The depth-psychology corpus approaches drunkenness through at least four distinct registers, each illuminating a different face of the same phenomenon. The Gnostic-hermeneutic register, represented most forcefully by Hans Jonas, reads drunkenness as a cosmological metaphor: the ‘wine of ignorance’ proffered by the powers of the world actively induces the soul’s oblivion of its own alien origin, so that drunkenness is not mere incapacity but a positively maintained counter-condition to gnosis. A second, mythological register—developed by Otto and Hillman—locates drunkenness within the Dionysian economy, where intoxication discloses both divine revelry and destructive frenzy, the two faces of a god who is simultaneously liberator and annihilator. William James introduces a third, phenomenological register, tracing the ‘sway of alcohol’ as a genuine, if pathological, gateway to mystical consciousness, a claim that resonates with Jung’s youthful ecstasy at the distillery and his subsequent theorization of the spirit-longing latent in addiction. The biblical-moral register, largely represented by Shaw, reframes drunkenness as sin rather than disease, insisting that naming it correctly restores hope by making it treatable through repentance. The tension between the ontological-symbolic readings (Jonas, Otto, Hillman, James) and the clinical-moral readings (Shaw, Abraham, Schoen) constitutes the central theoretical fault-line in the corpus’s treatment of this term.