The Seba library treats Blue Bird in 7 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, Campbell, Joseph, von Franz, Marie-Louise).
Perceived world and imaginal world appears together in the phenomenon of blue bird feathers. A vivid blue hue is not a pigment, not a dye, but a reflection of light that bounces off the thin opaque covering of the black physical feather.
Hillman uses the optical physics of blue bird feathers — blue that is visually present yet materially absent — as the paradigmatic demonstration that the imaginal world is real in experience without being materially grounded.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
upon the central corn — tassel at its top there is a bird, also blue, symbolic, it is said, of dawn, happiness, and promise.
Campbell documents the Navaho blue bird as a mythologically specific symbol placed at the apex of the cosmic cornstalk, encoding dawn, happiness, and the fructifying association of blue with earth, water, and sky.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986thesis
a vertical and a horizontal circle, having a common centre. This is the world clock. It is supported by the black bird. The vertical circle is a blue disc with a white border divided into 4 × 8 = 32 partitions.
Von Franz reproduces Jung's physicist's vision of the 'world clock' in which a black bird supports a blue vertical disc, situating blue and bird together within a synchronistic, cosmological mandala structure.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
the caelum is the blue sky in which the world has its home; but the sky is not the world, not physically mundified. The durabilities of the unus mundus are supernal durabilities that infuse things as they are with imaginal vitality.
Hillman elaborates the alchemical caelum as blue sky — the supernal register of the unus mundus — providing the cosmological framework within which blue bird symbolism acquires its imaginal significance.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Birds are not, never were, gods; there is no definite bird-cult, but there are an infinite number of bird-sanctities. Man in early days tries to bring himself into touch with bird-mana.
Harrison establishes the archaic theoretical ground for bird symbolism by distinguishing bird-mana from bird-cult, showing that birds carry numinous power without constituting gods — the substrate upon which imaginal blue-bird elaborations rest.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
first and foremost you should watch the birds who are so near the heavenly signs, the teipea, and who must know more than man. This watching of the birds we are accustomed to call the 'science of augury'
Harrison traces augury to a magical rather than divinatory origin, arguing that birds enact rather than merely predict celestial events, contextualizing the numinous proximity of birds to sky and color symbolism.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside
The birds atop the trees are, respectively, a quetzal, an eagle, a colibri bird, and a parrot; the colors of the trees are turquoise blue, blue, white, and half-blue, half-white.
Campbell's Aztec cosmological diagram places birds atop color-coded world-directional trees, associating turquoise and blue with specific cosmic quadrants and their avian emblems.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside