Cradle

in its character of crib, cradle, and nest, it is the bed of birth and, in its character of death tree, cross, gallows, coffin, and ship of the dead, it is the deathbed. The cradle and crib symbolism of the ship, known to us from the myths of the exposed hero child, belongs, like the birth symbolism of the life-preserving ark of Noah, to the vessel symbolism of the Feminine.

Neumann identifies the cradle as a node in the Great Mother's vessel-symbolism, structurally continuous with coffin and ship, encoding both the natal and mortal poles of the feminine archetype.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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Nest, crib, cradle, coffin, 243—Tree of heaven, 244—Tree of souls, 245—Tree of fate, 246—The twofold significance of the feminine wood: tree of life and tree of death, 252—Cross, bed, ship, cradle, 256

The table of contents entry confirms that Neumann systematically positions the cradle within the 'Lady of the Plants' chapter as part of the twofold symbolism of feminine wood, spanning life and death.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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The little boy was swaddled and laid fatherless in a cradle, and his mother sat rocking it… on the third day the boy kicked out with his feet before and behind, tore off the swaddling-clothes, crawled out, and broke the lime-wood cradle to pieces.

The Kalevala's Kullervo episode, cited in Jung and Kerényi's mythological science, presents the cradle as the first site of the hero's numinous destructive force, shattered as the expression of autonomous heroic selfhood erupting against maternal enclosure.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis

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Up till now the child bore its cradle name. It now takes its ni-ki-e name which relates it to its gens… This child has thrown away its cradle name.

Harrison's ethnographic material shows that the cradle name designates a pre-social, pre-ritual identity that is formally renounced in the Omaha 'Turning ceremony,' marking the cradle as the symbolic domain of undifferentiated origin preceding communal integration.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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80% of right- and left-handed mothers cradle babies with their head to the left. Males have no preference, but when they become fathers, 80% cradle to the left… The preference is specific to babies, as opposed to inanimate objects, and is therefore not simply a matter of convenience.

McGilchrist marshals neuroscientific evidence that cradling posture is governed by right-hemisphere attentional dominance, grounding the archaic symbolic valence of the cradle in measurable neurological preference.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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The ocean is his kinsman, the sea his cradle.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad passage, cited by Jung in Symbols of Transformation, positions the cradle as the cosmogonic origin-point of the sacrificial horse as world-symbol, equating it with the primordial sea and elemental genesis.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside) The sea whisper'd me.

Bloom's reading of Whitman's 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking' identifies the cradle as the elemental matrix from which the daemon-poet's voice is born, merging maternal, oceanic, and originary symbolism.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting

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The night is not the cradle that they cry, The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.

In Stevens's early poem cited by Bloom, the cradle is strategically negated as a regressive maternal frame, the poet refusing the oceanic mother's hold in favor of the mind's geometric clarity.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting

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I will cradle thee, I will watch thee; Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy!

Campbell cites Ibsen's Solveig cradle-song as an analogue for the initiatory return to feminine enclosure following masculine wandering, the cradle here functioning as the terminal consolation of the hero's journey.

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

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