Tantalos occupies a circumscribed but symbolically dense position in the depth-psychology corpus. The mythological figure—son of Zeus, father of Pelops and Niobe, condemned to eternal frustration in Tartaros—is treated primarily through three interpretive lenses. First, the ritual-anthropological lens, represented most fully by Jane Harrison, reads the Feast of Tantalos as evidence of archaic initiatory practice: the dismemberment, cooking, and resurrection of Pelops encodes a ceremony of New Birth inseparable from the death-and-rebirth logic of tribal initiation. Second, the psychologically oriented commentators, above all Edinger, read Tantalos as an ego that has overreached its proper boundaries by gaining illicit access to transpersonal secrets, thereby becoming caught between successive stages in the evolution of the divine. Third, mythographers and scholars such as Kerenyi, Rohde, and Greene situate the figure within Hades-topography, where his torment—fruit and water perpetually withdrawn—stands as an archetypal image of unappeasable desire and thwarted participation in divine abundance. Liz Greene reads the dynastic curse descending from Tantalos as a paradigm for inherited fate. The etymological stratum, supplied by Beekes, grounds the name’s Greek derivatives and their semantic field of hovering, trembling, and weighing. The tensions between ritual-historical, psychological-symbolic, and fate-oriented readings give the entry its scholarly richness.