The birthplace of the word

I begin The Birthplace of the Word, with the ancient Greek philosophers and their disagreement over the nature of the soul. I focus on the part of their definition of the soul which they term the "energetic soul," and consider to be housed in the body. They view this soul as fueled by respiration and a material produced by the taking in of air into the body, the Pneuma. After acknowledging the ancient's confusion over this idea of the Pneuma, I present Galen's view as being the most clearly articulated. He states that breathing produces Pneuma which powers the body to express itself in motion and emotion. Spirituality for Galen has to do then with air and the body, and the lung power behind movement. From Galen I trace the idea of the Pneuma through Augustine and the middle ages where it falls into obscurity. During these centuries spirit disassociates from the body and idea of a body soul is considered heretical. I then explain how the wisdom of Pneumatic philosophy as encoded m the ancient sculptures discovered in the Renaissance enabled artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo to rediscover and explore this idea. After the renaissance, however the idea of the Pneumatic Spirit gets lost again, only to break through once more into collective consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century. The main body of my text 1s taken up with tracing this break through in several different authors across different disciplines and noting similarities and differences between them. The works I choose are Freud's Studies In Hysteria, Nietzsche's, The Birth Of Tragedy From The Spirit Of Music, Robert Lewis Stevenson's, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Before delving into these four texts I examine the age in which the authors lived to better understand the climate of ideas which might have produced such a common interest. Then I look at the possible influence of the men on one another. Moving deeper into their inspiration, I examine commonalties of character structure due to similar upbringings. Since the Pneumatic Spirit is a concept which concerns the body, I examine the bodies of all four men and find that they each have a concern over a perceived weakness of their lungs. I put forward that this concern more than anything else motivates and shapes their interest in the Pneumatic Spirit. Turning now to the four texts I point out that in reality they are the same story, a story which can be broken down into Freud's topography for the onset, duration and resolution of a neurosis. I break my chapters down into the same kind of topography. Freud posits that the first stage of neurosis is that of a troubled sleep, a disease in which the sufferer may seem to others to have everything but within himself he knows that something is not right. Taking this idea in hand I explore the contrast between the public and private selves of, Freud's hysterics, Anna 0. and Frau Emmey, Stevenson's Henry Jekyll, and Lawrence's Connie and Clifford Chatterley, and stand with them as they watch break the dawn of a realization. Something is very wrong m their lives. Using Nietzsche's distinction between Dionysian man and Apollonian man, I put forth that the protagonists realize that their Pneumatic Spirits, their body selves, are starving. Freud felt that the period of dis-ease usually ended m a "return of the repressed." In my next chapter I trace how the stifled body self of Connie Chatterley, Henry Jekyll and for Nietzsche the collective body of western civilization rebels against the inhibitions placed on it by early socialization. Such a rebellion leads to a battle between socialized and unsocialized selves, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Pneumatic and the rational souls. I trace the vicissitudes of this rebellion and power struggle in the four protagonists and describe how the doctors, lawyers and family members called in to try and manage them, struggle to conceptualize and control the crisis they witness. Freud believed that all crisis' resolve in either integration and healing or in a further fragmentation of self which often leads to destruction. I apply this presentiment to each of the characters and find that while Connie Chatterley's crisis, with a little help from a gamekeeper ends in the former, Henry Jekyll's crisis leads to the later. To conclude my exploration I ask the question, 'what current relevance does concerning ourselves generally with the dance of the Pneumatic Spirit through history and in particular with its manifestation in the late 19'th century have for· the humanity today?' To answer this question I turn back to the word Pneuma and point out that this word forms the prefix for Pneumacystis, the A.I.D.S pneumonia. The concept of the Pneuma is not then merely a piece of intellectual archeology but is alive and well in our own age in a deadly disease. To conclude my exploration I examine what happens when one gazes upon this disease through the lens of having traced the concept of the Pneumatic Spirit through history and having understood its late nineteenth century manifestation.