The Seba library treats Jackal in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Hillman, James, Jung, Carl Gustav, Pollack, Rachel).
The one with the finest nose for the dead is the ancestral jackal: ‘In ancient Egypt, where this animal nightly prowled among the tombs, the god of the dead was Anubis, the jackal, and, this deity … is closely associated with decay and decomposition.’
Hillman establishes the jackal as the preeminent animal mediator of death in Egyptian religious imagination, grounding Anubis’s psychopompic function in the animal’s literal necrophagous behavior.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
Isis collected the pieces together again with the help of the jackal-headed Anubis. Here the dogs and jackals, devourers of corpses by night, assist in the reconstitution or reproduction of Osiris.
Jung identifies the jackal as an instrument of regenerative reassembly — the necrophagous animal paradoxically becomes the agent of bodily reconstitution and symbolic rebirth in the Osiris myth.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
The jackal-headed man going up is Anubis, guide to the dead souls, and therefore giver of new life … only death can bring new life, and when we fear death we are seeing only a partial truth.
Pollack reads the ascending Anubis on the Wheel of Fortune as the psychopomp who transforms death anxiety into the psychological truth that ego-death is the precondition for inner renewal.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980thesis
An Egyptian priest, assuming the mask of the jackal-god Anubis preparing the body of Osiris for rebirth.
Campbell documents the ritual identification of the priestly officiant with Anubis, emphasizing the jackal-mask as a liminal technology mediating between mortal and divine in funerary practice.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
see also ape; baboon; bat; bear; birds; bitch; bull; cat; chick; cock; cockatoo; crocodile; crow; dog; dolphin; dove; dragon; eagle; fish; fox; grasshopper; hawk; hen; horse; ibis; jackal
Jung’s index registers the jackal as one node in the broader theriomorphic symbolic system surveyed across the Collected Works, confirming its status as a recognized archetypal animal figure.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside