The Flying Bird occupies a remarkably heterogeneous position across the depth-psychology corpus, appearing as a charged symbol wherever questions of transcendence, psychic movement, and the perils of ascent arise. Within the I Ching commentarial tradition — from Wilhelm and Baynes through Wang Bi and the Taoist reading of Liu Yiming — the flying bird anchors Hexagram 62 (Preponderance of the Small) as an explicit structural image: the hexagram’s very form mimics wings, and the bird’s cry delivers the injunction that striving upward is rebellion while remaining below is devotion. Here the symbol functions as an ethical and cosmological warning against hubris in movement. In Jungian alchemy, the polarity between winged and wingless bird — a recurring motif in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis and von Franz’s Alchemy — maps directly onto the tension between volatile spirit and bound matter, sublimatio and the arrest of premature flight. Eliade situates the flying bird within shamanic ideology as the paradigmatic image of the soul-flight: the shaman’s bird costume, the eagle as progenitor, the soul-bird perched on the World Tree. Meanwhile, Zimmer’s reading of the wild gander (hamsa) supplies the contemplative dimension: the bird that moves freely between water and sky symbolizes the divine essence simultaneously embodied and transcendent. Together, these traditions reveal the flying bird as a symbol that triangulates ascent, danger, and liberation — asking always whether the flight is premature, disciplined, or genuinely transformative.
The hexagram has the form of a flying bird. ‘The flying bird brings the message: It is not well to strive upward, it is well to remain below. Great good fortune.’
Wilhelm establishes the flying bird as both the structural image and the oracular voice of Hexagram 62, encoding the ethical principle that upward striving is rebellion while downward devotion yields great fortune.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
The hexagram has the form of a flying bird. ‘The flying bird brings the message: It is not well to strive upward, it is well to remain below. Great good fortune.’ Striving upward is rebellion, striving downward is devotion.
This passage — substantively identical to the Wilhelm-Baynes edition — confirms the flying bird as the governing cosmological and moral symbol of Preponderance of the Small, rendering the bird’s message as a law of psychic and cosmic orientation.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
‘The flying bird is losing its voice’ … ‘That the bird is losing its voice can only mean that it is exhausted and hard-pressed because of not having found a safe place to stop.’
Wang Bi’s commentary interprets the flying bird’s lost voice as the exhaustion of a being that has overreached — a figure for the soul that has not found its proper resting place, literalizing the danger of ungrounded ascent.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
the wingless bird prevents the winged bird from flying away, while the winged bird wants to raise the wingless bird, and so they remain attached, linked together in a kind of insoluble conflict
Von Franz maps the alchemical polarity of winged and wingless bird onto the psychic tension between volatile spirit and bound instinct, framing the flying bird as the volatile fantasy-soul that must remain in productive conflict with earthbound matter.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
In the ‘separatio’ one of the birds can fly, the other not. The ‘unio’ produces the winged hermaphrodite.
Jung presents the flying bird’s capacity for flight as the marker of successful separatio, and the ultimate coniunctio as the production of a winged hermaphrodite — the bird-symbol thus indexes the entire alchemical process of psychic integration.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis
Because shamans can change themselves into ‘birds,’ that is, because they enjoy the ‘spirit’ condition, they are able to fly to the World Tree to bring back ‘soul-birds.’
Eliade establishes the shaman’s transformation into a flying bird as the definitive symbol of the spirit-condition, grounding the bird’s flight in the archaic cosmology of the World Tree and the retrieval of lost souls.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
the bird costume is indispensable to flight to the other world: ‘They say that it is easier to go, when the costume is light.’
Eliade documents the functional necessity of the bird costume in shamanic practice, showing that the flying bird’s symbolism is not merely metaphorical but operationally constitutive of the shaman’s aerial journey.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
The wild gander … swims on the surface of the water, but is not bound to it. Withdrawing from the watery realm, it wings into the pure and stainless air … it symbolizes the divine essence, which, though embodied in, and abiding with, the individual, yet remains forever free
Zimmer’s reading of the hamsa as the bird that moves freely between earthly and celestial realms provides a Hindu analog to the flying bird’s double nature — simultaneously incarnate and transcendent, bound and liberated.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
the correct way of predominance of the small is that action not stray from tranquility … ‘the real person plunges into the profound depths, floating about yet keeping within the circle,’ neither indifferent nor obsessed
Liu Yiming’s Taoist commentary extends the flying bird hexagram’s teaching into an alchemical-spiritual praxis: genuine flight is paradoxically grounded, maintaining inner stillness within outward movement.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Buddhist texts speak of four different magical powers of translation (gamana), the first being ability to fly like a bird.
Eliade traces the motif of bird-flight across Buddhist and Hindu yogic traditions, demonstrating that flying-like-a-bird is universally the primary marker of achieved spiritual power and liberation from ordinary bodily constraint.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
The appearance of the bird is an augury. You know that birds appearing and doing the unexpected represents a sign from the gods.
Von Franz situates the sudden bird-flight within the traditional system of augury, treating the unexpected bird as an eruption of the unconscious — a divine signal redirecting the hero’s path toward individuation.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
He dreamed of a volcano, and from its crater he saw two birds taking flight as if in fear that the volcano was about to erupt … the dream represented an individual initiation journey.
Jung reads the eruption-driven flight of two birds from a volcanic crater as an initiation symbol, the birds’ sudden ascent marking the threshold moment where psychic transformation becomes unavoidable.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
birds and beasts had mana other and sometimes stronger than the mana of man … Birds are not, never were, gods; there is no definite bird-cult, but there are an infinite number of bird-sanctities.
Harrison distinguishes between bird-cult and bird-mana, arguing that the flying bird’s sacred power inheres not in divinity but in a special participatory quality that humans have always sought to absorb.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
the seventh light, the highest, the floating, which rises with flapping wings, released from the embrace of the tree of light with six branches and one blossom
In the cosmological schema of the Red Book, the highest of the seven lights — associated with the stars — is imagined as a winged being rising from the World Tree, placing the flying bird at the apex of Jung’s personal mythological hierarchy.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
Sublimatio is an ascent that raises us above the confining entanglements of immediate, earthy existence … The higher we go the grander and more comprehensive is our perspective, but also the more remote we become from actual life
Edinger’s account of sublimatio as dangerous ascent provides the alchemical-psychological context in which the flying bird’s upward trajectory must be understood as ambivalent — expansive but potentially severing contact with lived reality.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985aside
there to his great amazement was a very large bird flying above him … Then the thought suddenly struck him that it would be nice to be like this bird.
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, the flying bird precipitates an envious identification that initiates one of the myth’s transformative (and comic-catastrophic) episodes, illustrating the danger of uncritical desire for the bird’s freedom.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside