The Psyche in Antiquity:

Book One
Early Greek Philosophy
From Thales to Plotinus

Edward F. Edinger
Edited by Deborah A. Wesley

title:
The Psyche in Antiquity. Book One, Early Greek Philosophy
From Thales to Plotinus Studies in Jungian Psychology By
Jungian Analysts
author: Edinger, Edward F.; Wesley, Deborah A.
publisher: Inner City Books
isbn10 | asin: 0919123864
print isbn13: 9780919123861
ebook isbn13: 9780585308883
language: English
publication date: 1999
lcc: BF173.J85
ddc: 150.195
subject:
Jungian psychology, Philosophy, Ancient - Psychological
aspects, Jung, C. G.--(Carl Gustav),--1875-1961.
1

Introduction

Depth psychotherapy and nuclear physics are unique phenomena of the twentieth
century, and in certain respects have no predecessors. Because of this, a little
explanation is needed as to why this book arising from depth psychotherapy, a
most modern vocation, should take up material from so long ago. Although depth
psychotherapy is original, born almost sui generis, in its practical application it is
the heir of three noble traditions: the medical tradition of the care of patients, the
religious tradition of concern for the soul, and the philosophical tradition of dialogue
in the search for truth. This particular study centers on the third tradition, the
philosophical one.

The early Greek philosophers were the first to articulate certain ideas and images
that are central to the Western psyche. It behooves depth psychologists to be
familiar with these images and their origins and to recognize them as they appear
in modern dreams and other psychic contents. We know that many cultures hold it
vital to their wellbeing to be in touch with their ancestors; it promotes our
psychological health as well to be in touch with the early Greeks, our cultural
ancestors. Such study connects us with our own psychic roots, which reside in the
collective unconscious, laid down like geological strata during the evolution of the
human psyche.

In general the human embryo's physical development echoes the stages of the
evolution of the species, a parallel expressed as ''ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny." Something of the same sort happens in psychological development.
As a personal analysis leads one back to childhood or family origins, it returns one
at the same time not just to personal childhood but also to the childhood of the
species. Knowledge of these earlier ideas and psychic images as they were
experienced by the human race as a whole is relevant for the analyst at a practical
level.

C. G. Jung speaks of this:

In consequence of the collective nature of the [archetypal] image it is often

impossible to establish its full range of meaning from the associative
material of a single individual. But since it is of importance to do this for
practical therapeutic purposes, the necessity of comparative research into
symbols for medical psychology becomes evident on these grounds also.
For this purpose the investigator must turn back to those periods in human

2
 history when symbol formation still went on unimpeded, that is, when there
was still no epistemological criticism of the formation of images 1

This certainly applies to the early Greeks. They had no epistemological criticism of
the metaphysical doctrines they spun out and projected onto the universe. What
they espoused was almost pure psychology. It was the phenomenology of the
psyche expressing itself in a naive way.

In a later work, Jung states:

Any renewal not deeply rooted in the best spiritual tradition is ephemeral;
but the dominant that grows from historical roots acts like a living being
within the ego bound man. He does not possess it, it possesses him. 2

That remark speaks to the practical importance of making these archetypal

amplifications in the course of the analytic process. The psychological renewal that
the patient experiences in analysis becomes rooted in the best spiritual tradition of
the human race and not just in the shallow roots of his or her own personal life.
Certainly ancient Greek philosophy is part of our best spiritual tradition. If we are
not connected to these roots, we are ephemeral.

The early Greeks stood at the dawn of rational human consciousness. They had
just stepped out of the mists of participation mystique with nature. They were
beginning to reflect on the nature of human existence with a bit of objectivity.
Wordsworth characterizes this transition in ''Ode: On Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood":

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; . . .

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

1
"The Philosophical Tree," Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 353. [CW refers throughout to The Collected
Works of C.G. Jung]
2
Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 521.

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 And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!3

We can think of the early Greek philosophers similarly: they are trailing clouds of
glory, so to speak. They are not abstract rationalists; they are just stepping out of
identification with the archetypal psyche, trailing clouds of that dimension with
them. This means that their concepts and images are laden with the numinosity
that accompanies all newborn things. When these same ideas are paralleled in the
dreams and fantasies of patients in analysis, recognizing such connections is
highly therapeutic.

The modern notion of a philosopher is that of an academic, dry-as-dust rationalist.

The early tradition of philosophy was anything but that. Philosophers were
visionaries, quite similar to the great Hebrew prophets. Like the prophets they were
gripped by the numinosity of certain archetypal images. The prophets proclaimed
the reality of their visions in the idiom to which they were born: the Hebrew religion.
Similarly the Greek philosophers expressed their visions in their particular idiom,
the language of dawning Greek rationalism. They were attempting to conceptualize
the images that gripped them. It is no coincidence that Thales, the first
documented Greek philosopher, became prominent in 585 B.C., the year of the
capture of Jerusalem by Babylon and the deportation of the Israelites, their exile
and the prophetic activity of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

It is my premise that philosophy, especially early philosophy, like religion, is

primarily psychology. It is the phenomenology of the psyche revealing itself in a
particular setting, rather than an abstract intellectual discourse. Nietzsche was
perhaps the first person to recognize this. In Beyond Good and Evil, he says:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has
been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary
and unconscious memoir.4

Jung agrees that the psyche is the foundation of all philosophical assertions:

3
Poetical Works, p. 460.
4
Sect. 6, p. 13.

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 How much ''soul" is projected into the unknown in the world of external
appearances is, of course, familiar to anyone acquainted with the natural
science and natural philosophy of the ancients. It is, in fact, so much that we
are absolutely incapable of saying how the world is constituted in itself and
always shall be, since we are obliged to convert physical events into psychic
processes as soon as we want to say anything about knowledge. 5

It does not surprise me that psychology debouches into philosophy, for the
thinking that underlies philosophy is after all a psychic activity which, as
such, is the proper study of psychology. I always think of psychology as
encompassing the whole of the psyche, and that includes philosophy and
theology and many other things besides. For underlying all philosophies and
all religions are the facts of the human soul, which may ultimately be the
arbiters of truth and error.6

Looking over the phenomenon of Greek philosophy as a whole, one has the
impression that the initial and overriding interest of the Greek philosophers was in
what lies beyond the visible world. They sensed that there was something behind
what was ordinarily seen. Their basic questions were metaphysical, that is, beyond
the physical. It is remarkable to see that the dawning rational consciousness of our
species made that assumption so gratuitously: that there is something beyond
what one can see. As we now understand it, that assumption demonstrates the
projection of the reality of the psyche, which lies behind sensible, concrete
existence.

John Burnet, who was a scholar of Greek philosophy in the earlier part of the
century, grasped this same idea. He does not refer to the psyche per se but he
makes the same point. Burnet speaks as a classicist:

Greek philosophy . . . is dominated from beginning to end by the problem of

reality [meaning metaphysical reality]. In the last resort the question is
always: ''What is real?"…

The problem of reality, in fact, involves the problem of man's relation to it,
which at once takes us beyond pure science. We have to ask whether the
mind of man can have any contact with reality at all, and if it can, what
difference this will make to his life. To anyone who has tried to live in
sympathy with the Greek philosophers, the suggestion that they were
"intellectualists" must seem ludicrous. On the contrary, Greek philosophy is
based on the faith that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for
the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it. It was in
5
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 116.
6
"General Aspects of Dream Psychology," The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 525.

5
 truth an effort to satisfy what we call the religious instinct. Ancient religion
was a somewhat external thing, and made little appeal to this except in the
"mysteries," and even the mysteries were apt to become external, and were
peculiarly liable to corruption. We shall see again and again that philosophy
sought to do for men what the mysteries could only do in part, and that it
therefore includes most of what we should now call religion. 7

It is interesting to observe how this problem of the nature of reality had evolved by
the time of Plato, about 200 years after Thales. By then the issue had polarized
into two opposing views, which Plato describes in ''The Sophist" in terms of a battle
between gods and giants. One must recall that in early Greek mythology the
Olympian gods destroyed the Titans in a great war. The Olympian deities then
became the rulers. Plato refers to this as he says:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on
between them over their quarrel about reality.

…One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the
unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold of
every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs
only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They
define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite
party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly
contemptuous and will not listen…

[The listener in the dialogue responds:] The people you describe are
certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them before now.

[The speaker continues:]… Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very
wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen,
maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible
and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize
those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to
be true reality they call, not real being but a sort of moving process of
becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between
the two camps.8

The battle between the gods and giants, which began over two thousand years
ago, is not over yet.

7
Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato, pp. 11f.
8
Sect. 246a, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Plato's Collected Dialogues.

6
Greek philosophy has its own particular psychological context in antiquity. It was
only one of a number of currents which came together as the sources of the
modern Western psyche. The figure on the next page shows some of these
currents. Each will be described in turn to show how Greek philosophy fits into the
larger context of antiquity. One can think of them as rivers which join each other
when the conditions are right.

The Hebrew source is one of the largest, chiefly through the Old Testament. A
Babylonian tributary has poured itself into that great Hebrew river, so that if you
look closely at the Hebrew Bible you will find Babylonian mythology there also. A
small stream from the Hebrew river joins a small one from the Greek river, ending
in Philo. He was the first to document explicitly the synthesis of Hebrew religion
and Greek philosophy. Hebrew and Greek streams underwent another synthesis at
a later time as the Jewish heresy, Christianity, joined Greek philosophy to create
Christian theology.

Another prominent stream is Persian dualism, Zoroastrianism, later an aspect of

Gnosticism also. The Near-Eastern Great Mother religions made real contributions
to Christian theology as well, with the increasing emphasis on the Virgin Mary.

The other major river is the Greek one, which starts as mythology and develops
into philosophy and culture in general, especially into the arts. The Hebrew and the
Greek streams are the primary ones, which is signified in the traditional educational
maxim that modern Western civilization is a product of Athens and Jerusalem. An
important intermingling between the Greek and the Egyptian generated alchemy.
The parents of alchemy are Egyptian embalming and technology, a practical
tradition, and Greek philosophy. Alchemy later led into science itself, including
depth psychology.

The Roman tradition was substantially influenced by the Greek. It appears largely
in the realm of practical military and civic affairs and in the whole legacy of law.
Finally there is the primitive stream, which is behind all the others and includes
animism, shamanism and mantic procedures of various kinds, and which continued
to live mixed into these other currents and is still alive today. Greek philosophy is in
a central position, having interacted with almost all the other streams in its vicinity.

This book is organized around fourteen major personalities in the history of Greek
philosophy. Jung, who refers to all of them in his Collected Works, has included the
main Greek tradition in the body of data he used in his formulation of the psyche.
Each of these fourteen is associated with one or more central concepts or
metaphysical images. Nietzsche observed that the Greeks have embodied for us

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''all the eternal types [and] . . . all the archetypes of philosophical thought." 9 These
archetypal ideas which gripped the Greek philosophers have given birth to and
underlie much human reflection.

Sources of the Western Psyche

For the early Greeks, philosophy was a way to study the archetypes. The word
philosophia in Greek means "love of Sophia," and philosopher means "lover of
Sophia," that is, of Wisdom. In some settings Sophia was highly personified. In the
Hebrew wisdom literature and in Gnosticism, Sophia was the feminine consort of
the Deity. At the root of the word philosophia is the image of a love affair with a
goddess. F.E. Peters, in his lexicon of Greek terms, says:

By the traditional Greek account Pythagoras was the first to use the term
philosophia and endowed the word with a strongly religious and ethical
sense . . . which can best be seen in the view of the philosopher put forth by
Socrates in Phaedo 62c69e. In Aristotle it has lost these Pythagorean
overtones . . . philosophia has now become a synonym for episteme, in the
sense of an intellectual discipline seeking out causes. 10

The purpose of this book, however, is not to study philosophy, but to track the
psyche as it manifests itself in early philosophy. The archetypal ideas which so
gripped the early Greek philosophers are living psychic organisms and they
undergo differentiation and evolution as various minds grapple with them.
Eventually they become dried up, desiccated, so that what is left in Greek

9
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 2.
10
Greek Philosophical Terms, p. 156.

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philosophy is an abstract skeleton, all structure and no life. In depth psychology,
however, we still encounter these ideas as living organisms in the unconscious.
Jungian psychology redeems the relevance of ancient philosophy.

Connecting one's individual experience of the psyche, its evolution and

development, to the larger process of the evolution and development of the
collective psyche as a whole, is of practical importance for the understanding of
unconscious processes. If one accepts this premise, then only with the knowledge
of these earlier expressions can the parallels with modern ones be seen. Then it is
apparent that they manifest the same basic archetypal images.

Analysis attempts to bring about a renewal of the individual's psychology. It follows

then that the most profound and the most satisfying and enduring renewal in the
analytic process needs to be deeply rooted in the best spiritual tradition that the
individual is a part of.

In the course of analysis the ego changes its standpoint. It finds a broader context.
The personal, the contemporary, relates to a the larger perspective if large enough,
the perspective of eternity. It does, however, make quite a difference whether this
takes place consciously or unconsciously. There is a world of difference between
being unconsciously contained in a particular tradition and being consciously
related to it.

The Milesian Philosophers

The three Milesian philosophers, all from the city of Miletus, are usually considered
as a group. Thales lived from about 585 B.C.; Anaximander, a student of Thales,
lived from about 560 B.C. and Anaximenes, a student of Anaximander, lived about
546 B.C. As a group they brought to birth two primordial concepts: physis and
arche.

Physis (in Latin, natura; in English, nature) is a profoundly complex and ambiguous
term with a number of references. First, it is used for the source, origin, descent
and lineage of something. Secondly, it refers to the natural, original condition of
something, to a state or character of an entity, to its nature. Thirdly, it can refer to
the efficacious, generative power of the organic world, the power of growth. The
word physis derives from the root of the Greek verb pheo-meaning ''to grow," thus
it has an organic quality. As early as Aristotle, physis and God are mentioned in the
same breath, both having the power to create things. Finally, physis refers to the
regular order of things, an innate organic unity as contrasted with human law or
human contrivance. Democritus, for example, says that men's lives are determined

9
by the twin forces of nature and law, "nature" referring to an original organic or
divine derivation. Among the Stoics physis became a god of the universe. Marcus
Aurelius, a late Roman Stoic, says, "O Nature [physis], from you comes everything,
in you is everything, to you goes everything." 11 A dictum of Chrysippus, one of the
early Stoics, was: "Live by following [keeping close to] nature [physis]."12

The Hebrews lacked the Greek conception of nature. They had no term
corresponding to physis. This meant that when the Old Testament was translated
into Greek, physis did not appear because it did not exist as a concept. Philo was
the first to make use of the word consciously. To him physis is no longer the origin
or the creative power that it was for the early Greeks. Instead it has become an
agent of divine activity. The Hebrew mentality, which gives priority to the religious
dimension, had taken over the original word and subordinated it to its own usage.

In Gnosticism there appears the image of Sophia falling into the embrace of
physis. Sophia, a divine personification, falls into nature and then calls out to be
rescued. In early Greek alchemy we have the well-known dictum: ''Nature rejoices
in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature." 13 This indicates that
nature is split and is in conflict with itself at a certain level.

The classical feeling toward nature was totally reversed by Christianity which
demonized nature, turning her into an enemy of the spirit. 14 This is an outstanding
feature of collective Christian psychology. With the coming of the Renaissance this
attitude was again reversed, and nature was again given respect and
consideration. Science gave her further respect by studying her.

When we reach the Age of Enlightenment, nature has been deified. The first
sentence of the American Declaration of Independence, which was substantially a
product of the French Enlightenment, reads:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and
to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to
which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.

This is a late manifestation of physis appearing in modern political doctrine; "the

laws of nature and of nature's God" represents the highest authority to which
Jefferson could appeal. Finally, to bring the matter up to the present, Jung has
taken the step of identifying the unconscious psyche with nature:

11
New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 2, p. 657.
12
Ibid., p. 658.
13
Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 21, n. 152.
14
See Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, pars. 105ff.

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 The products of the unconscious are pure nature. "If we take Nature for our
guide, we shall never go astray," said the ancients. [This is an old Stoic
dictum]. But nature is not, in herself, a guide, for she is not there for man's
sake. Ships are not guided by the phenomenon of magnetism. We have to
make the compass a guide and, in addition, allow for a specific correction,
for the needle does not even point exactly to the north. So it is with the
guiding function of the unconscious. It can be used as a source of symbols,
but with the necessary conscious correction that has to be applied to every
natural phenomenon in order to make it serve our purpose. 15

Jung is reminding us that the ego is not a piece of nature. It is, in fact, contra
naturam to a very large extent. To use nature as its guide, the ego has to be very
careful because nature is not interested in mankind.

There are modern words which have physis as a root: physics, physical, physician,
physiology, physiognomy and so on. Physis is still a living entity in our evolving
language.

It is noteworthy indeed that physis was the first concept to crystallize out of early
Greek philosophy. Considered psychologically, the discovery of physis, nature,
means that one has perceived the separation between subject and object, between
the ego and its surrounding environment, nature. The most basic prerequisite for
consciousness is thereby established. Once there is an awareness that subject
and object are two different entities, then a dialogue becomes possible between
the ego, the subject, and nature, the object. Science becomes possible. In the
physical sciences the ego asks questions of nature. By the way the questions are
formulated and the experiments are set up, one coerces nature into giving specific
answers. This works somewhat differently for the depth psychologist, in that
although one puts questions to nature, nature also puts questions to us. Each
patient is a part of nature submitting a question for us to answer. What follows is a
two-way dialogue, unlike pure physical science. In one case humanity is
experimenting on nature, and in the other case nature is also experimenting on
humanity.

The other fundamental concept of the Milesians is the term arche. It means
beginning; principle; original substance; in German, urstoff, ruling element. In
alchemy the term arche was translated as prima materia or first matter. Derivatives
with the stem arche-include such words as archetype, archeology, archaic; then,
monarchy, patriarchy, etc. those terms refer to the ''first" as the ruler; the arche,
since it comes first, is the ruler. Other such words are archbishop, archangel and

15
The Role of the Unconscious, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 34.

11
so on. Understood psychologically, these terms refer to the projection onto the
material world of an elemental, original condition of the psyche.

In this projection, the psyche announces the fact that it derives from an original,
prime matter, and the conceptual image arche expresses the nature of the
primordial state of the unconscious. It is quite remarkable that early in Western
speculation, the unity of the psychic Self should be projected into the world in spite
of the latter's obvious multiplicity. The world obviously does not derive from one
individual stuff; it is a multiplicity. The assumption that there is an original arche
that lies behind the multiplicity is a daring one, yet it is made quite naively. No one
argued about the basic assumption that there was one thing as an origin. Rather,
they argued about the nature of the one thing.

Of the three Milesians, Thales is a semi-legendary character. Some of the remarks

preserved about him have an almost mythical quality. Interestingly, the name
Thales is close to the Greek word for sea, thalassa. Thales, who thought water was
the arche, may have a name which is the Greek equivalent of "seaman." He
announced that the arche was hydor, water. So one could say that the first
Western philosopher believed that the unconscious psyche is equivalent to water.
It is a familiar image, akin to the understanding of water symbolism in dreams.

The alchemists certainly picked up this idea, applying alchemical procedures to the
arche, the prima materia, saying that in the course of making the Philosophers'
Stone one must first reduce the materia one was dealing with to its original arche
which many thought of as waterby means of a solutio. Various kinds of water were
thought of as the end goal of the alchemical process: the hydor theion or divine
water, the aqua vita, the aqua permanens.

The Gnostic Naasenes equated their serpent, Naas, with Thales' concept of water.
It will become apparent that both alchemy and Gnosticism are products of the
primitive conceptions of Greek philosophy. For example Jung says:

The Naasenes themselves considered Naas, the serpent, to be their central

deity, and they explained it as the ''moist substance," in agreement with
Thales of Miletus, who said water was the prime substance on which all life
depended. Similarly, all living things depend on the Naas; "it contains within
itself, like the horn of the one-horned bull, the beauty of all things." It
"pervades everything, like the water that flows out of Edem and divides into
four sources."16

The living vitality of the symbol was demonstrated as subsequent symbol systems
picked up and amplified the original. A symbol has the power to draw various other
16
Aion, CW 9ii, par. 311.

12
images to it in an organic process of amplification. Thales even shows up in the
nineteenth century in Goethe's Faust, Part Two. In the Aegean sea festival scene
at the end of act two, Thales appears and leads the homunculus to the sea and to
his experience of the epiphany of the sea goddess. Thales sings a paean to water:

Hail, hail, once again. How I exult, possessed as I am with the true and the
beautiful… Everything came out of the water. Everything is sustained by the
water. Ocean, may you hold your sway forever. If you didn't send your
clouds, and brooks in abundance, and streams twisting this way and that,
and the great rivers, where would our mountains and plains be, where the
world? It is you who keep life at its freshest.17

As can be seen, these early images and figures frequently appear in later
examples of cultural history, an expression of the continuity of the collective
psyche. One can perceive these symbols not just as dissociated layers or
fragments but as living currents that run through the centuries.

Anaximander, who flourished about 560 B.C., held that the arche was the apeiron,
which means the boundless, the unlimited or the infinite. Peiron or peiros means
limit. A- is a privative, so apeiron means unbounded. It announces the fact that the
unconscious is fundamentally infinite or unlimited. Jung remarked, ''The decisive
question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?" 18 The German word
used by Jung for infinite is unendliches, exactly Anaximander's word. Our
experience of the unconscious, when we go deeply enough, leads to implications
of this sort. The Self,19 as we understand it in its phenomenology, is beyond the
limits of the ego to define and therefore, for the purposes of the ego, it is unlimited
or infinite. That is what wholeness is when it is experienced by the ego.

Anaximander gives us our first significant fragment of Western philosophy:

Things perish into those things out of which they have their birth, according
to that which is ordained; for they give reparation to one another and pay the
penalty of their injustice according to the disposition of time. 20

This fragment seems to have a numinous power to fascinate scholars and

commentators. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy is no more than an
extended commentary on this text of Anaximander, which is presented at the
beginning of the book and followed by a long dissertation on its meaning.
17
Act 2, lines 84328443, trans. Barker Fairley.
18
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 325.
19
The Self is Jung's term for the central archetype expressing the totality of the psyche as organized around
a dynamic center. It is experienced as the objective, transpersonal center of identity and cannot be
empirically distinguished from the image of God.
20
F.M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy. p. 8.

13
Cornford's exposition is not psychological; however his understanding is that the
multiplicity of individual, differentiated things we see around us is born out of an
original apeiron, an original unlimited stuff, through the intermediaries of the four
elements. This means that the apeiron first gives birth to the four elements. Then
the individual things arise from various mixtures of the four elements. (This view is
disputed by some scholars, as the four elements had not yet been delineated as
such.) The four elements in various mixtures bring to birth the multiple objects in
the world and then, when these objects perish, they return to the four elements
from which they came, as punishment for their injustice in coming into existence.
Their existence was a crime for which a penalty or reparation must be paid.

It is probably more suitable to think of the multiplicity of things as reverting to the

original apeiron when they die, rather than to the four elements. It is against the
apeiron that the crime has been committed. Either way one looks at it, the
remarkable fact remains that an ethical issue, justice or injustice, is attributed to
nature, to a physical reality. This indicates that the psyche is still not differentiated
from nature. If we extract this fact about the psyche from the physical world where
it has been projected by Anaximander, we can then reformulate his statement thus:
the existence of the conscious ego which is what the multiplicity of the world refers
to psychologically is based on a crime or an injustice which requires reparation. It
is a familiar idea, found for example in the myth of Prometheus stealing fire for
mankind or in the myth of the fall of Adam in the garden of Eden. Understood
psychologically both have the same meaning: human consciousness derives from
a crime and is fundamentally guilt-laden. 21 Later, Empedocles makes reference to
a prenatal crime to explain the nature of life on earth. Jung expresses the same
idea:

The opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all

psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. Even a life dedicated to God is
still lived by an ego, which speaks of an ego and asserts an ego in God's
despite, which does not instantly merge itself with God but reserves for itself
a freedom and a will which it sets up outside God and against him. 22

One can read Jung's passage as a psychological paraphrase of Anaximander's

text which says that things that pass away return to that infinite stuff out of which
they came and pay reparation for their injustice. Jung speaks of the infinite as God
in relation to the ego, which must pay for the injustice committed in being born into
separate, individual existence. It is a subtle psychological point, but Jung states it
unequivocally.
21
This is further explored in my Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche,
pp. 16ff.
22
Mysterium Coniunctionus, CW 14, par. 206.

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Cornford's discussion, of course, takes a different direction, as his interpretation is
based on a different set of categories. He focuses on the term chreon, destiny,
which can be translated as ''what must be." Noting that fate and right are linked
together, he discusses at length the term moira, which means lot or portion
determined by the gods. Here he is still in the realm of mythology. Psychologically
speaking, every individual human psyche, as it emerges and establishes itself out
of the original totality of the unconscious, the original apeiron or infinite, takes on a
specific character and a shape that is unique to it.

For example, one particular psychological function is given preference over others,
so that the more neglected functions are treated unjustly, so to speak. The
particular lot or function or moira that determines what character an individual
psyche will have, must necessarily be lopsided. There is no such thing as total
symmetry in an individual human ego, so that each one has its own particular
injustices as well, so to speak, which came with it into existence. This is another
way of understanding Anaximander's text.

Later philosophers, notably Plato, elaborated the concept of dike, meaning justice
or right behavior. They extracted it from the physical world of Anaximander and put
it in the context of ethics.

Finally there was the third Milesian, Anaximenes, who flourished about 546 B.C.,
and who announced that the first principle was aer (air). Peters's lexicon says
about the concept of air:

For Anaximenes the apeiron of Anaximander and the arche of all things was
air, probably because of its connection with breath and life (cf. pneuma). It was, as
were most of the pre- Socratic archai, divine. [It is important to realize that these
early men thought of the original stuff as divine, theion]. The later popularizer of
aer was Diogenes of Apollonia who made it the substance of both soul (psyche)
and mind (nous)… [A symbol which is alive ''magnetically" attracts to it other
things, so psyche and nous have also been associated with air.] The connection
aerpneumapsychezoe [life]theion [meaning divine] remained a constant one. The
air-like nature of the soul is raised in [Plato's] Phaedo… Since the heavenly bodies
dwell in the ether [a kind of upper air], another possibility was that the soul might
be absorbed into the stars… This belief was incorporated into later
Pythagoreanism, [which held that]… the aer between the moon and the earth was
filled with daimones and heroes. [Later, in Philo, the daimones became angels.]23

Peters here points out that, initially, Anaximenes stated that the original divine stuff
was air. Later thinkers said that it is also soul or mind, and that the whole layer of

23
Greek Philosophical Terms, p. 4.

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air surrounding the earthbetween the earth and the moonis filled with spiritual,
incorporeal beings. One finds this thinking even in Paul in the New Testament. It
became widespread belief that air was the medium containing spiritual entities
which affected human beings. The symbolism here is basically air-breath-wind-
spirit. The later word pneuma became an image of immense importance for the
thinkers who followed and for the psychology of modern dream interpretation, in
which one encounters air, wind and tornadoes for example. The symbolism started
with Anaximenes and a whole complex of symbolic images in which wind and spirit
are equated.

To put it in a nutshell, this symbol combination refers to the invisible, autonomous

dynamism of the objective psychethe dynamic of the Self expressed in the
symbolism of air and wind. Very likely the imagery derives from primitive
observations of what was called the breath-soul. When a warrior died on the
battlefield, he gave out a last breath, often associated with hallucinatory
phenomena. We see it even today. Individuals witnessing a death will sometimes
say that they see a wraith-like creature ascend from the mouth of the dying person.
It is the old idea of the breath-soul which leaves the body at death to go back to its
source, to the surrounding air.

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