The Seba library treats Shuttle in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including Plato, Liz Greene, Martha C. Nussbaum).
as a shuttle separates the warp from the woof, so a name distinguishes the natures of things. The weaver will use the shuttle well,—that is, like a weaver; and the teacher will use the name well,—that is, like a teacher.
Plato establishes the shuttle as the governing analogy for the instrument of intellectual differentiation, making it a figure for language’s capacity to divide and reveal essences.
, Cratylus, -388thesis
Since you have let the shuttle fall in, you must fetch it out again.’ So the girl went back to the well, and did not know what to do; and in the sorrow of her heart she jumped into the well to get the shuttle.
The dropped shuttle initiates an underworld descent in the Frau Holle tale, functioning as the precipitating object that compels katabasis and initiatory transformation.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
Only Ares, god of war, sees the point of the shuttle pierce the intelligent organs. Through their eyes these children reached out, accused, demanded response and reparation.
Nussbaum frames the shuttle as a weapon deployed to annihilate witnessing consciousness, its piercing action destroying the very organs that make moral claims upon another.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
KEpK[e; -[80e; [f.] ‘weaver’s shuttle’ (ll.); metaph. of comparable objects, e.g. ‘great bone of the leg, tibia’ (A. R., Heroph. Med.), ‘wedge-shaped division of the seats in the theatre’
The etymological record establishes that the Greek word for shuttle extended metaphorically to bones and architectural divisions, evidence of the term’s deep structural resonance as an instrument of partition and traversal.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
it can also be shown that πεῖραρ could mean a woof-thread and at the same time a difficulty of interpretation is removed from a passage of Pindar.
Onians traces the semantic overlap between the woof-thread of weaving and the bonds of fate, situating the shuttle’s product — the woof — within the archaic Greek conceptual field of necessity and destiny.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
For a discussion of anima and bleeding, see P. Shuttle and P. Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman
A bibliographic citation to Shuttle and Redgrove’s work on menstruation and the feminine positions the shuttle’s nominal presence within a broader depth-psychological discourse on the feminine and cyclic embodiment.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside