The Seba library treats Fireplace in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Onians, R B, Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine).
you make a crackling fire in the fireplace and at once you are at home. Now it’s warm, now the hearth lets you feel at home, as if you have spread your own
Von Franz argues that lighting a fire in the fireplace is a psychologically potent act of reclaiming inhabited space from the cold powers of the underworld, restoring warmth and belonging.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
All the skeletons thus found rested directly on fireplaces and in contact with cinders. The body in each case was apparently put on to the burning fire of the fireplace of his or her dwelling
Onians documents the Paleolithic ritual of placing the dead directly on the domestic fireplace, establishing the hearth as the primary site of contact between the living and the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
‘Spirituality is like that mortar in the fireplace,’ he offered pensively, ‘Just as the mortar makes the chimney a chimney, allowing it to stand up straight and tall, beautiful in its wholeness’
Kurtz employs the fireplace and its mortar as a structural metaphor for spirituality as the integrating force that transforms scattered, inert material into a coherent and functional whole.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
A whole tribe could gather around a campfire, not just for cooking and eating, but for socializing. Until then, the coming o
Damasio identifies the controlled fire — the proto-fireplace — as the evolutionary catalyst for communal gathering, sociality, and the cultural conditions enabling human psychological complexity.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Bill and I had supper in front of the fireplace then went to bed early. Grand day, first real fall weather.
A diary entry incidentally records the fireplace as a site of domestic intimacy and seasonal transition, functioning as an unremarked background of ordinary life.
, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside