waste land
The Seba library treats Wasteland in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Hollis, James, Frank S. Thielman, Beekes, Robert).
Desuetude is the experience of being dispirited, of lacking the energy to traverse the wasteland. Listless, joyless, adrift in anomie—who has not dwelt in such an arid place
Hollis identifies the wasteland explicitly as the experiential terrain of desuetude — the loss of spiritual energy (libido) that leaves the individual listless, joyless, and unable to sustain purposeful movement through life.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
a continually smoking wasteland, plants bearing fruit that does not ripen, and a pillar of salt stand
Drawing on the Wisdom of Solomon’s description of the ruins of Sodom, this passage embeds wasteland within a theological register of divine judgment, where moral corruption produces a permanently sterile and smoking landscape — an archetype of irreversible desolation.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
‘worker on wasteland’ (pap. IIP), -ía (-éia) [f.] ‘wasteland, erēmía’ (pap., H.); also napaxersía of a field
The Greek etymological record establishes that wasteland (xersía) is linguistically rooted in concepts of barren, dried-out mainland terrain, with the derivative sense of almost-barren or near-infertile land, grounding the symbolic in concrete geographical desolation.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
The harm to nature is concomitant with the stunning of the psyches of humans. They are not and cannot be seen as separate from one another.
Estés argues that environmental devastation and psychic impoverishment are not separable phenomena — the despoliation of natural landscapes mirrors and reinforces the creation of interior wastelands within the human psyche.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds.
Estés frames the recovery from psychic wasteland as the collective reclamation and resurrection of a ‘psychic motherworld,’ positioning feminine creative work as the antidote to the inner desolation wrought by disconnection from wild nature.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
When the personal soul-life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to act dry-boned as Death.
Estés describes the internal wasteland as the condition of hambre del alma — a starved soul — arising when a woman’s creative and instinctual life is destroyed, leaving her internally arid and compulsively hungry for any substitute vitality.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
This devastation of the world as a sensory living bo[dy]
Hillman identifies the Cartesian-Kantian logic of monotheistic universalism as producing a metaphysical wasteland — a desensitized cosmos stripped of qualitative particularity, in which place, taste, and soul are rendered merely subjective and therefore dispensable.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside
It is a tale about the river of life that became a river of death.
Estés uses the legend of La Llorona as a mythic map of the wasteland condition — the creative, life-sustaining river turned lethal — situating psychic and ecological sterility within an ongoing oral tradition of feminine loss and potential restoration.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside