The Seba library treats Baldur in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Hillman, James, Jung, C.G.).
the mistletoe which killed Baldur was ‘too Jung’; hence this clinging parasite could be interpreted as the ‘child of the tree.’ But as the tree signifies the origin in the sense of the mother,
Jung interprets the mistletoe fatal to Baldur as an incest-symbol — the ‘child of the tree’ representing the regressive libido that the incest prohibition forbids and that therefore destroys the luminous god.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
With Jesus, Baldur, certain saints, knights, and heroes, bleeding is primary, as if before the wound, as if the wound releases and reveals essence.
Hillman reads Baldur’s wounding as a defining puer motif in which bleeding does not merely signal damage but constitutes the archetypal revelation of the eternal youth’s essential transparency and vulnerability.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
there is an ancient parchment written in the old Germanic language which contains an invocation to Wotan (Odin) and Baldur… in a village in the Canton of Zurich where the peasants are still living by the same book, only now instead of Wotan and Baldur it is Jesus Christ and his disciples.
Jung argues that Baldur and Wotan remain psychologically alive in Germanic peasant culture, merely re-clothed as Christian figures, demonstrating the persistence of archaic layer-patterns in the collective unconscious.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
Alois Closs further reckons the two wolves, the name ‘Father,’ which was given him (galdrs fadir = the father of magic; Baldrs draumar, 3, 3), the ‘motif of intoxication,’ and the Valkyries.
Eliade’s citation of ‘Baldrs draumar’ situates Baldur within the shamanic complex surrounding Odin, linking the god’s death-dreams to Norse necromantic and ecstatic traditions.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
Baldur 193, 349
Greene’s index entry places Baldur within a comparative mythological glossary of fate-bound divinities used to illuminate astrological archetypes, treating him as one among the dying-and-rising youthful gods.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside
the crab, too, is symbolically lunar, moist, and anti-heroic: Baldur d
Hillman briefly associates Baldur with lunar, moist, and anti-heroic symbolic qualities in the context of a wider argument about animal symbolism and homeopathic healing.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside