Minerva

The Seba library treats Minerva in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, Hoeller, Stephan A., Jung, C.G.).

In the library 8 passages

Bruno confesses himself a child of Minerva (‘Her have I loved and sought from my youth, and desired for my spouse, and have become a lover of her form’). The relation between Minerva and images of the mind may help us to understand … the fact that it was to Athene that sacrifice was made by burnishers at Olympia before polishing the image.

Hillman uses Bruno’s Neoplatonic self-identification as Minerva’s devotee to argue that the goddess governs the relationship between mind and its own images, extending her domain beyond craft into the psychology of imagination itself.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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Athene’s art is the systematic plaiting of strands together … Inclusion of the excessive and abnormal by weaving it in is the art of political consciousness.

Hillman presents Athene/Minerva’s weaving as the paradigmatic form of political intelligence — not collage or repair but the principled integration of contrary forces into civic structure.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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Military science and political science, the wide view together with the immediate insight, as well as the brilliant confluence of theoretical science and applied technology — all this Western civilization owes to her.

Hillman situates Athene/Minerva as the mythic ground of Western civilization’s rationalist-strategic project, encompassing both theoretical and applied intelligence.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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Athene is the head-sprung daughter of Zeus, the very epiphany of his Nous, his introjected Metis (Athene’s mother). Metis (‘wise counsel’) stems from the same indogermanic root MĒ as metron, measure, rule, standard.

Hillman traces Athene/Minerva’s etymological and mythological lineage to establish her as the personification of measure, providential foresight, and normative consciousness within both civic and psychological life.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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When the ancient Greeks gave expression to their belief in such polar opposites as Eros and Logos, Dionysius and Apollo, Aphrodite and Minerva, they did not advocate that humans should cleave to one of these to the exclusion of the other.

Hoeller deploys Minerva as one pole of an archetypal polarity with Aphrodite, arguing that Greek religion recognized the transformative value of such tensions rather than seeking their resolution.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting

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The way of ordering particularly favored by much Jungian theory is through number (traditionally a province of Saturn, though sometimes attributed to Minerva, and Mercurius).

Hillman notes Minerva’s traditional association with numerical ordering alongside Saturn and Mercurius, situating her within the broader constellation of senex-ordering consciousness in Jungian theory.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

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