The Seba library treats Rim in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Campbell, Joseph, Nichols, Sallie).
it fills a pit only to the rim and then flows on. It does not stay caught there: The abyss is not filled to overflowing, It is filled only to the rim.
Jung reads the I Ching’s image of water filling to the rim as a psychological model of disciplined containment — the psyche must meet danger adequately without being overwhelmed or fixated.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Four quadrangular glyphs flaring from the rim of this symbol of the will-in-nature refer to four mythological eons supposed to have preceded our own.
Campbell identifies the rim of the Aztec cosmological symbol as the architectural zone where the four primordial eons radiate outward from the demiurgical center into historical time.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
Western culture he locates near the Wheel’s periphery where these archetypal ideas have been spun out into objective reality.
Nichols, via Mayananda, situates Western consciousness at the rim (periphery) of the Wheel — the zone of differentiation, motion, and worldly specialization as opposed to the Eastern center of archetypal unity.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
Life presents itself here as a process — as a system of constant transformation equally involving integration and disintegration, generation and degeneration.
Nichols frames the Wheel as a dynamic system of continuous transformation, implicitly positioning the rim as the site where opposing forces of ascent and descent meet and cycle.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
We must calmly weigh the conditions of the time and be satisfied with small gains, because for the time being a great success cannot be attained.
The I Ching commentary contextualizes the rim image within a counsel of measured restraint — one does not press beyond the natural limit the rim defines.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
A spring flows only sparingly at first, and tarries for some time before it makes its way into the open.
The parallel Wilhelm edition reinforces the hydraulic metaphor of gradual, bounded flow that underpins the rim-as-limit motif in Jung’s commentary.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Man is always on the edge of this epiphany of the spirit — the spirit or spirits of life and nature — if not face to face with it.
Kerényi’s ‘edge’ functions analogously to the rim: it is the liminal threshold at which human consciousness brushes against divine presence without yet fully crossing over.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976aside