Epicurean Eidōla: The Spores of Self
Since the beginning of this year I have been researching my next book. It’s taking me into territories considerably broader than my previous ones: the history of communication and intercultural exchange, sign theory and heraldry, anthropology of the senses, and, not least, my own experience of how these different fields converge and silently underpin my practice.
The book is germinating well in its dark soil. Occasionally, I will share fragments of the research as they emerge. These passages will all be reworked for the finished work. Yet for now, they give an impression of which sparks are coming through, and they allow us to stand together at some milestones on the journey.
What follows is a reflection on Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and his remarkable physical theory that once was thought to enable sensory perception, dreams, visions, and even forms of remote encounter. It’s a most curious historic pearl to keep polished in our pockets. Not at all because it has a high likelihood to be scientifically exact, but because it gives our minds a clear shape against which to inquire further in our own practical work.
“Whatever works is good.” is one of the core paradigms of Chaos-Magick. And indeed, there is truth in this. And yet, a sharply developed hypothesis of why things work allow us to frame our experiments with much more intention and beyond the realms of historic tradition or purely utilitarian needs.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
“The atmosphere was saturated by the presence of the idol.”
The sentence speaks to most of us intuitively. We understand what it might mean to enter a temple and feel that the space is somehow saturated by the presence of its god. We may recall the house of our parents: how, upon entering, even before seeing or hearing them, we could feel ourselves in some strange, almost physical contact with them — their invisible presence inhabiting the space.
And yet, strictly speaking, we usually treat such saturation as a manner of speaking rather than as an account of perception. We do not ordinarily mean that the flesh of the god or our parents have changed the physical environment of their home.
For Epicurus, however — the Greek philosopher of the late fourth and early third centuries BCE — what the enlightened West today tends to dismiss as magical thinking was, quite literally, a matter of physics. In his writings, above all in the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus develops an extraordinarily elaborate physical theory of perception.[1] It is a theory worth examining closely because it may radically broaden our understanding of how perception might operate between human and non-human people.
Epicurus does not conceive of perception primarily as an act of cognitive construction, in which the mind processes abstract signals — light waves, sound waves, chemical molecules, mechanical forces, or thermal changes — to produce representations of the world. He understands it in far more corporeal and immediate terms. To Epicurus, perception is reception: something of the very substance of the things around us reaches us, enters into us, and acts upon our senses, through which we become aware of them — and, in some sense, become intermingled with them. Although at an atomic level, perception to him is a mingling of the flesh.
Vision provides the most striking example.
According to Epicurus, every material object continuously sheds extraordinarily thin atomic images of itself into the surrounding space. These are called eidōlon (singular) and eidōla (plural) — literally, “images,” “likenesses,” or “semblances.” We might imagine them, imperfectly but helpfully, as microscopic sheets of smoke carrying the form of the object from which they have emerged. They are not mental representations produced inside us, but material emissions proceeding from bodies themselves. If we were to venture into goêtic language, we might call them carnal sparks or spores of the Self: minute fragments of a body’s outward presence, continually entering the world and becoming capable of affecting other bodies.
Moreover, there are images resembling, as far as their form goes, the solid bodies which we see, but which differ materially from them in the thinness of their substance. In fact it is not impossible but that there may be in space some secretions of this kind and an aptitude to form surfaces without depth, and of an extreme thinness; or else that from the solids there may emanate some particles which preserve the connection, the disposition, and the motion which they had in the body. I give the name of images to these representations […].[2]
No object, according to this kind of physics, ever sits idle in space. They all continuously shed themselves into space.[3] Like flakes of skin, their eidōla are continuously detached from the surfaces of objects — except that they are unimaginably thinner and smaller. Once separated, they travel outward from the object in the surrounding medium. In empty void, Epicurus argues, there would be nothing to resist their motion. Their movement in principle has no spatial limit. The object itself remains localized, yet, its eidōla are not confined to its locality.
This distinction is crucial: The idol is here; its eidōla are going everywhere.
Now, in a perfectly empty void, an eidōlon could continue moving without encountering resistance. The image would not simply fade because it had travelled a certain distance or time. But the physical world is full of stuff. All eidōla quickly encounter other bodies and atomic streams. Their configurations can consequently be disturbed, deflected, disrupted, compressed, or combined with other emissions. Eventually, some may reach a sensory organ.
Vision then, occurs when an eidōlon, retaining the likeness to its original source, reaches the eye and produces a corresponding impression in the perceiver. This is worthwhile pausing on: In Epicurean physics the eye does not see the object itself; it sees the outward traveling emissions of it.
When we look at a statue of Athena, our eyes do not somehow reach across the intervening space and apprehend the marble statue directly. The statue remains where it is. What reaches us are the atomic eidōla continuously emitted from its surface. Our eye is pierced by Athena’s atomic flesh. Seeing Athena is inhaling Athena at an atomic level. Perception ceases to be an abstract configuration process, and becomes something much more intimate. It is the reception, within our own bodies, of a particle of atomic flesh that has travelled the distance between us and Athena.
The same principle applies to the other senses. We do not hear a sounding object by some immaterial faculty reaching out toward it; currents proceeding from the sounding body reach the ear. We do not smell an object because the mind constructs its odor; material effluences from it reach and affect the organ of smell. In Epicurean physics, the perceived thing enters into a physical relation with the perceiver by sending something of itself toward the perceiver. Perceiving becomes a mingling of flesh.
Of course, this also means that perception is intrinsically vulnerable to interference. A wall, a tree, another body, turbulence in the surrounding medium, or competing atomic streams can interrupt or alter what proceeds from the source.
There is an extraordinary inversion here of the modern intuition that an object simply is, while perception happens afterward inside the observer. For Epicurus, the object is already active in perception before the perceiver has done anything with it. It emits. It travels. It encounters. It affects. The organism receives. Before we even awake, the world has already been calling for us.
The statue does not need to move in order to have a trajectory through space. Its eidōla provide that trajectory for it. The object remains still while its likenesses are perpetually in motion.
This gives us an equally important distinction between the locality of an object and the range of its presence. The statue of Athena is erected in her temple. Her eidōla are traveling. They radiate outward. All objects therefore have an orbit of presence surrounding them, strong in close proximity to their corporeal centre, softer the more it becomes interfered and diluted by other objects and atomic structures. As such, Epicurean physics offer us a surprisingly literal meaning to the intuition that a place can be saturated by a thing. The saturation is not mystical; it’s atomic.
And here the Epicurean picture becomes particularly strange — and, perhaps, particularly fertile for thinking about magical or animistic perception: the body of all objects has a defined centre and yet equally a potentially undefined circumference into which it emits itself, radiates out, saturates the space with its atomic likeness.
The Epicurean physics of eidōla, however, provide a framework that reaches beyond the five classical senses of perception. Also the “inner physics” of imagination and dreams become lucid and accessible through this model of reality. The soul provides the material locus of dreaming, while the mind operates upon the images it receives, combining and rearranging them in imagination. Yet, both are considered as sensory organs, that are responsive to and stimulated by the reception of eidōla.
In contrast to today’s view that considers perception a largely outer and imagination a largely inner phenomenon, in Epicurean physics both belong to the same carnal economy of objects. The threshold between world and imagination is not a boundary between externally received and subjectively self-generated information. Instead, just like our eyes, ears, or mouth can be filled with sensory stimuli, so can also our soul in dreams and our mind in contemplation.
For Epicurus all inner functions are still functions of external participation: In dreams we receive the eidōla of objects or beings possibly far removed from us, some of them distorted or combined and rearranged with others. The same is true for what we see in our mind’s eye when we walk in imagination or vision.
There is no immaterial force or independent cognitive agent in Epicurean physics; even the soul is a physical object, only in infinitely finer constitution than our eyes might see.
Let this sink in for a moment. Not because it necessarily holds any scientific truth, but because we do well in immersing ourselves in a worldview so radically different: In Epicurean physics there is no space for psychology without physiology, there is plenty of space for misperception, distortions and illusions, yet none for fantasy without any kind of spark or echo caused by real objects or beings. Nothing here ever happens without being a response to something real. Even our fantasy builds upon the storehouse of external images, by which it is saturated as its foundational soil. All life is exchange, transmission and recombination, or in Martin Buber’s terms, a dialogue of images.
For Epicurus, the world is constantly entering us in fragments of itself. And we are constantly shedding ourselves into the world. When awake, the eidōla arrive in us through our physical senses. When asleep, these extraordinarily subtle images enter our souls, and when we walk in vision they flow through the perception of our mind’s eye. So whatever state we are in, we are never sealed, alone, or isolated. Everything is continuously radiating, spreading and shedding itself around us, into us and with us. We participate in a world waiting with anticipation to give and receive.
Communication can be intentional, but it is never entirely voluntary. In an Epicurean cosmos, where every body is continually shedding itself in the form of images, sounds, scents, and touches nothing exists in isolation: the world is always entering us, and we are always entering the world. Our mind’s eye is continuously saturated with eidōla, which we actively combine, rearrange, fuse, and dissolve into new ideas. In this sense, communication is not merely something bodies do when they mean to speak; it is the ceaseless traffic of flesh affecting flesh. There is no moment when we are not entangled in “languaging” with the world.
We must admit that it is in the soul most especially that the principle of sensation resides. […] It is on that account that, when the soul departs, the body is no longer possessed of sensation; for it has not this power, (namely that of sensation) in itself; but on the other hand, this power can only manifest itself in the soul through the medium of the body.[4]
Footnotes
[1] Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book X, §§35–83: “The Letter to Herodotus, on Physics”, translated by Charles Duke Yonge, London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Online at Attalus.org.
[2] Epicurus in his letter to Herodotus, quoted after: Laertius, 1853, p. 440
[3] This shedding is not confined to the realm of vision alone; vision is simply the sense through which I want to illustrate this dynamic here. For Epicurus, objects and beings equally reveal themselves to the world through their scents, sounds, tactile impressions, and other material effluences they continuously emit into their surroundings.
[4] Epicurus in his letter to Herodotus, quoted after: Laertius, 1853, p. 447-448
