Sponge

In the lunar sea there is a sponge planted, having blood and sentience sensum, in the manner of a tree that is rooted in the sea and moveth not from its place.

This alchemical passage from the ‘Allegoriae super librum Turbae,’ cited by Jung, identifies the sponge as a sentient, blood-bearing lunar plant that embodies the paradox of vegetable life endowed with animal sensation, central to the moon-plant symbolism in the opus.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis

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out of the philosophic earth there arises a certain substance, like to the branches of a loathsome sponge. Whence they have put forward the opinion that the point about which the whole art turns lies in the living things of nature.

Dorn’s alchemical text, as reproduced by Jung, uses the sponge’s ramifying branches as an image of the vegetative, animate quality of the philosopher’s stone arising from the philosophic earth, linking porosity and proliferation to the living heart of the opus.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis

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it contained within it some sponge, huge, but bounded; that sponge must needs, in all its parts, be filled from that unmeasurable sea: so conceived I Thy creation, itself finite, full of Thee, the Infinite.

Augustine employs the sponge as a theological-cosmological figure for finite creation wholly saturated by the infinite divine, a containment model that resonates deeply with depth-psychological treatments of the psyche’s relation to the self or pleroma.

Augustine, Confessions, 397thesis

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The terrestrial equivalent of the sponge was said to be the puff-ball. Sponges could hear and were

Jung’s editorial footnote records the ancient belief that sponges possessed the faculty of hearing, reinforcing their symbolic status as creatures at the threshold between plant, animal, and sentient being in the alchemical imagination.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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The client may interact like a sponge in the group, taking in feedback and carrying it away to gnaw on like a bone in the safe respite of the individual therapy hour.

Yalom uses the sponge as a clinical metaphor for a particular mode of resistant absorption in group therapy, whereby the client withholds genuine in-group processing by passively soaking up material for private digestion elsewhere.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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Apelles liked the effect of the sponge because he recognized it as the very thing he had been going for.

Nussbaum’s invocation of the Apelles anecdote — in which a casually thrown sponge achieves the desired painterly effect — serves as a philosophical illustration of how chance discovery, recognized as the intended goal, structures the Skeptic’s inadvertent encounter with ataraxia.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting

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Like a dry sponge, Carew soaked up the culture of the group — not only the science, but also the shared interest in art, music, and scientific gossip.

Kandel uses the dry sponge as a casual metaphor for receptive intellectual absorption, illustrating how the image functions in scientific memoir as a figure for eager, comprehensive assimilation of a disciplinary culture.

Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside

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the extensions of each sponge remain distinct and do not influence one another, as if this morphological dominance exerted by the whole onto the parts were reserved for them alone and would not be transmitted, even by the narrowest proximity.

Simondon uses the sponge colony as a biological case study in the distribution of individuality between part and whole, arguing that morphological dominance does not transmit across adjacent sponge individuals even under conditions of extreme proximity.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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