Pestilence occupies a revealing crossroads in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as literal historical fact, mythic symbol, collective trauma, and diagnostic metaphor for social disorder. The literature distributes itself across several distinct registers. In the Greek mythological and classical-religion scholarship of Burkert, Kerényi, Nagy, Rohde, and Padel, pestilence appears as the punishment exacted by neglected or offended gods — Apollo especially — upon communities whose moral or ritual order has been violated; the pharmakos tradition explicitly mobilizes the scapegoat to arrest a pestilence whose origin is understood as cultic impurity. In Jungian and archetypal contexts, Edinger reads Saturn’s glance as the ‘father of all pestilence,’ locating plague within the alchemical-astrological imagination of evil materialized; Jung himself references Roman pestilence as backdrop to psychic transformation; and Hillman treats the pestilence of Thebes in Oedipus Tyrannus as a somatic-political metaphor for collective shadow. Alexander’s sociological analysis extends the metaphor to mass alcoholism as a ‘pestilence of hard liquor,’ a consequence of dislocation. Von Franz and Padel each deploy pestilence as transmitted poison — demonic, serpentine, or atmospheric — that enters communities through invisible vectors. What unifies these readings is the insistence that pestilence is never merely biological: it signals the eruption of unconscious, mythic, or social forces that demand ritual, moral, or psychological response.