The Seba library treats Iris in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Hillman, James, Kerényi, Karl, Hesiod).
In his early work on light Newton had captured Iris, the mediating rainbow (and anima mediatrix), in a prism of glass and dissected her into seven colors. Iris, the Rainbow Girl, and colors themselves lost their mediating role
Hillman argues that Newton’s prismatic decomposition of light destroyed Iris’s function as anima mediatrix, severing the mediating bond between the phenomenal and invisible worlds that color had carried.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
Iris, too, has a connection to this goddess, which is established by the presence of her cult on the Hecate island near Delos. To the essence of Iris, however, belongs the unreachable distance of a celestial sign, such as the rainbow, whose name she bears.
Kerényi defines Iris’s essence through the phenomenology of the rainbow—an unreachable celestial sign—and locates her within a chthonic-Olympian axis shared with Hecate.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944thesis
the goddesses sent out Iris from the well-set isle to bring Eilithyia, promising her a great necklace strung with golden threads, nine cubits long. And they bade Iris call her aside from white-armed Hera, lest she might afterwards turn her from coming with her words.
Hesiod’s Homeric Hymn deploys Iris as the instrument of divine solidarity among goddesses, sent on a covert mission of cosmic midwifery to circumvent Hera’s jealousy.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700thesis
He ordered Iris, who flies on golden wings, to take a message. ‘Go swiftly, Iris, take these words to Hector.’ Swift Iris heard him, and on feet of wind swooped down from Ida’s peaks to holy Troy.
The Iliad presents Iris as the paradigmatic swift divine messenger, her golden-winged, wind-footed nature emphasizing instantaneous transmission of Zeus’s will across cosmic distance.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
When father Zeus looked down from Ida, he was furious. He summoned Iris on her golden wings and sent her as a messenger. ‘Swift Iris, go turn them back! They must not come attack me!’
Zeus’s use of Iris as a restraining messenger against Hera and Athena demonstrates her function as executor of supreme divine authority, a threshold figure between Olympian factions.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
Iris is the messenger of the gods, the female equivalent of Hermes. Her rainbow connects heaven and earth: ‘as above, so below.’ She was Classically depicted with wings and was also the goddess who poured the rain from her vessel.
Place identifies Iris behind the Temperance tarot trump, reading her rainbow as the Hermetic axis connecting celestial and terrestrial planes, making her the feminine counterpart to Hermes in the symbolic imagination.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting