The Seba library treats Black Death in 4 passages, across 4 authors (including Richard Tarnas, Campbell, Joseph, Edinger, Edward F.).
The Black Death, or bubonic plague, began in China in 1333 in coincidence with the preceding Saturn-Pluto opposition and reached a climax in Europe in the 1348–51 period during the conjunction.
Tarnas presents the Black Death as the paradigmatic historical instance of Saturn-Pluto archetypal alignment, establishing a recurring pattern of collective catastrophe that includes the AIDS pandemic.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
curious dance epidemics that came to a climax in the fourteenth century, in the years of the Black Death.
Campbell cites the fourteenth-century dance epidemics coincident with the Black Death as exemplifying collective psychological seizure and the dissolution of individual ego-boundaries under mass psychic pressure.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
witnessing the putrefaction of a dead body, especially a human corpse, which was not an unusual experience in the Middle Ages, would have a powerful psychological impact.
Edinger notes that medieval familiarity with corpse-putrefaction — heightened by plague conditions — provided the projective ground from which alchemical mortificatio imagery was elaborated.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985aside
During these centuries, piety centered increasingly on Jesus the man. The practice of making the stations of the cross dwelt in particular detail on Jesus’ physical pain and sorrow.
Armstrong traces the late-medieval intensification of suffering-centred piety — historically associated with the Black Death era — as a theological response to mass death and bodily vulnerability.
, A History of God, 1993aside