The Seba library treats Hub in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Siegel, Daniel J., Campbell, Joseph).
In the center is the empty hub of the wheel, a realm of pure not-time. Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.
Von Franz uses the Taoist image of the empty hub to locate the Self beyond temporal consciousness, identifying the centre of the psychic mandala as a realm untouched by clock-time.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
In this metaphor for the mind, the hub represents awareness, and the points on the rim of the wheel represent that which we can be aware of — from sights and sounds to our sense of the body, our thoughts and feelings.
Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness uses the hub as a clinical metaphor for pure observing consciousness, differentiated from its sensory and relational content on the rim.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
Within the hub motion is communicated by three ever-circling beasts: a cock or dove, a serpent, and a pig, which represent desire, anger, and stupidity.
Campbell identifies the hub of the Buddhist Wheel of Being as the generative engine of samsaric existence, housing the three roots of delusion that drive the cycle of rebirth.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
the broad earth heaved and sunk, as though it was a huge cartwheel lying on its hub, and somebody was treading on its rim.
Armstrong’s account of Gotama’s approach to the Bodhi tree uses the hub-and-rim image to convey the cosmological stakes of finding the immovable spot, the axis of enlightenment.
, Buddha, 2000supporting
the hero as the incarnation of God is himself the navel of the world, the umbilical point through which the energies of eternity break into
Campbell equates the hero’s position at the cosmic centre — the Immovable Spot — with the hub-function: the point of intersection between eternity and temporal existence.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
It is, first of all, an energy system whose essence is motion. Thus we may use it as a kind of moving diagram for the inter-relationship of many facets of nature and human nature.
Nichols frames the Tarot Wheel as an energy system implying a central organising point around which the transformations of life revolve, evoking the hub’s structural role without naming it.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
the aimless cycle is a form of the Great Round, whose positive form, in India as elsewhere, is the great containing World Mother who raises her outstretched arms shelteringly.
Neumann situates the hub-less, aimless cycle of the negative wheel against the centred, contained Great Round, implying that the presence or absence of a governing hub determines whether the wheel is generative or destructive.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting