The Seba library treats Dust in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Coniaris, Anthony M., Hillman, James, Homer).
from dust to image of God; from dust to likeness of God; from dust to sons and daughters of God; from dust to heirs of God's eternal kingdom; from dust to partakers of divine nature; from dust to theosis
Dust here names the lowest anthropological rung in a patristic ladder of ascent, serving as the indispensable starting-point for the entire movement toward theosis and divine likeness.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis
fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; the parched desert, the quagmire, the foxhole and battle trench, slag heap and rock wall; bats in black caves, spiders and serpents lurking, ghouls rising from graves; dust to dust … the unfathomable autonomous depths.
Hillman situates dust within the chthonic shadow-vocabulary of Mother Earth, cataloguing it among the imaginal figures that connote radical, autonomous depth and the terror of the underworld.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
A cloud of dust rose up round Hector as he was dragged along, his dark hair flowing, with his whole face, which used to be so handsome, down in the dust.
The Homeric text presents dust as the medium of supreme humiliation and bodily abasement, the substance in which heroic identity is literally ground down and dishonored.
, The Iliad, 2023thesis
all these things are mere dust, and what is more despicable than dust? … they 'degrade their glory to the dust' (Ps. 7:5), and make their dwelling there, thus drawing upon themselves the curse of the Psalmist.
The Philokalia employs dust as a rhetorical measure of worldly vanity — all temporal preoccupations are ranked as dust — and uses the Psalmist's curse to warn that attachment to such things drags spiritual aspiration downward.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Ash is the incorruptible substance left in the alembic after the matter of the Stone has been subjected to the purgatorial fire … free from the turmoil of the passions. It is a synonym for the white stage of the opus, the albedo.
Ash — dust's alchemical cognate — is revalued as the purified, passion-free residue of calcination, the substance that marks the transition from the nigredo to the albedo in the opus.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
The dead, worthless residue is the stuff of the nigredo phase … It is the psyche that we find in the worthless, despised place.
Edinger reads the caput mortuum — the dead residue, dust-equivalent — as a psychologically necessary stage in which the most despised material proves to be the very seat of psychic transformation.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting
it is equally disgraceful … for those whose professed aim is the enjoyment of eternal blessings to be seen groveling in the dust of worldly things, shaming their vocation by incongruous behavior.
Gregory Palamas uses groveling in dust as a vivid image for spiritual regression — the contemplative who stoops to worldly attractions betrays a vocation oriented toward heaven.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode … The blood red dust blew down out of the sun.
McCarthy's prose, cited in the context of Hillman's move to Texas, invokes dust as the elemental atmosphere of a desert landscape freighted with sacrificial and mythic overtones.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
KovTT]: dust, sand, ashes, X 600, * 502, η 153. Kovio-aXos: dust-cloud, dust-whirl.
The Homeric lexicon clusters dust with sand and ashes under a single semantic field, indicating the ancient Greek conflation of pulverized matter across meteorological, martial, and funerary contexts.
, Homeric Dictionaryaside