a pre-Christian belief. After all, these spirits do not have to have been 'unjustly' killed; they may just have died young, as so many did in such an era. To put it another way: if we (perhaps inevitably) imagine them as restless ghosts, then we necessarily imbue them with a specifically Christian afterlife, and specifically Christian individuality. By contrast, so much evidence, from Homer, the Old Testament, and the New Testament world, suggests that spirits in those contexts were defined by their impersonally potent force. It was not, therefore, that these magically exploitable spirits were in any way personally restless (and all spirits, we

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should remember, were at this time destined only for Hades or Sheol, not for purgatory or heaven). Rather, they were unfinished, unspent, literally still potent, in the way that a quantity of gas or petrol or electricity is potent. Like the corpses of Old Testament belief, still 'alive' until all their blood was drained, these spirits retained a raw force of life. We should not occlude the idea that this force was the greater for being freed from the darkness of matter. But nor should we forget that it was a concrete force, not merely a concept.43 Once attuned to the impersonal transfer of suitable spirits, we can begin to appreciate how the chain of spiritual exchange could operate after Christ, as well as after John the Baptist. So, 'after Jesus had been executed, the Samaritan magician, Simon, was similarly thought to "be" Jesus. The Christians, of course, maintained that the spirit by which Simon did his miracles was not Jesus but merely a murdered boy'. Much later, 'in thirdcentury Smyrna, Christians were believed to do their miracles by using just such necromantic control of the spirit of Jesus, because he had been crucified'.44 If this was still believed in the third century, it seems very likely that it was believed in the years after Christ's death, when various disciples were performing numerous miracles. Whatever they themselves thought about this power, others must surely have attributed it to the use of the spirit of the violently-killed (and youthful) Jesus.45 Moreover, in both canonical and non-canonical Christian writings, there are some oddly close, perhaps concrete, identifications between Christ and his followers. We have seen that Paul could make some quite conveniently ambiguous elisions between his spirit, and that of God or Christ. When Paul claims "I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2.20); and "I dare speak of nothing save those things which Christ has done through me, by word and deed, by the power of signs and miracles, by the power of [his] spirit, to make the gentiles obedient" (Rom 15.19), just how concrete is he being?46 Given that the canonical Bible can include such statements as those of Paul, we might want to take seriously the noncanonical elision of Peter and Christ. Shortly before his crucifixion in Rome, Peter meets Christ. Asked where he is going, Christ replies, '"I go to Rome to be crucified"'. Peter: '"Lord, are you being crucified again?" ... "Yes, Peter, again I shall be crucified"'.47 Just what is this 'I' that Christ speaks of? It seems that Peter's crucifixion, and the fresh slaying of Christ cannot be mere coincidence. Let us now turn to one of the better known cases of spiritual transfer found in the New Testament.

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The Gadarene Swine The famous incident of the Gadarene swine is related by all the evangelists except John. The three versions are broadly similar, although Matthew claims that Christ cures two men possessed with devils, rather than the single person cited by Luke and Mark. Arrived in the country of the Gadarenes, Christ encounters a man 'which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs' (Luke 8.27). Matthew claims that the men are so ferocious that no one dare pass by the tombs, and Luke and Mark state that their single lunatic would frequently break the chains used to bind him. Luke continues: 'When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I do to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not. (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man ...) And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said Legion: because many devils were entered into him. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. And there was ... an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked' (8.28-33). Before considering in detail what this tells us about the spirit beliefs of Christ's working environment, we can briefly sketch out what a modern day agnostic or atheist might believe to have occurred here. Christ met a man suffering from some kind of lunacy (possibly marked by a multiple personality disorder). While he was attempting to cure him, a herd of swine was panicked for some reason and charged off a cliff into the sea of Galilee.48 (G.A. Wells argued some time ago that the swine were panicked by the man's paroxysms during the exorcism.49 The theory is certainly plausible, given that animals can often be particularly sensitive to the physical behaviour of humans or other animals.) The man was then persuaded that he was free of the devils, which had so convincingly been shown to be in the swine.50 We will see in a moment that the close fit between this episode and local spirit beliefs is one good reason for thinking that it did actually occur. We can also add one quite exact detail supplied by Mark: the lunatic was given, he states, to 'crying out and cutting himself with stones' (5.5). This looks broadly like a case of psychotic self-harm, and more precisely like a crude attempt at self-cure: the man may well have been trying to harm the demons, rather than himself.

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The most obvious New Testament quality of the incident is the characteristic transfer of spirit forces. Here as elsewhere, the belief is precise and logical. As with the pool of Bethesda, the underlying law is: one spirit, one cure (or possession). The story as we now have it was almost certainly rationalised in order to comply with this kind of law. That is: a whole herd of pigs was panicked, hence the necessity for the alleged 'legion'. Each swine was possessed with at least one devil.51 Once again, the idea of negative transfer of spirits can be found more or less universally. In the realm of illness, we find various instances in early-modern Europe (a culture hardly less vulnerable to disease, and arguably more so, in times of plague). Onions, for example, were a valuable defence against the plague, because they were absorbent, and would therefore draw away the baneful spirits which transferred this disease. The same principle underlay the idea that you could use a live chicken, pressed against a plague sore. You would do this until the creature died (perhaps, in reality, of shock) and then apply another. You repeated this until you reached a chicken which survived. This indicated that all the plague spirits had been drawn out of you. The tail feathers of the chickens would first be plucked out, in order to facilitate the transfer of spirits into their bodies.52 Nor were such habits mere popular superstition. Robert Boyle, for one, seems to have credited a number of accounts by which human illnesses were transferred to animals.53 The pervasiveness and durability of such beliefs is further underscored by their persistence into the twentieth century. In parts of North America circa 1934, for example, you could cure a bruise by pressing it against the stomach of a live toad until it died (the stomach probably being chosen for its greater absorbency).54 A particularly vivid (and ironic) instance of such transfer was described by a Greek peasant not long before 1970. In this highly magical culture a baby had become sick because it had been taken from its house before the prescribed forty day period after birth. The mother and a local healer took the child to the seashore for a curative magical ceremony, and the father, waiting some distance off, heard the child cry and came to chide them for their carelessness. Both women swore that the child had been silent the whole time. ‘Then we understood what had happened: when the spell was broken and the child was freed from disease, why then, the demon’s child got the sickness and started crying!’.55 In slightly altered form, this kind of belief can be found in our own lifetimes. Studying the medicine of the Taman people of Borneo, Jay H. Bernstein cites a cure in which the patient sits on a mat and is stroked with amulets by a healer. After blessings, the patient stands up and brushes themself off. The dirt from the mat is then tapped into a bowl of water, and

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a further procedure is used to kill the disease-bearing dirt, at this stage still alive within the water.56 Compare, again, the following use of nail-clippings. Taken from a sick person, these are mixed with wax. After you have said out loud, ‘I am about a remedy for the ague’, you then put them over the door of some healthy person. By sunrise your patient will be well, and the fever have passed into the house of your chosen victim (recall Smith's point about fever and suggestion). This recipe in fact derives originally from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Born in Italy in 23AD and killed in 79AD (by the eruption of Vesuvius) Pliny was writing shortly after the evangelism of Christ and his disciples. Although Pliny was notably derisive about certain forms of magic, he seems to have credited various kinds of spirit transfer. He was happy enough to advise his readers (notes Janowitz) that a heavy cold would clear up if the sufferer kissed the muzzle of a mule. Whether the beast was particularly absorbent is a question for veterinarians. But we can add that, conversely, Pliny rejected the contemporary habit of putting nail parings on doorposts because this might spread disease.57 This last belief in particular brings us back not only to the New Testament era, but also to the most stereotypically kind of 'primitive' fears about negative magic. And, as Hull in particular has shown, Luke's version of the Gadarene episode exhibits a quite painstaking awareness of the magical and demonological issues involved. For it was not merely a question of one demon, one possession. No less important was the exact nature of these particular demons. 'The Gerasene incident describes a water-hating, desert-loving demon. This characteristic appears more clearly in Luke than in the other gospels, Luke alone saying (8.29) that the Legion would take the man "off to the solitary places"'.58 While Luke does indeed pay more attention to details of demon lore, he is of course broadly echoed by his fellow evangelists, who cite the demons' emphatic fear of water. Probing further into the period's demonology, Hull adds that, 'water was a potent demon-destroying force'. In the Testament of Solomon, for example, the demon Asmodeus pleads, "I pray thee, King Solomon, condemn me not to go into water."'. Elsewhere in the same work, 'a passage added to the document under Christian influence' has a demon saying of Emmanuel [i.e., Christ]: "He it is who has bound us and who will then come and plunge us from the steep under water."' 'This text' (concludes Hull) 'shows that the fate of the Gerasene demons was regarded by the Christian editor as that of extinction by drowning'.59 Hull also cites a related passage on spirits (one briefly discussed above), found in both Luke and Matthew. In the version of the former:

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'When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth [it] swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh [to him] seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last [state] of that man is worse than the first' (Luke 11.24-26).60 Here we have a demon unsuited to the desert regions, rather than to water. We also have a close parallel to the Gadarene case, insofar as this passage shows why the demons might be better re-housed in swine than simply cast out into the world per se. Although the Gadarene spirits were evidently not hostile to desert or wilderness regions, they, like spirits in general, seem to prefer a quite specific, de-limited vehicle, namely, a human or animal body. To simply loose them into the open is therefore dangerous - a merely temporary measure until they re-inhabit the sufferer or another victim. Luke's respect for demonology helps affirm the reality of the spirit world by underlining its complexity. And its reality is further emphasised by the conclusion of the Gadarene affair. Matthew has the local population all come to Christ, where they 'besought him that he would depart out of their coasts' (8.34). Mark states that those who came to see the healed man 'were afraid' (5.15). Most emphatically of all, in Luke's version 'the whole multitude' of the local population 'besought him to depart from them; for they were taken with great fear' (8.37). Any possible gratitude for the taming of a dangerous lunatic is overwhelmed by a terror which is both potent and collective. This terror seems to be founded, at one basic level, in a serious belief in the power and reality of the spirit world. Secondly, it is inspired by the fact that Christ has the ability to manipulate this dangerous realm, and the sense that such meddling is rash and disruptive. Rather like a disease stored away in a laboratory, one or two lunatics may be a potential nuisance, but they are reassuringly familiar and contained vehicles of spirit forces. Break the disease out of the laboratory, and you have another scale of anxiety altogether. Given that all three authors agree on the request for Christ and followers to leave, we can well imagine not only that this element is authentic, but also that the perhaps euphemistic phrasing conceals more urgent, hysterical, or hostile attitudes on the part of the Gadarenes.61 All in all, this incident neatly distils several key features of spirit behaviour and associated magic. Spirits transfer, but do not easily disappear. As in numerous cases across history, one man's cure is another pig's downfall. The spirits in question are part of a well-defined taxonomy, and they are real and dangerous. Anyone who persists in seeing this tale as religious absolutism rather than empirical magic might want to bear in

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mind some of the problems offered by a 'face-value' reading of the story. First: Christ here indulges in a peculiarly irresponsible piece of showmanship, casting the devils into the swine as a form of proof that they have been banished from the lunatic. (This is of course a real possibility, and would suit readers who prefer to believe that Christ was in control of the whole scenario, rather than merely being the recipient of a lucky accident. Christ could have assumed that it was possible to make the pigs behave oddly, and may have done far more to provoke such panic than the gospels admit.) Secondly, there remains the very odd idea of Christ making a bargain with devils, who must ultimately be the agents of his arch-enemy, Satan. Thirdly, he does not even keep this bargain, as the devils are then cast into the deep when the swine plunge into the sea of Galilee. This manipulation and lying more closely resembles the typical habits of Satan rather than of Christ. Fourthly, he seems to have committed an evil act, destroying harmless animals (as many as two thousand, if we believe Mark), and damaging the livelihood of their owner. All in all, the view of Christ left by this tale looks very much closer to the sorcerers and the witch-craft which biblical authors elsewhere denounce. Perhaps most of all, Christ seems notably to manipulate and cajole supernatural forces (as any sorcerer or witch might do), rather than unequivocally commanding them. A more submerged but ultimately significant point concerns the difficulty of transferring spirit from humans to animals. For full-blown Christianity, a (or The) devil would usually have possession of one's highest, rational soul, the most typically human level of spirit. It is not obvious that a spirit in that context could be neatly re-housed in an animal, which does not possess a rational soul. Presumably, a self-respecting devil of (say) the early-modern period would take this as something of an insult, and perhaps behave like the restless spirit of the dry places.

Vehicles of spirit (I): Spittle, Oil, Bread In chapter nine of John's gospel Christ heals a blind man. This is presented as a particularly startling miracle ('Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind') and certainly seems to have stood as a valuable proof of Christ's divinity, both then and in later eras. Christ indeed quite explicitly (perhaps a little callously) remarks just before the cure that the man had been born blind precisely so that 'the works of God should be made manifest in him' (9.3); and John then goes to some trouble to insist on the veracity of the tale (9.8ff). Ironically, however, this is perhaps the most strikingly magical cure found

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in the whole of the New Testament. For Christ 'spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam' (9.6-7). Having done this, the blind man finds that he can see. We should note that the man's sight is evidently not restored until he has washed in the pool. As we saw above, the pool of Siloam and the pool of Bethesda were in reality the same thing. It is therefore quite possible that the man was favourably predisposed to belief in a cure by this site's miraculous reputation. It also seems very likely that Christ himself chose the pool accordingly. Our chief concern here is with the use of spittle and earth as vehicles of magical transmission. But it is also worth briefly emphasising that this kind of cure can now seem a particularly low or vulgar kind of magic. Many later Christians prefer to see their God and his son as people who work by absolutist command, without using homely materials, or indeed intermediary agents of any kind. Thus, G.H. Twelftree, writing around 1992, singles out Jesus' exorcisms because 'he did not use mechanical devices'.62 While this claim already involves some notable fudging in the case of the Gadarene swine, it is still more ironic that one of Yahweh's most primary and far-reaching acts was itself remarkably similar to Christ's healing clay. Adam was mashed up from plain mud, and 'became a living soul' when the Creator's breath spurted up his nostrils. The parallel is useful: in part because it reminds us that an absolutist and abstracting view of divine power is a post-Scriptural distortion. And it is useful, too, because in both Hebrew and Stoic cosmology, the forces of spirit or animation cannot exist in a disembodied state. In a highly animistic culture, the problem is not so much obtaining spirit powers, as containing them. Thus Christ's clay localises and utilises an unspecified force.63 Two other examples suggest, however, that even spittle alone can be a sufficient vehicle of magical or healing power. Mark chapter seven tells of how there was brought to Christ 'one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him. And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain' (7.32-5). It has been emphasised that both looking up to heaven and sighing were well-attested techniques of magical healers.64 Christ also deliberately touches the man's eardrums and his tongue. As Smith points out, magicians would commonly touch their patients, and 'fluid could help to make the contact closer; the readiest form of fluid was spittle, and both spittle and the act of spitting were commonly believed to

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have magical powers; so we find Jesus, like other magicians, smearing spittle on his patients or using a salve made with spittle'.65 At one level we can note that Christ's techniques here seem carefully designed to make some impact on his patient. The man cannot hear what he says, but can see Christ looking up to heaven. He can probably also see him sigh. Does he believe that this sigh is itself a vehicle for the transmission of healing power?66 As we will see, Christ himself evidently did believe that he could transmit power through his breath. A third use of saliva as a vehicle comes again from Mark, just a few verses on: And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put [his] hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly (8.22-25).

As Hull notes, this again is far from being a case of absolute fiat, as the treatment works only in distinct stages ('when the answer [to 'can you see?'] is only partly in the affirmative, the treatment ... is applied for a second time'.67) Like Smith and Janowitz, Hull also elaborates on the relatively widespread use of saliva in magical healing. 'All races of antiquity attached magical significance to spittle ... the power of a man is in his saliva and may be used against him'. It could be used in creation; Thoth uses his to heal the eye of Set.68 Pliny, notes Clark Kee, reports the beliefs that spittle protected one against snakes, increased the force of a blow (if one spat into one's hand) and could treat 'incipient boils ... leprous sores' and (most notably of all) 'eye diseases'.69 Albeit in slightly altered ways, saliva seems to have survived in popular magic well into the seventeenth century; in the 1998 film, The Red Violin, a female fortuneteller of that period has an expectant mother take bones which her husband is required to spit upon to aid the coming delivery and health of the child.70 Hull also states that, 'with the use of spittle we are in that shadowy world where medicine fades into magic and no sharp distinction can be made'.71 If this is broadly true, it could risk implying that magic is rather more irrational and esoteric than was actually the case, c.30 AD. The healing power of spittle has its own logic and consistency. At one level, it is founded on the sense that cosmic forces, such as pneuma, can be localised and transferred. At another, it is founded, not merely on the idea that certain individuals are especially good at manipulating this force, but

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that they themselves somehow carry - or even intensify - particularly potent charges of it. Thus the emperor Vespasian was asked to use his spittle to cure a blind man. In this case, Vespasian clearly did not play up any kind of healing performance, given that he himself was reputedly incredulous. For all that, the patient was supposedly cured at once.72 In such incidences, the request and hope for cure were clearly based on a sense of one individual's special power, and effective cures (if psychosomatic) were probably based on that too.73 We can see the same kind of pattern in Christ's healing career, given that most of his patients came to him (or were brought to him) as his reputation grew. However 'superstitious' it may now seem, then, the period's magical theory was not so homely as to imagine that just anyone could merely spit on some dust, apply it, and cure blindness. Certain privileged people channelled and focussed spirit powers, and Christ was one of these. It is surely no accident that the three canonical saliva-miracles occur in either John or the eminently magical St Mark. Matthew, we can imagine, was not going to touch this sort of thing with a twenty-cubit pole. Having said that, it is important to be aware that other uses of a transmitting vehicle can be overlooked. Oil, for example, was not merely a symbolic agent in baptism, but was used because it 'remains longer on the skin and the power can therefore penetrate further. In the Acts of Thomas the exorcist' first uses prayer and then 'breathes over the oil and the power [of Jesus] enters the oil'.74 Hull also stresses that 'the best way to retain power is to swallow something. From this arises the custom of swallowing an amulet or swallowing water with which a magical charm has been washed'.75 Compare this notion with a pivotal moment shortly before Christ's betrayal and trial. Telling the disciples that one of them will betray him, he is asked who this will be. 'Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped [it]. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave [it] to Judas Iscariot, [the son] of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly' (John 13.26-7). It is typical of a later, abstracting Christianity to see the use of the bread as purely symbolic. For Smith, however, it is in fact concretely instrumental: 'the notion that a demon can be sent into food so as to enter anyone who eats the food is common, particularly in love charms'. In this view, the bread is used to transfer a negative spiritual force, just as the saliva was used to transfer positive energies. (Notice, again, that such a belief is broadly consistent with Paul's transmission of his pneuma, either via letter, or the 'aprons and handkerchiefs' seen in Acts.) Smith adds that even Christ's 'concluding command [... do quickly] ... echoes a common conclusion of spells, "Now, now! Quick, quick!"'.76

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The above cases strongly imply that vehicles are used in healing in order to transfer spirit forces. Let us now turn to Scripture's most central example of this phenomenon.

Vehicles of spirit (II): The Hem of Christ’s Garment Not long after the episode of the Gadarene swine, Christ enters 'his own city' of Capernaum.77 His powers are now so highly prized that numerous people throng about him as he goes on request to a house where a young girl has recently died. In Matthew's version: 'And Jesus arose, and followed [the girl's father], and so did his disciples. And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment: For she said within herself: If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour' (19-22). If we had only Matthew's account, our interest in this episode would be quite limited. But in the gospels of both Mark and Luke there are certain important differences. The latter tells us: But as he went the people thronged him. And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: And immediately her issue of blood stanched. And Jesus said, Who touched me? When all denied, Peter and they that were with him said, Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately. And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace (8.42-48).

Mark's version is very close to Luke's. We find, then, that Matthew has here produced a particularly compressed and distorted version of an event which he perceives as either too magical, or too concrete, to suit his version of Christ. Yet even Mark and Luke (or those on whom they relied) may have distorted this event significantly. That is: they allow Christ to impose a measure of control and authority on a situation in which he is in fact quite impersonally exploited. The woman touches him, and is cured. She does not need his permission or his blessing (by which he does not

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merely comfort her, but potentially rewrites the cure as a matter of 'Christian faith'.) This distortion is writ large by Matthew. The emission of 'virtue' has gone; if we had this account alone, we would probably just guess that Christ felt one particular tug at his robe, and turned accordingly. Most importantly of all, we are led to infer that nothing has happened to the woman until Christ turns and effects his seemingly abstract verbal cure. Let us now briefly consider the intriguing issue of what may have been felt in this strange encounter. Both Christ and the woman feel something very definite and forceful. The woman's feeling can be gauged from Luke, if we believe that a psychosomatic cure has been effected. For her combined expectation and confidence in Christ's reputation were evidently sufficient to catalyse an at least temporary chemical cure. Anyone who does not believe in this possibility must still reckon with Mark, who states a little differently, 'And straightway the fountain of blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague' (5.29, italics mine). Which came first? The feeling, or the drying up of the blood-flow? If it was actually the feeling, then we have a stronger case for psychosomatic cure, with the woman's feeling being a measure of her readiness to be healed, and the cure following straight after. But we do not have to decide this question in order to accept that she felt something – an experience which the phrase 'in her body' seems to deliberately slant toward the physical rather than the mental. What was this feeling? It would be rash to attempt a final answer to a question which must remain at least partly subjective.78 But it would be reasonable to assume that the woman was at once immensely anxious and tremulously hopeful. She was extremely tense. When she had managed to make the acutely-desired contact, she relaxed. Her hope expanded. Small wonder that she felt something. It may seem stranger that Christ did so. Although we hardly need to prove this (given Christ's own insistence on it), it is interesting to consider that a touch fraught with so much nervous hope may well have been distinct from the general jostling of the crowd (just as the deliberate touch of one's friend, trying to gain attention, would be distinct in the crowded wedge of a tube-train).79 This impression actually accords with the period's own theory of the transmission of spirit forces. As Hull points out, while 'the power set up a sort of field around Jesus', affecting 'his clothing right down to the hem of his outer garment ... it is only touching for a deliberate purpose which can bring about this depletion of power, and this is why the woman is said to have "explained why she touched him"'.80 If we turn back to what the woman felt, we can remind ourselves of the

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peculiar charisma of those Old Testament prophets. These people radiated a force so great, so potently tangible that it simply must have come from somewhere else, running as it did off the scale of ordinary human powers. Accordingly, these men were honoured with the notion that God had deliberately boosted their vitality, injecting additional ruach into their bodies. Christ clearly had immense charisma. He had the confidence to act in a way which inspired confidence or fear. In his climate, confidence bred cures. For whatever reason, this kind of person does seem to quite literally make people feel something by means of mere physical proximity. They subtly warp and condition the air around them. It may be, then, that the woman really did feel something of this heightened psychic pressure (as she would not have done if (say) she had been blindfolded and put in the presence of a man who was reputedly Christ). Let us now consider this highly empirical transference in linguistic terms. The original Greek word, dynamis, also lies at the root of the word 'dynamic'; and the OED's first sense of this term ('of or pertaining to force producing motion: often opposed to static') already gives us some hint as to the typically mobile and transferable character of the forces involved in the cure.81 Sense 3 ('active, potent, energetic, effective, forceful') offers us further synonyms which fit the concrete processes of the period's magical healing (and here phrases such as 'he's really dynamic' or 'she's quite a dynamo' would broadly apply to Christ as someone marked by unusual energy and personal force). Sense 5b, meanwhile, shows how the word could still be associated with some kind of corporeal spirits as late as the nineteenth century: 'with Hahnemann and his followers: of the nature of some immaterial or "spiritual" influence'. Shifting back to some of the more influential uses of the word in Ancient Greek medicine, we find thanks to Harold W. Miller - that dynamis could not only have an important medical sense, but that - in one Hippocratic work in particular it was at once concretely physiological, and involved in bridging the line between body and soul.82 The two common English renderings of dynamis are 'virtue' and 'power'. For some readers the first of these could produce an ironic distortion of the New Testament Greek. As Christianity established itself, it often presented 'virtue' as something passive, deliberately limited to a person, rather than something likely to pass in or out of them. All too frequently, 'Christian virtue' would be the power not to do things. But the early-modern readers of the King James Bible would have been far more ready to closely associate power and virtue, with the latter term often referring, for example, to the particular medical powers of a herb or other medicinal agent.83 Again, as the OED reminds us, it could at this time

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denote 'The power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural or divine being'.84 Despite surviving phrases such as 'by virtue [i.e., power] of', for modern readers 'power' probably gives a better sense of the concrete force (and consequent effects) of 'dynamis'. Even this word can appear (or be read) more or less abstractly, especially when it appears in verbal formulae such as 'faith and power', or 'power and authority'. Once alerted, however, to the sense of concrete and effectual transference of power which we have just witnessed, we are able to detect innumerable similar cases in the synoptic gospels and the Acts. Mark talks of the 'power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils' (3.15), and of how Christ 'called [unto him] the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits' (6.7), with even Matthew precisely echoing this verse.85 The latter also tells how, after Christ cures a man afflicted with palsy, 'the multitudes ... marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men' (9.8). Compounding the impressions we had earlier, we find that dynamis effects the immaculate conception ('The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee' (Luke 1.35)), and that it has later been spiritually injected into Christ at his baptism, in order to empower him for his miraculous career: 'And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about' (Luke 4.14). This verse (which may also refer to the newly-won, perceptible charisma of Christ after his successful battle with Satan) is echoed by Acts ('How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him' (10.38)). Acts also includes a less obvious, but clearly associated, sense of dynamis when it presents Christ as one 'to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God' (8.10). Similarly, Christ's cures and miracles are 'acts of power' (Matthew 13.58, Mark 6.2), and the disciples are given power so that they can perform cures: 'And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high' (Luke 24:49). Here the 'until' signals the typically precise, localised moment of receiving that power, with the associated abilities that follow. Acts 6.8, similarly, relates how 'Stephen, full of faith and power [dynamis], did great wonders among the people'. In a number of places dynamis is also used to refer to the ultimate spiritual capacity, the power of God or of the heavens.86 Like the forces of electricity, of wind or water, of magnetism or gravity, New Testament power did things. It made things happen. It was

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often localised, concrete, impersonal, and transferable. It was felt in varying ways. All in all, it was very much like many uses of pneuma, and the two terms are quite frequently associated.87 Familiar as we now are with the highly material or dynamic qualities of New Testament spirits, we should pause to remind ourselves that for many post-Christian readers 'power and spirit' or 'power of the spirit' could register as some of the vaguest or most abstract formulae of Scripture. Although there are various reasons for this kind of shift, it is no surprise to learn that John, with his distinctive theology of pre-incarnation, makes not one use of dynamis. When Christ, for example, tells Pilate that 'Thou couldest have no power [at all] against me, except it were given thee from above' (John 19.11) the Greek word is 'exousian', meaning 'authority'. For John, Christ had always had power, and it was usually absolute. When we come to Paul, it is unsurprising to find that his uses of power, like his uses of spirit, are not always graced with the most luminous clarity. Yet even here, expected Christian dualisms can be thoroughly inverted. When he tells the Corinthians, 'But I will come to you shortly, if the Lord will, and will know, not the speech of them which are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of God [is] not in word, but in power', he really does seem to be opposing airy words to a power which is at once spiritual and material.88 Whatever the later Christian tendency to elevate abstract wisdom and abstract words, Paul's hostility to 'mere words' is consistent with his opposition to philosophy, and to the evident ridicule he suffered at the hands of bemused Greek thinkers.89 And it is also consistent with a man whose sense of coming power was imminent and fiercely urgent; as we have seen, Paul was no Thomas Aquinas, spinning out intricate webs of language, some ten and more centuries after Christ's failed reappearance. In non-canonical writings, we find Paul insisting, 'I am not strong except the Lord grant me power'; and dynamis being represented as the power to raise the dead.90 But it is back in the safely traditional gospel of Luke that we find the closest parallel to the lively power of Christ's healing garment. Early on in his career, Christ is similarly thronged by the hopeful (or desperate) sick, 'which came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases; And they that were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed [them] all' (6.17-19).91 Here, in a few bare words which might easily be skimmed over, Luke implies that the sick woman of Chapter 8 was merely doing what the bulk of the crowds were doing throughout Christ's mission.92 They behaved in the same way because they thought in the same way. Yet, if we had only this one

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reference to the emission of virtue, we might well fail to see its full significance. Thanks to the oddly fractious encounter between Christ and the furtive woman, we are able to realise just how exact and concrete such emission was. And we can also wonder, accordingly, about the context of Luke 6. For Christ had in fact just made a potentially shamanistic visit to a mountain, where he had been praying (allegedly to God) all night. Was this another (albeit smaller) version of the temptations in the wilderness? Did Christ, freshly invigorated by a shamanistic experience, quite perceptibly exude the virtue and charisma which prompted men and women to try and absorb powers directly from his body?93

Parallels In the case of the Gadarene swine we noted various parallel forms of transference and negative transference. The verses from Mark 5 and Luke 8 involve transmission of spirits or power into Christ's robe - something which most of us would consider to be an inanimate object. Allowing for regional and historical variations, we find that the psychology of that episode seems to be quite primal and universal. Various cannibal tribes would eat their own kin or other dead bodies in order to absorb that kind of power.94 In early-modern Europe, the corpses of executed felons were thought by many to have healing power. This could be understood as part of the wider phenomenon of corpse medicine, but could also be partially distinct from it, insofar as the powers of the criminal body were peculiarly transferable. Anything close to such a powerful entity would absorb some of that power, just as surely as plants absorb sunlight. Hence, it was believed in France that the hangman could cure ‘certain forms of illness by touching the sick with his hand when returning from carrying out an execution’.95 The executioner's rope was also held by many to have absorbed a similar potency, and was accordingly so valuable that an executioner might sell it, cut into the smallest possible pieces, to satisfy demand and maximise personal profit.96 As late as the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy's story 'The Withered Arm' has a young woman taking some trouble to touch the corpse of a recently hanged man to cure the arm in question, and at this point the rope is still 'sold by the inch' after the hanging.97 All these cases derive from various stages of Christian culture. The early-modern instances, when Christianity was far more full blooded than in its Victorian phase, probably did involve belief in the agency of spirits. To illustrate this vividly, and to show just how someone could supposedly feel something similar to what Christ and the sick woman felt, we can look

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briefly at a peculiar tale related before 1637. In this period, many educated people believed that spirits could remain for at least some time in the flesh of a corpse. As a strong believer in the efficacy of corpse medicine, the anatomist and physician Robert Fludd conducted an experiment in order to observe the behaviour of these invisible but potent forces. He took some flesh from 'a man strangled in the air' and 'applied it ... unto the part of my body, which was nearest unto it in natural position'. The spirits which still remained in this dead flesh were presently agitated by the presence of a live body. Accordingly, Fludd noticed that 'they drew off my mumial and vivifying spirits greedily, and at some times ... I felt them ... sensibly ... to tug and pull some adjacent parts'. When the corpse flesh was removed, Fludd 'found it much altered in smell and view, by reason of the quantity of my spirits ... attracted' into it.98 Although this alteration was probably the result of natural processes of decay, Fludd's reading of the change was clearly genuine. Similarly, his tendency to link the power of spirits with the effects of magnetism also shows us how tangible was his feeling of these spirits tugging 'greedily' at his own body. As should by now be clear, Fludd's experience was of course more genuinely 'Christian' than that of Christ and those who felt his healing powers, c.30 AD. In the earlier era, Christianity was subordinate to preexisting cosmologies. We have seen that one of these, the Hebraic, could make sense of such phenomena through Old Testament ideas of ruach. Considering the New Testament status of dynamis at some length, Hull offers other parallels. He notes, for example, how in the third century Testament of Solomon, dynamis occurs about nineteen times, 'never in the Marcan sense of miracle but often in the Lucan sense of an emanation from a spiritual being of his energy'. While the distinction between Mark and Luke is probably less solid than Hull implies, his general point is important, and its reference to concrete forces is neatly underlined by one particular usage from this source, involving 'the power of a muscle'.99 But the parallel which Hull emphasises most heavily is the 'primitive conception of mana'. Citing Friedrich Preisigke, he compares belief in dynamis to the Egyptian idea of Ra or Amon-Ra, the sun-god: 'Everything lives as a consequence of the flooding of Amon-Ra into everything', a power or spirit which 'cannot work without a vessel or container'. 'This divine presence exists in different degrees in plants, animals and men ... There may also be lifeless images of the God similarly full of high tension - such as statues or the property of the king'.100 Like 'Amon-Ra', pneuma was indeed a pervasive life-principle, and one which, similarly, could not 'work without a vessel or container'.101 No

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less apt is Preisigke's emphasis on tension: 'Christ is no more than the vessel, the bearer of this power. A vessel is necessary to the power as a surface is necessary to light. But only certain persons can carry such high tension, else why should the woman have come to Christ?'.102 At one level this idea fits the distinctive personal charisma discussed above. At a much wider, cosmic level it chimes perfectly with a central element of Stoic physics: 'all existing things involve the two principles of matter and pneuma and the qualities within any existing thing are owing to the tension (tonos) of the pneuma in it. Different degrees of tension will generate different qualities'.103 This continuum of animated matter also matches Harold Miller's analysis of dynamis. There is, for example, a specific dynamis of plants, echoing the fourfold Stoic grading of pneuma; while the supposedly differing physiological heat of men and women is also held to be a property of their respective dynameis.104

Faith versus Magic For much of Christian history, faith has been an integral part of theology and personal identity. In the centuries before science, when disease and death crushed humanity underfoot more or less unchecked, and in our own time, when science has been turned against humanity in a century of apocalyptic wars, this central Christian virtue is very often a 'leap of faith'. It is faith in something distant, abstract, intangible. By yet one more of those deft tergiversations in which religious psychology so often excels, this unreasoning faith - so frequently unsupported by hard evidence or results - has become a mark of virtue in the humble and undemanding believer, that meek Christian who will, at some conveniently unspecified date, come to inherit the earth. Christ himself certainly emphasises the need for faith. He refers to it several times, occasionally with some heat or even egotism, as when he inveighs against that 'faithless and perverse generation' which he wishes to suffer no longer.105 Variations of the phrase 'ye of little faith' are fairly common. But the faith of the New Testament is clearly very different from that of a Christian living in the medieval or early-modern periods. If we admit, hypothetically, that some of his peers had faith in Christ himself as the kind of being John presents (someone intrinsically powerful since his divine birth), we have to recognise that even these individuals were not achieving the kind of 'leap of faith' made by much later generations. For Christ showed results. They were happening on a daily basis, right there in Palestine, perhaps to yourself, perhaps to your friends or relatives. We should also bear in mind that, if you were desperate for a cure, then you

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would very probably do whatever Christ told you. If a successful cure required you to 'have faith', then you complied without any questions, and very possibly without fully realising what this meant. We have just seen how Christ may have imposed the healing power of faith onto the episode of the furtive touch and associated cure. He also does something broadly similar in the case of the pool of Bethesda, opposing a relatively abstract faith to the empirical magic of the healing pool. But if the woman of Luke 8 and Mark 5 had any 'faith', it bore very little relation to that of a fully developed, orthodox Christianity. As argued, she almost certainly wanted to believe in the possibility of a cure. But she did not have faith in Christ as a person, as a unique, divine and abstractly miraculous individual. She had faith in the power of Christ's body to contain and transfer healing power. She was probably no more sentimental or devoted to Christ than a gambler who has faith in the speed of a horse with a very good track record. Or, in the words of Preisigke, the woman's 'trust is not in Christ's mission, nor in him as salvation bringer in the Christian sense, for then the request would have been to the person of Christ, not to his garment. The faith is in the power. What the woman wants is the power, not the Christ; the water, not the fireman'.106 We have here, then, two levels of faith significantly distinct from that of later Christianity. One is a faith in Christ as someone who visibly produced positive results. The other is a faith in Christ as a focus for the powers which produced such results. It is also interesting to consider one other variant of the more familiar, typical Christian faith. We have seen that Christ could show some respect for empiricism or empirical laws. Did he therefore believe in a certain quite concrete interplay between faith and healing? That is: he may have felt that the woman's belief was what caused the virtue to be drawn out of him, thereby catalysing the process of transference and cure. Setting the original attitudes of the New Testament against the 'faith' of later Christians we encounter a strange irony: those meekly pious, suffering faithful, cleaving to the idea of a God who so consistently failed to do anything definite, seemed to have forgotten that one key impetus to the initial founding of Christianity was precisely its seeming power to do very tangible, worldly, material things. Before it became a virtue to unquestioningly 'have faith', one was far more likely to put one's faith in virtue - the real, concrete power or dynamis of that rare human vehicle able to bear the extraordinary weight of such forces. It should already be clear that such faith could be thoroughly impersonal. Could it also have been - from the woman's point of view quite definitely exploitative? Our discussion of the Gadarene swine has made it abundantly clear how widely and how long belief in spiritual

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transfer of disease persisted in popular culture. Although data on this topic is necessarily thin, what there is strongly indicates that the 'miraculous' transfers of the New Testament were relatively common and mundane matters for the two millennia following Christ's death. In popular culture, ordinary magic was the rule, not the exception. The three gospel accounts of this cure all seem to agree on one thing: the woman's touch was deliberately covert. She furtively attempted to touch Christ's garment without his knowledge. Susan Haber has very plausibly argued that this was because the woman - like all those around her - was sharply conscious of the kind of Jewish purity laws discussed above, in chapter two. The flux of blood made her 'unclean', and it was for this reason that she should not have touched Christ, or any other Jews.107 Yet this explanation does not rule out a second reason for the woman's furtive behaviour. Was she in fact trying, not to gain power from Christ, but to transfer her disease to him? Recall Preisigke's description of Christ in this context: 'a vessel is necessary to the power as a surface is necessary to light. But only certain persons can carry such high tension...'. Perhaps, in the woman's mind, only certain persons could safely absorb other people's diseases. Or - to be a little more precise - they could do so up to a point. Compare the beliefs of those at once ultra-pious and habitually magical Greeks interviewed by the Blums in the 1960s: ‘when he was healing, Jesus took the sins of others upon himself; eventually he died from this. That’s like with the healers here; when Maria, for example, cures others of pain, that pain is transferred to her, but she has no place to put the bad after that’.108 Here, as with the Gadarene swine, disease or spirit forces can only be transferred, never destroyed. The quoted words seem, first, to make a typically concrete elision between sins and diseases; the two are more or less inextricable, and those 'sins' which materially weaken Christ are far from purely abstract. Accepting that elision, we then find that Christ - like Maria - is absorbing very real, physical forces. We must at least consider the possibility that the woman, when touching him, had a similar idea of his powers, and the ultimate danger which successive cures posed for him. Note too the comfortably natural movement from Christ to the living healers of the Greek informant's village. In an oblique but very real sense, that at once heretical and undoubtedly pious stance merely rewrites Preisigke's belief, that Christ could be seen as an impersonally potent medium: one which could either emit or absorb spiritual forces. In the latter case, the supposed 'son of God' is potentially no more than a kind of convenient spiritual dustbin. Let us now turn to the miraculous exploits of Christ's most devoted followers.

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The Disciples The Transfer of Power We saw in chapter four that there was a quite definite infusion of spirit into the apostles at Pentecost. Whatever we think of the supposedly 'mighty wind' and 'tongues of fire', we can rely more safely on those derisive bystanders who, 'mocking said, these men are full of new wine' (Acts 2.13). However one interpreted the apostles' peculiar condition, it is clear that the injection of pneuma was associated with a very definite and extraordinary psychic state. And the disciples had also been quite definitely invested with power during Christ's lifetime. Luke tells us that, just after the raising of Jairus' daughter, Christ 'called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power [dynamis] and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases' (9.1).109 If we consider this question of deliberate transfer with the aid of Hull's ideas, we find that Christ's power seems to have been delivered over to his disciples in distinct stages. Commenting on the power conveyed by Christ's garment into the sick woman, Hull first underlines the impersonal fluidity of this force: 'the power can be passed from one person to another. It is not a moral quality nor a learned skill but an acquisition'. Moreover, it is 'a property which can be conveyed either with the will of the donor, as in Luke 9.1 or without it, as in 8.46'. That is, the woman did not receive sufficient power to enable her to become a healer, because the will of the donor would need to be exerted to effect this.110 Turning to Luke 24.49 ('And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high') Hull argues that this last promise refers to power 'directly from the source of power itself'. And this, he believes, is probably why 'the success of the church in Acts is more dramatic than the limited and partial success of the disciples during the ministry of Jesus'.111 Extending this theory slightly, we can infer that, at his death, Christ is able to transfer not just some power (as he did in Luke 9), but all of his power, now that he, absorbed into the Godhead, will no longer require it. Interestingly, John broadly agrees with Luke about this post-mortem transfer. He tells of how the risen Christ blesses the disciples, and informs them, 'as my Father hath sent me, even so I send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them' (20.2123). We have here a striking glimpse of the very tangible action of pneuma: Christ quite definitely breathes the Holy Ghost onto and into the

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disciples.112 Paul's insistence that 'the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power', seems to be precisely and concretely foreshadowed here. Christ's words make clear what is happening, and what it means, but it is not obvious that they are materially performative. What seems to count most is the physical transfer of pneuma through breath. It is probably characteristic of John to link this power with remission of sin, rather than with healing or other miracles. In doing this, he suggests a particularly surprising role for the spirit powers bestowed on the disciples. Here pneuma can not only work materially on material things (bodies and their diseases); it can also work materially on seemingly immaterial things namely, sins. This increased sphere of pneumatic influence would appear to further marginalise and depersonalise the role of Christ. Forgiveness of sins (surely the supreme power, in Christian theology) is no longer limited to the personal choice of Christ, but extended to mere humans, and concretely effected by the injection of pneuma into their bodies. If we remained in any doubt about the material reality of this act, we should be persuaded by some of the associated details and parallels. Two closely related points are suggested by Hull: 'normally the skin provides the opening for the power but if an extraordinarily large influx is needed a larger opening will be used. So God breathed his spirit into man through the nose, and in John 20.22 the power leaves Christ through his mouth. In Pistis Sophia 141 we read: "Christ blessed the disciples and breathed into their eyes"'.113 We will see in a few moments that spirits could undoubtedly be absorbed through the eyes, and with sometimes devastating effects. Whatever orthodox Christians might say about the non-canonical source of the above statement, it is hard to deny that it offers a perfectly logical extension of the canonical verses in John. There would be little point in breathing, in such a context, if the breath were not absorbed. (Indeed, an orthodox Christian in particular would surely have to admit that this would be the biggest, most important 'waste of breath' since Yahweh told Adam, 'mind you don't touch those apples'.) If it is to be absorbed, the eyes are probably the best choice. They are more receptive than the nostrils, and they are more likely than the mouth to be open at any given time. Compare, again, Christ's statement in the non-canonical Coptic Gospel of Thomas: ‘He who drinks from my mouth will be as I am, and I shall be that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him’.114 Taken at face value, this accords strikingly well with what we have seen above of the magical use of dead spirits. In such cases, Christ was said to actually be John the Baptist, while Simon Magus would later be said to be Christ. If anything, the emphasis on 'that person' is more typically 'Christian' than much of the impersonal force or transfer of New Testament power or

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pneuma. And, however one reads such nuances, it seems clear that the apostles did drink from Christ's mouth in John 20, and did become in many ways like Christ after they did so. We should also bear in mind that, non-canonical as Thomas may be, his gospel has often been considered one of the closest to the official Scriptures.115 Meanwhile, if the noncanonical Acts of John does not have that status, it certainly shows a solid logical sense of the properties and behaviour of Christ's pneuma when it has one Drusiana (just raised from the dead) tell the Saviour: 'God of the ages, Jesus Christ ... You breathed into me your spirit with your polymorphous face, and showed much compassion'.116 Once again, parallels extend well beyond Christian writings. The Ancient Romans, for example, employed a peculiarly positive 'kiss of death'. As a person died, the nearest male kin put their mouth to that of the dying, in order to receive their departing spirit.117 As E.B. Tylor notes, this practice was itself broadly echoed by the Seminole Indians of Florida: 'when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use'.118 However much future Christian theology may have overlaid Christ's transfer of breath and power, it is clear that it was rooted in a primitive or magical conception of spirit forces.

The 'Special Miracles' of St Paul It was not only the twelve apostles who had miraculous powers. For someone who had not long since been watching with happy approval as St Stephen's head was smashed open by rocks, Paul soon embarked on an impressive miracle-working career. Chapter nineteen of Acts states that 'God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them' (19.11-12). These are indeed very 'special miracles'. On the whole, even Christ had to touch or be in the immediate presence of those he cured. Nor was this all that Paul did in chapter nineteen. Rather tellingly, he begins by meeting some men who have been baptised, but only by John the Baptist, and who, some time after Christ's death, know nothing whatsoever of any Holy Spirit. Paul explains to them how Christ is John's successor, and baptises them in the Saviour's name. The following verse states: 'And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied' (19.6). Paul then goes into the synagogue, where he speaks boldly for his new faith some three months (albeit, we soon learn, to be met only with hostility (19.8-9)). All in all,

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this imitation of Christ seems to teeter perilously between flattery and blasphemy. Paul not only baptises, but transfers the Holy Ghost itself, producing a scene of prophecy which looks remarkably like that of Pentecost.119 In this sense, he appears to be usurping the powers not just of Christ, but of God himself. It is perhaps not merely whimsical to wonder if the phrase 'special miracles' is less a term of eulogy than a kind of halfembarrassed apologetic label for some particularly extraordinary and dubious events. Just how or where did Paul get these remarkable powers? Unlike the Twelve, he has not explicitly been given the power of pneuma by God or Christ. Approaching this scenario from an agnostic, empirical viewpoint, we can offer two broad answers. First: following Hull's point about the dramatically increased success of apostolic miracles after the crucifixion, we can infer that success is here breeding success. Confidence breeds greater confidence, which begets more cures. This impression is borne out by the way that, just at this time, 'certain of the vagabond Jews' begin trying to use the name of Jesus in exorcisms.120 Paul’s own success, meanwhile, is so great that he cannot personally meet the enormous public demand for his presence; because of his snowballing reputation, he must now use handkerchiefs and aprons as proxy agents. Secondly: Paul was probably having such great success because of his formidable egotism. Like Christ, he had an immensely forceful presence, and could therefore achieve an unusually high number of psychosomatic cures. Nuancing this second point, we can also hypothesise that it was Paul's own idea to send the handkerchiefs and aprons. If this was the case, then it is hard not to infer that he had an impressively inflated opinion of anything which came within his Midas' touch.121 This issue of extraordinary psychic presence will come into play again shortly. If we consider the affair from the viewpoint of those around Paul, it is hard not to suspect that at least some believed his new powers to be causally related to Christ's death. He was now held to be using Christ's spirit, as Christ had been thought to use that of John the Baptist. Recall, too, the ambiguous authority invoked in I Cor 5.4. When Paul said, 'In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ' some of his audience could well have paid particular attention to the possible elision between 'my spirit' and the 'power' (dynamis) of the prematurely slain Christ. Let us further examine these 'special miracles' in the context of pneuma and dynamis. Given what has been said above about Paul's role as the true founder of Christianity, it cannot be over-emphasised that these proxy cures give him, at least temporarily, a status higher than that of Christ.

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Christ, as Hull argues, was able to carry and transfer the kind of forces which could operate even through his clothes. But Paul is able to carry forces so potent that they will not only pass into physical objects, but remain in them for some time after they have been taken well away from his body. Again, we cannot help but conclude that he gained this reputation by virtue of a personal presence either like, or greater than, that of Christ. But he may also have gained it precisely because he was not Christ - if he had been as narrowly Jewish as that, he would perhaps have been less likely to believe in the transfer of pneuma across some distances: here, pieces of cloth carry it from him to the sick, just as his letters supposedly carried it to his Corinthian flock. Along with Christ's use of the spittle and clay, and the Gadarene swine, the use of these handkerchiefs and aprons surely rates as one of the most glaringly magical episodes in the whole of the New Testament. At the most immediate level of comparison, it is no small irony that the 'vagabond Jews' are then supposedly made an example of during their failed (and illegitimate) exorcism. After all, they are doing no more than obeying the underlying laws of Paul's proxy cures. Paul is supposedly using Christ's power, which is great, and highly transferable. Shifting our attention outward, we find that the incident clearly parallels much of the psychology of sympathetic magic: the notion that one can heal or harm a person through an object which is associated with them. This idea was still credited by certain educated men in the time of Milton, and some of its adherents did indeed believe that the 'sympathy' was effected by the dynamic agency of spirits. Sir Walter Ralegh, moreover, offers a particularly close variation of the Pauline method, allegedly having claimed that he could cure the wounded if he had brought to him just a handkerchief dipped in their blood.122 Arguably closer still was the use of handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of Charles I, at his execution in January 1649. These were believed to have cured a number of people of 'the king's evil' some time after Charles's death; and it is interesting to note that the importance of the blood may confirm our impression of Paul's handkerchiefs and aprons as carrying something definite from his body.123 Both then and later, quite ordinary executed felons were credited with similar powers. Accordingly, like Gertrude Lodge in Hardy's tale, you would touch the corpse directly if you could. If you could not, you bought some of the rope from the executioner, or touched the executioner himself. In both these last two cases, the underlying principle is exactly that of Acts 19. Extraordinary power is dynamic and transferable - volatile, we might say, or even contagious. As we have also seen, Fludd was convinced that

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these corpses exercised their power through the medium of spirits. Here as elsewhere, non-canonical Scripture offers another instructive comparison. In the Acts of John, our eponymous hero embarks on a bout of holy showmanship in order to convert the highly sceptical pagan priest Aristodemus. Aristodemus first wants John to drink poison and show himself unharmed. To spice up the whole business, he prefaces this by giving the poison to two condemned criminals, so as to let John see its effects, and possibly unnerve him in the process. The criminals die; John survives. But Aristodemus (one of 'little faith' par excellence) wants yet more miracles. John must now raise the criminals from the dead. John therefore gives Aristodemus his coat, and tells him, ‘"Go and cast it upon the bodies of the dead, and say: 'The apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ has sent me that in his name you may rise again, that all may know that life and death are servants of my Lord Jesus Christ'". When Aristodemus had done this, and had seen them rise, he worshipped John, and ran quickly to the proconsul'. Both he and the proconsul are baptised by John, and build a church in his name into the bargain.124 While the higher Christian orthodoxy would go on to outlaw such texts, we do not need to argue about canons or authenticity in order to see that this, like the chopped rope of executions, gives us a good example of popular belief in spirit forces. Moreover, whatever Christian orthodoxy felt about the in-spirited clothing of John (who surely had more claim to such powers than Paul), a broader Christian tradition would later acknowledge this kind of event, and do so with still greater material detail. In the sixth century, Hull records, a silken cloak was laid, not over a living body, and not even (directly) over a dead one, but was spread 'for the night over the coffin of St Martin'. Consequently, 'in the morning [it] was so highly charged with the saint's power that it successfully healed the king of Spain'. The mantle, indeed, was 'actually said to weigh more in the morning'.125 Much later, in 1647, an English translation of a Catholic text warned princes, 'do not ... spoil your subjects; let the vestments of the priests be sacred in your eyes'. For God, 'hath many times made garments express his intentions, peradventure because they are in some sort a part of our selves while they are united to us'. So far the idea is unremarkable enough roughly akin to the idea that 'clothes make the man', or that what we wear reveals our inner personalities. But the author, Virgilio Malvezzi, goes on to explain that 'the spirits which continually exhale out of our bodies, are those that cause this union'.126 Although Malvezzi is not explicitly referring to miracles, he may well be recalling the tale of St Martin, or even Paul's exploits in Acts. If he is not, his claims only strengthen our

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impression that this idea of spiritual action-at-a-distance was a quite fundamental part of magical psychology, spanning both centuries and continents.

Barjesus and the Evil Eye Hull helps us to see that it was not only Paul who could focus and project such power when he emphasises how, in Acts 4.33, '"the apostles gave witness with great power"', i.e., not simply with great impact but [with] the aid of a mighty force'; while Stephen, being 'full of grace and power' begins accordingly 'to work great miracles and signs' (Acts 6.8). Most strikingly of all, we hear of how, as the apostolic reputation snowballs, 'they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid [them] on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them' (Acts 5.15). Although 'normally a deliberate contact is required ... the healing power of Peter's shadow looks’, for Hull, ‘like an exception and is a case of radiation rather than deliberate contact'.127 But the last case of apostolic miracle brings us back to Paul. And it is a case which seems very much in keeping with our sense of his personality. As we saw above, on the island of Cyprus Paul and his Christian mafia muscled in on the existing spiritual operation and convinced the governor, Paulus, that they were able to offer better protection than the lowly Barjesus. With this 'false prophet' still resisting the interlopers, Paul, being filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, And said, O full of all subtlety and all mischief, [thou] child of the devil, [thou] enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? And now, behold, the hand of the Lord [is] upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand. (Acts, 13.9-11).

If we set this episode against Paul's 'special miracles' we are forcefully reminded of the volatile instability of such power. For those who believe in it, it can very easily tilt from good to bad. Just what did Barjesus understand to be happening here? Perhaps most basically: he believed Paul to be a vehicle of power, and - consciously or unconsciously - was sufficiently intimidated by the angry intent of Paul's eyes to believe that this power was being shot out and into his own pupils. This degree of genuine terror was therefore sufficient to blind him temporarily. This sense of terrifying and perceptible intent fits with the precise

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Greek word used. Rendered in Acts as 'having looked steadfastly', atenizǀ means 'to look intently at' (or, in Paul's case, 'to look with intent'). The term does appear elsewhere, but is notably rare outside of Acts.128 At 14.9, by 'looking intently' at a cripple, Paul perceives 'that he had faith to be healed', and cures him accordingly.129 When Acts 23.1 has Paul 'earnestly beholding the council [the Sanhedrin]' and saying 'Men [and] brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day' the context is different; but the repeated association of atenizǀ with Paul helps confirm our sense that his unusual personal force can be linked to the force of his stare. Meanwhile, Acts 3 has Peter 'fastening his eyes upon' [atenisas] a lame man at the temple gate. Although here there is no reference to the Holy Ghost or to pneuma per se, just a few seconds later the man leaps to his feet and walks. In that case the detail itself is arresting (and otherwise a little curious), especially as Peter also very precisely commands the man to 'Look upon us' before the cure is effected (3.1-8). Peter’s cure seems to be a reverse form of the process effected by Paul. The gaze of each man is powerful - a kind of optical confidence trick perhaps not entirely unrelated to hypnosis. And in each case that power is convincing to those upon whom it is directed. In considering the oddly neglected episode of Paul and Barjesus, I will first look briefly at the question of psychosomatic injury or disease; secondly at the phenomenon of the evil eye in general; thirdly at other references to it in the Old and New Testaments; and fourthly at the likely factors which underlay that particular moment of confrontation between the two men at Paphos. What happened to Barjesus was no miracle; nor was it fabricated. In the broadest terms, he was a victim of his own fear. There is convincing evidence that, for those who believe in magic, fear can kill.130 Beneath this most extreme effect (usually known as 'voodoo death'), numerous startling psychosomatic disorders have been documented in folklore and in medical literature. Those believing themselves the victims of witchcraft have displayed an impressive range of self-generated symptoms, including bruising, varying degrees of paralysis, fits, and even stoppage of urine.131 Barjesus' temporary loss of sight, meanwhile, would once have been termed 'hysterical blindness'. Medical science now groups this kind of affliction under the term 'conversion disorder': symptoms include 'paralysis ... gait disorder ... loss of vision, loss of hearing, and episodes resembling epilepsy'.132 Fear of the evil eye is clearly one of the most ancient, widespread and enduring of all magical beliefs.133 Whilst doubtless predating literary

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sources, it is found in the Old Testament, and referred to by Democritus, both of whom associate it with envy.134 As with any widespread belief, notions of the evil eye could naturally display important local variations. In some forms, the action of the evil eye is attributed to the deliberate intent of the person conveying it. In 1930s Egypt, for example, if a man, on entering a house, 'looks at a thing and says "this is a fine thing" then he is envious ... It is not sufficient to look, but he must stare at it intently'.135 Notice that there the eyes of the conveyor and the 'victim' do not need to make contact. We can begin to understand this more clearly if we turn to what seems to be the more predominant conception of the evil eye: namely, that it is often projected involuntarily. Its possessor may not even be aware of it - may indeed even actively wish not to use it.136 In such cultures, what counts is not the perceived expression or attitude of the jettatura (literally, ‘one who throws’) but their perceived reputation, and the beliefs of their potential victims.137 Like the strange contagion which might infect the body of the executioner, or the heady forces vibrating out into Christ's robe, this kind of power is impersonal. It transcends, even partially defies the person who carries it. To put this another way: for those genuinely terrified of such ocular power, an angry or potent stare is not read in terms of personality or psychology. Those traumatised by the gaze of an early-modern witch, or even (later on) by that of Byron, Pope Leo XIII, or Kaiser Wilhelm II, were often reacting to perceived forces not of the mind, but of the body.138 For the evil eye might be delivered without intent, by someone who was powerful without malice, or envious without knowing it.139 Consider, for example, Plutarch's account of the process in the early part of the second century. '"It is likely that this [the streaming of emanations from the body] should occur above all through the eyes. For vision is mercurial and conveyed by a medium that gives off a fiery radiance. It diffuses an amazing power ... Envy similarly naturally penetrates the soul and fills the body up with evil ... when people consumed by envy rest their eyes on persons, and these eyes, being situated adjacently to the soul, draw evil from it and attack the persons as if with poisoned/bewitched missiles, it is not at all unexpected or unbelievable ... if they influence the persons they look at ... All in all, the emotions of the soul intensify and invigorate the powers of the body"'.140 As a magician, Barjesus would be doubly predisposed to take such powers seriously. At one level, he believed in magic. And more precisely, 'sorcerers, living as they did in a world of envy and slander, particularly feared' the evil eye.141 But Plutarch's description is especially useful, in part because of its implicitly Stoic cosmology, and in part because of its detailed empiricism.

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His words jolt us forcefully back into a world where someone might be quite literally 'poisoned' by envy. In turn, they might well poison others. As J.H. Elliott has emphasised in his discussion of the evil eye, Plutarch's statement was consistent with the general theory of optics in and after Paul's time: 'the eye, in the opinion of the ancients and in contrast to modern theory, was not a passive recipient of external light but an active agent. The eye was thought to possess light or "fire", which, by the rays it emitted, had an active effect on the objects on which its glance fell'.142 Whether implicitly or explicitly, Scriptural references to the evil eye echo Plutarch's belief that its powers are closely linked to the emotions, and therefore to the soul of the bearer. Emphasising that the eyes were dangerous just because they were thought to be 'situated adjacently to the soul', Plutarch provides yet one more confirmation that what mattered in the New Testament was not psyche, but pneuma.143 For he is clearly not talking about the abstract, ethical soul of Christian dualism. The power he describes is one which is fundamentally continuous with the material world. Soul overflows into body, and the combined result shoots forth out of the eyes. It was also Plutarch who popularised tales of the Thibians, living 'long ago ... in the area of Pontus', and being able to blight people with 'a look, a breath, or an utterance'.144 Taken up much later by Gianbattista della Porta, this report would be quite precisely explained in terms of spirits which, projected from the eyes, merged into a victim's bloodstream, thence attacking their heart (and with sometimes fatal results).145 We have seen that certain New Testament instances of psyche and pneuma carry strong traces of Ancient Hebrew usage. Given this overlap between Old and New Testaments, we should also be aware that Jews of Christ's era might have been sensitive to the warnings of Proverbs. Proverbs 28.22 ('He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him') suggests that the possessor of the evil eye is himself unaware of it (and thus can harm others involuntarily), and that it carries the intrinsic bad fortune so often associated with it throughout folk culture. Envy would also seem to be implied, given that this individual wishes to be rich, and thus probably envies those who are. By contrast, Proverbs 23.6-7 might look to the casual modern eye like a case of conscious or deliberate 'bad faith': 'Eat not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats. For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.' Yet, although there is clearly a disjuncture between outer words and inner 'thoughts' (or emotions) here, this does not prove that the danger offered to the greedy diner is itself

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deliberate.146 Rather, as with Plutarch's notion of bad emotions intensifying 'the powers of the body', the host's inner qualities inevitably poison the surrounding atmosphere. Again, this poisoning is quite literal: 'the morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words' (23.8).147 In the New Testament there are several explicit references to the evil eye. Matthew's instance (spoken by the householder, in the parable of the labourers and the pennies) is one of the more oblique cases: 'Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?' (Matt 20.15). Even this, of course, could have resonated powerfully with those predisposed to fear the evil eye; and in the circumstances could certainly imply envy, or at least discontent. More interesting from our point of view is Mark, who has Christ (after his debate with the Pharisees over formal observances) explain to his disciples: 'That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness' (7.20-22). At the broadest level, it is telling that the only vice from this list which could not easily be understood by any modern reader is the evil eye. Nor would this person fully comprehend its meaning if it were merely glossed as 'envy'. This, after all, seems already to have been cited under 'covetousness'. For the evil eye, in such a context, is again a feeling which can do things. It comes from the heart, and thus probably from the soul, and once again it is an emotion (listed amidst other emotions, after the catalogue of deeds) which can intensify the powers of the body.148 Although it is not obvious that Christ takes it in this sense (seeming rather to limit its effects to the bearer) some of those around him certainly would.149 Moreover, as Elliott in particular has emphasised, in the Sermon on the Mount Christ himself uses belief in the evil eye to contrast the 'man of light' with the 'man of darkness': 'the light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness'.150 Elliott emphasises that this was 'probably an authentic saying of Jesus', and Eastman, noting that the Greek word for 'single' often means 'generous' in the New Testament, shows that Christ was appealing to widespread popular beliefs about generosity, meanness, and the bearer of the evil eye.151 We now come to the moment of confrontation between Paul and Barjesus. Most of our concern here is with what Barjesus was likely to have believed, both about the evil eye in general, and about Paul in .

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particular. But we must at least briefly consider the possibility that Paul was deliberately trying to put the evil eye on his rival. Susan Eastman has emphasised that Paul himself was aware of the evil eye, and believed in it: uniquely, he alone uses the Greek word, 'bascanios', meaning 'bewitched' (and later often precisely translated as 'to fascinate', i.e., to bewitch through the power of the eyes).152 Eastman also argues that in Galatians 3 ('O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?' (3.1)) 'Paul holds up the cross of Christ as an antidote to the evil eye, similar to the protection afforded by amulets'.153 Although he of course means to give Christ's death a much broader, more elevated status than that of ordinary apotropaics, he nevertheless shows his familiarity with more ordinary magical beliefs here, and his willingness to exploit them. Eastman also believes that the Pharisees may have accused Paul of being a miser, thus linking him with the evil eye. For, she points out, at Galatians 4.14 he says to them, 'you did not spit me out'. 'According to Pliny, "spitting" was one method of protection against the evil eye'; thus Paul was again playing off local beliefs, and doing so with a coded brevity which clearly shows that these fears could be evoked by the lightest of rhetorical touches.154 We also know that Paul, of all people, must have believed in the possibility of sudden temporary blindness. Just after his Damascene conversion he himself had suffered it for three days, before the scales fell from his eyes at the visit of Ananias (Acts 9.1-18). Was Paul therefore trying to play on Barjesus' beliefs and fears, and trying to blind him? It is of course quite possible that the text of Acts 13 merely rationalises an unexpected result of that encounter. That is: Paul did not speak the above words, but Barjesus' fears were themselves sufficient to produce the temporary blindness. The author (probably Luke) then decided to give Paul a little more control and authority by having him state the curse in the written account (though we should also note that Luke may just have been recording popular reconstructions when he had Paul speak in this way).155 However: if we take the text at face-value (as Christians are fond of doing) it seems impossible to deny that Paul was trying to blind his rival. He plainly curses him with this intention. Moreover, from our point of view it seems very likely that this statement had a kind of performative power. Barjesus, falling prey to psychosomatic blindness, may well have not done so if Paul had not verbally, explicitly instilled that exact fear in him. There again: in such an environment, the gaze alone would certainly have been enough for some. Eastman, after all, confirms that the evil eye in this culture could kill, that it was thought to operate via a direct gaze,

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and that (citing Pliny) it was associated in particular 'with "furious eyes"'.156 And it seems very likely that in Acts 13 Paul's gaze matched the psychology which we would expect to be characteristic of such a confrontation. Both his stare and his attitude were aggressive, vindictive, and egotistical. As Charles Freeman notes, Paul could be fiercely jealous even of 'rival Christian preachers'.157 Let us now turn, in that apt pivot between the two men's faces, to what Barjesus might have felt in these terrifying moments. As a magician, Barjesus would not only have believed in the evil eye, but would almost certainly have been predisposed to link it with pneuma. As Ernest D. Burton pointed out almost a hundred years ago, pneuma features prominently in magical papyrae of the New Testament era.158 This suggests, quite basically, that Barjesus would have understood the evil eye to operate through the pneuma of the eyes. More precisely - and more importantly - it suggests that he may well have been all too keenly aware of Paul as an individual able to command a specially great or intense force of pneuma. As Burton further explains, amongst magicians of this period, 'the man who had received the divine pneuma was thought of as pneumatikos'.159 Thus, from Barjesus' point of view, Paul, as a formidably accomplished magician, had a reputation which made his pneumatic powers all the more terrifying to a fellow magician. Moreover, Paul - if we accept EngbergPedersen's claims - also thought of himself as 'pneumatikos' (recall, again, his letters and the pneumatised 'aprons and handkerchiefs', as well as his quasi-Stoic cosmology) and would therefore have directed his ferocious gaze with particular confidence at this moment. Like those Neapolitans who would later believe 'turbulent spirits' to make the jettatura especially dangerous, Barjesus may also have suspected that Paul's agitation significantly increased his pneumatic powers.160 And, although he was unlikely to know the text of Acts 9.17 - where Ananias states that Jesus 'hath sent me, that thou mightst receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost' - he may have known the story. If so, he could well have believed that the Holy Ghost entered through Paul's eyes, thus restoring his sight as it did so. More basically, we can be quite certain that Barjesus believed Paul to be envious. Two other intriguing points are raised by Elliott. He notes, first, that envy, that emotion so central to the evil eye, was generally regarded as '"blindness of soul"'. And, he adds, 'both blindness of soul and physical blindness were linked in the popular mind with the Evil Eye'. Secondly: 'potential possessors of the Evil Eye included persons with unusual physical features, such as joined eyebrows ... or those suffering ocular impairment, and especially blindness'. Paul, he stresses, answered to both of those criteria. He had joined eyebrows, and

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he had famously been struck blind for three days.161 As well as confirming that psychosomatic blindness was a real possibility in this culture, these points add further weight to the inferred terror felt by Barjesus, and show us that in the context such terror was rational and well-founded. If anyone was likely to strike you blind with their eyes at this time, it was Paul. Having said all this, we cannot depart from Paphos without briefly screwing up our own eyes and frowning. Eastman's article is thorough and well-detailed; and Elliott in particular has made an extensive and rigorous study of the evil eye in several different pieces, going so far at one point as to wonder why a phenomenon so widely discussed by anthropologists, folklorists and historians has not been the subject of a monograph by any theologian.162 Yet neither Eastman nor Elliott make one single, even glancing, reference to the incident of Paul and Barjesus.163 Why? We can only infer that they are somehow uncomfortable with the episode - either because of Paul's basically uncharitable behaviour, or because it so clearly links him to the world of popular magic. Indeed, for orthodox Christians, a link to the world of popular magic is arguably the least damaging implication of the Paphos incident. If we set the affair in the wider context of Paul's conversion and subsequent 'pneumatisation', we find what looks startlingly like a miniaturised version of Christ's own miraculous career. As we saw, Christ was imbued with pneuma by the dove at the river Jordan. After an ambiguous struggle in the wilderness (was he using the pneuma against devils? was he trying to win the pneuma from devils?) he presently demonstrated his new power by exorcising a man with an unclean spirit (Mark 1.23-26). Paul is injected with pneuma ('the Holy Ghost') when Ananias comes to restore his sight (Acts 9.17). Some time after this he travels to Paphos and, 'being filled with the Holy Ghost', triumphs over Barjesus. Whilst there seems to be a much longer gap between Paul's pneumatisation and his demonstration of it, this would on the one hand give time for his pneumatic (or magical) reputation to spread far and wide, thus reaching the ears of Barjesus. Moreover, it seems to be not long after the Paphos incident that Paul achieves a particularly close resemblance to Christ: at Lystra he cures a lame man, at which bystanders exclaim, 'the gods are come down to us in the likeness of men' (Acts 14.8-11). Later, in Acts 19 he transfers the Holy Ghost into certain disciples by laying on of hands, and presently performs those extremely 'special miracles' accomplished by the use of 'handkerchiefs or aprons' (19.4-6, 19.11-12). We have already emphasised that Christ - assuming he ever wanted a universal Christianity - had a lot to thank Paul for. In light of the above,

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we can argue that, looking down warily from the place above, Christ might also have been thankful to Paul for another reason. For, as the speech about 'gods come down' shows with especial clarity, Paul at this stage might well have tried to found his own personal religion or cult, rather than that of Jesus. Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the seamless interplay of religion and magic than Paul's use of 'the Holy Ghost' to project the evil eye. Once again, we find that this episode is part of a complex web of spirit forces. Even if we overlook Paul's alleged use of God (the Holy Ghost) to do evil, we can hardly overlook the persuasive echoes of Christ's supercharged garment. Christ could heal without trying, if the recipient believed in his magical powers. Paul could harm without trying, given Barjesus' natural belief in a phenomenon which so often operated without the bearer's intent or knowledge. In each case, the power is impersonal. Moreover, it is probably also significant that Hull's analysis of intent so neatly echoes differing versions of the evil eye. The woman of the bloody flux did not get a healing power which she herself could use and transfer, because for this Christ's intent would have been required. Did certain cultures, similarly, believe that intent affected the nature or volume of evil power conveyed by the jettatura? As Plutarch has indicated, some believed that this power could also be delivered through the mouth, or through speech. We have seen Christ very precisely 'breathing' out pneuma or dynamis, and we will soon see that, in such moments, breath and speech could be peculiarly intertwined. Equally, while we might see Paul's speech ('behold, the hand of the Lord [is] upon thee, and thou shalt be blind ...') as a kind of performative psycho-magic (Barjesus believes what he is told, and it happens), it may in context have been seen as another very concrete way of literally delivering power from the body.164 As the popular Italian term jettatura makes abundantly clear, something is transferred - literally 'thrown' - from the bearer in such cases. We can by now appreciate that many observers of the period may not have always distinguished very clearly between Christ and his disciples. They were all held to have performed extraordinary cures, and these cures were almost certainly viewed by many in magical rather than moral terms. Ironically, the longer-term notion of Christ's dying for all humanity was probably rather meaningless to those who wanted concrete and immediate cures, c.50 AD. In more than one sense, this notion was far too abstract. A dead person was not going to focus or transmit healing power in the way that the living Peter or Paul could do. Before we turn to the crucifixion

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itself, we need to see how soul and spirit were behaving in some of the most famous of New Testament miracles.

Raising the Dead In fact, once we become more familiar with the period's attitudes to life and death, we find that perhaps the greatest miracle lay in the devious arts of those who sculpted up the New Testament canon, making a selection that gave the raising of the dead an artificial aura of wonder and rarity. Even canonical scripture shows, on occasion, that the dead could be a surprisingly restless or temporary category of beings. As Wilson reminds us, at the crucifixion '"the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised"'. Why, Wilson asks, is no one more curious or thorough about this seemingly extraordinary occurrence? Did these revenants 'like Jesus, ascend into heaven, or did they have their dying to do over again?'165 Within all the mountains of paper under which Christian scholars have buried the New Testament, surprisingly little has been said about this mass revival. Moving to non-canonical writings, we find that the raising of the dead is an all but mundane phenomenon. Various apostles accomplish this miracle on a fairly routine basis. Now and then, the mere four cases of the New Testament can be easily matched in as many minutes. The dead are whipped up from their tombs so easily and casually that the affair risks degenerating into farce. Take, for example, the miracle of Peter and the smoked fish. Here the context is already telling, indicating as it does an insatiable and credulous appetite for spectacle and wonder, largely devoid of piety or ethical concern. Having been richly entertained by a talking dog, the crowds become dissatisfied when this loquacious beast dies. Rather than raising the dog itself, Peter turns to 'a smoked tunny fish hanging in a window' and asks the onlookers, '"When you see this swimming in the water like a fish, will you be able to believe in him whom I preach?"'. They agree that they will; Peter commands '“Tunny, in the presence of all these, live and swim like a fish”’; the fish obeys, swimming for over an hour; further crowds gather; and people throw pieces of bread into the water (presumably to see that the fish has not only animation, but also living appetite).166 A case of human revival makes it clear that raising the dead had become something of an apostolic trademark. A gardener's daughter dies, and 'this distrustful old man, failing to recognize the worth of the heavenly grace, the divine blessing, besought Peter again that his only daughter be raised from the dead'. There is no detail whatsoever on how the revival

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was performed. We are next told that, 'some days later, after she had been raised, a man who passed himself off as a believer came into the house of the old man to stay with him and seduced the girl, and the two of them never appeared again'.167 What actually happened here? Clearly the tale is slanted - and, it seems, in a rather devious way. For one thing, the apostles in these writings are immensely fond of raising the dead, and positively exploit the art as a piece of Christian showmanship. It is therefore rather odd that this account is so prejudiced against the gardener for his request. Those wanting kin restored are not usually rebuked in this way. What really seems to have happened is something like this: the daughter could not be revived, and the tale about her eloping was concocted in order to account for the embarrassing fact of her failure to reappear. This fiction may also conveniently chime with the alleged impiety of the gardener, implying that he deserved to lose his daughter to the amorous young man. The tale alerts us to an important probability. The apostles were famed for reviving the dead. Accordingly, they had a lot of requests. Because of this high volume of appeals, it may have been that they had the luck to stumble on some people only seemingly dead, and thus 'revived' them. In some or many cases, however, they were not successful, as here. If these embarrassing failures could not be hushed up, then they had somehow to be explained away. We will see in a moment that there were particular reasons why death could be so provisional and reversible in the New Testament world. In order to appreciate just how commonplace, confused, or shambolic the phenomenon could be, we should briefly note two other cases. When the multitudes are undecided as to the magical or religious supremacy of Peter or Simon Magus, the natural choice of contest is the raising of the dead. The Roman arbitrator asks Simon to kill a slave by magic, and Peter to revive him. The crowd shall then judge which is the greater miracle, and which the greater man. This contest becomes prolonged, and gets more interesting for our purpose as it advances. Regarding the slave, what is perhaps most telling is the way that the crowds believe Simon to have killed him merely by whispering in his ear. And their credulity can clearly stretch yet further. With another dead man now brought in as material for the contestants, Simon demands, ‘"Romans, when you see that the dead man is raised, will you cast Peter out of the city?"’. The crowd agrees, adding that they will also burn Peter into the bargain. 'Simon came to the head of the dead man, bowed three times, and he showed the people how the dead man had lifted up his head and moved it, and opened his eyes and lightly bowed to Simon'. The phrase 'he showed the people how...' makes it all too clear that this

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is mere trickery. Peter himself asserts this, and goes on to make the dead man actually rise and walk, saying and showing emphatically what 'raising the dead' really means. But what most concerns us is the crowd's immediate response to Simon's fraud.168 They appear thoroughly convinced, and have begun gathering wood to burn Peter when he intervenes with his more impressive miracle. This little glimpse of popular credulity may well be fairly representative of what 'raising the dead' actually meant in such a culture - the kind of environment, after all, in which numerous saintly corpses could raise themselves if they chose. And Peter himself seems to have little right to complain of such spectacular trickery, given his own crowd-pleasing exploits with the smoked fish elsewhere. Our second case makes the first look impeccably scientific by comparison. Earlier we caught a brief glimpse of a woman called Drusiana. Drusiana has the ambiguous distinction of appearing in an episode from the Acts of John. When we meet her she has already decided to abstain from sex with her husband, Andronicus, in order to attest her newly-found Christian piety. She is ill-rewarded for her restraint, however. For a man named Callimachus now begins to lust after her. This causes her, in somewhat obscure distress, to become feverish, and she shortly dies in the presence of John himself.169 Callimachus, undeterred by this minor obstacle, bribes the steward of Andronicus, gets into her tomb, and is preparing to enjoy amorous dealings with her corpse when a snake appears. It bites the steward, Fortunatus, who dies. Callimachus falls down, and the snake then sits on him. Although he is never openly declared dead, he is assumed to be so on the arrival of John and Andronicus. Going into the tomb, they meet a youth - evidently Christ who tells them to raise up Drusiana, and who then ascends to heaven while they watch. Andronicus wishes John to raise Callimachus first, so that he can explain to them what has happened. After his revival - and a surprisingly candid admission of his plot - Drusiana is then raised by John. She herself wishes to have Fortunatus raised too. Callimachus now objects; John embarks on some Christian moralising; and it is presently agreed that Drusiana should perform the next resurrection. She does so. We have now seen almost as many revivals, in a bare few moments, as in the whole of the New Testament itself. One of them involves the recently-dead reviving the dead (rare, perhaps, but actually not unique within the apocrypha).170 Matters now take an interesting turn, as Fortunatus is markedly ungrateful, exclaiming ‘O how far the power of these awful people has spread! I wish I were not raised, but remained dead, so as not to see them’. He then flees. John prophesies that Fortunatus will presently die of the snake bite, and

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this is soon found to be true, at which John exults - with perhaps unChristian glee - ‘You have your child, devil!’ before going off to rejoice with his brethren.171 Here, then, is the other side of Scripture's ultimate miracle. In popular conceptions, such events were none too rare, and sometimes none too dignified.172 In John's death-raising farce in three acts, we meet - among other things - a churlish revenant who dies twice in the space of roughly as many days, and of the same snakebite. Let us now see what this kind of occurrence meant for the soul and its closely related spirit, pneuma. Given that there are just five revivals in the New Testament, it is perhaps significant that only three are actually performed by Christ. The fact that one is the work of Peter gives us some link to the busy revivalism of his extra-canonical career. And, as Smith has suggested, that instance also seems to once again point to the magical basis of such cures. A pious convert called Dorcas (or Tabitha) seemingly dies, and is washed and laid out in an upper room of her house. Acts goes on: 'And forasmuch as Lydda was nigh unto Joppa, and the disciples had heard that Peter was there', Tabitha's family 'sent unto him two men, desiring him that he would not delay to come to them'. Having arrived, Peter sat praying alone with Tabitha, and then, 'turning him to the body said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes: and when she saw Peter, she sat up' (Acts 9.38, 40). Smith links this to the earlier raising - by Christ - of Jairus' daughter: 'Mark claims to give the exact Aramaic words used for the raising of Jairus' daughter - talitha koum (5.41). Mark translates these words ("Girl ... get up") as the Greek magical papyri sometimes translate Coptic expressions. However, talitha koum also circulated without translation as a magical formula'. Accordingly, 'a partial misunderstanding of it became the basis of another phrase - if not an entire story - preserved in Acts 9.36ff where Peter raises a dead woman conveniently named Tabitha by saying to her in Greek, "Tabitha, get up." (Tabitha is a mispronunciation of talitha, which the storyteller mistook for a proper name)'.173 We will return shortly to the details of this cure. A second case, supposedly performed by Paul in Troas, can be handled more swiftly. Acts 20 tells of how a young man called Eutychius falls asleep on a window ledge while Paul is speaking late into the night. After he is 'taken up dead' Paul (perhaps charitably, in the circumstances), 'went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves, for his life is in him'. Did Paul raise this young man from the dead? Or did he simply verify that he was actually still alive? It is hard to be absolutely certain on this evidence. But if Paul had really done the former, he made surprisingly little of it - likewise the author of Acts, or the apostles' hosts (who, on

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finding the young man alive, 'were not a little comforted' - rather than say, 'greatly amazed'). In reality, it seems that when he states, 'his life [psyche] is in him', Paul meant just this. He had verified a pulse, rather than conjuring back Eutychius' spirit. This brings us to the three revivals accomplished by Christ. Luke 7 tells how, when Christ reached the gate of the city of Nain, 'there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow ... And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare [him] stood still. And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother' (7.12-15). This is interesting for one main reason: the woman herself does not ask Christ to perform this miracle. (As we have just seen, even when it was not possible to get any sort of permission, raising the dead could backfire.) We must then consider the possibility that Christ did this as much by way of a propaganda coup, as for the sake of the woman herself.174 Next comes the case of Jairus' daughter. Christ is first implored by the father just after his return from amongst the frightened Gadarenes. En route to Jairus' house, he has been thronged by admirers, including the woman cured by touching the hem of his garment. Luke tells us that a messenger presently rushes out to announce the death of the recently sick girl, to which Christ responds, 'Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole' (8.50). Christ then goes into the house, accompanied by Peter, James, John, and the girl's parents. Surrounded by lamentation, he states 'Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth'. We then hear that 'they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead'. (It is not quite clear exactly who 'they' are - presumably not the parents (who would seem easily roused to laughter, in the circumstances)). Luke then states that 'he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat'.175 The two key elements of this episode are Christ's assertion 'she ... sleepeth', and the phrase 'her spirit came again'. Taking this latter first: it is obvious enough that the revival involves pneuma, not soul or psyche. We should perhaps pause, however, to remind ourselves that pneuma is not an easy synonym for the singular Christian soul; rather, here as elsewhere, spirit is probably a plural noun. The phrase more closely resembles something like 'her blood came again', rather than 'her soul came again'. If we recall the instance of Drusiana - who, after her revival by Christ, states 'You breathed into me your spirit with your polymorphous face...' - we can

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see that for her reanimation evidently involved some of Christ's spirit. If he had breathed out all of it, he himself would have died. Shifting back several hundred years, we find that the Jairus incident is remarkably like the revival of the dangerously wounded Sarpedon, in book five of Homer's Iliad. In that earlier case, ‘a gust of the North wind/blowing round him carried back the life breath/he had gasped away in pain’. In each revival, spirit leaves, but not permanently or fatally. And, in each case, the victim seems to exist temporarily in some uncertain space between life and death. Sarpedon's plight is serious and unusual enough to be singled out and described in some detail (and to imply the intervention of Zeus). What of Jairus' daughter? It is difficult to be entirely sure what Christ means when he says that 'she is not dead, but sleepeth'. But he clearly seems to be opposed by those around him. Thus, this 'sleep' is in some important way opposed to death. The Greek word which Christ uses is katheudei.176 When Scripture uses ‘fallen asleep’ or similar as a euphemism for the dead, it uses a different word, kekoimƝmenoi.177 Christ therefore does not seem to use ‘sleepeth’ metaphorically or euphemistically; a conclusion which fits with the evidently derisive laughter his claim prompts.178 (Bystanders would hardly be derisive if he had simply said that the girl was dead.) The most obvious modern explanation for the girl’s condition is that she is in some kind of reversible coma.179 While this is plausible, it could co-exist with a slightly different view on the part of Christ. He may in fact believe that she is 'dead' but not very dead. That is, she has been dead for less than three days.180 To understand more fully what this means, we must now turn to Lazarus, and to his place amongst the restless (or slightly) dead of numerous other pre-scientific cultures.

Raising the Very Dead Yet again, we find that a tale which has the power to stick in the mind of the most woefully unregenerate child has an ultimately rather insecure status. Here is the sole biblical account, given by that most isolated of the gospellers, St John. Lazarus' sisters send urgently to Christ to tell him that their brother is sick. Christ answers: 'This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby. Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was' (11.4-6). Presently he persuades his disciples to go with him to Lazarus' home in Bethany. During these verses, Christ takes the trouble to make clear to his followers that Lazarus is quite certainly dead, adding: 'And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may

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believe' (11.15). Reaching Lazarus' cave tomb, Christ commands that the stone be rolled from its entrance. At this, Martha seems to object: 'Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days'. Christ appeals to her faith, and then has a brief dialogue with God before crying 'with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes...' (11.39-44). Even those happy to accept this single account, without asking why no other evangelist records so important a tale, must be a little puzzled by its internal oddities. First: why are we told that 'Jesus loved .... Lazarus' and his sisters, and next that he 'therefore' deliberately remained where he was for two full days?181 (The literal translation of this verse seems to link Christ's love and his stubborn waiting yet more clearly: 'Therefore, when He heard that he is sick, then, indeed, He remained in the place where He was two days.') And why do we have the famous verse 'Jesus wept' in a context where Christ knows he will raise Lazarus, thereby making his grief unnecessary? A reasonable inference is that John has opportunistically rewritten a more original, much less congenial account. For, after the two day wait, Christ 'saith … to [his] disciples, Let us go into Judaea again'; to which they respond, 'Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?' (11.8) Given that it was quite clearly Christ's decision to wait, it seems as if he was indeed afraid of Jewish hostility, as much as were the disciples. 182 What is perhaps slightly odder than John's artful revision is the way he still leaves in details which give away the underlying sequence of events. We first hear that 'This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby'. There is only one reasonable interpretation of this. Christ wrongly believes Lazarus will not die. This is what the verse plainly says, and is also consistent with Christ's assured delay, apparently confident that Lazarus will merely linger in his sickness until the Saviour comes to heal him.183 When Lazarus quite inconsiderately (or blasphemously) falsifies this hope, the goalposts shift. Now, we learn, Christ is 'glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe' (11.15). Whatever Christ himself actually did (or intended to do) one thing is clear. John is happy for this episode to appear as a carefully staged miraculous showpiece. This is implied first in verse four, and then - much more emphatically - when Christ is 'gladdened' by his own absence, the consequent death of Lazarus, and the associated opportunity to raise a dead man, so that the disciples 'may believe'. John thus allows Christ to coldly manipulate the whole episode, callously immune to the sisters' grief (or, indeed, the trouble and expense of an unnecessary funeral).184

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This irresponsible showmanship concerns us for one particular reason: either Christ or John is aware that four days was a peculiarly significant timespan in pre-scientific conceptions of death. Discussing relations between Christian and Jewish mourning rituals, Frederick S. Paxton states that 'the initial three-day period of mourning had its roots in a popular Near Eastern belief that the soul lingered near the corpse for three days after death, hoping to re-enter the body. Only when the soul observed the face of the corpse begin to change in the process of decay did it give up hope and go on its way'.185 Evidence for this belief is found within the New Testament itself. Dorcas, for example, had been laid out, but almost certainly for less than three days. Peter had been requested precisely because he was relatively close ('nigh unto Joppa') and maps of the area indicate that his journey was only about fifteen miles. And Jairus' daughter must have 'died' still more recently, having been alive when the Saviour began the short journey to the house. As Christ said, she was indeed only sleeping; or, if she was dead, she was certainly not as dead as the odorous four day corpse of Lazarus. The closest Scriptural parallel with John 11 comes from chapter eleven of Revelations, which tells of how certain prophets shall be killed, and left unburied 'three days and an half'. After this period, 'the spirit of life [pneuma zǀƝs] from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them' (11.7-11). Once again, the implication of this carefully exact timespan (stated twice) is indisputable. A body raised in two days is unusual. A body raised in three is startling. But three and a half takes us into the territory of the very highest class of miracle. Beyond Scripture, numerous parallels show that the New Testament attitude was essentially pre-Christian, matching as it does the markedly empirical or magical beliefs of tribal or folk culture. In their study of cannibalism, Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes emphasise that, among the Fijians (as encountered by European travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century) 'cannibalism was part of an absolutely fundamental religious and social understanding of the world ... founded on the worship of ancestor spirits'.186 More precisely, the Fijians 'believed that the spirit of a body clung to a corpse for four days after death. Sacrificing and eating the body [within four days] annihilated the spirit and prevented it from ascending to the spirit world and becoming a source of power and guidance to your enemies'.187 This very exact timespan broadly corresponds to the three day period implied in John's gospel. Both reflect the notion that a body begins to decay (a process often first detectable by

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smell) only after a few days have passed; and that it does so precisely because the spirit which previously helped it cohere has now fully departed. The slight variation between Fiji and Bethany (in the latter case, four days is too long) may reflect climatic differences, conceptions of decay, or both. And in one sense the difference is especially valuable, in that it seems to confirm the empirical basis of the belief, which might otherwise be seen to arise from the often magical status of the number three. (As we have seen, a very similar idea prevailed in the educated medical culture of the early-modern period. Those Paracelsians so keen to get a corpse off a gibbet in less than three days agreed with the Fijians that spirit power inhered until a body succumbed to the first signs of decay.) Similarly, in Christian folk culture, post-mortem rites frequently assume that the soul has not made an immediate departure. A person may be sufficiently 'dead' for mourning and funeral preparations to begin, but even then a significant liminal period persists, lasting three or more days. Within this period, the soul may linger for varying amounts of time in or around the body. In Rumania, circa 1919, 'when the man is dead, a window is opened or a pane is broken so that the soul may fly out’ and ‘any mirrors which may be in the house are covered up' so that the soul may not mistake them for an exit and become trapped therein.188 Similarly, in traditional Slav culture doors and windows must be left open so that the soul could escape.189 Remarking on the widespread 'practice of throwing open the windows ... before death for the purpose of easing the departure of the soul', E. Bendann adds that 'this precaution was resorted to' in England in 1890, 'upon the death of a dignitary of the Church of England'.190 Tylor notes that 'the Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death', and Piero Camporesi finds the Catholic Church attacking this practice among Italian peasants of the late sixteenth century: 'nor ... is it proper to make an opening in the roof of the house, in the belief that otherwise the soul would not escape from that dying body'.191 Such customs imply that the soul remains temporarily with a body which is being prepared for a funeral. They may also imply that the soul in these cases is in fact reluctant to leave its body. Other habits quite definitely attest to this belief. Tylor found that 'the Iroquois ... used to leave an opening in the grave for the soul to visit its body', and that 'some of them still bore holes in the coffin for the same purpose'.192 Agnes Murgoci witnessed a variation on this in Rumania. Echoing Paxton's point at two levels, she tells of how a dead body was usually taken out for burial 'after three days', and even during the procession, 'in all Roumanian countries, the dead person is either carried uncovered to church, or holes are made in the coffin, so that he may see and hear what is going on'.193 In

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this case, the soul seems to be not just around the body, but still in it - an inference which is neatly underlined by Elisabeth Warner's study of Russian peasants less than a century ago. The time when kin watched the corpse was a 'liminal period', during which 'the body still retains some vestige of life. Life departs only in slow stages. In Russian, the word for corpse (pokoinik) is an animate noun'.194 Those studying such cultures have found some striking points of tension between official Church attitudes and peasant practices and beliefs. (Some people thought that part of the priest’s duty when officiating at a burial was to inform God of all the dead person’s sins, and therefore actually tried to get the body buried before he could interfere. One old woman was prevented by a priest from putting her grandson’s moneybox into the grave.195) Given how poignant these clashes could sometimes be, it is no small irony that the supposedly low and 'superstitious' culture of rural peasantry is far closer to the realities of death in the New Testament closer, at least, to the minds of those who sustained or promoted the deathraising miracles of Christ and his followers. The basic root of that similarity is, once again, empirical. In such environments, it is simply not possible to make universally reliable judgements about life and death. Sometimes, the dead are merely 'asleep'. Accordingly, they do come back. In these cases, the soul has found that the body was not actually dead, and returned accordingly. Thus we see yet more clearly the special value of Lazarus; in New Testament culture, the three day corpse could in fact raise itself. When Christ or Peter revived such bodies, they were merely assisting (or mimicking) natural phenonema. But even in the case of Lazarus, we are still witnessing an essentially pre-Christian event. In a fully developed Christian culture, educated or otherwise, it is simply not a good thing for the dead to return. Warner, for example, points out that the Russians would refrain from keening in the first hours after death, during which time it was '"considered possible ... to 'howl back' .... the deceased. Here, they recount terrible instances of how, when this rule was broken, the dead man was 'called back' ... and thrashed about in convulsions for days afterwards"'. Again, 'particularly in the three days before the funeral, when the corpse lay at home in its coffin, watched and prayed over day and night, many people believed there was some small risk that the deceased could be revived'.196 This, again, was evidently linked to the many Russian tales of revenants and vampires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.197 In parts of Greece, as late as the 1970s, this risk was far from small. On the island of Evia, during the corpse-watching the body could be irrevocably possessed and vampirised if anything at all was passed over it.198 On the Greek mainland, meanwhile,

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a man found stirring in his coffin was hastily stoned to death by terrified villagers.199 Over in countries such as Britain in and after the eighteenth century, the popularity of the Bateson Life Revival Device (allowing the only slightly dead to ring for help from their prematurely sealed coffin) showed that mistakes could all too often be made in cases of severe coma.200 In Britain, however, those who revived were not objects of terror. Their revival would usually be attributed to a simple, essentially abstract fiat of God. By contrast, in cultures where the soul had varying degrees of empirical reality, it was also treated as a relatively independent power in its own right. The devil may sometimes be involved, but many of the beliefs cited above suggest that the soul alone could often be sufficient for reanimation. For all the distance between twentieth-century Rumania and biblical Jerusalem, it is notable that this independent, more or less impersonal power recalls that of pneuma or dynamis. In each case, a lifeforce is respected because it is powerful. In Christian folk belief, that sense of power is overlaid - to at least some degree - by Christian reverence, piety, or gratitude to God. But in the pre-Christian world of the New Testament, the realm of death is not marked by such deference. Following the power of the soul to its logical conclusion, we find an especially neat irony lodged within Paxton's account of the lingering spirit. Here, 'the judgement of the dead' is empirical, not ethical. Rather than God judging the soul, the soul (like an attentive doctor) judges its own body. In such a context, it is a good thing to raise the dead. Moreover, it is relatively natural. Once Christianity had persuaded people that a dead body had immediately lost its soul, or that the soul had been judged, it was obviously far less straightforward for it to cross the new, more forcibly etched, line between life and death. For the Jews of the Old Testament, blood itself was a more or less independent life-force; hence the notion that an animal corpse was still alive until all its blood had drained out. For the Stoics, 'life' was perhaps still more impersonal. In their cosmology, pneuma was fundamentally an agent of coherence and tension. (Hence the otherwise seemingly odd extension of pneuma to stones or pieces of wood). Once a body showed signs of losing its original coherence and tension, pneuma had gone. In 1621 the clergyman Thomas Granger, alluding to Christ's raising of Lazarus, talked of how, once the dead man's 'soul [had] re-entered', it naturally 'causeth motion of the spirits, first in the heart, then of the pulses, and blood, then of a leg, or arm ... till at length he be risen wholly out of the grave'.201 Even in late Christian culture, this incident could still be interpreted with careful respect for physiology. That is: Lazarus' revival is

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not absolute or instantaneous, but noticeably gradual. The soul activates the spirits, and the spirits slowly stir the body back into life.202 What we can note here is that Granger is working with a Christian hierarchy of soul over spirit. As we have seen, that kind of hierarchy cannot be derived from the New Testament itself. Although spirit and soul (pneuma and psyche) exist as separate linguistic entities, it is probably pneuma which revives the body of Lazarus, just as it does that of Jairus' daughter. In either case, those around Christ could very reasonably understand that he himself had supplied this spirit force (a quantity of spirit, like a quantity of donated blood), as he so often did when healing. It pulsed abundantly out of him, pouring through his clothes into the body of a woman who clutched at them. Finally, however, even the overwhelmingly vital Christ would give up the ghost. Or, at least, he would give up something.

The Crucifixion Although I will not look in any detail at Christ's temporary post-mortem revival, we should remind ourselves here that this supposed index of divinity was actually significantly less miraculous than the revival of Lazarus. Christ, after all, had been dead just three days, not four. Turning to the crucifixion, we find that the Bible's most famous example of a departing spirit occurs at the death of Christ himself, who 'gives up the ghost' shortly after being tormented with a vinegar-soaked sponge offered him by way of drink. Even at this pivotal moment of the Saviour's career, however, the four gospels display a striking lack of consistency. Virtually the only thing they do agree on is the refreshment by vinegar. Matthew insists that there is an earthquake, and that graves open to let out various saints. These remarkable events are not recorded by any of the other gospels. Everyone except John agrees that the attendant centurion makes a comment just after Christ's apparent death. But Matthew has him state 'Truly this was the Son of God' (27.54) in response to the earthquake and resurrection of saints. Mark has 'And when the centurion ... saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said Truly this man was the Son of God' (15.39). The comment is provoked by Christ's behaviour, not by any natural (or supernatural) events. Luke, finally, is even less clear about the cause of the Roman's exclamation: 'Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man' (23.47). This is spoken after Christ has given up the ghost. On one hand, 'a righteous man' is clearly very different from 'the Son of God' (and indeed sounds rather like the kind of complement that an honourable Roman might bestow on anyone who made a good manly end). Even taken alone,

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the verse is internally dubious. For the centurion to call Christ 'a righteous man' is hardly an axiomatic glorification of God or of Jesus. Given our interest in the concrete circumstances of biblical events, it is well worth noting this most glaring failure of the four apostles to get their stories straight. (The event is, after all, both of seminal importance, and highly public.) But the most interesting set of variations concerns the exact moment of Christ's death. His giving up of the ghost is an event pitched somewhere between the fleeting spirits of Homeric warriors, the vapouring pneuma of the Stoics, the recycled ruach of Hebraism, and the radically new soul of that upstart sectarian cult which would come to be known as Christianity. John's version states: 'When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost' (19.30). Here the phrasing is relatively abstract. A modern reader unfamiliar with Greek conceptions of life and death would be very hard pressed to suspect that Christ is here breathing out the vital force of life. John's version is also notable for the high degree of control given to Jesus. Having calmly held a dialogue with his mother as she stands below, and having taken great care to see that the manner of his death conforms with various prophecies, he seemingly accepts the vinegar (thus fulfilling another prophecy) and all but chooses the exact moment of his death. 'It is finished' means in one sense that all necessary prophecies have indeed been fulfilled. But it also allows Christ to effectively write 'the end' beneath the last dramatic scene of his life, verbally performing his own death. And it further implies that he actually chooses to die at that moment just because he recognises that nothing further is required. Such an ability would undoubtedly have been a valuable one: some victims of the cross were supposed to linger for several days, rather than hours. It should be added, however, that the bowing of his head could well be interpreted as an involuntary failure of strength and life.203 Lacking the detail of the bowed head, Luke's gospel arguably allows Christ greater control over the moment of his death. He utters the famous line 'Father forgive them; for they know not what they do' (23.34). Bystanders mock him, as an oddly powerless Son of God. One of the crucified thieves joins in this derision. Yet the other rebukes his partner-incrime, and after asking that Christ will remember him in the next world, is told 'To day shalt thou be with me in paradise' (23.43). The sun is now darkened 'and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost' (23.45-6). After this we have the centurion's comment. Christ thus chooses to die, having neatly and voluntarily yielded up his spirit to God.

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But what does he actually give up? There is little reason to think that it is anything more than the vaporous essence of life. Christ, after all, is Jewish. He would therefore be most likely to believe that his quantitative life-force is now about to be swallowed up within the ruach of Yahweh, just as a few drops of water are dissolved into an ocean. That impression is reinforced by the rendering of the Modern King James Bible: 'And crying with a loud voice, Jesus said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And when he had said this, he breathed out the spirit'. But to see the empirical dimension of the episode most fully we need to turn to Mark and Matthew. The latter agrees on the unusual darkness which prevails from the sixth to the ninth hour. But he then states: 'And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice ... My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (27.45-46). Here all control has vanished. Preceding verses do not have Christ holding dialogue with his mother, forgiving his executioners, or comforting a dying thief. His only words are a moment of agonised blasphemy and despair. For once, we have some reason to accept that this statement (recorded verbatim by Mark (15.34)) was a genuine one. Christ's famous lament is already interesting just because it gives us such a clear glimpse of how he actually felt when enduring the unimaginable agonies of crucifixion. Anyone who has suffered intense pain, or even just the chronic discomfort of illness, will recognise the psychic bleakness or horror which can accompany that kind of bodily state. To some degree this happens routinely to anyone who wakes in the dead of night, finding themself acutely panicked by concerns which had seemed very mild in the daylight. In reality, these are quite tolerable, and will seem so again after breakfast. But fatigue and low blood sugar invest them with a potent nihilism which can seem all too genuine while it lasts. Christ's startling outburst is borne out of a state of extreme physiological torment and reduction. Centuries after the last judicial crucifixion, and with the cross transformed into a triumphant icon of the faith, people risk forgetting the real agonies of that death: intense muscle fatigue, nausea, delirium and dehydration.204 Hostile responses to the simulated, supposedly 'excessive' violence of films such as The Last Temptation and The Passion of the Christ reinforce our sense that the realities of such a death have been cosmetically softened and denied. How can any representation of a crucifixion be too violent? And Christ's lament is of vital interest for another, more precise reason. If we see it in its true physiological context, it seems hard to deny that it was thoroughly involuntary - almost the equivalent of a spontaneous scream of pain. By extension, the death which occurs a few moments later

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seems to be equally involuntary: 'Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost' (Matt 27.50). A last cry of agony, and death. Here the Saviour does not 'commend his spirit' or verbally underscore his death as a kind of scrupulously performed achievement. Yet even that rendering lacks the implicit Stoicism of Mark. In his gospel there is the same loss of control. Christ's only words are the bitter rebuke. Finally, after being tormented with the sponge of vinegar, 'Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost' (15.37). This verse offers the clearest equivalence between breath and spirit. The phrasing is not conclusive, but is highly suggestive: does Christ in fact give out his cry and his spirit in one and the same breath? It is certainly notable that, creatively varied as they are, all four gospels do manage to agree on the close association between Christ's cry and his death. Was this because that specially violent cry was indeed seen as an expulsion of his last vital spirit? In this respect we should note that, in the original Greek, Mark's verse lacks the 'and' being more faithfully rendered by a version such as Young's 'And Jesus having uttered a loud cry, yielded the [not his] spirit'. In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, Christ lets out his spirit in much the same way as those dying Homeric warriors, passive and helpless while the essential vapour of life escapes through the opening of a wound. Once some spirit had been transformed into a soul, the phrase 'gave up the ghost' would become at best a voluntary leap into heaven, or at worst a hollow general synonym for death. This loss of original context was clearly aided by the seeming normality of a breath emitted from the mouth - something which could be misread more easily than the fleeting spirits of Homeric war, loosed out from the ribs on the edge of a spear's point. And the distortion is either registered or increased by certain alternative translations. In the International Standard Version of the New Testament even the obliquely spiritual 'ghost' has vanished: 'Then Jesus cried out with a loud voice and said, "Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit." After he said this, he breathed his last' (Luke 23.46).205 There again, a version such as Darby’s New Translation can be intriguingly ambiguous: 'And Jesus, having cried with a loud voice, said, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit. And having said this, he expired'. While many readers would doubtless take this as a blandly unproblematic formula for 'he died', those more attentive to etymology (or to that Hebrew god who 'inspired' his divine breath back in Genesis) could precisely connect the spoken delivery of spirit with its quite literal ex-piring. In both Matthew's and Mark's accounts, Christ twice cries 'with a loud voice'. The first time that he does so, he speaks actual words ('My God, my God...'). But even here the loudly cried speech can be understood as part

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of a cry of pain. On the second occasion it seems to be only a cry - a final inarticulate howl of agony. Luke also seems to acknowledge such a cry (although he may in fact be referring to 'My God... why hast thou forsaken me?' and glossing over the embarrassing words themselves). This last cry of pain would hardly be surprising. Christ is suffering the ultimate stages of a horrific death - something which glimmers through even in John's highly staged account, when Christ, profoundly dehydrated, admits that 'I thirst'. Now, if this itself is a realistic part of such an execution, so too is the supposedly 'ironic misunderstanding' of the watching crowd, who, when they heard Christ's 'Eloi, eloi' ('My God...') 'said, Behold, he calleth Elias ... let us see whether Elias will come to take him down'.206 This is only 'ironic' to those fanciful enough to believe that Christ really was the son of God. First: it seems doubtful that, moments from death, he spoke very clearly. Mark has 'eloi, eloi', and Matthew has 'eli, eli'. Second: the crowd's inference was perfectly reasonable. As we have seen, Christ was identified with Elias. We have also seen that the crowd may have been turned against Christ precisely because he was crucified, therefore displaying a signal lack of power.207 By definition, a son of God did not get crucified - something which was to trouble Christians for another three hundred odd years to come. This kind of thing was what the majority of those around him believed about Christ. Such beliefs can too easily get lost, as we look back through that prism of theological abstraction founded substantially on just one of the four Gospels - a creed designed to emphasise the absolute divinity of a man who is much better understood as a remarkable human being, exploiting the powers of a cosmology profoundly alien to our own. Here is another, probably more representative view of the crucifixion: Now it was midday and darkness covered all Judaea. And they became anxious and distressed lest the sun had already set since he was still alive. It stands written for them: ‘The sun should not set on one that has been murdered.’ And one of them said, ‘Give him to drink gall with vinegar.’ And having mixed it they gave it to him to drink. And they fulfilled all things and accumulated their sins on their head. And many went about with lamps [and] as they supposed that it was night, they stumbled. And the Lord called out and cried, ‘My power, O power, you have forsaken me!’And having said this, he was taken up. And at the same hour the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was torn in two. And then the Jews drew the spikes from the hands of the Lord and laid him on the earth. And the whole earth shook and there was great fear.

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This account from the non-canonical Gospel of Peter is in many ways a balanced combination of the four gospels on which it probably drew.208 We have the midday darkness, the vinegar, the Joanite notion of prophecies being neatly 'fulfilled'. The sins on the heads of the Jews, meanwhile, offer us a plausible extra dash of that anti-semitism in which Christians would later specialise, quite directly echoing Matthew 27.25, after the crowd has insisted that Barabbas, not Christ, should be freed: 'Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us, and on our children'.209 And the cry... ‘My power, O power, you have forsaken me!’. Here it all ends as it had begun. The impersonal and temporary power injected at the River Jordan has gone. At a general level, this accords with the mockery as to Elias: no one will help Christ, and he cannot help himself. He has no power. Not only that: he feels that he has no power, just as surely as he felt that some had been smuggled from him by the woman of the bloody flux. In those moments of radical physical exhaustion, he does not feel, as we might, that he has no energy, but that he has no power. His statement may reflect a sense that he wants to help himself, and cannot; its author or those reading him may have understood it to refer to the power derived from one specific dead spirit (such as John or Elias). It is also possible that the subtle shift (from 'my power' to 'o power') accurately reflects a sense that this power is indeed impersonal and general, that it is 'yours' only so long as you have it, so that Christ's syntax precisely outlines the process of its loss. However debatable this may be, one thing is certain. In this account, we are worlds away from the kind of theology which John was to inspire. Christ does not give up 'a soul' or even 'a spirit'. It leaves him, and his response to this implies that his dynamis or pneuma has always been equivalent with the raw and concrete forces of vitality, inseparable from the warm and vulnerable flesh of a real human being. Accordingly, 'Peter' seems to collapse the different stages articulated by the four evangelists. This last exhausted lament is all. There is no need to give up any spirit to God. The spirit and power were one, and both have fled. The physical reduction of the crucifixion does not kill Christ's spirit, but it does make it realise that it needs another home. As the Stoics knew so well, it cannot exist in a disembodied state. As Hull emphasises, power of such high tension required a body of similarly high tension: this slack and exhausted bundle of drained flesh was hardly that. Perhaps, indeed, it is not too fanciful to parallel the vanished power with that hovering, empirically attentive soul which would wait up to three days, studying its body to be sure that this sometime home really was now uninhabitable. Christ's power

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makes the decision rather more quickly, as naturally and instinctively as bees leaving a flaming hive, or rats tumbling from a sinking ship. Harsh as this may seem, it was, in every sense, nothing personal.

CONCLUSION

In the beginning was empiricism; later, came abstraction. In the beginning, there was holism; later, there came dualism. In Homer and in most of the Old Testament, there is no individual, personal soul. There are quantities of spirit, not spiritual entities. In many ways these older spirit forces precede and exceed the individuals which they temporarily inhabit. Similarly, we find no heaven, and nothing seriously akin to the Christian hell in either the Greek epics or the bulk of Ancient Hebrew Scripture. If there had been more stable, abstracted, individual Christian souls in these books, they would have remained vastly different from those later Christian souls which were fundamentally conditioned by their relation to a fiercely dualistic afterlife. As Armstrong has rightly emphasised, even the New Testament dualism of Paul was worlds away from that which came to prevail in the centuries of full-blown Christendom. The Pauline version, after all, was something as urgent, provisional and expectant as the man who quite explicitly told his followers that some of them should live to see Christ's return to earth and the end of human history.1 The cosmic holism of the Odyssey and Iliad is seen generally in the association of thymos with the winds, and particularly in the at once divine and natural revival of the wounded Sarpedon. In the Old Testament spirit forces have a broadly similar organic quality: they can be breathed into the world or individuals by Yahweh at times of special need; and they are reabsorbed into Yahweh with ecological economy at the death of any person (or, according to Ecclesiastes, any animal). In the New Testament, meanwhile, pneuma is given to Christ at the river Jordan, and breathed back again to God at the crucifixion. Devils and spirit forces flow through all the spaces of Palestinian life just as surely as germs and electricity now flow through our own. Thanks to the recent work of Engberg-Pedersen it is also apparent how thoroughly Paul draws on the monist cosmology of the Stoics in order to sketch out his theories of pneumatic transformation and resurrection. In these final pages I want to look at two highly influential authors who bridge the classical and post-Christian worlds. On one hand Galen, when heard in his own words, appears in many ways to confirm the preChristian, pre-dualistic nature of the western world both in and after the times of Christ and Paul. On the other, St Augustine at once confirms that

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the New Testament had failed to provide a systematic and comprehensive theology, and shows how much effort and ingenuity was needed, circa 390AD, to create and sustain it. This postscript not only helps to underline the distinctly pre-Christian pneumatology of the texts discussed in preceding chapters, but also offers readers a bridge to The Smoke of the Soul - the book in which I will go on to examine the nature and difficulties of the body-soul relationship in early-modern Christianity.

Galen While the ultimate fate of Christianity still hung in the balance, scattered across relatively powerless and often intellectually divided groups of disciples, a Greek anatomist was busy thrusting his knife and his fingers into the raw matter of earthly life. Like Aristotle, Claudius Galen left an extensive body of work on numerous subjects: as Vivian Nutton points out, 'his writings in Greek amount to approximately 10 per cent of all surviving Greek literature before AD 350'.2 He was therefore dangerously attractive to those who wished to accept the totalising authority of one single figure. And, like Aristotelianism, Galenism became a highly conservative and immobile body of ideas, successfully obstructing the progress of medical science for a very long time. In reality, Galen himself was in many ways like Aristotle in his careful adherence to material particularity, and his fondness for experiment.3 He was infinitely more cautious and provisional in his ideas than those who later distorted his thinking into a kind of medical Ten Commandments. If Aristotle was no Aristotelian, then Galen was surely no Galenist. I will discuss the effects of Galenism extensively in The Smoke of the Soul. Here we need to concern ourselves briefly with three basic topics. One: what were Galen's ideas of pneuma? Two: what were his ideas of the soul? Thirdly, we need to look at the highly distinctive and highly influential rete mirabile - the artfully meshed net of cephalic veins and arteries which was to become a kind of organ of the Christian soul in following centuries.

Pneuma For Galen as for Aristotle, pneuma is closely connected with air, heat, and blood, and is a vital instrument of both the body and the soul. It is seen as one of the purest, most mobile substances in the body: 'the lightest and thinnest of anything in the body is firstly pneuma, secondly vapour, and in

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the third place that part of the blood which has been accurately elaborated and refined'.4 As various scholars have emphasised, Galen echoes Aristotle, in that he repeatedly stresses the importance of heat to organic life as a whole.5 One important facet of Christian misogyny was indeed the Aristotelian/Galenic idea that women were 'less perfect' than men because they were colder.6 At the same time, a certain minimal amount of refrigeration was required, as excessive heat would lead to instability. Galen believed that pneuma was contained in the arteries, and here already his characteristic empiricism is evident. For arterial blood does of course look and behave differently from that of the veins. Galen noted carefully that arterial blood was 'bright red, thin, and like pneuma', and that it was hotter and moved faster than venous blood.7 Most references to pneuma occur during Galen's many descriptions of bodily process. Heat operates on food during the process of digestion. Once cruder elements of the nourishment have been separated out, pneuma undergoes stages of gradual and increasing refinement. Travelling through the vein known as the vena cava, blood leaves the liver and ascends to the heart. 'During its brief stay in the right ventricle the blood is acted upon by the intense innate heat of the heart so that it becomes somewhat thinner, more spirituous, and purer'. This renders it fit for the task of 'nourishing a porous, highly active viscus like the lung'.8 Its final and most important refinement will occur in the head and the brain - something which we will encounter more fully in a moment, when dealing with the rete mirabile. To do justice to Galen's highly integrated and dynamic system of physiology, we should also emphasise that pneuma is produced in part by air. This is derived not only from the most obvious form of inspiration via mouth and nose, but also through the skin as a whole: 'those arteries which reach the skin draw in the outer air when they dilate, while those which anastomose at any point with the veins attract the thinnest and most vaporous part of the blood which these contain'.9 We have seen that the Stoics posited as many as four different types or levels of pneuma. The medical theory of Western Christianity preferred three. Natural spirit was in the liver, vital spirit in the heart, and psychic or animal spirit in the brain. Here once again, however, we are in the realm of the Galenists, rather than of Galen's own thinking. Galen adhered definitely to only two of these types of pneuma, the animal and the vital. One scholar has gone so far as to doubt that Galen actually distinguished as many as two, and even C.R.S. Harris, who disputes this claim, admits that 'the distinction between the two kinds of spirit [animal and vital] is not always easy to maintain with great clarity'.10 Harris goes on to emphasise that 'of the existence of a vital spirit Galen appears to be less certain than

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of the existence of the psychic spirit'.11 Notably, the chief roles of vital and animal spirit are typically practical ones. 'The function of the vital spirit is to be the instrument of the vital processes in the body, i.e. those which make and keep the animal alive and make it something essentially different from a stone or a clod of earth; that of the psychic to be the instrument of the activities concerned with action, will, and choice'.12

Soul The very fact that Galen says so little about soul in his medical works is itself telling. Although scarcity of evidence impels some caution, it seems fair to say that Galen's ideas of soul are closer to those of Aristotle and the Stoics than they are to those of Christianity. In his two essays on the 'passions' and 'errors' of the soul, he seems chiefly concerned with anger or loss of composure, and with thinking which runs contrary to reason. He does not use the word 'sin', and seems to be concerned only with injuries to others and with the indignity inflicted on oneself when reason is unbalanced. At one point he talks about the soul as 'dishonoured', and this kind of attitude is reinforced by a longstanding impression that the classical virtue of self-control is not only peculiarly rational, but peculiarly male.13 M.T. May has stressed that 'there is a strong resemblance or at least a close connection between soul and some aspects of Galen's Nature'; and on the occasions where psyche is used in relatively specific ways by Galen, it seems to mean something like 'life' or 'nature' or 'essence', but never with any moral or eschatological overtones.14 It is also worth noting that – as Nancy G. Siraisi emphasises – Galen uses ‘Nature or the [Platonic] Demiurgos’ interchangeably in his writings.15 Galen's attitude to Christianity was evidently that of many educated Romans and Greeks at this time. To the cautious and sophisticated thinkers of these cultures, the strange new faith looked at best quaint, at worst alarmingly fanatical. Nutton stresses that early education in the four major philosophies, 'Stoic, Platonist, Aristotelian and Epicurean, not only gave [Galen] a detailed knowledge of their conflicting doctrines but also produced a deep uncertainty, from which he was rescued only by a consideration of the eternal truths of mathematics and geometry'. Nutton adds that Galen's 'own philosophy was avowedly eclectic, for he regarded it as a mark of weakness to commit oneself unequivocally to the doctrines of any one sect (like the Christians and Jews, whose adherence to their sacred texts and belief in miracles he found extraordinarily naive)'.16 As physician to the imperial court, Galen had contact with Marcus Aurelius,

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whose exemplary devotion to Stoicism probably had some influence on his employee.17 What we can say on the evidence of his writings is that Galen had a strong and enduring sense of the body as an emphatically teleological entity: it showed powerful evidence of deliberate and ingenious design. Siraisi has indeed stated that Galen ‘developed a teleological account of the human body far more fully and explicitly than any other ancient writer’.18 In general terms, Galen refrains from attempting to define the soul. As Harris points out, 'Galen is at great pains carefully to distinguish [psychic pneuma] from the soul, the essence of which he regards as being an unknown. The soul resides, indeed, in the brain, but it is not to be identified with the pneuma in its ventricles. The pneuma is only an instrument for effecting perception and voluntary action'.19 At one point Galen implies - and with a certain brusqueness - that no one has any more notion of the soul than he does. He wonders 'how it is that we who confess that we are still ignorant of the nature of the soul nevertheless venture to call this pneuma psychic'.20 But this reluctance to describe the soul may well be another typical instance of caution, rather than anything resembling religious reverence. For elsewhere, Galen considers that the soul may be bound up with respiration, and wonders how long 'are we likely to be ignorant of the way in which respiration is useful? As long, I think, as we are ignorant of the substance of the soul'. But, he then adds, 'we must nevertheless be daring and search after Truth, and even if we do not succeed in finding her, we shall at least come closer than we are at present'.21 Clearly this last statement is a long way from the timid 'Christian humility' of those to whom certain vital 'secrets of Nature' are the preserve of the Almighty alone. Considering the soul more precisely, we find that Galen broadly adhered to the Platonic division of three souls ranked hierarchically. But, as May notes, he regarded these 'as different phases or divisions of the one soul inhabiting the body'.22 Moreover, at one point Galen displays a clear impatience with the idea of the third soul of growth or nutrition: ‘since feeling and voluntary motion are peculiar to animals, whilst growth and nutrition are common to plants as well, we may look on the former as effects of the soul [psyche] and the latter as effects of the nature [physis]’. It follows that ‘if there be anyone who allows a share in soul to plants as well, and separates the two kinds of soul, naming the kind in question vegetative, and the other sensory, this person is not saying anything else, although his language is somewhat unusual’.23 At one level this statement seems to imply a briskly commonsense impatience with the misuse of language floating free from empirical

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realities. At another, it conspicuously aligns humans and animals as specially endowed with 'soul' - therefore seeming to support the notion that Galen understood soul to mean something like 'life', and particularly the kind of life which was self-moving. In this last sense, we find him elsewhere asserting that 'the first principle of motion ... is the authoritative part of the soul'.24 And the implicit bracketing of humans and animals as en-souled creatures recurs elsewhere at greater length. First stating that 'the body is the instrument of the soul', Galen could easily appear to be reciting the most unproblematic Christian orthodoxy. Such an impression briskly dissolves when he adds, 'and consequently animals differ greatly in respect to their [bodily] parts because their souls also differ. For some animals are brave and others timid; some are wild and others tame'. Yet 'in every case the body is adapted to the character and faculties of the soul. The horse is provided with strong hoofs ... for truly it is a strong, proud animal and not faint-hearted. The strength of the brave, fierce lion, however, lies in its teeth and claws'. Moving on to man, Galen proclaims that 'he is an intelligent animal and, alone of all creatures on earth, godlike'.25 We could of course wonder if 'godlike' here aligns man with those ethically doubtful powers of the Greek or Roman gods, rather than with the awesome single deity of Christian faith. Yet even those who preferred the latter comparison would surely have to admit that in the very same line Galen refers to man as 'an intelligent animal'. In doing so, he further underscores his notion of soul as a characteristic of self-moving life forms per se: both men and dumb beasts are 'animated creatures'; both are 'animals'. Moreover, in his clear distinction of brave and timid animals, he is evidently using 'soul' to mean nothing more ethically or eschatologically weighty than 'nature' or 'character' (thus the horse is proud, the lion fierce, and so on). This usage indicates that there could potentially be more difference between the souls of certain animals than between man and animals in general. Glancing back, we are thus reminded of Aristotle's impatient complaint: '"it is ridiculous to seek the common formula … while neglecting the formula "proper to each particular type of soul'.26

The Rete Mirabile For all his caution about the precise nature of the soul, Galen is quite certain of one thing: the soul is in the brain. And the psychic pneuma most closely related to it takes on this highest form only after undergoing extensive and arduous refinement in the head and the brain itself. Here we need to quote at length from Galen's original description. Moving carefully

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through the human head, he has now arrived at the base of the skull, in an area which modern anatomical textbooks show to be occupied by a network of veins and arteries known as 'the circle of Willis': The plexus called retiform [rete mirabile] by anatomists, is the most wonderful of the bodies located in this region. It encircles the gland [the hypophysis] itself and extends far to the rear; for nearly the whole base of the encephalon has this plexus lying beneath it. It is not a simple network but [looks] as if you had taken several fisherman's nets and superimposed them. It is characteristic of this net of Nature's, however, that the meshes of one layer are always attached to those of another, and it is impossible to remove any one of them alone; for, one after another, the rest follow the one you are removing, because they are all attached to one another successively. But of course, on account of the delicacy of the members composing it and the closeness of its contexture, you could not compare this network to any man-made nets, nor has it been formed from any chance material. Rather, Nature appropriated as the material for this wonderful network the greatest part ... of the arteries ascending from the neck to the head.

