The Seba library treats Krater in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C.G., von Franz, Marie-Louise).
On the Mithraic monuments we often come across a strange symbol: a krater (mixing-bowl) with a snake coiled round it, and a lion facing the snake like an antagonist.
Jung identifies the krater as a Mithraic symbol of contained transformation, flanked by serpent and lion as antagonistic forces, linking it to the broader symbolism of sacrifice and renewal.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Krater (mystical society), 328 krater, early Christian use of the, 108, 328
Jung’s seminar index distinguishes the krater as both a named mystical society and a cultic vessel with documented early Christian usage, signaling its dual ritual and institutional significance.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
from Zosimos onward the alchemists continued to work with the motif of the mysterious vessel of transformation. ‘One the procedure, one the vessel, one the stone’ is unceasingly emphasized in the texts.
Von Franz situates the krater within the broader alchemical vessel tradition inherited from Zosimos, where container and content are paradoxically identified as a single transformative reality.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting
Let us turn now to other details of the vision. The most striking feature is the ‘bowl-shaped altar.’
In commentary on Zosimos’s visions, Jung draws attention to the bowl-shaped altar as a key structural element, implicitly linking the krater-form to the site of alchemical sacrifice and transformation.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
On a krater in Lecce a stately seated feminine figure, holding a tympanon in her left hand as a sign that she is a maenad, welcomes a timid youth and hands him a bowl of the wine.
Kerényi reads the krater in Dionysian vase-painting as the locus of initiatory encounter between mortal youth and divine maenad, marking the vessel as mediator of transformation into the Dionysian mystery.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
Sabazios and the Great Goddess of Asia Minor enthroned, on a krater painted by Polygnotos… Attic deities, on a large Attic calyx krater by the Kekrops painter.
Kerényi catalogues multiple iconographic instances of the krater as a surface for depicting divine presence and cultic scenes, establishing it as a central vehicle for Dionysian religious imagery.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
A horned Dionysos as bridegroom in his Boukoleion, on a bell krater from Thurii, one of the Hope Vases.
The krater here serves as the iconographic ground for the sacred marriage of Dionysos, linking the vessel-form to the hieros gamos theme within Dionysian cult.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
Zosimos, writing in the third century A. D., quotes one of the very oldest authorities on alchemy in his treatise ‘Concerning the Art and Its Interpretation,’ namely Ostanes.
Though not naming the krater directly, Jung’s discussion of Zosimos contextualizes the vessel-symbolism central to the alchemical tradition in which the krater operates as a transformative instrument.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside