plants
The term ‘plant’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several intersecting axes, none of which are merely botanical. In the Jungian and alchemical traditions, the plant serves as a primary symbol of psychic growth and the self’s emergence: Jung reads the plant in mandala imagery as signifying the status nascendi, the god in his rising, while alchemical texts from Dorn through Khunrath treat the philosophical tree and its moon-plant variant as projections of the opus itself. Campbell’s mythological readings locate the plant of immortality—plucked at the ocean’s floor by Gilgamesh—as the archetypal object of the hero’s quest, always just beyond safe reach. A second axis involves ontological range: Aristotle, Plotinus, Aurobindo, and Damasio each debate whether the nutritive soul or life-principle found in plants constitutes genuine vitality, consciousness, or something more rudimentary. McGilchrist presses this question most aggressively, marshalling contemporary plant biology to argue that plants possess memory, anticipatory cognition, and even something like community—a position that directly challenges the reductionist denial of inner life to non-animal organisms. Finally, the plant appears as metaphor for the psyche’s productive capacity: Jung’s seminars figure individuation as planting a germ that grows toward a star-flower, while Maté deploys the carnivorous plant of popular culture as a vivid icon of addictive consumption. The collective force of these deployments is to make ‘plant’ a boundary-marking term—the threshold between mere mechanism and animated psyche.
The plant stands for growth and development, like the green shoot in the diaphragm chakra of the kundalini yoga system. The shoot symbolizes Shiva and represents the centre and the male, whereas the calyx represents the female, the place of germination and birth.
Jung reads the plant in mandala imagery as a symbol of psychic growth, linking botanical germination to the masculine principle and the sacred centre of the self.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
That plant is like a brier in the field; its thorn, like that of the rose, will pierce thy hand. But if thy hand attain to that plant, thou wilt return to thy native land. The plant was growing at the bottom of the cosmic sea.
Campbell identifies the plant of immortality in the Gilgamesh myth as the archetypal prize of the hero’s descent—attainable only through wound and ordeal at the uttermost depths.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
Man should plant a germ, which would grow up in the form of plant, and the plant would create a flower which would be the star. It would be what we call the Yoga plant, with the star flower.
Jung uses the image of the seed growing into a star-bearing plant as a poetic metaphor for individuation, the transformation of latent human potential into luminous selfhood.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
Plants are clearly able to remember and learn from experience. Philosopher Michael Marder concludes: ‘Plants are definitely conscious, though in a different way than we, humans, are.’
McGilchrist, citing Marder and empirical research on mycorrhizal networks, argues that plants possess genuine consciousness and form communicating communities, challenging the orthodox denial of inner life to non-animal organisms.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
plants are clearly able to remember and learn from experience.177 Philosopher Michael Marder concludes: ‘Plants are definitely conscious, though in a different way than we, humans, are.’
A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist’s argument that empirical plant cognition research substantiates philosophical claims for a non-animal form of consciousness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Plant biologists Karpiński and Szecńska-Hebda describe what they call the ‘life wisdom’ of plants, that is, their capacity to integrate and simultaneously read and act on stimuli of all kinds, and prioritise their responses.
McGilchrist invokes contemporary plant biology to document anticipatory cognition and strategic memory in plants, pressing the case that intelligence is not confined to nervous systems.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Plant biologists Stanisław Karpiński and Magdalena Szechńska-Hebda describe what they call the ‘life wisdom’ of plants, that is, their capacity to integrate and simultaneously read and act on stimuli of all kinds, and prioritise their responses.
McGilchrist documents plant cognition research as evidence that living systems below the level of nervous tissue exhibit forms of wisdom, memory, and anticipation.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘The plant is like a buckthorn,’ Ut-napishtim had told him. ‘Its thorns will tear your hands; but if your hands can pluck it, you will gain new life.’
Campbell’s retelling of the Gilgamesh plant episode foregrounds the mythological motif that immortality’s botanical emblem is necessarily wounding—renewal requires the hero’s blood.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the first task of course is to find the plant. Fortunately the plant helps because it glows in the dark. Once the plant is found, the digger must draw three circles around it and then turn westward.
Edinger reads the ritual extraction of the mandrake root as an alchemical parallel to unearthing the Philosophers’ Stone, in which the luminous plant actively cooperates in its own discovery.
, The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting
In the lunar sea there is a sponge planted, having blood and sentience, in the manner of a tree that is rooted in the sea and moveth not from its place. If thou wouldst handle the plant, take a sickle to cut it with, but have good care that the blood floweth not out.
Jung cites alchemical moon-plant symbolism to show that the botanical image in the opus carries attributes of sentience and blood, making the plant a figure of the animated, dangerous arcanum.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
After nature has planted the root of the metallic tree in the midst of her womb, viz., the stone which shall bring forth the metals, the gem, the salt, the alum, the vitriol, the salty spring, sweet, cold, or warm, the tree of coral or the Marcasita.
Jung quotes Dorn’s alchemical description of nature planting the metallic tree, presenting the botanical metaphor as the language through which the opus conceptualizes transformation from within the prima materia.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
all the plants are also held to be alive—for they clearly have within themselves a potentiality and principle of the right kind, through which they take growth and decay in opposite directions.
Aristotle grants plants full participation in soul through the nutritive faculty, establishing them as the baseline case of living principle—the stratum below which no ensoulment exists.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
Life is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth.
Aurobindo dissolves the boundary between vegetable and mineral life by arguing that the same universal Life-Force manifests in plant and earth alike, challenging any qualitative distinction.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Claude Bernard understood that plants and animals have similar basic requirements. Plants are multicellular organisms that need water and nutrients as animals do; they have complicated metabolisms.
Damasio recuperates Claude Bernard’s nineteenth-century insight that plant and animal life share fundamental homeostatic requirements, grounding a continuum of living regulation.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Now look at the plants, where they come from, they come down from the mountains or grow up from the earth. Then see how one approaches them, namely one must collect them at the right moment and on the appropriate day.
Von Franz quotes an early alchemical text in which plants serve as the primary model for the opus—gathered at the auspicious moment, embedded in cosmic timing, and sharing one substance.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
As for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord to the other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true people might be found to declare prosperity possible to the very plants: they have life, and life may bring good or evil.
Plotinus cautiously withholds happiness from plants on account of their lack of sensation, while acknowledging the philosophical pressure to extend wellbeing to all living things.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
The hit musical Little Shop of Horrors offers a brilliant metaphorical image of addiction. Seymour takes pity on a ‘strange and unusual’ little plant that’s dying of malnutrition… Only temporarily appeased, the plant wants more.
Maté deploys the image of an insatiably hungry plant as a cultural metaphor for addiction’s centrifugal demand—the plant as a figure of compulsive consumption that escalates without limit.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. In each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had come from a herbarium.
Freud’s botanical monograph dream introduces the plant as a screen object for associations around memory, guilt, and forgetting, illustrating the method of dream analysis rather than symbolizing the plant per se.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside
Again, amongst plants and herbs some are fruit bearing, others edible, others fragrant and flowery, given to us for our enjoyment… For there is not a single animal or plant in which the Creator has not implanted some form of energy capable of being used to satisfy man’s needs.
John of Damascus situates plant life within a providential teleology, reading every species as endowed with a divinely implanted energy directed toward human use and healing.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside
the absence of bodily locomotion makes no essential difference to the presence of vitality in the plant.
Aurobindo argues that immobility is not a criterion for the absence of vitality, using the plant as the key example that life does not require visible movement.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside
Phalli were carved out of fig wood, and an epithet of Dionysus, Φιθδαι, was used to describe them. Dionysus, himself, was called Συκίτης, Συκεάτης.
Otto notes the fig tree’s sacred status within the Dionysian cult, linking its swollen fruit to procreative symbolism and the god’s identification with vegetative abundance.
, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965aside