Anima, Pneuma, Psyche

Derren Brown returns to a word he says used to put him off: soul. In Book Six of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, he goes looking for what the Romans actually meant by it, and finds something closer to breath than to the Christian afterlife he grew up believing in. Brown traces the word through Latin and Greek, through an alphabet that once had no vowels, and lands on Marcus's own picture of the soul as a small, guarded room that stays untouched no matter what the body suffers. Then he follows that idea forward, past Marcus, into cognitive therapy and mindfulness classes that have never read a word of him.