The Seba library treats Bat in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Nichols, Sallie, Eliade, Mircea, Jung, C. G.).
The bat is a night flyer. Avoiding daylight, he retreats each morning to a dark cave where he hangs upside down, gathering energy for his nighttime escapades. He is a blood sucker whose bite spreads pestilence
Nichols reads the bat’s behavioral traits — nocturnality, inversion, parasitism — as precise symbolic correspondences for the Devil archetype’s relationship to the unconscious and the shadow.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis
Satan’s relationship to the bat is particularly important and requires our special attention.
Nichols argues that the bat wing is not decorative but carries irreducible symbolic significance linking Satan to the domain of unconscious, nocturnal, shadow energies.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
see also ante-lope; ants; bat; bear; bee; bird; boa con-strictor; buffaloes; bull; cat; centaurs
Eliade catalogues the bat among the animal spirits associated with shamanic helping-spirits, transformation, and the shaman’s death-and-rebirth complex.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
see also ape; baboon; bat; bear; birds; bitch; bull; cat; chick; cock; cockatoo; crocodile; crow; dog; dolphin; dove; dragon; eagle; fish
Jung’s symbolic index places the bat within the wider bestiary of psychologically significant animals, without further elaboration, signalling its status as a recognized archetypal figure.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside