The Seba library treats Lightning in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Harrison, Jane Ellen, Pollack, Rachel).
the eggs turned into abstract spheres or circles, and the magician’s touch became a flash of lightning cutting through her unconscious state.
Jung interprets the lightning flash in active imagination as the impersonal, transformative force of the unconscious replacing the personal relationship with the analyst, rediscovering the rotundum and the Anthropos symbol.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
In the Chymical Wedding of Rosencreutz the lightning causes the royal pair to come alive. The Messiah appears as lightning in the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch.
Jung catalogues lightning as a cross-traditional animating and Christological symbol, from alchemical texts to Docetist theology, where the divine condenses itself ‘like the greatest lightning-flash into the smallest body.’
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
In Greece a place that was struck by lightning became an ἀβατov, a spot not to be trodden on, unapproachable… such places were dedicated to Zeus the Descender.
Harrison demonstrates that in Greek religion lightning-struck sites become charged with sacred taboo — abata — consecrated to Zeus and marking the boundary between divine descent and human access.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
Kabbalists picture the path made by the light of creation as a zigzag, sometimes referred to as the lightning bolt of God.
Pollack presents the Kabbalistic ‘lightning bolt of God’ as the structural template of creation, the path through which divine light descends sequentially through the Sephiroth to organize the cosmos.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
The penal severity that serves to make men avoid transgressions should be as clearly defined as lightning.
Wilhelm’s I Ching commentary equates lightning with juridical clarity and the swiftness of just punishment, pairing it with thunder’s decisiveness as the dual emblem of the hexagram Shih Ho (Biting Through).
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
The phrase is ‘thunder and lightning,’ not ‘lightning and thunder,’ because the movement starts from below… The penal severity that serves to make men avoid transgressions should be as clearly defined as lightning.
The Baynes–Wilhelm translation amplifies the directional logic of the thunder/lightning dyad, fixing lightning as the symbol of transparent legal clarity and moral definition.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
the boulders had surreptitiously transformed themselves into eggs. The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance.
Chodorow contextualizes the pre-lightning imagery in Jung’s case study, establishing the symbolic field — eggs transforming toward the philosophical vessel — into which the lightning flash subsequently intrudes as the transforming agent.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting
the Above comes downward, the Below mounts aloft… the entirety of the Above and Below is thought of as filled with spiritual godly presences, which pass as ‘heavenly energies’ upward and downward.
Nichols grounds the Tarot Tower card in Sumerian cosmology, establishing the vertical axis of heavenly descent — the conceptual space within which lightning operates as the supreme emblem of divine downward irruption.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside