The Seba library treats Kingfisher in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C. G., Campbell, Joseph).
High up in the painting appears a kingfisher’s wing, and between it and the head of Ka floats a round, glowing nebula of stars.
Jung identifies the kingfisher’s wing in his own visionary painting as a mediating image positioned between the chthonic Ka-soul and a stellar nebula, marking the bird as a psychic threshold symbol.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
a kingfisher with fish and a three-headed snake; in the centre, the four cherubim of Ezekiel, flanked by sun and moon
In a patient’s painted symbolic tree, the kingfisher appears as part of a layered cosmological schema linking animal, elemental, and celestial registers within the alchemical tree image.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
Biliku caused Kingfisher, the fire-bringer, to lose his wings, so that it was he who became the first man.
In Andamanese mythology as analyzed by Campbell, the Kingfisher is a divine fire-thief whose punishment transforms him into the first human being, coupling the bird with cosmogonic threshold crossing.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
a kingfisher making a noise in the trees, Otoo turned to me, saying, That is the Eatooa; and seemed to look upon it to be a good omen.
Campbell’s ethnographic record of Polynesian ritual documents the kingfisher as a theophanic sign, identified by a chief as the voice of a deity and interpreted as a favorable omen during sacrifice.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
kingfisher, fig. 32
Jung’s index to Alchemical Studies catalogues the kingfisher as a distinct iconographic symbol warranting its own figure reference within the alchemical symbolic lexicon.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting
kingfisher; lambs; leopard; lions; lizard; mouse; ostrich; otter; owl; panther; parrots
Eliade’s systematic index of shamanic animal-helpers and transformation-animals includes the kingfisher within a comprehensive catalogue of spirit-forms employed in ecstatic practice.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside