The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the hellenic consciousness
singing and reciting of verses in obvious harmony with human respiration and
blood circulation, undisturbed by any kind of intellectual reflection.
When the cantos of the Iliad and Odyssey were written down, edited and
compiled at the end of the sixth century, the time of the rhythmical memory was
past. The very fact that this writing took place indicates the loss of the faculty
of the previous kind of memory, for during the time of the rhythmical memory,
writing had been neither necessary nor generally known. The transformed
memory became gradually a visualizing of facts and a recording of data. Soon
after the Homeric poems were written down, Herodotus, the father of history,
was born. The rhythmical memory died out. The historical memory appeared.
The Homeric poems can inform us still more concretely concerning the
Greek psyche. They indicate how the Hellenes experienced the so-called “seat
of the soul.” Reasoning was not yet experienced by the Greeks in the brain as it
is with us. It lived, rather, in the breathing functions of man. At the beginning
of the life of Hellas, undisturbed by any kind of sophistication, Homer never
mentions the head or the brain as the seat of intelligence. In Homer’s epics we
can discover a duality of expression regarding the mind of man in meeting the
words phren and thymos. 10
Phren, the diaphragm, separates the cavity of the chest from the organs
below and is naturally connected with breathing. Thymos (or etor and kardia) are
the words for the heart. When Homer wishes to express the whole soul life he
calls on both forces: Kata phrena kai thymon. The word thymos is linked with the
feeling and willing and is psychologically connected with the pulsation of the
blood. Phren, received from without; thymos or kardia, within the circulation of
the blood, lives in the mind.
Agamemnon’s “heart leaps from his breast and his knees tremble beneath
him.” 11 The diaphragm of Odysseus is “well-balanced”; but the wine affects
the diaphragm of Polyphemus instead of affecting his head as it does that of
the man of today; and Odysseus declares he longs to wound him in the “breast
where the diaphragm holds the liver.” 12 These phrases are not to be taken
merely as evidence of the fact that the Greeks were ignorant of physiology
but as evidence that their consciousness had its seat in a different region of the
body, in the heart and respiratory system rather than in the head and nerves.