Animae Celestes
by Gregory Feeley
Illustration by Steve Cavallo
All happy theories are alike; each generation reacts to them in its own way.
In 1489 Marcilio Ficino wrote of the spiritus, a vapor which circulates throughout the nervous system, conveying sensory perception and mediating between the corporeal body and the immortal soul. A valuable faculty: yet while soldiers take care of their weapons, as musicians do their instruments and hunters their hounds, “the priests of the Muses, who seek the highest truth and good, are careless enough (alas) to neglect an instrument by which one can measure and grasp the whole world. Such an instrument is the spirit… Formed from the subtler blood by the heart’s heat, it flies to the brain, where the soul employs it assiduously for both the interior and the exterior senses.”
This small book was posthumously collected with others in Ficino’s Opera Omni, published in an expensive edition (there was in 1576 no other kind) in Basel, and distributed throughout the libraries of the learned. In 1713 Henri Lavalle, a natural philosopher at the University of Paris, read the study and exclaimed, “Of course—it is the esprits of Descartes, dimly prefigured by the Florentine Platonist. The body, in short, is a perfect mechanism, like the nested spheres of the heavens, and the spiritus is aether.” In 1849 Odeon Puysage, an engineering student studying Renaissance science, came upon Ficino’s tract and observed in his notes that “Spiritus = systeme pneumatique. ‘Cordis Calore’—cf. la puissance motrice du feu (Carnot).” Reading in search of a topic for his doctoral thesis, Emile Weissmann found the fat marbled volume (rebound by the librarians some decades earlier) in 1908 and told his skeptical advisor that “The spiritus acts as doorkeeper to the ego. The intervention of the repression mechanism would take place here.” And in 1994 Amy Bunker, a Boston graduate student studying on a Fulbright scholarship, came across the passage in the Rare Book Room and nudged her boyfriend Paul, who was reading Marivaux. “Sounds like a user interface, doesn’t it? The spiritus is Windows for human consciousness.”
But how could such a system operate, with one foot in the material world and the other in eternity? Ficino goes on to explain that the spirit requires care, especially the spirit of studious men, for its constant use in thinking and imagining will consume it (“Like motor oil?” asked Paul). Its constituent elements are drawn from the finer part of the blood, leaving the rest thick and black. Studious men thus tend to be of melancholy temperament, the way vampire victims are anemic. Ficino offers a detailed regime of proper diet and activities—wines and aromatic foods, wholesome odors, pure stir and sunshine, and music—to keep the phlegm, bile, and blood in proper maintenance, although music proves to be the most important item, since songs, like the spirit itself, are aerial in nature.
“Sound consists of aerial movement,” Amy explained as they rode the Metro home. “Whereas sight merely transmits images. And since the spirit is composed of aerial movements, sounds affect it more profoundly.”
“Sound is analog, while light is merely digital,” said Paul.
“Um, maybe. But Ficino believed that the world is a single organism, with a soul, and thus a spirit to mediate it. And the spiritus mundi is made of quinta essentia, the fifth element, which contains the powers of the four humors that supply the human spiritus. So if a person can make his spiritus sufficiently like the spiritus mundi, he can enjoy an influx from it, which will nourish and purify his spirit, and thus his soul. So you should make all these adjustments to your spiritus—you can use talismans, planetary influences, whatever—so that it is in proper sympathy with the world spirit.”
“Getting a download from the spiritus mundi,” remarked Paul, who had a good Catholic education but knew nothing of Renaissance theology save what his studies in Enlightenment literature had suggested. “Praise the Paraclete, I have gotten a good connection!”
“Don’t make fun,” said Amy mildly. “Ficino was being a good Neoplatonist, and his treatises were very influential.”
“Doesn’t even sound like he’s a good Christian. World spirit? Did the Pope know about this?”
“It’s no stranger than the aetheric vehicle, and the Neoplatonists didn’t get attacked for that.”
“Aetheric vehicle? Is this something the nuns forgot to teach us?”
“Hang on, it’s in my notes.” Amy pulled out her laptop and flipped it open. An entity of pure reason (the soulless calculating engine that medieval thinkers never encountered but vividly imagined), the machine displayed her afternoon’s notes and then located, at her command, the entry on Vehiculum. “Here it is. The Neoplatonists believed that the soul crossed the heavens in this aetheric vehicle before entering the human body. It begins as a perfect shining orb, but exposure to physical matter corrupts it, making it dark and leaden. And unless you purify it with an infusion of aetheric forces, it will drag down your soul at death, preventing its ascent into the heavens.”
“That sounds like paganism,” Paul complained. “No wonder the church got worried about all these monks reading Greek manuscripts.”
The doors hissed open as the train stopped and two Maghrebi men came in. They sat opposite Amy and Paul, apparently oblivious of the sign that reserved such seats for the Mutiles de Guerre. They were dressed in the garb of construction workers, one of the better jobs available to the pool of African immigrant workers who lived in Paris. The younger one, Amy noticed with disquiet, was staring frankly at her lap. Of course, it was the computer. Even businessmen were curious at a laptop scarcely larger than a woman’s compact.
She leaned toward Paul. “Did you know that astrology was unknown in Europe for most of the Middle Ages? It was kept alive in the Arab world, and was reintroduced to Christendom only after Arabic treatises began to be translated in the twelfth century.”
“Those aren’t Arabs,” said Paul.
“I know that,” she replied, nettled. “I was just thinking that it was the Arabs who discovered zero, or rather invented it, I guess. The Greeks never conceived the idea, and Europeans were still using Roman numerals until around 1200. Zero makes a lot of things possible,” she noted, patting her computer.
Both men were looking at them with faint quizzical smiles. They recognized Paul as French, and were doubtless wondering to hear him speaking a tourist’s language.
“An aetheric vehicle carried one passenger only?” asked Paul as the Metro began to ease forward.
“Well, of course: it wasn’t some heavenly shuttle. Think of it as a specially designed carton that contains a single egg.” Paul had grown up in Washington, where his father was a consular official, while Amy had lived all her life in Cambridge. They had met while working summer jobs in Manhattan, and had clutched each other in mock horror at the subway’s jouncing ride. The smooth glide of the Metro sometimes seemed an injunction to keep their hands to themselves.
“Wasn’t it the Romantics who wrote about people crossing the skies in some otherworldly vehicle?” Paul mused. “They always called it a ‘car,’ and I assumed that it was based on the early railroad locomotives. Actually they sounded like UFOs.”
“Of course they were based on locomotives, the Romantics were crazy about Science. Did their descriptions make them sound mechanical?”
“Don’t be silly—do you think they had pistons and stacks on them? They were smooth and shiny, just like your aetheric vehicle.”