The Seba library treats Griffin in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Abraham, Lyndy, Campbell, Joseph, Beekes, Robert).
This mythical creature, with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, is usually paired with the hot, dry, male principle known as sulphur and personified by the red lion.
Abraham establishes the griffin as the cold, wet, mercurial counter-principle to sulphur’s red lion, and their combat as the alchemical enactment of simultaneous dissolution and coagulation in the opus.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
A pre-eminent characteristic of the griffin — eagle-headed in his origin on Cretan soil — is his piercing sight, which qualifies him here for his post as Chief Inquisitor.
Campbell reads the Cretan griffin as a celestial tribunal figure whose defining attribute of piercing vision makes it the archetypal guardian of judgment between life and an Elysian afterlife.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964thesis
Through Lat. gryphus, the word entered the Western Eur. languages (griffin, Greif).
Beekes traces the etymological transmission of the griffin figure from a Pre-Greek substrate through Latin into the Western European vernacular traditions, grounding the symbol’s cross-cultural range.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
The tensions between his career and his thought are many and famous. They have been set forth with convincing precision of argument by Miriam Griffin in her fascinating study.
Nussbaum cites Miriam Griffin as a scholarly authority on Seneca’s biographical paradoxes, a use of the surname that is purely bibliographic rather than symbolic.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994aside
Impulse, he says, is a word of general signification which was used a great deal in common speech and also in Plato’s works… Griffin’s recognition that hormê is a synonym for the various forms of desire is correct.
Inwood endorses A. K. Griffin’s lexical analysis of hormê as a general synonym for desire in Aristotle, a scholarly citation with no symbolic bearing on the mythological creature.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985aside
if we accept Susan Griffin’s dictum, ‘woman who is nature,’ then the unceasing generation of pornographic images cannot be a male province or even a male perversion.
Hillman invokes Susan Griffin’s ecofeminist equation of woman with nature as a rhetorical premise for his argument about Aphrodite and pornography, with no reference to the heraldic creature.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside
Compare Hillman’s ‘Responses’ (to David Griffin), in Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, ed. David Ray Griffin.
A bibliographic reference to David Ray Griffin as editor of a volume on archetypal process theology, constituting a surname citation with no mythological relevance.
, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014aside