The Seba library treats Willow in 3 passages, across 3 authors (including Liz Greene, Jung, Carl Gustav, Beekes, Robert).
were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river.
Greene deploys Old Man Willow as an archetypal figure for the shadow’s hidden malevolence — outwardly vital but inwardly corrupt, its invisible psychic rootwork colonizing the unconscious like poison spreading through an underworld river.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
The disappearance and hiding of the image in the wood, in the cave, on the seashore, its twining-about by the lygos-tree, all this points to death and rebirth.
Jung identifies the lygos-tree (willow or chaste-tree) entwining the divine image as a ritual symbol of death-and-rebirth within the hieros gamos complex, situating the willow centrally in the mythological grammar of renewal and sacred marriage.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
“bound with willow-twigs”, Laconian epithet of Artemis (Paus.) … AUYOS can be connected with isolated formations in other languages: Lith. lugnas [verb.adj.] ‘supple’ … The original meaning of AUYOS would be “turning, bending”.
Beekes establishes that the Greek word for willow (lygos) carries a primary semantic field of supple bending and ritual binding, attested in its Laconian association with Artemis, grounding the tree’s mythological valence in an Indo-European etymology of flexible yielding.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting