The Seba library treats Hierogamy in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, Jung, Carl Gustav, Burkert, Walter).
on New Year’s day that Ishtar lies with Tammuz, and the king reproduces this mythical hierogamy by consummating ritual union with the goddess … The world is regenerated each time the hierogamy is imitated
Eliade argues that the ritual hierogamy between king and goddess-representative is the paradigmatic act of cosmic regeneration, repeated annually to restore fecundity and renew time itself.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
train of thought connected with the hieros gamos, namely, rejuvenation magic. The disappearance and hiding of the image in the wood, in the cave, on the seashore … all this points to death and rebirth.
Jung links the hieros gamos directly to the archetypal cycle of death and renewal, situating it within a broader symbolic complex of rejuvenation magic centered on the Argive cult of Hera.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
a number of allusions to the secret climax of a festival in sexual union, a sacred marriage, hieros gamos … A tradition of sacred marriage exists in the Ancient Near East: the Sumerian king is the lover of the Great Goddess
Burkert surveys the institutional evidence for sacred marriage in Greece and the Near East, acknowledging the scanty Greek record while affirming the Sumerian royal hierogamy as the clearest structural model.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis
hierogamy, of sun and moon, 314n … hieros gamos, 109, 176, 177, 229
The index to The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious confirms that hierogamy and hieros gamos are treated as distinct but related entries, with the solar-lunar conjunction as its primary cosmological instance.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
hierogamy, heaven/earth, 285
Eliade’s Shamanism indexes the hierogamy of heaven and earth as a discrete cosmological category within shamanic cosmology, situating it alongside hierophanies and the dialectic of the sacred.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
marriage is a symbolic representation of heaven and earth, on the one hand, practical and, on the other hand, ideal. Hence divorce, from this view, is a radical cosmological horror; it splits heaven and earth.
Hillman invokes the hierogamic archetype implicitly by treating marriage as a cosmological symbol whose dissolution ruptures the heaven-earth conjunction, applying the mythic schema to contemporary individuation.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
religious calendar commemorates, in the space of a year, all the cosmogonic phases which took place ab origine … man is contemporary with the cosmogony and with the anthropogony because ritual projects him into the mythical epoch of the beginning.
Eliade’s argument that ritual repetition recovers primordial time establishes the cosmological logic within which hierogamy operates as the sexual-creative moment of annual renewal.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954aside
The Austroasiatic cultivator who uses the same word, lak, to designate phallus and spade … assimilates seed to the semen virile … life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life
Eliade’s discussion of agricultural-sexual symbolism provides contextual grounding for hierogamy by showing how ordinary productive acts are experienced as participation in cosmic generative union.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside