The Seba library treats Cherub in 7 passages, across 4 authors (including Hoeller, Stephan A., Jung, C. G., Campbell, Joseph).
the above-mentioned cherub, one can find the expression of the Anthropos or ‘complete man.’ In Psychology and Alchemy he reiterated the same thought and stated that the quaternary symbols of the mandala indicated the ‘god within’ the psyche.
Hoeller argues that Jung reads the composite cherub as an emblem of the Anthropos — the quaternary Self — whose divine wholeness is progressively interiorized into the modern human individual.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
The four wings of the cherubim recall the winged female genies who protect the coffin of Pharaoh… The cherubim, too, were protective genies, as is apparent from Ezekiel 28:14 and 16. The apotropaic significance of the quaternity is borne out by Ezekiel 9:4.
Jung establishes the cherubim as apotropaic quaternary figures whose protective function is homologous with the cross as God’s mark, linking them to the psychology of wholeness and the archetype of the Self.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
chimeral cherub combines the body of a bull, feet of a lion, wings and breast of an eagle, and a human head wearing a miter with six horns. These are features suggesting the four zodiacal signs of the spring and autumn equinoxes, summer and winter solstices.
Campbell decodes the Assyrian composite cherub as an astronomical-cosmological symbol encoding the four cardinal zodiacal stations of the precessional year, identifying it as a gate-guardian that unifies cosmic time in one symbolic form.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986thesis
no actual cherub with a flaming sword is required to keep us out of our inward garden, since we are keeping ourselves out, through our avid interest in the outward, mortal aspects both of ourselves and of our world.
Campbell reinterprets the cherub’s flaming sword as a psychological projection: the true barrier to Eden is not divine interdiction but ego-attachment to the sensory world, inverting the guardian’s menace into an invitation to inward transformation.
, Myths to Live By, 1972thesis
chermes, 148&n Cherub, 88, 281n cherubim, 281; four, of Ezekiel, fig. 32
This index entry documents Jung’s sustained cross-referential attention to the Cherub and Ezekiel’s four cherubim as distinct symbolic nodes within his alchemical and psychological schema.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
Philo de Cherub. 27, 92 … Philo de Cherub. 57, 94
Dihle’s citation of Philo’s De Cherubim situates the cherub within the Hellenistic Jewish philosophical tradition that informed both Gnostic and early Christian angelology, providing a genealogical context for the term’s depth-psychological reception.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
The celestial maternal mandala expresses itself in many forms. The ancient Gnostics see it as Sophia, Barbelo, or as Mary Magdalene; Jung as the heavenly city foursquare and as God’s forsaken daughter and wife.
This passage contextualizes the quaternary mandala symbolism that immediately precedes Hoeller’s cherub-as-Anthropos argument, establishing the compensatory feminine dimension of the same quaternary archetype.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982aside