The Seba library treats Crossroads in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Hillman, James, Liu I-ming, Woodman, Marion).
Neither would give way; a violent fight; son kills father. The place is several times called a 'triple way.' … No appeasing bread, honey, milk, or eggs, no soul food, at this crossroads.
Hillman identifies the Oedipal crossroads as a mythically charged site of irreversible fate and unconscious violence, where neither reason nor ritual appeasement operates, making it the paradigmatic locus of compulsive, unseeing encounter.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
Top yang: Carrying the crossroads of heaven; development … when one arrives at nonstriving, for the first time one is known to others — who does not extol carrying the crossroads of heaven?
Liu I-ming employs 'carrying the crossroads of heaven' as the culminating image of Taoist spiritual maturation, in which the practitioner, having completed inner nurturance, embodies the cosmic intersection of all directions and becomes an agent of transformation for others.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
The god of opportunity, luck, thresholds, and crossroads, we remember it is also Hermes who inhabits hermeneutics — the philosophy of meaning and interpretation.
Hillman places Hermes — god of crossroads — at the root of his archetypal method, linking the spatial figure of the threshold to hermeneutics itself, so that interpretation is always a crossing-point activity.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
consciousness is reflecting Hercules at the crossroads or unsure Paris asked to choose among the goddesses, or enlightened Apollo musing at a distance.
Hillman invokes Hercules at the crossroads as the archetypal ego-stance of reflective choice, arguing that only from this distanced position — itself mythically conditioned — can one speak of polytheistic relativism or evaluate competing mythic claims.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
your own tuning fork will tell you whether she's lived through her own crossroads. If she hasn't, don't trust her. She'll be into power.
Woodman uses 'crossroads' as a criterion of psychological authenticity in the Crone figure, marking it as the lived ordeal through which genuine authority and freedom from power are won.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
far from leading us to the same crossroads it will allow us to go beyond, namely, to grasp the moment of tipping over, the moment of reversal where from the conjunction of desire with its object qua inadequate, there must emerge the signification which is called love.
Lacan employs 'crossroads' as a dialectical figure for the critical juncture where desire meets its inadequate object and must tip over into love, distinguishing his analytic path from one that merely arrives at an impasse.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
I shall be grateful to readers of these Last Lectures for adding their own path to this crossroads, to this writing.
Benveniste's editor uses 'crossroads' metaphorically to characterize the unfinished, multi-pathed textual space of the posthumous lectures, implicitly invoking the term's connotation of open encounter and interpretive choice.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside