The Seba library treats Pine in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Beekes, Robert, Schore, Allan N.).
Driven mad by his mother’s insane love for him, he castrated himself under a pine-tree. The pine-tree played an important part in his cult; every year a pine-tree was decked with garlands, an efhgy of Attis was hung upon it and then it was cut down.
Jung establishes the pine as the definitive cultic tree of Attis, the site of self-castration and annual sacrificial ritual, directly symbolizing the surrender of instinctual libido to the Great Mother.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Ovid, by the way, says of the pine-tree that it is ‘pleasing to the mother of the gods, because Cybelean Attis here put off his human form and stiffened into a tree-trunk.’ Transformation into the pine-tree amounts to burial in the mother.
Jung interprets transformation into the pine as symbolic burial within the Great Mother, equating the tree with the maternal unconscious that receives and dissolves the son-lover’s individuality.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
most people know of the pine-tree of Attis, the tree or trees of Mithras, and the world-ash Yggdrasill of Nor
Jung situates the pine of Attis within a comparative mythological survey of sacred trees, anchoring it as one of the canonical examples of the tree-of-life symbol across religious traditions.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
pine-cones, 203, 219n pine-tree, 219, 233, 351, 423f, 425
The index of Symbols of Transformation records pine-tree as a recurring symbolic term appearing across multiple contexts involving sacrifice, the mother goddess, and vegetation numen.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Heard the whispering of the pine-trees, Heard the lapping of the water, Sounds of music, words of wonder: ‘Minne-wawa!’ said the pine-trees
Jung cites Hiawatha’s perception of the pine-trees as speaking voices to illustrate the child’s animistic merger of nature with the maternal object, the pine here carrying the numinous language of the unconscious.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
πίτυς resembles Lat. plnus [f.] ‘fir, pine’ and Alb. pishe ‘fir, pine’, both with an unclear basis and, on the other hand, Skt. pitudaru-, putudru- [m.] tree name
Beekes documents the uncertain Indo-European or pre-Greek etymology of the Greek word for pine, noting cognates in Latin and Albanian while acknowledging that no clear ancestral root can be firmly established.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
The dyad thus creates a symbiotic ‘merger’ experience (Pine, 1986a).
Pine is cited here as a developmental psychoanalytic authority (Fred Pine) on symbiotic merger states in early mother-infant interaction, entirely unrelated to the arboreal symbol.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside