The Seba library treats Trunk in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Neumann, Erich, Benveniste, Émile).
whose root is the metallic earth, its trunk red tinged with a certain blackness; its leaves are like the leaves of Marjoram…its flower is yellow.
Jung demonstrates that in alchemical symbolism the tree’s trunk—colored red with blackness—participates in the total opus as a structured axis linking the earthly root to the solar and lunar fruits, encoding the stages of transformation.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
the djed is taken to represent a tree trunk with the
Neumann identifies the djed pillar—core symbol of the preserved, upright Osiris—with the tree trunk, linking it to the psychological imperative of ego-coherence and resistance to dismemberment in matriarchal-to-patriarchal cultural transition.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
the radical dreu- with its alternative forms drū-, doru- exclusively designates ‘tree.’ Thus Gothic triu translates Gr. xúlon ‘tree, wood’
Benveniste’s philological analysis grounds the trunk/tree complex in the deep Indo-European root *dreu-, establishing the archaic semantic foundation—wood, hardness, endurance—that underlies the symbolic deployment of ‘trunk’ across cultures.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
He sows the land with trees, among them an oak which later rises to heaven and covers the sun and moon with its branches.
In the Finnish Kalevala context analyzed by Jung and Kerényi, the world-tree whose trunk connects earth and cosmos must be felled by a chthonic hero—foregrounding the trunk as the structural axis of mythological cosmology.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
the tree is also a mother…because from trees coffins are made, and there are the tree burials. The shamans of circumpolar tribes…are buried in a tree.
Von Franz demonstrates that the tree—and by implication its trunk as bodily axis—functions as the Great Mother in both life-giving and death-receiving aspects, making it a core symbol of the containing feminine in fairy-tale analysis.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
Long ago there was a deep devotion to living trees. They were valued, for they symbolized the ability to die and return back to life.
Estés situates the tree’s sacred body—including the trunk as the central living structure—within archaic women’s religious practice, where it symbolized cyclical death and renewal belonging to the Goddess rather than the patriarchal father.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little…I found that its root system was attached to all the other living lilacs up and down the fence line.
Estés uses the image of a dead tree whose root-and-trunk system connects subterraneously to living neighbors as a metaphor for the soul’s hidden resilience and communal sustenance.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
BSI. *trup-, *troup- has been compared, as in ORu. trupŭ ‘trunk, (field of) corpses’, Ru. trupŭ ‘corpse’, OPr. trupis ‘log’
Beekes traces a Baltic-Slavic etymological cluster linking ‘trunk’ with ‘corpse’ and ‘log,’ suggesting a deep linguistic association between the tree trunk and the body as inert or dead mass relevant to depth-psychological imagery.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside