The Seba library treats Snow White in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Bly, Robert, Jung, C.G., Jung, C. G.).
The best-known order or sequence of these colors is that mentioned in ‘Snow White’: white, red, black. We can call this order the Great Mother sequence.
Bly argues that Snow White’s opening color triad constitutes the archetypal ‘Great Mother sequence,’ positioning the tale as the canonical European expression of a universal initiatory color symbolism.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
It is not difficult to see that Snow White belongs to the same cycle of myths as Sleeping Beauty. It contains even clearer indications of the myth of the seasons.
Jung classifies Snow White within a seasonal myth-cycle, reading the heroine’s glass-coffin sleep as an intuitive symbolic rendering of the earth imprisoned by winter awaiting vernal liberation.
, Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961thesis
Snow White arose from the same unconscious source as Sleeping Beauty, namely, from a complex concerned with the expectation of coming events. These events may be compared exactly with the deliverance of the earth from the prison of winter.
Jung traces Snow White’s unconscious origins to a developmental complex anticipating libidinal awakening, equating the tale’s structure with the solar fertilization of a winter-bound earth.
, Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902thesis
In ‘Snow White and Rose Red,’ the women live together with no man around… There is an infantile, sentimental, paradisiacal atmosphere, an innocence which is not the integrity of the simpleton but a kind of unreal paradise.
Von Franz reads ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ as a satirical critique of naïve Christian ‘kindergarten’ consciousness, distinguishing its false innocence from the deeper integrity demanded by the individuation process.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The bear was good-natured, but when it got too bad he would say, ‘Don’t kill me, children!’ and added, ‘Snow White and Rose Red, don’t kill your suitor!’
Von Franz presents the bear’s address to Snow White and Rose Red as the pivotal fairy-tale moment that introduces the masculine principle (the enchanted prince) into an exclusively feminine, infantilized world.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
when thou seest the Matter white as Snow, and shining like orientall gemms. The white Stone is then perfect.
Abraham’s alchemical dictionary explicitly invokes snow-whiteness as the criterion of perfected albedo, providing the symbolic substrate that links Snow White’s name to the purification stage of the opus.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
snow the whitened ‘body’ of the Stone also known as terra alba foliata… whose ‘whiteness surpasses any snow in the world.’ This is the pure matter from which the new Stone or ‘philosophical child’ is formed.
Abraham establishes snow as a primary alchemical symbol for the albedo and the philosophical child, a symbolic nexus directly relevant to Snow White’s name and her fairy-tale role as an innocent figure awaiting transformation.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
In mythology black and white are often not an ethical designation… White, on the other hand, stands for daylight, clarity, and order, but can be either negative or positive, depending on the situation.
Von Franz’s contextual analysis of color symbolism in mythology provides an important corrective to moralistic readings of Snow White’s whiteness, insisting on the ambivalence of white as a psychic signifier.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside