Two articles on etymosophy have been planned for this year: today’s, dedicated to the idea of Man, and the next one, in about six months’ time, aimed at developing some concepts and dedicated to the idea of World Server.*
We are living through the third annual cycle of the sixth septennium of the Table of the Plan, which has been intuited for Humanity and guides thoughts in common (for those who follow its steps), a year marked by the Goal “Communion with the World of Ideas”.
In honour of the great Thinker who set the Idea as the founding Principle of his philosophical vision, Plato, we believe it is just the right time to take up one of his “dialogues”, the Cratylus, which is all about language, to consider the etymological interpretation, contained therein, of the word ánthropos, “man”. [1]
Socrates says: “[…] Is not naming also an action? […] Now naming – onómázein – is part of saying […] The name is a tool for teaching and distinguishing the essence as is the shuttle for the fabric.” (386b-388c)
Socrates thus affirms that, just as the bobbin in the weaving distinguishes the warp and the weft by weaving them coherently, in the same way the name identifies the object by revealing its essence, the ousía, “what it is”, in reality.
The thought is reiterated a little further on: “[…] We affirm that the correctness of the name is that which shows the essence of the object. […]” (428e)
This determination of the essence of the object is understood by Plato as a mutually implemented teaching between the speakers.
Socrates specifies, with a sort of “etymological game” intended to exalt the concept, that what creates the names – o-nóm-ata – of things is the natural norm itself, in Greek called nóm-os, which has the power to express the idea of the thing in letters and syllables: in short, it is the idea of the object that is eponymous, providing the model for the correctness of the word that represents it and endowing it with dynamis, the power to signify, although the idea itself remains ineffable (388d-390 and 394e).
After examining some proper names of men and gods from Homeric verses, since poetry is by its very nature revealing – a kind of invocation to the Muses – Socrates moves on to consider the common names by which gods, demons or demi-gods, the hero, man, soul and body are defined.
It is important to note that the etymological quest, the identification of the essence/ousía of man, is thus immediately embedded in a hierarchical conception of reality, since the order of succession of the six aforementioned categories reflects the Platonic vision of the hierarchy of living beings, affirming the ontological primacy of the divine (397c).
Socrates says: “[…] the other animals do not examine, or consider, or look up at any of the things that they see… Therefore of all the animals man alone is rightly called man (ἄνθρωπος), because he looks up at (ἀναθρεῖ) what he has seen (ὄπωπε). […]” (399c)
It is thus awareness, consciousness, that identifies the essence of man.
There is another important point to note, when Socrates ironically observes that the “divine wisdom” (daimonía sophía) that seems to have taken possession of him in inspiring him to search for the essence of names is not demonstrable: “[…] So I think this is our duty: we ought today to make use of this wisdom and finish the investigation of names, but tomorrow, if the rest of you agree, we will conjure it away and purify ourselves, when we have found some one, whether priest or sophist, who is skilled in that kind of purifying. […]” (396c-397a)
The socratic investigation of the names in the Cratylus, in short, is not aimed at identifying a method of searching for the true that shows its validity in the foundation of an episteme or scientific knowledge, open to be transcended by intuition, as occurs e.g. in the Sophist, or in the Theaetetetus, or in the Parmenides, but rather operates at the borders of poetry, recalled several times, and the art of divination.
If it is therefore vain and improper to evaluate Socrates’ etymologies with the scientific criterion that would be elaborated more than two millennia after his time, it is important and nice to recognise that Plato laid the philosophical foundations of etymosophical research, considering that the word “etymology” derives from the Greek etymos, true, real: the Philosopher planted an ideal seed that would be revealed centuries later.
It was only during the 1800s, in fact, that a verifiable method for identifying the roots of words was discovered, heralding in the history of human culture the advent of the science of etymology – from the Latin etymología, transliteration of the Greek etymología, composed of etymon and logía – which investigates the phonetic, morphological and semantic evolution of terms starting from the primary discovery of an original root, identified through comparative linguistics: thus began the partial reconstruction of the extinct Proto-Indo-European language through its multiple historical heirs that stretch from the islands of the Greenland Sea to Chinese Turkestan.
One thus goes back as far as the point in the history of a word where it turns out to belong to a family of other words, in our case offshoots of the Indo-European stock, by means of documents or hypotheses ascertainable through phonetic laws, while also taking into account that sometimes all traces of the connecting links have been lost and the investigation must be kept open and unsolved.
The Greek word ánthropos has been the subject of great debate in the past, with the hypothesis of the most varied etymology, for which thousands of pages have been written.
In the spirit of brevity, let us recall here only two proposals, one because it is suggestive, and the other because it is currently the most credited:
The first is formulated by the poet Ovid, who writes (Metamorphoses, Book I, vv. 85-86):
[…] os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. […]
“He (the Creator of things) gave to sublime man the face and commanded him to contemplate the heavens and to lift his gaze straight up to the stars.”
Here Ovid freely expresses in poetry the connection he recognises between three components of the Greek word ánthropos: aná, “on high”; os, eye, face; athréo, to look. According to this suggestion, man is “he who looks up”.
The most recent hypothesis, based essentially on a comparison between Greek ánthropos and Sanskrit nṛ, terms that both mean “man”, traces the origin of the word back to the Indo-European root *NṚ-, which the linguist Rendich breaks down as follows: “comes [ṛ/ar] from the cosmic Waters [n]”. In Sanskrit nāra means the human being, and nārī is the woman. [2] The initial a was introduced for euphonic reasons, as was the middle th, while the second component of the term derives, as everyone has always basically guessed, from the root of ops, meaning “eye”, “face”, “appearance”.
In the etymon *NṚ- two primary sounds of the Indo-European mother tongue can be detected: the root n/an, which designates the vital breath of the celestial, divine cosmic Waters, the breathing, and also the soul, and the root r/ar, which expresses the idea of motion to unite, so fundamental as to name the Ar-yan people.
Rendich writes: “[…] With the root an, the Greek formed the word ánemos, “breath”, “wind”, but the Latin must be credited with having recalled in the words animus “mind” and anima “soul” both the material and corporeal aspect of the vital principle [an] of the Waters [n/na/nā], and its immaterial and transcendent aspect. […]” [3]
With respect to the third component of ánthropos, -opos, the root of looking is *AKS-, which expresses the idea of “initiating [a] a curvilinear motion [kṣ]”: see the Sanskrit akṣi, “eye”: the Greek opsis, “eye, face, vision”. [4]
According to this etymological investigation, man is “he whose face comes from the divine cosmic Waters”, or, with an equally acceptable interpretation, “a divine Breath that has vision”.
The Greek language also developed from the same root the term anér, to indicate man, while Latin lost that Indo-European root to develop another, from which would derive the word homo, to which the Italian word for man is heir. [5]
We have already mentioned in an article a few years ago the root of homo, *KṢAM-, which is composed of the following sound elements: “to be limited [m] all around [kṣ]”,“to bear”, “soil”, “earth”.
Derived from this etymon are the Sanskrit kṣam, earth, kṣamya, terrestrial; the Greek terms khthón, earth, and khthonioi, the spirits of the depths of the earth; the Latin humus, earth, humilis, “humble”, in the sense of “close to the earth”. [6]
The Latin homo thus conveys the idea of “one who is terrestrial”.
The English language, with man, and the German language, with Mann, developed their terms from another Indo-European root, *MAN-, from which Italian has taken the word “mente” (mind), and Sanskrit that which designates manas, the faculty of thinking: “man is he who thinks”.
We will not linger on this root, which is so important, because we have dealt with it several times on these pages, we merely recall its synthesis: since Man can be interpreted as the composition between the sound M, which expresses the idea of relationship, and the sound AN, which expresses the idea of the divine vital breath, the same as anima (“soul”), man can be defined as the higher Mind, the breath of Life (AN) that relates (M) the worlds.
In conclusion, we can synthesise our reflection by stating that the three words examined to designate man give us profiles stemming from three different Indo-European roots, which we try here to compose into a single image: man is a divine Breath that has vision, inhabits the Earth, through the Mind exercises the role of creative intelligence and relates the planes of creation.
Further study of this fundamental mediating role arising from the etymological investigation can be found in the TPS document about Humanity, which illustrates the function of the human Centre in relation to the other planetary Centres, the Hierarchy and Shamballa, and to the super- and subhuman Kingdoms.
Therefore, Man’s chief gift, that Mantrika shakti which is the qualifying note of the Fourth Human Hierarchy (of which that power of “naming”, or onómázein, as Plato defined it, from which we have taken our starting point, is a constituent element), fits into the hierarchical vision of reality intuited by that great Thinker.
Let us conclude with two thoughts from Agni Yoga, New Era Community, § 47 and § 215:
In schools respect must be taught for the pronouncement of a concept. […] But people must understand that the word is the pedal of thought—that each word is a thunder-bearing arrow.
Loss of the true significance of concepts has contributed much to contemporary savagery. People strew pearls about like sand. Verily, it is time to replace many definitions.
[…] When a traveler stands on a summit, does he not feel that his body is being raised as if he were a unifier of worlds? Indeed, not breaking away from the Earth, but containment of the capacity for unifying is what makes man a creator. […]
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[*] Today, as it regularly happens at intervals of about three months, the heliocentric conjunction between Mercury and Neptune occurs, a planetary aspect associated with the harmony of language.
[1] We specify that we give a literal translation of the quoted excerpts in order to convey the dialogical immediacy of the concepts.
[2] Franco Rendich, Comparative etymological dictionary of classical Indo-European languages, Rome 2010, p. 217
[3] Franco Rendich, Ibid., pp. XXXIX-XL
[4] Franco Rendich, Ibid., pp. 18-19
[5] To be precise, the nara root in Latin has not disappeared completely, but traces of it remain in some proper names, e.g. Nero.
[6] Franco Rendich, Op. cit., p. 50
