keys
The Seba library treats Key in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Bly, Robert, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, von Franz, Marie-Louise).
The key is under your mother’s pillow—just where Freud said it would be. Getting the key back from under the mother’s pil
Bly identifies the Key’s location as the defining riddle of male initiation: it is held by the mother, and recovering it is the foundational act of separating from maternal enclosure to claim one’s own life.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
The risk involved in getting the key from under the pillow is not worth the effort… just don’t force me to put my hand under my mother’s pillow and take out the key to freedom.
Bly frames the theft of the Key as psychologically perilous—awakening maternal wrath and unconscious resistance—yet essential to liberation from a shrunken, regressive life.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
the blood on the key is women’s blood… it is so much more serious, for the blood represents a decimation of the deepest and most soulful aspects of one’s creative life.
Estés reads the blood-stained Key in the Bluebeard tale as evidence of damage to the feminine creative soul: the degree of bloodshed measures the severity of self-destructive forces that have been active within the psyche.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Within a glance he saw a key was missing. ‘Where is the smallest key?’… He threw open her wardrobe and the little key on the top shelf had bled blood red down all the beautiful silks
The missing and bleeding Key in the Bluebeard narrative functions as an irrefutable index of transgression, dramatizing how forbidden knowledge leaves indelible traces that expose the psyche’s encounter with destructive truth.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
the key in other texts is an image for the arcane substance and the lapis… The lapis functions as a key inasmuch as the experience of the self gives consciousness a ‘method’ for realizing the secrets of the unconscious
Von Franz situates the alchemical Key as a metaphor for the lapis and the self: as the self is realized, consciousness gains the instrumental means of unlocking the symbolic contents of the unconscious.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
Alphidius in his book speaketh of the treasure house, which he teacheth can be opened by four keys, which are the four elements.
Von Franz preserves the alchemical tradition in which Keys are plural and elemental, the four elements collectively constituting the method by which the sealed treasure of the opus is accessed.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
the beggar said he could not give a present… but he gave a key which the boy was to keep until he was fourteen, and then he would see a castle in the meadow which the key would open
Von Franz’s fairy-tale analysis presents the Key as a deferred initiatory gift from a godlike figure, operative only when the recipient has reached the requisite developmental threshold.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
the latter being also the old beggar who gave Ferdinand the key. In disguised form these two images represent the old Germanic god Wotan.
Von Franz identifies the bestower of the Key with the archetype of Wotan, connecting the act of giving a key to a transpersonal initiatory power that mediates between the divine and the human developmental journey.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
A key to the understanding of all astrology is within the reach of anyone who truly understands the meaning of the following definitions
Arroyo employs ‘key’ as a pedagogical metaphor, positioning the four astrological factors—planets, signs, houses, aspects—as the foundational concepts that unlock astrological interpretation.
, Astrology, Psychology, and the Four Elements: An Energy Approach to Astrology and Its Use in the Counseling Arts, 1975aside