Petrification occupies a distinctive place in the depth-psychology corpus as a polyvalent figure for the arrest of psychic life — the freezing of the unconscious into immobility when consciousness refuses its dynamic claims. Von Franz provides the most sustained analysis, reading petrification through the fairy-tale figure of Faithful John: whenever the dominant principle of consciousness fails to recognize the ever-changing aspect of the unconscious, a rigidifying, stone-making effect ensues. This is not mere metaphor but a clinical observation: theorizing the unconscious into fixed categories, clinging to ritual as rote magic, or refusing the sacrificial demand of the Self all produce, in von Franz’s formulation, an inelastic and non-living standpoint. Jung himself, in his dream-seminar commentary, frames petrification as what nature ‘hates’ — the mechanistic rational attitude that roots up living process. Nietzsche, read through Sharpe and Ure, supplies a counter-position: petrification as deliberate ascetic remedy against suffering, a Stoic ideal that his new ethics explicitly repudiates. Weber’s ‘mechanized petrification’ — cited by Tarnas — extends the term into cultural diagnosis, naming the iron-cage terminus of disenchanted modernity. López-Pedraza introduces a redemptive corollary: proper sacrifice within the Hermetic sphere prevents petrification by keeping libido in rotation. The term thus marks a threshold between calcification (pathological arrest) and the stone’s alchemical dignity (lapis as completed individuation), a tension the corpus never fully resolves.