The Seba library treats Box in 6 passages, across 3 authors (including Nichols, Sallie, Plato, Jung, Carl Gustav).
we choose instead to live in square boxes whose windows hold up pre-selected views for our inspection, screened to exclude nature
Nichols argues that the square box symbolizes the ego’s culturally imposed constraints, filtering direct experience of nature and the unconscious in contrast to the circle’s unmediated wholeness.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis
To earth let us assign the cubical figure; for of the four kinds earth is the most immobile and the most plastic of bodies.
Plato’s Timaeus establishes the cube — the three-dimensional box — as the geometric form of earth, grounding the box symbolically in materiality, stability, and fixity within a cosmological schema.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The second elementary triangle, the half-square, is now used to construct the square face of the cube. Here again Plato uses more elements than are necessary — four instead of two.
Plato’s construction of the cube from half-square triangles reveals the geometric architecture underlying the box-form assigned to earth as a primary body.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Many people are circulating round a large central oblong with four smaller oblongs on its sides. The circulation in the large oblong goes to the left and in the smaller oblongs to the right.
Jung’s dream analysis presents rectangular enclosures arranged in a mandala-like pattern, implicating box-shaped forms within the quaternary symbolism of the individuation process.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
The square has the power of ‘swelling itself out’ into the cube — the first body reached in the above progressions.
The passage traces the mathematical genesis of the cube from the square, situating the box-form within a Platonic progression from plane to solid as the basis of material existence.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
not every part of a pyramid or cube is a pyramid or cube
Cornford notes Aristotle’s objection concerning the non-homoeomereity of the cube, clarifying the ontological status of the box-form within Platonic elemental theory.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside