The Seba library treats Oven in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Neumann, Erich, Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Hillman, James).
oven, 46, 285–86, 286n owl, 45, 180, 236n, 272, 275
Neumann’s index entry confirms the oven is treated as a substantive symbol of the Great Mother archetype, assigned specific page analysis within his mapping of the Feminine principle.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
To light a fire which burns brightly in the hearth. or in the oven signifies the begetting of children, for the hearth and oven are lik~ a woman … and fire in them foretells that the woman will be-come pregnant.
Citing Artemidorus, Vernant establishes the classical Greek interpretive tradition in which the oven explicitly symbolises the female body and reproductive capacity.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
bladder furnace suspends material in a bladder with its mouth protruding outside the oven. These are but some described in technical works on ovens and condensed in Ruland’s Dictionary, entry on ‘Furnus.’
Hillman catalogues the oven’s many alchemical variants, establishing it as a differentiated site of psychic transformation in which different heating methods enact distinct operations on psychic material.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
There is a kind of oven there that is brightly lit inside, probably by an invisible fire. Mrs. Aron gets all kinds of things ready near the oven and begins working with them.
Von Franz presents a clinical dream in which the oven is the central instrument of a witch’s occult preparation, functioning as a site where demonic-maternal energies are conjured and transformed.
, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting
ipnos may have developed from *ippnos … It has been compared with a synonymous West Germanic word: OE ofen, OHG ovan ‘oven’, also ON ofn, from PGm. *ofna- < *ufna-.
Beekes traces the Greek and Germanic etymology of the oven-word, situating its linguistic roots in concepts of baking and furnace-craft while noting the difficulty of cross-linguistic connection.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
The circular altar of the hearth, the symbol of the enclosed space of the house, can evoke the female abdomen, the source of life and children.
Vernant develops the hearth-oven-womb symbolic complex, showing how the enclosed circular altar of Hestia carries the same bodily and generative resonance as the oven proper.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
‘The Oven Bird,’ from Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward C. Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979).
Bly cites Frost’s ‘Oven Bird’ in a bibliography, a marginal reference that associates the oven image with a poetic register of diminishment and autumnal voice.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside