The difficult noun φρην (phren) originally, or most literally, described the lung(s) but in the overwhelming majority of its usages came to refer to a faculty of the mind, and specifically the imagined partition between the fluidic world of one's emotions and the dry land of one's words and rational thoughts — and rational thoughts are thoughts in words: deliberate, logical and constructive thoughts. Since one's emotions were considered seated in the belly (κοιλια, koilia), and the ratio in the chest or heart (καρδια, kardia), our noun φρην (phren) mostly corresponds to the function of the midriff. In the Greek classics this word occurs only once in singular and elsewhere (including the New Testament) always in plural, which indicates that it not so much emphasizes the mere existence of the midriff but rather its perpetual reciprocating motion.

The act of contracting the midriff pushes the bowels down and expands the chest cavity, and we breathe in. The opposite is achieved by relaxing the midriff, which allows the bowels and abdominal muscles to push it back up again. And this is a big deal because the Greek word for inhaling gave us the word for soul, namely ψυχη (psuche), while the word for exhaling gave us the word for spirit, namely πνευμα (pneuma). And that means that our noun φρην (phren) is a very important word indeed.

Emotions are grouped together with the senses, and we share all these with the animals, who, like humans, have emotional cores and mouths to absorb raw food and the senses to absorb raw data; all to feed the emotional self. Despite popular contentions to the contrary, all animals have awareness and a sense of symbolism or else a male fruit fly wouldn't mate with a female fruit fly. All animals are vocal and all have vocal symbols (proto-words) between them, but only humans are truly verbal and create their very world, their human beehive, their human anthill from words.

In English we speak of language fluidity, being fluent in a language, which is surprisingly spot on. All speech is fluent, but established words (as found in dictionaries) and definitions (as found in encyclopedias) are solids. Humans are defined as creatures that live in vast rational superstructures constructed from established words, formalized thought, standards, norms and all that. These human symbols are the bricks from which we build the world in which we live, and that's much less of a metaphor than it seems.

Our human world is nearly entirely synthetic. Nearly all the physical items and tangible materials you see around you were manufactured, and their manufacturing came as a result of many scientists and technicians trying to find ways to respond to the collective needs of the people, as expressed by their writers and poets, who in turn worked hard to capture the emotions that subliminally drove society and cast them into terms, phrases and figures of speech, which in turn congealed by the forces of the market until they became so established that they could be counted on and built upon and evoked by generations of builders to come. Not merely the speech with which we describe and experience our world, not merely the norms, styles and beliefs upon which we form our tribes, but also the literal bricks, cement and concrete, the steel, the plastic, the touch-screens and the satellites of our world were once mere void and formless desires that were hoisted up, cast into words, transacted and exchanged and finally materialized as constituents of our much better world.

Emotions are private and unique per person and relate to the soul, whereas the ratio is collective and the same for everybody and relates to the spirit. Language can only exist when everybody uses the same words and rules of grammar, which makes language entirely spiritual. But one's unique sentiments, even when their expression employs words, are soulical (and yes, that's a word). Science is the pursuit of consensus (and no, not the pursuit of "truth"), which makes it spiritual. Art is the pursuit of uniqueness, which makes it soulical.

Both soul (emotions, art, the self) and spirit (ratio, science, the collective) each have their own function, realm and governance, and although they support and feed each other, their separation must be guaranteed lest madness ensues. Madness ensues when an artistically conceived notion (true for me, fun for me, I am the center of the universe) is mistakenly considered to be scientific (true for everybody, fun for everybody, everybody sees me as the center of the universe and nothing else matters). The opposite, however is widely considered supremely virtuous: when we can derive our private identity wholly from whatever is true for everybody, when the self dies and is sown and bears fruit in the field of collectivity (John 12:24), when the walls of the self fall and the prisoners are released, when the cover of the pit is removed and the contents are released, when the dead rise, when the demons flee.

The relativity (that is: the how, the why and the effects of their relation) of the emotions and the ratio is arguably one of the most widely discussed topics in all of world literature and shows up literally everywhere, from Samson and Delilah and Elijah and the widow to Romeo and Juliet, Gatsby and Daisy, and even Star Trek's navigational array and cleverly named warp core and warp coils.

Although there is rarely a paint-by-number correlation, and these stories rarely review this über-narrative by its absolute extremes (discrete ratio versus discrete emotions) but rather often intermediate phases and half-way stations (ratio reflecting on feelings, and passion responding to law), these stories invariably not only discuss the proper division between soul and spirit but also their troubled communication and the ultimate objective of their seamless merger. And whether this inevitable merger results in death and wholesale destruction or else life and eternal glory depends largely on the quality and efficiency of their communication whilst still apart and courting. And that brings the focus back to our important word φρην (phren), which governs that courtship.

The ratio is solar (ηλιος, helios) and the emotions are lunar (σεληνη, selene), and their relativity is terrestrial (γη, ge). Earth in turn is heir to life, from its humble but Paradisical beginnings to the emergence of single-cellular collectivity, then multicellular intelligence, then society and finally an entire global population of souls both wholly united under the sun and wholly free under the moon.

That is, of course, if humanity will have been able to properly bridge the two realms, and the solar ratio has not only found the entrance to the lunar underworld, but actually gained access to it and found a way to retrieve its waters and bring it up to irrigate the fields. And all this without descending into madness, being blown to smithereens, being devoured by whatever lord of hell, or dying slowly but surely on a cross. And if these things are inevitable, then at least followed by the reassembly of his parts (as told in Egypt), being vomited back up by the beast (that's the Jonah variant), or resurrecting upon Passover.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake famously declared: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite". The Hebrew word for "door" is דלה (dala), which derives from the verb דלל (dalal), to hang, and relates to the noun דלי (deli), meaning bucket (hence the name Delilah; Samson means Solar-Man). In the Bible, the ratio and the emotions meet consistently at a well, and their point of intersection is consistently depicted as an iteration of the meta-narrative of the Woman At The Well, which runs from the patriarchal Rachel and Rebekah to the unnamed Samaritan lady whom Jesus encountered at Sychar (John 4:5).

It's officially a mystery where our noun φρην (phren) comes from (hence the curiously misnamed field of phrenology) but that's possibly also because the experts look for roots that have to do with either emotions or thought, whereas our word doesn't relate to either but to the transition between them. Since words are the bricks with which we moderns construct the buildings of our world, and our emotions are the proverbial "waters under the earth", here at Abarim Publications we surmise that our word shares its root with the noun φρεαρ (phrear), which describes a well and particularly an artificial well or cistern (see below).

Hence, we further propose that our noun φρην (phren) stems from a long lost verb φρεω (phreo), which described precisely the kind of transition that is achieved when drawing water from a subterranean reservoir and hoisting it up to the surface to be consumed. This verb is not present in the extant Greeks texts we have, but it does survive in the well-attested verbs διαφρεω (diaphreo), to let or bring through (hence our word diaphragm), εισφρεω (eisphreo), to let or bring in, and εκφρεω (ekphreo), to let or bring out.

Our noun φρην (phren) speaks of the membrane that keeps our emotions separate from our ratio, but which also supplies our rational faculties with a semi-constant stream of emotional water, to make mud, to make the bricks that are our words. Our noun φρην (phren) or rather its plural form φρηνες (phrenes) speaks of the word-making facility of our mind, which draws formless mass from our emotional core (which is private), casts it into a mold (which is cultural), and dries it in the sun of reason (which is collective). The brick that comes out may be a single word or an entire thematic paragraph, and is thus closely related to the Logos, or Word of God, which becomes an active character in the Bible in Genesis 15:1 in the ringing phrase: "Do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you" (perhaps, dare we say, like a ring of bricks around a well?).

The plural dative form of our noun is φρεσι (phresi), which in older texts is spelled as φρασι (phrasi), which obviously relates to the noun φρασις (phrasis), meaning speech, from which we get our word "phrase", and the verb φραζω (phrazo), to explain (see below).

A properly functioning φρην (phren) results in proper mental breathing, which in turn results in proper and precise speech. Proper speech may range from a pinpoint whisper to thundering rhetoric, and from a concise declaration of facts to an eloquently adorned presentation, but the effect of proper speech is always a building that supports its own weight, that remains standing after the builders have left, and may serve as an abode for generations to come. Proper speech does not contain muddy vocables (ehm, dum-dee-dum, tralala) or liquid vocal outburst (MUWAAAAH! OOOOYOYOYOY!). Particularly in children and less mature adults this membrane called φρην (phren) tends to be rather leaky, and the bucket with which the waters are drawn is often not big enough to contain the flow that comes howling out. When we sleep, this membrane is rolled up like a scroll, and our emotional and rational selves merge into the state we call dreams. This is why dreams are often speechless and only very rarely contain text.

In the Bible this membrane is depicted in the broadly attested meta-narrative that runs from the second-day firmament (Genesis 1:6) to the curtain between the emotional holy and the rational holy-of-holies (Matthew 27:51).

Our noun occurs a mere one time in the New Testament, namely in 1 Corinthians 14:20, but from it stems a stately array of derivations:

The noun φρεαρ (phrear) describes a manmade well or cistern, or perhaps more precise: the upper parts of it that sits atop the ground, the circular mantel of bricks, usually with a roof over the actual mouth and a bucket hanging from a rope. If wells and springs are natural formations, then the φρεαρ (phrear) is its artificial counterpart. The Hebrew equivalent of this word, namely עין ('ayin), both means well or fountain and eye, which indicates that the ancients understood that light comes from one's surroundings and enters the eye like water that comes up from a well and becomes incorporated into the dry land of one's mind. That means that the "lamp" that is one's eye shines inwardly into the mind, not outwardly into the surroundings (also see the verb נהר, nahar, meaning to flow, which is used to describe both the flowing of water in a river and light from a lamp; meaning that the ancients had a sense of what later would be called Relativity Theory).

As we describe above, here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the Biblical phenomenon of the man-made well relates to an artificial means to access the emotional depth of the human mind. The most obvious manifestation of this well is the Logos, of which any kind of writing system and thus any kind of writing may be a tributary (2 Timothy 3:16). All modern text derives from the alphabet, which was completed in the days of David (see our article on the name YHWH). What particular well the patriarchs dug isn't specifically given (Genesis 26:18), but it probably has to do with the concept of artificial selection that is also the foundation of all language and all science (Genesis 30:32, John 4:6).

Whatever mechanism is responsible for the frequent invasion of our rational selves by wild emotions, and how to control it if that were possible, in the Bible it's often reviewed in terms of the meta-narrative of The Woman At The Well (from Rachel to the Samaritan woman Jesus met). Joseph and Jeremiah went down the well, but came back out. So did Daniel, and he found lions there. At Bethesda the waters of the deep were stirred by a descending angel. John the Revelator saw locusts ascending, and they had hair like women and teeth like lions (Revelation 9:1-2).

The noun φρεαρ (phrear) — and we propose the noun φρην (phren) as well — stems from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root "brehwr", meaning well or source, and to boil or be hot. In Latin this root became the familiar verb ferveo, to boil or be hot, hence our English words fervent and fervor. The same root gave us the English verbs to burn and to brew. Alternatively (and this is a private hunch from us here at Abarim Publications), these words may correspond to the Hebrew verb פרר (parar), to split or divide (and be part of a set of Greek words that are actually Hebrew).

In the New Testament, our noun φρεαρ (phrear), well or cistern, occurs 7 times; see full concordance.

The verb φραζω (phrazo) means to put to words, to verbalize, to explain (Matthew 13:36 and 15:15 only). The New Testament is filled with explaining but this verb is used only twice, which indicates that it describes not a general form of explaining but rather more specifically: to translate a series of verbal images into verbal prose. Our verb obviously relates to the unused noun φρασις (phrasis), meaning speech, from which also stems the English word "phrase". Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that these words in turn stem from φρασι (phrasi), the older spelling of φρεσι (phresi), the dative plural of φρην (phren), the figurative mental midriff that keeps the emotions separate from the ratio, and which supplies the mind's word-forming faculty with emotional water (see the discussion above).

The verb φρασσω (phrasso) means to enclose with a fence or wall, and although experts report difficulty in explaining the origins of this verb, here at Abarim Publications we're confident it fits right into the cluster presented on this page. Our verb tells of the building of a circular wall around a well and relates to the nouns φρεαρ (phrear), well of cistern, φρασις (phrasis), speech, and ultimately φρην (phren), midriff. It occurs in Romans 3:19, 2 Corinthians 11:10 and Hebrews 11:33 only, consistently in the pseudo-figurative sense of curtailing speech and the muzzling of lions. From this verb derives:

The noun φραγελλιον (phragellion) means whip or scourge (John 2:15 only). Its similarity to the previous (the noun φραγμος, phragmos, enclosing wall), is accidental but perhaps not without significance or profundity to a creative Greek poet — which means that its adoption into Greek may have been helped along by imagined implications, particularly in light of the Roman domination of the Greek speaking world.

Our noun φραγελλιον (phragellion) transliterates the common Latin noun flagellum, which denotes a relatively small whip, like an equestrian whip for frequent small impulses, and is a diminutive form of flagrum, a full-sized Indiana Jones bull whip. These words stem from a rather poorly attested PIE root "bleh-" that appears to have denoted a general swinging or whipping motion: an incessant to-and-fro that causes a volley of sharp sensations purposed to bring about change of course or action in some large animal or herd thereof. Whether our word "flag" comes from the same root is not formally known, but that merely means that formal linguists have found no rule that would prove this. More intuitive language users may note the link as something that couldn't be more obvious (also see our article on the verb καμπτω, kampto, to curve or bend, that may have something to do with the Hebrew noun מפה, mapah, flag or banner), but those same intuitive speakers may also relate these words to the verb to flog, which evidently stems from another PIE root, namely plehg-, to beat. Also note that the zebub-part of the name Baal-zebub comes from a verb that means to aimlessly zig-zag or move to-and-fro.

Even more striking, however, is the associated Latin verb flagitare, which doesn't simply mean to whip but rather to (forcefully) demand (some victor of spoils, an official of his dues, legionnaires of their pay) or even accuse (in the sense of to drag someone to court) or to tempt or incite (unexpecting innocents into acts of lewdness). That means that the emphasis of our noun lies not on the physical qualities of a whip but rather on the practical usage of it, or better yet: the effect of its use, namely to make a big lumpy beast go somewhere willfully (or semi-voluntarily, under its own propulsion) or do something it wouldn't have done on its own, by causing it to experience a during series of negative sensations from which it naturally wants to remove itself. That means that our noun rather literally describes a "mind-changer" or "will-bender", a thing unlike a chisel or sword but rather alike a goad or prod or even a sharp word: a shout or scolding or name-calling (see for a close parallel the verb λοιδορεω, loidoreo, to revile or verbally abuse).

This in turn sheds additional light on the enigmatic story of the widow and the godless judge (as told in Luke 18:1-8: our words are not used here), in which the judge is the big lumbering beast and the widow the incessant whip-wielder who gets her way in the end. The pun, of course, is that many of the contemporary pagan traditions of the time imagined their gods to be whippable bovines (bulls, cows, calves), who they would entreat ad nauseam for perks and favors (see 1 Kings 18:1-40 for a lengthy discussion of this category of pagan religions, and note that Baal means Lord: see Matthew 6:7 and 7:21). The theology of the Abrahamic covenant works precisely the other way around: God is permanent and we humans are poked and prodded so as to learn the natural laws upon which the universe works, so that we may dwell in that universe in all the freedom it has to offer. Pre-Abraham, we the people whip the deity who won't budge. In Abraham, we the people whip ourselves, so as to learn God's ways and assume his divinity. Pre-Abraham, people seek to dominate positively everything, even the gods, so as to become the leader of the world. In Abraham, people seek to serve and become one with all, including God. The Romans, with their sickening desire to dominate, are obviously pre-Abrahamic, and their whipping will alter everything except the fact that they will always lose from God and be defeated by the godly.

The idea that many small impulses bring about a single unified effect is very common in the Bible. It's the working principle of the idea that the indivisible nature of God is caried by a multitude of godly ones (John 17:21-23, Ephesians 4:3-6). It is also fundamental to the idea that a single and unified Law is the effect of many individual rules (see the name Torah), or that the great Highway of God comes about from many feet shuffling wherever they happen to go (see our article on the word τριβος, tribos, smoothness).

An important equivalent of our noun is the native Greek word μαστιξ (mastix), also meaning whip and also accompanied by a set of associations and poetic implications. From our noun φραγελλιον (phragellion), whip, derives:

The verb φρουρεω (phroureo) means to keep guard or keep in check, which is not unlike the verb φρασσω (phrasso) and rather similar in form to the noun φρεαρ (phrear), the brick enclosure of a well. This verb is used 4 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

The verb φρυασσω (phruasso) means to overflow or boil over: to make vocal noise that does not consist of words (Acts 4:25 only). In our modern world this verb describes immature or uncivilized behavior, but in an evolutionary sense, it marks a step up from having no speech whatsoever and a beginning of modulating vocal patterns that would eventually congeal into real words. This verb is clearly related to the noun φρεαρ (phrear), well, which in turn has a strong patriarchal association to it. The name of both the brother and grandfather of Abraham is Nahor, which means to snort vigorously.