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Understanding McLuhan
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08401_Field_TCGG T166.txt
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1996-04-10
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intervention to which Homer resorts so constantly and, to
our thinking, often so superfluously. We find it
superfluous because the divine machinery seems to us in
many cases to do no more than duplicate a natural
psychological causation. But ought we not perhaps to
say rather that the divine machinery “duplicates” a
psychic intervention—that is, presents it in a concrete
pictorial form? This was not superfluous; for only in this
way could it be made vivid to the imagination of the
hearers. The Homeric poets were without the refinements
of language which would have been needed to “put
across” adequately a purely psychological miracle. What
more natural than that they should first supplement, and
later replace, an old unexciting threadbare formula like
menos embale qnmv by making the god appear as
a physical presence and exhort his favorite with the