psyche

Given the immediate experience of life would be essentially along the circle of elements, everything the psyche does and experiences, like thinking and feeling, would also essentially be along that circle. In other words, life as personal experience (psyche) would essentially happen along that circle.

In the model of elemental transformations in the zodiac from the star signs section, all star signs transform from outer to inner elements (except for the desired element). Inside is where one might suspect the psyche to be.

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Could the argument be reversed, would an assumption that the psyche is inside imply the transitions of the zodiac ? At least they are general in the sense that for each element they select the transition from the outer adjacent element via the element itself to the inner adjacent element.

So all transformations in life would be about learning in the broadest sense, end up inside, but with hopes also for outside, maybe even often as offspring, new life.

And the psyche would be closely related to e5.

Was the prehistoric psyche of people maybe not much able, yet, to separate the two active elements from each other, what the individual can move outside (emo) from the thoughts related to that (eri?), and labelled both as a single experience of everyday life as fire/red, leaving black/dark for the largely given state of things outside (ero) and white/ bright for the largely given flow of things inside (emi) ?

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Thus first just three proto-elements, of which ‘red’ fire later split into yellow fire plus red air ? And before learning to preserve and later to create fire, a more passive psyche of mostly just ‘black and white’, with fire/light essentially as a given phenomenon outside and inside ? And maybe black for outside, because it is dark at night without the fire of the sun or also in a cave without a campfire, while inside the mind it can be bright anytime ? And before that black and white mixed into one in perpetual change, as in yin-yang ☯ or in some of Heraclitus’ fragments ?

leads

• The four tasks of Psyche in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass are about elemental transformations of nominally the psyche.
  The four tasks are in the middle of the book, nested threefold into the outer story of Lucius as an ass, the fairy tale of Cupid and Psyche, and Psyche’s visits to different deities for help, until she ends up at Venus who poses the four tasks to her.
  While the two outmost stories are based in part on well-known older myths and folk tales, and the ancient gods reflect their well-known natures, this appears not to be the case for Psyche’s tasks. Instead it is more likely that Apuleius devised them himself or at least that they emerged around his time, as a way to convey certain new ideas.
  Only few of Apuleius’ works have survived. One is On Plato and his Doctrine, a short version of Plato’s philosophy, another is On the God of Socrates, with thoughts on ‘daemons’ as beings that live in the air, and he translated Plato’s Phaedo to Latin, where Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul on the evening before his death by hemlock.
  The word that Plato used for soul is psychê, literally ancient Greek for a butterfly, that mystical short-lived creature.

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  A butterfly is often seen as either resting on a flower or else fluttering on to the next one, which reminds of the psyche, which often dwells a while on a topic, then “flutters” on to the next, often also in a rather random looking way.
  Apuleius lived in a very fruitful time in which many symbolic systems found a form to stay in for many centuries by melting Greek and Egyptian/African views into something new: Star signs got their attributed elements; in Stoicism the highest, lightest form of pneuma was called psychê; in alchemy the transition towards the philosopher’s stone black-white-yellow-red is the same order of elements as apparently in Psyche’s tasks; a mummy reminds of the chrysalis into which a caterpillar weaves itself and later emerges as a butterfly, a cocoon as sort of a vessel towards a higher life; leading back in time to silkworms, the changing colors of a mulberry and the great goddess, or forward to then upcoming religions like Christianity that feature the idea of an immortal soul, and so on.
  The original title of the book was Metamorphoseon Libri XI, which is likely why Apuleius might have devised the tasks of Psyche as elemental transformations of the soul and placed them at the very center of his masterpiece.
• Myths may have carved out the cycle of elements more closely and in a more streamlined way than most other stories, as in myths originally only what felt ultimately important was worth the effort of remembering it by heart during life and transmitting it orally from one generation to the next. Myths around star signs, in particular, might even more specifically reflect only certain segments of the cycle of elements.
• Observing something that happens outside (emo) can lead to insights into the workings of the world (eri), so the psyche would have operated along the circle of elements, emo → eri. Natural sciences would be a lot about this part of the cycle, relating essentially experiment (emo) and theory (eri).
  You could, for example, not learn much of what a cube is, unless it moves (emo) or if you move yourself and look at it from various angles or turn it in your hand (eri → emo). Just looking at a cube from a single perspective (ero) would not allow to learn much about a cube as a physical object with specific properties and symmetries, but could still change your mood (emi?). Such a mood might still allow to learn something in the sense of later being able to recognize a cube if you encounter another one from a similar angle, but not much in a consciously analytical way, and arguably recognition might rather come indirectly from a transition emi → eri, from learning inside from different moods.
  Even though in the model of the star signs, transitions would in the end tend to go inside, in practice things would often involve both ways, for example, when looking at a cube from different sides, both moving it, eri → emo, and learning from its movements, emo → eri, in a close feedback loop.
  At emi much more may already be going on unconsciously than is obvious, there may already be a lot of comparing of different experiences (ero) happening in the background, which then eri could analyze by observing emi inside similarly to emo outside. And what eri would postulate, might again create an emotional reaction, and so on ?
• How would the maybe more subtle view of dual female and male elements in the I Ching fit here ? And generally into the astrological model of transformations in the Western zodiac ? What about the Chinese zodiac, which probably emerged roughly around the year zero like similar systems in the West ? Does it also mirror elemental transitions of the psyche ? Or maybe something else ? What about other zodiacs ?
• Is it true that the psyche is inside, that all would travel inside during life, or is that more of a Western view, not ultimately true ? But maybe part of the truth if adding similar transitions “the other way” to balance it, or in some other ways ?
• I switched the fire colors in the illustration of the archaic circle so that the darker color (red) is closer to black and the lighter color (yellow) closer to white, actually as in alchemy.
• Before agriculture, people essentially had to follow nature. Where to stay, where to find something to eat, was beyond human control. Similarly, the flow of feelings, dreams, visions was not something people could approach analytically at first. That probably came in time by telling stories, with mythology and other stories. Abstract concepts like love were first personified as deities like Aphrodite/Venus, only later things became more abstract, as in Greek philosophy.
• Reading a text silently was apparently not usually done in antiquity. Texts were rather recited aloud, hence also texts often in rhymes to give them rhythm and melody. Thus in and out of what the psyche actively did were still somewhat mixed up into one: no thinking without speaking or acting.
• New Testament Recovery Version, 1 Th 5:23, footnote 5c:
  “The spirit as our inmost part is the inner organ, possessing God-consciousness, that we may contact God (John 4:24; Rom. 1:9). The soul is our very self (cf. Matt. 16:26; Luke 9:25), a medium between our spirit and our body, possessing self-consciousness, that we may have our personality. The body as our external part is the outer organ, possessing world-consciousness, that we may contact the material world.”
  Hence from inside to outside this could be seen as the colors of the ripening mulberry, spirit-water-white, soul-air|fire-red, body-earth-black; part of the cycle emi-eri|emo-ero; inside and outside the passive elements, in-between the active ones.
  Note, however, that the footnote might be more of a modern interpretation/insight than explicit or implicit ancient views; spirit-soul-body were pneuma-psyche-soma in Greek.
• Where does the identification air-thinking and water-feeling come from in contemporary psychological astrology ? Maybe from Jung’s “Psychological Types”, but is it like that there ? And what about the ancient theories of humors and temperaments, do they reflect this view ?
  Temperaments seem to have been almost exclusively describing outer appearance and behavior, but not internal motivation. For example, phlegmatic types (‘water’) were considered rather slow and weak. And temperaments seem to have been hardly mentioned in the context of astrology.
  It seems that a shift towards psychology would have only come roughly with the 20th century, along also with developments around Freud and others. In Alan Leo’s descriptions of the elements in The Art of Synthesis (1912) there seem to be already some tendencies into that direction.
  But it seems that Jung would have been first to define four purely psychological functions to derive 8 psychological types via intra- and extraversion. In Psychologische Typen he has an extensive chapter with definitions of terms, where he also defines ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensation’ and ‘intuition’.
  From my perspective, sensation goes beyond just registering things, it also covers what I would call ‘measurement’, the translation of sensory input to more abstract concepts like, for example, ‘dog’, which also includes some categorization. The conscious mind then operates mostly on those categories, logically or also in other conscious ways, including judging things. A feeling is sort of an unconscious categorization in response to other things going on in the mind, sort of feeding data into a neural network and the network then maybe detecting something that is suspicions, resulting in the corresponding feeling, but this probably already simplifies too much. Finally, intuition in Jung’s sense would in my view include unconscious creations that become conscious for further judgement and analysis, sort of the result of a generative neural network that produces various ideas of which some after some basic unconscious testing are allowed to become conscious. That would in a nutshell be how I would describe things, and Jung arguably was already close to that in 1921.
  But I am not sure if these categories are all that natural, even though they certainly mirror many things in useful ways.
  In my personal feelings, Jung’s book would be biased in ways that later lead to troubles for him including the red book.