Digitus Infamis

Alexander J. Ford

Fall, 2024

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Introduction 

 

Perhaps the most distant ancestor of all spiritual ideas is the simple notion that the outward nature of a thing—its appearance, its manner, it's motion—is governed by and is therefore exemplary of some inner volition; some will to order, or animating principle. One sees all others in precisely these terms. The concept of the soul for the ancients neatly symbolized the in-dwelling aspects of man. Life and motion were taken to be synonymous by natural philosophers of the pre-industrial ages. Even the up-reaching growth of vegetative life seemed to belie some inner, invigorating force. In truth many spiritual systems are alloys of this simple tenet. That the esoteric (or strictly, ‘inner’) principle can be understood through careful scrutiny of its outward form is the foundation shared by the myriad schools of physiognomy, and of divination. This idea has long linked the architect to the hierophant. In pouring over the histories, the doctrine of macrocosm and microcosm—so common to man of antiquity—emerges time and again. It is an inevitable current, which is produced by the movements of our 'first' qualitative idea. 

 

As the form of the body and the form of the temple were both models of the cosmos, so was the hand itself—the "instrument of instruments," Aristotle called it—a microcosmic emblem. Chiromantic tradition postulates numerous sympathies between the form of the hand and the sky, and as well, between the form of the hand and the body at large. Some brief notes may suffice: The circle of the sky is identified in the vola, or thenar; in the palm of the hand. The zodiacal divisions in the heavens are reflected by the twelve phalanges of the four fingers. Graven on the palm from the moment of birth is a complex latticework of lineaments, unique to each individual, and in them the ancients saw shapes analogous to horoscopic arrangements drawn across the dome of heaven. The hand is thus the prototypical sigil; the runic circle, an earthly exemplum governed by proportion to the celestial exemplar. As a curious aside, if the reader will permit, we might note as well that the sigillary hand—that is, some esoteric principle rendered in the bodily clay—in all likelihood directs us toward the symbolic root of the earthly disk, or pentacle of the tarot. In any case, all that we intend to say here at the outset is that for the ancients, one’s hand evidently expressed something about the inner nature of the individual to whom it belonged. With a skilled eye it followed through no great leap that systematic study of those mundane symbols might yield some esoteric knowledge. That knowledge was eventually marshaled into an art. In this way, in some age now lost, chiromancy was born. 

 

In this series of studies we continue to constrain our focus to the symbolic character of each individual finger. Following on from the first, or index finger we now turn our attention to the second, or middle finger. Medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian written traditions in European palmistry record in unwavering tone that the middle finger was connected symbolically both to Saturn in the sky, and to the Spleen in the body. This symbolic triad can be compared to the Forefinger-Jupiter-Liver grouping. And so, we will attempt (as ever) to clarify the underlying rationale that produced those associations. Such things for the ancients are, as I have remarked elsewhere, never arbitrary, and always conceived in accordance with some qualitative reasoning. As we continue to investigate the Indo-European symbolism of the hand, the cynical attitude of modern scholars—that the Chiromantic tradition in Europe is essentially foreign; introduced from an Arabian source no earlier than the twelfth century, and was modeled on ideas autochthonous to India—becomes less and less tenable. Modern scholarship simply does not adequately account for the degree to which those Medieval sources align with the much wider, and more ancient systems of Proto-Indo-European metaphysics that inarguably connect the Vedic cultures to their fountainhead on the Pontic Caspian steppe.

 

In his 1658 treatise on the principles of Chiromancy, Marin Cureau de la Chambre writes at some appreciable length on the connection between the middle finger and the spleen. The character of this treatise is, naturally, something of a product of its time in the sense that its primary aim is to justify traditional Chiromantic ideas with medical theory, and with surgical anecdotes. Concerned not directly with the symbolic character of the hand, de la Chambre rather proceeds having taken those things for granted. This in-and-of-itself signals to the reader that the middle finger and spleen associations (among others) were, even in that time, viewed as a ‘given.’ Such ideas were it seems, already old.

 

“I could add for a third observation,” writes de la Chambre, “The sympathy betwixt the spleen and the middle-finger, the wonderful effects which the opening of the Salvarella produceth in the diseases of the spleen: For this vein commonly betwixt the middle and the third finger, as Hippocrates saith … that the virtue of the spleen is through that vein carried to that finger…” Contemporaneously with this manuscript, Richard Saunders defined the middle finger in his seminal treatise on physiognomy and chiromancy. He wrote: “This finger is Saturn.” 

 

Turning the hand over to observe the lines in the palm, if only for the moment—a thorough analysis of these features’ symbolic heritage remains out ahead of us—we would point out that the line which divides the palm vertically in half; beginning at the rascetta in the wrist and extending up toward the middle finger, has from the very earliest traditions, been named the line of Saturn. 

 

It seems most prudent to first approach the spleen (and its association with black bile) and to question the role that both played in ancient medical philosophy. These systems of thought trace their roots at the very least to the humoral theory of Hippocrates, on to Galen, and down through their many disciples. With a clearer picture of the melancholic character of the spleen, we can properly approach the question of the middle finger, and of Saturn: How did it come to pass that Medieval and Renaissance mystics took this finger as the chiromantic instantiation of the Saturn-spleen idea? The answer lies waiting beneath the fact that both the middle finger and the spleen have, from a very early date, been deeply enmeshed in taboo.

 

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Humoralism

 

In order to understand the archaic picture of the spleen, we will have to begin with a survey of the relevant aspects of the humoral theory of medicine—which dominated curative thought in Europe for millennia. It was according to developments in this theory that individual organs became identified with individual humors; the spleen to black bile specifically. The general seed of the humoral idea is this: The health of the human body is the result of the balance of four vital fluids, or “humors,” and that illness or disease is the result of their imbalance. 

 

The origins of this theory are to be found in a classical Greek text titled ‘On the Nature of Man,’ which was written no later than the fifth century BCE, and was authored (according to Galen) either by Hippocrates himself or by his son-in-law, Polybus. In either case the brilliance of this document belongs to its author's ability to holistically incorporate what were, up until that point in time, disconnected elements of natural philosophy and empirical medicine. Prior to the appearance of this treatise physicians postulated many different humors in the body. It wasn’t until the Pythagorean notion was established in the philosophical milieu--of the special significance of the number four--that a set of four humors became the ideal. In the Pythagorean fragments the sacred tetrad is defined with clarity and conviction: The number four “holds the root and source of eternal nature.” Advancing a number of essential tetrads; the seasons, the elements, the cycle of ages, the ages of man, the dactyls, etc., the Pythagoreans laid the first flagstone on the path to the fourfold doctrine of Hippocrates. A few more stones were necessary, which were provided in short order, culminating with the author of that treatise. In their highly influential work on the subject, authors Saxl, Panofsky, and Klibansky describe the progression of these philosophical ideas into the humoral theory of medicine so neatly that it's hardly worth paraphrasing:

 

"The notion of the humors as such comes from empirical medicine. The notion of the tetrad, the definition of health as the equilibrium of the different parts, and of sickness as the disturbance of the equilibrium, are Pythagorean contributions. The notion that in the course of the seasons each of the four substances in turn gains ascendancy seems to be purely Empedocles. But the credit for combining all these notions in one system, and thereby creating the doctrine of humoralism ... is no doubt due to the powerful writer who composed the first part of On the Nature of Man. This system included not only the Pythagorean and Empedoclean tetrad but also the doctrine of the qualities that Philistion handed down to us ... From this the author of On the Nature of Man evolved the following schema, which was to remain in force for more than two thousand years:" 

 

Blood, Spring, Warm and Moist

Yellow Bile, Summer, Warm and Dry

Black Bile, Autumn, Cold and Dry

Phlegm, Winter, Cold and Moist

 

As they state, the idea of humors itself comes from empirical medicine. That is to say, the existence of in-dwelling bodily fluid is simply an empirical observation. But, upon closer inspection, one of those humors presents an issue even at this level. Two are self explanatory—blood and phlegm, well and good. Yellow bile is perhaps less obvious to the scrutiny of a modern layman, but nevertheless, it is present and empirically demonstrable. Yellow bile was viewed as a secretion of the liver, and it is not particularly difficult to imagine that ancient observers may have conflated it with stomach acids, in episodes of vomiting. The acidic taste is in fact the source of the Greek word for yellow bile as well, but more in due course. These three humors are thus readily produced by physicians. Identifying a fourth humor, however, is a bit trickier. And it is for that reason that black bile has been characterized as a ‘notional’ humor by many academics, and rightly so. The physician in antiquity would have been faced with three visible humors, and as well, with the philosophical idea that the body ought to be properly characterized by a tetrad. This principle was treated most seriously in the post-Pythagorean world. And so, the existence of a fourth humor was likely deduced ipso facto for natural philosophers. Black bile was thus conjured up to fill the role of the final humor, and its qualities were assured on account of the fact that the cold and dry pairing of Alcmaeon and Philistion had not yet found its humoral analogue, and so, must of-necessity characterize the fourth.

 

Now, the discerning reader might take pause to wonder, and raise the question: Surely there are other, more obvious bodily fluids that could have been identified for a humor. Saliva, urine, seminal fluid etc—are not any of these more evident than postulating an ‘invisible’ fourth humor? And yet, recall that the humors served a more specific purpose in early medical theory. They were not merely building blocks of the body; the elements served that function. The humors were elemental analogues. Their role, their principle role, was to account for good and for ill health in the bodily system. Proper accord between the humors resulted in κρᾶσις (krasis), or ‘balance.’ Imbalance between them, favoring one above the others, was believed to result in sickness and in disease. In this way, we can append the observation that for a bodily fluid to work as a humor at all, it must occasion to present itself as symptomatic of some illness. This is a requirement that cannot easily be met by urine, or saliva, or seminal fluid, etc. Phlegm, blood, and yellow bile all share this quality, they are all in turn expressed as symptomatic in the course of illness and disease. Thus they lend themselves quite nicely to the notion that the body is expelling an excess of some vital fluid; that it's accounting for an inner unevenness. And if this is the case, we would expect for black bile to be traceable to a similar symptomatic expression. If we take a moment to interrogate the name that the Greeks gave to this fourth humor, that expression will be clarified as well.

 

Melancholia in the original Greek is rendered ‘μελάγχολος' from μέλας and χόλος. As for the second component, kholos, this word is translated most commonly as ‘bile,’ and figures into the form of yellow bile’s Greek name as well. In other words, black bile is termed an alternate form of yellow bile. Indeed in the early physiological texts, black bile is theorized to be a degenerated form, or a state of yellow bile. Nevertheless the word ‘bile’ has a different root, isolated to Latin and of peripheral concern to the Greek consideration at hand. We will set the issue of the word ‘bile’ aside. Kholos can be translated to ‘gall’ as well, the meaning of which is down to the bitterness or acidity of the yellow humor. Yellow bile, then, is the bitter yellow fluid in name, and black bile is its blackened counterpart. 

 

But what of the first component—melas? This word, although commonly translated as ‘black’ in a humoral context, more nearly means ‘bruised,’ and can be taken in different contexts to refer to black, or to dark, or to blue. Thus, we might argue that the color of black bile reveals a symptomatic expression that was endemic to its initial conception: bruising. To press this point a moment further, recall the qualitative associations furnished by the author of the Hippocratic treatise—black bile has always been associated with coldness and with dryness. These two qualities explicitly define the βροτός (vrotos), the ‘blood outside,’ in contrast to the warm and moist ‘blood-inside,’ the θυμός (thumos). We explored the Proto-Indo-European notion of two-bloodedness in our study of the forefinger, and so, must content ourselves only to nod in that direction for the moment in order to maintain some semblance of scope. As the blood slows, cools, and dries it also blackens, a simple observation that lies in qualitative accord with the Hippocratic picture of a fourth humor; the cold and dry humor which bruises and discolors thus would have appeared verified by the mystical picture of the cooling, drying, and blackening of the blood. We are reminded of a remark in Cioran, that the melancholic is characterized by his "slow blood." It’s worth noting as well, that in the later Hippocratic tradition the black bile was considered at times to be conveyed within the blood, or even to be a sedimentitious component of it. As a matter of fact, all of the humors have been thought at one time or another, to be conveyed throughout the body together with the blood by way of venous and arterial lineaments. 

 

Here we ought to direct the reader's attention to a rather brilliant observation made by Ingvar Johansson and Niels Lynöe in their book "Medicine and Philosophy: A Twenty-First Century Introduction." What follows is, perhaps in its entirety, the material or empirical aspect of the humoral system. It is not hard to imagine this process being carried out by physicians of old to demonstrate all four in one simple experiment, though, the reader is advised to bear in mind that without the metaphysical context in which ancient man would have rationalized such a demonstration, the ‘what’ will remain entirely bereft of the ‘why.’ In any case, the authors explain:

 

“If blood is poured into a glass jar, a process of coagulation and sedimentation starts. It ends with four clearly distinct layers: a red region, a yellowish one, a black one, and a white one.  … The lowest part of the same column consists of sediment that is too dense to permit light to pass through. Therefore this part of the column looks black and might be referred to as ‘black bile.’ On the top of the column there is a white layer, which today we would classify as fibrin; it might correspond to Galen’s phlegm. The remaining part is a rather clear but somewhat yellowish fluid that surrounds the coagulated column in the middle. It might be called ‘yellow bile,’ but today we recognize it as blood serum.”

 

Each of these four humors, as we have said—if the cause of imbalance in the body—resulted in some form of illness. Those illnesses were gathered up under the umbrellas of their associated humor. Thus a ‘melancholic’ excess might be susceptible to a variety of melancholic sicknesses. The same could be said of a sanguine excess, and so on. And yet, with relative celerity it seems to have become apparent to the natural philosophers that a true and proper balance of all four humors was an unattainable ideal. No physician could furnish a man in perfect, flawless health. For this reason we can understand how the humoral doctrine began to shift from diagnoses toward dispositions; toward temperamental archetypes. While they still accounted for their associated sicknesses, such conditions were viewed not as excesses beyond balance, but as excesses beyond the normal excess which produced in men their different temperaments. 

 

Melancholy in particular enjoyed special treatment by Ancient Greek writers before all the rest. In the melancholic, the ancients recognized something of the frenzy and the reckless tragedy, that typifies all paragons of the Indo-European spirit. Looking to Gellius, we find melancholy aptly described as a “disease of heroes.” In the Phaedrus, Socrates discusses the Platonic idea of frenzy, distinguishing it from base evil: “but in fact we receive the greatest benefits through frenzy," he says, "that is, in so far as it is sent as a divine gift.” Plato does not connect this idea to melancholy himself, however. For him, melancholy is a moral madness; a hallmark of tyranny. We will return to this notion at some length once we arrive at the issue of Saturn. 

 

Saxl, Panofsky, and Klibansky explain the development of melancholic heroism in Aristotle, writing that it was he who “first brought about the union between the purely medical notion of melancholy, and the Platonic conception of frenzy. This union found expression in what for the Greeks was the paradoxical thesis that not only the tragic heroes like Ajax, Heracles, and Bellerophon, but really all outstanding men, whether in the realm of the arts or in those of poetry, philosophy or statesmanship—even Socrates and Plato—were melancholics.” In fact there is a text to be found in the Aristotelian corpus, titled Problem XXX I, which has been referred to by scholars as the first monograph on melancholy. In this text, Aristotle identifies black bile as the source not just of a kind of debilitating sadness and lethargy, but also potentially of ecstatic madness; of true genius. This duality between brilliance and ruin defined melancholia well into the Victorian age. 

 

Rather than continue to probe the nature of melancholia—a colossal task which is, quite frankly, among the most well-trodden fields in the realm of academic art history, we will recall to the forefront a number of foregoing points that set the stage for the task at hand; for drawing the middle finger into its proper place in that symbolic landscape. First, that black bile is the source of melancholia. Second, that melancholia came to exemplify the temperamental blade’s edge between genius and lunacy; of the shared root that provides both a capacity for heroism, and a capacity for tyranny. To these two items we will add now a third. According to Hippocratic and Galenic tradition, the organ in the body which rules over black bile is the spleen. 

 

We say ‘rules over’ to simplify the issue somewhat, here, for across history the spleen has been thought by some to produce this humor, by others to separate it out from the blood or from the body at large; to filter it, etc. Regardless, what has remained certain from Hippocrates down to 18th century medicine was the singular principle that black bile was of special significance to the spleen. And so our question now becomes: What did the ancients make of the spleen?

 

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The Spleen

 

Prior to modern medicine, the question of the spleen’s function in the body seems quite plainly to have baffled many physicians. Beginning in the Hippocratic corpus, it was believed that the spleen served to draw water off of the body. This of course coincides with the early notion that the fourth humor was water, rather than black bile—and so we might conclude that even before the arrival black bile onto the theoretical scene, the spleen was still considered to rule over the fourth humor. Plato, in the Timaeus gives us further clues—stating that the spleen’s function is to “maintain the liver bright and pure.” In other words, the spleen’s role was to cleanse the liver; somehow it ‘drew off’ corrupting substances from the nobler organ. Although the Alexandrian texts are lost, Galen tells us that Erasistratus considered the spleen to be an entirely useless organ. Six hundred years after Hippocrates, Celsus wrote that the spleen was an “entirely unknown organ, whose task is to pour melancholy humors of the blood through the splenogastric vessels.” In Galen’s own writing, the spleen attracts and eliminates melancholy during the processes of transmuting in-taken sustenance, into both blood by the liver, and by the other organs into the substances of their own constituent tissues.

 

Continuing to scour the histories, splenetick speculation strays down even stranger corridors. Athletes apparently viewed runners’ stitches as caused by the spleen no-doubt on account of their common position in the general area of that organ. Pliny explains that “The Viscus (spleen) has the characteristic of slowing down the race of men, for this reason, runners were subordinated to its burn with a red-hot iron.” The surgical removal of the spleen was, as well, not unknown in antiquity. Coupled with its apparent ‘uselessness’ for some, and its role as an athletic villain, it was even postulated by some physicians that those who underwent, and recovered from splenectomy could run faster as a result of the removal of that organ. 

 

On the subject of splenectomy performed in antiquity, physicians would immediately have noted that it is entirely possible for a human being to survive without a spleen. The ancients were obviously aware of this fact. They surely would not have considered it unremarkable. Because the spleen’s actual function in the body is related to the immune system, many who die as a result of splenectomy suffer that fate specifically because they contract an unrelated illness afterward, which their immune system cannot fight off without the aid of the spleen. It’s entirely likely that the ancients would have observed a patients’ recovery, and fine constitution following a splenectomy, and should he perish as a result of a subsequent illness they might mistakenly (though understandably) blame the illness, rather than understanding that it was the absence of the spleen which rendered him deathly susceptible. By the 16th century even the celebrated polymath Paracelsus added his thoughts on the subject, proclaiming that the spleen was a completely superfluous organ which ought to be excised when diseased. Likewise, we read that the physician Vesalius performed many splenectomies on various animals, supporting as it were the notion that whatever the spleen was, it was not essential to life. 

 

From this confluence of ideas we can gather that the spleen was taken to be a dormant, or even malevolent influence; ‘subordinating’ the athletic potential of the body. The ancient picture of the spleen thus vacillated from assisting the liver, to utter uselessness, and even to outright harm.  And yet throughout all of this speculation, even when the ancient authors labeled the spleen as an ‘unknown’ organ, nevertheless, all remained in firm accord that the spleen must interact with the melancholic humor. The prevailing sentiment emerges that it drew-off excess melancholia from the bodily system. It is in Aristotle (at last) that we discover a most poetic description of the spleen, which, after much consideration, appears to mark the proper path through this great storm of symbolism. In his treatise on the Parts of Animals, Aristotle calls the spleen a ‘counterfeit, or bastard liver.’ At first glance this line may give one to furrow their brows—what could Aristotle mean by a ‘bastardized,’ or false liver? 

 

To uncover the answer to this question we will have to examine the words with which the ancients named the spleen. This word ‘spleen’ is lent to modern English from the Greek σπλήν, which descends in turn from a Proto-Indo-European root, *splǵʰ-. The reader will take care to note that the PIE formulation does not contain the long ‘e’ sound which persisted unchanged in derivative forms, all the way to modern English. The literal meaning of this root is hard to place. It appears translated only as ‘spleen.’ An alternative descendant of the same word is simplified, ‘‘lien, -enis.’ The long ‘e,’ present here as well, is attested by two grammarians (Servius and Priscian) in the works of the 4th century writer Serenus, at least. Philological consensus holds that the Proto-Indo-European root *splǵʰ- was replaced by *(s)liǵʰ, on account of the fact that the prior form was believed to be taboo—a process termed metathesis. The specific model for introducing the long ‘e’ remains an open question. 

 

To simplify a bit, then: In the original tongue of the Pontic-Caspian speaking peoples, the organ was called *splǵʰ. This name and by extension the organ itself was taken for taboo—which tells us that even in those days, the spleen was viewed as bad-natured, baleful, dangerous, or to quote Aristotle, “bastardized, counterfeit.” Owing to this nature, the pronunciation of the word was metathesized in descendant tongues, to incorporate a long ‘e’ sound, in order to avoid invoking the taboo associated with vocalizing the true name. We see this  process play out time and again in the ancient world. Take for example the Greek word for wolf—which should be ulkos—but was metathesized to lukos. The same can be observed in the Latin word lupus (ulpus).

 

Now, into this set of concerns we will add one further. When it was introduced to the low Germanic languages, the word spleen displaced a different name for that organ: Milt.  This word, curiously, was used both to refer to the spleen and, in certain contexts, to the seminal fluid and/or testes of male fish. And while this may cause the reader to tilt their head, we will set that second meaning aside for the moment—returning to it in due course in the context of Saturn. In Middle English this word was milte, from the Old English milt, which in Proto-Germanic was rendered *melto. In all likelihood this alternate designation for the spleen was an idiomatic name offered instead of the taboo—descending from the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)meld- to ‘weaken’ or ‘melt,’ related no doubt to *(s)meld- 'to beat,’ ‘to grind,’ or ‘to crush.’ While at first it may seem incongruent to refer to the spleen as a beaten or weakened organ, nevertheless there is something here quite clearly in alignment with the spirit of Aristotle’s notion of the spleen as counterfeit or bastardized in some way. Recalling our consideration of the linguistic origins of black bile’s ‘blackness,’ so to speak, as a darkening, blue-blackening, or bruising humor in the most remote sense, we can finally offer a possible solution to the puzzle. 

 

It’s well-known that the ancients believed not just that the liver was the source of blood in some traditions; as the seat of the soul and the source of life—but further that the physical tissue of the liver was blood. The liver seemed to ancient observers to be different from the tissue of other organs in the body; and so saturated with blood it was not a far leap to conclude that the very substance of that organ was blood. The spleen, as it happens, appears to be made up of a very similar tissue. Further, the spleen is not red in coloration, as the liver is; rather the healthy spleen is a deeper, purplish hue. That is, ‘discolored;’ we might easily say that the spleen appears to be a diminutive, bruised liver. Housed on the left, sinister, or weakened side of the body it is thus compositionally obverse to the larger, redder, right-dwelling liver. This qualitative line of reasoning is borne out with clarity, as we have seen, in the philological sphere—throughout the Indo-European traditions. So we contend that it was according to this deeply ancient thought process that the spleen has, from the earliest moments, been identified as the ruler of the melancholic humor, and the source of the melancholic temperament. This is the fountainhead of self-evidence, wherein the spleen and melancholia converge. The spleen draws off the poisonous substances from the rest of the body and so, in time it became both the cleanser of the liver for some, while for others it became synonymous with those toxic substances, even becoming their source. That is the root of the Aristotelian notion that the spleen was a bastard liver: it was the house of taboo in the bodily system. It’s no small wonder then, that the spleen would be given over in a chiromantic sense to the middle finger; the digit of taboo in the hand—digitus infamis, or digitus impudicus as it was called by the Romans. 

 

To linger a moment longer, we will point out as well that the the etymological heritage of the name ‘milt’ (*(s)mel-) converges with the Greek formulation melas or melancholia, *mel-, which releases us into a much broader linguistic sea of related terms that swirl around these elemental concepts, all of which reinforce one another, and assure us of our ancestors' propensity for, and great love of qualitative interconnectedness: Malevolence, malady, and from various derivatives falseness, erroneousness, evil; even the Latin "Oculus Malus," or the evil eye, comprises this root. The Greek melas was also not constrained to the demarcation of a bruised hue, or black-blue coloration. This word enjoyed a wide array of apparently idiomatic literary attributions—it was commonly used to indicate tyranny, and so again, we brush up against the Saturnian question: for it was Saturn who castrated, and overthrew the first tyrant.

 

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Fascinus

 

It’s no secret that the middle finger has for centuries been identified as a phallic symbol. Any charlatan among palmists will delight to say as much. Raising this finger and curling the rest on either side into the palm produces a form which is unmistakably reminiscent of the phallus and testes. 

 

In Classical antiquity this gesture was called ‘katapygon,’ formed of kata, or downward, and puge, or the buttocks. Which is to say, offering the middle finger was a gesture of insult then much in the same way it is now, today in the west. Famously, Diogenes is said to have offered his middle finger in insult to the orator Demosthenes in the 4th century BCE. In Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, one character even extends his middle finger during a discussion about poetic meter, which is apparently a double pun in the sense that the ‘daktyloi’ when scanned, (long, short, short) creates a phallic form as well. Isidore of Seville repeats, in his Etymologiae, the name “shameless finger” according to the same popular usage.  

 

Little more than this is typically said. If one is keen to look into the history of the gesture as an insult, accounts of these classical items—which only verify our simplistic modern idea about this finger—can be trotted out, as if to close the book on the question. It’s an affronting image, and so the finger is an affronting finger. Usually some petty, free-associative warbling might be pried from speculators, if pressed even further—being an insulting gesture, and so an insulting finger, we can associate it loosely with all of the poetic ill-temper befit of a saturnine or melancholic disposition. Probably on account of all this modern nonsense did Paul Hamlyn lament in his fantastic volume on chiromantic practice that the middle finger "has always been the palmists' headache." So it seems.

 

Unsatisfied as we are with such a flimsy analysis, and irritated by its commonality, the reader will perhaps agree that such an argument ignores the large body of symbolic thinking, which we have just laid out. In his survey of the use of gesture in healing rituals, Herbert Fischer notes of the middle finger that a “vulgar literature had for definite reasons already degraded it to digitus infamis.” Although any investigation into what came before that degradation is absent his scope, we nevertheless find ourselves in accord with the sentiment. Surely there is more to the chiromantic association of the infamous finger with the philosophical picture of the spleen. Can we not say with conviction that both are taboo, and so some sympathetic linkage must persist between them the roots of which are buried in that soil? If there is, we would expect the middle finger to fit neatly into the foregoing tapestry of splenetick and melancholic symbolism so carefully curated by man of antiquity. And so we do.

 

Parallel to the traditional usage of the middle finger for a phallic insult, there are many traditions as well that hold both this dactyl and the phallus to be apotropaic symbols—of specific use in averting the evil eye. In Plutarch, we find the figure Patrocleas who explains the evil eye in this manner:

 

“Envy, which naturally roots itself more deeply in the mind than any other passion, contaminates the body too with evil. When those possessed by envy to this degree let their glance fall upon a person, their eyes, which are close to the mind and draw from it the evil influence of the passion, then assail that person as if with poisoned arrows; hence, I conclude it is not paradoxical or incredible that they should have an effect on the persons who encounter their gaze. … What I have said shows why the so-called amulets are thought to be a protection against envy; the strange look of them attracts the gaze, so that it exerts less pressure upon its victims.”

 

In his second satire, Persius briefly describes a woman concocting just such a charm to ward off the evil eye using the middle finger and saliva—which was also thought to have special potency in this respect. He writes that “with her middle finger, and propitiatory saliva, she [was] skilled at warding off that evil eye that withers …” 

 

Particularly vulnerable to the effects of the evil eye were children and infants. And so it was the case in Rome that many young children and adolescents would commonly wear necklaces hung with pendants fashioned in the shape of a phallus, or a winged phallus. Rings were also common, many having been discovered that are too small for the hand of an adult. Winged phalluses also adorned doorways and portals, and sometimes took the form of wind chimes (tintinnabula)—all in effort to distract and detract from the potency of the evil eye; so ubiquitous in the ancient world. The word ‘fascinate’ descends from the Latin name for these amulets and charms: The fascinus, on account of its power to captivate the evil eye. 

 

So we understand that the middle finger’s apotropaic usage was likely down to the fact that it shared a sympathetic form with the fascinus; it isn't difficult to imagine that should one have found himself the object of another’s hateful gaze, absent a charm, he might extend his middle finger in the form of the fascinus in response. After all, is this not how we today still use the middle finger—often in reply to hateful attention or a pointed and poisonous look? Or in other words, as if our intention was to ward against it? Taking this on board then, we must continue by questioning why it was that the phallus was believed to perform such a function at all, in the first place. 

 

Some relatively recent writers have even gone so far as to suggest the power of the fascinus over the evil eye was down to the ability of laughter and ridicule to neutralize ill intentions. And while this may prove a sufficient explanation for many a giddy modern reader, sporting an appreciable appetite for kitsch, it's the opinion of this author that it would be an entirely insufficient explanation for any learned man of antiquity--such was simply not his disposition. Whimsy has never belonged in the temple. No, there must be a qualitative mechanism; a certain inherence at play. Only on those grounds do symbolic ideas successfully persist through time even when a proper understanding of their purpose has long since passed out of mind. They must seem consistent, even to the uneducated observer. The mechanism of the fascinus and its relation to Saturn is, upon some reflection, most likely to be found in the agrarian origin of that deity. The phallic symbol is above all simply a symbol of life; of creation, generation, and propagation. In this sense, it is the natural enemy of the evil eye--of destruction, and of ruin, and of decay. The agrarian symbolism of Saturn must color the magical power of the fascinus, and thus naturally counteracts that which “withers.”

 

Before we move on to introducing the Saturnine dimension of our train of reasoning, recall that the Spleen was often characterized as an apotropaic organ, drawing off the black bile or melancholic substances from the body. In this sense, its microcosmic identification with the middle finger follows naturally, as the phallic symbol was independently a warding symbol against the evil eye. At times, then, the spleen was seen to draw off bad influence, or to be a bastard object itself (as in Aristotle), perhaps in a similar fashion to the way in which the katapygon has been interpreted both as insulting and protective in different contexts, and at different times.

 

 

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Saturn

 

Paul Hamlyn devotes some time in his brief treatment of the middle finger, toward separating the morbidity and the chaff from Victorian chiromantic ideas about Saturn. “Independently of his astrological trimmings,” he writes, “Saturn was the son of Coelus and Gaia, the Earth goddess, and was, in terms of mythology, largely instrumental in civilizing the people of Italy, introducing agriculture and various arts at a time when they were largely barbarians.” We find an accord between this agrarian picture of Saturn’s origin and the sedemintitious or ‘earthy’ nature of the black bile, and by extension the seat of Saturn in the body: The spleen. 

 

The name of Saturn has been subject to a considerable amount of philological speculation. The Latin Saturnus is thought most likely to be lent from the Etruscan satre, and been combined with the similar Latin formulation ‘satus,’ being a past participle of serere, or, ‘to sow.’ The issue, however, is that the long ‘a’ doesn’t seem to fit well with that particular root. Thus the suggestion becomes—reasonably enough—that it was combined with the Latin according to some mechanism. Regardless of the particulars it is a certainty that the character of this mythological figure was in his early days as Hamlyn notes: more or less agricultural. 

 

Because of this, we can begin to understand at a much broader level the meaning encoded in the myth of the castration of Ouranos by Kronos-Saturn. The fascinus is taken as a symbol for life; for procreation, for regeneration, quite literally that which imbues the earth with its vivifying principle or spiritus. Recall the Indo-European idea that in the union of man and woman, it is woman who provides the bodily clay—i.e. plays the role of Gaia—and it is the man in turn who provides the anima, the role of Ouranos. In suffering castration at the hands of Kronos-Saturn, we witness the divestment of the power to perpetuate the cycle of harvest, of season, of age, and at a most fundamental level to ensure the posterity of his people from Ouranos. Kronos-Saturn thus takes the mandate for himself, symbolically in the form of the fascinus, from which the mythological tradition tells us the first race of Titans were born. The story of Ouranos and Kronos is, therefore, clearly read as a prototype of the antagonism between the oculus malus and the fascinus. The middle finger is thus offered as one of many symbolic instantiations of the fascinus, and Saturn’s proper place as the ruler of that dactyl is clarified. 

 

As a final note, we will turn our attention to a strange but brilliant article which first appeared published pseudonymously by the Italian mathematician and esotericist Arturo Reghini, in 1927. Writing for the controversial UR Gruppo under the pseudonym Pietro Negri (assumed in nod to the 17th century painter of the same name), Reghini speculated on the origin of the name Saturn. He posits that the phoneme Sat- which, recall, is not properly explained even now by philological consensus, can be understood through linkage to the Sanskrit branch of the Proto-Indo-European tongue. What emerges is a striking philosophical thesis, which very well may lie at the root of the mountain of symbolism we have here endeavored to chart. Bear in mind here, at the close, the apparent ontological linkage between the agrarian Saturn, and the magical Fascinus. In the main thrust of his essay, Reghini writes:

 

“We have seen that the four ages of Greco-Latin antiquity correspond to the four yugas of Hinduism. An analogous correspondence is possible with the name of Saturnus. It does not involve the planet’s name, which in Sanskrit is shani and signifies “low,” being the lowest or most distant planet. Much more important to us is the correspondence with the Sanskrit designation of the golden age. The first of the four yugas happens to have two names, both interesting for our investigation. They are krta-yuga and satya-yuga. Krta-yuga is the perfect age (per-fectum, “made through and through”), from the root kra, “to make or complete,” from which, according to Curtius, the Greek name Kronos for Saturnus derives. Satya-yuga is the “good age,” the “true age.” The adjective satya, “true,” is connected to sat, “being,” and therefore “the real,” “the true.” Satya-yuga is the age of Sat, the age of “Being.” The affinity between satya and the German satyar is evident; Saeter-tag is the day of the true god, just as Donnerstag is the day of the thunder god. The Latin Sate-urnus, the German saeter, and the Etruscan satre must all indicate the true god … and as the Sanskrit suffix -ya joined to sat gives us the name of the golden age, so the Latin suffix -urnus united to Sat gives us the name of the golden Saturnus, king of the golden age.”

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end.