Yet more Jung

Mary Foote’s private life was far more complex and worthy of serious description than it is usually accorded by those who study the history of analytical psychology or write about the life of Jung. In that sense, she is representative of many other women who came to Zurich at this time and remained for the rest of their lives to become important players in Jung’s. Foote’s family ungraciously described them and her as most other commentators on Jung’s jungfrauen have done, as women “with female problems who, like a lot of other sentimental-mystical crones, got in over [their] head and relaxed by attaching to the doctor.”"’ Such descriptions admittedly touch upon some of the personal difficulties in these women’s lives, but they totally ignore their intellectual abilities and achievements. Thornton Wilder, who sought Jung’s counsel shortly after his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize, had a much kinder view of the women whose lives were centered around analytical psychology than is usually accorded them. He saw them as women “whose melancholy gentleness seems to allude to the fact that life has been unjust and unkind.”

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 Jung did not respond specifically to this possibility, but he used it to make the comparison of
how different the English were from Americans:

In England you have to be careful not to make educated mistakes. You must look up everything you are going to mention. . . . Don’t ever make that kind of mistake in England, because they will catch you at once. Now, in the U.S., it won’t matter. Don’t worry about it, because they wouldn’t know the difference, most of them. But and this is important Americans have a 6th sense for the genuine. Don’t ever, ever, ever say anything for the effect of it if you are not absolutely certain, because they will catch you up on it.

Jung told her, “The American sixth sense for the something real is the reason they have discovered me, While Europeans have yet to do so.”

The other point he wanted to make concerned the anima within men. He said men could not work with him or become his friends because “they have a harder time accepting their anima than women [do in accepting their animus].” He said he could only get along with men who had established solid and respectable careers in other fields, because other psychologists always became

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Soon she began to analyze her own dreams, but she “got in a mess” and asked Jung to take her on as a patient. He agreed to take her free of charge if she would prepare translations from Latin and Greek alchemical texts in exchange. Naturally, she accepted. Jung told her his interest in alchemy sprang from the realization that everything within his own fantasies that he thought was personal was really anchored in a long historical tradition. Mythology had not given him the answers he sought; nor had his forays into comparative religions such as Gnosticism, Manicheism, and others. He was convinced that a study of the historical development of alchemy would result in parallels with his own spiritual development, and if so, would provide a logical extension from which he could generalize to treat patients. Jung planned to study alchemical manuscripts not because he wanted to find the secret of how to create literal gold, but, rather, because he sensed that the search of the ancient alchemists for transformation paralleled his modern one for successful individuation.

Thus, von Franz the still-teenage girl became the recipient of confidences Jung had hitherto told no one but Toni Wolff. He told von Franz he had been collecting information about alchemy for the previous decade, independent of but coinciding with meeting the eminent Sinologist Richard Wilhelm and reading his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. Jung told von Franz that that book provided the bridge between the dead end of Gnosticism and the great unknown represented by alchemy. To explain further, he told her how puzzled he had been by the dream of an American analysand who dreamt he was an eagle that ate his own feathers and fell to death in the desert. On his next visit to the British Museum, his excitement was palpable when he found “the so-called Ripley Scroll,” in which there is an alchemical representation of an eagle eating his own feathers. Von Franz insisted that this was the first time she heard Jung describe the process he later defined as “synchronicity.”

John D. MacDonald

Bright Orange for the Shroud:

The tough Calusa Indians were there at the time Christ was born, building storm shelter islands out of the shells of the oysters and clams they ate, leaving a staggering enough tonnage of shells by the time the Spaniards totally eliminated them that miles and miles of the first rude roads into the edges of the Glades were paved with those shells.

This is the land of the great enduring myth of the Seminole. They were a ragtag ethnic jumble, driven all the way down from Georgia and the Carolinas, until finally after the forced resettlement of most of them in the southwest, there were not two hundred and fifty left-scattered, hiding, demoralized-not worth any further military effort. For fifty years their numbers remained about the same. Then slowly they reestablished a new culture composed of remembered fragments of many old ones, speaking pidgin versions of old tongues. They had even begun to acquire a kind of plaintive dignity, but then the white man pushed the Tamiami Trail across the Glades from Naples to Miami, eliminating them as a tribe, turning them into roadside merchants of such a vast gypsy cynicism that of all the artifacts they manufacture and sell to the tourists-not one hears any relation to their customs, habits, or prior way of life. They are the carnival Indians, degraded by commerce, curious heirs to the big colorful lie that they were never Whipped, never made a truce. They are the comedy Indians who, never having used tomtoms in their history, never having used the tomahawks or bows and arrows like the Plains Indians, now make vast quantities of each and sell them to people from Ohio.

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the draglined canals that give him “waterfront” lots to sell. ’As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the Glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with . egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.

But it will take a long time to kill it. And 'years from now foolish men will still be able to kill‘ themselves off within miles of help, hopelessly :lost among islands which all look exactly alike. It is a black land, and like every wilderness in the world, it punishes quickly when a mistake is made, quickly and with a casual, savage indifference.

Aristotle from Leroi

What is Life? It is Erwin Schrodinger's question. His answer was that life is a system that feeds on negative entropy. Herbert Spencer defined life as ‘the definite combination of heterogeneous changes. both simultaneous and successive’. Jacques Loch thought that living things were chemical machines ‘consisting essentially of colloidal material. which possess the peculiarities of automatically developing. preserving. and reproducing themselves’. Hermann Muller though: that any entity that had the properties of multiplication, variation and heredity was alive. For the authors of any biology textbook that you care to pick up it is a rather arbitrary list of properties: metabolism, nutrition, reproduction and so on; for most biologists it is a question best ignored. Aristotle asked Schrodinger’s question, and answered it. At first he gives the conventional list of properties: ‘By life we mean the capacity for self-nourishment, growth and decay.’ But that doesn’t really capture the terms in which he analyses the problem. He’s after a much more abstract description of what it is that separates the living from the dead His deeper answer is that living things, uniquely, have a soul.

LIV

THE TRADITIONAL GREEK conception of soul was Homer’s. Patroclus falls at Troy and his disembodied soul takes wing for the House of Hades. Perhaps this explains why the Greek name for a butterfly is the same as that for ‘soul' -psyche -for, as the soul flees a corpse at death. so a butterfly clambers from its Chrysalis.

In The Phaedo Plato elaborates the traditional theory. The soul is no longer merely something lost when we die; it reasons and regulates the body‘s desires while we are alive. Now it is Socrates who is dying. His soul too will leave the body in which it is trapped and travel to Hades. but where Patroclus' soul will live, at best, a kind of feeble afterlife, Socrates' soul can look forward to the prospect of perpetual reincarnation or so he optimistically argues. In The Republic the soul gains further complexities. It becomes the seat of moral virtue. Plato describes the human soul as being mutilated by evil rather as the sea monster Glaucus evidently modelled on a species of spider crab is weighed down by the shells and seaweed encrusting it.

Fragments of Aristotle's youthful works tell of similar beliefs. A dear friend. Eudemus. had died on a Sicilian battlefield. In a monograph devoted to his memory, Aristotle has Eudemus' soul returning to its home. Another early work, the Protrepicus compares the relationship between body and soul to the unpleasant Etruscan habit of binding their captives face to face with a corpse -the soul being the living partner in this macabre pas de deux.

Of this passage one scholar said, ‘Surely we are here in the presence of a sick. if strong and beautiful, mind.’

Later in life, Aristotle wrote a whole book about the soul, de Anima, or The Soul. Devoid of Platonic moralizing, it is resolutely scientific in tone:

Some types of knowledge may be especially fine and worthwhile for their precision or because their objects have greater value and elicit greater wonder. It is for both these reasons that we should treat the study of the soul as one of extreme importance. However its investigation seems to be of special importance for truth as a whole and the study of nature in particular. For souls are the principle of animal life.

This. to us. is a very strange, even suspect, claim. ‘Soul’ is a word burdened with many meanings but none in modern science. Perhaps we would do better to abandon translation, but mere transliteration hardly helps matters at all For us, ‘psyche’ refers to mental states -in particular, consciousness. To be sure, Aristotle does treat mental states in his book but he treats them as physiology: the Cartesian problem of consciousness hardly arises.

Indeed. The Soul is not a psychological treatise at all. but his most general statement about the systems of command and control that enable living things to do what they do.

Aristotle asserts, with fairly little argument. two propositions: that all living things ... plants, animals and humans .. have souls: and that. when a living thing dies, its soul ceases to exist. These were probably commonplace among fourth-century Greek intellectuals.  Plato clearly believes the first and has to argue against the second. But what, exactly is the soul? Aristotle begins by surveying his  predecessors views.

Everyone, he says, agrees that souls are associated with movement: the ability of living things to breathe, grow, wriggle, swim, walk and fly. A good account of the soul should be able to explain how. He considers the popular idea that souls are made of some physical matter. The usual candidates for soul-stuff are the elements: air, water or fire -only earth seems to be missing as a candidate soul'stuff. He rejects them all. Quite reasonably, he cannot see how any element is capable of making an animal move. He considers Democritus' argument that movement is due to the restless motion of the spherical atoms that comprise creature’s souls_ That. says Aristotle. is about as sensible as Daedalus’ scheme for animating a wooden statue of Aphrodite by pouring molten silver into it‘ Elements are the stuff that souls operate on; they are the substrate of life ~not life itself.

He also considers some less mundane ideas. One, proposed by a renegade Pythagorean, is that the soul is a harmony Aristotle interprets this to mean that it is a particular ratio of elements. This idea also strikes him as simplistic. Yet he sees some merit in it. It has something in common with his own theory insofar as it depends not on the properties of matter per se, but rather on the way in which matter is arranged. For Aristotle, when he comes to give his own theory, argues that the soul of a living thing is its form its eidos in its body.

I have argued that, when Aristotle speaks of the ‘form’ or ‘formal nature’ of a creature, he often means the information required to order matter into a creature of a given kind. This interpretation is based not only on the various analogies he gives (imprints in wax; letters and syllables), but also on the fact that forms are present even when they are invisible. They are somehow present in an animal’s seed and are responsible for the development of the embryo and the appearance and functions of the adult. So an animal’s soul is its form, albeit under particular circumstances:

"If we must say something general about all types of soul, it would be the first actuality of a natural body with organs."

The key word here is ‘actuality’ entelekheia. It is this word, a bit of Aristotelian jargon, that is most distinctive about his theory of the soul. He often uses it in opposition to ‘potentiality’ dynamis opposition runs deep into his physical theory. Any change, in Aristotle’s view, is the actualization of a potential. Thus when he says that the soul is an actuality, he's stressing the fan that it's something that previously existed only potentially; that it‘s something that comes into being From something else. When combined with the claim that the soul of a living thing is ‘its form in its body'. it becomes clear that he means that the forms of unfertilized seed are mere potentials; and that those forms when realized in growing embryos and functioning adults are souls.

This is still irritatingly abstract. But Aristotle tells us much about the properties of souls and they. in turn. tell us what he's getting at. Some properties are quite general and apply to all that souls do in all creatures; others are more specific and apply just to humans. Four of them are particularly revealing.

First, an Aristotelian soul is not made of matter. That’s clear from his objection to Democritus’ crude materialism, but it also follows from his definition of the soul as the form in a body’. Second, the soul is associated with the presence of organs, which means that it is a functional property of living things. Third, the soul is responsible for change in living things. By this he means that it regulates the body’s processes: growth, maintenance, ageing, locomotion, sensation, emotion and thought itself. Finally, the soul is responsible for a creature’s goals, ultimately its survival and reproduction.

Aristotle’s use of entelekheia to describe the soul tells us how important he thought this was, for the word is partly derived from telos, an end or goal. This conception, too, runs deep into his metaphysics. The soul, he says. is ‘an entity [ousia] in the sense of a definition [logos]’. By this he means that a living thing’s soul is the sum of its functional features. If an eye were a living creature, he says, then its soul would be vision. He is so committed to the idea that functional features define a creature (or an organ), rather than the stuff it’s made of, that he even says that if an eye can’t see (because it’s damaged) then it really isn’t an eye at all. It’s an eye ‘in name only’, like the ‘eyes’ that Greek sailors paint on the prows of their ships.‘ He insists that a corpse isn’t a man at all since it does not have a soul. From this point of view, a male cuttlefish who copulates with a dead female is not only wasting his time but making a serious philosophical mistake.

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Aristotle is trying to root out the ‘homunculus’. He is attacking the notion that there is within us all a small, disembodied person -an I- who is thinking our thoughts, hating our hates, loving our loves and controlling, in some mysterious fashion, our bodily machines. He does not have Descartes’ problem of explaining how an immaterial soul moves the body.

In the biological version of the ‘spiritual soul', Aristotle is a vitalist. To be a vitalist is to suppose that living things have some property that cannot be found in, or derived from, inanimate matter; to deny that living things are really just very complicated machines; to believe in the autonomy of life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a battle raged particularly in Germany between biologists and philosophers who thought that living things are just machines and those who did not. The latter were invariably impressed by the very thing that so impressed Aristotle: the goal’directness of living things. Teleology was an invitation to fill the explanatory vacuum with resounding, if empty, phrases: vis vitalitis, vis essentialis and the like. The last scientist of any repute to wear the vitalist badge proudly was Hans Driesch (1867-1941). A brilliant experimentalist in his youth, one of the founders of experimental embryology- in middle age he abandoned mechanistic theory and became a committed vitalist, arguing that no machine could even in principle construct a living thing. ‘But this may mean no more than that the living machine is more complex than any that Driesch has in mind,’ was Edward Conklin’s sardonic quip in 1914, and now Driesch is known, if at all, only as an object lesson on the perils of abandoning the lab bench for the airy realms of philosophy. In an unfortunate homage to Aristotle, Driesch called his vital force entelechy.

Mind-body dualists may still lurk in the darker recesses of philosophy departments, but in biology vitalists are extinct. The goal-directness of living things has been explained by natural selection, which tells us why living things have goals and what those goals are, by physiology and biochemistry which tells us how they achieve those goals and by genetics which tells us where those goals are stored and how they are transmitted from parent to child. Aristotle’s final, moving and formal causes all the work that he attributed to the soul ~ have been absorbed by, and divided among, the branches of biology. The question, then, is this: did Aristotle, ignorant of this seamless hierarchy of explanation, succumb to Kantian despair and press a traditional word, ‘soul’, into service as a placeholder for the gap between inanimate material and all the things that living things do? If so, then he is a vitalist. Or did he use ‘soul’ as a term to embrace the processes by which living things develop and function; processes that he thought rightly or wrongly were perfectly explicable in terms of the physical science of his day? lf so, then he is a materialist albeit of a very sophisticated kind.

It is sometimes said that all modern biologists are ‘materialists’ insofar as all our explanations take account of the brute properties of matter ~ chemistry and physics. But no biologist is a naive, Democritean, materialist, for all agree that the distinctive properties of living things depend on the arrangement of matter. The elements, though necessary, are not sufficient for life. An ordering principle information is needed as well. We are, to coin a term, ‘informed materialists’.

That was Aristotle’s view as well. It is why he identifies psyche as the actualization of eidos. It is only a beginning. Soul appears in his book on developmental biology and heredity The Generation Jof Animals; in his book on animal locomotion The Movement of Animals; in his functional anatomy The Parts of Animals; and, most of all, in his physiology The Length and Shortness of Life and Youth andOld Age, Life and Death. Soul, in short, pervades Aristotle’s biology. When we survey all that he says about its workings it becomes apparent that he has given a detailed and coherent account, embracing many levels of biological organization, of how animals abstract matter from the environment, transform it, distribute the transformed matter throughout their bodies and use it to grow, maintain themselves. reproduce, perceive the world and respond to it and that the form, structure or organization of all this activity is the soul.

The result is a vision that is at once disturbingly alien and surprisingly familiar. It is alien when we consider that we have been talking about ‘soul’. a word that by religious and philosophical tradition is usually applied to entities only tangentially connected to the physical world, if at all; but it is very familiar when we ignore the word itself and attend to what Aristotle is trying to understand the moving principle of life.

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It is sometimes said that Cuvier got his teleology from Kant, but for Kant teleology was just a ‘heuristic fiction’ and an invitation to despair. ‘There Would never be’, he said, ‘a Newton capable of explaining a blade of grass.’ Cuvier was more sanguine. ‘Why should not natural history also have its Newton one day?’ (‘And now it’s got one’ was his unspoken reply) One can feel a pang of sympathy for Cuvier. If natural history has a Newton, it’s Darwin who, in the Origin, is generous even as he puts his predecessor in his place:

The expression of conditions of existence, so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier, is fully embraced by the principle of natural selection. For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life; or by having adapted them during long~past periods of time: the adaptations being aided in some cases by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct action of the external conditions of life, and being in all cases subjected to the several laws of growth."


Notice how subtly Darwin changes Cuvier’s meaning. When Cuvier invokes the conditions of existence he is generally trying to explain the fit of an animal’s parts to each other; when Darwin does, it is to explain the lit of an animal’s parts to its environment. The difference is only one of emphasis. Anyone who seeks to understand the design of living things necessarily studies them as wholes in themselves and in their worlds; the three great students of animal design, Aristotle, Cuvier and Darwin, all kept at least an eye to both.

In the Origin Geoffroy’s Law of Compensation appears under the heading ‘correlation of growth’. ‘I mean by this expression’, says Darwin, ‘that the whole organisation is so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified.’ Darwin’s idea is more general than Geoffroy’s, for he allows that the connections need not be economic. But he credits him (and Goethe) for the insight.

These concepts continue their scientific run. But they have transmuted again, for if Aristotle, Cuvier and Geoffroy all wrote on the far side of 1859, Darwin joins them in writing on the far side of 1900 or, if you prefer, 19533‘ Aristotle’s principle of conditional necessity is now just as often applied, if not by that name, to molecules or even genes.

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AESCHYLUS WAS VlSITlNG Sicily when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it and killed him. The tortoise probably died too since the only part of the story that’s certainly true is that golden eagles do seize tortoises, carry them aloft and release them in order to crack them open like nuts. Neither the playwright nor the tortoise matters here; one is only an accidental anvil and the other is food; the interest of the story is how the eagle accomplished this feat.

A neurophysiologist, sketching the mechanisms involved, would describe a causal chain that begins with a goal (bodily maintenance), that requires an appetitive motivational drive’ (hunger), perception (of the tortoise and Aeschylus’ head), a variety of computations (how and when to seize, carry and drop the tortoise) and motor’responses to execute them by. He would say that the physiology underlying some of these processes is well understood, that some of them are obscure, and that how it all works together is quite unknown. He would point out that we struggle to give a computational model of a worm wriggling across a petri dish never mind an eagle on the hunt.

Aristotle also attempts a mechanistic explanation of animals in motion. He sketches how the senses work, how they transmit information to the sensorium, how this information is integrated with respect to the animal’s goals and how it is transformed into mechanical action in its limbs. This system has even been given (by two classical philosophers) a very scientific’sounding acronym, the CIOM model‘ which stands for Centralized Incoming Outgoing Motions. Aristotle simply calls it the sensitive soul. By any name its anatomy is hazy, its physiology wrong. but its structure percipient.

Perception obviously requires the transmission of information about the world from the world to within an animal. As Aristotle puts it, perception is the transmission of an object’s form without its matter. This process begins with the five senses: sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch and their respective organs. He assumes that perception involves a qualitative change in a sense organ. That implies that the perceived object must make contact with it.

It’s easy to see how contact-dependent change works in touch, taste, hearing and, perhaps, smell. Vision is trickier. Empedocles and Plato argued that the eyes contain a fire and that light rays from this fire travel to the object of sight. Aristotle trenchantly points out that if this torch-beam theory were true, we’d be able to see in the dark. We might reasonably assume that his own theory of light is merely the reverse: that light rays emanate from some source and enter our eyes where they effect some change. That, however, is Newton, not Aristotle.

Aristotle supposes that some media air and water have the property of being either opaque or transparent. When such a medium is exposed to the sun or a fire it becomes transparent. Light, then, is not a ray, a wave or a particle, but a quality, an actualization of a potential. When we look at an object through a transparent medium, its shape and colours initiate movements in the medium that travel to our eyeballs where they effect a change.

Each sense organ perceives certain kinds of changes in the world; this specificity depends on the elemental composition of their uniform parts. To perceive colour and shape, eyeballs must be transparent and so are made of water; to perceive touch, flesh must be made of something solid and so is made of earthy stuff. His account of what actually happens in the eyeball when we see some object is quite opaque. He probably believes that the eyeball undergoes a physical transformation of some sort. Certainly he supposes that contact with sense organs initiates a chain of physical consequences that reach into the body.

The target of this chain is the central sensorium. the locus of perception itself. By ancient anatomical tradition, Plato thought the central scnsorium was the brain and. For once, Plato was right. Aristotle, of course, supposes that it is the heart. His main argument for this is that there should be a single. central principle of all the soul’s Functions. To make his theory work, he obviously needs a physical connection between the heart and the peripheral sense organs. You might expect him to appeal to nerves, but he doesn’t know about them. (He uses the term neuron but applies them to sinew; Herophilus would identify nerves as a distinct tissue in the following century) Aristotle therefore supposes that sensory transmission operates via the network of blood vessels as well as various ‘channels’. Most of these ‘channels’ do not obviously correspond to anything in modern anatomy, but one of them is probably, to use its modern name, the optic nerve. His argument rests on the fact that if it is severed by a blow to the head, blindness follows as if a lantern had been snuffed out. It’s unclear whether he thinks that sensory information is transmitted by the vessels channels themselves, the blood or some’ thing else; in any event, physical continuity between the peripheral sense organ and the central sensorium is essential.

The core functions of the sensitive soul take place in the heart. It’s where raw perceptions are translated into mental representations which, When added to desires, become actions. Aristotle assumes that the sensitive soul’s function is to maintain the animal’s wellbeing by ensuring, inter alia, that it gets enough to eat and that it doesn’t get eaten itself. Animals therefore experience the world in terms of pleasure or pain, as defined by the goal of self-maintenance. The eagle perceives the tortoise with pleasure; the tortoise perceives the eagle with pain. However, a given perception may be either pleasant or painful depending on the animal’s internal state: an eagle sated on tortoises may disdain another one.

The term that Aristotle uses for the mental representation of some object is phantasia. To explain, he personifies: ‘ “I have to drink,” says desire. “Here’s drink,” says sense-perception or phantasia or thought.’ He does not, Of course, give a mechanistic account of phantasia or any other higher cognitive process, but he recognizes the difficulty. After explaining the physiology of smell, he says, ‘but smelling is more than such an affection by what is smelly- what more? Is not the answer that, while the air owing to the momentary duration of the action upon it of the smelly thing does itself become perceptible to the sense of smell, smelling is an observing of the result produced?’ Indeed.

Phantasia and desire may be black boxes, but when he explains how he effects action, he becomes very physiological again. Heating and cooling of the heart accompany both of these mental events. These thermal changes initiate motionthat is then transmitted to the limbs. To explain how

he invokes devices that he calls automatic puppets:

The movement ofanimals is like that ofautomatic puppets, which are set moving when a small motion occurs: the cables are released and the pegs strike against one another . . . For they [animals] have functioning parts that are of the same kind: the sinews and bones. The latter are like the pegs and the iron in our example. the sinews like the cables. When these are released and slackened the animal moves. Now in the puppets . . . no qualitative change takes place . . . But in animals the same part has the capacity to become both larger and smaller and to change its shape; the parts change qualitatively when they expand because of heat and contract again because of cold.

The important point about these puppets is that they are automatic (automata). They seem to have been mechanical dolls of some kind. He’s careful to note that their motions aren’t exactly like those of animals since animal motions also involve qualitative change such as expansion and contraction of the kind found in the heart. This gives him another anatomical problem. He has to translate qualitative changes in the heart into mechanical changes and then distribute those mechanical impulses to the limbs, and he has to do this not only without nerves but also without muscles.

It’s not that the Greeks were oblivious to muscles. Classical statues of athletes and heroes display them in enviable relief. Hippocratic texts refer to muscles as myes ‘mice’ but are vague about what they do. Aristotle avoids the term altogether and calls them sarx ‘flesh’ -which he supposes has mostly a sensory function. His effectors of local motion are, then, sinews and a substance called symphyton pneuma.

Variously rendered ‘connate pneuma’, ‘hot breath’, ‘spirit’ or simply EP, pneuma is one of the most mysterious, yet powerful, substances in Aristotle’s chemistry It is something like hot air, but its heat is of a special kind, not the heat of conventional fire. It is analogous to the divine ‘first element’
(aither) of which stars are made. More mundanely, it gives organic materials special properties: olive oil is shiny, floats on water and does not freeze thanks to its high pneuma content.

Astrology from 99 Glimpses

At his office in Fleet Street, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, was struggling to come up with a fresh angle on the news of another royal birth. Then it came to him: why not ask Cheiro,* the most famous astrologer of the day, to predict what life might have in store for her? Cheiro had, in his time, given personal readings to, among others, Oscar Wilde, General Kitchener, Mark Twain and King Edward VII. The little Princess would surely be a doddle.

Gordon telephoned Cheiro’s office, only to be informed by his assistant, RH. Naylor, that the great man was unavailable. Instead, Naylor put himself forward for the task. His article, ‘What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess’, duly appeared the following Sunday.

Naylor foretold that Princess Margaret Rose would have ‘an eventful life; a prediction that was possibly on the safe side, since few lives are without any event whatsoever. Moreover, it would be decades before anyone could confidently declare it to have been entirely uneventful. and by that time people’s minds would have been distracted by other, more eventful, things. More particularly, Naylor predicted that ‘events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year’.

The article proved a huge success, so much so that Gordon proceeded to commission Naylor to write forecasts for the months ahead. As luck .. or chance, or fate would have it, one of his predictions was that ‘a British aircraft will be in danger between October 8th and 15th’. He was just three days out: on 5 October, on its maiden overseas flight, the passenger airship R101 crashed in Beauvais, France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board.

Naylor’s reputation was made. John Gordon now hit on the idea of asking him to write a weekly column making predictions for all Sunday Express readers according to their birthdays. Naylor puzzled for some time over how to incorporate 365 different forecasts into a single column, and eventually devised a more off-the-peg system by dividing the sun’s 360-degree transit into twelve zones, each of them spanning thirty degrees. He then named each of the twelve zones after a different celestial constellation, and offered blocks of predictions for each birth sign. This was how the modern horoscope came into being.

In the Princess’s seventh year, 1936, a series of events of tremendous significance to the Royal Family did indeed come about, exactly as predicted: the death of King George V, the abdication of King Edward VIII, and the accession of King George VI. Small wonder that Naylor was now regarded as something of a genius; before long he was receiving up to 28,000 letters a week from his bedazzled readers, anxious to know what fate had up its sleeve for them.

By now, every other popular newspaper had taken to employing a resident astrologer; according to Mass-Observation, ‘nearly two-thirds of the adult population glance at or read some astrological feature more or less regularly’.

One of the beauties of the horoscope, from the point of view of the astrologer, is that its followers are more than willing to forget or ignore any prediction that turns out to be wrong. In future, Naylor would be the beneficiary of this impulse to turn a blind eye. At the beginning of 1939, for instance, he confidently declared that ‘Hitler’s horoscope is not a war horoscope . . .'

Tyrant

by Stephen Greenblatt

FROM the early 1590's, toward the beginning of his career, all the way through to its end, Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? 

“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.”' Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-tooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? 

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? 
Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting peole submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

Shakespeare repeatedly depicted the tragic cost of this submission- the moral corruption, the massive waste of treasure, the loss of life- and the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of of health. Is there, the plays ask, any way to stop the slide towards lawless and arbitrary rule before it is too late, any effective means to prevent the civil catastrophe that tyranny invariably provokes? 

The playwright was not accusing England’s current ruler, Elizabeth I. of being a tyrant. Quite apart from whatever Shakespeare privately thought, it would have been suicidal to float: such a suggestion onstage. Dating back to 1534. during the reign of the queen’s father, Henry VIII legal statutes made it treason to refer to the ruler as a tyrant. The penalty for such a crime was death. . 

There was no freedom of expression in Shakespeare's England, on the stage or anywhere else. The 1597 performances of an allegedly seditious play "The Isle of Dogs" led to the arrest and Imprisonment of the playwright Ben Jonson and to a government order-fortunately not enforced- to demolish all the playhouses in London. Informants attended the theater, eager to claim a reward for denouncing to the authorities anything that could be construed as subversive. Attempts to reflect critically on contemporary events or on leading figures were particularly risky. 

As with modem totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing what most mattered to them at one or more removes. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could acknowledge truth-to possess it fully and not perish of it-through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance. Hence the fascination he found in the legendary Roman leader Caius Martius Coriolanus or in the historical Julius Caesar. hence the appeal of such figures from the English and Scottish chronicles as York Jack Cade. Lear, and above all, the quintessential tyrants Richard III and Macbeth. And hence, too, the lure of entirely imaginary figures: the sadistic emperor Saturninus in Titus Adronicus; the corrupt deputy Angelo in Measure for Measure; the paranoid King Leontes in The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare's popular success suggests that many of his contemporaries felt the same thing.

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“I will stir up in England some black storm,” he broods to himself, a storm that will not cease to rage until the crown he plans to seize-"the golden circuit on my head”-shines like the sun and calms the fury. And he has, he reveals, found the perfect person to be his agent: “I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman/john Cade" (2 Henry VI, 3.1.349-57). 

John (or Jack) Cade was an actual person-a lowerclass rebel about whom few personal details are known who led a bloody popular revolt that flared up against the English government in 1450 and was quickly and violently suppressed. To fashion his character, Shakespeare cobbled together materials he gathered from the historical chronicles (including the speculation that Cade was secretly funded by York), combined them with the traces of other peasant uprisings, and added details drawn from his own vivid imagination. Shakespeare’s grand Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, does not care in the slightest about the ultimate fate of the base man he has seduced into furthering his designs, and he cares still less about the ragged mob he intends to stir up into rebellion. But he has observed Cade carefully and seen qualities that may make him useful, including an uncanny indifference to pain and, therefore, an ability to keep hidden their secret bond:

Say he be taken, racked, and tortured, 

I know no pain they can inflict upon him 
Will make him say I moved him to those arms. 



Secrecy is important: it would not do for the powerful aristocrat to be revealed as the instigator of a vicious popular uprising. 

The uprising turns out to be an even greater storm than York could have wished. The mob, gathering just outside London in Blackheath, is rallied by Cade, who proves himself to be an effective demagogue, the master of voodoo economics: 

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common. . . . There shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord. (4.2.61-70) 

When the crowd roars its approval, Cade sounds exactly like a modern stump speaker: “I thank you, good people” (4.2.167). 

The absurdity of these campaign promises is not an impediment to their effectiveness. On the contrary: Cade keeps producing demonstrable falsehoods about his origins and making wild claims about the great things he will do, and the crowds eagerly swallow them. To be sure, his neighbors know that Cade is a congenital liar: 

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Cade: My mother a Plantagenet- 

Butcher:. (Aside) I knew her well; she was a midWIfc. 

Cade: My wife descended of the Lacys-

BUTCHER: [Aside] She was indeed a peddler’s 
daughter and sold laces. (4239-43) 

Cade’s absurd assertions of aristocratic lineage should make him seem merely a buffoon. Far from a wealthy, high-born magnate, he is little more than a vagabond: “I have seen him whipped three market days together,” whispers one of his supporters (4.2.53-54). But, strangely enough, this knowledge does not diminish the mob’s faith. 

Cade himself, for all we know, may think that what he is so obviously making up as he goes along will actually come to pass. Drawing on an indifference to the truth, shamelessness, and hyperinflated self-confidence, the loudmouthed demagogue is entering a fantasyland-“When I am king, as king I will be”-and he invites his listeners to enter the same magical space with him. In that space, facts do not count (4.2.65). Two and two do not have to equal four, and the most recent assertion need not remember the contradictory assertion that was made a few seconds earlier. 

In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade’s grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd’s anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade. Famously, it is at the end of one of Cade‘s speeches that someone in the crowd shouts, "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (4.2.71). 

Shakespeare knew that the line would get laughs, as it has done for the last four centuries. It releases the current of aggression that swirls around the whole enterprise of the law-directed not merely at venal attorneys but at all the agents of the vast social apparatus that compels the honoring of contracts, the payment of debts, the fulfillment of obligations. We blithely imagine that the crowd wants such responsible qualities in its leaders, but the scene suggests otherwise. What it wants instead is permission to ignore commitments, to violate promises, and to break the rules. 

Cade begins by talking vaguely about “reformation,” but his actual appeal is wholesale destruction. He urges the mob to pull down London’s law schools, the Inns of Court, but that is only the beginning. “I have a suit unto your lordship,” entreats one of his chief followers, “that the laws of England may come out of your mouth” (4.7.3-7). “I have thought upon it,” Cade replies, “it shall be so. Away! Burn all the records of the realm; my month shall be the Parliament of England ” (4.7.11-13). 

That in this destruction the common people would lose even the very limited power they possess-the power expressed when they voted in parliamentary elections--does not matter. For Cade’s ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is to tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions. Better to have the law come from the mouth of the dictator. who may claim to be a Plantagenet but whom they recognize as one of their own. The masses 3ft perfectly aware that he is a liar, but---venal, cruel, and self‘ Serving though he is-he succeeds in articulating their dream; “Henceforward all things shall be in common” (4.7.16). 

Cade’s rant stands in for any transparency about his own past and any serious commitment to make good on this or that particular promise. Far from demanding that he keep his word, his followers are gratified When he rails against all contracts: “Is not this a lamentable thing, that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment; that patchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?” (4.2.7275). The remark about the “scribbled-over” parchment is at once ridiculous-how else should legal documents look?and canny. The poor whose passions Cade is arousing feel excluded, despised, and vaguely ashamed. They have been left out of an economy that increasingly demands possession of a once-esoteric technology: literacy. They do not imagine that they can master this new skill, nor does their leader propose that they undertake any education. It would hardly suit his purposes if they did so. What he does instead is manipulate their resentment of the educated. 

The mob quickly apprehends a clerk and levels an accusav [ion against him: “he can write and read.” Indeed, his accus

report, “We took him setting of boys’ copies”--that is. 

cparing writing exercises for schoolboys (4.2.81). Cade undertakes to conduct the interrogation: “Dost thou use to write thy name," he asks. “Or hast thou a mark to thyself, like a honest plain-dealing man?" (4.2.92-93). If the clerk knew what was good for him, he would insist that he was illiterate and signed his name only with a mark. Instead he proudly proclaims his accomplishment: “Sir, I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.” “He hath confessed!” the mob shouts. “Away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor.” “Away with him, I say!” orders Cade, echoing the crowd’s demand. “Hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck” (4.2.94-99). 

Jack Cade longs for the time when, as he puts it, boys played games of toss “for French crowns,” a time before the country was “maimed and fain to go with a staff” (4.2.14550). Until weaklings led it astray, he suggests, England compelled its enemies to tremble before its power, and that glorious swaggering must now be recovered. He promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education. The educated elite has betrayed the people. They are traitors who will all be brought to justice, and this justice will be meted out not by judges and lawyers but in a call-and-response between the leader and his mob. The English treasurer Lord Saye “can speak French"-“and therefore he is a traitor" (4.2.153). It makes perfect sense: “The Frenchmen are our enemies. . . . I ask but this: can he that speaks with the tongue of an enemy be a good counselor, or no?" The crowd roars the answer: 

“No, no-and therefore we'll have his head!"