The Seba library treats Ivory in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Lattimore, Richmond, Campbell, Joseph, Snell, Bruno).
One pair of gates is made of horn, and one of ivory. Those of the dreams which issue through the gate of sawn ivory, these are deceptive dreams, their message is never accomplished.
Penelope articulates the classical dream-gate opposition in which ivory is the material of false, unaccomplished visions, establishing the foundational depth-psychological association of ivory with beautiful illusion and deceptive unconscious content.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009thesis
Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold?… Eileen had long white hands… That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.
Campbell’s citation of Joyce demonstrates how the Marian liturgical epithet ‘Tower of Ivory’ undergoes phenomenological concretization, collapsing sacred symbol into sensory experience of cold, white feminine presence.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
‘The Muse is joining together gold and white ivory and the lily-flower which she has taken from the dew of the sea.’ Piece afte
Snell reads Pindar’s composite image of gold, ivory, and sea-lily as emblematic of a Heraclitean aesthetic of correlative tensions, in which ivory serves as one pole of a beauty constituted through contrast and wholeness.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
mammoth ivory bracelets engraved with meander and zigzag designs and a pendant of mammoth ivory in the form of a tooth, two roughly carved little sitting animals, six extraordinarily beaut
Campbell’s survey of Upper Paleolithic sites establishes mammoth ivory as the primary material substrate of humanity’s earliest symbolic and ritual artifacts, linking the substance to the very origins of mythic consciousness.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
The temples that whitened the hills and cities of decadent Greece and ascendant Rome were now crammed with more and more statues of gods… of every conceivable sort: marble and ivory, gilded
Jaynes places ivory cult-statuary within his argument for the revival of idolatry following the collapse of bicameral hallucination, using ivory as a marker of the material intensification of divine representation.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
copper, stone, wood, ivory objects, and certain breeds of animals were somehow being obtained from there
Campbell catalogues ivory among the luxury trade goods linking Indus Valley civilization to Mesopotamia, positioning it as a marker of long-distance exchange networks that transmitted mythological and cultural influence.
, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting
genae tuae eburneae, venter tuus sicut crater tornatilis non indigens poculis, vestes tuae candidiores nive, nitidiores lacte, rubicundiores ebore antiquo
The Aurora Consurgens employs ivory (ebur) within the Song of Songs bridal imagery to evoke an ideal of luminous, precious whiteness that alchemical commentary associates with the purified feminine principle.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside
Like Lat. ebur, ἐλεφάς is a foreign word. Except for the vT-suffix, the final part recalls Eg. ab(u), Copt. eou ‘elephant, ivory’
Beekes traces the Greek and Latin lexemes for ivory and elephant to Egyptian and Hamitic substrata, establishing the foreign, culturally transmitted character of the substance’s very name within the classical symbolic repertoire.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside