κρατήρ

The krater is for diluting madness. It’s for mixing together. The word literally means “mixer”. Soul may be contrasted with body; pure soul, without anything to contain it, spills over into psychosis.¹ This is the wine, the domain of Dionysus. It also the ideai and the nous. Then, on the other side, there is the diluting agent: water. It is the lower part of the soul—mere logos as opposed to nous; or, if the wine is the psyche, then the water is the soma. It is the material that is given shape by ideai. It is also mere thinking (epistemos) as opposed to direct understanding (noesis).

The krater, as Timaeus explains, is is the appropriate vessel for mixing together the pure and impure forms of being, the same, and the different into a cohesive whole out of which the living soul of the kosmos itself, and of its inhabiting gods, can be crafted.

Apart from Plato’s dialogues, the krater is also mentioned in the Corpus Hermeticum, namely in CH IV.

See also

• For a different opinion about wine and water, see The Mixing-Bowl of Mind by Polyphanes.

1. The modern sense of the word could perhaps be reinterpreted as referring to “too much soul”. Or, we could simply take it to be the actual Greek term ψύχωσις, “ensoulment”. ↩