The Seba library treats Adonis in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Neumann, Erich, Bly, Robert, Alexiou, Margaret).
Adonis: and boar, 78, 97, 224n; and castration, 59f, 188, 253; and Dionysus, 90;
Neumann positions Adonis as a central figure in his analysis of the son-lover archetype, explicitly linking the myth to castration symbolism, the Great Mother, and the constellation of dying gods including Dionysus.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
The detail of the wounded leg leads us in an entirely different direction if we remember the ritual woundings of Adonis and Attis. Sir James Frazer sets out in The Golden Bough, particularly in the volume called Adonis, Attis, Osiris, the results of his enormous research on this matter.
Bly, drawing on Frazer, reads the ritual wounding of Adonis as the foundational mythic pattern underlying cultures in which the son-lover of the Great Mother must be sacrificed for cosmic and vegetative renewal.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
the rivers, trees, springs and mountains join his dirge for the fair Adonis, killed by a boar while hunting, and the cry to Adonis is echoed in refrain throughout the poem by the Loves.
Alexiou demonstrates how the Adonis cult generated a highly formalized tradition of ritual lament in which all of nature participates in mourning, and his death symbolized the cutting and underground ripening of vegetation.
, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974thesis
Adonis, 121, 199
Jung's index in Aion places Adonis in proximity to Gnostic, alchemical, and astrological figures, indicating his treatment of the myth as a comparative symbol within the broader typology of the dying-and-rising divine figure.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
the shaman must needs be a wounded man, and a spear gave Christ a wound in his side before his death.
Bly extends the wound mythology of Adonis into a cross-cultural pattern linking shamanic initiation, sacrificial wounding, and the dying-god motif, contextualizing Adonis within a universal masculine psychology of suffering.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
In Cyprus Pygmalion was thought to have been a king and one of Aphrodite's lovers.
Kerényi's treatment of Cyprus as Aphrodite's sacred island and the site of her cult implicitly situates the Adonis-Aphrodite complex within its geographical and cultic homeland, though Adonis is not named directly in this passage.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside