Narcissus

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Narcissus is the youth of Greek myth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and, unable to leave it, wasted away and died — giving his name to the flower said to have sprung up where he lay, and to the modern word for self-absorption.

The story survives most fully in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, written around the turn of the Common Era, though it was older than his telling. In Ovid’s version Narcissus is a beautiful boy who spurns every lover who comes to him, among them the nymph Echo, who can only repeat the last words spoken to her and so cannot make herself understood; rejected, she fades until nothing remains but her voice. The spurned then pray that Narcissus might one day love and be denied as they were. The prayer is answered when he leans over a still pool, sees his own face, and is caught — taking the image for another person, reaching for it, and never grasping it. He dies fixed there, and in place of his body the narcissus flower is found. Earlier Greek sources give variant shapes to the tale; the cruel symmetry of a beauty undone by his own reflection is the constant.

The figure acquired a second life in philosophy. In the treatise on beauty in the first of his Enneads, the third-century philosopher Plotinus invokes Narcissus as a warning: the soul that chases the beauty of bodies, mistaking reflections for the real, is like the youth who reached into the water after an image and sank. For Plotinus, sensible things are images of a higher beauty, and to grasp at them as if they were that beauty is to plunge into the depths and be lost in matter, the soul drowning in what it took for solid. The way out runs the other direction — back toward the source of which the visible world is only the reflection. Later Neoplatonists and the readers who carried their thought into Christian and esoteric writing kept this gloss, in which the myth reads as a compressed parable of the soul’s descent and the danger of taking appearances for the truth they merely picture.

The two registers rarely meet cleanly. The myth as the poets tell it is a story about beauty, longing, and a death; the philosophical reading turns it into a diagram of the soul. Modern scholarship treats the moralizing interpretation as a later overlay rather than the tale’s original meaning — Plotinus put the lesson there, drawing on a much older Platonic suspicion of the image. The allegory is genuinely his, and genuinely a reading; the boy at the water’s edge was, first, only a boy who could not look away.

→ In the library: Plotinus — Enneads I.6 'Beauty' (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Gnosis · Oedipus