Up in the air

I was surprised that your resident classicist, Prof Baldwin, whose columns I thoroughly enjoy, should write [ Ft347:57] that

“Plato’s ‘Myth of Er’… has the hero’s body mysteriously returned to his funeral pyre after his visit to the underworld with the souls of the departed.” Plato’s Greek irrefragably has the warrior’s soul ( psychen, in the accusative), not his material frame, embark on what was clearly a psychonautic journey. Diction aside, Plato’s worldview would not even admit a corporeal ascent into the sky as the theory of the elements recognised only ‘fire’ (and, according to the Peripatetics, ‘ether’) in the heavens – not the ‘earth’, ‘water’ and ‘air’ of which our bodies are composed. Careless writing could hardly account for Dr Baldwin’s slip, as teleportations – which are material by definition – formed the focus of the article. Er’s body remained on the battlefield. As I argued in my article ‘Three Ancient Reports of Near-Death Experiences: Bremmer Revisited’,

Journal of Near-Death Studies, 27.4 (2009), 223-253, the story of Er reads as a classic case of a neardeath experience (NDE) – even if the elaborate cosmological vision contained in it spelled out the actual cosmology espoused by Plato and his mouthpiece Socrates.

I am all the more baffled because Prof Baldwin himself produced an excellent translation of Timarion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984) – a Byzantine text which contains another striking report of an ancient near-death experience, describing even more graphically how the vision occurred during a coma while the body was wasted by dysentery and prolonged fasting. See Ft323:40-43 for some more adventurous musings about the nature of such cosmic visions. Marinus van der Sluijs Namyangju, South Korea

Barry Baldwin replies: I am grateful to Marinus for his graceful remarks about my Classical Columns. His point about ‘Psychen’ is a fair one. Nevertheless, if you toil through the notice of this word in Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon, many shades of meaning are recorded. In some cases, it appears that the word can virtually combine body and soul. The same is true of Christian and Byzantine Greek usage; cf. Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon. The souls behave in a physical way with (e.g.) their drinking – how, by the way, do souls imbibe?

Plato emphasises that Er’s body remained uncorrupted 10 days after being killed in battle. Was anyone watching the pile of corpses day and night? Er himself had no idea what had happened to him. He could well be describing a physical experience in figurative soulful language.

As to the Timarion – thanks again, Marinus, for your compliment – loath as I am to pass over my own productions, I left it out for spatial reasons. I may subjoin that I treated this whole subject at much greater length in FT236:21. It was also touched upon in my columns in FT138:411, 141:18,

146-18. I cheerfully admit Marinus is closer to Plato’s wording, and may be closer to the truth. I can only end by saying that: To ER is Human…