The Seba library treats Cliff in 8 passages, across 8 authors (including Wilhelm, Richard, Richard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes, Alfred Huang).
The wild goose gradually draws near the cliff. Eating and drinking in peace and concord. Good fortune. The cliff is a safe place on shore.
Wilhelm’s commentary establishes the cliff as a symbol of achieved stability — the second stage in a graduated developmental ascent, marking security and readiness for further progress.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
The wild goose gradually draws near the cliff. Eating and drinking in peace and concord. Good fortune. The cliff is a safe place on shore.
This parallel I Ching commentary reinforces the cliff’s valence as a haven of provisional security within the symbolism of gradual, orderly advancement.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
The swan approaches the cliff. A cliff is a safe haven for birds. This yin element corresponds to the yang element a
Huang’s translation situates the cliff within a cosmological sequence — water to shore to cliff to plateau to tree to hill — as a nodal point of yin-yang correspondence and safe transition.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
The child ran out to the cliff overlooking the water, and there, far out in the windy sea, was a huge shaggy silver seal… The boy scrambled down the cliff and stumbled at the bottom over a stone — no, a bundle — that had rolled out of a cleft in the rock.
Estés deploys the cliff as a mythic threshold between the human world and the oceanic unconscious, where the child’s descent retrieves the primal maternal soul from the margins of the instinctual world.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
there are two cliffs, one of them of smooth stone and so high that it rises to heaven and its summit is invisible. In the middle of this cliff is the cave of S
Kerényi identifies the mythological cliff of Skylla’s cave as an axis mundi figure — an overwhelming vertical limit beyond human sight — framing the encounter with the monstrous as an encounter with the unfathomable depths of the chthonic feminine.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
we see on a cliff on our right something strange and mysterious: the cliff wall has a shelf about halfway up. There are birds standing on it, divided into two groups
Von Franz presents the cliff face as a liminal stage for an uncanny mystery drama, where nature’s hidden rituals are witnessed at the threshold between ordinary consciousness and archetypal enactment.
, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting
the whole herd was running at headlong speed toward the precipice, the rock piles directing them to the point over the enclosure below. When they reached it, most of the animals were pushed over
Campbell’s account of the buffalo pis’kun situates the cliff-precipice as a ritual instrument of sacrificial death, a structured threshold between life and collective nourishment through purposeful destruction.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Cliff paintings and idols. Spain, neolithic ROW 1: Cliff paintings of abb
Neumann’s catalogue references cliff paintings as early neolithic sacral inscriptions, situating rock surfaces among the primary media through which archaic humanity encoded the numinous.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955aside