Necklace

the fire becomes a devastating, bloodthirsty Kali, who devours the life of man from within, as the mantra of her sacrificial ceremony says: ‘Hail to you, O Kali, triple-eyed Goddess of dreadful aspect, from whose throat hangs a necklace of human skulls.’

Jung deploys the necklace of skulls as the central image of Kali’s destructive aspect, arguing that passion overcome by the rational ego regroups as a devouring force whose emblem is this ornament of death.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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As necklace she wore a garland of human heads; her kilt was a girdle of human arms; her long tongue was out to lick blood. She was Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, the harmonization of all the pairs of opposites.

Campbell identifies Kali’s necklace of heads as the mythological emblem of cosmic totality, signifying the harmonization of creation and destruction in the figure of the Great Mother.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis

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Tartarus is bordered by a bronze fence, a three-lapped necklace of night ‘shed’ round it. The Titans are ‘hidden’ there ‘under misty dark’ where ‘are the springs and termini of dark earth and misty Tartarus.’

Padel identifies the necklace as a cosmological boundary image in Greek thought, where ‘a three-lapped necklace of night’ encircles Tartarus, making encirclement-as-ornament synonymous with containment and underworld confinement.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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The indissoluble fetter which the goddess Nirriti has bound about your neck, this do I unbind for life and strength.

Onians demonstrates that in Vedic ritual the neck-bond is a concrete image of divine compulsion and destruction, whose removal through prayer and sacrifice constitutes liberation from fate.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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I remember one necklace with black stones and teardrops, beautiful and lustrous. I think of how to describe it.

Signell presents a clinical dream in which a necklace of black stones and teardrops serves as an identifying memory-object linking a grieving woman to maternal inheritance and an early, pre-verbal loss.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991supporting

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a skeleton with a necklace and girdle of lion teeth and bear teeth.

Campbell documents Paleolithic burial practice in which necklaces of predator teeth accompany the dead, indicating the archaic use of neck-ornaments as apotropaic or totemic power-objects bound to the body at death.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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Eurymachos’ man came back with an elaborate necklace of gold, strung with bits of amber, and bright as sunshine.

In the Odyssey, necklaces appear among the suitors’ gifts to Penelope, functioning as tokens of courtship, social competition, and the attempted economic capture of a woman’s allegiance.

Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting

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the symbolic objects which substantively would be worth much less, so that ‘the closest thing the Homeric epics would have to money can be shown to be regarded by the heroes as of essentially symbolic rather than substantial value’.

Seaford’s broader argument about symbolic value in Homeric gift-exchange provides indirect context for understanding why necklaces in Homer carry social and mythic weight disproportionate to their material worth.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

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