In the article published on Monday of this week, I detailed something of the concept of the vehicle of the soul, the ochēma of the pneumatic body, as it appears in the Corpus Hermeticum. It occurs to me now that the reader may find themselves slightly confused by the following ambiguity in the sources around the language. Sometimes, it seems, pneuma or spiritus, “spirit,” is the physically or metaphysically higher principle, and other times, psychē or anima, “soul,” holds that distinction. It would be easy enough, I suppose, to just lazily gesture towards these principles as interchangeable and to categorize them by what they trigger cognitively in the mind of the reader, inviting the reader to adopt the system that best reflects the way they’re naturally inclined to use the language. If “soul” tends to name that most original facet of one’s distinctive life, then one is free to adopt the model in which it is superior to pneuma; if “spirit,” then the reverse. But it will be useful going forward, and indeed for the general knowledge of the reader, to see that there’s a specific reason for this overlap of meaning that has to do with the changing nature of philosophy in the Hellenistic, Imperial, and Late Antique eras of the Ancient Mediterranean world. This post may well read somewhat like an encyclopedia entry, then, as I try to unpack, in briefer terms than I am normally accustomed to, the relevant data.
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