The Seba library treats Carpet in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Edinger, Edward F., Eliade, Mircea).
the woven cloak or carpet with its designs is often used as a symbol for the complex symbolic patterns of life and the secret designs of fate. It represents the greater pattern of our life, which we do not know as long as we live it.
Von Franz argues that the carpet’s woven design is the primary psychological symbol for the unconscious teleological pattern of an individual life, invisible to the ego until retrospective contemplation reveals it.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
The nomadic Arab tribes, who are still famous for their carpet weaving, say that the carpets they use in their tents represent that continuity of earth which they need to prevent them from feeling that they have no soil under their feet.
Von Franz grounds the carpet’s symbolic depth in ethnographic fact, reading it as a portable territorial anchoring that protects the psyche from the disorienting influence of foreign or alien soil.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
A tapestry is being brought down from the attic. It is in two separate parts which are to be joined — the burlap backing and the threaded design… The design was very rich and complex.
Edinger presents a dream tapestry as an alchemical coagulatio image, distinguishing material ground from meaningful pattern in terms that parallel von Franz’s carpet symbolism, here applied to the psychology of biological inception.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting
four ‘sons of the shaman’ carry the candidate out of the yurt on a felt carpet, singing.
Eliade documents a Siberian shamanic initiation rite in which the felt carpet functions as a ritual vehicle for the candidate’s ceremonial transit, confirming the carpet’s cross-cultural sacred-ground symbolism.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting