Hide

The Seba library treats Hide in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, Alexiou, Margaret, Panksepp, Jaak).

In the library 7 passages

Where would we be—what would we be—without our skin, our hide? My hide defines me; it establishes the limits, the boundaries, between the ‘me’ and the not-me. Home is the place where one’s very ‘hide’—limited and bounded almost by definition—fits.

Kurtz and Ketcham fuse the somatic and psychological senses of ‘hide’: the skin that bounds the self and the shelter in which the self may safely become vulnerable are revealed as structurally identical.

Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis

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Hide me, mother, hide me, so that Charos cannot take me! Chorus: Woe to you, woe to you! — Make a cage and put me in! — Make a chest and shut me in!

In Greek ritual lamentation the dying girl’s appeal to be hidden enacts concealment as a frantic, ultimately futile maternal protection against the absolute exposure of death.

Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974thesis

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Maybe the deus absconditus is more artefact than authentic experience. Maybe the idea of the deus absconditus is no more than the mirror image of homo absconditus.

Giegerich argues that the theological notion of a hidden God is the projected reflex of modern humanity’s own self-concealment, making divine hiddenness a symptom of psychological self-enclosure.

thesis

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Sleep stopped, in case the eyes of Zeus should see him, and perched inside the tallest tree on Ida… He sat there hidden in the fir tree’s branches.

Sleep’s concealment from Zeus in the Iliad enacts hiding as a strategic evasion of divine surveillance, illustrating the political and cosmological dimensions of concealment in the epic tradition.

Homer, The Iliad, 2023supporting

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He asked glorious Hermes at once: ‘How were you able, you crafty rogue, to flay two cows… And he bade them both to be of one mind and search for the cattle, and guiding Hermes to lead the way and show the place where now he had hidden the strong cattle.’

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes presents hiding stolen cattle as the archetypal Hermetic act—cunning concealment as a foundational gesture of the trickster principle.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting

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Ares the huge and bellowing had yet heard nothing of how his son had fallen there in the strong encounter but he, sheltered under the golden clouds on utmost Olympos, was sitting, held fast by command of Zeus.

Ares’ enforced shelter under Zeus’s command illustrates divine concealment as subjugation—being hidden from the field of action as an exercise of superior power.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside

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