Within the depth-psychological corpus, murder functions not merely as a juridical or ethical category but as a multi-layered symbol touching the foundations of psychic life, ritual necessity, and the structure of evil itself. Plato’s Laws furnishes the foundational legal-theological framework, distinguishing voluntary from involuntary homicide, prescribing purification rites, and situating killing within a cosmology of pollution and divine retribution. Rohde’s study of Greek soul-belief extends this into archaic religion, demonstrating how the unavenged murdered soul becomes an active, vengeful agent demanding propitiation. Padel traces the bond between spilt blood and the Erinyes, arguing that murder and madness are inseparable in the Greek — and by extension Western — tragic imagination. Jung, in both the Red Book and his commentary on Nietzsche, treats murder as an inner event: the vision of the slain hero prefigures collective catastrophe and signals the movement from one psychic dispensation to another. Hillman re-examines murder through the lens of daimonic calling and the shadow, resisting reductive parental explanations for extreme violence. Beebe, reading Jung’s Red Book, interprets the figure of the murdered hero as the inferior function sacrificed by collective incapacity. Von Franz and Kerényi locate ritual murder at the origin of initiatory mysteries, linking it to death-and-renewal cycles. The term thus spans legal prescription, purification theology, tragic psychology, archetypal initiation, and the phenomenology of radical evil.
Spilt blood is the Erinys connection between murder and madness. The Oresteia, establishing murder as the paramount interest of Orestes’ Erinyes, also established their punishment as madness.
Padel argues that in Greek tragic imagination, spilt blood structurally links murder to madness through the Erinyes, a connection that became foundational for Western tragic psychology.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles.
Jung presents a visionary encounter in which murder — the slaying of the hero — is disclosed as a psychically necessary death prefiguring collective catastrophe and the possibility of renewal.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
The murder of one was the poisonous arrow that flew into the hearts of men, and kindled the fiercest war. This murder is the indignation of incapacity against will, a Judas betrayal that one would like someone else to have committed.
Beebe reads Jung’s Red Book to argue that the inner murder of the heroic principle represents the inferior function’s revolt against conscious will, an act whose poison spreads into collective violence.
, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017thesis
Hitler did not institute his murder-based nation for economic gains… Breaking all commandments frees you from human bondage, opening a door to a suprahuman condition where devil and divinity are indistinguishable.
Hillman argues that politically organized murder cannot be explained by materialism but must be understood as the daimonic crossing of taboo thresholds in pursuit of a transgressive, suprahuman condition.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
In Homer, when a free man has been killed, the State takes no share whatever in the pursuit and punishment of the murderer. It is the duty of the nearest relatives or the friends of the murdered man to carry on the blood-feud against the assailant.
Rohde establishes that archaic Greek culture located responsibility for avenging murder entirely within the kinship group, with the murdered soul’s own power compelling retribution — a structure later absorbed into state religion.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
Stories about a mythical murder that did not however end with the total destruction of the slain child — a murder that was hinted at (how we can only conjecture) in the rite of initiation — have been preserved from the sphere of the Samothracian mysteries.
Kerényi identifies ritual murder of the divine child as the hidden nucleus of initiatory mystery religion, a death that paradoxically preserves rather than destroys the sacred life.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
Only after Hainuwele’s murder could men die, and only then could they be born again… On account of the murder of Hainuwele she became angry and set up a great gate on one of the nine dancing-places.
Kerényi and Jung trace the Indonesian Hainuwele myth to show that primordial murder inaugurates both mortality and rebirth, situating the act at the cosmogonic threshold between divine and human existence.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
purification… restored the man, hitherto regarded as ‘unclean’, to participation in the religious gatherings of state and family… The Homeric poems know nothing of any such religious purification of those who have incurred the stain of blood.
Rohde traces the development of blood-purification rites as the institutional response to murder’s ritual pollution, marking a transformation in Greek religious consciousness post-Homer.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Homicide in general is not punished as such in the ancient law codes. In order to be punishable it was necessary for the murder to affect a man of the group: morality stopped at the frontier of the natural group.
Benveniste demonstrates through Indo-European legal semantics that the concept of punishable murder was originally bounded by social membership, with killing outside the group carrying no legal or moral weight.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
Next follows murder done from anger, which is of two kinds — either arising out of a sudden impulse, and attended with remorse; or committed with premeditation, and unattended with remorse. The cause of both is anger, and both are intermediate between voluntary and involuntary.
Plato’s Laws introduces a phenomenological taxonomy of murder based on emotional state and premeditation, placing anger-driven killing in a morally ambiguous zone between voluntary and involuntary acts.
, Laws, -348supporting
he who would avenge a murder shall observe all the precautionary ceremonies of lavation, and any others which the God commands in cases of this kind. Let him have proclamation made, and then go forth and compel the perpetrator to suffer the execution of justice according to the law.
Plato frames legal prosecution for murder within a ritual framework of divine sanction and purification, insisting that justice and religious ceremony are inseparable in homicide cases.
, Laws, -348supporting
he who has committed any such crime returns, let him have no communication in sacred rites with his children, neither let him sit at the same table with them, and the father or son who disobeys shall be liable to be brought to trial for impiety.
Plato legislates that intrafamilial murder produces permanent ritual contamination, severing the killer from sacred domestic communion and making violation of this prohibition an act of impiety.
, Laws, -348supporting
Hitler knew the shadow all too well, indulged it, was obsessed by it, and strove to purge it; but he could not admit it in himself, seeing only its projected form as Jew, Slav, intellectual, foreign, weak, and sick.
Hillman argues that politically motivated mass murder originates in the radical failure of shadow integration, with the killer projecting unacknowledged inner darkness wholesale onto an external group.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
He disappears and leaves the country — at the boundaries of the country the state’s authority ceases, and so does the power of the indignant spirit of the dead, which is bound to its native soil.
Rohde explains that voluntary exile was the archaic mechanism for escaping the territorial revenge-power of a murdered person’s soul, since that power, like all local deities, was geographically bounded.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Germans in olden days, for instance, hanged prisoners as sacrifices to the god Wotan… We have to ask what lies behind the idea of killing an enemy not as social revenge or in judgment, but by the more archaic form of a sacrifice to the gods.
Von Franz distinguishes sacrificial killing from judicial murder, arguing that archaic execution retained a sacred dimension directed toward divine beings rather than social order.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
Dick Hickcock, who killed the Clutter family in cold blood, said: ‘I thought a person could get a lot of glory out of killing. The word glory seemed to keep going through my mind.’
Hillman uses the Hickcock case to illustrate how the daimonic hunger for recognition and glory can, in a psychically impoverished subject, become fatally displaced into homicidal acting-out.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
The vigorous prosecution of the case on the part of the relations of the dead is help to the dead man… The accusing relatives come before the court as representatives of the dead man.
Rohde documents the Greek legal procedure in homicide cases as a theological act in which living relatives stand as proxies for the murdered soul’s ongoing demand for justice before both human and divine tribunals.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Aeschylus hands us in a single phrase the ambivalence of tragic causality… To kill his kin. Despite their framework of ambiguity and paradox, tragedians reflect the medical writers’ equilibrium.
Padel traces how Greek tragedy, through the figure of kin-murder, encodes the deepest ambivalence about human agency, making the decision to kill one’s own a site where internal and external causality collapse.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
These pleasures are each man’s Erinys. They incite him to kill his fellow citizens, enslave himself to tyrants, and join conspiracies against democracy.
Padel cites Aeschines to show how Erinys-logic was extended in classical rhetoric: ungoverned inner passions become the murderous Erinys that drives men to civil killing and political tyranny.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Unless I avenge the death of my parents, I ought to lose the name of man and be called a weak woman. And immediately, having put out the lights, he cleft the head of Sicharius.
Auerbach’s citation of Gregory of Tours presents early medieval murder as embedded in an honor-shame logic that frames killing as the restoration of masculine identity rather than transgression.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
when they finally burst their dams they are capable of transforming the course of human history into an unprecedented orgy of destruction.
Neumann situates collective murder not in individual pathology but in the systemic repression of the shadow by the old ethic, whose suppressed energies erupt as mass destruction.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949aside