The Seba library treats Trench in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, Hillman, James, Homer).
The Roman mundus was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for the human habitation.
Eliade identifies the trench as a cosmogonic symbol: the Roman mundus, a circular trench quartered to mirror the cosmos, functions as the paradigmatic axis mundi around which sacred human settlement is organized.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; the parched desert, the quagmire, the foxhole and battle trench, slag heap and rock wall
Hillman catalogues the battle trench among the chthonic shadows of Mother Earth, situating it within the autonomous, unfathomable depths that shadow the earth’s archetypal power.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
we would be fools to try to drive swift horses over this trench. It is too hard to cross. Sharp stakes are set along it, and beyond it, the Greeks have built their wall.
In the Iliad, the trench before the Greek ships functions as an impassable liminal threshold — a military and symbolic boundary separating the ordered interior from the violent exterior of battle.
, The Iliad, 2023thesis
The sinner is laced in a cask or in a trench dug in the ground, and when he emerges he is said to ‘be born a second time, from his mother’s womb.’
Eliade presents the trench as a ritual womb of regeneration, where symbolic burial in earth enacts purification and rebirth — a magico-religious operation equivalent in efficacy to baptism by water.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
from the mesolithic there was found in the shelter of the Kaufertsberg near Lierheim in a trench about a foot deep a skull by itself, coloured with red, complete with its lower jaw
Onians documents Paleolithic and Mesolithic use of trenches as sacred receptacles for skull-burial, grounding the trench’s chthonic symbolism in archaeological evidence of the ancient treatment of the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
infantrymen with bayonets fixed, snipers in ambush, torpedo men in destroyers report no particular hatred, little heroic ambition, unconcern for victory, or even passion for their cause
Hillman, treating the psychology of combat, touches on the altered and paradoxical experiential states of soldiers in battle — the milieu in which the trench becomes the literal ground of psychological transformation.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside