ants
The Seba library treats Ant in 4 passages, across 4 authors (including Abram, David, Jung, Carl Gustav, Beekes, Robert).
what if the ants were the very ‘household spirits’ to whom the offerings were being made? I soon began to discern the logic of this.
Abram argues that Balinese ritual offerings to ‘household spirits’ are functionally and intentionally addressed to the actual ant colonies sharing the compound, dissolving the boundary between ecological agent and spiritual presence.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
You take three matchboxes, put 1,000 black ants in the first, 10,000 in the second and 50 in the third, together with one white ant in each, shut the boxes, and bore a hole in each of them.
Jung deploys the ant as a statistical illustration — the lone white ant among thousands of black ones — to make the improbability of synchronistic astrological findings intuitively vivid.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
Kvi\ll, KVi1to<; [m.] name of unknown insects (small ants acc. to Arist. Sens. 444b l2), that infest several trees and plants
Beekes identifies a Greek lexical cluster denoting small ant-like insects that damage vegetation, noting the term’s probable pre-Greek substrate origin and its attestation in Aristotle’s sensory writings.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
These animals pursued me into the tempests called neurosis, analysis, Zurich… how the ‘dream-I’ dreads going bugs.
Hillman establishes the theoretical frame within which insects including ants carry depth-psychological weight: animals that appear in dreams signal the animal soul’s claim on consciousness, and ‘going bugs’ names a specific dreamer’s dread of insect-level psychic visitation.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside