Call the world…“The vale of Soul-making.” – John Keats
To be born is to be weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. – Ben Okri
Remember, and failing that, invent. – Monique Wittig
As a mythologist I am neither objective nor dispassionate but interested (to “be between”) in complication (“folding together”). Although I regret not taking Latin in high school or Greek in college, I proudly admit to being an amateur (from amare, “to love”). I love words and I love stories. I’m neither a scientist nor a theologian but a reckless dilettante (“to take delight”). I’m interested in what Utah Phillips called the Long Memory:
…the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. The loss of that long memory deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going, but where we want to go.
The Long Memory is about who we were before our imagination became so diminished; how our ancestors communicated deeper truths than we know how to grasp now; deeper because they had language that could acknowledge the ambiguities and nuances of life. It’s complicated. And, because our souls, at some level, still remember that we have lost so much of who we once were, it is also a source of grief. So we turn to mythological thinking and speaking – poetry and story – in our quest to bring soul back into the world, to re-animate the world.
Plato wrote that in the afterworld each soul picks a new incarnation best suited to its needs. Then it drinks from a spring called Lethe (“forgetfulness”) and remembers nothing of what it has learned. Similarly, Jewish tradition tells that when a soul is ready to be born, the angel Lailah places a finger over the soul’s lips, gesturing “Shhhh!”, thereby forming the cleft found below its nose, and the newborn soul remembers nothing. In West Africa it is said that each soul forms an agreement with a pair of divine twins regarding their purpose in the next life. Heading toward birth, however, they embrace the tree of forgetfulness and again remember nothing.
Perhaps it is human nature to literalize our mythic images. There is an actual tree of forgetfulness near the “Gateway of No Return” at the old slave trading fort of Ouidah in Benin, West Africa.
Before newly enslaved people were forced onto the ships, they had to walk around this tree. Men had to go round it nine times, women and children seven. This experience, they were told, would make them forget everything – their names, their family, and their old life.
They did not forget their language, however, and many African words found their way into American English. Michael Ventura, in his remarkable essay Hear That Long Snake Moan, writes:
...some of our most common terms – terms often associated with the music – are from African languages...funky is from the Ki-Kongo lufuki, meaning “positive sweat.” Mojo...is Ki-Kongo for “soul.” Boogie comes from the Ki-Kongon mbugi, meaning “devilishly good.” Juke, as in jukebox...is the Mande-kan word for “bad.” Jazz and jism likely derive from the Ki-Kongo dinza, “to ejaculate.” And the use of the concept “cool” among the Yoruba people is precisely the same as its use as popularized by jazz musicians...Sidney Bechet, the great New Orleans reed player, called his music “the remembering song.”
Myths of forgetfulness imply that life is an effort to fulfill forgotten obligations – surprises, disappointments and initiations that shock the soul into remembering. The soul returns to the truth it once already knew but forgot. The return is a process of un-forgetting (a-lethe-ia) that requires re-crossing that same river. Truth is remembering. In a Mayan dialect, “remember” means “to feed.” From this perspective, our inevitable family wounds don’t necessarily limit us. What does limit us is our capacity to imagine. The Spanish word for “remember” is recordar, which translates as “pass through the heart (corazone, related to “courage”). It takes courage to remember who we really are, and to speak the truth. Beautiful language helps.
This is why myth and poetry utilize metaphor (”a carrying over”), which allows us to leap the chasm between thoughts and transmit multiple levels of meaning. Unlike fantasy, which is self-centered, imagination implies dialogue (“to speak across”). Indeed, many indigenous languages negotiate communication without the verb “to be.” Speakers in these places must communicate indirectly, tolerate ambiguity and endure the tension between opposites rather than settling for “either-or” resolution. Consequently, their ordinary speech is full of beautiful imagery – and stories.Martín Prechtel writes:
Because Mayans and most indigenous people the world over are not burdened with the dilemma of “to be or not to be”...without a verb to be that’s not even a question; they teach, learn, remember, keep alive, argue, and respond to questions through stories.
And stories acknowledge that no person is isolated but is always defined by relationship. Consider that in Gaelic you cannot say, “I am angry at you.” You have to say, “There is anger between us.”
When we reduce memory to literalized data storage, we forget how to make images and weave new meaning. The Baal Shem Tov (”Master of the Good Name”), founder of Hassidism, said, “In remembrance is the beginning of redemption.” Truth – aletheia – is memory; and myth is truth precisely because it refuses to reduce the world to one single perspective.
Indeed, the word mnemonic, something that aids memory, comes from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, the mother of the nine Muses, who serve her by rendering her essence – history – into art.
The work of re-imagining the world (or re-membering it) can involve using creative approaches to language such as etymology to approach insight. For example, “forget” is the opposite of “remember.” But the opposite of “re-member” (putting something back together) could also be “dis-member.” This is exactly what the God Dionysus does to King Pentheus in the Greek tragedy The Bacchae, which I address in my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence. A soul – or a nation – that refuses to remember who we are will inevitably provoke an outside force to dismember it.
Here is the fundamental message of The Bacchae. At a crucial point in the play, Pentheus orders his men to “provoke” (from vocare, to call) Dionysus. This is marvelously appropriate, because (as in the Gaelic) the two characters (cousins, in fact) are in relationship. At some level Pentheus can choose. He can invoke or evoke his own Dionysian nature, or he can innocently project it outwards, provoking its expression in another person, with tragic consequences.
My book applies this thinking to American history, and at no time since it was published 15 years ago has this basic insight been more relevant. How ironic that our media commonly used an acronym (Greek: “name at the top”) for “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – ISIS, an ancient goddess who shared much of her symbolism with Semele, Dionysus’s mother.
Dionysus, the enigmatic stranger, brought Pentheus down. “Stranger” (or “foreigner”) comes from the Greek xenos, a word that was interpreted differently based upon the context. It could indicate simply that someone was not a member of the community. But it also could mean “guest” in the elaborate ritual of hospitality, xenia (”guest-friendship”). The Greeks apppreciated ambiguity because strangers could be gods or goddesses in disguise (as in the myth of Baucus and Philemon). So they emphasized respect toward strangers, and hospitality was critically important to Zeus himself. Even today, tourists can stay at Hotel Philoxenia (“love of the guest/stranger”). Sadly, American English has diminished this notion, using only one side of the ambiguity in the fevers of xenophobia that periodically sweep us up in immigrant-hating.
Investigating the original meanings of words can help us to think metaphorically. Some mysteries, however, continue to evade our understanding. Why does “cleave” have two opposite meanings (“adhere to” and “cut”)? Why does “engage” have both a marital implication as well as a martial one? Why do we pay attention?
And how about entertain (to hold together)? What does “together” refer to – subject or object? Two or more subjects can hold something in common. One subject could hold two or more objects. Or a community, several subjects, could hold mutually exclusive concepts – the tension of the opposites – in a ritual container such as tragic drama, and suffer together. Perhaps the original meaning of entertainment was ritual renewal of the community though shared suffering, just as compete (”strive after something together”) may well have meant “to petition the gods together” in its original context.
We also need to see past uninspired translation. First-century Jews spoke in Aramaic. The word used by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as “evil” means “unripe.” What if we used “unripe” instead of “evil?” Unripe persons are simply immature, or in ritual terms, uninitiated. The indigenous world understood that communities are responsible for helping such “ripen,” rather than punishing or exiling them, because each person’s gift was unique and indispensable. This is critical: if we can’t imagine a sym-bolic (“throwing together”) world, then we are left with a dia-bolic world.
Even diabolic (related to “dance”), originally implied communication between adversaries. Lazy, unimaginative language, said James Hillman, “displaces the metaphorical drive from its appropriate display in poetry and rhetoric…into direct action. The body becomes the place for the soul’s metaphors.” In other words, if we can’t make images in art, music or beautiful speech we get sick.
Part of the work of bringing soul back into the world is learning to address this world – and each other – with beautiful, complex, multi-faceted, nuanced (shade of color, mist, vapor, cloud) language (or tongue; Spanish: lengua), and to know how our words have evolved over many centuries from their original Greek, Latin, Germanic and other meanings. English in particular is a mish-mash (mash: to mix with hot water, reduce to a soft pulpy consistency) of influences, because English history is a story of invasion by different language groups. English, writes John McWhorter, “is not normal.” It is indeed ironic that the English themselves invaded so many other countries that the language acquired countless words from other places. But that is another story.
Part Three includes a very incomplete list of English words with surprising (related to comprehend) roots, original meanings and connections to other common words. Before going there, however, let’s look at some very specific language history.
Part Two – Twelve Words to Think About
How powerful are the words we use? How have they influenced the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves? Consider how Christianity arose linguistically.
Only monotheism, with its simplistic dualisms, sees difference as a threat to be eliminated; whatever isn’t aligned with one people’s god must necessarily follow his opposite. Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous.
By the time of Jesus, the idea that humans are alienated from God (who actually regrets having created them) was firmly in place (Genesis 6: 5-6). And so was the idea that the children of light must forever confront the children of darkness. In the Hebrew story, God had forbidden men to create “graven images,” which were central to indigenous spirituality. This was the birth of monotheism’s assault upon the imagination. Later Christians would fight brutal wars over this question (and some Muslims still do).
Word One: Hamartia
Aristotle used the word hamartia (“error” or “missing the mark,” a term from archery) to describe the tragic hero’s inevitably fatal flaw, the wound that (in archetypal terms) connected him to his potential. It was the very thing that made him unique. In both the Greek and the Celtic worlds, if sin had any meaning at all, it meant “failure,” and – this is critical – potentially any failure can be reversed. Christians, however, interpreted hamartia as inherent and inescapable sinfulness, mankind’s literal inheritance from Adam’s original mythic transgression. The result was the doctrine of original sin, as elaborated by St. Augustine. Men required discipline and moral purification to control their darker side and emphasize their higher nature.
The change in the meaning of hamartia is an historical marker that drags us into a fearsome new world in which everyone was tainted from birth with the mark of evil. Children were corrupt by nature and must be kept from polluting adults through baptism (”to dip, steep, dye, color”) soon after birth. It was a cruel corruption of indigenous initiation rituals, which generally occurred around adolescence.
Word Two: Daimon
Another factor in the solidification of Christian dogma (originally, “opinion”) was the rational and ascetic Greek philosophical tradition. The Church turned Plato’s notion of a realm of pure ideas into the afterlife, which was a higher, better place than the sensual world. Another old word took on new meaning. Plato wrote that before birth each soul receives a unique soul-companion or daimon that selects a pattern for it to live on earth. James Hillman explains, “The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and...is the carrier of your destiny.” It was known as genius (related to gene, generate) by the Romans and jinn or genie by the Arabs.
Like hamartia, daimon was connected to the indigenous notion of purpose. Older traditions understood human complexity, but Greek dualism insisted on a clear distinction between good and evil. In the second century B.C.E., the seventy men who translated the Hebrew Bible into a Greek book (the Septuagint) denoted unclean spirits as daimonion.
Thus, with two linguistic shifts, westerners gradually lost both their guiding spirits and their sense of their innate purpose in life. Eventually, human intuition (if it disputed church dogma) would express only the demonic, and the pagan gods, archetypal images of human potential, became demons.
Changes in language signaled changes in cult practice. The breakdown of ritual eventually led to a condition in which human urges that were once hallowed to the gods became evil acts. The church suppressed them, re-pressing them into the collective unconscious and blamed all suffering on human sinfulness. Orphism had taught that the soul (derived from Dionysus) was potentially good; but the body (from the ashes of the Titans) was its prison, where it remained until all guilt might be expiated. This, wrote E. R. Dodds, led to “a horror of the body and a revulsion against the life of the senses.” Indeed, the Orphics had attacked the erotic imagination: “Pleasure is in all circumstances bad; for we came here to be punished.”
As the age of mythological thinking neared its end, so did the deeper symbolism of initiation. The holy text that emerged out of this period omitted the few metaphors of the sacred Earth that had been allowed into Hebrew scripture. As a result, writes Paul Shepard, the New Testament is “one of the world’s most antiorganic and antisensuous masterpieces of abstract ideology.”
All these factors were rolled into the messianic tradition. Pagan cults had expressed a longing for the return of the king or the divine child who was reborn in the hearts of the initiates. But as mythological thinking declined, the Jews longed for a literal messiah (“the anointed”, Khristos in Greek). They witnessed the quick passing of many such figures, including the historic Jesus. After his death, however, he became “The Christ,” a concept, writes Arthur Evans, that was molded by traditions that had “...nothing to do with his life, applied by people who never knew him, recorded in a language he never used.”
Word Three: Apocalypse
At first, the Romans welcomed the new god. Their cosmos was still marked by epiphany, the continual manifestation of spirit in the world. Paganism never needed structures of belief; celebration of multiple divine images was one of its most essential characteristics.
But it was precisely this animating connection between cosmos, Earth and soul that Christianity sought to replace. Its transcendent god could only enter the world through revelation, which led to dogma and reduced a world of possibilities to one of dreadful certainties. This god was kept alive through belief, not through sacrifices. Saint John of Patmos interpreted his apocalyptic vision not as an internal experience, a “lifting of the veils” (its literal meaning), but as universal destruction, which I write about here. His Book of Revelation is world-class, ecstatic poetry. Interpreted literally, however, it is the very definition of – and a prescription for – madness. Much later, judgment-obsessed Puritans would consider it the most important section of the Bible.
Word Four: Pagan
For generations, the new belief (a word that has long lost its etymological connection to “love”) system was primarily urban. Everywhere across Europe, rural people were the last to be forcefully converted (some not until the 14th century), since they lived closer to the natural and still magical world that had been served by the older cults. Christians called them “country dwellers” (paganus). Eventually the term pagan became so thoroughly defamed that modern English can barely describe it in value-neutral terms. Common dictionary definitions include “an irreligious or hedonistic person.” For millennia these people had gratefully accepted the mysterious bounty of the earth in the form of Dionysus’ wine and Demeter’s bread. The Eucharist (”thanksgiving, gratitude”) ritual eventually expressed a denatured version of these mysteries, after eliminating both Dionysus and Demeter.
In the late fourth century the Church set the Christian canon (”measuring line, rule”), which excluded all alternatives to the new orthodoxy (”right, true, straight”). It declared that Jesus had been born on December 25th. Now, his birth coincided with the rebirth of the sun, and the symbolism of his light conquering darkness matched a common theme in ancient hero myths. Other old beliefs, such as reincarnation, died slowly. Early theologians had embraced it, but eventually the church opposed it because it promoted the idea that men could find the truth for themselves, without intercession by religion. It wasn’t until 543, however, that they declared it anathema (“devoted to evil”).
Nothing that Jesus said in the Gospels suggested anything about his death as a sacrifice. Saint Paul, however, changed Christianity’s central image from the birth of the Divine Child to his death and resurrection. An invitation to immanence became an excuse for transcendence. A religion of love became an obsession with suffering. It taught that Christ’s sacrifice had occurred once, not as part of an unending cycle. Emphasis on this single event and the progression from creation to salvation solidified our concept of linear time and led to the invention of clocks, which eventually contributed to the regulation of social behavior for the purpose of production (the word “calendar” came from the Latin calends, the first day of the month, when business accounts had to be settled). The western world eventually interpreted mythic stories as actual history.
Jesus, unlike Dionysus, had died not to symbolize the cycle of creation but as a payment for humanity’s bad behavior.
In the indigenous world men had always understood the necessity of symbolically killing the child-nature in their boys as a prelude to inviting their full participation in the adult world. But the crushing of paganism (pagans, of course, never referred to their Earth-based rituals as an ism, a word used todescribe an ideology) produced a different narrative, the actual sacrifice of a divine child for the glory of his father. Fanatics (who would later become fans) emulated this god, and Europe feasted on the bodies of its young in constant warfare.
Word Five: Martyr
Jesus was now the suffering god, but not the ecstatic, bisexual destroyer of boundaries like his predecessor Dionysus, and certainly no pacifist. Worshipers beheld his stern figure, the Pantocrator (“ruler of all”), glaring down from church ceilings, amid horrifying scenes of the Last Judgment. “Because a monotheistic psychology must be dedicated to unity,” wrote Hillman, “its psychopathology is intolerance of difference.” For centuries, white men, in history’s most profound contradiction, would rape and pillage to hasten the coming of the Prince of Peace.
Over the centuries the meaning of the word martyr changed. This was something new – the willingness to die not to protect one’s family but for abstract ideals such as religious opinions. And men who could die for a cause could now look back at ancient Biblical symbolism and imagine sacrificing their children to that same cause. Historian Bruce Chilton wrote:
Uniquely among the religions of the world, the three that center on Abraham have made the willingness to offer the lives of children – an action they all symbolize with versions of the Aqedah – a central virtue for the faithful as a whole.
Abraham’s knife became a soldier’s sword in Christian iconography. Dying as Christ (around 100 AD) became dying for Christ (500 AD), which became killing for Christ (1000 AD).
Word Six: Breath
Dualistic thinking became interlinked with misogyny in language. Men identified with mind and spirit and associated women with nature and the body. We can follow the linguistic shift. The Old Testament Hebrew word ruah (spirit/breath) is gendered as feminine. Translated to Greek it became pneuma, which is a neuter noun. But Saint Paul elevated pneuma to the Trinity as the Holy Ghost, which became the masculine spiritus in Latin.
In Alchemy, spirit became a substance that unites the fixed and volatile elements of the philosopher’s stone, and eventually the essence of distilled alcohol. Slowly, the Latin language acknowledged that the spirits had retreated from the church, which no longer recognized metaphor, and had come to reside, literally, in a bottle.
Word Seven: Evil
As I mentioned in Part One, the Aramaic word used by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as “evil” means “unripe.” Unripe persons are not evil; they are simply immature, or in ritual terms, uninitiated. Their antisocial behavior may be nothing more than a cry for help. And when we look more deeply at the classic Hero myths – which are often initiation stories – we can see that the protagonists don’t overcome evil, not even an evil part of themselves, but their own “unripeness.” Through the corruption of the term hamartia, however, the Church insisted that no one was unripe; rather, everyone was inherently evil, except for the tiny minority of the “elect”, a word that Calvinism changed from verb to noun.
Word Eight: Devil
In a dualistic world, God required an evil twin. In Hebrew myth, Satan was originally an adversary of humans and enforcer of Jehovah’s will. But he gradually changed from “opponent” into a personality whose nature is to obstruct, a rebellious prince in eternal opposition to the divine will. The Septuagint used the Greek word diabolikos (accuser, slanderer, “to throw across”), which became the English “devil.” Hebrew myths of the fallen angel (Lucifer, or “light-bringer”) added to the image of this eternal opposition:“How thou art fallen, oh daystar.”
This established the foundations for European racism. Light/white became synonymous with spirit/goodness, while dark/black represented the material world, the fallen world. The New Testament solidified the image; Barnabus described Satan as the “Black One.” Saint Jerome linked blackness with sex; the Devil’s strength was “in his loins.” Augustine claimed that everyone is black until he accepts Christ.
The choice was now clear and unambiguous. If one wasn’t an observant Christian, he followed the dark prince. In this form, wrote Jacob Needleman, the Devil becomes irredeemably evil: “All the truly terrifying images of the devil are in one way or another rooted in the diabolical.”
Clement of Alexandria declared that the gods of all other religions were demons. Since their mere existence questioned the belief in one true God, they could only be allies of Satan. The church now had an “Other” to justify its Catholic (“universally accepted”) self-perception – and justification for its genocidal crusades.
Scholars disagree as to how Satan received his popular image. Some claim that the earliest model was the lecherous goat-god Pan, feared by early Christians for his shameless sexuality and his association with the wilderness, where hostile spirits lay in wait. He caused panic. They depicted Satan with Pan’s hooves, an oversized phallus and horns, which carry a potent ambiguity, wrote historian Jeffrey Russell. They symbolize Satan’s power and evoke the “mysterious, frightening otherness of animals...not only fertility but also night, darkness and death.”
Some link Satan with the European Horned God, consort of many Goddesses. These images evoked the ambiguous mix of fertility and death (not evil) that indigenous people still understand, but which the modern mind splits into two figures.
Others connected Satan with Hades, ruler of the underworld, but the Greeks also knew Hades as Pluto (“wealth,” root of “plutocrat”). Here is as sharp a divide as we can find between monotheism and Pagan thinking, which perceives a wealth of possibilities both under the ground and in the psychological underworld. The Western world would not begin to imagine these possibilities until the late 19th century, when Freud “discovered” the unconscious, although he admitted, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
Word Nine: Heretic
The paranoid imagination created enemies within to match those without. Even more dangerous than pagans were the schismatics who divided the community with false doctrines, and heretics (“able to choose”).
Word Ten: Hell
When Christians assigned Satan a realm to administer, they named it after Hel, Nordic goddess of the underworld, sister of the wolf who threatens to emerge and wreck vengeance upon the gods of the upper world. Greece, however, retained indigenous associations. There, the lord of Hell is still Charon, the ferryman of the river Styx (“the hateful”), and rural Greeks still place coins over a dead person’s eyes to pay for the journey. If Hades (as Pluto/wealth) is forgotten, his ferryman still makes a tidy profit.
When words come together, they can form metaphors. In America, those metaphors often carry specifically martial meanings that, in turn, can give us insight into our American mythology. For more, see my essay Military Madness – The Unacknowledged Metaphors in Our Daily Speech
Word Eleven: Family
The Modern English word for family is a relatively recent invention. The French-speaking Norman invaders replaced the original words hiwisc/híwscipe and híwrǽden, which were based on notions of relationship and the land. Family derives from the Latin familia (“slaves of the household”). This transformation from Old English to the Latin-rooted word shifts the already-existing association of ownership within a family from the land to the people of the family, while simultaneously underlining that that ownership is tied to enslavement.
Word Twelve: Clue
This word refers all the way back to the myth of the “clew” of thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus to escape the Labyrinth after he killed the Minotaur. It indicates that anything that guides or directs us requires an active role on our part. The clue is out there, but we must unravel it.
And, just for fun: Liquidity. Here is part of a discussion on liquid metaphors in the world of finance:
Liquid assets can be turned into cash which you can channel into a business...investors will pour funds in, and, if the cash keeps flowing, you’ll ride on the crest of a wave and beswimming in money…an overflow of cash can lead to carelessness…Foolish investments could drain resources and create a significant gulf. Consequently, companies might have to liquidate their creditors, and their revenue could run dry overnight. Some companies will sink without trace…the vast majority will experience the ebb and flow of typical fluctuations. Some companies will draw on a huge pool of resources. The most successful will have floating assets…Don’t forget what happens when your liquid assets are frozen!...Laundering!!...trading doesn’t come with a guarantee of bouyant business and swelling profits, and so many companies founder within their first years, and are dissolved…Although not a fan of “trickle-down” economics, believing instead in “priming the pump” from the bottom, I admit that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Part Three
The work of bringing soul back into the world involves learning to address each other with beautiful, complex, multi-faceted, nuanced language, or tongue (Spanish: lengua), and to know how our words have evolved over many centuries from their original Greek, Latin, Germanic or other meanings.
So here is a very incomplete list of English words with surprising (related to comprehend) roots, original meanings and connections to other common words. I invite you to bookmark an etymology dictionary on your computer. Get into the habit of wondering, “Hey, what does that word mean? Where did it come from? Is it related to this other one? Why?”
Absurd – Out of tune
Adam – Man, the one formed from the ground
Adolescence – Becoming adult; related to nourish, old
Adulate – To wag the tail
Adore – To call to; related to orator, oral
Aesthetic – A gasp in the face of wonder or horror;related to aesthete, anesthetic
Aggravate – To make heavier; related to grief
Agony – A struggle for victory; related to protagonist, act, antagonize
Alcatraz – Web-footed sea bird, related to albatross
Alchemy – Early form of chemistry
Alcohol – To stain; related to kohl, powder used to darken the eyelids
Algorithm – Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
Allegory – A speaking about something else
Amateur – One who loves; related to amor
Amazon – One of a race of female warriors; without a breast
Ambition – Going around to solicit votes.
Ambivalent – Both strengths; related to valiant
Amnesia – Loss of memory (the goddess Mnemosyne); related to mind
Analyze – From Dionysus “the Loosener”; related to catalyst, release, lose, solve
Anarchy – Lack of a leader; related to archetype, architect, archives, archbishop
Anesthetic – Loss of beauty
Angel – Messenger, one who announces; related to evangelist
Anger – Tight, painfully constricted, narrow, to squeeze; related to anxious
Animate – To give life to, from anima (”life, soul, breath”), related to animal
Anthology – A gathering of flowers
Anxiety – Tight, constricted; from Ananke, goddess of Necessity, related to angina
Apocalypse – To lift the veil; related to Calypso
Appreciate – To set a price to; related to price, prize, praise
Apprentice – Someone learning; related to apprehend
Apricot – Early-ripening fruit; related to precocious
Arena – Sandy place to soak up blood in Roman or Spanish amphitheaters
Arctic – The Bear constellation
Assassin – Related to hashish
Assist – To take a stand; related to resist
Asterisk – Little star
Astound – To thunder, deafen, related to astonish
Astronaut – Sailor of the stars
Atone – To be at one
Audit – A hearing or listening; related to audition, audience, audio, auditorium
Auspicious – Divination by observing the flight of birds; related to augur, auspices
Author – One who causes to grow; related to authority, augment
Average – Financial loss incurred through damage to goods in transit
Avocado – Testicle (Aztec); or lawyer (Spanish); related to advocate
Ballet – Throw one’s body; related to ball, diabolic, parable, ballot, metabolize, ballistic
Barbarian – Unintelligible speech of foreigners
Bead – To ask, pray; related to bid
Believe – Related to love, libido, lovely
Belladonna – Beautiful lady
Berserk – A warrior clothed in bearskin
Bible – From Byblos, the port that exported papyrus; related to bibliography
Blade – A leaf
Bless – Blood sprinkling on pagan altars; possibly related to wound
Boil – Related to bull (Papal edict)
Book – A beechwood tablet on which runes were inscribed
Boondocks – Mountain, difficult to access
Boulevard – Top surface of a military rampart; related to bulwark
Bowel – Sausage; related to botulism
Bugger – Bigoted stereotype of a Bulgarian
Caesar – Leader who has long hair; related to Kaiser, czar, caesarian
Calendar – Calends, the first day of the Roman month
Canard – To half-sell ducks
Cancer – Crab-shaped; related to canker
Capital – Pertaining to the head; related to capitalism, capo, decapitate
Capitol – From temple of Jupiter on Rome’s Capitoline Hill
Car – To run; related to career, cargo, course, corral, charge
Carnival – Temporarily stop eating meat; related to carnage, incarnation
Casino – Little house
Cataclysm – Wash down; related to cloaca
Catastrophe – Turn downward
Caterpillar – Wooly cat; related to pile
Catholic – Universally accepted; related to whole
Cereal – From Roman Goddess of agriculture, Ceres (Greek: Demeter)
Chance – A falling; related to cadence, accident, casualty, cheat, decadence
Character – Engraved mark, symbol or imprint on the soul, pointed stake
Charisma – Favor, divine gift. From Charis, attendant of Aphrodite
Chattel – Property; related to cattle
Checkmate – The King is dead
Chemical – From alchemy, that which is poured out
Chiropractic – Done or made by hand
Chivalry – Horsemen; related to cavalier, cavalry
Chlorine – From the goddess Chloris/Chloe; related to chlorophyll, chloroplast
Chorus – A dance in a circle; related to choreography
Cinema – Picture of movement; related to kinesiology, solicit, excite, recital
Circle – Related to circus, circumstance, cycle, chakra, zodiac, Circe
Clue – A ball of thread; referring to the myth of Ariadne and the Labyrinth
Clinic – Of the bed (where dreams happen); related to client, climate, recline
Collude – Play with
Combat – Beat together; related to battle, batter
Comet – Long-haired star
Communicate – Make common
Companion – Bread mate; related to accompany
Compassion – Suffer together
Compete – Petition the gods together; related to competent
Complain – Beat the breast; related to plague
Complicate – Fold together; related to complicit
Compost – Place together; related to compote, position, posit
Comrade – Sharing the same room or bed; related to camera, chamber
Condescend – Go down together
Condolence – Suffer together; related to doleful
Condom – Glove
Conflagration – Burning together; related to flagrant, bleach (v.)
Conflict – Strike together; related to afflict
Confound – Pour together
Congregate – Collect in a flock, related to gregarious, aggregate
Conjugal – Yoke together, related to jugular, conjugate
