Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘semen’ operates at several distinct registers simultaneously: as a biological substance whose ancient theorization encoded patriarchal metaphysics; as a symbolic vehicle for pneuma, soul, and generative power; as a ritual substance in ethnographic and alchemical contexts; and as a psychophysiological correlate of vitality, spirit, and even prophetic capacity. Hillman’s sustained critique in The Myth of Analysis reveals how the ancient hierarchy of male over female seed — from Aristotle through Aquinas — functioned not as empirical science but as fantasy in service of a worldview, with semen bearing the ‘concocted,’ pneumatic, white superiority attributed to the masculine. Onians traces semen’s identification with cerebro-spinal substance back through Greek, Latin, and Vedic sources, linking it to the head as the seat of life and procreative genius. Plato’s Timaeus grounds semen in marrow running from brain to spine, making it literally the medium of soul. Daoism, as represented in Kohn’s handbook, treats semen as concentrated vital force whose retention or emission is decisive for spiritual cultivation. Turner and Victor Turner locate semen (‘ntoro’) within ritual and communitas symbolism across African societies. Jung and the alchemical tradition figure the solar sulphur as ‘semen virile’ — a formative, paternal, active substance. The term thus concentrates questions of gender, soul, vitality, cosmos, and the politics of biological theory.
Air is the pneumatic aspect that concocts the blood into the rarefied substance of semen, which is lighter, whiter—and more soulful… ‘The father, not the mother, provides the offspring.’
Hillman exposes how Aristotelian pneumatic theory encoded semen as the uniquely ensouled, spiritualized substance, thereby grounding the philosophical doctrine of female inferiority in a fantasy of male generative superiority.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
the female does not contribute semen to generation but does contribute the matter of the catamenia [menses], or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals.
Hillman presents Aristotle’s foundational denial of female seed as the cornerstone of a philosophical — not merely biological — argument that made female essence structurally inferior.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
The outlet for drink… was so fashioned by them as to penetrate also into the body of the marrow… and which in the preceding discourse we have named the seed. And the seed having life, and becoming endowed with respiration, produces in that part in which it respires a lively desire of emission.
Plato’s Timaeus identifies semen with the life-bearing marrow descending from the brain, making generative desire an expression of the soul’s own vital root embedded in the body.
, Timaeus, -360thesis
This marrow, being instinct with life and finding an outlet, implanted in the part where this outlet was a lively appetite for egress… At de gen. animo 735a, 7, Aristotle says that the semen both has soul and is soul potentially.
Plato and Aristotle converge in treating semen as the material vehicle of soul itself, making it the primary mediating substance between psyche and biological generation.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
if a man can be pure and tranquil for a long time, his semen will concentrate, his spirit condense and his vital force stabilize. If he does not leak [semen] for three years, an elixir will form in the lower cinnabar field.
Daoist inner alchemy treats semen retention as the literal mechanism by which vital force is transmuted into spiritual elixir, making semen the material substrate of enlightenment.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000thesis
to see in the seed, which carries the new life and which must have seemed the very stuff of life, a portion of the cerebro-spinal substance in which was the life of the parent.
Onians argues that archaic Greek thought identified semen with cerebro-spinal fluid — the body’s supreme life-substance — making generative seed a literal portion of the procreative soul located in the head.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
white symbolism and its connotations of semen, saliva, health, strength, and auspiciousness in many African and other societies… a nexus between the father-child bond, ntoro (as semen, spirit, and social division).
Turner demonstrates cross-culturally that semen occupies a cluster of white symbolic meanings — spirit, health, communitas — constituting a social and cosmological category, not merely a biological one.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
ntoro (literally, ‘semen’), which he regarded as an exogamous division based on transmission by and through males only… the ntoro divisions are of the utmost importance.
Among the Ashanti, ‘semen’ (ntoro) names not only a bodily fluid but a social category organizing patrilineal transmission, ritual identity, and communitas — embodying the symbolic weight of the father-child bond.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Blood turns into semen in men, and in women into milk. This ‘turning’ is interpreted as ‘the flaming sword which turned.’
Jung’s exposition of Simon Magus presents semen as a transformation of blood via fiery pneumatic force, linking generative substance to the Gnostic drama of divine power manifesting in material creation.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
Why is a man’s seed white and a woman’s red?… It is white in men by reason of great heat and quick digestion, because it is rarefied in the testicles; but a woman’s is red, because her terms corrupt the undigested blood.
Hillman traces how the red-white chromatic symbolism applied to male and female seed in both alchemical and medical traditions encoded a hierarchy in which male semen, as ‘concocted’ blood, occupied the superior, spiritualized pole.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
anoints the uttararani (uppermost piece) with butter: ‘Thou art the power’ (semen). This is then placed on the adhararani, with the words: ‘Thou art Pururavas.’
Jung’s Vedic fire-ritual amplification equates semen with the active, fertilizing power of the male fire-stick, making it the generative force cosmologically identical with Agni.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Luna mater et ager in quo solare seminarique debet semen… ego enim sum sicut semen seminatum in terram bonam.
In the alchemical corpus Jung cites, the solar masculine principle is explicitly figured as semen sown in the lunar feminine earth, framing the coniunctio in terms of seed and generative fecundation.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
Pater et semen virile. / Substantia sulphuris quasi semen paternum, activum et formativum.
Alchemical sulphur is equated with paternal semen — active and formative — establishing semen as the archetypal masculine principle of psychic as well as material transformation.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
this interpretation of the cerebro-spinal substance as the seed is vital to the whole thought. To this interpretation, we shall see, there contributed the head’s demonstration of fertility in producing hair.
Onians identifies the equation of cerebro-spinal fluid with semen as the architectonic premise of archaic Greek psychophysiology, with hair-growth as phenomenological evidence of the head’s generative potency.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
in our tradition, wherever it was conceded that there was female seed, or where the even rarer concession was made that such seed was necessary for reproduction, female seed was inferior.
Hillman establishes the cross-traditional rule that any acknowledgment of female seed was always accompanied by its devaluation, revealing the ideological rather than empirical nature of seed discourse.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
That genius, William Harvey, after famous dissections upon the uteri of the does of King Charles, came to the ‘conclusion that semen could not enter the uterus and therefore was not necessary for conception.’
Hillman shows that even empirical investigation of semen was shaped by prior theoretical commitments, with Harvey’s conclusion illustrating how fantasy structured ostensibly scientific observation.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
the marrow itself is formed of other things… he made out of them the marrow, contriving thus a mixture of seeds of every sort for every mortal kind… he moulded into spherical shape the plough-land, as it were, that was to contain the divine seed.
The Timaeus grounds semen in the marrow as a cosmically crafted ‘mixture of seeds,’ with the brain as its spherical container — making generative substance a work of divine demiurgic intention.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
There is semen mixed with the blood. The baby is gone. The devil picks up a short pointed instrument like a compass.
A clinical dream reported by Woodman presents semen mingled with blood in a nightmarish context of demonic coercion, illustrating how the shadow can contaminate generative and life-giving substances.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982aside
‘the seeds of trouble come from your head’, semina curarum de capite orta tuo.
Onians adduces Latin evidence in which ‘seeds’ (semina) originating from the head are transferred metaphorically to psychological disturbance, illustrating the semantic reach of the seed-head nexus.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside