Word For The Day: Mantis -- Nothing About The Bakken -- June 11, 2020

Word for the day: mantis.

How did we ever get here?

I'm back in my Greek tragedy phase, re-reading Keld Zeruneith's The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, From Odysseus to Socrates for the umpteenth time. If I can take only five books with me when I'm sent into the next world, this would be one of the five.

Right now, I'm reading the last chapter, the chapter on Socrates.

From page 509:

Even though the daimonic in Odysseus' case is primarily associated with being possessed by a daimon, the concept contains the same latent meaning as in the description of Socrates.

Daimonic refers to a human being who, touched by the divine, as Odysseus was by Athene, becomes incomprehensible to those around him. And it is very much the case for Socrates that the daimonic aspect applies to his doctrine, works and life. 

Later:

We have touched on the fact that daimones (plural of daimon) populate the area of consciousness tat arises between gods and men ... the daimones appear as more or less anonymous forms of explanation for the metaphysical indeterminacy that especially Sophocles captured in his writings....Man's character is his daimon. 

And then, getting closer:

According to Diotima, the truth about Eros (Cupid) is that he is not, as claimed by Phaedrus, a god but a daimon, a messenger between gods and men.

And there we are: Diotima.

Who was Diotima?

Diotima was a character in one of Plato's "dialogues" or plays, as it were.

The wiki entry for Diotima calls her Diotima of Mantinea so as not to be confused with another Diotima, I suppose:

Diotima of Mantinea was an ancient Greek prophetess and philosopher thought to have lived circa 440 B.C., who plays an important role in Plato's Symposium. In the dialogue, her ideas are the origin of the concept of Platonic love.

So, now Diotima of Mantinea:

The name Diotima means one who honors or is honored by Zeus, and her Mantinean origin is reminiscent of the root "mantis," which would suggest an association with prophecy. The Greek form also includes the sound nike: Diotima Mantinike as a pun in Greek would thus sound like "Diotima from Prophet-victory."

In the Symposium, she is implied to be a priestess or prophetess and is said to be from the Peloponnesian city of Mantinea, which was allied against Athens at the time of the dialogue - though one version of the manuscript preferred in old readings called her a mantic woman, or seeress, rather than a woman from Mantinea.

Since the only contemporaneous source concerning her is Plato, doubts have been raised about whether she was a real historical personage or merely a fictional creation; however, nearly all of the characters named in Plato's dialogues have been found to correspond to real people living in ancient Athens.

We, we got to Mantinea. From that, mantis, etymology:

First use found in the1650s, "type of insect that holds its forelegs in a praying position" (especially the praying mantis, Mantis religiosa), Modern Latin, from Greek mantis, used of some sort of elongated insect with long forelimbs (Theocritus), literally "one who divines, a seer, prophet," from mainesthai "be inspired," related to menos "passion, spirit," from PIE *mnyo-, suffixed form of root *men- (1) "to think," with derivatives referring to qualities and states of mind or thought (compare mania and -mancy).

The insects, which live in temperate and tropical regions worldwide, are so called for its way of holding the enlarged forelimbs as if in prayer. 

Praying mantis is somewhat redundant, sort of like the Los Angeles Angels, I suppose. Or not.

Back to daimon. One of my top-shelf books is Harold Bloom's The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime.

Harold Bloom is incredibly difficult (for me) to read. But he taught me two important "concepts" with regard to literature: the importance of "irony" and "originality."

For Bloom, literature failed if it was not original and if it did not contain irony. The Bible is the ur-book (not yearbook) for Bloom, although he says he is a non-believer.

Socrates was both: ironic and original.

In The Daemon Knows, Bloom compares and contrasts at great length two writers, with six chapters, resulting in a total of twelve American writers. Bloom, p. 4:

The common element in these twelve writers -- albeit covertly in T.S. Eliot -- is their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales. Emerson was the family sage for the James clan, including Henry James, Sr.., as well as the novelist and the psychologist-philosopher William, whose essay "On Vital Reserves" is a hymn to the daemon.

I was introduced to Henry James by a most wonderful woman some years ago, during the height of my reading days, back in England, around 2003, I suppose. She never went to college but because of a great high school literature teacher Colleen was very, very well-read and incredibly fun with whom to share stories. It did not hurt that she was quite attractive, and incredibly poised. Sexist alert! She introduced me to Henry James. Ironically, my wife, a psychiatric social worker, introduced me to William James.

And as Colleen would say, "And, so, there you have it." That's how we got to mantis as our word for the day.

Colleen also introduced me to the hyphenated word, "one-off."

What a digression.