Snow occupies a surprisingly rich and multivalent position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as symbol, phenomenological image, and alchemical signifier. The range of treatments extends from Jung’s brief but pointed mythological reading of Snow White as a seasonal myth—the earth ‘held fast by winter’s cold, awaiting the liberating sun of spring’—to the alchemical lexicography of Lyndy Abraham, where snow designates the whitened body of the Philosopher’s Stone, the terra alba foliata, signifying purification after the nigredo. Von Franz extends this polarity further, identifying the color white and its association with snow as carrying the ‘weird inhuman coldness of the unconscious psyche,’ a freezing estrangement from human warmth emblematized by troll figures in Norse fairy tales. Dōgen’s waka poetry, by contrast, reads snow as the expression of oneness within multiplicity—white uniformity covering the diverse particularity of autumn leaves—while Robert Bly’s verse encounters snow as the medium through which the positive dark enters consciousness. Conforti approaches snow ethnographically, noting that Inuit vocabulary for snow’s differentiated states reflects the depth of environmental attunement. Across all of these treatments, snow serves as a threshold image: it marks the boundary between warmth and coldness, consciousness and unconscious, nigredo and albedo, the human and the inhuman.
the whitened ‘body’ of the Stone also known as terra alba foliata (the ‘white foliated earth) 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 the primary alchemical image for the albedo stage, signifying the purified white matter from which the Philosopher’s Stone is reborn after the blackening of the nigredo.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
Snow White belongs to the same cycle of myths as Sleeping Beauty. It contains even clearer indications of the myth of the seasons… the earth, held fast by winter’s cold, awaiting the liberating sun of spring.
Jung interprets Snow White as a seasonal myth in which snow figures the earth’s winter captivity, psychologically encoding the child’s identification with dormant life awaiting renewal.
, Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961thesis
The color white is also associated with snow, with the negative aspect of coldness, with the weird inhuman coldness of the unconscious psyche. I would therefore assume that the troll is a secret power that has frozen up, so to speak, estranged from all human warmth.
Von Franz identifies snow’s whiteness as symbolizing the inhuman coldness of dissociated unconscious contents, embodied in the figure of the troll who has become frozen and estranged from warmth.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
The whiteness of snow represents oneness, while the bright colors of the leaves manifest multiplicity. Each tree has its unique nature… Oneness and multiplicity live together.
Dōgen reads the rare coincidence of snow and colored autumn leaves as a Dharma expression of the interpenetration of absolute oneness with conventional multiplicity.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234thesis
The family style is pure white like plum blossoms, snow, and the moon… In sitting and letting go of thoughts, we are one with the plum blossoms, the snow, and the moonlight.
Dōgen uses snow, plum blossoms, and moonlight as co-equal images of purity and non-discrimination, emblems of the family style of Zen practice achieved through zazen.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234supporting
Grasses lie unseen in the field under snow the white egret hides itself in its own appearance… The entire world is covered in snow, and it is still snowing continually. The bird is also white, so we cannot distinguish it from its environment.
Dōgen’s waka uses the snow-covered field and the white egret’s self-concealment as a figure for the practice of prostration, in which the practitioner merges with the ground of being.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234supporting
watching snow fall on some long grass, I felt the positive dark come in again… The grass is half-covered with snow… As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away, And the barn moves nearer to the house.
Bly employs the image of snow falling on grass as the phenomenological occasion through which the ‘positive dark’—the shadow’s fertile dimension—enters waking consciousness.
, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988supporting
It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs. The last poem has the most marvelous and alert sense for changes of light, the deepening darkness, sensed with the body, as snow is about to fall.
Bly cites Stevens’s snow imagery to argue that poetic attention to imminent snowfall exemplifies the reawakening of somatic and synaesthetic perception against the tyranny of purely visual, reading-based consciousness.
, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988supporting
He stumbles through the snow and then thinks he sees a drop of blood in the snow. He looks closer and sees that it is a rose petal. A few steps further on are another and another; the whole way is strewn with them, and in the snow is the trace of delicate, bare feet.
Von Franz cites the literary image of blood-red rose petals traced across snow as a puer aeternus epiphany—the irruption of Eros into the cold, undifferentiated field of unconscious longing.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
He stumbles through the snow and then thinks he sees a drop of blood in the snow. He looks closer and sees that it is a rose petal… in the snow is the trace of delica
This parallel passage reinforces the puer aeternus theme: the snow field serves as the blank, frigid unconscious into which the sudden apparition of warmth and Eros irrupts as crimson rose petals.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
The children brushed the snow off his coat, and they soon dared to put their feet on his back… in the winter when the ground was frozen the dwarfs had to stay underground and could not do any mischief, but as soon as the sun had thawed the ground, then the dwarfs came up.
Von Franz reads the fairy tale’s winter-snow as the season during which shadow and trickster forces (the dwarfs) are immobilized underground, establishing snow as a liminal boundary between latent evil and its release.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
The Inuit, for instance, whose survival depends on the ability to read patterns in the snow and ice, have developed an extensive vocabulary to describe the many different states of snow while most languages offer but one or two words for snow.
Conforti uses Inuit snow vocabulary as an instance of field-resonance between organism and environment, demonstrating how depth of environmental attunement generates corresponding differentiation of symbolic and linguistic fields.
, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting
there is day after day of white sky, white snow… and all the tiny specks in the distance are people or dogs or bear. Here, nothing thrives for the asking. The winds blow hard… Here, words freeze in the open air.
Estés deploys the Arctic snowscape as the mythic ground of the Sealskin/Soulskin story, where snow’s totalizing whiteness figures the extreme conditions under which soul-retrieval and instinctual return become necessary.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
I naturally tried it out in my youth and so imprisoned myself in a hut in the mountains in the snow. I felt perfectly happy because I occupied myself the whole day with cooking… that one pattern of behavior prevented me from getting caught by other devils.
Von Franz recounts her own isolation in a mountain hut in the snow as an autobiographical aside illustrating how behavioral busyness can forestall the direct encounter with the unconscious that genuine retreat demands.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside
The sacred mountain Hakusan does not discriminate between summer and winter. The mountain is immovable, accepting all the different conditions of the four seasons, including roaring thunder in summer and snow in winter.
Dōgen invokes the snow-covered sacred mountain Hakusan as an image of magnanimous, non-discriminating mind—the equanimity of practice that accepts all seasonal and psychic conditions equally.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234aside
He had asked for a piece of white cloud, and a piece of white cloud, accordingly, they tried to obtain. But how could they obtain a piece of white cloud? All tried very hard and, finally, they made it snow. Then, when the snow was quite deep, they gave him a piece of snow to play with.
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, snow appears as a mythic substitute for white cloud, illustrating the trickster’s capacity to compel nature’s transformation in order to satisfy his primordial and undifferentiated desires.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside