Coffin

when Osiris was murdered by the demonic god Seth, the latter shut him into a lead coffin and threw it into the sea… Osiris’ lead coffin was identified with the alchemical retort as early as the third century of this era, and was described as the real ‘secret of alchemy.’

Von Franz establishes the coffin’s central depth-psychological valence by equating Osiris’s lead coffin with the alchemical vessel of transformation, identifying it as the mythological prototype of the retort in which dissolution and rebirth occur.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis

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I find myself trying to get the corpse out of the coffin but realize that I am the corpse. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold myself together because there is nothing left to keep the body together anymore. I go through the bottom of the coffin and enter a long dark tunnel.

Stein presents a dream in which the coffin functions as a transitional container: the dreamer’s dissolution of ego-identity within it precedes passage through a transformative tunnel toward an encounter with the figure of the Self.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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Behind him there was only one passenger seat, as in the smallest aircraft. But there in that passenger seat was a coffin full of rattling bones. One half of his personality had been killed by the mother. And he would have trouble landing on earth again until that coffin… had been resurrected and brought back to life.

Von Franz interprets a recurring dream-coffin as the repository of psychic life destroyed by the negative mother complex, whose resurrection constitutes the therapeutic goal of individuation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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care being taken that it does not fall back into the coffin, for the head and belly are filled with herbs and oil, and the Gods in the coffin must not be disturbed.

Von Franz’s citation of the Egyptian mummification ritual treats the coffin as a sacred enclosure housing divine presences that must not be violated, reinforcing its symbolic character as a numinous container.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

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he could hear everything that was said around him… he could neither move a limb nor speak, yet could distinctly hear them making his coffin and digging his grave. And so there he lay, as though alive.

Campbell’s account of the Yakut shaman demonstrates the archaic motif of consciousness surviving within apparent death, with the coffin’s construction heard by the not-yet-dead as evidence that the threshold between life and death remains permeable.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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“He would like to come out, but the coffin is nailed down.” “If he weren’t in the coffin, could he come back?” “He couldn’t root up all that sand.”

Yalom records a child’s articulation of the coffin as the definitive barrier against return from death, capturing the phenomenological encounter with irreversibility that depth psychology identifies as a primary source of existential anxiety.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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This first house, the tomb, then becomes of its own accord a casing for the soul, a human body, in which the soul of the dead is ‘housed’ after leaving the earth.

Rank traces an archetypal equivalence between tomb, coffin, house, and the human body as successive casings for the soul, establishing the coffin within a broader symbolic series of containers that express the soul’s need for form.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting

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The burial of the important dead as if they still lived is common to almost all these ancient cultures… This practice has no clear explanation except that their voices were still being heard by the living, and were perhaps demanding such accommodation.

Jaynes offers a bicameral-mind hypothesis for burial practices, suggesting that the coffin and grave functioned as physical accommodations for the hallucinatory voices of the recently dead still heard by archaic communities.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside

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