The Seba library treats Weasel in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Hillman, James, Jung, C.G., Radin, Paul).
When Hercules was born, a weasel attendant at his birth was the first to recognize and proclaim Hercules to the world. The sneaky moment calls up the heroic from the beginning; something tricky is going on whenever a heroic impulse comes into being.
Hillman argues that the weasel at Hercules’ birth reveals an irreducible trickster-shadow at the origin of every heroic impulse, implicating depth psychology’s heroism-integration model in a deeper hermetic complicity.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
There is a medieval master who painted the Madonna with the Weasel. This weasel is found in popular Greek superstitious belief. Subsequently the weasel exists only as a female, as far as I know, and conceives through the ear. And so it stands as an analogy for the Virgin.
Jung identifies the weasel as a pagan animistic symbol of virginal conception absorbed into Christian Mariology, illustrating how folk zoology underwrites theological image-formation.
, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis
The warbundle itself consisted of a deerskin wrapping enclosing a strange assortment of objects… a weasel skin, a number of eagle feathers, a deer-tail head-dress, two wolf tails, a buffalo tail, a war-club, three flutes and various kinds of ‘paint-medicine’.
Radin’s documentation of the Winnebago warbundle places the weasel skin as one among several animal-power fetishes conferring specific martial capacities on ritual participants.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Thoroughbreds like Qiji and Hualiu could gallop a thousand li in one day, but when it came to catching rats, they were no match for the wildcat or the weasel — this refers to a difference in skill.
Zhuangzi uses the weasel as a figure of functionally specific excellence, arguing against universal hierarchies of value in favour of contextual aptitude.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting
In Semonides, a ‘bee-woman’ makes a better wife than a ‘weasel-woman.’ Aristophanes’ animal choruses draw on this tradition.
Padel shows the weasel functioning in Greek misogynistic typology as a negative female archetype within a systematic animal code for classifying human character.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Then he changed himself into a weasel with a black tail. He ran and hid under all the roots and in all the piles of wood and finally came back to the czar’s palace.
Von Franz presents the weasel as one station in a hero’s shapeshifting sequence against a magician-adversary, connecting it to an archetypal logic of concealment and underworld penetration.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
The formation of galēi shows that the word originally indicated the skin; cf. alōpek-ēi, etc. … The original meaning ‘weasel-skin’ is found in Lat. galea ‘leather helmet.’
Beekes traces the Greek term for weasel to an original referent of weasel-skin, establishing the etymological substrate that links the animal to material culture and protective covering.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside
A man who has fled into the wilderness, where goosefoot and woodbine tangle the little trails of the polecat and the weasel, and has lived there in emptiness and isolation for a long time.
Zhuangzi uses the weasel’s trail in the wilderness as an image of radical isolation, evoking the longing for human connection that motivates the passage’s reflection on exile.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013aside
Lopez, Barry. Crow and Weasel. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
A bibliographic citation in Hillman’s reference list signals the weasel’s presence in the imaginative literature informing archetypal psychological reflection on character and the lasting life.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999aside