The Seba library treats Ravine in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Neumann, Erich).
He who knows the male, yet cleaves to what is female, Becomes like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven; And being such a ravine, He knows all the time a power that he never calls upon in vain.
Jung cites the Tao Te Ching to establish the ravine as the supreme symbol of receptive, feminine selflessness whose paradoxical yield is inexhaustible power — a key analogue for the psychological attitude of the self in harmony with Tao.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
a ravine is used to symbolize danger; it is a situation in which a man is in the same pass as the water in a ravine, and, like the water, he can escape if he behaves correctly.
Von Franz reads the I Ching hexagram K’an to establish the ravine as an archetypal image of objective, inescapable danger whose resolution depends not on force but on correct comportment modelled on the nature of flowing water.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
phallic symbols are thrown into a ravine supposed to be swarming with snakes, a
Neumann situates the ravine within the fertility cult of the Great Mother as a chthonic receptacle into which sacrificial offerings are cast, linking it to the serpentine, fecundating depths of the earth-womb.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
heard the terrible roar of water through its wide and deep ravine, dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks, and with a vast spring nearly made it.
Campbell deploys the ravine as the Perilous Ford of Arthurian romance — a threshold ordeal the hero must leap in service of love, dramatising the archetypal demand for a decisive, total commitment that brooks no hesitation.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
on Wordsworth’s route through the Simplon Pass and the ravine of Gondo, and his treatment of his experience in Descriptive Sketches as well as The Prelude
Abrams notes the ravine of Gondo as the biographical and textual site where Wordsworth’s confrontation with sublime, abyssal landscape catalysed his mature poetic-psychological vision in The Prelude.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside