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.
In the library
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Mine is the ruining of all high halls, / And tumbling down of towers and of walls / Upon the miner and the carpenter. / I struck down Samson, that pillar shaker; / And mine are all the maladies so cold, / The treasons dark, the machinations old; / My glance is father of all pestilence.
Edinger cites Chaucer's Saturn to demonstrate the alchemical-archetypal identification of pestilence with the malevolent, cold gaze of Saturn, rooting plague in the symbolic register of cosmic evil and material corruption.
Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
The Erinyes' resentful thoughts will fall on the land, an everlasting, intolerable, unfading pestilence. The Erinyes 'spew out poison.' Their poisonous, serpentine connections underlie the image of poison spilling from their passion onto human ground.
Padel argues that in the Oresteia pestilence is the daemonic effluence of the Erinyes' vindictive passion, making it a figurative enactment of transferred psychic poison onto the collective body.
Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
It refers the pestilence to Ares (1911) and calls on Athene (158), Artemis (161), and Dionysus (212) for protection, even suggesting for Oedipus fathering gods other than Apollo: Pan, Hermes, Dionysus.
Hillman shows how the Chorus of Oedipus Tyrannus refuses to confine the city's pestilence to a single Apollonic cause, distributing its divine ground across the full pantheon and widening the psychological reading of collective sickness.
which had been afflicted by a pestilence resulting from the unjustified death of Androgeos the Cretan. In effect, then, the primordial death of the primordial pharmakos on the level of myth causes a potentially permanent impurity, which in turn calls for permanent purification by way of year-to-year reenactment on the level of ritual.
Nagy establishes pestilence as the mythic consequence of unjust sacrificial death, constituting the aition that necessitates the pharmakos ritual as perpetual communal purification.
Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
Von Franz situates pestilence within the archaic medical model of divine projection, where plague is an invisible demonic missile shot by God or supernatural power, linking it to the depth-psychological concept of the projected shadow.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis
The god himself, as the story goes, once freed the city from a pestilence by making the rounds in this way, and the ritual was established to commemorate this event.
Otto presents pestilence as the condition overcome by divine ritual circumambulation, arguing that the cultic practice commemorates not magical absorption of miasma but the god's protective presence encircling the community.
Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965thesis
Mass alcoholism, an almost invariable companion of headlong and uncontrolled industrialisation and urbanisation, spread 'a pestilence of hard liquor' across Europe.
Alexander extends the pestilence metaphor to mass addiction, treating the social epidemic of alcoholism as a psychosocial pathology structurally analogous to infectious plague, caused by the dislocations of modernity.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
There was a devastating pestilence and funeral pyres burnt in great number. When the fire was already blazing around Koronis, Apollon said: 'I can no longer endure it that my son should perish with the mother!'
Kerényi situates pestilence in the mythological narrative of Koronis's death, presenting it as Artemis's collective punishment that sets the scene for Asklepios's miraculous birth and the origin of healing.
Stasis in book 3 behaves as an exterior overriding destroyer, like a disease or daemonic tragic passion. It gathers to itself the power of the plague in book 2, which 'fell upon' Athens like an army, in an image of attack shared by passion and disease.
Padel demonstrates Thucydides' deliberate structural parallel between pestilence and civil war, showing how Greek thought fused bodily plague with political and psychic disorder as homologous invasive forces.
Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
given defeat, civil strife, famine or pestilence, their anger, despair, and bewilderment will discharge upon him with such force as to endow him, in thei
Adkins situates pestilence within the Greek logic of pollution, showing how collective disaster drives the community to identify and expel a polluted individual as causal agent, a proto-scapegoating psychology.
Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
In Numbers Yahweh is enraged at the rebellion of the Israelites and threatens to destroy the entire nation by pestilence. Moses remonstrates successfully.
Edinger reads the biblical pestilence-threat as an expression of Yahweh's shadow — the destructive face of the deity — which is only averted by Moses's intercession, a drama of ego mediating between collective and the unconscious.
Edinger, Edward F., The Creation of Consciousness Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984supporting
Hel, rides on a three-legged horse in time of pestilence. In the Bundahish there is a monstrous three-legged ass who stands in the heavenly rain-lake Vouru-Kasha; his urine purifies its waters.
Jung juxtaposes Norse and Iranian mythological figures of pestilence to demonstrate the libido's dual capacity as simultaneously fructifying and destructive, with plague marking its destructive polarity.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
at the city gate, Alcofrybas is asked for his health certificate, because the plague is rampant in the great cities of the land; this is a reference to the pestilence which raged in the cities of northern France during the years 1532.
Auerbach notes pestilence as historical context embedded in Rabelais's narrative, illustrating how literary grotesque registers the lived reality of epidemic disease as background to social satire.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
pestilence in, 116; psychic change in, 554; Senate, in; Tarpeian rock, 11
A brief index reference in Jung's Collected Works associates Roman pestilence with psychic change, suggesting Jung viewed epidemic disease as concomitant with collective psychological transformation.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976aside