The Molted Soul Falls to Earth
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Socrates — ἡ δὲ πτερορρυήσασα φέρεται ἕως ἂν στερεοῦ τινος ἀντιλάβηται, οὗ κατοικισθεῖσα, σῶμα γήϊνον λαβοῦσα,
The myth now tells how souls come to be embodied at all. A soul that keeps its wings intact travels the heights and helps steer the whole universe. But a soul that has molted — pterorrhuēsasa, its feathers flowed away — can no longer stay aloft. It sinks, drifting downward, until it grabs hold of something solid and settles there, taking on an earthly body. That joining of soul and body is what gets called a 'living creature,' a mortal one; the soul is deathless, but the compound, once made, is destined to die. This is Plato's account of birth: not a beginning but a fall, the descent of a winged, heavenly thing into the heavy earthen frame it will spend a life trying to rise out of again.
Socrates describes the soul's fall. A soul still perfect and winged soars aloft and governs the whole cosmos; but a soul that has shed its wings drifts downward until it seizes on something solid. There it settles and takes on an earthly body — and the compound of soul and body, so joined, is what we call a mortal living creature.
The whole architecture of the palinode is contained in one verb: pterorrhuein, 'to shed the wings.' In the myth every soul once had wings and flew in the train of the gods, and what it fed on up there was the vision of the eternal Forms — Justice, Beauty, the Good themselves. To molt is to lose that vision; the feathers flow away, the soul grows heavy, and it falls, until it strikes something solid and takes an earthly body. So embodiment, birth, is a fall — and the body a gēïnon thing, made of earth, into which the heavenly soul is 'settled,' katoikistheisa, as into a house it did not choose. This is a bleak-sounding picture, but the palinode is not a tragedy of the fall; it is a drama of re-ascent, and the wings are the hinge of both directions. The soul fell by losing its wings; it will rise by growing them back. And what grows them back — this is the whole point Socrates is building toward — is the sight of beauty here below. When the fallen soul, walking the earth in its heavy body, catches sight of true beauty shining through a beautiful face, the old plumage begins to stir and sprout, and it remembers what it once saw. Love is the re-fledging of the soul. Every heavy, earthbound thing about our condition is real; but so is the memory in the feathers, waiting for beauty to wake it.
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