Obsidian

The Seba library treats Obsidian in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, Jung, Carl Gustav, Campbell, Joseph).

In the library 6 passages

black appears in broad daylight in naturally given pigments and in other phenomena from charcoal and obsidian to blackberries and animal eyes. Moreover, the negative and primitive definition of black promotes the moralization of the black-white pair.

Hillman invokes obsidian as material proof that blackness has autonomous positive existence and is not merely a privation of light, thereby challenging the moralized opposition of black and white in Western metaphysics.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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the hero, in the belly of Kombili, the King Fish, seized his obsidian knife and cut open the fish’s belly. ‘He slipped out and beheld a splendour.’

The obsidian knife serves as the hero’s instrument of self-liberation from the devouring maternal womb, enacting the mythological pattern of death-and-rebirth through severance.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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‘Here is that by which thou wilt survive the wind of the obsidian knives.’

In the Aztec funerary rite, obsidian knives mark a specific ordeal of the underworld journey, functioning as lethal threshold guardians that the soul must be ritually equipped to survive.

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

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Blood sacrifice and dismemberment belong to the fertility ritual of the Great Mother. Both fecundate the womb of the earth.

Neumann’s analysis of Aztec and Mesoamerican sacrifice establishes the cultural context within which obsidian instruments held their primary ritual significance.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting

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The sun was pictured as an eagle, and the offerings sustaining his flight were hearts. Four quadrangular glyphs flaring from the rim of this symbol of the will-in-nature refer to four mythological eons.

Campbell’s discussion of Aztec cosmological symbolism provides the broader mythological framework within which obsidian’s sacrificial associations are embedded.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974aside

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