Hole

In the depth-psychology corpus, ‘hole’ operates across a remarkably wide symbolic register — from cosmogonic aperture to wound, from the vulva of earth to the drain of psychic danger. Jung’s reading of the Wachandi fertility rite identifies the hole dug in the ground as a ritual representation of the feminine generative principle, the earth’s womb summoned into sacred actuality. Turner’s ethnographic material extends this polarity: the ritual holes of the Ndembu simultaneously signify tomb and womb, death and procreative power, encoding in a single chthonic space the great ambivalences of passage rites. Von Franz’s creation mythology adds the cosmogonic dimension: the tree of light uprooted leaves a hole in the heavenly cupola through which the world-founding fall becomes possible. Jung himself, in his dream seminar, treats the hole as an epistemological figure — the gap in the world-order that the unconscious rushes to fill, projecting archetypal contents into apparent empirical fact. Sanford reads the round hole in a dream stocking as both imperfection and intimation of wholeness, the circle’s negative form still carrying its numinosity. Schoen’s analytical theology renders the ‘black hole’ as the supreme image of archetypal evil and addictive force — a gravitational absolute that swallows light itself. Wang Bi’s I Ching commentary supplies the ‘Sink Hole’ as a hexagrammic archetype of inescapable peril and the loss of the Dao. Together these voices establish the hole as a threshold image: simultaneously the wound in containment and the aperture of possibility.

In the library 11 passages

the hole is filled with marvelous ideas, which then emerge as mythological ones… If the unconscious actually fills all the holes in our worldview and we don’t notice it… we will be cut off from the unconscious

Jung argues that gaps in rational world-order are automatically filled by unconscious projection of archetypal contents, making the hole the very site where mythological thinking secretly operates.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis

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They dig a hole in the ground, so shaping it and setting it about with bushes that it looks like a woman’s genitals… In this rite of spring there is enacted a sacramental mating, with the hole in the earth representing the woman

Jung interprets the ritual hole as the archetypal feminine generative principle given concrete form, the earth’s body made participant in a sacramental fertility rite.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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the holes stand for ‘graves (tulung’a) and for procreative power (lusemu)’ — in other words, for tomb and womb… The ikela of heat is the ikela of death. The cool ikela is life.

Turner documents the Ndembu ritual holes as a paired symbolic structure encoding the fundamental polarity of death and generation within a single liminal space.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis

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the tree of light which stands beside his hut, must be pulled up by the roots; then the earth which is really the cupola of the heavens will have a hole in it, and beside that hole he is to be placed

Von Franz traces the mythological hole as a cosmogonic aperture — the wound in the heavenly vault through which the primal descent and world-creation become possible.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis

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The black hole swallows up, sucks up everything — matter, gravity, even light. Nothing, it seems, can escape its powerful tractor-like beam into the dark vortex. Is the black hole another image of alcoholism and addiction, of Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil

Schoen employs the black hole as his governing image for archetypal evil and addictive possession — a gravitational absolute from which no ego-force can escape once drawn into its field.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

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the small hole from which the bugs emerge. The hole is in the wall, above her head, that lacuna or vulnerable spot in the protective containment… Crucial to this emergence from out of the woodwork and into awareness is the small hole

Hillman reads the dream-hole as a lacuna in the ego’s protective structure — the aperture through which repressed, chthonic psychic contents finally force their way into consciousness.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

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the neat, round hole in the stocking… The round hole in her stocking expresses both an imperfection

Sanford interprets the dream round hole as a dual symbol: both a flaw in the persona’s perfection and an unconscious allusion to the circle’s wholeness, pointing toward the instinctual nature not yet integrated.

Sanford, John A., Dreams: Gods Forgotten Language, 1968supporting

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Here in the Constant Sink Hole one falls into the drain hole at the bottom, and this means misfortune… one has entered its drain hole… someone who has lost the Dao and now lies exhausted at the bottom of the Sink Hole

Wang Bi’s commentary on Hexagram Kan presents the hole as an archetypal image of inescapable psychic peril — the deepest pit of danger reached when one has wholly lost one’s orienting principle.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting

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Kan here indicates a pit… constant [xi] is added to its name… it refers to the fact that both the upper and the lower trigrams are Kan [Sink Hole], so ‘constant’ here describes how dangerous it is — that is, what a multiplicity of danger is involved

Wang Bi elaborates the doubled Sink Hole hexagram as a symbol of compounded, inescapable peril requiring constant inner preparation — an image of psychic depth as danger multiplied.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting

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the senior adept and his major male assistant begin to dig deep holes there, known as makela (singular, ikela), a term reserved for holes serving a magico-religious purpose

Turner establishes that the ritual hole carries a distinct technical designation in Ndembu practice, marking its special status as a consecrated locus of transformative power.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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she jumped into the well to get the shuttle. She lost her senses; and when she awoke and came to herself again, she was in a lovely meadow

Greene’s fairy-tale analysis uses the descent into the well — a vertical hole — as an image of the necessary katabasis into the unconscious that precedes psychic renewal.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside

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