The Seba library treats Mire in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Hillman, James, John of Damascus).
whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods.
This passage preserves the Orphic-Platonic formulation of mire as the posthumous fate of the uninitiated soul, establishing its foundational significance as an image of psychic stagnation and the cost of neglected individuation.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
this part of the book begins in a mire of doubts about how to speak about psychology at all. These doubts form part of the subjective factor inherent in psychology.
Hillman appropriates the mire as an epistemological condition intrinsic to depth psychology, arguing that the discipline necessarily originates in an ineradicable subjective quagmire rather than objective clarity.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
like the hog, that delighteth to wallow in mire, the soul, that hath been buried in evil habits, doth not even perceive the stink of her sin, but rather delighteth and rejoiceth therein.
John of Damascus presents mire as the image of habitual moral desensitization, wherein the soul entrenched in compulsive evil loses the capacity to recognize its own degraded condition — a figure directly usable in depth-psychological accounts of complex possession.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
it is the experience of being forgiven that pulls us out of the stagnating mire of a self-centered focus on our own pain and pushes us back into the not-necessarily-pure but at least circulating stream of community.
Kurtz employs mire as a figure for narcissistic stagnation in suffering, positioning the experience of forgiveness as the transformative force that restores circulation and communal reconnection.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
mire of the deep, 146f
This index entry indicates that Jung’s corpus treats ‘mire of the deep’ as a discrete alchemical-psychological concept, pointing toward its function as an image of the primordial unconscious abyss.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside