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The Eyes of Lynceus
The Eyes of Lynceus
To cite this article: Gregory Shaw (2013) The Eyes of Lynceus, Jung Journal: Cult ure & Psyche, 7:4,
21-30
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The Eyes of Lynceus
Seeing Through the Mirror of the World
GREGORY SHAW
Richard Frankel has addressed the problem of human suffering and alienation in terms of
narcissism and melancholy as they relate to our current immersion in virtual reality.1 His thesis,
following Freud, is that our avoidance of loss and suffering cuts us off from reality and the
vulnerability of relationships and encloses us in a narcissistic, hallucinatory, and melancholic
world. Despite the fact that the World Wide Web seems to “connect” everyone, its psychological
effect significantly disconnects us from one another, exacerbating the avoidance and encapsulation
that Frankel describes. The Internet provides each of us with a private world in which we
are virtual gods, where our will is law, and through which all our desires can be met with the
click of a finger.
The Neoplatonists of Antiquity believed that all souls are connected but that our connection
comes through participation in a World Soul. They believed that our identities are deepened as we
become more and more intimate with the divine Being that ensouls the world. Through an
enriched experience of this intelligent presence, the individual—despite his or her existential
isolation and suffering—becomes woven into the totality of the world, breathing in and through
all things. Thus, despite the wounds and traumas of embodied life Neoplatonists trusted that souls
could be connected and healed through participation in the World Soul. These later Platonists
would probably breathe a sigh of relief at not having to combat such a powerful seduction as the
Internet, one which offers the appearance of easily obtained connection and universal power yet
leaves the soul lost and fractured in a world of virtual images. As Frankel articulates, Freud’s “grief
work” is focused on images, specifically the remembered images of what one has lost and the
psychic effort to integrate the pain involved with that loss. According to Freud, the interruption of
this process causes us to fragment, become split off, and to fall into a self-alienated and increasingly
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 7, Number 4, pp. 21–30, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047.
q 2013 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2013.840486.
22 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013
isolated state of melancholia. This is where the immersion in virtual images through the Internet
can foreclose the psychic work and acceptance of loss. The Neoplatonists were also acutely aware of
the power of images. They believed that our engagement with images—both material and
conceptual—determines whether the soul is fragmented or becomes whole. Two Neoplatonists,
Plotinus and Iamblichus, who lived in the third and fourth centuries CE, had quite different
strategies for how the soul should engage images. They provide a context in which the alienation of
the psyche as discussed by contemporary psychologists can be re-imagined.
Gnostics, Christians, and Hermetists gripped the collective imagination. In the Hermetic treatise
Poimandres, the material world is viewed as the error of a divine Archetypal Man, a cosmic
Narcissus, who becomes so entranced with his own image reflected in the waters of Nature that he
tries to embrace it but falls, thus creating the world and human beings (Copenhaver 1992, 3).
In this cosmology, as in many Gnostic cosmologies, the world itself is the result of a primal mistake,
so escaping from it is the goal. Plotinus opposes these dualist cosmologies. He sees the world as a
reflection, but of an archetypal realm. For Plotinus, the mirroring that is our world is the way
divine Forms are revealed (Armstrong 1986, 147– 181). The cosmos is theophany, not a mistake.
So it is instructive to see how Plotinus explores the theme of narcissistic reflection in human souls.
He asks how we discover divine beauty and says
When [we] see beauty in bodies [we] must not run after them; [we] must know that they are images,
traces, shadows, and hurry away to that which they reveal. For if a man runs after the image and wants
to seize it as if it were reality, like a beautiful reflection playing on the water . . . is it not like the myth
telling us mysteriously about such a dupe who sank down into the stream and disappeared? (Ennead
I.6.8, modified)
Plotinus’s allusion to Narcissus is telling, for the beautiful image to which he is attracted is his own.
Thus, although Plotinus believes the cosmos itself is not a mistake, our identification with the body is.
Beauty and reality are to be found in the invisible Forms, not in their material reflection, so Narcissus’s
fixation on his “image” represents how human souls become enthralled in their bodies, the “image” of
their divine souls. In effect, Plotinus shifts the primal error of Gnostic dualism from the cosmos to the
psyche. The material cosmos is good, but our identification with the body and our failure to recognize it
as a reflection of the invisible Forms is a mistake. Alluding again to the error of Narcissus, Plotinus says
. . . because we are not accustomed to seeing beautiful things within and do not know them, we
pursue external beauty and do not know that it is that within us which moves us: as if someone looking
at his reflected image and not knowing where it came from should pursue it. (Ennead V.8.2.34 –35)
For Plotinus, the body both reveals and inevitably entraps the immaterial soul in the mirror of
matter. Our engagement with the world confirms the sense that “I” am a body, for this is what
the mirror tells me; this is the error of Narcissus. There remains in Plotinus a gnostic aversion to
Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 23
matter and the material world. He goes so far as to describe matter as an “absolute evil,” a dark
mirror that imprisons the soul (Ennead I.8.3.38 –40). That the soul’s confusion is caused by
the mirror of matter is also evident in a passage where Plotinus describes the fall of the soul
by referring to the myth of Dionysus who is torn apart and devoured by the Titans after he is
distracted by a mirror. “The souls of men [Plotinus says] see their images as if in the mirror of
Dionysus and come to exist [here] in a leap downward from above . . . .” (Ennead IV.3.12.1 –3).
For later Platonists, Dionysus’s dismemberment is both a myth of human origins and a description
of our self-alienation. We project our souls into matter, enter into sympathy with our reflected
images—our physical bodies—and through identification with them are dismembered by the
Titans, that is, by our own titanic passions (Hadot 1976).3
To these images of the fallen soul Plotinus answers with the figure of Odysseus. Whereas
Narcissus becomes lost in the mirror of matter, Odysseus sails through the waters of materiality
and returns to his homeland, which symbolizes the soul’s reunion with the divine Forms and the
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images. Lynceus represents a way of engaging the world not as mirror but as window. Thus, through the
image of Lynceus, Plotinus provides a model for inhabiting a body. He also says the divine is revealed in
sensate objects and maintains that the Egyptians had learned to “reveal the spiritual wisdom of the
divine world” directly through the images inscribed in their temples (Ennead V.8.6, modified). Yet
despite these positive views of material and embodied reality, Plotinus seems to prefer the disembodied
state. He goes so far as to argue—against the authority of the Platonic tradition—that the soul never
descends into a body (Ennead IV.8.8). In sum, there is a contradiction in Plotinus between his
affirmation of the cosmos as divine and his belief that matter, the body of the cosmos, is evil. It was
Iamblichus, the Syrian Platonist of fourth-century Syria, who develops the world-affirming trajectory
of Plotinus’s thinking and explores its consequences. Iamblichus used the “eyes of Lynceus” to design a
renewed school of Platonism in Syria, and he provides a different approach to the problem of
narcissism and self-alienation.5
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these very conditions become the means through which we recover our divinity. Iamblichus
understood that our bodies are built by contractive energies he called daimons. These divine
beings serve the process of creation by building the physical world and our singular sense
of identity. We become congealed through our engagement with these daimons.10 We are, to
use psychoanalytic language, mirrored into existence: daimons personifying the instincts
that sustain our embodied existence. Again, in agreement with Plotinus, Iamblichus believes
that the narcissistic soul contributes to its self-alienation without being aware of it. The
difference between the two Platonists is that Plotinus sees this contribution as a correctible error,
whereas Iamblichus sees it as the inevitable consequence of divine unfolding. For him,
embodiment and our wounds are a kind of felix culpa without which the soul could not become
complete.11
A brief description of Iamblichus’s soul-work is in order because most scholars have
associated Neoplatonism with Plotinus and we are unfamiliar with Iamblichus’s therapy. He
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called it theurgy, working with the gods.12 He believes that souls share in the creation of the
world and this includes our own self-alienation. The work of healing begins, for Iamblichus,
by recognizing the presence of the gods in the very impulses and contractions that wound us.
Unlike heavenly gods or the World Soul, human souls possess mortal bodies; we become
alienated from our divinity and lose touch with the totality we bring to the world. Theurgy is
the art of recovering the divine impulses we carry by paying attention to our suffering and
learning how to receive the gods in our pathologies—each condition providing a place where
the soul can recover the divine impulse revealed in its suffering. These places do not require
that we “close the eyes” to access them. They are physical places and are unique to the
suffering of each soul.
A personal anecdote may help to exemplify how this works. When I initially received Richard
Frankel’s paper, “Digital Melancholy,” I began reading but couldn’t get through the first paragraph.
It was too depressing—Freud, grief, melancholy—unbearable. I had to wait until I went to the
most depressing place I know, one that I visit every week—the Laundromat. There, sitting among
the tired, economically deprived, and recently divorced, I had a place that could contain the
heaviness and melancholy of Frankel’s paper. I found it illuminating. The Laundromat provided a
ritual receptacle for what I could not contain on my own and it allowed me to enter the depth of
Frankel’s essay. This is what Iamblichus means by learning how to receive the gods. Place matters.
In Frankel’s terms, without this receptive capacity we cannot engage in grief work, bridging
melancholia and mourning. In theurgic terms, without a place we cannot integrate the divine
currents in our life.
For theurgists of Iamblichus’s school, our traumas become the indices of where the soul
needs work and what gods need our attention.13 According to Iamblichus, the gods who
sustain the world are present in all our experiences. The soul becomes subject, he says, to the
divisions, collisions, impacts, reactions, growths, and breakdowns over which these gods rule.14
These are the unavoidable consequences of embodied life, all part of the theophany of
existence. It is only through honoring these traumas and their gods that we can shift our
perspective: the soul learns how to receive the gods, recover its divinity, and share fully in the
totality praised by Plotinus.
26 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013
But the difference with Plotinus is significant. The Iamblichean soul recognizes in the mirror
of Narcissus, in its illusory sense of self, and in the traumas that follow, a divine impulse that must
be recognized, honored, and ritually received . . . sometimes even in the Laundromat! Platonic
theurgists weave themselves into the cosmos; they gradually transform the self-reflecting mirror of
the world into a window. They exchange the vision of Narcissus for that of Lynceus, and the fusion
of individual soul with World Soul, which is described so evocatively by Plotinus, is realized by
theurgists in the body and through the material world. Our very mortality and vulnerability, our
wounds, become the portals to this experience.
Conclusion
I see a correspondence between Iamblichus’s ritual recognition of the gods in our traumas and the
grief work described by Frankel. The contexts are vastly different, but in both, the soul, in the face
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of existential grief, can either retract from suffering—and thus become more split off and shadowy
—or it can honor the grief and face it, as it is best able to do. Iamblichean theurgy was tied to a
traditional belief in a World Soul with gods revealing themselves in nature and culture. This
provided support for the difficult work of recovering the parts of the soul that had been
dismembered or, in contemporary discourse, dissociated or split-off. Through performing
traditional rites to the gods revealed in one’s suffering, the soul is given a container to help endure
and transform its grief. In our contemporary world, we lack such assistance. Even a will of iron
seems insufficient to endure such weight.
To be more specific, our contemporary way of imagining the world seems to virtually
guarantee that we remain narcissists. Our sense of self is based on what Plotinus described as a
mistake: taking image for reality. In Iamblichus’s terms, we are self-alienated. Despite every effort
to engage in grief work, from a Neoplatonic perspective, our situation seems hopeless. We take our
concepts of reality—including our “self” concept—as if they were real and thus buffer ourselves
from contact with a living world. Our culture has long since given itself over to this habit, and the
virtual world of the Internet is simply one more iteration of this impulse. The digital world, in
many ways, is an amplification of the habit of thinking that Iamblichus said prevents us from
theurgic contact with the gods. We are familiar with it because it forms the basis of our culture.
It is the assumption that our concepts define reality and give meaning to the world, and it has
become so natural to us that we confuse the image with what it reflects and find it difficult to
imagine anything could be otherwise. The Internet is an extension of this trajectory of thought.
Although Plotinus certainly exercised rationality, he warned that discursive thinking has a
power to bewitch us. When we take our concepts as real—the “self” concept most of all—we
become bewitched and enthralled (Ennead IV.4.43.16; Rappe 2000, 104). As David Abram
puts it, we become lost in the “mirrored labyrinth” of thought (2010, 178).15 Iamblichus
characterized this habit as a poison from which we need a protective talisman.16 They knew.
The Internet seems perfectly suited for a culture that has become locked in self-absorption. For
what is the error of Narcissus but to see only himself while gazing at the stream? The stream,
the world, is not real but is a reflection of our thinking. We alone are real. How far we are
from possessing the eyes of Lynceus!
Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 27
Perhaps the most significant difference between our worldview and that of the
Neoplatonists is that for us the world has no subjectivity; it lives only through meanings we give
to it. For Neoplatonists, the world is alive and intelligent; it is the anima mundi, a living soul
with faces and voices; it is living and breathing presence. Their world is not simply a mirror to
our subjectivity but is its own subject and each object its own face and voice, not to be read for
our subjective meanings.17 But we are not Lynceus. We are Narcissus. The world has no
significance except for how it reflects our subjectivity. “Not only does this view kill things by
viewing them as dead; it imprisons us in [a] . . . tight little cell of ego” (Hillman 1997, 103).
James Hillman argues that we have forgotten the anima mundi and her beauty. We have
become insensate and dull, trapped in subjectivity. Yet even this could come alive if we could
gain the eyes of Lynceus and re-enter a living world.18 The heaviness of grief work, then, could
be transformed; it could begin to move, play, and even dance . . . perhaps it must dance.19
Speaking specifically to the problem of the Internet, Hillman reiterates the concerns of
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Plotinus and Iamblichus about the bewitching power of discursive thought: “Technology
becomes psycho-pathological when, like any other phenomenon, it is deprived of soul, as it has
been by the very theoretical assumptions that gave birth to it in the first place. It was
monstrously conceived” (Hillman 1997, 123).
Yet, just as the subjective self-as-Narcissus can be woven back into the World Soul, so can
technology. It is not so much that technology is soulless and alienating; it is, rather, a mirror of
our own alienation. In theurgic terms, the hallucinatory virtual world sustained by the Internet
could be read as a symptom to remind us of what gods we have neglected. After all, if the
world is theophany, then the Internet must have divine roots and we can learn to engage its
divinities. Perhaps we need to understand the complex relations of Hermes and Aphrodite and
find the altars on which they can be propitiated.20 We need to discover a place where we can
receive the gods present in the Internet. Yet before we make such moves, we must recognize
where we are and how alone Narcissus is. We must feel the grief. For, despite the efforts of
contemporary therapists, it is hard to imagine how grief work, sustaining openness and
vulnerability to the world, can take place if we don’t really think the world—apart from us—is
real. I conclude by quoting from Hillman again, reflecting on the difficulties of doing therapy
in our contemporary world:
If particulars—whether images, things, or the events of the day—are to afford significance, the burden
has been on the subject to maintain libidinal cathexes, “to relate,” so that depersonalization and
derealization do not occur. It has been up to us to keep the world aglow. Yet these syndromes . . . are
latent in the theory of the external world as soulless. Of course I am lonely, unrelated, and my existence
throwaway. Of course therapy must focus on relations rather than on contents . . . things that
matter, because connection becomes the main work of therapy when the world is dead: ego psychology
is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead
world so as to reanimate it. What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what terrible need for
will-power . . . . Of course I am in desperate narcissistic need, not because I have been neglected or still
neglect my inmost subjectivity, but because the world without soul can never offer intimacy, never
return my glance, never look at me with appeal, with gratitude, nor relieve the essential isolation of my
subjectivity. (Hillman 1997, 121–122)
That, I suggest, is a good starting point for grief work and the transformation of Narcissus.
28 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013
ENDNOTES
17. As James Hillman put it: “All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature to be read
for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the
shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to their presence: ‘Look here we are’”
(Hillman 1997, 102).
18. This is precisely the point of Iamblichus’s coordinating of our self-alienated soul into divine activity.
19. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton prescribes “dancing” as one of the most effective cures for
excessive melancholia (Burton 1927, 479). To dance is to enter spontaneous, immediate experience;
it is to recover the Dionysian power of the flow. It is, in Neoplatonic terms, to re-member the
dismembered body of the god torn apart by the Titans. Dionysus is the Neoplatonic image of an
embodied god, their icon of Incarnation. But this is no docetic and desexualized Incarnation, merely
appearing in a body with its “head in heaven” (one can see how appealing Plotinus’s imagery is for
Christianity). Dionysus is mortal and he is abundantly sexual. He is animal, mortal, and he is immortal.
20. Hermes, god of communication, revelation, and lies must certainly be present in the virtual world of the
Internet. Aphrodite, too, as she is the goddess identified with the Soul of the World and its Beauty:
spiritual, sensual, and pornographic. For the Neoplatonists, Aphrodite is the anima mundi to which we
have become insensate, yet she appears in our archetypal lusting for images on the computer. Our erotic
engagement with the Heavenly and/or Common Aphrodite of Plato’s Symposium (180d –181d) is
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abram, David. 2010. Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.
Armstrong, A. H. trans 1966–1988. Plotinus. Enneads I–VI. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 1986. Platonic mirrors. ERANOS 55: 147 –181.
Burton, Robert. 1927. The anatomy of melancholy. New York: Tudor Publications.
Copenhaver, Brian. 1992. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English
translation, with notes and introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hadot, Pierre. 1976. Le mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin. In Narcisses: Nouvelle Revue de
Psychanalyse. XIII (Printemps): 102.
———. 1993. Plotinus or the simplicity of vision. Trans. Michael Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hillman, James. 1983. Archetypal psychology. Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc.
———. 1997. The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Dallas: Spring Publications.
Iamblichus: On the mysteries. 2003. Trans. Emma Clarke, John Dillon, and Jackson Hershbell. Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature.
Miles, Margaret. 1999. Plotinus on body and beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rappe, Sara. 2000. Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive thinking in the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and
Damascius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shaw, Gregory. 1995. Theurgy and the soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. University Park: Penn State
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Simplicius. 1882. De anima. Ed. M. Hayduck. Berlin: B. Reimeri.
GREGORY SHAW, PhD, is Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, Massachusetts. He is the author of
Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Penn State Press, 1995) and a number of articles on
the later Neoplatonists and Iamblichus, including a comparison of theurgy to the contemporary practice of
Jungian active imagination. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the embodied aspects of
later Platonic philosophy and its similarity to the tantric traditions of South Asia. Theurgical Platonism
presents a radically non-dual vision of reality at odds with our usual way of understanding Platonism.
Correspondence: Gshaw@stonehill.edu.
ABSTRACT
In the last decade, the world has experienced a profound cultural change effected by the digital revolution.
The influence of the Internet on virtually all aspects of our lives has outpaced our ability to reflect on its
30 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013
consequences. Along with the papers written by Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs, this essay explores the
challenge of the Internet as a new iteration of an ancient problem. The Neoplatonists of Late Antiquity
recognized that when we become lost in images we fall into self-alienation and narcissism. Using the
strategies of Plotinus and Iamblichus, this article explores their solutions to a problem that is still with us and
seems to have intensified to an even greater degree due to the titanic power of the Internet.
KEY WORDS
alienation, dualism, gods, grief work, Iamblichus, Internet, Lynceus, melancholia, mourning, Narcissus,
Plotinus, theurgy, World Soul
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