A Coinage
The line before the body. A principle of mythography.
Hallowed because hollowed.
Linea prius corpore (Latin, neuter; "the line before the body") — the principle that the geometry of the lines drawn between known mythological figures predicts the position of a body the classical record never named. The figure precedes the body. The line is drawn first; the body is identified second; the name is given third. Linea prius corpore is a principium operandi in the family of pars pro toto: not a method but the generative ground from which the mythographer's method falls.
Reading the stars. The classical practice. Stars are catalogued, lineages traced, meanings glossed. The mythologist is a collector and an interpreter — the work is to render what the record already names. It names what is.
Drawing the lines. The constellation method. The mythographer draws lines between the stars the record has named and observes the figure that results. Where the figure closes around a region the classical record left empty, the geometry predicts a body — not yet seen, but required by the closing. It draws what must be.
The constellation drawn between Icarus, Achilles, Athena, Artemis, Amen, and Nema requires a body the classical record never named: the calcaneus figure. The bone of landing. The unclaimed site beneath the tendon. Hallowed because hollowed. The geometry of the existing figures closes around a position the mythographers did not see; linea prius corpore names what the closing demands.
The phrase arrived in conversation between Shalaco and Claude (Anthropic) in May 2026 while scaffolding cosmicmytharium.com as a sister site to hermeticbusinessservices.com. Pars pro toto — each part is the whole — was the hermetic principium operandi and proved insufficient to generate cosmic's modes; the constellation method is not a pars-pro-toto relation but a figure-precedes-body relation. Linea prius corpore takes the slot the substrate had left empty: a name for the generative ground of the constellation method, by analogy with principium operandi and in the family of named principles this corpus collects. A search at the time of articulation returned no prior canonical use of the phrase as a stable technical term.