Galen then spends some time describing the curiously tortuous, uneconomical route taken by the branches of these arteries to enter into the interior of the head. Having done so, he finally asks: 'Well, what is this wonderful thing, and for what purposes has it been made by a Nature who does nothing in vain?' The answer is that, 'wherever Nature wishes material to be completely elaborated, she arranges for it to spend a long time in the instruments concocting it'.27 Having undergone considerable elaboration in the retiform plexus, the psychic pneuma is then further transformed within the choroid ['placenta-like'] plexuses which line the ventricles of the brain.28 Mixed also with air breathed through the nostrils, the chief instrument of the rational soul can now be propelled back through invisible passages in the nerves in order to effect all those basic acts of will, impulse and motor function which would later be explained in terms of complex brain chemistry and electrical activity.29 We will have much more to say about the rete (and Galen's original description) elsewhere. Harris notes that the structure seems first to have been described by Herophilus (335-280BC).30 And Galen himself clearly refers to 'the plexus called retiform by anatomists'; this structure is evidently something which has been generally accepted by predecessors and contemporaries. It may be fair to say that for certain observers in later centuries the rete had an importance which rivalled or even exceeded that of the heart or brain. Given this, it is necessary for us to appreciate the context of Galen's original description. It is well known that the Romans,

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with their aqueducts, their imperial network of impressively straight roads, their architecture, glass windows, and use of a type of concrete, were in fact more technologically advanced not only than most contemporary cultures, but also than many of those which followed them.31 Yet for all that, this was still an age before the microscope, before electricity, before the industrial revolution.32 Wrenching our minds back into such a context, we might now begin to realise that the interior of the human body enjoyed a peculiarly high status as a piece of remarkably intricate technology. To put this another way: when Galen celebrated the ingenious complexity of the rete, he was describing something which could well have seemed the most impressive piece of processing equipment ever seen. Having said this, we now need to confront one of the greatest ironies of medical and religious history. Such a structure was in fact not present in humans. It seems to be generally agreed that Galen dissected only animals. In ungulates, and most especially in the ox, the wonderful interweaving of veins and arteries which Galen so admired can indeed be seen in this region of the head.33 In humans there is nothing so impressive. One later substitute, the cavernous sinus, is so small that (as Dr James Shaw emphasised to me some years back) 'you need a halogen lamp to dissect it'. This error was to cause no small controversy in the Renaissance. The problem for Christianity was almost certainly a greater one than it was for Galen: as we have seen, he evidently considered the soul to be especially characteristic of animal, self-moving life-forms. For Christians it must have been particularly odd that creatures who definitely lacked the highest form of soul should have been the only ones to possess such a structure.34 At the same time, it must be emphasised that the problem of the rete was far from simple. Three points in particular complicate the matter. First, Galen had the authority of Herophilus for the rete, and Herophilus as Harris emphasises - had dissected the human brain. Secondly, the actual anatomy of the human head in and around this area has produced an impressive number of possible substitutes. Harris sets out the quite recent debates among medical doctors on this matter, and in doing so reveals a range of opinions which may partially justify the lack of agreement seen among Renaissance anatomists.35 (Indeed, one medically-qualified scholar, Rudolf E. Siegel, was still insisting in the late 1960s that the human brain does form a rete at this point.36) Having passed through this imputedly organic space between body and soul, this world and the next, we have now reached a suitable point at which to meet our second author - a man whose religious feelings were far from tentative.

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Augustine In turning, now, to Augustine, I want to emphasise two strands of his attitude to the soul. First: for Augustine the soul largely resembles his attitude to knowledge and creation in general; the spiritual dominates the material, and the abstract the particular. The older continuum of spirit and matter seen in much of the New Testament is now forgotten or carefully obscured. Secondly: in the area of soul and spirit, as in many other cases, one of Augustine's key tasks is to effectively rewrite problematic sections of the Old Testament. In his writings, then, we can see orthodox Christian theology in the process of construction and reconstruction. Seen in terms of his long historical influence, St Augustine is probably the most important figure in Christianity after Christ and St Paul. From our point of view this influence is interesting just because the bulk of it was psychological and spiritual rather than political. Born in 354, Augustine lived an ordinary and indeed relatively sensual life until his (allegedly) dramatic conversion in 386 AD. While in a state of emotional agitation, he heard the voice of a child repeating, 'Take it and read, take it and read'. Seizing hold of Paul's Epistles, Augustine hit upon Romans 13.13-14: 'Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites'.37 We are hardly wrenching the meaning of this text if we see those last phrases as including the empirical study of nature - something which was to stagnate abysmally during the political ascendancy of the Christian faith. But for Augustine the words also had a very particular personal resonance. He now became celibate. In 391 he became a priest in the Roman colony of Hippo in North Africa; and in 395 rose to the position of bishop. Part of Augustine's impact must have depended on his personal qualities. His account of his conversion derives from his most famous work, Confessions. In writing this highly emotional, highly intimate account of his life, feelings, and supposed sins, Augustine gave birth to a genre of literature which would both shape and exceed Christianity. (It is surely no accident that the other such title rivalling Augustine's in fame was written by the great pioneer of Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.) Both in this work, and in his careful and humane dealings with his largely uneducated Christian flock Augustine comes across as a sympathetic and engaging human being.38 It is probably true to say that, for someone like the poet Petrarch, Augustine was a more real and immediate living presence than was (say) Thomas Aquinas - a figure who had died in 1274,

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just thirty years before Petrarch's birth in 1304. It has been suggested that Augustine deliberately modelled himself on St Paul.39 Whatever the truth of this, it also seems that the two men were at least partly similar in temperament. Augustine was undoubtedly more learned and more intellectually rigorous than Paul. But the two shared a certain emotional fire and energy, and a tendency to repeatedly assert the spiritual over the physical. Perhaps most of all, Augustine developed the new individuality of Christian psychology into an obsessively dramatic interior world all its own. In another famous statement from the Confessions, he notes how: 'men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves'.40 The Bishop of Hippo was to redress this failing with a vengeance. For Augustine the soul is no mere physiological function, bounded in a few bare inches of dark tissue within the heart or the brain. Rather, it is a secret inner doorway through which the pious individual tumbles out into a whole infinite cosmos of spiritual adventure, and where every slightest grain of dust is alive with the presence of God himself. Although we cannot here begin to do justice to that vibrant new inner space, it is worth considering that Augustine himself was only one of its many new inhabitants. In desert caves and smoky hovels, from the arid glitter of North Africa to the damp steaming hearth-places of Germany and Britain, innumerable anonymous Christians found their cramped lives strangely expanded by their experience of the soul - an entity which might even be compared to the chemical experiments of the 1960s in its ability to fantastically unravel and defamiliarise the everyday world and mind of humanity. As noted, the bulk of Augustine's work can indeed be seen as the triumph of abstraction over empiricism. Augustine and other early Christians were engaged not just in a dynamic struggle to create and patent their version of the soul, but to force upon the western world that peculiar tendency to abstract the spiritual which would typify so much of what passes for thought in Christian history. Even the title The City of God exemplifies Augustine's habitual desire to shift and elevate the grounds of argument from this world to the next. And the book's context and motivation bear out that impression. In 410AD a wave of alien terror burst through the gates of Europe's most powerful city, when the Gothic warrior Alaric entered and sacked Rome. This event was not just a political and military trauma, but a kind of reverberant psychological violation. Seemingly invincible and aloof for over six centuries, the guardians of law

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and culture were now torn apart by the rude martial energies of northern Europe. Among various suitably extreme responses, many Romans bitterly accused the Christians of having angered pagan gods by turning their sometime adherents away from older loyalties. It was against this dark and chaotic backdrop that Augustine composed The City of God.41 His responses to anti-Christian sentiment are various: at one level he simply details other historic catastrophes and emphasises that these had no connection with the Christian faith. In a wider sense, however, Augustine's defence of Christianity represents a startlingly bold assertion of the next world over this one, of the abstract over the particular. For in The City of God he is claiming not just that the sack of Rome was not the fault of Christians, but also - implicitly - that the event does not matter in the way that pagan observers felt that it did.

Re-creating the Soul For Augustine the new Christian soul must have seemed all the more precious just because its nature and definition were, in his lifetime, still very much under construction. In his works The Immortality of the Soul and The Magnitude of the Soul Augustine repeatedly and doggedly shifts the grounds of argument from the empirical to the abstract. In their basic assumptions Augustine's ideas about both body and soul are largely platonic, though stripped of any of the sensuality or eroticism to be found in books such as Timaeus and Phaedrus. Consider, for example, Augustine's implicitly platonic notions of 'reality' and 'existence'. More than once he uses the phrase 'the body, insofar as it exists', meaning that its existence is naturally inferior to that of the immaterial and immortal soul.42 For both Plato and Augustine the supernatural is undoubtedly more real than the earthly. Similarly, Augustine feels that 'nothing could be more absurd than to say that the objects seen by our eyes have being, while those things which we discern with our intellect do not'; since 'only a fool would doubt the fact that the intellect has an incomparably higher rank than our eyes'.43 As this implies, for Augustine the soul is an emphatically rational and intellectual entity. And these powers somehow operate without the mediation of the body and its senses. Hence 'the body is not able to be of aid to the soul in its striving toward understanding, since it cannot even be of hindrance'. Meanwhile, although 'united with the body (and this not in space, although the body occupies space) the soul is affected prior to the body by those highest and eternal principles'.44 The soul, for Augustine, has a special direct access to divine truths. The highest form of knowledge

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is introspective and rational, rather than empirical or sensual. Compare this with Augustine's opposition to the broadly Stoic belief that 'life' (i.e., soul) 'is some kind of organization [temperatio] of the body'. By way of refutation, he asks: 'who, indeed, in the pursuit of a thorough self-introspection, has not experienced that his understanding of things became more adequate to the extent of his ability to withdraw and remove his mental intention from the senses of the body? If the mind were an organization of the body, this would have been impossible'.45 The most basic point here is Augustine's understandable desire to elevate the soul above the perishable realm of matter. Two other interesting points are also implied by his argument. One is (again) that all worthwhile knowledge is rational and introspective - and hence best accessed without the obvious use of the senses. From this viewpoint, experimental science is not so much undesirable as outrightly meaningless. A second point arises from his final sentence. There he seems to imply that mind or soul must be detached from the body in order to access such essentially divine knowledge. When handling the long-running question of body-soul unity, Augustine can be equally abstracting. 'The soul', he tells us, 'is not contained in space and is not united in space with the body'.46 Similarly, 'the soul must not be regarded in any way as either long, or wide, or strong'. For 'such qualities ... are attributes of bodies'.47 From the point of view of modern science that first statement is nonsensical. If the body is in space, and the soul is in the body (as Augustine explicitly states elsewhere) then surely the two must be 'united in space'.48 We have seen that pre-Christian Stoicism (and much of the New Testament) posited what can at best be termed a continuum of spirit and matter. In this cosmology, 'spirit' (pneuma) was essentially just a rarefied form of matter. At certain moments that kind of view has at least to be briefly acknowledged in Augustine's work. Hence Augustine's fictional pupil, Evodius, seems to evoke an essentially Stoic notion of matter when he muses: 'if we admit that even the wind is a body, I cannot deny that the soul seems to be a body, for I think it is something like the wind'.49 Augustine's main reason for including this idea, however, was that it was still sufficiently prevalent to need opposing. Notably, he goes on to persuade Evodius that justice, for example, is real without being material, encouraging his interlocutor to rather think of the soul as something like justice, than something like wind.50 Another opposition between Stoicism and Christianity can be seen when Augustine shifts the material continuum of Stoic creation toward a moral hierarchy, asserting that, 'the rational soul cannot be converted into

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the irrational'. For, 'if the irrational soul were not itself subjected to the rational by reason of its inferior rank, it would assume a form in an equal way and be like the latter'.51

Rewriting Judaism In The City of God Augustine finds numerous oblique references to Christ or Christianity in the Old Testament, thereby helping to weld together two potentially disparate books and traditions.52 Ironically, however, in the case of the soul Augustine can be said to find a more convenient model in the work of the pagan Plato, than in Scripture itself. ‘Let Thales depart with his water, Anaximenes with his air, the Stoics with their fire, Epicurus with his atoms’, he writes at one point, asserting that ‘those who understood [Plato] far better than others, do think that in God is the cause of natures, the light of reason, and the rule of life’.53 In these brief few words, Augustine collapses all the material particularity and dynamism of different Greek thinkers and cosmologies into the single omnipotent figure of God: know Him, and you know enough. Yet in certain parts of the Old Testament the deity's attitude to the soul becomes oddly inscrutable. In seeking to incorporate Hebrew pneumatology into Christian dualism, Augustine finds himself engaged in some especially subtle negotiations when he touches on the vexed subject of breath. For the Hebrews this had connoted an indissociable fusion of the divine and the physical, in the form of neshamah or ruach. This problem is of course focussed most sharply in the creation of Adam in Genesis. Given how subjective Augustine's discussion of this is - to say nothing of its reliance on Greek translations of the Hebrew - we will need to briefly recollect Staples' analysis of this key passage: In Gen 2:7 we find that Yahweh formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed in his nostrils the neshamah of life, and man became a living nephesh. In Gen 2:19 we find that Yahweh formed the beasts out of the ground ... and they too became living nephesh ... Man became a living being, and the beast became a living being. The neshamah was not the nephesh, but the neshamah entering the body made a living nephesh. The nephesh in this case was used almost with the force of our word "life" ... We have, therefore, both ruah and nephesh meaning "life" in an abstract and general sense, but there is a difference: The nephesh can live, the nephesh can die, while the ruah is life - it belongs to Yahweh, and will presumably return to him (Gen 6:3).54

By contrast, although in The City of God Augustine spends some time on this and related texts - and does admit that in the Old Testament both man

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and beasts receive or have pneuma - he essentially skirts around the problems posed by the Hebrew concept of nephesh.55 Whilst he admits that 'this fashioned dust was made a living soul', he also subtly reslants the Hebrew belief a few moments later, when he claims that man had a body formed from dust, 'to which the soul was given so that it might become a living body: that is, so that man might be made a living soul'.56 In that last statement we have two broadly Christian impositions: first, 'the soul' has been inspired into Adam, and second, Augustine is obliged to essentially split the holistic term neshamah into two, at one point glossing it as 'living body' and at the next as 'living soul'. A more deft sleight of hand, intentional or not, occurs when Augustine compares Genesis with Isaiah, 'at that place where God says, "I have made all breath", meaning, no doubt, all souls'. One would imagine that God, of all people, should be even more capable than Alice of saying what he means, and meaning what he says. With Augustine's help, here, he is enabled to speak as a Christian rather than as a Jew. In those bare ten words ('"I have made all breath", meaning, no doubt, all souls') the Hebrew quantity of temporary life becomes an immortal entity.57 What comes across most clearly of all in these passages is how much Augustine dislikes the original Hebrew concept of ruach (as well as certain versions of its effectual descendant, pneuma). For, 'our adversaries say that, if God's breath is understood to have come from God's mouth, and if we are to believe that this is the soul, then we must acknowledge that the soul is of the same substance' as God.58 One of Augustine's answers to this is the claim that God made some additional breath out of nothing and inserted this into Adam. That solution is itself fairly typical of the kind of theological abstraction which Augustine both pioneers and promotes. Yet more anti-empirical are his tendency to prefer the general term 'inspired' to the more concrete and sensuous 'breathed' (in the chapter in question he twice 'corrects' this), and his claim that even the breath inspired into Adam is itself 'incorporeal'.59 This problem of divine breath transmitted into humans also dogs Augustine in the New Testament. Here the key text was John 20.22, where the risen Christ 'breathed on His disciples, saying "Receive ye the Holy Spirit"'. As opposed to the literal transference of pneuma for which I have argued (and the subsequent power which the disciples gain as a result), Augustine tries to claim that 'the corporeal breath which proceeded from the mouth of Christ's flesh was not the actual substance and nature of the Holy Spirit'; but rather 'a sign whereby we might better understand that the Holy Spirit is common to both Father and Son'.60 Valuable work by the scholars Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen

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suggests that Augustine's struggle to assert the abstract over the concrete, and the incorporeal over the material, put him very much in the minority in his own lifetime. Inspired at least partly by Old Testament traditions, many Christians of this period still persisted in seeing God as not only material but anthropomorphic, having something like a human body and features. Griffin and Paulsen show that such beliefs were prevalent not only amongst the uneducated flocks of Augustine, Origen and St Basil, but that they could extend even to Tertullian, who demanded plainly: 'how can he be nothing without whom no thing was made, so that one void should have wrought solid things...? For who will deny that God is body ... although God is a spirit? For spirit is body of its own kind, in its own form'.61 As Griffin and Paulsen rightly emphasise, those last words in particular recall Stoic physics, which at this stage 'still strongly influence some Christian thinkers'. Besides Tertullian, we have those Egyptian monks who, in 399, stormed Alexandria and threatened to kill the bishop, Theophilus, for his attack on anthropomorphic Christianity.62 Griffin and Paulsen have also convincingly argued that Augustine himself, in his earlier years, shared these anthropomorphising beliefs, and cite a passage from Confessions in which he admits, '"I had not the least notion ... how there could be a spiritual substance"'.63 It may, then, have been with that typically sharper zeal of the convert that Augustine argued against these still prevalent notions in his later lifetime. Indeed, it is not impossible that he argued the harder and longer just because he was still trying, unconsciously, to convince himself. At any rate, it is a specially nice irony to find him, during his discussion of Genesis, claiming that the glaringly anthropomorphic speech of Yahweh, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' (Gen 1.26), actually denotes a likeness not of body, but of soul, referring to 'the rational soul, which God implanted in man'.64 When set against Galen's ideas of soul, or even against the status of pneuma in New Testament culture, Augustine does indeed look relatively abstracting and anti-empirical. If we briefly set him against one of his eminent theological successors, however, we can gain another perspective on his place in the long-term history of Christian pneumatology, whilst also glancing at the kind of body-soul orthodoxy against which certain early-modern thinkers would ultimately react. The kind of radically unscientific Aristotelianism in which Christian theology was mired in the Middle Ages was substantially due to the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).65 In Aquinas' lifetime, the victory of Christian Aristotelians over Christian Platonists was yet to come. As with

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his adaptations of Aristotle, Aquinas' use of Augustine is one which tends to select the most abstractive ideas, and to then re-express these in language still further alienated from ordinary speech or ordinary human experience.66 Where Augustine had airily dismissed Thales, Anaximenes and Epicurus in favour of God's spokesman, Plato, Aquinas takes an equally monolithic stance with regard to the single Greek authority tellingly referred to, in his work, as 'The Philosopher'. Whilst nominally following Augustine on the question of the soul's place in the body, Aquinas here produces the kind of archetypal Scholastic doubletalk which was to be the bête noire of thinkers such as Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century. His basic response to the question 'Whether the whole soul is in each part of the body?' is that: 'in each body the whole soul is in the whole body, and in each part is entire'.67 Although he then goes on to consider objections to this view (for example, if every part of the soul is indeed in every part of the body, it would seem that the power of sight would be in the ears as well as the eyes, and so forth) it is hard to feel that he is genuinely troubled by these. His blandly abstracting confidence in the power of words over things shines through in his conclusion that: 'since the soul does not have quantitative totality ... it is enough to say that the whole soul is in each part of the body, by totality of perfection and of essence, but not by totality of power'.68 Compare this to two moments in Augustine's discussion of the same question. First, we have his claim that 'the soul ... is present at the same time and entire, not only in the entire mass of its body, but also in each of its individual parts. For, it is the entire soul that feels the pain of a part of the body, yet it does not feel it in the entire body'.69 This may look paradoxical to us; and it is certainly a case of empiricism in the service of abstraction. For all that, it shows that Augustine's discussion of the soul is ready to take into account ordinary human experience: he does not simply ignore the (potentially inconvenient) fact that we feel pain only locally, not holistically.70 Another way of putting this is to note that Augustine's illustration (if not his conclusion) could be understood by one of his uneducated flock, whilst Aquinas' statement on this topic could not. Perhaps still more telling is a second moment in which Augustine is prompted to wonder at the sensitive or vital souls of certain worms. In The Magnitude of the Soul he seems to be genuinely troubled by the fact that the several parts of a worm cut in pieces will all keep moving - something that he and his pupils had directly witnessed.71 This would seem to be highly relevant to the question Aquinas is discussing, even if it were used only as something to argue against. Typically, however, Aquinas appears unwilling to descend to this kind of detail.

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At this point it is fitting to recall Armstrong's comments on the originally short-term dualism of Paul: 'the paradoxes that he imposed on his converts were the paradoxes endemic to a time of crisis: Paul believed he was living in the "last days" of the world. Two thousand years later the paradoxes have hardened into the Christianity we have today'.72 Having partially opposed Augustine to Aquinas, we can conclude this overview by more broadly opposing the empiricism of Galen to the abstracting paradoxes of Christian thought per se. Here is Augustine on the behaviour of fire, noting how God ‘gave the fire that wonderful power to make all things that it burns black, itself being so bright’. He then goes on to further illustrate this divine power by emphasising the fact that fire will also 'burn stones until they be white’.73 Once again, this relatively empirical illustration is effectively smothered by the theological use to which Augustine puts it. For he then presents it as one of ‘Nature’s testimonies, that bodies may remain undiminished in the fire’. Accordingly, he now feels confident in asserting that God can over-rule the supposedly habitual course of nature (and thus, by extension, that he may detain the unworthy in perpetual combustion).74 This subordination of ordinary natural laws to divine will contrasts sharply with a moment in which the (often teleological) Galen briefly notes the artful design of the eyebrows and eyelashes. The historian of science and magic, Lynn Thorndike, cites Galen's ‘admiration at nature’s providence in keeping the eyebrows and eyelashes of the same length and not letting them grow long like the beard or hair’. But, Galen goes on to insist, this was only ‘because a harder cartilaginous flesh is provided for them to grow in’; for ‘the mere will of God would not keep hairs from growing in soft flesh’.75 The mere will of God... We only need to try and imagine a Christian using such a phrase any time between around 400 and 1600 AD to appreciate what a remarkable stance this was. For the pious believers of the Renaissance, God could conjure perfect and dynamic living bodies from any heap of dust or ashes, any litter of charred or shattered bone; from the grass that a corpse had dissolved into, or the fish which had eaten it. So said many of the most highly educated men in the world, when they explained the processes of the final resurrection. Tacitly opposed to all this immense weight of literature, learning and power we find a small ridge of bony flesh, evoked with loving respect for its exact material texture. It is probably no accident that one of the most accurate analyses of the long-term Christian reconstruction of pneuma comes not from a theologian, but from a medical historian. Over fifty years ago, Benjamin

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Lee Gordon shrewdly noted that, by rendering pneuma as the equivalent of the Latin spiritus, Galen’s Latin, Arabic and Hebrew translators were effectively registering, if not causing, a fundamental shift from the original (Greek) idea: ‘Galen intended to convey by the term pneuma the entrance into the body of a material substance from the air that had to be renewed constantly through respiration’ rather than ‘a fixed entity blown into the body at the time of birth or conception’. Hence, ‘the spiritus animalis of the Middle Ages developed into a mystical power, a disembodied supernatural entity that controls all the phenomena of life’.76 Nor was it any accident that the anatomist and heretic Michael Servetus (1511-1553) - a figure able to recover both the original dynamism of ruach and pneuma through his physiological research, and the notion of Old Testament 'soul' as God's breath, through his knowledge of Hebrew - would endure a martyr's death at the hands of Jean Calvin.77 Protestants, it seems, could be the 'people of the Book' only so long as they did not read that Book too carefully. It is clear, then, that much had to change at the level of orthodox literate theology before the Christian soul could assume a character sufficiently abstract to satisfy the learned élite. Come the early modern era, such ideas would no longer satisfy every erudite Christian. In the early-seventeenth century, for example, Sir Walter Ralegh would complain that 'the substance of the soul is scarce known', whilst John Donne went so far as to argue that centuries of theology had failed to even establish that all men actually had souls.78

The Persistence of Spirit Forces Having shown that much changed in the realm of educated thought, we can also profitably ask: what stayed the same? It has been noted before now that Plato's tripartite soul, with its hierarchy of the divine brain, intermediate heart, and potentially bestial and unruly liver, broadly foreshadows Freud's model of human beings as composed of the primitive id, more rational ego, and potentially altruistic super-ego. But Plato, quite aside from his emphatic religiosity and dualism, is indeed too hierarchical to wholly match the Freudian view. For all its immense distance in many ways, arguably the most modern picture of the human individual is found in Homeric man. There, where menos, thymos, aion, phrenes and nous fluctuate in an unstable play of conflicting forces, unfixed by an absolute hierarchy, and where physiology and its attendant mutability are central, we seem to find a far more honest representation of human experience and

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consciousness than all the false dualisms later imposed by Christian thought. But arguably the most interesting parallels with pre-Christian cosmology are found in tribal culture and in Christian folklore.

The Concept of Mana In chapters one and two it was argued that in many ways the surviving literature of the Homeric and Ancient Hebrew worlds portrays tribal cultures. This argument can be reinforced by a brief look at the beliefs of Polynesian tribes, as studied by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recall Hull's parallel for the incident in which dunamin flows out of Christ's robe, which he explicitly compares to 'the 'primitive conception of mana'. Citing what he sees as the Egyptian version of this, he adds that, 'everything lives as a consequence of the flooding of Amon-Ra into everything', a power or spirit which 'cannot work without a vessel or container'.79 We do not have to fully accept the likeness of Amon-Ra to see that Hull's use of mana was here a very shrewd one. Since it entered the vocabulary of European scholars in the nineteenth century, mana has been one of the most significant terms and concepts in the study of magic and religion, having indeed become 'part of the metalanguage of anthropology' in the past hundred years.80 With the word and its cognates coming first from Polynesia and Micronesia, scholars presently began to claim that there were closely analogous terms in numerous other traditional cultures, in North America, Africa, Australia and Sumatra.81 Not surprisingly, the concept and its intellectual history are highly complex and contested: there has been debate about the grammatical status of the word; and, in more recent decades, a general reaction against earlier tendencies to use the term too loosely and (arguably) with a pervasiveness and fascination not wholly dissimilar to the magical psychology it supposedly denotes.82 For all that, the following statements still offer us a broadly accurate picture of this elusive force. Almost a hundred years ago A.M. Hocart cited the view that '"a thing is mana if it operates; it is not mana if it does not"'.83 More recently, we find Mircea Eliade stating that, 'all conspicuous success is a proof that a man has mana'; whilst F. Allen Hanson describes it as referring to a 'state of being ... enjoyed by those objects, places or persons that benefit permanently (or at least for an extended period) from the strengthening influence of the gods. A primary mark of mana is outstanding effectiveness in action'.84 The OED, similarly, tells us that mana means 'authority, control, influence, prestige, power, psychic force'.

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Famously, mana has also been compared to a kind of primitive electricity.85 At one level, then, we can link mana with the world of Homer by recalling the words of Ruth Padel, who stated that, 'in Athenian homes', invisible gods 'were a force as live and considerable as electricity in ours'.86 It was also Padel who compared the tantalisingly elusive status and behaviour of terms such as menos, phrenes and thymos with the notably dynamic, interactive and pervasive qualities of liget amongst the Ilongot, the headhunting tribe of the Philippines. In this region, the work of those anthropologists who have recognised the broad link between uses of liget and of mana offers us a bridge between the spirit forces of the Homeric world, and those similarly tribal cultures of later eras and quite distant continents.87 A second link can be found between mana and thymos. Discussing the nuances of Sarpedon's divinely-aided recovery, we drew on Caswell's study of thymos: 'I submit that thymos is in fact the human counterpart of the winds, brought to animate the body by the winds as we see in the revival of Sarpedon, and carried away on the winds from the body once it has ceased to be able ... physically to continue breathing and to contain the thymos within the phrenes'.88 At one level we can here note Robert Blust's discovery: in various Polynesian languages, mana originally meant 'thunder' and/or 'wind'.89 We also find that both thymos and mana underwent a similar evolution over time. Caswell emphasised how 'this synonymity between the winds and thymos was buried gradually by the tendency of the language to specialize and draw distinctions between the cosmic and the individual levels. But because epic diction is conservative, it is still possible to discover the remnants of this relationship'.90 Similarly, Blust notes of the two senses of mana (thunder and spiritual power) that, over time, in many languages these 'came to be dissociated'. In each case, then, that basic, essentially primitive reverence for the most awesome powers of nature (wind or thunder) seems to be the oldest root of terms (mana and thymos) which later became more narrowly human in usage. Turning specifically to menos, we can remind ourselves of the potentially unstable, rawly animalistic qualities of this Homeric term something which might at times be controlled or contained by thymos, but which might in certain cases overpower it. In this respect we should also recall how menos could be used to denote the potentially uncontrollable or dangerous powers of animals such as the lion or the horse. Similarly, mana is a power which can be dangerous, as well as beneficial, being closely linked with the word tapu - a term which can be translated as 'taboo' or 'sacred'.91 Mana and menos, then, share that quite primal quality: a power which is potentially unstable, and can therefore very easily tilt from good to bad.92

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Those primal winds of thymos and mana, blowing across both centuries and oceans between Sarpedon and the Polynesians, allow us to quite quickly see the most basic links between mana and Old Testament spirit forces. If we restate Hanson's definition of mana ('a state of being ... enjoyed by those objects, places or persons that benefit permanently (or at least for an extended period) from the strengthening influence of the gods. A primary mark of mana is outstanding effectiveness in action') we can see how closely those aspects of mana resemble the use of ruach to specially empower individuals such as Moses and Caleb. These forces come from on high, and their potency is demonstrated by worldly success. Again, mana and ruach are common to humans and animals. Thirdly, when 'an elderly Maori interviewed in 1921' stated that '"the gods differ from man only in the fact that their mana can never be overwhelmed or destroyed. Man's can"' he gave a definition remarkably close to the temporarily possessed ruach of the human organism - a quantity not an entity, impersonally recycled into Yahweh upon the person's death.93 A shared emphasis on taboos (especially ones which involve the touching of 'unclean' or dangerous objects) also links mana-societies with the Old Testament. For the Ancient Hebrews, nephesh could be central to dietary taboo, as when Leviticus warns that 'ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life [nephesh] of all flesh is the blood thereof'.94 These and other Hebraic taboos were clearly rooted in the idea of certain forces being transferred between people and objects. Underpinning such beliefs, then, was something like a law of nature rather than any merely customary, superficial observance. This point allows us to broaden that comparison out into the world of the New Testament. When Gerald Schnepp identified nine characteristics of Melanesian mana as: 'impersonal; supernatural; potential universality of possession; works for both good and evil; is all-pervading; possessed by persons, animals and things; is transferable; its failure is attributed to the intervention of a stronger spirit; and it may sometimes be secured by offerings', he listed at least eight qualities frequently typical of dunamin or pneuma in Stoic and New Testament culture.95 Whilst pneuma was often clearly associated with the possession (or transfer) of unusual power, it is dunamin which (like mana) is often precisely rendered as 'power'. When analysing the transfer (or theft) of dunamin from Christ's garment to the sick woman, Hull (citing Preisigke), emphasised how 'only certain persons can carry such high tension, else why should the woman have come to Christ?'.96 This ability to carry such 'high [spiritual] tension' is closely paralleled in Polynesian mana-societies.

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Blust explains how, in such communities, density of mana was associated with hereditary chiefs not just for political reasons, but via a kind of law of physics; commoners must avoid any objects touched by these chiefs because 'it was widely believed that such contact would be dangerous or even fatal to anyone who himself lacked the mana to withstand the mana of the chief'.97 Finally, we have the connection between spirit forces and the dead. As we saw in the previous chapter, 'it was generally believed' in New Testament culture 'that the spirit of any human being who had come to an unjust, violent or otherwise untimely end was of enormous power. If a magician could call up and get control of, or identify himself with such a spirit, he could then control inferior spirits or powers'.98 Similarly, the power of mana often resided with certain types of Polynesian ghost, known as tindalos, and it was possible to draw on them as a source of mana, transferable to the realm of the living.99

Popular Religion and Popular Magic When examining the especially striking case of spirit transfer into the Gadarene swine we glanced at a few related examples from later Christian cultures. What those instances did not show was just how long these spirit forces (and their associated magical beliefs) endured in many parts of Christendom. By its very nature, evidence on this topic is far less complete than we would like. But what data we do have on the lives and beliefs of ordinary people across Europe and North America strongly points to one broad conclusion: for most people, in most of history, there was little else but magic. In rural areas especially, witchcraft, the evil eye, vampirism and a multiplicity of active spirit forces dominated the lives of the poor or uneducated well into the twentieth century. Although such people may well have been intensely pious, their piety was probably often highly unorthodox - if not heretical - by educated standards. Moreover, if in times of practical need or urgency they faced a choice between conventional piety and magic, then magic would almost certainly be favoured because of the seeming control and explanatory power which it offered. In terms of religion per se, many people seem to have been relatively detached from religious professionals and their orthodoxy. At times this detachment expressed itself as outright alienation or irreverence. Thus Max Weber, writing some time before 1920, could state that, 'to this day, no decision of church councils ... has succeeded in deterring a south European peasant from spitting in front of the statue of a saint when he holds it responsible for withholding a favour even though the customary

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procedures were performed'.100 And Catherine Merridale, discussing Russian popular belief, noted that after a death some friends or kin would try to bury the deceased themselves as quickly as possible, prompted by their belief that the officiating priest, with his incomprehensible formulae uttered at the graveside, was actually informing to the Almighty on the sins of the departed.101 At the level of the deity himself, we can reasonably suspect that most ordinary Christians fell under the broad stance identified by Elvis Costello in 1989, when he has God complain: 'sometimes you confuse me with Santa Claus; it's the big white beard, I suppose...'.102 For humble believers, there was little comfort, sense, or reality in the abstract, formless God which Augustine and his educated peers were still struggling to establish c.400AD. The anthropomorphism which Griffin and Paulsen identified as the norm there may well have changed little in the following 1500 years. Compare, for example, the case unearthed by Keith Thomas, in which (sometime before 1623) one dying man of sixty, 'who had heard at least two or three thousand sermons in his lifetime', upon being asked '"what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body"'.103 These last words confront us with a popular pneumatology which makes even New Testament pneuma seem abstract and ethereal by comparison. Sadly, we cannot easily say how many other humble believers harboured souls of such rocklike gravity. But what we do know is that - as we saw in chapter six - the soul was very real and worldly for most Christians until around a hundred years ago. Its exit from a 'dead' body could be prolonged, difficult, uncertain, subject to material obstacles; most of all, it could be the agent of vampirism. Folklore records show that in Greece and in central-eastern Europe the soul played a central role in this phenomenon into (and sometimes after) the 1920s. To this day some Greeks still cover mirrors in the house of death, due to the explicitly-stated fear that the soul may otherwise fly into them and become trapped.104 In one Greek mountain village on the island of Evia in the 1970s, all the older villagers still recalled the last vampire destroyed there in past years. So terrifying was this creature that the living sought to protect themselves by a heresy which, for educated Christians, could seem all but unimaginable: as far as they were concerned, they quite literally destroyed the soul of the undead.105 Although this belief is rarely stated so explicitly, it may well have been implicit in the destructive rituals of other vampire communities. The heart, so often held to be the seat of the soul by the most pious amongst literate and illiterate Christians, was often singled out for special attention - sometimes staked, sometimes burned; sometimes, indeed,

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treated in yet more surprising ways still... In the remote southwestern village of Marotinu de Sus in Romania, the corpse of one Petre Toma was identified as a vampire or strigoi by his own brother, held to have caused the illness of Petre's niece. Accordingly, at midnight six local men dug Toma up, cut his chest with a scythe, pulled out his heart, and took it 'spiked aloft' on a pitchfork, 'to the crossroads outside the village. There they roasted it over a brazier and ... stuffed glowing coals into the ventricles. Held up in the night sky, the heart shed charred flakes that were caught in a tea towel. These were taken to the niece's house, ground up and mixed in a glass of water. "The niece drank it," ... "and in the morning she said she felt better... in this way she was cured"'.106 This was not the only time that those threatened by a vampire drank the ashes of its heart. But the case is remarkable not just for its cannibalism. It occurred, after all, in early 2004 - some weeks after Stephenie Meyer had signed a three-book deal for her Twilight vampire novels. Daniel McLaughlin, an Observer reporter who covered the story of Marotinu de Sus, added that fear of the evil eye was indeed commonplace in this strange time-capsule of once prevalent European rural beliefs. Not only that, but in the nearby village of Celaru there had recently occurred an incident that could just as easily have come straight out of the New Testament. We saw that, in certain Gospels, the Gadarene lunatic was treated with a seeming inhumanity which was clearly routine for the period: chained up naked outside, by tombs which were presumably some distance from the main community.107 This was almost certainly a crude attempt to drive the devils from the man's body. Compare, first, Edith Durham, travelling in Albania in the early 1920s: 'in order to drive out the devils, great cruelty is sometimes inflicted. In an orthodox monastery, I once saw a wretched lunatic stark naked, tied to a kennel out of doors like a dog and in great misery, but could do nothing to alleviate his lot. The monks were trying to drive out the evil spirits'.108 If Durham had been born a few decades later, she might have been yet more startled to hear what happened in Celaru in 2005. Maricica Irina Cornici was a nun who was apparently suffering from schizophrenia. Taking this as a case of demonic possession, Father Daniel Petru Corogeanu attempted to perform an exorcism. Cornici was chained to a cross in a dark and cold room, gagged, and left without food or water for five days. She died, and in 2007 Corogeanu was jailed for fifteen years.109 If the 2000 year old story of the Gadarene lunatic seems less shocking by comparison, we might like to remind ourselves that he was perhaps lucky to live in a warmer climate (assuming, of course, that someone was brave

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enough to offer him water now and then). By 2005 the Celaru incident was probably very atypical for Europe (although not, if we believe Corogeanu, for Romania: 'exorcism is a common practice in ... the Romanian Orthodox Church, and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests').110 Deaths from exorcism, however, have occurred with surprising frequency across the world in recent years: in Century City in Los Angeles in 1996, and in Milwaukee in 2003, to cite just two examples.111 We can reasonably assume that in Durham's time, when vampirism and the evil eye were certainly facts of life for many, the miserable lunatic of the Albanian monastery was in rather less of a minority. In such environments various forms of spirit transfer were more or less commonplace. In many cases the pervasive and enduring fear of the evil eye, for example, is founded on the notion of malign spirits. For many who feared it, this phenomenon almost certainly involved the emission of something from the eyes of the jettatura.112 Conversely, the cure of numerous ailments - minor and major - by transfer magic has been so widespread and habitual as to stand as a serious candidate for the most common form of popular magic. Your disease - or skin blemish - could be cured by transferring it to plantlife, animals, or other humans.113 That last category seems to have been the rarer of the three (although it could of course be done remotely, by (for example) touching your wart to a stone or other object, and leaving the object where someone else may touch it or carry it away).114 Yet we saw it occurring in Greece in the early 1960s, in the remarkably Christlike figure of the healer named Maria: ‘when he was healing, Jesus took the sins of others upon himself; eventually he died from this. That’s like with the healers here; when Maria, for example, cures others of pain, that pain is transferred to her, but she has no place to put the bad after that’.115 That kind of belief was by no means limited to Catholic countries in the twentieth century. Before his death in 1909 George Pickingale, the famed and feared 'wizard of Canewdon' in Essex, was known for a range of magical powers. In one instance he healed a local woman of her rheumatism by '"transferring the disease to her father"'.116 If this kind of thing could happen in late-Victorian or early-Edwardian Essex, just a short ride from London, it must certainly have happened across Christendom many times before, in the 1900 years after Christ. Once again, when considering how thoroughly detached ordinary men and women might be from the orthodoxy of an Augustine or an Aquinas, it is

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hard not to feel a certain admiration for people who were in so many ways liable to be tyrannised over by the powerful and the educated. Ultimately, in their day-to-day lives such people had more to fear from the raw powers of nature than they did from God or his obedient theological secretaries. Or, to put it another way - as it was in the beginning, so it was in the end. From Palestine c.30AD, to Celaru in 2005, for the vast mass of ordinary humankind spirits were at worst deadly, and at best, useful. Seeking to recover some of the more valuable insights of a now unfashionable nineteenth-century anthropology, Blust writes: there is growing evidence that some widespread and apparently arbitrary features of human culture that appear at first to defy explanation were in fact inspired by a prescientific attempt to understand the forces of nature. Not least of these is the globally distributed belief in dragons, which almost certainly owes its origin to animistic conceptions of the rainbow as an immense snake that drinks from a terrestrial source and spews out the water as rain, or that drinks up the rain and causes it to stop (Blust 2000). In both cases (dragons and mana) the attempt to achieve a prescientific explanation of powerful or frightening natural phenomena led from observations of nature to interpretive cultural constructions that eventually became dissociated from their supernatural moorings ... the human imagination does not create culture ex nihilo, but is creatively inspired by the world we live in.117

Quite recently, a remarkable study by Iain McGilchrist has illuminated many of the questions in this book from a new and intriguing angle. The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World examines the very different attitudes and habits of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. It claims that the right hemisphere is more interested in living things, in empathic relationships between living things, in concrete realities, and a generally holistic, intuitive approach to the world. The left, by contrast, favours clear definition, abstraction, control, analysis and detached manipulation. McGilchrist further argues that, ideally, both hemispheres should cooperate, with the right hemisphere having overall dominance. He believes that different epochs in western history have been characterised by the dominance of either right or left hemisphere - the Enlightenment, for example, being a clear case of ultra-rational left hemisphere dominance. He also believes that, despite some oscillation since that time, the left hemisphere has become progressively more powerful, to the point where it now dominates western life dangerously, promoting narrowly analytic and utilitarian attitudes towards much of the world and human experience.

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In a book which is already formidably learned and wide-ranging, fusing neuroscience and psychiatry with philosophy, poetry and literature, McGilchrist is understandably selective in his overview of western history. But, whilst he does not say much about early Christianity, he does discuss the Homeric world in some detail. Noting, as I have, that 'when Homer wants to speak of someone's mind or thoughts, he refers to what is effectively a physical organ - Achilles, for example, consulting his thumos', he pithily sums up the concrete and holistic cosmology and psychology of this literature: 'the body is indistinguishable from the whole person'.118 McGilchrist also takes a similar stance toward Plato and Aristotle, seeing the former as preferring types and abstractions over concrete reality, and his pupil as seeking an unbiassed 'understanding [of] the natural world' a stance which, sadly, 'did not survive with his works'.119 It should by now be clear how well the right brain's holistic, concrete, living view of reality fits not only Homer but the world of the Old Testament - a mindset which refused to distinguish emphatically between concept and percept, Sheol and the grave, the soul and the body. Similarly, despite the dualism later imposed on it, the popular mind of the New Testament world preferred the living, embodied, dynamic force of pneuma to the abstracted and reified entity of psyche. Moreover, even Paul at times allowed a porous divide between the human body and that divine pneuma which could potentially saturate and transform it. It was only later versions of Christianity which asserted the sharper dualism of a degraded body and incorporeal soul, along with the associated dualism of heaven and hell, absolute salvation versus absolute damnation.120 It hardly needs emphasising that a world without the scientific and technological gains of the left brain would in many ways be a very harsh and limited one. But it is striking how well the right brain world fits so many qualities of the pre-dualistic cosmologies studied here - something which I emphasise, in part, because I read McGilchrist's work only after writing most of this book. Returning to the long-running opposition between official theology and popular magic, we might add that the former has often been highly abstracting and of course almost exclusively literate. Both of these very left brain qualities were denied to most of humanity for most of history. Let us close, then, by imagining the response of an archtheologian to all those woefully empirical and mundane concerns of the ordinary and vulnerable Christian. 'Have you no morals, man?' Thomas Aquinas might have asked of such people. To which, of course, the predictable and just reply: 'Can't afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me'.121

NOTES Introduction 1

Although some commentators are undecided about the truth of this claim, Julia Annas believes it to be factual (see Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 23. 2 Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. Abraham Arden Brill (Moffatt, 1918), chapter three. 3 De Anima, 41-43. 4 Extract from Primitive Culture (1871); repr. in: From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, ed. Mircea Eliade (London: Collins, 1967), 184-5. 5 In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 114.

Chapter One 1

On Sanskrit, Latin and old Slav, see R.B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence, also of Some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (Salem: Ayer, 1987), 44. On Arabic, see H. Wheeler Robinson, 'Hebrew Psychology', in The People and the Book: Essays on the Old Testament, ed. A.S. Peake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 353-382, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 353-382, 356. On the relationship between 'spirit', 'mind', 'air' and 'wind' in ancient Vedic, Zoroastrian, and Homeric texts, see: Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Menis in Greek Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 177-194. 2 For the universality and persistence of such a practice, see Elizabeth A. Warner's article on peasant attitudes to death in 1990s Russia, where an older informant tells of how death used to be ascertained in his earlier lifetime: '"You would put a mirror to where the breath should be. The mirror will mist over if he has the slightest breath in him."' ('Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol'niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part I: The Restless Dead, Wizards and Spirit Beings' Folklore 111.1 (2000): 67-90, 74.) 3 The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 49. As Henry E. Sigerist notes, the Vedas partly resemble Homeric literature in being originally oral works; it is therefore particularly difficult to date their origin with any precision (A History of Medicine Volume II: Early Greek, Hindu and Persian Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 148-9.)

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229

Noting that 'atman' only later 'came to designate the transmigrating soul', O'Flaherty points out that indeed it seems to be 'the body, not the soul', which is 'led to heaven’ (The Rig Veda, 47-8). 5 O'Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 76. For the riddle's difficulties, and commentary on its symbolism, see respectively, O'Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 71 and 81. 6 The Upanishads are seen as the last of the vedas, and classed among the Indian sacred texts known as 'vedanta'. 7 The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy: Selections from the Rig Veda, Atharva Veda, Upanisads, and Mahabharata, trans. Franklin Edgerton (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 139. Edgerton, noting that these lines are from the Brhad Aranyaka Upanisad, ‘probably the oldest Upanisad we have’ (135), is echoed by Patrick Olivelle (Upanisads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-4). For further details on the nuances and complexities of 'atman' in this era (at least five different types of breath were now distinguished), see Olivelle, Upanisads, xlix-l. The final words of this hymn indeed seem to have something which (at least to us) implies an existential assertion of transient, shared human feeling against the bleak unconcern of Nature per se; an impression sharpened all the more by the poignant suddenness with which this human voice breaks out. 8 For a discussion of the relationship between atman and matter, see also Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas Vol.1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 24346. 9 On the 'differences between ancient and modern concepts of truth, fiction, lies and poetry', see Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold, Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London: Duckworth, 2005), 12. 10 From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values and Beliefs (London: Constable, 1970), 28. On the longer-term shift from 'dominant aristocratic households' to 'the classical city state', and the complex tension between oikos and polis, see: Johannes Haubold, Homer's People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11; and Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 96, citing I. Morris. 11 On the related concept of Homeric laos ('people'), see Haubold, Homer's People, passim. 12 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 3-4. For the theory that Melantheus' death was actually a remnant of several similar scenes, expurgated at some point by 'civilised censors', see Gilbert Murray, as cited by: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Robert Hullot-Kentor, 'Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment', New German Critique 56 (1992): 109-141, 141, n.62. 13 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1998), XXII.408-17. For historical episodes which broadly match Hector's psychology here, see: Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21; Tony Thorne,

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Countess Dracula: the Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 21, citing an account by PálĘczy Horrrath (1944). 14 In this latter case castration and other features of deliberately aggravated killing suggest highly meaningful, rather than purely bestial violence. On tribalism, see Haubold, Homer's People, 12, citing B. Quiller. 15 On the social prestige and semiotics of this kind of violence, see also Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 96, 104-5. 16 For more on the 'family tree' of gods and humans, see Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 98-99. For an intriguing discussion of the sometimes blurred line between gods and humans at the moment of death, see: Alex Purves, 'Falling into Time in Homer's Iliad', Classical Antiquity 25.1 (2006): 179-209. 17 Andrew Ford states that ‘we are not sure whether [transcription took place] in the eighth century or the sixth’ (Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1). Cf.: The Iliad: A Commentary, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), I, ed. G.S. Kirk, 4: ‘Homer ... was as much a remote figure to the ancient world as he is to us’. Kirk also notes that ‘the Iliad and the Odyssey were widely known by the middle of the seventh century BC, if not earlier’ (ibid.); and Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 11, 19. 18 For discussion of this issue, see: Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 11; Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 96-97. 19 On the relationship between earlier and later periods, see Padel: 'Tragedy's language of consciousness rests on Homer, with whom Athenian poets thought and worked, and on the lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC' (In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18). 20 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 25. Cf. Sarah Iles Johnson, who argues that the much later Greek and Roman habit of ritually animating statues of the gods 'enabled the theurgists to work within a worldview that sharply distinguished between the physical and spiritual realms - a worldview that was not common to earlier, more traditional Greek and Roman mentalities' ('Animating Statues: A Case Study in Ritual', Arethusa 41.3 (2008): 445-77, 446). 21 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 39. Cf., more broadly, Leonard Muellner: 'when we read the first book of the Iliad, it is possible or even likely that we are "recognizing" manifestations of Achilles' anger, consistently named with the word menis, that in their proper cultural setting have nothing to do with his anger...' (The Anger of Achilles, 1). 22 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), 7. 23 On the grammatical gender of these words and their often dynamic contexts, see Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 18-19. 24 As its connection with Latin ‘cordis’ or modern English ‘cardiac’ implies, the word ‘kardie’ or ‘kradie’ is the one term which in some uses refers precisely to the heart as an organ (see David B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 15, n.14.)

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25 In the early-modern period, Shakespeare's Theseus can still talk of ‘the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling/... from heaven to earth’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1, 12-13). 26 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 19. 27 A key term from Greek tragedy which partly resembles phrenes is splanchna ('the innards, the general collection of heart, liver, lungs, gallbladder, and attendant blood vessels'; see Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 13-14). 28 Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 173, 277. Cf. especially Onians, Origins, 23-43, who has argued that 'diaphragm' frequently conflicts with the details and contexts of the word's usage. Onians adds (38) that ‘the lungs of a bird are still called its “soul” in several counties’ of Britain c.1951. For further support of Onians' view, see Caroline P. Caswell, A Study of Thumos in Early Greek Epic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 61. 29 Michael Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: a Study of Words and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 75-77. 30 Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 17-18, 50. 31 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 20. 32 Iliad XXIII.103-4; cited by Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 281. Fagles has here: 'So even in Death's strong house there is something left, a ghost, a phantom - true, but no real breath of life' (XXIIII,122-3). 33 Cf Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 19, on the liver as an important Greek seat of passions which can be torn, slashed, and eaten by various emotions. 34 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 21. Cf. her citation of Hippolytus: '"My tongue promised, my phren did not."' She notes, too, perhaps, some incipient or relative dualism: 'By the mid-fifth century, it is possible to oppose phrenes to the externally seen body' (22). 35 Origins, 66. 36 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 89. 37 The heart seems to have done this to a surprising degree in early-modern Christianity (see: The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), chapter one, conclusion). 38 Paul S. Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 29; Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11. Cf. the lingering echo found, still, in a 'dry' personality, someone detached and aloof from emotional flux. 39 Cf. Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 27, on the 'intermittent physicality' of heart and phrenes. 40 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 175. 41 Cf. Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 23: 'these innards flow with emotions that behave like liquids'. 42 Cf. Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 21: 'PhrƝn's first feature seems to be responsiveness'.

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Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 1. Cf ibid.: 'Generations of classicists and readers of Homer ... have been making do with approximations in meaning which range from "soul" to "anger", And yet the uses of thumos are so varied, covering almost every important aspect of inner human experience, that it seems possible only to translate each occurrence as is fitting to that passage without attempting consistency' (Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 1). Cf. Redfield, Nature and Culture, 174, for whom thymos is 'the seat of the whole practical consciousness, from instant rage and pain to planning and deliberation ... a single phenomenon and at the same time with extraordinarily subtle internal differentiation'. 45 Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 50. Cf. ibid., 62. 46 Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 50. 47 Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 43, citing Iliad XIII, 279-83. 48 Clearly this kind of register is erroneously shifted to the level of abstract metaphor if in such a passage thymos is rendered as ‘heart’, something not imagined to physically drop through the body. 49 ‘Blood and Hunger in the Iliad’, Classical Philology 101.1 (2006): 15-33, 32. The passage cited occurs in Murray's translation at II, 359. 50 Odyssey, I, 391. 51 Odyssey, I, 215. 52 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 27, citing Iliad 21.324 23.230. 53 Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 63. 54 Cf. Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 14. 55 Cf. the at least partial dependence of thymos on food and drink. 56 Snell, 14. Cf. Adkins, From the Many to the One, 17, and Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 303. 57 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 15. 58 These passages prompt us to wonder about the line which tells how ‘Achilles hath wrought to fury the proud heart [thymos] within him, cruel man!’ (I, 429). Does this ability to wilfully 'alter his own soul’, without divine or external aid, confirm Achilles' specially superhuman status? In the context of warfare, we can assume that ‘fury’ is at least partially linked to its now most common register, that of rage. Recalling the link between ‘phrenes’ and ‘frenzy’, however, we find ourselves nudged toward a sense still current in the Renaissance: that of fiercely active mental powers, as in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1545). As the OED reminds us, this now rare usage signified ‘inspired frenzy, as of one possessed by a god or demon; esp. poetic “rage”’. 59 Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, II, 128. It should be added that Fagles' translation makes explicit the oak's sanctity in a way that other versions do not: compare, for example, 'a beauteous oak of Zeus' (Murray, II, 245). Cf. also Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 95, on Zeus's apparently maverick behaviour in this instance. 60 See for example the case of Elphenor stabbed by Agenor: ‘So his spirit [thymos] left him...’ (Iliad, I, 187); and cf. Claus, Toward the Soul, 22. 61 The Iliad: A Commentary, II, 129. 44

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Caswell, A Study of Thumos, 62, 61. We find, after all, that the Greek deities could interact with humans (and in various creative disguises) when prompted by their notorious sexual appetites. 64 Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 33. 65 For a broad parallel to this divinely-initiated revival in Akkadian literature, see: Lloyd R. Neve, 'The Spirit of God in the Old Testament', PhD, 1967, City of New York Theological Seminary, 23-4. 66 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 2. 67 Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, trans. John Raffan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 162. 68 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 204. Cf. also Adkins, From the Many to the One, 25; and Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (London: Blackie and Son, 1924), sense 5: ‘Might, vigour, power, strength’. For discussion of the partially related term, menis, see Muellner, The Anger of Achilles. 69 II, 265. Cf. also Helenus on Diomedes in Iliad VI: ‘no one can vie with him in might [menos]’ (I, 269). By contrast, Homeric menis is 'restricted to gods and Achilles' alone (Muellner, The Anger of Achilles, 2; cf Joan V. O'Brien, The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero and the Goddess in the Iliad (Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), 79-80). 70 This seems indirectly confirmed by an instance in which menos is seen to effectively burn up the body at death, once thymos can no longer hold it in check (see Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 60). 71 Cf. Redfield, Nature and Culture, 172: 'Menos also makes the man, like an ax, hard-tempered; as it gives a man the power to move, it also gives him the power to resist change'. 72 Cf. Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 24-5: ‘Menos is "force", which is often "ferocity", as in a wild animal, the hot sun, fire, or stormy gales’. 73 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 172, citing Iliad IX.706. 74 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 172, 185. Cf. Padel, 24: ‘Wine "increases menos in a weary man"’. 75 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 172. 76 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 175. 77 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 172, citing I. 103-4; XIX.365-67. 78 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 275, n.17, citing XX.93, XXII.204. 79 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 51-2. 80 See Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 52; Claus, Toward the Soul, 25. Onians sees it as being in the lungs with thymos. 81 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 25. Claus (Toward the Soul, 25) also considers that menos could be ‘in’ thymos. 82 On the formal artifice of early Greek hexameter, see Graziosi and Haubold, Homer, 18. 83 Cf. Iliad I, 229, 253, 267; II, 15. 84 Other translations of the coupling can themselves be remarkably misleading; compare, for example, the inaccurately static, definite, or abstractive 'heart and 63

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soul' or 'life and soul'. 85 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 90. 86 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 25-6. 87 Roger M. Keesing has argued that anthropologists are prone to impose cosmologies on tribes such as the Ilongot, with liget being used as a primary component of the inferred cosmology in that case. Whilst sophisticated and thought-provoking in many ways, Keesing's suspicion that anthropologists falsely exoticise such cultures does ultimately seem quaintly academic and intellectualising: in the end, a tribe which collects heads as a way of life is very different from the average society in Britain or France or Germany (see: 'Conventional Metaphors and Anthropological Metaphysics: The Problematic of Cultural Translation', Journal of Anthropological Research 41.2 (1985): 201-217). 88 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 175. 89 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 16 (citing Iliad II.iv.309). 90 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 16. Cf (ibid): ‘it is never thought of as something material the way thymos is often conceived’. 91 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 176, citing I.363; Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 39. 92 'In Homeric language we would say that poetry is the work of noos, not thumos. The poet is detached; he recognises' (Redfield, Nature and Culture, 219). 93 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 176. 94 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 177. Cf. ibid., '"In Homer nous never means 'reason'..."'. 95 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 16. 96 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 82, 83. 97 Redfield, Nature and Culture, 177. 98 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 200. 99 For such a usage see Iliad IV, where Simoeisius is killed by Aias: 'brief was the span of his life [aion], for that he was laid low by the spear of great-souled Aias' (I, 189). 100 See Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 212-14, 221-2, who notes how Athene ‘dried up’ Odysseus’ flesh when transforming him into an old man. 101 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 202. Similarly, it is a term which would later be used for 'liquid desire' (ibid.). 102 Odyssey, I, 181. 103 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 203-4. 104 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 205. 105 Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind 13-14. 106 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 61-3. For a possible example of such association, see Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 168, ll. 172-3. 107 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 103. 108 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 104, Odyssey XVII (II, 191). 109 For actual links between sneezing and orgasm, see: 'Notes & Comments', BMJ, 1.5451 (1965): 1658; Mahmood F Bhutta and harold Maxwell, 'Sneezing Induced

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by Sexual Ideation or Orgasm: an Under-Reported Phenomenon', JRSM 101.12 (2008): 587-91. 110 Cf. Paul Hammond: ‘Partly as a result of Freud’s work, our contemporary mythologies about ourselves include the assumption that hidden sexual feelings or behaviour could, if brought to light, reveal some ultimate, definitive truth about a person: our identity is often thought to be, at root, our sexuality. When a newspaper tabloid drags someone out of the closet, the “truth” about them is “revealed”’ (Love Between Men in Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan, 1996), 25). 111 Cf. Jan Bremmer, who distinguishes psyche from other Homeric soul-words by terming it the 'free soul' (The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 9, 13-14). 112 Adkins, From the Many to the One, 15. 113 See for example Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops: ‘“Would that I were able to rob thee of psyche and aion, and to send thee to the house of Hades"’ (Odyssey, IX (I, 341)); and Hera on the possible death of Sarpedon 'when his psyche and aion have left him' (Iliad, XVI (II, 199)). It may also explain why, on one occasion, a boar has his psyche leave him at death (‘the boar’s life left him’(Odyssey, XIV (II, 65)). This oddity may have resulted from the kind of collective authorship outlined above; but if so would still imply that degrees of 'bestial' materiality could be admitted to psyche by certain Homeric poets). 114 See for example Iliad, XIV: 'Atreus’ son smote with a thrust in the flank Hyperenor, shepherd of the host, and the bronze let forth the bowels, as it clove through, and his soul [psyche] sped hastening through the stricken wound, and darkness enfolded his eyes’ (II, 105). 115 Kirk, in noting that Hades was at least ‘a less destructive and dismal place than the Mesopotamian House of Dust’, points to one more Ancient version of the afterlife strikingly unlike either heaven or hell as conceived by Christianity (The Iliad: A Commentary, II, 8). As E.B. Tylor points out, various tribal cultures (Tasmanians, Algonquins, Abipones, and Zulus) have similarly identified the shadow and the soul (From Primitives to Zen, 177). 116 ‘The Soul, Death and the Afterlife in Early and Classical Greece’, in Hidden Futures: Death and Immortality in Ancient Egypt, Anatolia, the Classical , Biblical and Arabic-Islamic World, ed. J.M. Bremmer, Th. P.J. van den Hout, R. Peters (Amsterdam University Press, 1994), 91-106, 101. 117 As we have seen, the Greek word often used to denote the ‘shades’ or ‘ghosts’ of the dead is eidolon – a term whose additional meaning of ‘image’ seems to confirm this depthless status of the dead. 118 Iliad, II, 501. Cf. the ghost of Odysseus' mother on how, ‘when one dies ... the sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together, but the strong force of blazing fire destroys these, as soon as the thymos leaves the white bones, and the psyche, like a dream, flutters off and is gone’ (Odyssey, XI (I, 417)). 119 For further details see Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 59-61. For

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scholarly discussion of the different levels of consciousness accorded to the dead in different parts of Homer, see The Iliad: A Commentary, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), VI, ed. Nicholas Richardson, 178; Bremmer, ‘The Soul, Death and the Afterlife’, 100-101. 120 For further evidence that Homeric 'shades' are more like reduced bodies than 'liberated souls' see Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer, 158. 121 Bruno Snell argues that the first instance of this changed spatial nature occurs in the writings of Heraclitus, c.500BC (The Discovery of the Mind, 17). It is worth noting here an interesting point made by Jan Bremmer, who points out that ‘in late parts of the Odyssey ... we hear of Hermes as a guide’ to the underworld. As Bremmer astutely notes, ‘a guide suggests a difficult route’ suggesting that ‘the world of the dead was mentally dissociated from the world of the living’ as well as ‘the need of a reassuring, knowing person’ to allay ‘anxiety about one’s own fate after death’ (‘The Soul, Death and the Afterlife’, 103). 122 Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer, 161. Presumably this process of further loss would vary to some extent, depending on the age of a particular person (and their corresponding residue of aion) at death. 123 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 94. Cf. Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 8; and Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 9; Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer, 55. 124 It is also possible that psyche was located in the head so that it could be shut away from the more energetically responsive areas of consciousness where thymos and menos held sway. As we will see, this was very much the stance of Plato in later decades. 125 On 'body', see Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 5-8; Adkins, From the Many to the One, 21; on self see Snell, v-xii, 1-22; Adkins, 13-48. 126 See Robert Renehan, 'The Meaning of [Soma] in Homer: A Study in Methodology', California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (1979): 269-282. For further qualification of certain of Snell's claims, see Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 67. 127 From this viewpoint the relatively blurred Homeric line between life and death is also more comprehensible. Christianity as we know it gives absolute privilege to a conscious rationality rooted in the soul. Hence a corpse in which there seem no traces of that psychic ego is absolutely 'dead'. Homeric culture, lacking that overarching soul, accords a certain diminished life to the flesh of a corpse, even though the psyche is understood to have 'fled the barrier of the teeth'. 128 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 90. 129 See for example Adkins, From the Many to the One, 15, 18. 130 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 95. 131 E.B. Tylor, extract from Primitive Culture (1871; repr. in: From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, ed. Mircea Eliade (London: Collins, 1967), 177). 132 The 'Soul' of the Primitive (1928), trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 17-18. 133 Cf. Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 1-2.

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Chaper Two 1

Ancient Jewish Scripture contained 24 books, some of which were later subdivided in the 'Christian' Old Testament. These were grouped under three headings, the Torah, Neviim and Ketuvim, or Pentateuch, Prophets, and Hagiographa. 2 Although the Old Testament falls well under a thousand years in terms of probable dates of written composition (900-165BC), oral versions and the dating of its earlier historical events take it to over one millennium. 3 There has been surprisingly little acknowledgement of this. In a relatively recent article, Sjoerd L. Bonting at once cites Robinson, admits that 'pneumatology has remained an underdeveloped area of theology', and yet habitually collapses together ruach and New Testament pneuma ('Spirit and Creation', Zygon 41.3 (2006): 713-26, 716 and passim). 4 The apparent order of composition, however, is not always identical with the sequence we now find in the Old Testament. Cf. Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (London: UCL Press, 1993), 133-4. 5 The J documents are thought to have been composed by a Judaean, in Jerusalem, c. 950-850 BC. J, standing for 'Jahwist', reflects the authorial tendency to refer to God as 'Jahweh'. Conversely, the E documents refer to God as 'Elohim'. These were written by a priest in North Israel, c. 750BC. The D documents comprise the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy and derive from Jerusalem, c. 622 BC; the P documents, or ‘Priestly Code’, were also composed in Jerusalem, probably by a priest, c. 450BC. 6 This complex chronology is acknowledged in the Moffatt Bible, which gives indications of the source dates of different sections within individual books of Scripture (James Moffatt, A New Translation of the Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948). 7 Letters from the Earth (1909; repr. Sioux Falls: Nu Vision, 2008), 21. 8 Cf. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell, 146: 'in general, Judaism is much less a faith, in the sense of a series of propositions requiring assent, than a law, a holy way of life to be followed'. 9 Compare the ritual castration of tribal violence in Afghanistan in our own century, as well as the mutilations practised by the Italian mafia. 10 A relatively late echo of Old Testament attitudes to the pollution inherent in the corpse is found in the Greek island of Evia, where walls and ceiling in the room of death had to be whitewashed in the earlier twentieth century, and where clothes of the living must all still be changed, as late as 1970 (see: Juliet du Boulay, 'The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death', Man 17.2 (1982): 219-238, 224-5). 11 Citing a theory that the link between death and impurity is associated with sin, Philip S. Johnston rightly concludes that 'the impurity of death need not relate to morality' and 'probably relates more to separation from Yahweh' (Shades of Sheol:

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Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2002), 44-5). The taboo on recently-delivered mothers survived an impressively long time, as reflected in the Christian purification ceremony known as 'churching'; this was still being performed in parts of Britain in the 1870s, and in parts of Greece some way into the twentieth century, 'they used to say that the lechona [pregnant woman], if she died, was so polluted, so impure, that she could not be accepted in heaven’. The Greek woman stating this recalled how, during her own very dangerous delivery, ‘I tried my best not to die, because of what they say happens to you then’ (Richard and Eva Blum, The Dangerous Hour: the Lore of Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 19-20). 12 The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 186-9. Cf. the seemingly related taboo in the Qumran community, whose Community Rule 'implies that people should be able to control their bodies in such a way as to eliminate any spontaneous behaviour' (Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians (London: Routledge, 2001), 37, italic mine). 13 Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 188. 14 Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 183-4. It should be emphasised that Eilberg-Schwartz is concerned to undermine the distinction between 'savage' and 'civilised' communities. On this issue, and the longstanding anthropological neglect of Israelite culture, see ibid., 1-21. For a broadly similar tribal fertility rite in Nicaragua, documented by the Italian Renaissance scholar, Mambrino Roseo, see Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 54. For a valuable discussion of problematic issues within the anthropology of religion, see Morton Klass, Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). 15 On this sense of tribal separation, cf. Karen Armstrong: 'For a Jew, to be holy meant to be separate' (The First Christian: St Paul's Impact on Christianity (London: Pan, 1983), 75). 16 As with many terms translated from a wholly different alphabet, these words have various spellings. I have here adopted some fairly common versions, and ones which are relatively easy for a range of readers to handle. 17 H. Wheeler Robinson, 'Hebrew Psychology', in The People and the Book: Essays on the Old Testament, ed. A.S. Peake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 353-382, 355. 18 Cf Ernest D. Burton, 'Spirit, Soul, and Flesh: II. ʪ˒ ʔʺ, ʓ ʰʓ४ ʴˇ