The Seba library treats Shark in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Richard Tarnas, Hoeller, Stephan A., Bleuler, Eugen).
If you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.
Tarnas reads Melville’s shark-governance maxim as a perfect Saturn-Pluto archetypal metaphor, wherein primal destructive instinct, when disciplined, becomes the very substance of moral nobility.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
Endre Ady, who called God a terrible shark… God is terror and darkness just as much as he is love and light.
Hoeller records the theological equation of God with a ‘terrible shark’ as a vindication of Jung’s view that the divine is a coincidentia oppositorum encompassing both destructive terror and creative love.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
She begins to repeat, ‘Yes, I am also a shark-fish.’ Thus she employs an entirely peculiar and impossible clang association… to express the idea that she is someone very bad.
Bleuler cites a schizophrenic patient’s self-identification as a ‘shark-fish’ as a clinical specimen of clang-association, where the shark image functions as an unconscious vehicle for moral self-condemnation.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
sea serpents; serpents; shark; sheep; snake; sparrow; sparrow-hawk; spider; squirrel; stag; swan
Eliade’s comprehensive index of shamanic animal-helpers includes the shark among the creatures that may serve as a shaman’s spirit familiars, positioning it within the full spectrum of transformational animal powers.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside
all of us, from shark, to robin, to or
Thompson invokes the shark as an exemplar in Gould’s evolutionary contingency argument, noting that all life — shark to human — depends on improbable historical accidents of survival.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside