The axe appears in the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a cultic and mythic instrument rather than an everyday tool, accumulating layers of sacrificial, chthonic, and initiatory significance across several overlapping traditions. Walter Burkert’s work on Greek sacrificial ritual traces the axe’s central role in the Bouphonia: the ox-slayer swings the axe, kills the bull, and then throws the axe away—a gesture that encodes both the necessity and the guilt of sacred violence. Jane Harrison extends this reading by arguing that the axe was the very symbol of Sky-Zeus himself, so that sprinkling it with water constituted a rain-charm of the highest efficacy. In the Dionysian register, Kerényi identifies the double axe (pelekys) as so intimately bound to Dionysos that the god could be addressed as ‘Dionysos Pelekys,’ the cult instrument becoming a theophanic name. Clarissa Pinkola Estés draws the axe into feminist mythopoetics, arguing that in women’s healing rites the axe of pruning originally belonged to the Goddess before patriarchal narrative transferred it to the father, rendering its wounding of the psyche ambivalently both destructive and generative. Burkert’s account of Lykurgus—who, in divine frenzy, turns the axe on his own children—maps the axe onto the border between divine madness and human order. Across these readings the axe functions as an instrument of severance that simultaneously opens a threshold: between life and death, sky and earth, old religion and new.