Within the depth-psychology corpus, the vase occupies a surprisingly rich symbolic register, moving between the archaeological, the philosophical-economic, and the psychoanalytic-mythological. Kerenyi, whose iconographic method dominates the Dionysian literature, treats painted vases primarily as documentary evidence for cultic practice — the chous, krater, pithos, and hydria each carrying ritual specificity — yet implies that the vessel-form is itself a container of sacred meaning, a logic made explicit by Otto Rank. Rank, working from the premise that vessel-form is modelled upon the human body, argues that the vase originally signified the lower body, then the whole body, thereby grounding ceramic symbolism in what he calls the ‘abdomen-ideology.’ Campbell’s index entry for the ‘ritual vase’ (the Warka Vase) situates the form within the earliest strata of sacred iconography, while Campbell’s treatment of the vas hermeticum signals the alchemical current in which the vessel becomes a transformation-chamber. Richard Seaford introduces an entirely different tension: for him the vase serves as the paradigm case of a commodity whose qualitative particularity is dissolved by the abstraction of monetary value. Taken together, these treatments reveal a persistent structural question — whether the vase is a container that preserves (life, the body, mystery) or a form that is itself dissolved by the systems of exchange and abstraction that surround it.
the vase signified at first the lower body, then the whole body (the neck and shoulder of th
Rank argues that the vase-form is anthropomorphically modelled on the human body, tracing the development of ornament and vessel-form to the same biological and psychological principle that underlies all human art.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis
with the development of monetary value the vase seems to embody a single abstraction – five (drachmas). The association with a single number is even more likely in the case of a coin
Seaford uses the vase as the exemplary commodity whose qualitative uniqueness is annihilated by monetary abstraction, making it a limit-case for the philosophical consequences of money in early Greek thought.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
When a vase is sold for five drachmas, the price belongs, in a sense, to the abstract unlimited continuum of monetary value – an unlimited continuum in that it is homogeneous and infinitely accumulatable in unending circulation.
Seaford demonstrates that the monetary pricing of the vase assimilates it to all other commodities while simultaneously delimiting it, illustrating the Pythagorean tension between the unlimited and the limiting.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
Vas hermeticum, 255 (226) Vase, ritual, see Warka Vase, The
Campbell’s index identifies both the hermetic vessel and the ritual vase (the Warka Vase) as distinct but related symbolic categories within the mythic image, connecting alchemical and archaic-sacral uses of the vessel-form.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
The design comes from an archaic vase of the ‘prothesis’ type, a vase used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects.
Harrison situates the funeral vase as an iconographic document expressing the Greek double attitude toward the dead — as fearful revenants and as ancestors — making the vessel a threshold object between death and communal continuity.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
the ship took on a ritual significance which the vase painters easily raised to the level of myth. They were able to put life into the seated statue so convincingly that it became a god enthroned on a real ship
Kerenyi attributes to vase painters the capacity to mythologize ritual imagery, demonstrating how the painted vessel mediates between cultic performance and mythological narrative in Dionysian religion.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
Girl swinging over an open pithos, on an Attic hydria. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. 95. Swing game over an open pithos, on a chous by the Eretria painter.
Kerenyi’s iconographic catalogue deploys the open pithos as a recurring ritual vessel in Dionysian imagery, where the open container marks the boundary between the living and the chthonic during Anthesteria rites.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
GORGO WITH A DARK FACE Plate I a Rhodian vase; from “The Journal of Hellenic Studies” 6, 1885, 281.
Kerenyi repeatedly grounds his analysis of Greek divine archetypes in the evidence of specific named vases, treating the vessel as both material artifact and iconographic witness to the mythological imagination.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
This vase by Teplist / The look of the Viennese forest / The nostalgia which emanates from / The trees / The flowers / The light / The sunset / Will bring memories to you from other times / Reminiscences of your childhood.
In Kandel’s memoir, a gift vase explicitly functions as a mnemonic object and an affective trigger for childhood memory, providing an autobiographical instance of the vessel as container of psychological time.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside
Dipylon, fragment of vase 76, 771! … ‘Duenos’ vase 304
Harrison’s index entries for named vases (Dipylon fragment, Duenos vase) signal the methodological centrality of ceramic iconography as primary evidence in her social-origins account of Greek religion.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside