Amy went back through the Greeks and checked again. Galen makes clear that the hegemonikon creates an image for the soul to perceive, while Renaissance writers right up to Ficino agree that visual images imprint themselves powerfully upon the spiritus; indeed, the image of a beloved woman could actually infect the spiritus, dominating the subject’s consciousness and driving out everything else. Amy at last caught Ficino admitting as much: “The lover carves into his soul the model of the beloved. In that way, the soul of the lover becomes the mirror in which the image of the loved one is reflected.” So the phantasmic image persisted into the late Renaissance: they simply called it other things.
Something about this bothered Amy, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was after twelve, and she permitted herself a break from her labors. While checking the card catalogue she had looked up Michel Tournier, and two titles had jumped out at her: Le Vent Paraclet and Les Meteores. Abandoning classics country for the lower levels where literature was kept, Amy located the books and found a comfortable chair out of sight of her cluttered carrel.
After half an hour she was ready to confirm Paul’s judgment of the man. Le Vent Paraclet was a memoir, scabrous and opinionated, flavored with philosophical asides that seemed faintly crackpot. She found one passage (“The human soul is shaped by myths that are in the air. Even… many animals, from insects all the way up to mammals, enter into relationships with one another—and sexual relations in particular—only by means of odor. In other words, their souls are literally in the air”) interesting enough to enter into her Notes, and a lot of wind imagery, but nothing about the Paraclete. Les Meteores turned out to be a novel, full of grotesque conceits, including a heretical priest who proposes that the stewardship of Christ must be superseded by one of the Holy Spirit, for whom a Third Testament would be required. Amy enjoyed the rant, and entered bits of it (“Ruah is the Hebrew word traditionally translated as wind, breath, emptiness, spirit.… The Holy Spirit is wind, tempest, breath, it has a meteorological body”) for later checking. How prevalent was the ancient conception of the soul as pressure front?
Eating a quick brioche at a courtyard table, Amy checked her notes (she could not bring the books outside) and tried to make sense of the dispute over the hegemonikon. Despite the fact that most of their rival schools disagreed with them (and the Renaissance would side in time with the pneumatistes), the Stoics had been right: consciousness resided in the brain, and had nothing to do with the arteriovascular system. The pneuma did not circulate throughout the body but resided in the brain: or rather, it did not race through the arteries as a pressurized vapor, but traveled through the nerves and in the brain on the currents of what was indeed a half-physical, half-immaterial phenomenon: the electrochemical impulses that leap from synapse to synapse. Like the spiritus, it partakes of both corporeal matter and of the force that fills the universe: the electroweak force of theoretical physics, which manifests most grossly in the movement of electrons and most subtly on the quantum realm where human consciousness may truly reside, the domain of spontaneous creation, attraction between objects, the free will of uncertainty, escape from matter.
“They were right after all, in a way,” Amy remarked to her laptop as she closed it down and folded it up. She returned to her carrel and, feeling replete with original sources, looked to her small stack of modern histories and pulled out Couliano’s Eros et Magie a la Renaissance. Peeking at the table of contents, Amy saw chapters with such titles as “Magie pneumatique,” “La vehicule de l’ame et l’experience prenatale,” and “Ejaculation et retention de la semence.” “This is the stuff,” she said, settling in.
It was indeed. Discussing the influence of the pneumatic theory of sexual attraction on Arabic mystic poetry, Couliano notes how an eighth-century poet named Bashshar ibn Burd had been sentenced to death “because he had identified the woman to whom he had dedicated his poem with the Spirit or ruh, the intermediary between man and God.” So here the ruah was a mediating force, not an aspect of the divine. This was interesting, but the next sentence drove it straight out of her mind as Couliano, noting that “only unattainable womanhood can be deified,” remarked that Gervase of Tilbury once had a young woman sent to the stake because she had resisted bis sexual advances.
Well, that really says something, thought Amy, feeling a little sick. She knew what was bothering her now. Chrysippus believed that the pneumatic sensory system also produced voice and sperm, while Ficino explained that the planet ascendent in the zodiac at the moment of a person’s birth will imprint its qualities upon both the soul and sperm. And Ficino wasn’t the only one who seemed to confuse people with men: both his fourteenth-century predecessors (Amy paused to check this) and later figures such as Bruno and Campanella consistently attributed to the soul seminal and vascular qualities specific to males.
And why should she be surprised? The entire concept of the spiritus— an inflamed substance racing through blood vessels, pneumatic pressures affecting cognition—is basically a guy thing, the shaky induction of monks who associated tumidity with the life force and had no understanding of that half of humanity which doesn’t. Even their detailed mechanism of arousal, with the heavy emphasis on visual stimuli, is the obvious work of men.
In fact—Amy began to set up the Search function in her Notes file— she had read something about just this earlier this year. From a book review of some glossy pornographic novel, about voyeurism and similar male concerns. Here it is:
“Men seem to carry within themselves a complex and variable template of what is sexually appealing, and their eyes are forever making fine discriminations—some eyes make finer discriminations than others—concerning the real women they see and how closely they approximate the template, which cannot actually be perceived except in keenness of feeling aroused by such approximations, and none of this, template, search, feelings, seems to be any choice of theirs, but to be a fact of their biology.” (Wash. Post, 2/20/94)
That’s the phantasmic mirror, all right. The ancient world’s window for the soul proves shaped like a keyhole, just as the myths that supposedly define Western culture—Actaeon spying Diana in her bath, or the story of Tiresias with its underlying theme of male anxiety over women’s multiple orgasms—are the tales men tell each other, boastful or insecure, the ground-pawing snorts of a bull spying maidens on the beach. Men’s reality, proffered as reality.
Amy tried to explain her theory of the electrodynamic pneuma to Paul over espresso on the steps outside the library. A wheeled stand stood by the curb, dispensing its wares in Styrofoam cups to students who didn’t care to walk two blocks to crowded bistros. We’re not really in Paris at all, she thought as she swirled the grainy liquid at the bottom of her cup; this block stands in the same country that NYU does.
She said: “They knew that sensory data traveled from the sense organs to the seat of consciousness, and they knew that it would have to be synthesized—processed—before the mind could perceive it. But they didn’t know about nerves, and since the blood travels quickly throughout the body, they took that for the transport mechanism. But the cerebral cortex does convert sensations into percepts, no one knows how, and then the mind perceives them, using processes that do not operate by the normal rules of the universe. Remember that physicist who said that the fundamental operations of thought must take place on the quantum level?”