Hind

The hind frequently shows the way or finds the most advantageous point for the crossing of a river. On the other hand, she sometimes lures the hero to disaster or even to death by leading him over a precipice or into the sea or a swamp.

Von Franz establishes the hind’s fundamental ambivalence as an anima figure: simultaneously a guide who aids the hero and a destructive lure leading to death, and further designates the horned hind as a hermaphroditic union of anima and shadow.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis

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the hind in our story is negative; it lures the brothers to their doom. In medieval allegories, the stag was a symbol of pride, and again the hook for this projection is very obvious, if you have ever seen a beautiful stag carrying its antlers in a majestic way.

Von Franz connects the negative, doom-inducing function of the hind to medieval allegorical traditions of pride, reading the deer’s self-exhibiting antlers as the natural basis for the projection of dangerous narcissism onto this animal.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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the virginal Goddess Artemis is associated with the stag, such a visibly male, phallic, assertive animal. We already know: In the inverted world of cognition, the closing in on the game in the spirit of killing leaves its (the game’s) innermost truth in virginal intactness.

Giegerich reads the paradoxical association of Artemis with the stag as an expression of the self-contradictory logic of cognition, where the masculine-phallic deer and the virginal goddess represent two sides of a single, dialectically inverted truth.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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the father the right hind leg, the mother the left hind leg, the elder brother the right fore-arm, the younger brother the left fore-arm

Harrison documents the ritual apportionment of a slain animal’s body parts among kin categories, incidentally using ‘hind leg’ in a structural description of communal sacrificial distribution rather than as a symbolic animal figure.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside

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