Brian M Chapman: Writer, Author

Blood, Bones and Neurons

Symbolic Alignment of Logos–Bone, Eros–Blood, and Thanatos–Neuron

Understanding the triad Logos–Bone, Eros–Blood, Thanatos–Neuron requires a journey through myth, philosophy, psychology, and symbolism. Each pairing evokes a rich archetypal image: Logos (the Word, reason, ordering principle) corresponds to Bone (structure, foundation, enduring form); Eros (love, life-force, passion) corresponds to Blood (life’s fluid, passion, kinship); and Thanatos (death, the end, the death-instinct) corresponds to Neuron (the mind, awareness, the brain’s signals). Across cultures and disciplines, we find echoes of these alignments strengthening this trinity of meaning. Below is a cross-disciplinary exploration of these symbolic correlations, citing mythic narratives, philosophical insights, depth psychology, mysticism, anatomy, neuroscience, and literature that resonate with each pairing.

Logos and Bone: Structure, Word, and the Skeleton of Meaning

Logos, in Greek thought, signifies the Word or divine reason that gives order to chaos. Bone, as the skeleton, provides the rigid structure that upholds the living body. Across myth and mysticism, bones often symbolize the indestructible essence or framework that endures when softer matter (flesh, emotions) falls away. In Ezekiel’s biblical vision, a valley of dry bones is revived when the prophet speaks God’s word over them – “Ezekiel was to tell the bones that God would make breath enter them and they would come to life.” At his proclamation, “the bones came together, flesh developed… breath entered the bodies, and they stood up”

gotquestions.org. Here the Logos (divine word) literally reconstitutes bones into living structure, underscoring how meaning or spirit can animate the bare framework of life. A similar theme appears in folklore such as the story of La Loba (Wolf Woman) told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés: the crone gathers the bones of dead creatures and sings over them to resurrect them. “She searches the desert for dry bones. Upon finding them, she sings over the bones, and they spring back to life. The bones represent the dead and dried-up parts of ourselves”delightedowl.com. The creative Logos – the song or story – breathes life into the skeletal remains, a powerful metaphor for the rejuvenation of the spirit from the most bare-bones essence of self.

Mythology often uses bones to denote the lasting cosmic order. In Norse creation myth, for example, the primordial giant Ymir is sacrificed and the world is built from his body: “Out of Ymir’s flesh was fashioned the earth, and the mountains were made of his bones… and the ocean out of his blood”

en.wikipedia.org. The giant’s bones become mountains, the stable structure of the world, much as Logos provides a stable structure to reality. His blood becomes the sea, foreshadowing the link between blood and the life-giving waters (an Eros theme). Likewise, in alchemical symbolism the principle of Salt – one of the tria prima or three essentials – was identified with the body or fixed structure that remains after death. Alchemists saw Salt as “the physical ‘body’ which remains after combustion, the corporeal substance that survives death to reinaugurate new life… the fulcrum of death and revivification”aaroncheak.com. We can analogize Salt to bones: the ashes or bones left behind form the basis for renewal. This resonates with Logos, as Logos is that which endures and gives form even when life energies recede.

Philosophically, Logos has long been associated with form, order, and rational structure, which mirrors the role of the skeleton. The Greek Stoics imagined the Logos as the rational principle pervading the cosmos, much like an underlying skeleton. In Jungian psychology, Logos is the archetypal masculine principle of discrimination and understanding, often contrasted with Eros. Jung noted that historically “from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos… Logos as objective interest,” whereas Eros is the relational, connective principle

jungiancenter.org. Logos in this sense “separates what Eros binds” – it distinguishes, categorizes, and upholds structure. This aligns with bone as something solid, separate and distinct (one bone from another), giving shape to an otherwise formless flesh. We even use phrases like “the bare bones of an argument” to mean the essential structure of ideas – a direct linguistic echo of Logos–Bone symbolism. In the arts, the Apollonian impulse (as described by Nietzsche) corresponds to reason, form, and plastic beauty – Apollo is the god of sculpture and measure, who “stands for reason… order, wisdom”courses.aynrand.org. We might see Apollo’s marble statues as embodiments of logos in bone-like stone, delineating clear form. Taken together, these threads show Logos–Bone as the synergy of idea and form: the Word that structures and the skeleton that speaks (in its endurance) – a pairing that appears from holy scripture to psychological theory to everyday metaphors.

Eros and Blood: Life Force, Passion, and the Flow of Life

Eros represents love, desire, and the generative life-force. Its alignment with Blood is intuitively potent: blood is the warm, pulsing fluid without which life ceases, often associated with passion (“hot-blooded”), kinship (“blood ties”), and sacrifice. Many traditions explicitly equate blood with life and soul. In the Hebrew Bible, it is stated outright that “the life of the flesh is in the blood”

biblehub.com. This ancient notion, that blood carries the essence of life (the animating soul or nephesh), underlies religious rituals from the blood offerings of Leviticus to the Christian Eucharist where wine symbolizes the blood of Christ (imbibing it grants spiritual life). Eros as life-energy thus finds a natural symbol in blood, the literal life-energy flowing in our veins.

Mythic narratives reinforce this symbolism by using blood to spark creation or renewal. A vivid example comes from Aztec mythology: the god Quetzalcóatl descends to the underworld to rescue the bones of previous generations of humanity, and then revives them by adding his own blood. He “created mankind from the bones of the previous races… using his own blood… to imbue the bones with new life.”

en.wikipedia.org. This scene powerfully fuses bone and blood to engender life – the bones (structure) needed the divine blood (life-force) to become living humans. Quetzalcóatl’s act is essentially an Eros act – a loving sacrifice to create life – with blood as the medium of resurrection. We see a similar motif in the Greek Dionysian rites: Dionysus, god of wine and ecstatic life, was mythically dismembered and reborn, and his worshippers honored him with wine (often likened to blood) and animal sacrifice. The flowing of blood or wine in Dionysian ritual released a frenzy of life and passion, symbolizing Eros unleashed. Dionysus stands in contrast to Apollo (Logos) – where Apollo is bone-dry reason, Dionysus is wet blooded passion. Fittingly, Nietzsche wrote that Dionysus represents “irrationality and chaos… passion, emotions and instincts”en.wikipedia.org, as symbolized by wine’s rush. The blood of the grape had for the Greeks the same life-affirming, erotic charge as literal blood in other cultures.

In psychology, Sigmund Freud famously identified Eros as the life instinct – encompassing sexual drives, creativity, and the will to live – in opposition to Thanatos, the death instinct. “Eros is the drive toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives”

en.wikipedia.org. Eros in Freudian thought keeps us wanting to grow, to connect, to generate new life and art. This notion gels with the symbolism of blood: blood carries oxygen and nutrients to every cell, sustaining growth and vitality. We might say the libido itself “courses” through the psyche like blood through the body. Depth psychologists have often noted that images of blood in dreams can signify vital energy or passion returning to the dreamer’s life. For example, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that a dream of bleeding can mean the psyche is releasing repressed emotional energy – a painful but necessary outpouring of life-force. Thus, Eros–Blood is a natural coupling in the symbolic imagination: both represent life, love, and connectivity. Blood ties bind family; erotic love binds individuals; social or spiritual love binds communities (often through blood pacts or sacred blood in ritual). As Jung observed, “the principle of Eros is the great binder and loosener”, uniting that which was apartjungiancenter.org – just as blood circulates to integrate the whole body.

It’s worth noting the sacrificial aspect of blood as well, because love and life often require sacrifice. In many myths the fertility of the land is restored by the spilling of noble blood (the slaying of a king or god). The archetype of the sacrificial lover – from Jesus to Osiris to Odin hanging on the tree – involves blood that nourishes others. In Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail containing Christ’s blood brings healing and eternal life to those who find it, a motif of Eros (divine love) overcoming the wasteland of death. In literature, passions of love are frequently intertwined with blood and mortality – Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have their “blood wedding” in death, and the phrase “blood runs hot” marks the fever of youthful love. All these examples reinforce Eros–Blood as the warm, red thread of life and love, celebrated for its generative power but also acknowledged for the vulnerability and sacrifice that love so often entails.

Thanatos and Neuron: Death, the Mind, and the Shadow of Mortality

Thanatos, the Greek personification of Death, symbolizes the drive toward dissolution, silence, and entropy – what Freud called the death drive. Pairing Thanatos with the Neuron (brain cell) highlights the role of the mind and nervous system in both the awareness of death and the execution of the death principle. Unlike other symbols which might externalize death (a skull, a scythe, bones), the neuron is an inner agent – it suggests that death is also a process or concept generated within the psyche. Modern psychology and neuroscience indeed support this link: the human brain is what allows us to comprehend our mortality. As anthropologist Ernest Becker argued, “Unlike other animals, humans are uniquely aware of their own mortality, which creates an existential burden”

johnstoszkowski.com. This existential dread – an intellectual and emotional response to the idea of death – is a product of our large brains (billions of neurons modeling past and future). Thanatos “lives” in the mind as much as in the graveyard; our neurons continually grapple with it, whether in the form of fear, denial, or sometimes a morbid fascination. Philosophers from Socrates onwards noted that consciousness of death profoundly shapes human behavior. Socrates even claimed that practicing philosophy is “learning to die” – implying that the rational mind (Logos) must come to terms with Thanatos as an ever-present truth.

In Freudian depth psychology, Thanatos is the counter-force to Eros. While Eros strives to create and connect, “the death drive… is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through aggression, repetition, and self-destructive behavior”

en.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org. Freud postulated that living organisms have an unconscious wish to return to an inorganic, tensionless state – essentially to dissolve back into non-being. This manifests not only as literal suicidal behavior or risk-taking, but also in subtle ways like sabotaging ourselves or repeating traumas (the repetition compulsion). Notably, these dark impulses originate in the mind’s depths – in the psyche which is rooted in our neural system. We can thus see Thanatos–Neuron as the destructive or entropic tendency arising within the very wiring of our brain. Neurobiologically, one might associate Thanatos with the “freeze” or shutdown responses mediated by the nervous system under extreme stress, or the pathways of aggression and fear in the amygdala and hypothalamus. In fact, cutting-edge neuroscience has found that the brain’s centers for aggression and for sex are closely linked, even interchangeable under certain conditions. Studies in mice have identified neurons in the hypothalamus that can switch an animal from mating behavior to killing behavior with minor changes in stimulationsciencedaily.comsciencedaily.com. The same region (the VMH, ventromedial hypothalamus) contains circuits that, when activated one way, trigger mating (an Eros function), and when activated another way, trigger violent aggression (a Thanatos function). Such findings intriguingly suggest that the brain contains a built-in toggle between love and death impulses – a literal neural locus for Eros and Thanatos. The neuron, then, is not only the seat of consciousness and rational Logos, but also the mediator between our deepest life urges and death urges.

From an anatomical perspective, the neuron’s demise is the ultimate signature of death. In medicine, brain death – defined as the irreversible cessation of all brain/brainstem function – “is the clinical and legal determination of death”

theautopsybook.com. No matter if the heart still beats with artificial support, when the neurons stop firing, the person is considered gone. This reinforces a symbolic truth: Thanatos claims us through the brain, through the snuffing of the mind’s light. Culturally we see this in how death is often portrayed as a loss of self or consciousness (the “soul leaving the body”) – the body may become bone, but the person is gone when the brain no longer animates it. Mystical traditions echo this: many speak of a “second death” which is the death of one’s earthly mind or ego, as opposed to just the body. The neuron (mind) is the last bulwark against Thanatos; when it goes quiet, the Logos and Eros of a person recede as well.

Archetypally, Thanatos has a paradoxical relationship with Logos and Eros. Some philosophies (e.g. certain strains of Buddhism or Gnosticism) see the drive toward transcendence or nothingness as a spiritual goal – a kind of Thanatos in holy form – which must be balanced with love and understanding. The creative process often requires a “death” (of old ideas, of ego) to give birth to new forms, tying Thanatos to Eros in an endless cycle. Literature frequently explores this triadic interplay. For instance, Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice explicitly weaves Logos, Eros, and Thanatos together. Its protagonist Aschenbach is a disciplined author (a man of Logos) who becomes infatuated (overpowered by Eros) with a beautiful youth, and this unbridled passion leads him to decay and death (Thanatos). As one analysis describes, Aschenbach’s “Apollonian life-form collapses” when he surrenders to Dionysian Eros, and he “succumbs to the Dionysian frenzy” that ultimately destroys him

kci.go.kr. Mann deliberately invokes Greek myth (the struggle of Apollo vs Dionysus) to show how the rational structure of a life can be undone by erotic obsession, ending in literal death. This story is a poignant example of how intimately Thanatos and Eros dance in the human psyche, with the mind (here an intellectual’s mind) as both the battleground and the casualty.

In summary, the Thanatos–Neuron alignment highlights the internal, mental nature of the death principle. It reminds us that death is not only a physical event but also a psychological reality – a force that lives in our thoughts, fears, and even instincts. Our neurons generate nightmares of death but also, in facing Thanatos, generate philosophy, art, and spiritual insight. As much as Eros (Blood) gives us the zeal to live, Thanatos (the shadow in the Neurons) gives depth and urgency to that life, inspiring reflection and wisdom. And between them, giving form to both, stands Logos (Bone) – the structural principle that can articulate both the ecstasy of Eros and the silence of Thanatos into meaningful expression. Together, this trinity of Logos, Eros, and Thanatos – mapped onto Bone, Blood, and Neuron – provides a compelling framework through which humans have tried to understand the structure of existence (bone/earth), the gift of life (blood/water), and the inevitability of death (neuron/air of the mind). Each domain – mythology, mysticism, anatomy, psychology – offers its own metaphors, but strikingly, they all converge on this same triad, affirming its archetypal power in the human experience.

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