bones
Bone occupies a singular position in the depth-psychological corpus as the irreducible substrate of life, death, and renewal. Across the sources assembled here, the term carries meanings far exceeding its anatomical reference: it functions as the seat of the life-soul (Onians), the locus of shamanic death and rebirth (Eliade), an instrument of sorcery and phallic magic (Campbell), and the primal material from which cosmos and creature are reconstituted (Ests, Plato). Onians demonstrates with philological rigor that ancient Greek and Roman thought located the life-principle — the vital fluid — precisely within the bones and marrow, rendering the skeleton not a symbol of death but of concentrated vitality. Eliade extends this into the shamanic complex, where the rebirth-from-bones motif appears across Siberia, the Americas, and Africa as a foundational mythico-ritual structure: the animal or shaman is dismembered to bone, then reconstituted, enacting the cycle of death and return at the level of pure essence. Clarissa Pinkola Estés reads this through a feminist archetypal lens in her figure of La Loba, the bone woman who sings flesh back onto scattered wolf skeletons. Plato situates marrow as the anchoring medium for the soul in the body. The tensions in this constellation are real: bone is simultaneously the most durable remnant of mortality and the indestructible vessel of regeneration — a paradox that animates its depth-psychological significance.
Rebirth from the Bones. That the hunted or domesticated animal can be reborn from its bones is a belief also found in regions outside Siberia.
Eliade identifies the rebirth-from-bones motif as a near-universal mythico-ritual complex in which the bone represents the indestructible seed of life from which the creature is reconstituted.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
from the old Spanish land-grant farmers and Pueblo people of the Southwest, I heard one-line reports about the bone people, the old ones who bring the dead back to life; they were said to restore both humans and animals.
Estés grounds the bone-as-regenerative-substance motif in Indigenous Southwestern tradition, linking it to the archetype of the Wild Woman as Life/Death/Life mediator who reconstitutes being from skeletal remains.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
For Propertius quite unmistakably the surviving powers of the dead that are carried to the other world, that receive judgment, are the bones.
Onians demonstrates through Roman literary evidence that the bones — not the shade alone — were understood to carry the essential vital and spiritual powers of the dead into the afterlife.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
in Egypt too, the bones were to be preserved for resurrection… In an Aztec legend mankind is born from bones brought from the nether region.
Eliade marshals cross-cultural evidence — Egyptian, Aztec, Iranian, Tibetan — to establish that bone preservation is universally linked to resurrection and the regeneration of the cosmos.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
The starting-point for all these was the formation of the marrow, for the bonds of life, so long as the soul is bound up with the body, were made fast in it as the roots of the mortal creature.
Plato’s Timaeus establishes marrow — the innermost substance of bone — as the ontological anchor of the soul in the mortal body, making bone the literal root-structure of incarnate life.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
in the bones, 287-8, 496
Onians’ index confirms that the bones are catalogued in his study as one of several bodily loci of the life-principle, alongside the head, knees, and marrow.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
If the Yaga had given Vasalisa a knee-bone on a stick, that would require a different symbolic rendering. If she had given her a wrist-bone, a neck-bone, or any other bone — other than, perhaps, the female pelvis — it would not mean the same thing.
Estés insists on the specificity of which bone carries symbolic power, arguing that each bone has a distinct psychological and archetypal resonance, with the skull uniquely representing intuition and ancestral discrimination.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
we are willing to untangle the bones of the Death nature. We are willing to see how it all goes together. We are willing to touch the not-beautiful in another, and in ourselves.
Estés uses the image of untangling bones as a metaphor for the depth-psychological work of confronting the Death/Life nature within the psyche and accepting what is not-beautiful in self and other.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
In a number of tombs, all about 1200 B.C., there were found with the vessels containing food exactly identical vessels containing one or more human bones.
Onians documents archaeological evidence of bones preserved in burial vessels as repositories of the procreative life-soul, connecting Jewish, Roman, and Near Eastern funerary practice.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The man who uses the bone holds it under his penis, as if a second penis were protruding from him.
Campbell documents Australian Aboriginal pointing-bone sorcery in which bone functions as an extension of phallic magical power, capable of penetrating and destroying a victim at a distance.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Kurkutji first of all sucks very hard at the stomach of the patient and removes a certain amount of blood. Then he makes passes over the body, punches, pounds and sucks, until at last the bone comes out.
Eliade describes the shamanic extraction of a pathogenic bone as a healing technique, in which the intruded foreign bone — an agent of sorcery — must be removed from the patient’s body.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
To protect her or supply her needs, it may have been intended that the life-stuff or the spirit of each of these creatures should attend her.
Onians interprets the arrangement of animal bones around Paleolithic burials as an intentional transference of the vital spirit contained within bone to accompany and sustain the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
With them were found a human thigh bone and a humerus bone of the upper arm. All the evidence, says Wernert, shows that it was ‘un lieu de culte et depot sacre de la communaute paleolithique.’
Onians surveys Upper Paleolithic cult deposits in which human and animal bones were deliberately preserved, establishing an archaeological basis for the sacred status of bone in prehistoric European religion.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Empedocles was the first to suggest that bone, sinew, flesh, and blood were composed of the four elements in definite proportions. Bone, for example, contained four parts of fire, two of earth, one of air, and one of water.
The Timaean commentary situates bone within the Empedoclean elemental framework, identifying it as the most fire-dominant tissue — structurally the densest crystallization of the cosmic elements in the body.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
a finely carved small bone horse head and a polished bone tool of beautiful workmanship carved with the head of some small animal resembling a marten.
Campbell documents Paleolithic burial sites where carved bone artifacts accompany the dead, suggesting bone served as a ritual medium connecting the living, the dead, and the animal world.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
the knees with the thigh-bones were treated as the other seat of the yuyf. A suppliant may clasp them or make appeal by them in speech.
Onians identifies the thigh-bones and knees as a secondary locus of the life-soul in Greek thought, where their ritual clasping in supplication reflects belief in the vital power resident in the bone.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside