Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘cloth’ operates across three distinct but interrelated registers: the mythic-symbolic, the cosmological-philosophical, and the ritual-funerary. At its most symbolically charged, cloth appears as the medium of fate and deception — nowhere more forcefully than in Penelope’s great cloth in the Odyssey, which Jungian commentators have recognized as an archetype of the psyche’s capacity for creative delay, the weaving and unweaving of the self’s commitments over time. In the Homeric and Pindaric material treated by Onians, the woof-thread (πεῖραρ) is itself fate, the bond laid upon mortals by divine decree, binding life and death into a single textile metaphor. The alchemical and Gnostic streams add further complexity: in the Gospel of Philip, the master-dyer who transforms colored cloths to white literalizes the purificatory work of the opus; in Yoga philosophy (Bryant on Patañjali), a cloth’s aging serves as the paradigmatic illustration of temporal flux and the illusion of stable identity. Funeral cloth — enshrouding the dead, veiling the eyes of corpses, wrapping the bones — carries weight across Greek, Norse, and Egyptian contexts in Onians. Finally, in clinical depth-psychology (Jung, Hillman), cloth figures in dream imagery as the integumentary boundary between death and healing, shame and concealment, and the priapic dynamic of cover and exposure. The term thus weaves together fate, transformation, time, concealment, and the boundary between living and dead.
every day she wove the mighty cloth, and then at night by torchlight, she unwove it. For three long years her trick beguiled the Greeks.
Penelope’s winding-sheet exemplifies cloth as the archetypal medium of psychic deferral — the conscious creation and nocturnal dissolution of a textile as an act of sovereign self-preservation against patriarchal coercion.
, The Odyssey, 2017thesis
The master went into the dye works of Levi, took seventy-two colored cloths, and threw them into a vat. He drew them out and they all were white.
The Gospel of Philip deploys the dyeing and whitening of colored cloths as a direct allegory of soteriological transformation, with Christ figured as the master-dyer who bleaches multiplicity into unity.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis
when we say a cloth has become old, in reality we are referring to a certain cutoff point in this sequential flux, which Patañjali here refers to as the final moment of change.
Patañjali uses the aging of cloth as the canonical philosophical illustration of impermanence, arguing that the perception of an object’s continuity masks the continuous subatomic flux underlying all temporal experience.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis
The equation of the wrapping of fate given by the gods with that with which men wrapped the dead
Onians identifies a structural homology in Greek and Northern European thought between the divine textile of fate and the physical cloth used to enshroud the dead, locating cloth at the intersection of cosmic decree and mortuary ritual.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
I wrap the white linen cloth across me now and prepare for a natural sleep. The man’s healing hands are on my shoulders.
In this clinical dream image from Man and His Symbols, the white linen cloth functions as the liminal integument between death-taint and therapeutic rebirth, marking the moment of transition from dissolution to healing.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
I fear that neither Flaubert nor Aretino grasp that the tin fig leaf or small piece of cloth belong essentially with the priapic. Cover-up is essential to priapic arousal.
Hillman argues that cloth-as-concealment is not opposed to erotic display but structurally constitutive of it, making the small piece of cloth a necessary element in the psychology of priapic fantasy and arousal.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
You burned in clothes from gods; you were anointed with oil and honey.
Achilles’ funerary rite in the Odyssey foregrounds divine cloth as the ultimate honour accorded to the heroic dead, marking the boundary between mortal body and immortal commemoration.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
Kaoftâ [m.] ‘horse-cloth’ (Agatharch., X. Cyr.) … iflUTLOV nuxu Kul TpUXU, nãpLâ¶AULOV ‘thick and coarse cloth, covering cloth’
Beekes’ etymological analysis of Greek textile terminology traces the Oriental loanword origins of key cloth-words, grounding the symbolic weight of covering and concealment in the material and linguistic history of the term.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
it can also be shown that πεῖραρ could mean a woof-thread and at the same time a difficulty of interpretation is removed from a passage of Pindar.
Onians demonstrates that the Homeric word for ‘fate’ (πεῖραρ) is etymologically and conceptually continuous with the woof-thread of weaving, establishing cloth-making as the root metaphor of ancient Greek fatalism.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
It was carefully taken out of the cloth, in which it had been wrapped up, and spread, at full length, upon the ground before the priests.
Campbell’s description of the Hawaiian royal maro records the use of cloth-wrapping as a ritual act of preservation and consecration for sacred regalia, extending the symbolic function of cloth into Polynesian kingship rites.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside