The Seba library treats Cone in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Harrison, Jane Ellen, Campbell, Joseph, Jung, Carl Gustav).
it has been made possible and indeed practically certain that the omphalos was a cone surmounting a grave. We have further had abundant evidence that cones did surmount graves.
Harrison argues that the omphalos — the navel-stone of Greek religion — was definitively a funerary cone, establishing the cone as a primary cultic object linking grave, fertility magic, and sacred geography.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
Suidas speaks of the Aguieus pillars as ‘altars’ (Qwpot). As an altar in our sense, as a place for burnt-offering, the obelisk could scarcely serve, but, when it stood on a grave-mound or on a basis, mound or basis would serve as altar.
Harrison identifies the Aguieus cone-pillar as a sacred altar-object of Apollo, demonstrating the cone’s function as a ritual interface between earth-mound and divine power.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
As the female power resident in the earth releases the seed life from the cone, so the knowledge of the two goddesses releases the mind of the neophyte from its commitment to what Paul termed ‘this body of death’.
Campbell reads the mystery-cult cone as a symbol of chthonic seed-release, homologous to the gnosis that liberates the initiate from mortal bondage.
, The Mythic Image, 1974thesis
the upper sun comes out of the cone and the cone gazes after it, dejected about where it is going. One has to retrieve it with a hook and would like to place it in the small prison.
In Jung’s visionary rune-commentary, the cone mediates between upper and lower suns, functioning as a dynamic regulating vessel within the psychic economy of the Self.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
the serpent comes and wants to drink from the vessel of the below. But there comes the upper cone and stops.
The upper cone acts as a liminal stopper that arrests the serpent’s chthonic consumption, dramatizing the cone’s role as a boundary-regulator between solar and telluric forces.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
Seeing takes place when the light between the visual faculty and the object is stretched into the shape of a cone.
The Stoic optics reported by Diogenes Laertius posit the cone as the precise geometric form taken by the luminous medium linking eye to object, making it the shape of perception itself.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
The formula ‘neither equal nor unequal,’ C 5 ends, is enough to save the cone from being a cylinder. If this is right, has Chrysippus here thrown away the advances concerning ‘limits’?
Chrysippus employs the cone as a test case for Stoic continuum theory, using it to probe the paradoxes of infinite divisibility and the ontological status of geometric limits.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
Their shape is that of a blunt cone, and their likeness to the omphalos is clear.
Harrison identifies money-box funerary objects whose blunt-cone shape preserves the morphological memory of the beehive tomb and the omphalos, tracing the cone’s sacral-commemorative lineage.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
a phenomenon noted by Novalis and celebrated in the poetic invocation of the ‘tire-cendres’ crystal (tourmaline) can be understood based on the system of the symmetry of the cone’s frustum.
Simondon grounds the electrical polarity of heated tourmaline in the structural symmetry of the cone’s frustum, linking geometric form to physical individuation and pointing toward a naturalistic basis for cone symbolism.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting