(hey there-- I've been peeking in at your LJ linked from Boutell's from time to time.)
...yeah, there is a pretty long-standing association of the spirit/soul with the element of Air, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks etc.-- iirc there's some weird and widely-scattered folklore about beans based on the same reasoning, such as the Pythagorean taboo on eating beans because they contained ancestors' spirits and Eilonwy's brief comment (in one of Lloyd Alexander's Welsh-influenced "Prydain" series) that you can get rid of ghosts by spitting beans at them, the latter of which is similar to the Setsubun festival in Japan which banishes oni demon-ogres by throwing beans at them. (Because after all, when you *eat* beans, they may tend to produce excess internal air pressure....)
But back to textual interpretation, surely it would've been enough to cite the original Greek hagion pneuma?
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ninetydegrees
Re: On the Trinity
on 2007-08-26 09:02 pm (UTC)...yeah, there is a pretty long-standing association of the spirit/soul with the element of Air, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks etc.-- iirc there's some weird and widely-scattered folklore about beans based on the same reasoning, such as the Pythagorean taboo on eating beans because they contained ancestors' spirits and Eilonwy's brief comment (in one of Lloyd Alexander's Welsh-influenced "Prydain" series) that you can get rid of ghosts by spitting beans at them, the latter of which is similar to the Setsubun festival in Japan which banishes oni demon-ogres by throwing beans at them. (Because after all, when you *eat* beans, they may tend to produce excess internal air pressure....)
But back to textual interpretation, surely it would've been enough to cite the original Greek hagion pneuma?