Basket

the mysterious baskets (pl. Lvua), which, according to the testimony of Clement of Alexandria, contained pastries, salt-offerings, and fruit... I have taken from the cista, and after working with it I have laid it back in the basket and from the basket into the cista.

Jung establishes the Eleusinian basket (liknon/cista) as the ritual container of phallic and regenerative mystery content, through which the neophyte performed initiatory 'work,' making the basket the central vessel of chthonic transformation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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A woman receiving a basket without substance... Receiving an empty basket indeed. Basket, K'-UANG: open basket, put in baskets; bottom of a bed.

The I Ching commentary defines the basket as a vessel whose emptiness or fullness carries divinatory and moral weight, here signifying a failed or hollow relational offering.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis

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The woman holds a basket: no fruits. The man sacrifices a goat: no blood. Nothing is favorable... There are no fruits in the basket and no blood from the sacrificed goat. These are bad omens.

Huang's commentary on Hexagram 54 treats the empty basket as a concrete omen of failed reciprocity and absent substance in marriage or partnership, extending its symbolic range into ethics and fate.

Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting

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We regard vessels from the outside, admiring the glaze on the pot, the cut of crystal, the weave of a basket, and handle of a jug... the void in the vessel is just that: empty.

Hillman situates the basket among vessels whose outer form conceals an interior void that Western culture misreads as mere emptiness, arguing that the void is the psychologically active dimension of any container.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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The wizard raised the basket on his back and went away with it, but it weighed him down so heavily that the sweat streamed from his face.

Kalsched deploys the fairy-tale basket as a narrative image of psychic burden and enforced labor, in which the container's concealed contents exert a compulsive power over the carrier.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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just as when things are shaken and winnowed by means of winnowing-baskets and other instruments for cleaning corn, the dense and heavy things go one way, while the rare and light are carried to another place

Plato's Timaeus uses the winnowing basket as a cosmological analogy for the Receptacle's differentiating action, linking the basket to principles of separation, sorting, and elemental ordering.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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Midlanders will at any rate have seen the kind of basket called T'(Uaeo~. If they will imagine this basket without the perforations at the base and with its mouth at the top opened wide, they will have a sufficient picture.

The commentary on the Timaeus uses the familiar basket as a pedagogical analogy for the anatomical vessel (weel), illustrating how ordinary containers model cosmological and physiological structures.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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Pythias saw my basket, shook the fish to have a better look, and said: 'And what did you pay for this stuff?'

Auerbach's quoted passage uses the market basket as a realistic narrative detail of everyday economic life, without symbolic elaboration.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside

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