Within the depth-psychology corpus, drought functions as a polysemous symbol operating simultaneously on cosmological, psychological, and ritual planes. Its most concentrated theoretical treatment appears in Jung’s own writings, where it marks the condition of psychic aridness — the soul starved of inner life — and in the celebrated Wilhelm rainmaker anecdote, which von Franz transmits as paradigmatic of the analyst’s obligation to restore inner order before outer conditions can change. The Jungian axis thus reads drought not as mere meteorological misfortune but as a symptom of collective dissociation from the unconscious, a fall from Tao or Self-alignment. Eliade broadens this frame: in extremis, when drought, storm, or epidemic overwhelm every lesser religious resource, archaic humanity turns again toward the supreme, transcendent deity — a pattern repeated across cultures and confirming drought as the crucible of highest religious need. Moore’s Jungian-archetypal reading situates drought within the mythological logic of the King archetype: the failure of creative, generative ordering produces aridness, while its restoration — as in Baal’s defeat of chaos — inaugurates rainfall and fertility. At the margins, Schwartz applies the figure idiomatically to family therapy (a ‘leadership drought’), and Schoen names Set as the mythic ‘bringer of drought,’ anchoring the term within an archetypal evil complex. Across voices, drought consistently signals a rupture in the living flow between psyche and world.
In Kiaochou came a great drought so that men and animals died in the hundreds. In despair, the citizens called for an old rainmaker who lived in the mountains nearby.
Von Franz presents the Wilhelm rainmaker story as the paradigmatic depth-psychological response to drought: collective outer disorder resolved through the individual’s restoration of inner psychic order.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars.
Jung deploys drought as a direct metaphor for the soul’s inner destitution, the condition of spiritual impoverishment that results from exclusive orientation toward the external world.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
in cases of extreme distress, when everything has been tried in vain, and especially in cases of disaster proceeding from the sky-drought, storm, epidemic-men turn to the supreme being again and entreat him.
Eliade argues that drought, as sky-borne catastrophe, functions as the extreme threshold at which archaic humanity abandons lesser deities and returns to the transcendent supreme being.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
Set, the brother of Osiris, is the ‘personification of the evil desert, the bringer of darkness and drought. From him comes everything destructive and inimical to human life.’
Schoen locates drought within the archetypal evil complex, identifying the Egyptian god Set as its mythological personification and connecting it to the destructive pole of the psyche.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
the Canaanite Baal, for instance, after he defeated the dragon of the chaotic sea, and because he loved the earth, ordered the chaotic waters into rainfall and rivers and streams.
Moore presents the mythological defeat of chaos as what ends implicit drought conditions, showing that the King archetype’s generative ordering transforms aridity into fertility.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting
This passage refers to Hosea 13: 5: ‘I did know thee in the wilderness, and in the land of great drought.’
Jung cites the biblical image of divine encounter in the land of great drought as an alchemical and scriptural reference point, linking arid desolation to the site of numinous knowledge.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
a large local community performs ritual to reverse the effects of famine, drought, or plague.
Turner situates drought among the collective crises that necessitate rites of group reversal, demonstrating its structural role in triggering communal liminality and ritual renewal.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
His job is to bring Self-leadership to this family system, which is having a leadership drought.
Schwartz applies drought idiomatically to describe the absence of Self-leadership within a family system, extending the term from its cosmological register into clinical family therapy.
, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995aside
Thousands are dying of famine and drought. Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh.
Armstrong invokes drought as one marker of contemporary apocalyptic crisis, situating it within the broader question of whether traditional religious ideas can survive modernity’s extremities.
, A History of God, 1993aside
Our medicine-man’s method of rain-making is simple and handy — just a pair of rattles. We know of another rain-maker — this time a king — whose apparatus was more complex.
Harrison documents ancient rain-making ritual as a function of the sacred king, implicitly situating drought as the condition that empowers and legitimizes the ritual specialist.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside