The rainbow occupies a surprisingly rich and multi-valent position within the depth-psychology corpus, appearing at the intersection of cosmology, alchemy, covenant theology, shamanic ascent, and the phenomenology of awe. Jung furnishes the most theoretically elaborated treatments: in Psychology and Alchemy he reads the rainbow as a bridge that mortals must pass under rather than walk upon, a liminal structure marking the boundary between human and divine registers of reality. In Mysterium Coniunctionis and the Archetypes, rainbow colours are bound to the alchemical cauda pavonis — the peacock’s tail — as the iridescent eruption heralding the albedo after nigredo’s dissolution. Hillman extends this line, reading Newton’s prismatic capture of Iris as the historical suppression of colour’s mediating, soul-carrying function. Campbell maps the rainbow as the literal vehicle of divine transit in Navaho cosmology, where gods and the dead travel its arc between sacred mountains. Eliade documents the rainbow as a cosmic ladder used by shamans and mythological heroes to ascend to celestial beings across Buddhist, Australian, and Siberian traditions. Zimmer notes it as the emblem of Indra. In Kabbalistic exegesis surveyed by Hillman, the Hebrew word for rainbow (keshet) doubles as penis, anchoring the covenant symbol in an eroticised cosmological transmission. Taken together, these treatments reveal the rainbow as an archetypal bridge-symbol mediating heaven and earth, spirit and matter, covenant and crisis.
A rainbow is to be used as a bridge. But one must go under it and not over it. Whoever goes over it will fall and be killed. Only the gods can walk rainbow bridges in safety; mere mortals fall and meet their death
Jung interprets the dream-image of the rainbow as a threshold symbol delineating the boundary between human and divine registers, prohibiting literal ascent while directing psychic movement downward, toward water and unconscious depths.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
In his early work on light Newton had captured Iris, the mediating rainbow (and anima mediatrix), in a prism of glass and dissected her into seven colors. Iris, the Rainbow Girl, and colors themselves lost their mediating role
Hillman argues that Newton’s decomposition of the rainbow into spectral physics destroyed Iris’s classical function as anima mediatrix — the soul-carrier transmitting planetary messages between the visible and invisible worlds.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
the rainbow as Jahweh’s sign of the covenant between heaven and earth says: ‘The Hebrew word for bow, keshet, denotes in Hebrew literature not only rainbow but, in the rabbinic literature, also penis.’ Further, the term, brith, or covenant, that the rainbow signifies also applies to circumcision.
Hillman draws on Scholem’s Kabbalistic scholarship to expose the erotic-cosmological stratum of the rainbow symbol, identifying keshet with the sefirah Yesod and the phallic transmission of divine force from above to below.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
In the Bamiyan frescoes the Buddha is represented seated on a rainbow of seven bands; that is, he transcends the cosmos… The throne of the Supreme Being is surrounded by a rainbow… Mythical heroes and medicine men ascend to these celestial beings by using, among other things, the rainbow.
Eliade establishes the rainbow as a universal axis of shamanic and cosmic ascent, appearing in Buddhist iconography, Australian supreme-deity mythology, and across Siberian and American traditions as the vehicle by which heroes and medicine-men reach celestial powers.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
Upon the rainbow he moves from mountain to mountain, for it is thus that the gods travel, standing upon the rainbow. The rainbow is swift as lightning.
Campbell documents the Navaho Blessing Chant’s use of the rainbow as the divine mode of travel, a swift luminous vehicle linking sacred mountains and enabling the spirit’s homeward journey to Life Unending.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986thesis
he proposed to the patriarch Noah a contract between himself… he instituted the rainbow as a token of the covenant. If, in future, he summoned the thunder-clouds which hide within them floods of water and lightning, then the rainbow would appear, reminding him and his people of the contract.
Jung reads the Noachic rainbow not as a simple sign of mercy but as a psychological safeguard binding Yahweh’s own destructive impulse, a mnemonic device constraining the deity’s temptation toward a repeat deluge.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
After the nigredo, the blackened body of the Stone is washed and purified… When the blackness of the nigredo is washed away, it is succeeded by the appearance of all the colours of the rainbow, which look like a peacock displaying its luminescent tail.
Abraham’s alchemical dictionary situates rainbow colours as the defining marker of the cauda pavonis stage — the luminescent transition between nigredo and albedo signalling the dawning purification of the philosopher’s stone.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
golden points at the outer rim… emitting rainbow colours. These are the colours of the peacock’s eye, which play a great role as the cauda pavonis in alchemy… the rainbow colours spring from the red layer that means affectivity.
Jung reads rainbow colours in a mandala as alchemical cauda pavonis imagery, linking their emergence from the affective red layer to Böhme’s account of the ‘love-desire of Beauty of Colours’ arising from the union of Nature and Spirit.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
At the top, the sun, surrounded by a rainbow-coloured halo divided into twelve parts, like the zodiac. To the left, the descending, to the right, the ascending, transformation process.
Jung describes a patient’s mandala in which a zodiacally divided rainbow-halo crowns the sun, marking the poles of a dual transformation process and linking chromatic symbolism to astrological and alchemical numerology.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
in the rainbow, where the male power has been tempered to the female power, the male is red and the female blue… Combined as here in a rainbow, the two are known as ‘The Sunray’ and said to stand for ‘light rays emerging from a cloud when the sun is behind it’
Campbell analyses Navaho symbolic gender dualism within the rainbow, where red and blue represent the tempering of male and female cosmological forces into a unified light-principle called The Sunray.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting
Among the older printings of this card, there is a rainbow arching across the sky behind the angel… Iris is the messenger of the gods, the female equivalent of Hermes. Her rainbow connects heaven and earth: ‘as above, so below.’
Place’s Tarot commentary identifies the Temperance card’s rainbow with the goddess Iris as divine messenger, reading the arc as the classic Hermetic axis linking celestial and terrestrial realms.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
The Bible tells us that God made the rainbow as a promise that the world will never again suffer a flood of destruction. But the rainbow carries a more positive promise as well — that life brings happiness and not just an absence of pain.
Pollack expands the covenantal rainbow symbolism in the Tarot Ten of Cups into an affirmation of joy as a positive ontological condition of life, not merely the cessation of suffering.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
His three-minute video from 2010 of his encountering a double rainbow outside his home in Yosemite has been seen, as I write, nearly fifty million times… he cries and laughs the kind of existential laugh we emit when recognizing something vast and profound, beyond the narrow view of the default self.
Keltner uses the viral double-rainbow encounter as empirical evidence that rainbow experiences reliably trigger states of awe — vocalisations of transcendence and existential questioning — dissolving the boundaries of the default self.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
sending for Rainbow to make it beautiful while the seeds that the people had produced were planted, the Hactcin made a sand-painting with four little colored mounds in a row, into which they put the seeds.
Campbell records an Apache cosmogonic narrative in which Rainbow is summoned as a beautifying presence to consecrate the first planting, linking chromatic ritual to the originary act of agricultural creation.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Rainbow, emblem of Indra
Zimmer notes in passing the rainbow’s identification as the emblem of Indra, the Vedic storm and warrior deity, situating it within Hindu cosmological iconography.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946aside
Such tears are, in fact, like a rainbow, a God-given sign of hope. This spiritual rainbow is caused by the rays of the Son of God striking the tears of penitence and transforming them into sparkling droplets of joy and hope.
Coniaris applies the rainbow-as-covenant to Orthodox pneumatology, reading tears of repentance transformed by divine light as a ‘spiritual rainbow’ — a sign that prayer has been heard and new life granted.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998aside
rainbow, sign of contract, 374
A bare index entry in Jung’s Psychology and Religion confirms his sustained identification of the rainbow as the Noachic sign of covenant, cross-referencing the passage where Yahweh’s compact with Noah is psychologically analysed.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside