The Seba library treats Cloak in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Freud, Sigmund, Campbell, Joseph, Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne).
they serve my purpose just as served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak. That at which the interpretation of the dream can be started… he hastily covers the weak spots in the dream’s disguise
Freud uses the cloak as a technical metaphor for dream-disguise, arguing that the dreamer’s verbal substitutions reveal the ‘weak spots’ in the cloak of manifest content through which the latent meaning threatens to emerge.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
another, older Athena is reflected in a magnificent statue (c. 525 B.C.) from the archaic temple on the Acropolis, which shows her head crowned with snakes, and her cloak falling from her shoulders as a mass of entwined snakes
Campbell reads Athena’s serpent-cloak as a survival of pre-Olympian Great Goddess imagery, the garment signifying regenerative chthonic power that precedes and undergirds the Olympian persona.
, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013thesis
another, older Athena is reflected in a magnificent statue (c. 525 B.C.) from the archaic temple on the Acropolis, which shows her head crowned with snakes, and her cloak falling from her shoulders as a mass of entwined snakes, with one clasped in her left hand
Harvey and Baring identify Athena’s snake-cloak as emblematic of her descent from the Great Goddess, the garment functioning as an iconographic marker of transformative, pre-patriarchal divine authority.
, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996thesis
cloak, of invisibility, 33, 38
Von Franz catalogues the cloak of invisibility as a recurrent fairy-tale motif, classifying it alongside the magical cap as an archetypal instrument that alters the hero’s relation to the visible, collective world.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
Purple by itself is simple, and so is silk, and the cloak which is made of both. But if the king put it on, the cloak receives honour from the honour due to the wearer.
John of Damascus argues that the cloak is inert matter elevated by the dignity of its wearer, a theological position that mirrors depth psychology’s treatment of the persona as deriving its meaning from the psychic content it expresses.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
clothing represents persona, the first view the public gains of us… the persona is not simply a mask to hide behind, but rather a presence which eclipses the mundane personality
Estés interprets clothing — and by extension the cloak — as persona in an initiatory sense: not mere concealment but an outward display of archetypal authority and mastery in the depth-psychological tradition.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Then put on, as I bid you, a soft coat and a tunic to the feet to shield your body
Hesiod’s practical injunction to don protective outer garments against winter provides an archaic literary baseline for the cloak as bodily protection, against which later symbolic usages are implicitly measured.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside