The Seba library treats Famine in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Augustine, Shaw, Mark E.).
The starving woman endures famine after famine. She may plan her escape, yet believe that the cost of fleeing is too high… That is the trouble with famine. If something looks like it will fill the yearning, a woman will seize it, no questions asked.
Estés argues that repeated psychic famine destroys instinctual discernment, producing compulsive and indiscriminate grasping at any apparent relief.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take onto ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul.
Estés identifies the ‘famine of wild soul’ as the psychological condition that renders women vulnerable to self-destructive enchantments, as encoded in the Red Shoes motif.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
To be in the state of hambre del alma, a starved soul, is to be made relentlessly hungry. Then a woman burns with a hunger for anything that will make her feel alive again.
Estés names soul-famine — hambre del alma — as the root condition driving the wounded woman’s frantic and undiscriminating pursuit of vitality.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it.
Augustine identifies a paradoxical spiritual famine in which the soul’s depletion produces not longing but a deepened incapacity to recognize or desire its true nourishment.
, Confessions, 397thesis
when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need… his situation had to get worse before he ‘came to his senses’
Shaw reads the prodigal son’s famine as the providential collapse of external resources that dismantles enabling structures and creates the necessary conditions for genuine repentance.
, The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective, 2008supporting
Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of will power which a famished man experiences.
Frankl testifies that literal famine under extreme captivity produces a ‘soul-destroying’ cognitive and moral crisis in which hunger supplants all other forms of human concern.
, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946supporting
all over India and Nepal famine prevailed… All famine and disease disappeared and people were
In Tibetan hagiography, famine functions as a cosmological consequence of interrupted sacred practice and is reversed when spiritual order is restored.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
While perhaps two million Irish starved during the ‘Great Hunger,’ ample quantities of meat and grain went on being shipped across the channel for sale in English markets.
Easwaran deploys historical famine as evidence of the karmic and ethical consequences of institutionalized greed, linking structural hunger to the Gita’s analysis of unchecked desire.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
given defeat, civil strife, famine or pestilence, their anger, despair, and bewilderment will discharge upon him with such force
Adkins notes famine as one of the communal disasters that, in Greek moral culture, triggers the scapegoating of the ritually polluted individual.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside