Milky Way

By the impulse of the first weight the soul, having started on its downward course from the intersection of the zodiac and the Milky Way to the successive spheres lying beneath, as it passes throu

Edinger, citing Macrobius, presents the Milky Way as the cosmological origin-point of the soul’s descent into incarnation through the planetary spheres — the mythological-psychological hinge between transpersonal and personal existence.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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this vision is the source of what Empedotimos had to say about the dwelling-place of the souls in the Milky Way… The above-mentioned story of the souls and the Milky Way was also known to Julian

Rohde traces the ancient Greek tradition, transmitted through Heraclides Ponticus, of the Milky Way as the habitation of disembodied souls, establishing the philological foundation for later depth-psychological appropriations of this cosmological soul-geography.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis

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our particular group being twenty: twenty Milky Ways of billions of exploding nuclear furnaces, flying from each other through spaces not to be measured

Campbell deploys the scale of the Milky Way — one among twenty in a local galactic group — to demonstrate that mythological literalism about bodily ascent to heaven is cosmologically impossible, demanding a metaphorical rather than literal reading of religious narrative.

Campbell, Joseph, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986thesis

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Until the end of the nineteenth century, I think, astronomers took it for granted that the Milky Way galaxy was the whole of the universe.

Easwaran uses the historical discovery that the Milky Way is merely one galaxy among a billion as an analogy for Sri Krishna’s incomprehensibility — no finite frame of reference suffices to contain the divine totality.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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Milk finally ‘represents’ the original connection to and continual thirst for the world we long to ‘remember.’

Hillman’s meditation on milk as the substance of primordial memory and the Golden Age provides a mythological-psychological context contiguous with Milky Way symbolism, linking lacteal imagery to archetypal longing and the senex-puer dialectic.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015aside

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