The Seba library treats Doe in 5 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Kerényi, Karl, McGilchrist, Iain).
Her eyes’ tender light / Surely did shine / Like the soft eyes of the doe … nature acquires a hidden maternal significance (‘doe’); he, too, discovers in the sounds of nature a hint of his mother’s voice
Jung reads the doe as Siegfried’s projected mother-imago, a symbol of regressive longing for the idealized primal mother that simultaneously summons the devouring, unconscious-dragon danger.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
The first doe that he shot at he missed, / And the second doe he trimmed he kissed, / And the third ran away in a young man’s heart … One of the countless symbolic or allegorical images of the sexual act is a deer hunt
The doe in the medieval English folk song is cited as evidence that the deer-hunt constitutes a recurring symbolic-allegorical image of the sexual act within dream interpretation.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis
a doe sprang between them: it either was sent by Artemis or was Artemis herself in beast’s form. The twins hurled their spears at the doe, and each hit the other.
Kerényi presents the doe as an avatar of Artemis—divine feminine agency disguised as animal prey—whose sudden appearance enacts an inescapable fate and mutual destruction.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Siegfried wants to part from the ‘imp’ who was his mother in the past, and longingly he reaches out for the other mother.
The passage contextualizes the doe image within the broader dialectic of the dual-mother archetype: the devouring mother versus the luminous maternal ideal toward which the hero strives.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
all things stedfastnes doe hate / And changed be: yet being rightly wayd / They are not changed from their first estate; / But by their change their being doe dilate
Spenser’s archaic usage of ‘doe’ as an auxiliary verb (‘do’) appears in McGilchrist’s discussion of circular transformation and hemispheric dialectic, with no symbolic resonance relating to the animal.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside