The Seba library treats Jungle in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Epstein, Mark, Dane Rudhyar, Jung, Carl Gustav).
I shall now try with your guidance to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending of Hellenic love of proportion, Jewish sobriety, and philistine timidity have kept me away.
Freud’s own words figure ‘the Indian jungle’ as the irrational, Eastern domain of mystical experience that Western rationalist identity — defined by proportion, sobriety, and timidity — structurally excludes.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
a man is living in a thick jungle, so thick that he has never seen a night-sky filled with stars. In the jungle, he constantly experiences fear and attacks from hostile living things. Jungle-life seems to him an awesome chaos of brutal instincts.
Rudhyar deploys the jungle as a parable for consciousness imprisoned within biological chaos, from which only exposure to cosmic order — figured as the star-filled sky — can liberate the whole person.
One must imagine the velvety blue of a tropical night, the overhanging black masses of gigantic trees standing in the primeval forest, the mysterious voices of the nocturnal spaces, a lonely
Jung frames the primeval African forest as the phenomenological context that makes synchronistic and archetypal experience credible, insisting that the numinosity of such encounters cannot be appreciated without imagining the physical jungle setting.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
Its light surrounds the jungle with an uncanny glow. It is changeable, mysterious, like woman. Yet its phases are soon noted down.
Rudhyar positions the jungle as the primordial atmospheric setting in which lunar mystery — magic, imagination, and the first stirrings of psychological life — is experienced by archaic humanity.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
tigers belong to hillside thickets, the jungles, and the river beds of Asia. Lions live in groups, accurately called prides. They hunt in teams. Tigers are solitary.
Hillman uses the ecological specificity of the jungle — as tiger habitat — to differentiate two contrasting modes of psychic energy: the collective, solar heroism of the lion versus the solitary, lunar, shamanic nature of the tiger.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
we were surrounded on all sides by a huge pack of hungry hyenas who had obviously smelled the sheep’s blood. They performed an infernal concert, and in the glow of the fire their eyes could be seen glittering from the tall elephant grass.
Jung’s African memoir renders the jungle night as a domain of threatening instinctual forces — the hyena pack — that press upon the fragile circle of civilised consciousness represented by the campfire.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting
The one who is to go into the jungle has been eaten by the lion.
Campbell cites an East African death-pronouncement in which entering the jungle is synonymous with fatal exposure to devouring nature, figuring it as the space where the ego is most vulnerable to annihilation.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
became understandable to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of the rain forest ecology in which the culture was embedded.
Abram’s account of perceptual initiation into rain-forest culture implicitly positions the jungle as the ecological matrix through which an expanded, participatory sensory consciousness is cultivated.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside