Humour

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The Humors are four bodily fluids that, within the paradigm of early Western medicine, influenced the psychology of the human mind.

The four humors are

Overbalances or underbalances of any of these fluids was believed to explain personalities and moods. In the case of sicknesses, doctors would attempt to correct these balances to restore the patient to health. For example, if a doctor's diagnosis was an overabundance of the humor blood, he may have prescribed the use of leeches to bleed a patient and thus correct the imbalance.

In ceremonial magick these four humors have correspondence to the four western elements: choler to fire, blood to water, phlegm to air, and melancholy to earth.

Correspondences

Overview table

c. 400 B.C. Hippocrates's four humours yellow bile black bile phlegm blood
-->
 Season: summer autumn winter spring
-->
 Element: fire earth water air
-->
 Organ: liver brain/lungs gall bladder spleen
-->
 Qualities: dry & hot dry & cold wet & cold wet & hot
-->
 Characteristics: easily angered, bad tempered despondent, sleepless, irritable calm, unemotional courageous, hopeful, amorous
c. 325 B.C. Aristotle's four sources of happiness hedone (sensuous pleasure) propraitari (acquiring assets) ethikos (moral virtue) dialogike (logical investigation)
c. 190 A.D.' Galen's four temperaments choleric melancholic phlegmatic sanguine
c. 1550 Paracelsus's four totem spirits changeable salamanders industrious gnomes inspired nymphs curious sylphs
--> Paracelsus's four gustos bitter sour sweet salty
c. 1905 Adicke's four world views innovative traditional doctrinaire skeptical
c. 1914 Spränger's four value attitudes artistic economic religious theoretic
c. 1920 Kretchmer's four character styles hypomanic depressive hyperesthetic anesthetic
c. 1947 Erich Fromm's four orientations exploitative hoarding receptive marketing
c. 1958 Isabel Myers's cognitive function types SP - sensory perception SJ - sensory judgement NF - intuitive feeling NT - intuitive thinking
c. 1978 Keirsey's four temperaments artisan guardian idealist rational

Keirsey, David, 1978 Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence |Publisher: Prometheus Nemesis Book Co Inc; 1st ed edition (May 1, 1998) ISBN 1885705026


The moods are caused by exess of the fluid to which they belong. All these attributes are stable troughout the ages, exept fore som ideosyncrasies by single authors.

Correspondences by Paracelsus

Paracelsus, the renaissance physician, acknowledges the four temperaments and names them as sources of disease, but he denies that they are linked to the elements and astrological signs. Those he identifies also as possible sources of diesease, but unrelated ones. He bashes his contemporaries for linking them. Instead, he states that the four gustos cause the temperaments, if one is dominating (see overview table).

Modern correspondences

The Korrespondences to modern psychological theories don't all fit perfectly, but they show how deeply this system has influenced medical/psyhological thought. These authors use the familiar number of 4, and allude to "correspondences" that sound vaguely familiar in order to make their point. May be they even don't do that consciously.

See also:

History

Those bodiely fluids and their attribution first apear in ancient greece, in the writings of Aristoteles in the roughly contemporary writings ascribed to Hippocrates. Modern scholars don't believe that the works of Hippocrates were the works of one man, even if he really existed he was only the semi-legendary founder of the school of thought. Today, it is virtually impossible to determine weather one of the two authors made them up, or if they just elaborated on an older tradition. For a possible source, see the paragraph on Platon.

Later, the ancient roman physician Galen elaborated on the topic and linked the body fluids to the temperaments. He seems to be the first who named them as such, but their characteristics were already described in the hippocratic writings. Each temperament included not only character traits, but also pphysical weaknesses and vulnerabillity to certain diseases.

The writings of Galen and through him Hippocrates influenced the medical sciences of later times substancially. the theory of the four humors was a mainstay of medicine until the advent of the age of reason. It was completely disproved as late as 1858 by Rudolf Virchow. Bevore that, they were widely regarded as scientific facts.

But what changed was the view on what scientific facts actually are. The greek thinkers, and especially the greek and roman doctors, thought that the four humours were real body fluids, such as blood. They knew blood vessels, and desperately thought for the channels the other fluids might use. They believed that all illnesses, including severe mental illnesses, were caused by disturbances of the body, that are observable if one finds the means to do so. They had a well developped empiric medicine and dissected animals in order to learn more about the functions of the body.


With the demise of the ancient world, this rational world view got lost. While some of their knowledge about herb use and such theories as the four humors were preserved or rediscovered later, they largely turned back to magical thinking, folk medicine and the like. The humors were again linked to the elements and astrology, they were often seen as mystical entities rather than as real thing. Accordingly, there were many magickal reciepts to cure imbalances in them. Each had it's own magical sqaure, for example.

The four humors today

Unani/Hikmat medicine

Anthroposopy

Magick

Similar systems

Platon and Ayurveda

Platon, who also was a greek philosopher and a contemporary of Aristoteles, developped his own system. He is distinquishing three bodiely fluids, correspanding to the three primary elemeents.

In Ayurveda, the indian traditional medicine system three temperaments are distinguished. They are called Doshas. Like the western humors, they are thought to have influence on the bodiely constitution and health of a person, but also on their character traits. Interestingly, they are attributed to the same elements as Platon's body fluids, although Indian tradition knows 5 elements.

The doshas appear in the Vedas, which are clearly older than Platon. It is possible that those ideas have found their way to greece and influenced Platon, and possibly also Aristoteles and the hippocratic writers.

Overview table

Pneuma Chole Phlegma>


Element Wind (air) fire water


Dosha Vata Pitta Kapha


Dosha temprature cold hot cool

References

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