It has never been clear to me what Ezra Pound means by "paideuma" -- a word he received from the anthropologist Leo Frobenius in the 1920s. Pound's own definition is intriguing but obscure, yet the concept is obviously important to him. Embedded in the Wikipedia entry on Frobenius is this: With his term paideuma, Frobenius wanted to describe a gestalt, a manner of creating meaning (Sinnstiftung), that was typical of certain economic structures. Thus, the Frankfurt cultural morphologists tried to reconstruct "the" world-view of hunters, early planters, and megalith-builders or sacred kings. This concept of culture as a living organism was influenced by the theories of Oswald Spengler. I recently came upon an out of the way essay on Frobenius. Herewith some excerpts. These are drawn from Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child. a monograph by Janheinz Jahn. It appeared first in German in Internationales Afrika Forum. 9. (1973), 524-36. and the next year in English as a publication of the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jahn (1918 – 1973) wrote extensively on African culture and literature, and translated many African, Caribbean and Afro-American works into German. Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child is a sensitive appreciation (despite its title); it was his last work. It was translated into English by Reinhard Sander. The footnotes indicate that the quotations are from several different Frobenius sources. (Frobenius (1873 – 1938) explored Africa starting in 1904, and wrote many papers and books on his journeys and findings up to shortly before his death. The monograph quoted here includes a map showing his many routes.) (from p.13 – 14) Cultures are to him living organisms. “Culture lives and dies, arises anew and travels through cultural spaces on its own terms, as if man were not there. Who indeed is only the tool for its formation….” “Cultures live, give birth, and die.” But Frobenius goes further than Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West; he sees something behind culture: the essence of culture. This essence in its turn has a soul: the paideuma. Scientifically, such things can neither be understood nor proven; one can only feel one’ s way into them: “Cultural thinking must be led by the desire for a feeling of unity.” Hence his works do not set out to be scientific and are “in no way an account of specific cultures; they are rather meant as an attempt to make the reader live and feel himself into the soul, into the paideuma of the essence of culture.” This paideuma defies not only human understanding, but also human taming. It is like fate, if not fate itself. It creates structures as it wants to and carries out “pendular movements..” Some time in the remote past, the pendulum had swung from West to East, and now it was swinging the other way.. In the Pacific it created a “highly mythological culture,” then on the Asian continent a “highly religious one.” Then in Central Europe a “highly philosophical one.” And finally, in Western Europe a “materialistic culture.” In the Eastern Mediterranean it (the soul of culture) culminated in the liberal arts –- among which one should also include Greek philosophy. In Rome it expressed itself through a social organization, and in England through the the psychology of world economics. (Does this get us any closer to the meaning of "paideuma" ?)