Ruby Slippers

The Seba library treats Ruby Slippers in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Beebe, John, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Schoen, David E.).

In the library 9 passages

These slippers, which once belonged to the ‘sister’ of the Wicked Witch of the West… are, I think, meant to represent the concealed introverted feeling standpoint of Almira Gulch… Dorothy has in effect ‘killed’ introverted feeling and has to accept the psychological consequences.

Beebe argues that the Ruby Slippers encode introverted feeling as a mana-charged psychic standpoint that Dorothy acquires by vanquishing its original carrier, compelling her to integrate what she has repudiated.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017thesis

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Introverted feeling, as Jung was the first to get us to see, is a valuation function that works at the archetypal (not the personal) level, taking the deepest possible sounding of a situation.

This passage establishes the theoretical framework — introverted feeling as archetypal valuation — that grounds Beebe’s interpretation of the slippers as its symbolic vehicle.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting

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The psychological truth in ‘The Red Shoes’ is that a woman’s meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed, or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth.

Estes’s analysis of compulsively enchanted red footwear provides the comparative fairy-tale context within which the Ruby Slippers’ seductive and destabilising power resonates symbolically.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The man in the red beard has brought something to life, but it is not the child; it is the torturous shoes. The girl begins to whirl and twirl her life away in a manner that, as with addiction, does not bring bounty, hope, or happiness, but trauma, fear, and exhaustion.

Estes frames red shoes as instruments of compulsive, soul-severing enchantment — a motif that shadows the Ruby Slippers’ ambiguous power to bind their wearer.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The archetypal symbolism of the shoe goes back to ancient times, when shoes were a mark of authority: rulers had them, slaves didn’t.

Estes grounds the symbolic register of enchanted shoes — and by extension the Ruby Slippers — in the archaic equation of footwear with power, authority, and sovereign standing.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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the divine red tincture flushes the white stone with its rich red colour… The rich red (sometimes purple) of the rubedo is given many names by the alchemists.

The alchemical rubedo — the reddening that consummates the opus — supplies an indirect symbolic register within which ruby-red objects, including the slippers, carry transformative and culminating significance.

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

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