For Porphyry, blood was a humor associated with the basest form of human existence, namely the appetitive part of the human soul. In this view, he follows both Plato and Galen.65 In the Galenic anthropology, which mirrors the tripartite Platonic one outlined in the Republic66 and the Timaeus,67 humans ingest food, which the body turns into blood in the liver. This substance is associated with that part of the human being that concerns itself with nourishment and reproduction. As the body continues to refine this substance, it rises until it reaches the heart, where it becomes a kind of enlivening force associated with what Plato calls the spirited part of the soul, that part that experiences passions of various kinds. Finally, this substance rises to the brain, where it is further distilled into what Galen calls psychic pneuma, which circulates in the “ventricles of the brain and throughout the nervous system.”68 For Galen, this tripartite physiological system helped to link the body and soul. It also served to explain how and why “changes in the body could alter one’s mental balance and behavior and vice versa.”69 A number of Porphyry’s works indicate that this model informs his ideas about blood and its connection with embodiment and the appetitive part of the human soul. The connection between body and soul based on the tripartite physiology may help to explain why, for Porphyry, the kind of food one ingests is important, as it directly affects one’s mental state.
In On the Cave of the Nymphs, a longish allegorical interpretation of ten lines from Homer’s Odyssey,70 Porphyry interprets the cave as a symbol of the descent and re-ascent of the soul into and out of the body. In his interpretation he ties the mistiness of the cave to blood. And he furthermore associates both blood and moisture with desire, pleasure, reproduction, and bodily existence. He writes that “right here in this world the spirit becomes damp or saturated, as a function of its sexual desire, and the soul drags a damp vapor along with it from its descent toward γένεσις.”71 According to Porphyry, this descent into genesis is accompanied by a certain kind of pleasure for the soul. As a parallel, Porphyry cites other celestial souls, which are, according to the Stoics, nourished by terrestrial vapors: “The sun was nourished by the vapors rising from the sea, the moon by the waters of spring and rivers, and the stars by vapors rising from the earth.”72 In this way, “There is a compulsion for souls, whether they are embodied or disembodied but still dragging along some corporeal material—and most of all for those souls that are just about to be bound to blood and moist bodies—to descend to moisture and, once they have been moistened, to become embodied.”73 In other words, for Porphyry, all souls that have descended into the celestial and sublunar regions are associated with some kind of body made up of varying proportions of fire, air, water, and earth. And the bond between their soul and body, that is, their pneumatic vessel, is nourished by moisture.
Porphyry also uses these elemental principles to explain how certain divinatory practices work by using the souls of the dead. These souls are “attracted by pouring out” the moist substances of “blood and bile.”74 Additionally, he explains the physical appearance of these ghosts and shades by employing elemental theory and the various characteristics associated with water (namely moistness and coldness). He thereby connects these elements and their characteristics with the humors of the human body (in this case, blood and bile). He writes: “souls in love with the body drag along with them a damp spirit that condenses like a cloud—for moisture in the air when condensed becomes cloud—and when the spirit in them condenses they become visible because of the excess of moisture. From souls of this sort come the apparitions that sometimes confront people, tinting and manifesting their spirits according to their fantasies.”75 Those among them who are “body-loving” take on this moisture and become visible. So just as the sun is nourished by the seas’ exhalations, the souls of the dead are, for a time, drawn to and nourished by spilled blood and bile. In On the Cave of the Nymphs, Porphyry does not explicitly mention evil daemons. But as discussed earlier, the same principles apply in the fall of good daemons into vice and a baser form of existence. According to Porphyry, the only difference between good and evil daemons is that the latter are spirits that have identified with their “pneumatic” part and seek to feed it excessively.
A similar sort of reasoning about the association of blood, materiality, and the realm of generation governs a number of things Porphyry says in On the Styx.76 Fragment 377F is particularly apropos in this regard. On the Styx, like On the Cave of the Nymphs, takes its departure from certain Homeric verses, in particular, things the poet said about Hades and its various rivers.77 The work exists in fragmentary form, and what remains draws on numerous authorities for its main arguments, from pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles to historians such as Herodotus to the second-century Edessan Christian philosopher Bardaisan, whose accounts of certain Brahmanic water rites Porphyry finds particularly fruitful.
In Fragment 377F, Porphyry creates a map of the afterlife in which he situates various kinds of souls, both human and daemonic. He divides human souls into “buried” and “unburied,” by which he seems to mean those who have been released from the body and those whose souls are still attached to their corporeality in some way. In Homer, the buried and unburied are taken literally. In Porphyry’s case, the “unburied,” those who have not been allowed to cross the river and enter the gates of Hades proper, participate in the memory of the actions of their lives.78 This happens to those souls who failed to live justly or to work toward their release from embodiment. The memories they continue to experience serve as punishment and may also have a remedial effect. Porphyry writes, “For they receive appearances (phantasias) of all the terrifying things they have done in life and are punished.”79 Their earthly misdeeds are avenged in this manner.80 But the just, the ones who have sufficiently freed themselves from the bonds of corporeal existence and its attendant desires, passions, and pollutions, are able to pass inside the gates of Hades. There they blissfully forget their life on earth and are known to one another only “by the particular way of thinking which they have obtained in Hades,” and no longer as humans. In other words, they are no longer identifiable by their earthly deeds or by their appearance, which manifests itself in shade-like form for those still dwelling on the other side of the river.81 Rather, their manner of reflection serves to identify and distinguish them.
As in On the Cave of the Nymphs, blood is the substance that calls forth these spirits from their forgetful state in the context of necromantic ritual. Porphyry writes: “Nor would they speak about human things to those humans still living, unless they receive a vapor of blood and thereby think human things, which those outside also think though they do not drink of the blood, since they have the condition of the knowledge that occurs in the souls of mortals from drinking blood.”82 Indeed, if they did not drink blood in this way, the souls of the blessed would remain in their state of happy forgetfulness about “human affairs” and would not prophesy to living beings about their fates.
Porphyry associates blood with the remembrance of human life because it is the substance that most clearly represents embodied existence at its basest level, the level of nutrition and reproduction. He explicitly connects what he takes to be Homer’s meaning with medical ideas about blood, attributing to the poet the opinion that “for humans the thinking about mortal things is in their blood.”83 Porphyry further harmonizes the position he attributes to Homer with one he finds in Empedocles, the pre-Socratic who most focused on medicine and the body. He quotes Empedocles as saying, “Nourished in the waves of blood opposite the semen, thought there begins especially to circulate in humans, for blood around the heart in humans is the thought.”84 In other words, when blood reaches the heart, an organ that is naturally fiery, the humor is heated to create a vapor that gives rise to thoughts related to “mortal things”—things pertaining to embodied existence, or thoughts that are connected with passions and images.85 This sort of thinking, relying as it does on sense perception and images, is related to the faculty of phantasia.
Hence, Porphyry draws on specific associations