Vulture

This bird was not a vulture, as Freud and then Neumann have declared. Neumann, despite noticing that a nibio is not a vulture and so correcting Freud’s error, nonetheless sustains it by retaining the mistranslation as symbolically correct in order to analyze, along with Freud, Leonardo in terms of the mother-complex.

Hillman argues that both Freud and Neumann’s deployment of the vulture symbol in Leonardo analysis rests on a demonstrable mistranslation that was knowingly preserved to serve the mother-complex interpretation.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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The vulture symbol (which Freud also discusses in the work mentioned) makes this view all the more plausible. With some justification he quotes as the source of the symbol the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, a book much in use in Leonardo’s time. There you read that vultures are female only and symbolize the mother. They conceive through the wind (pneuma).

Jung grounds the vulture’s maternal symbolism in the Horapolline tradition, treating it as archetypal evidence for the universal dual-mother motif rather than as a biographical datum about Leonardo.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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‘Listen to the garrulous vulture, which does not deceive you at all.’ Heleen de Jong comments that ‘The vulture and raven symbolize the circular motion of the alchemical process; the black raven represents the putrefactio; the vulture is the completion of it.’

In alchemical imagery the vulture marks the culmination of putrefactio within the circular operation of the opus, contrasting with the raven that signals the process’s onset.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis

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The early capitals of Upper and Lower Egypt were cities where two Mother goddesses ‘of lasting splendor’ had reigned from time immemorial: the vulture goddess Nekhbet of Nekhen in Upper Egypt, and the snake goddess Uatchet of Buto in Lower Egypt.

Neumann situates the vulture goddess Nekhbet within Egyptian sacred geography as one of two primordial matriarchal powers whose conflict with the patriarchal Horus mythology can still be traced in ritual.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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Leonardo, unconsciously no doubt, portrayed a central figure of the matriarchal mystery world, closely related to the vulture goddess. For Dionysus is the mystery god of feminine existence… The vulture has nothing to do either with Dionysus or with the puer.

Hillman critiques Neumann’s extension of the vulture goddess symbolism to Dionysus and the puer, rejecting the evidentiary basis while acknowledging that any archetype may be viewed from multiple perspectives.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

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Vulture Skull Rebirth Separation of Soul from Body Greenness Skeleton Healing Conception Grave Sowing Sickness Wound Germination Wilderness Worms ~ Corpse Death

Edinger positions the vulture within the mortificatio–putrefactio complex of alchemical imagery, associating it with rebirth, soul-separation, and the cluster of death-and-renewal symbols central to the nigredo stage.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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The date etched on Pillar 43, known as the Vulture Stone, marks 13,000 years ago, aligning not with the end but the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

This passage notes the Vulture Stone of Göbekli Tepe as an archaeo-astronomical marker, tangentially connecting the vulture image to archaic cosmological record-keeping outside the depth-psychological context proper.

Harding, M. Esther, Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 1955aside

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