The Seba library treats Chisel in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Jung, C.G., Beekes, Robert).
he is represented as having a chisel with which he chisels and cuts out the whole world... a kind of divine artisan who shaped the mountain and chiseled out the sky.
Von Franz establishes the chisel as the cosmogonic instrument of the deus faber, the divine craftsman who simultaneously creates and constitutes the world through the act of chiseling.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
when he reached an impasse, then he painted a picture or with a chisel struck out of a stone the image which seemed to him to lie within it.
Von Franz documents Jung's use of the chisel as an instrument of active imagination, releasing from stone the images demanded by the unconscious when verbal or painterly methods were insufficient.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis
Later he brought this face out of the stone with chisel and hammer and perpetuated it as the trickster Mercurius.
Von Franz recounts how Jung used chisel and hammer at Bollingen to materialise the trickster-Mercurius figure seen in the masonry, linking the tool to synchronistic psychic events and archetypal manifestation.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis
he beats the tortoise on the head with the wooden handle of the chisel... An instrument is an important motif. Instruments often turn up in dreams with the same meaning that they have in mythology.
Jung analyses the chisel as a dream instrument carrying mythological valence, and distinguishes between its wooden handle (restraint, non-lethal intent) and its iron cutting edge as symbolic opposites within a single tool.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
chisel (dream 28), 642, 643, 649-50
The index of the Dream Analysis seminar confirms that the chisel receives sustained interpretive attention across multiple sessions, marking it as a formally significant dream motif in Jung's clinical record.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
smilē [f.] 'knife, wood-carving knife, scalpel, chisel', instrument for artisans, physicians, sculptors, etc.
Beekes establishes the Greek etymological root of chisel-like instruments, demonstrating that the single word smilē encompasses the artisan's, physician's, and sculptor's cutting tool, supporting the depth-psychological conflation of craft, healing, and creative differentiation.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
Prayer does not work as a substitute for a steel chisel or the wing of an airplane. It does not replace muscular action.
Pargament uses the chisel as an incidental benchmark of concrete, volitional, material agency — contrasting instrumental action with spiritual coping — without engaging its symbolic depth.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside
We chisel away at this complex system of beliefs.
Perel employs 'chisel away' as a metaphor for the gradual therapeutic dismantling of inhibitory belief structures, invoking the tool's connotation of careful, incremental differentiation without mythological elaboration.
, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007aside