The Seba library treats Reindeer in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Onians, R B, Burkert, Walter, Campbell, Joseph).
Heaped outside the wall were eighty reindeer horns, a reindeer head almost complete, and a mammoth’s jawbone, molar, pelvis and tibia.
Onians adduces Solutrean burial evidence of massed reindeer remains as ritual protective deposits, arguing that the life-substance or spirit of each creature was intended to attend the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
it is from the Magdalenian phase, the full flower of the Reindeer Age culture, that the greatest number have been found
Onians identifies the ‘Reindeer Age’ as the archaeological apex of Paleolithic cranial-cup cult practice, connecting reindeer culture to the earliest documented ritual use of the head as sacred vessel.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
Reindeer, bones gathered, 14, submersion sacrifice, 65
Burkert locates reindeer within his comparative taxonomy of sacrificial restitution ritual, pairing bone-gathering with submersion sacrifice as evidence of archaic hunting-culture religious economy.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
the magnificent cave-painting art of the Mammoth and Reindeer Ages
Campbell situates the discovery of Altamira cave art within the Mammoth and Reindeer Ages as the foundational moment for recognizing a Paleolithic mythological imagination.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
the Tungus shaman’s costume represents a stag, whose skeleton is suggested by pieces of iron. Its horns are also of iron.
Eliade links the deer/stag-as-shamanic-costume directly to the bone-rebirth complex, demonstrating how the reindeer’s skeletal form is ritually reproduced to enact the regeneration of hunted animals.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
ram; reindeer; roebuck; sea serpents; serpents; shark; sheep; snake; sparrow
Eliade’s index lists reindeer among the array of shamanic helping-spirit animals, confirming its place within the broader taxonomy of animistic transformation central to his comparative shamanism.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
The hind frequently shows the way or finds the most advantageous point for the crossing of a river. On the other hand, she sometimes lures the hero to disaster or even to death.
Von Franz, discussing the deer as anima-symbol in fairy tales, establishes a symbolic field directly contiguous with the reindeer’s mythological register, though she refers specifically to hind and stag rather than reindeer by name.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970aside