The Seba library treats Moat in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C. G.).
this moat is a very important symbol, and the fact that the spirit in the tale drains it helps us to understand what we must do on our own journey. We must not lie down and go to happy sleep
Estés argues that the moat is a threshold boundary water demarcating the land of the dead, whose proper traversal — neither drowning nor sleeping — constitutes the creation of consciousness through descent.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Painting of a medieval city with walls and moats, streets and churches, arranged quadratically. The inner city is again surrounded by walls and moats, like the Imperial City in Peking. The buildings all open inwards, towards the centre, represented by a castle with a golden roof. It too is surrounded by a moat.
Jung presents the mandala’s concentric moats as an archetypal psychic architecture in which successive boundary waters protect and define the sacred center of the Self.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
A mandala as a fortified city with wall and moat. Within, a broad moat surrounding a wall fortified with sixteen towers and with another inner moat. This moat encloses a central castle with golden roofs whose centre is a golden temple.
Jung’s own commentary on his 1928 Red Book painting establishes the moat as an essential structural element of mandala symbolism, encoding the gradated protection of the psychic center.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
A mandala as a fortified city with wall and moat. Within, a broad moat sur-rounding a wall fortified with sixteen towers and with another inner moat. This moat encloses a central castle with golden roofs whose centre is a golden temple
This catalogued mandala description, appearing in Jung’s clinical work, confirms the moat’s systematic role as concentric sacred boundary within the typology of Self-imagery.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
A mandala as a fortified city with wall and moat. Within, a broad moat sur rounding a wall fortified with sixteen towers and with another inner moat. This moat encloses a central castle with golden roofs whose centre is a golden temple
A parallel citation of the same mandala schema reinforces the moat’s canonical status in Jung’s alchemical and psychological typology of fortified sacred centers.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
starving, she comes to an orchard in which all the pears are numbered. A spirit drains the moat around the orchard, and while the mystified gardener
Estés’ narrative establishes the moat as a psychic obstacle surrounding the nourishing unconscious, whose removal by a guiding spirit enables the hungry maiden’s access to soul-sustaining fruit.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
There remains a deep moat between them and us, despite the safari vacations, the snorkeling, and the nostalgia. We may long for their presence in some subliminal way; our behavior, however, keeps them ‘out there.’
Hillman employs the moat as a metaphor for the culturally maintained psychological distance between the human ego and the animal world, persisting beneath nostalgic longing for reunion.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
Rather than marry him I would jump from my tower into my moat. You’ve seen my tower, how high it is, you’ve seen the moat, how deep it is.
Campbell’s retelling of the Parzival narrative uses the moat as a chivalric literary motif of sovereign self-determination and the threshold the hero must prove himself worthy to cross.
, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990aside