Orchid

The Seba library treats Orchid in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Moore, Thomas, Schwartz, Richard C, Campbell, Joseph).

In the library 4 passages

pomegranate, grape, starfish, python, raincloud, rose, emerald, oaktree, waterfall, zebra, orchid, earthquake, papaya, dolphin and giraffe. Whatever it may be, each thing has an archetypal home: Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Sol or Luna.

Moore deploys the orchid as one member of an enumerated series of natural particulars to demonstrate Ficino's principle that every entity in the world belongs to a specific planetary-archetypal domain.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982thesis

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pomegranate, grape, starfish, python, raincloud, rose, emerald, oaktree, waterfall, zebra, orchid, earthquake, papaya, dolphin and giraffe. Whatever it may be, each thing has an archetypal home: Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Sol or Luna.

This later edition repeats Moore's foundational claim that the orchid, like all natural phenomena, is anchored in an archetypal planetary identity within Ficinian astrological psychology.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis

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As Gregory Bateson (1979, p. 8) famously asked, 'What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?'

Schwartz invokes Bateson's iconic ecological question — with the orchid as one of its hinge-terms — to ground IFS therapy's systems-thinking in a vision of interconnected living patterns.

Schwartz, Richard C, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995supporting

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the monk replied with a scattering of orchid-like seeds that deprived the leeks of their smell; and in Ennin's day one could see over all the terraces both orchid-like flowers and leeks without smell.

Campbell records a legendary episode in which the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī deploys orchid-like seeds as a counter-magical force that neutralizes imperial malice, casting the flower in a role of spiritual purification and mythological contest.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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