Moderns tend to focus on mechanics and abstractions, leading to a focus on the heart and the head/brain. We denigrate emotions and try to ignore them, but if we attend to them we notice that they primarily arise, or are felt, in the gut.
Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear.
This alone would be reason enough for hepatocentrism.
That reasoning would only be bolstered by knowledge of the liver’s regenerative abilities, its high-desirability to meat-eating predators, its size and weight, its mysterious structural homogeneity (at a macroscopic level), and its visible response (upon inspection) to a life of health or sickness and abuse.
You're right that we have a different web of concepts and emphasize different abstractions than other cultures did, but this bit paints a really misleading picture of who we're talking about and how sophisticated their ideas were:
> Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear.
There's very little difference in the amount of "knowledge" between any two cultures, or really even between any two people. One culture's collective knowledge may be more reliable or more demonstrated or more productive (by some measure), but everybody's always walking around with a head 100% full of knowledge.
It's a mistake to think that Mesopotamians, Babylonians, and Greeks were "surviving by intuition" under "some low-level feeling of fear". Like us, they were building huge cities with complex trade networks and economies, with obscene bureaucratic processes and people so specialized in craft and work that their whole lives were committed to studying or teaching or keeping account balances in order.
They had rich, interwoven systems of knowledge, and the ancient Greeks in particular fancied mechanics and abstractions much the way we do -- a similarity that exists largely because we openly modeled much of modernity on their culture.
When hepatocentrism prevailed among the Greeks, it wasn't in the context of some scared, emotionally volatile people making do in caves beset by tigers and lions or something. It was in the context of highly educated urbanized people drawing sensible conclusions based on what their culture happened to emphasize in its own web of thoroughly mechanical and abstract concepts.
Some of your suggestions about what facts they were integrating are probably right and many of them are fun to speculate about, but whatever they were, they were being fit into a much more elaborate and abstract schema than you're giving credit to. These were not inbred bumpkins or wild primates making cute guesses and enshrining them in mysterious lore. They were scientists and physicians living and studying in ways not all that differently than our own, and their discoveries were being encoded into myth by the esteemed, committed poets among their aristocracy in much the same way that screenwriters and novelists work modern knowledge into their stories.
Edit/tldr: my original comment concerned the foundation of or the seed of the historic belief of hepatocentrism rather than the reasoning or knowledge held by those whose writings were influenced by or regarding hepatocentrism once it was already established.
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I don’t particularly disagree with your response, but I think you’ve really read into what I was saying and so misrepresent my points. That’s probably my fault since I wrote it quickly.
To hopefully help clarify (but again quickly, since I’m only here to procrastinate and my low-level feelings of fear are growing unpleasant.):
In regard to their distractions and knowledge, I’m simply pointing out that they did not have today’s specific knowledge of human physiology and functioning. This would allow them to speculate further in other directions beyond the interests and areas of focus we have today that have been deemed logical and correct. And they did not have as many ready sources of information to distract them or to assure them that there was nothing more to learn. Sure, perhaps they were blind to this as we are, and so the relative effect would be much the same. But, there was still a quantitative difference in information and sources. And there were certainly branches of the knowledge or paths of specualtion that had not yet been cut off as some are today.
By “ancients”, I include prehistoric man, whose feeling and thoughts would serve as the foundation for historical man’s own ideas and writings. I don’t mean to suggest that they were dumb or anything like that; only that they, without written word, would be more sense-oriented rather than concept-oriented.
And in regard to “low-level feelings of fear”, I do not mean this to be inferior to overt conscious thought and reasoning. In fact, I think we fail all too often to attend to these feelings today and it harms us. These low-level feelings, fear or otherwise, still guide us today. We just don’t notice it as much and prefer to believe we move forward with logical plans rather than intuitive drives.
When I think of this I wonder how absolutely incredible an octopuses experience of life must be.
We have neurons in our guts that act as a second brain, and that leads to all sorts of funny feelings and conflicts; the octopus has neurons embedded through all its limbs. Truly otherworldly
Also in Turkish. "Canım ciğerim" (my beloved, my liver) is a term of friendly affection. Also when we want to say something like "I know what kind of person you are and what you are up to!" we say "ciğerini bilirim" which literally means "I know your liver" / "I know how your liver is like". One more: "ciğersiz" (liverless) is an insult for a person who wrongs you, schemes behind you, does not help you when you are in need, ungrateful etc.
The origin of this meaning is very similar, but hati means either heart or liver depending on the context. With heart probably being a more common way that it is used.
Tbh after a neuropharm PhD - Hepatocentrism makes more sense than cardiocentrism at the very least. Everything happens in the liver to some degree, more than the "toxin remediation" metaphor its closer to "the entire chemicals and materials industry"
Catch 22 put it better of course,
> "... But come to us with a liver complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a large, ugly mystery to us. If you’ve ever eaten liver you know what I mean. We’re pretty sure today that the liver exists and we have a fairly good idea of what it does whenever it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Beyond that, we’re really in the dark. After all, what is a liver?"
Like if we have to choose some Centrism at all,
- heart and lung are important to maintain continuous service, but can be replaced with a dumb pump and sparger basically
- brains tend to overhype their own importance but the rest of the body can keep running *okay* for a while with lots of the brain removed (I.e "brain dead but still living")
- kidneys, replace w dialysis, OK enough
- liver, cannot be substituted except for transplants, body just doesn't work with it gone
Personally I'd go for a digestive centric view:
- in principle it kind of separates multicellular animals ... You have to be 3d to contain a double ended open tube
- the intestine/stomach is our daily bargain with death so to speak, to prolong our own life by devouring other life
- *digestion is highly responsive to autonomic arousal*, I.e. emotional qualia. Think of the stomach feeling metaphors of love, fear, rage, anticipation ...
- in fact many emotions are best described *in terms of* their digegstive qualia
- Digestive stuff is quite highly innervated, read about the neurobiology of guts for a great rabbit hole
- etc.
- and finally "guts" is already culturally establishrd, "gut feeling" "trust your gut" "has guts" etc
I noticed when watching lions/tigers/bears in nature documentaries killing an animal, they don't eat muscle meat, they go immediately for the organs (liver, heart, etc). It's the "second-tier" predators like coyotes and hyenas that eat the muscles.
Then I read about Native Americans (and many other cultures) prioritizing consuming the liver above all other organs and started to get curious.
Also, I can personally confirm that alcohol is damaging to the soul---not merely the body.
Hercule Poirot (in "The Cornish Mystery"): "Hein, the pancreas is nothing. Of the digestive organs, the liver is the key. Look after the liver and life will take care of itself."
(I have cut my alcohol to 2 drinks per week to look after my liver - still looking forward to life taking care of itself!)
Funny, i went from the typical culturally alcoholic or at the very least binge drinking Brit to having a drink only when ‘forced’ to by circumstances which equates to one or two pints every few years when I visit Liverpool, my birthplace.
I feel culturally American now though and huge part of that is feeling alienated, pressured and ridiculed when back in the UK because of my refusal of alcohol.
I don’t even talk about it or ‘holier than thou’ about it or even care at all about others drinking but many people back there see it as a personal insult if I choose not to drink. Even if i sneak a Shandy or 0% beer.
So weird to me now but I was fully part of that culture until aged 28. I even remember ‘jokingly’ bullying people into drinking to excess.
I’m now 46 and have been in the USA since 2005 full time.
When I was in high school, we read the Canterbury Tales. In "The Wife of Bath's Tale," a knight violates a young woman. He is described as having a "lusty liver."
> All of these terms, including the Anglo‐Saxon word “lifere,” seem to closely resemble the English verb “to live,” underscoring the relation of the liver to life in populations influenced by the Celtic culture.
Except that "liver" (etc) and "life" have no etymological relationship, so this coincidence can't have anything to do with Germanic culture, much less Celtic(?!) culture.
It’s pretty surprising that they believed this. The heart is very obviously thumping in your chest, and it’s very easy to notice that the (visible) veins in your wrists, neck and thighs are pulsing at the same rate.
It just seems like a more obvious “center” for an ancient person; the mechanics are so easily detectable from the outside, while the liver sits silently.
I think that's at least partially a view that's obvious because we now consider the heart the "center" of the body. The lungs are obviously expanding as you breath, your stomach obviously digests your food into what becomes you, blows to the head cause mental issues so it's obvious that the brain is used to think.
Meanwhile there's this huge organ in your chest with a non-obvious purpose, I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone to claim it holds your soul or something.
Agreed. We put the things we want to believe, but don't have evidence for, in places where we have the least evidence lying around to contradict them. It's why there's a woo woo subculture that uses words like "quantum" in dubious ways.
Not only that but the heart rate changes with your breathing, physical activity, thoughts, emotions ... I want to say it "has the pulse" but that sounds like a corny literal use of the expression.
In more old folk belief in middle east for example; heart, liver and stomach have different emotions associated with them. Liver is attachment and grief, heart is excitement and love, stomach is contentment, frustration, anger. Growing up in the region I have these associations too. These are often from old medicine like the works of Ibn Sina, who mostly recited ancient Greek, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese doctrins.
I still recall when my sister worked as a medical secretary for a gastroenterologist she brought home a pamphlet "Be Kind To Your Liver". It's crazy how little people know of their liver; fatty liver, acetaminophen toxicity, ethanol processing via dehydrogenase of males vs females.
Gastroenterologist are a funny and good natured bunch my sister's boss would say "Poop is my bread and butter".
"Hepatocentrism was a medical doctrine that considered the liver the center of the whole human being."
Puts a different light on prometheus's punishment. His liver devoured by eagle and then grown back to be devoured again. It's like his soul/essence is reborn or reincarnated daily to be destroyed again.
What is interesting is that the liver is one of the few human organs which are really able to regrow after an injury.
Therefore even if this may be just a coincidence that the legend of Prometheus includes the periodic regrowth of his liver after being wounded, there is also the possibility that some ancient people were aware of some cases of liver regeneration, though it is not clear how they could have discovered that.
Warfare may have helped. When you see often enough some injuries and how people recover (or not) from them, some may see patterns and intuit recovery mechanism:
- Injuries to the lungs aren't always fatal but patients tend to have lasting breathing problems.
- Liver injuries... hmmm, make your eyes turn yellowish, and it seems like those who come from the region where they drink hot water with some plant inside tend to fare better than those who don't, and if you survive, eyes return to normal and you can make a full recovery.
It was more a referende to the act of boiling water. The observer at that point might not yet know if it's just a correlation or not. Just gathering information.
I have written my previous comment before reading the complete article, but the article does not contradict it.
The article says that there have also been several other authors who have speculated like me that the Greeks might have been aware of the regeneration ability of the liver.
The article continues to say that they do not believe that this was possible.
I agree that it is very unlikely that they were aware of liver regeneration, but it was not impossible.
At that time, they would have seen very frequently wounds to the liver, from spears, arrows or swords. Most of the wounded would have died due to infections but some of them would have survived and recovered.
The unlikely element is only the conclusion that their liver had regenerated, because it is unlikely that their corpses would have been dissected after death, to examine their livers. Nevertheless, in Egypt the viscera were removed before mummification. Therefore it is possible that some Egyptians could have noticed cases of liver regeneration and this knowledge could have been passed to some Greeks.
Even so, they might have thought that the cases of liver regeneration are an exception that can happen only with the help of gods, because most liver wounds must have been fatal, due to infections or blood loss.
I’m not sure if you are serious about this argument or using it as a rhetorical one for purposes of a historical argument, given GP’s context.
Regardless, I would hope that onlookers do not believe in these ideas scientifically because we know an lot about the liver and it’s place within the body.
> The liver is the store of your Emotions.
Emotions are not stored, they are experienced by way of the Amygdala within the brain. It is sensitive to neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.
> Thats why its called "The Liver"
This organ was given its name long ago and its origin is debated (toss up between old Germanic/Norse languages or PIE). The true nature of this organ was unknown when it was named, however.
> Its where all that you intake, including food and alcohol get processed.
The liver does not process everything you “intake” but it does do a great deal, mainly acting as a catalyst for the decomposition of many types of molecules into useable substances.
> Alcohol is consumed to either enhance or suppress experiences.
Ethanol is a neurological depressant (as opposed to a stimulant) and prevents the normal operation of the brain for which the symptoms include impulsivity, reduction in reactivity, motor function impairment, memory loss, etc. it’s a poison that your liver is really good at breaking down.
> This is also why Alcohol has been a prevalent substance forever.
Alcohol has been prevalent because it’s easy to make, sterilized food while still being safe to consume, and (at high enough concentrations) would give you an altered state of mind that has had both cultural and religious significance throughout history.
TFA talks about the etymology of the word for liver in various European languages. I think part of the point of this article is how people thought of its function before, and part of their argument is in fact the name and etymology.
Anyway I think when you are in different emotional states your body does seem to feel it in ways that have probably not been fully studied or understood. Obviously for example your heart reacts to emotion. I know that therapists and others who talk about trauma talk about it as something impacting your body. Not to mention all the physical ailments which are documented to be aggravated by stress or have it as a major factor. So while it may seem naive to say your liver stores emotion, I don't think the idea is completely ridiculous. Your whole body probably has some form of reflected record of your health history, even if you can't really call it a literal "memory".
What the fuck are you even talking about? There was nothing in this post that indicated anything to suggest that rational thought exists in your head.
I try not to disparage people for their ideas about the world, but what you have is a flawed understanding of basic biology and other basic shit about the world.
While I’m not particularly religious, I will make an exception for you:
I know somebody who had a liver transplant. They didn't gain any new memories or lose their old ones. Unless the doctors used a liver memory transfer device, I don't think memories are stored there.
And, I'm not an astrobiologist but I don't think DNA stores your memories and experiences.
Can HN get rid of the light gray text on light background please? It is annoying and user-hostile. I shouldn't have to squint to read a comment just because I arrived here later than those who think they deserve a better reading experience than I do.
Seconded, it's incredibly user hostile. The mid-gray text in the comment header is sufficient to distinguish a flagged comment while maintaining readability.
That's fine and all, but I don't think the ancient greeks knew about DNA, alcohol processing, etc? I always assumed it was the liver because the liver physically grows back. But that is also modern medical knowledge. I'm just saying that prometheus legend reads differently when viewed from the ancient greek context. There is a richer, deeper layer that is missing without this context. As is the case with most literature.
Livers were considered instruments of prophetic foretelling. It was the eagle that consumed Prometheus is liver during his punishment, and that eagle was the embodiment of Zeus. Zeus sought to consume the liver of foresight, in order to fortell who would ursurp his throne, as he had overthrown Chronos. The story is a symbol of the succession mythos that defines all Mediterranean religions.
Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear.
This alone would be reason enough for hepatocentrism.
That reasoning would only be bolstered by knowledge of the liver’s regenerative abilities, its high-desirability to meat-eating predators, its size and weight, its mysterious structural homogeneity (at a macroscopic level), and its visible response (upon inspection) to a life of health or sickness and abuse.