Red Wine

Red wine occupies a remarkably dense symbolic position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a sacramental substance, an alchemical agent, a Dionysian vehicle, and a clinical index of avoidance behavior. The tradition’s most sustained engagement comes through the wine-blood equation: Edinger traces the ancient Egyptian identification of wine with the blood of God’s enemies, its patristic reversal into the blood of Christ, and its appearance in clinical dreamwork where red wine figures the mixing of psychic opposites toward communion. Burkert and Otto ground this symbolism in archaic Greek religion, establishing that the association of red wine with blood is ‘widespread and very ancient’ and that Dionysian wine-making myths encode a sacrificial logic in which the god’s own dismemberment becomes the opus of fermentation. Kerényi amplifies this by locating the vine’s origins in Minoan culture and by reading the grape-mother complex as evidence of a pre-Hellenic Dionysian substrate. In alchemical literature, red wine and the juice of grapes serve Abraham’s corpus as figures for the aqua permanens and the mercurial fire that dissolves and transforms the prima materia, while von Franz reads the red-white dyad in Aurora Consurgens as a hermaphroditic union of opposites incarnated in the figure of Wisdom. The tension between sacred intoxication and pathological avoidance—clinically noted by Harris and Shaw—marks the term’s modern frontier.

In the library 11 passages

The communion wine is to be prepared by mixing two separate wines—a dark blue wine and a red wine… a red-yellow spotlight focuses on a small table between and behind the two men. On the table is a bottle of the warm red wine with the Scotch label clearly marked ‘Paul.’

Edinger reads a clinical dream in which red wine—labelled ‘Paul’ and positioned between political opposites—enacts the Pauline coniunctio, demonstrating how red wine symbolizes the reconciliation of psychological and theological antinomies in the individuation process.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis

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The association of red wine with blood is widespread and very ancient. The most obvious myth would be that Dionysos, the god of wine, was himself killed and dismembered to serve as wine for sacramental drinking.

Burkert establishes the foundational mythological thesis that red wine’s identification with blood is not a late allegorical overlay but an archaic sacrificial equation rooted in the Dionysian dismemberment myth.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis

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The ancient Egyptian priests had identified wine with the blood of God’s enemies. According to Plutarch: they did not drink wine nor use it in libation as something dear to the gods, thinking it to be the blood of those who had once fought against the gods.

Edinger traces the paradoxical reversal at the core of Christian wine symbolism: wine begins as the blood of God’s enemies and, through patristic analogy, becomes the self-sacrificed blood of Christ, encoding a sacrificer-victim inversion fundamental to depth-psychological interpretation of the Eucharist.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis

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The juice of grapes or wine is the aqua permanens or mercurial water, also known as the alchemist’s secret fire. Hoghelande’s De alchemiae difficultatibus stated: ‘Man’s blood and the red juice of the grape is our fire.’

Abraham establishes that in alchemical literature red wine and grape-juice are systematic equivalents of the aqua permanens—the mercurial dissolving agent—equating the vine’s juice with blood and with the secret transformative fire of the opus.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis

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the white (lily) and red (wine), a hermaphroditic being who unites the opposites in herself. Not only are they contained in her, she is actually the medium of their conjunction.

Von Franz reads the red-wine/white-lily pairing in Aurora Consurgens as a hermaphroditic symbol of the coniunctio oppositorum, in which Wisdom herself becomes the living medium through which contrary principles are united.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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In the Greek poetic language the vine or grape is called the mother of the wine, and in the Orient we also encounter a divine ‘mother of the grape.’ One may speak of a Dionysian religion of the vine.

Kerényi recovers the archaic maternal symbolism of the vine, demonstrating that the grape-as-mother motif links the Dionysian wine complex to Great Mother religion and to the mytheme of the god’s reunion with his divine mother.

Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting

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Unmixed wine is sometimes described as ‘red’, ἐρυθρός, and twice we hear of νέκταρ ἐρυθρόν. Thus all the Homeric evidence for ambrosia and nectar is satisfied.

Onians demonstrates that Homer’s epithet ‘red’ for unmixed wine aligns it with divine nectar, indicating that the chromatic quality of red wine carries archaic connotations of divine life-substance in Greek thought.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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Wine appeared to be the liquid of the seed of the vine and was assimilated to the seed of man. The cult of Dionysos identified with wine was notably phallic.

Onians establishes the archaic assimilation of wine to semen and vital seed, grounding the Dionysian wine-blood-life equation in a broader Indo-European conception of wine as concentrated life-fluid.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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By pouring the contents of one into the other, he mixes water with wine, the water being equated in his scheme with Sophia, ‘divine wisdom,’ which had fallen to earth… and the wine with the fiery spirit of the Savior Christ.

Nichols cites the Gnostic Marcos’s two-chalice Eucharist to argue that mixing wine (Christ’s fiery spirit) with water (Sophia) dramatizes the coniunctio at the heart of the Angel Temperance archetype in the Tarot sequence.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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If we drink one glass of red wine at night primarily to get rid of tension and stress, that too is experiential avoidance—but unless we have certain medical conditions, it’s not likely to be harmful, toxic, or life-distorting. However, if we drink two entire bottles of red wine each night, that’s a different story.

Harris employs red wine as a calibrating example within ACT’s framework of workable versus problematic experiential avoidance, marking the threshold at which a culturally normalized symbolic substance becomes a clinical concern.

Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting

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Pour a noble wine into a crystal glass with a red thread in its stem and you feel that it is in the right form, while to drink that wine from an earthen milk-jug is not right—it is no longer the same thing, the containing form has done something to the wine.

Jung uses the image of noble wine poured into a fitting vessel as an analogy for the moon’s formative effect on dynamic psychic content, illustrating the Yin principle’s capacity to give form and qualification to vital substance.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside

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