The Seba library treats Orchard in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Bly, Robert, Homer).
Like a mother offering the babe her breast, the pear tree in the orchard bends down to give the maiden its fruit. This mother’s juice is that of regeneration.
Estés identifies the orchard’s pear tree as an embodiment of the regenerative unconscious that nourishes the wounded feminine psyche at the moment of its deepest descent.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
be they of pear, of tree, of orchard, of stages and ages of a woman’s life, we can count on them to repeat themselves over and over again, in the same cycle and in the same manner.
Estés elevates the orchard to a master symbol of the Life/Death/Life cycle, positioning it as a recurring psychic template for feminine transformation across all stages of life.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Late at night, 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 presents the numbered, moat-encircled orchard as an initiatory threshold in the Handless Maiden’s third-stage descent, where the liminal boundary between the living and the dead must be crossed for psychic renewal.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
the Celts imagined paradise to be an apple orchard in the West where death is. This correlates with all sorts of details in old European life.
Bly situates the apple orchard as a Celtic image of paradise-in-death, linking it to the sacred pentangle, Sophia, and the soul of the earth in a trans-cultural symbolic chain.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
Artemis sent disaster to these men. She was enraged because King Oeneus had failed to make a sacrifice to her of first fruits from the high ground of his orchard.
Homer’s account of Artemis’s destruction of Oeneus’s orchard frames the cultivated grove as sacred obligatory space whose neglect provokes divine retribution, establishing the mythic orchard’s ritual-theological dimension.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
They planted and tended an orchard with great care. The house that they built was graceful to look at from the outside, and inside it was filled with old paintings and photographs.
Moore uses his great-grandparents’ carefully tended orchard as an anchor of ensouled family life, whose eventual disappearance into wilderness becomes an image of soul’s loss when ancestral care is abandoned.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting