The Seba library treats Pebble in 5 passages, across 4 authors (including Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, Campbell, Joseph, Damasio, Antonio R.).
The pebble is a part of the stone, the symbol of the Self. It will make an imprint on my foot — a merging with the Beloved. The foot is a replica of the whole body, which will become impregnated with the Self.
Vaughan-Lee interprets a dream-pebble worn in the shoe as a Sufi-Jungian symbol of the Self progressively imprinting itself upon the whole person through bodily suffering and intimate contact.
, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992thesis
mouse, pebble, worm, or some less substantial shamanistic projectile … the shaman called to a sickbed must first decide, therefore, what sort of disease is to be treated.
Campbell catalogues the pebble as one of several shamanic intrusive objects believed to cause illness, situating it within a cross-cultural taxonomy of pathogenic foreign bodies requiring ritual extraction.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
even the images that constitute a prominent feeling can be accompanied by other feelings, a bit like the harmonics of a sound or the circles that form once a pebble hits the water surface.
Damasio employs the pebble striking water as a phenomenological analogy for the concentric, self-amplifying structure of affective experience in consciousness.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
a number of developed varieties of the paleolithic hand ax have been found as well as earlier and cruder ‘pebble tools’
Campbell locates pebble tools at the origin of human material culture, implying that the stone’s psychological symbolism is grounded in the earliest stratum of hominid intentionality.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
if we break up a stone and then further break up the fragments, the pieces remaining are still pieces of stone. The real lends itself to unending exploration; it is inexhaustible.
Merleau-Ponty uses the inexhaustible divisibility of stone to illustrate the irreducibility of the real, a principle that resonates with depth-psychological claims about the inexhaustible depth of archetypal matter.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside