The Seba library treats Gorge in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, Chodorow, Joan, Jung, Carl Gustav).
Gorge, K'AN: dangerous place; hole, cavity, hollow; pit, snare, trap, grave, precipice; critical time, test; risky. The ideogram: earth and pit.
This passage establishes Gorge as the primary hexagram image of unavoidable danger, defining it etymologically and symbolically as a hollow threshold requiring full, unreserved engagement.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
Gorge: Stream ventures and falls into the gorge, flowing on through toil and danger. Gorge ends the yin hemicycle by leveling and dissolving forms.
This passage situates Gorge cosmologically as the terminal moment of the yin cycle, whose action of dissolving direction and form is not destructive but cyclically necessary.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
With the struggle of Force, CHIEN, comes heavy labor and isolation. Gorge, K'AN, brings toiling, difficult but worthy labor.
Gorge is here distinguished from pure struggle by its quality of worthy, persistent labor — the stream's patient passage through the dangerous hollow as a model of psychic endurance.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
So we came to a gorge.... In leaping the gorge the youth falls into the chasm. X is left alone and comes to a river where a white sea-horse is waiting for her with a golden boat.
In Jungian active-imagination material, the gorge marks the decisive threshold where a projected inner figure (the youth-animus) is lost to the abyss, leaving the ego to proceed alone toward transformation.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997thesis
long and often very dramatic series of fantasies ensue. The advantage of this method is that it brings a mass of unconscious material to light.
This passage provides the methodological frame — active imagination as deliberate weakening of conscious inhibition — within which the gorge imagery of Case X arises and carries its psychological weight.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
one concentrates one's attention on some impressive but unintelligible dream-image, or on a spontaneous visual impression, and observes the changes taking place in it.
Jung's methodological account of active imagination contextualizes the gorge as a spontaneously generated threshold image arising from concentrated attention on unconscious fantasy material.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
River, CH'UAN: water flowing between banks; current, channel; associated with the Streaming Moment and the trigram Gorge, K'AN.
This passage links the Gorge trigram to the broader lexical field of flowing water and river, underscoring that Gorge is the symbolic container through which stream-energy must pass.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
Three Major New Discoveries from the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
A bibliographic reference to Olduvai Gorge as a paleoanthropological site — present as a nominal coincidence with the term rather than a conceptual engagement.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside