I often think that those of us who work with classics are in the resurrection business, communing with shades and entreating them to come back with us to the above world. It is painstaking work. Our tools are neither chisel nor spade, but rather imagination and sympathy. So, how to begin? Where does one start? What preparation is necessary to ensure a meaningful encounter with these long lost ancestors of ours? Zbigniew Herbert, the great Polish poet, calls this process a delicate dialogue with the dead: âA careful listening for the voices of those that have left us, a touching of stones on which partially erased inscriptions of past fates are still discernible, a calling up of shades so they may feed on our compassion⊠.â1 Herbert is onto something when he speaks of our encounter with the ancient Greeks as a conversation with shadows. They do indeed continue to haunt us, often within the penumbra of our language.
This sort of lexical reincarnation can be found at the dawn of the Greek language with the advent of the word sĂȘma. SĂȘma can mean either sign or tomb, and therefore points to the fundamental intersection between these two concepts, which on the surface seem to have little in common with one another. How could two such dissimilar terms be equated? Well, each sign (word) entombs a certain meaning for all eternity; every time we encounter that specific sign, the interred meaning is brought back to life in the form of a phantasm (mental representation). In this respect language can be seen as a resurrection machine: entombing meanings in signs that when read or spoken, bring the spirit of their meaning back to life.
And so, philology can be thought of as a kind of thanatology; an ever so patient attempt to disinter these ancient meanings and associations from their contemporary lexical moorings.
âBut how â exactly?â
â âHow exactlyâ what?â I ask back.
âDo we go about talking to the dead?â another says.
âThat is the question.â
âBut is there an answer?â
âYes, but Iâm not sure youâre going to like it.â
âWell?â
âIt has to do with â â
âYes?â
âA god.â
âA god?â
âYes.â
âWhich one?â
âHermes.â
âThe one who ushered souls to Hades?â
âYes, but all these Greek gods did double duty. In addition to being a guide to the underworld, Hermes was also the god who âŠ?â
âInvented language for mortals.â proffers another student.
âItâs why his name becomes part of our modern-day word for hermeneutics.â says a second.
âThis god loves the depths of things, whether thatâs beneath the ground or in the roots of words.â I say, adding, âWe need to follow in his fleet footsteps.â
âWhere?â
âTo the center of the text and ourselves.â
âMeaning?â
âThat the journey to the center of a text is also a journey to the center of ourselves, which is also, very much, like a journey to the underworld. We need to start digging.â
âAnd when we âdigâ our way to this âcenter of ourselves,â what are we supposed to find?â
âOur imagination.â
âAnd what does that do?â
âIt helps us inhabit these ancient works.â
âBut how?â
How indeed. This is the subject of much philosophical speculation. A whole host of thinkers from Plato, through Marsilio Ficino, all the way to the likes of Freud and Jung believed that a certain set of primordial meanings exist deep within our psyche. Henry Corbin, the philosopher turned Islamist, takes this thinking a step further by conceiving of a very distinct province within our imagination which he calls the imaginal. The job of Corbinâs imaginal realm is to take all the mythological, metaphysical, and mystical intimations we have and transform them into concrete and tangible images. Depending on oneâs imaginal skill and tenacity, these images can go on to achieve the seeming solidity of an alternate objective reality.2 To arrive at these transformative powers we need to follow the likes of Hermes as he transforms himself from Hermes-the-guide-to-the-underworld to Hermes-the-guide-to-the-underground-of-texts. The one informs the other. This slow historical transformation is, as Iâve said, instructive. It is a descent with a long and venerable history, both literal and figurative. It bespeaks a deep (no pun intended) intuition on the part of our ancestors. It is ultimately a journey that will eventually lead to Corbinâs imaginal realm where we can enter into a dialogue with the past; once there, we can visualize it, decipher it, and, if weâre lucky, bring a part of its potential meaning back to the light of day. And so, without further ado:
Downward ho! a brief history of going under
The ancient Greeks called it nekyia, the rite for persuading the dead to speak. The most famous literary example of this can be found in the eleventh song of the Odyssey. Here, Odysseus employs the directions of Circe to famously speak with Achilles and other residents of Hades. This becomes the basic template for many future journeys to the underworld. Aeneas will follow a similar path in the sixth book of the Aeneid.
These fantastical travels were not just reserved for poets, but also for early Greek philosophers. Heraclitus will speak of being lured by bathus (aka âthe depthsâ), writing, âYou could not find the ends of the soul though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos.â Other philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles, ignored Heraclitus, and searched for the secrets of the soul through the ritual of katabasis. This is the practice of sustained incubation deep within the recesses of various caves. When you break this word in two, you have kata = down and basis = step; which is what these two philosophers did. Parmenides describes his own youthful ritual of katabasis in the prologue of his great poem on the nature of being. Empedocles also practiced this underground art in order to acquire a state of epopteia (âthe beholdingâ of the most ancient wisdoms). Yulia Ustinova, in her Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, believes that such âincubationsâ functioned as a form of sensory deprivation, where the human being is secluded from the external stimuli or ânoiseâ of life. Once the mind is relieved of processing this continual stream of sensory input, it has the tendency to turn in on itself. The result of such a process, according to Ustinova, is âan intensive discharge of inner imageryâ which changes the brain, not only experientially but also physiologically and biochemically, leading to altered states of consciousness.3 This demand for such otherworldly contact became a âbig businessâ for late antiquity when, due to the volume of would-be-visitors, entire caves were converted into veritable cities of nekyomanteia. Here the general public could undertake their own katabasis, usually with some sort of guide or pyschopompĂłs (psukhe = soul, pompos = conductor). Although these practices have long been abandoned, they have left a significant trace in the way we conceive of meaning as having a certain depth that must be plumbed in order to lead to any sort of deep understanding. Even in this last phrase, âdeep understanding,â we can see the trace of this ancient desire still at work in our everyday language. Meaning is not just hidden in our imaginations but buried and in need of further textual excavation.
Nowadays when we think of interpreting an ancient text, we tend to think of it like a kind of textual archeology. The discovery of multiple meanings in the text is similar to the experience of the modern traveler who, while visiting the excavations of Troy, discovers the fact that there were seven Troys that lay one on top of another. When we encounter a classic text, we are often moving through strata after strata of previous meanings and interpretations. Freud was a great fan of Henry Schliemann, the amateur archeologist who discovered Troy. The father of psychoanalysis fancied himself an archeologist of the mind with his conception of the unconscious as something buried deep within us, ever in need of psychic excavation. Freud will write to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess about an early patient that, âBuried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period ⊠in which all the remaining puzzles converge ⊠I scarcely dare believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.â4 And later, in penning the case study on his famous patient Dora, Freud compares himself to a conscientious archaeologist, â⊠I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity⊠.â5 Out of such thought would grow Eugen Bleulerâs concept of Tiefenpsychologie, which we translate as depth psychology. This brings us to the doorstep of Carl Jungâs rather vague notions of the âcollective unconsciousâ and âarchetypal thinking.â It is through the help of Jung that the thinker Henry Corbin emerges with a significantly more rigorous (and far more evocative) notion of the functions of what he believes to be a very archaic region/faculty of humankindâs imagination. What he calls:
The realm of the imaginal
This is a relatively modern conceptual paradigm that Corbin begins to articulate in the late 1940s. It is built on the foundation of ancient Greek and Arab theories of phantasia, a word which is often translated as âmental representationâ or âimage.â Aristotle tells us in De Anima (3.7â8) âthe soul never thinks without phantasmata.â He goes on to designate three types of resulting interior activity: phantastikon (the forming of mental representations), dianoĂȘtikon (forming of opinions from these mental representations), and mnĂȘmoneutikon (the storing and recalling of these mental representations). Zeno, the Stoic, speaks of human...