The Four Rivers of Paradise — Pison, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates, flowing from a single Edenic source — constitute one of depth psychology’s most productive cosmological symbols, operating simultaneously as cosmography, psychic topology, and quaternary schema. Jung reads the motif through the Naassene Gnostic tradition in Aion, where the rivers are mapped onto the four sensory and spiritual functions, with the Euphrates as the ambivalent ‘fourth’ bearing a daimonion-like double valence. This fourfold emanation from a unified centre becomes, in Jung’s broader symbolic grammar, an emblem of wholeness: the self radiating outward through differentiated functions, mirrored in dreams of four rivers framing a European heartland. David Miller traces the myth’s descent through Platonic underworld geography (Acheron, Cocytus, Lethe, Pyrephlegethon) into the body’s humors and finally into the unconscious itself, charting a progressive interiorization. Campbell situates the symbol within the ancient Near Eastern garden-centre complex, noting its Sumerian antecedents and its structural role in organizing sacred space into four quarters. John of Damascus preserves the exegetical-cosmographic reading — the single oceanic source parted into four rivers — that theological tradition transmitted to the alchemists. Bly and Hamaker-Zondag employ the rivers as one item in the broader inventory of quaternary completeness. The central tension in the corpus runs between cosmological literalism and psychological hermeneutics: whether the rivers name places or psychic functions.