Wind

winds

Wind occupies a remarkable density of symbolic registers across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmogonic force, psychic metaphor, purifying agent, and directional power. In the Indo-Tibetan materials — from the Bhagavad Gita’s proclamation of wind as divine purifier to Tibetan medical discourse on ‘wind disorders’ afflicting over-zealous meditators — wind is understood as animate intelligence coursing through the world and the body alike. The Navajo corpus, as analyzed by Abram, develops perhaps the most philosophically precise account: the Holy Wind (nilch’i) enters the human being at birth, leaves its trace in the spiraling whorls of fingerprints and hair, and constitutes a person’s animating intelligence — making wind not merely metaphor but ontological substance. In Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma) traditions, wind, breath, and spirit collapse into a single term, placing wind at the origin of creation and of selfhood. The I Ching tradition distributes wind across multiple trigrams (Sun, Chen), associating it with gentleness, penetration, increase, and perseverance — wind reinforcing thunder, wind scattering hidden evil, wind blowing above water as disintegration. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation reads wind mythologically through the courtship of the East Wind in Longfellow’s Hiawatha, linking wind to the motif of dual motherhood and rebirth. Across all traditions, the central tension is between wind as uncontrollable dissolution and wind as the very medium of spiritual nourishment and renewal.

In the library 19 passages

Hebrew has a single word for both ‘spirit’ and ‘wind’ — the word ruach … At the very beginning of creation, before even the existence of the earth or the sky, God is present as a wind moving over the waters.

Abram argues that the Hebrew ruach and Navajo precedent together demonstrate that wind’s primordiality — as spirit, breath, and divine presence — is a cross-cultural ontological axiom, not mere metaphor.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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the particular Wind that enters with the first breath will have a powerful influence upon the whole course of that person’s life … the growing child is believed to be continually subject to the influence of Winds existing around him.

The Navajo Holy Wind doctrine, as Abram presents it, constitutes wind as a personalized animating intelligence that enters at birth and leaves its material trace in the vortices of fingertips and hair.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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In Tibetan Buddhism, and especially in the Tibetan medical system, ‘wind’ is used as a metaphor for mind because both are in constant motion. Anyone with what we would call an emotional illness is said to have a ‘wind’ disorder.

Epstein establishes wind as the governing Tibetan medical metaphor for mind, making the suppression of wind — and thus of mental movement — a pathological act with somatic and psychological consequences.

Epstein, Mark, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998thesis

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emotion is wind, breath, or what flies in it. The mind itself ‘flies.’ … Air, breath, wind are the soul’s element. Of course it flies.

Padel demonstrates that in Greek tragic psychology, wind, breath, and psychic movement are structurally identical — the soul’s constitution as wind-stuff explains why madness, passion, and death all share the idiom of flight.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Among purifying forces I am the wind … The wind is a powerful purifier; without the wind to keep impurities from accumulating, our atmosphere could not continue to sustain life … In most ancient cultures the wind is deified as a divine power, endowed with tremendous capacity for both evil and good.

Easwaran, glossing Krishna’s self-disclosure, establishes wind as a divine purifying force whose cosmological necessity — clearing toxins from the atmosphere — mirrors its spiritual function in most ancient religious systems.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis

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The air, we might say, is the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment … the very mystery of the living present.

Abram reframes air and wind phenomenologically as the invisible medium uniting all breathing bodies — plant, animal, and human — into a single respiratory community, making wind the hidden condition of perceptual presence.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

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Every morning he sees a beautiful girl in the meadow, whom he eagerly courts … The comparison with water is not irrelevant, because from ‘wind and water’ man shall be born anew.

Jung reads the East Wind’s courtship in Hiawatha as a mythological image of renewal, where wind’s erotic union with water encodes the archetype of rebirth from the dual maternal elements.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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Wind and thunder: the image of INCREASE. Thus the superior man: If he sees good, he imitates it; If he has faults, he rids himself of them. Wind and thunder generate and reinforce each other.

In the I Ching, the paired trigrams of wind and thunder produce the hexagram Increase, where wind’s amplifying of thunder serves as cosmological image for moral self-cultivation and mutual enhancement.

Wilhelm, Richard, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting

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Above is thunder, below is wind; when thunder is in motion, wind follows along. Thunder and wind grasp each other; with wind the sound of thunder reaches afar, following thunder the blowing of the wind is powerful. This is the image of perseverance.

The Taoist I Ching interprets the wind-thunder pairing as a model of perseverance, where wind’s following of thunder demonstrates sustained orientation toward movement without rigidity.

Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting

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Above is wind, below is water … the nature of wind is to penetrate, but it cannot get into water … wind blows above water: unintegrated. Thus ancient kings honored god and set up shrines.

Liu I-ming reads wind-above-water as the hexagram of Disintegration, where wind’s failure to enter water images a social and spiritual scattering that ritual reverence alone can resolve.

Liu I-ming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting

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scattering the evil hidden in secret recesses, as the wind sca[tters]

Wilhelm’s commentary on hexagram Sun (The Gentle/Wind) identifies wind’s penetrating, scattering function as the model for commands that must reach into hidden recesses of consciousness to be truly effective.

Richard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting

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Wind blowing up in the sky is small nurturance; thus do superior people beautify cultured qualities. Small nurturance is smallness of development. Above is wind, below is heaven — this is wind blowing up in the sky.

Liu I-ming associates wind-above-heaven with the hexagram of Small Nurturance, where wind’s gentle, gradual action models the incremental cultivation of refined human qualities.

Liu I-ming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting

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Thunder brings about movement, wind brings about dispersion, rain brings about moisture, the sun brings about warmth.

Wilhelm articulates wind’s elemental function in the I Ching cosmology as dispersal — one of the fundamental operations through which natural change propagates across the world.

Wilhelm, Richard, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting

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the phlegma ‘conflagration’ of the fire god is being conducted by Zephyros the West Wind and Notos the South Wind … Achilles prays to Boreas the North Wind and Zephyros the West Wind.

Nagy demonstrates that in Homeric epic, the wind-gods function as vectors of heroic martial power, conducting divine fire and embodying the elemental force (fire-and-wind combined) that constitutes the hero’s biē.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting

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Zephyros, the west wind, Boreas, the north wind, and Notos, the south wind … These winds, so he tells us, are of divine origin, and bring great benefits to mortals. There are, however, also the gales, children of Typhoeus, which descend upon the sea to the great hurt of mankind.

Kerényi maps the Greek theological distinction between the four principal winds — divine, beneficial, born of Astraios and Eos — and the chaotic gales born of Typhoeus, establishing a moral topology of wind.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting

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There Is Knowing in the Wind … ‘I know that it’s windy.’ ‘I’ refers more to my mind than my body … ‘The knower knows that it is windy.’

Thich Nhat Hanh uses wind as a grammatical-philosophical test case for dissolving the subject-object structure of knowing, proposing that awareness inheres in phenomena — including wind — rather than in a separate observer.

Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988aside

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WIND BLOWING WIND YOU LIKE WIND MAKES YOU FLY WITH IT UP IN THE AIR OTHER PEOPLE DONT LIKE WIND THEY CRINGE IN WIND THEY HIDE FROM WIND I LOVE WIND WEEEEEEEEEE FLY ON WIND.

Woodman presents an analysand’s automatic writing in which wind becomes the ecstatic medium of freedom from embodied heaviness, a dissociative fantasy of flight that signals unprocessed developmental arrest.

Woodman, Marion, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982aside

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carried still farther by the power of wind, and wind, which is strengthened by the power of thunder. Their combined action imparts duration to both.

Wilhelm’s commentary on hexagram Duration (Hêng) notes wind and thunder’s mutual reinforcement as an image of the principle of perseverance — endurance arising not from stasis but from dynamically sustained interaction.

Wilhelm, Richard, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950aside

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