The Seba library treats Blade in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Jodorowsky, Alejandro, Watson, Burton).
A sharp blade was needed. In the dream I could not get the blade sharp enough. The dreamer needed a better contact with the Logos-Cutter than he had as yet achieved.
Edinger identifies the blade as the psychic instrument of separatio and the Logos-Cutter, whose insufficient sharpness in a dream signals the dreamer’s inadequate capacity for differentiation and conscious discrimination.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
Must taste again the keenness of his blade / When he has trod the path of anguish round; / And all the wounds are healed and well again
Edinger invokes the blade of an implacable demonic figure as an image for the perpetual wounding-and-healing cycle of self-dissection inflicted by those who possess only sharp rational intellect with which to examine their soul-life.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
I do not know how to cut, to give the blow that will separate subjective from objective. I am not a party to anything: I am still incapable of taking part, of committing myself.
In Jodorowsky’s Tarot hermeneutics, the sword-blade symbolizes the decisive Logos-act of separation; the Page’s inability to wield it emblematizes an immature intellect suspended in duality and incapable of existential commitment.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting
with bare blade in hand. Zhuangzi entered the door of the hall with unhurried steps, looked at the king but made no bow.
The bare blade in the Zhuangzi passage serves as an emblem of mastery and sovereign presence, foregrounding the paradox that true command of the sword transcends its literal cutting function through non-aggressive composure.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting
copper the axe in the belt, and the haft was a thumb’s length and the blade a nail’s length.
In Jung and Kerényi’s mythological reading, the diminutive copper blade carried by the sea-born hero figures the paradox of overwhelming power concentrated in minimal form, illustrating how transformative cutting force is independent of physical magnitude.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
he turned himself into a blade of grass among seven hundred and seventy other blades of grass.
Von Franz’s fairy-tale analysis presents the transformation into a blade of grass as a liminal concealment strategy within a shape-shifting sequence, the blade-form serving as an image of radical self-diminishment at the threshold of magical pursuit.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
will receive this sword, a splendid Thracian blade with silver studs, stripped from Asteropeus when I killed him.
Within epic narrative, the named blade functions as a trophy of heroic transmission — a concrete emblem of martial excellence and the transfer of honor through the agonistic economy of war.
, The Iliad, 2023aside
There Lykon hacked at the horn of the horse-hair crested helm, but the sword blade broke at the socket; Peneleos cut at the neck underneath the ear
The broken blade in Homeric combat illustrates the failure of the cutting instrument at the decisive moment, dramatizing the vulnerability of the warrior who depends entirely on the weapon’s material integrity.
, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside
explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced, and thus that Darwin was to be the ‘Newton of the blade of grass.’
Thompson cites Kant’s challenge regarding the blade of grass as a benchmark for biological teleology, using it to interrogate whether Darwinian mechanism genuinely accounts for the organized self-production that defines living form.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside