The term ‘winged’ functions in the depth-psychology corpus as a multivalent symbolic operator, spanning the aerial phenomenology of Greek tragic emotion, the alchemical grammar of volatile and fixed principles, the mythopoeic figure of the puer aeternus, and the cosmogonic symbolism of the Orphic egg. Padel’s rigorous excavation of Greek tragic language reveals that ‘winged’ is the primary register through which soul, emotion, daemonic assault, and madness are figured: feelings hover, swoop, and fly; the soul descends ‘winged’ to Hades; Erinyes row through air on wings. Neumann and Hillman extend this into archetypal psychology proper, where the winged figure—Pegasus, Eros, Icarus, Mercurius—marks the spiritualization of libido and the puer’s dangerous vertical aspiration. Von Franz reads the alchemical opposition of winged and wingless birds as the psyche’s fundamental tension between volatile fantasy and fixed instinct. Jung himself, in both the Red Book cosmology and the alchemical corpus, deploys winged imagery for Phanes-Eros and for the dual nature of Mercurius—spirit eluding fixation. Carson’s Platonic analysis of Eros as Pteros locates wings at the threshold between divine enlargement and human formal limitation. Across all these positions, ‘winged’ names the axis of transcendence, transformation, and the precarious freedom of psychic energies that resist earthly containment.
The mind’s contents and products are winged things, flying either in air outside or in spaces you yourself contain. The same things are ‘windlike’: emotion is wind, breath, or what flies in it.
Padel establishes ‘winged’ as the governing metaphor for psychic contents in Greek tragic thought, equating the mind’s emotions and knowledge-units with airborne, volatile creatures.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
What the winged horse symbolizes is the freeing of libido from the Great Mother and its soaring flight, in other words, its spiritualization. It is with the help of this same Pegasus that Bellerophon performs his heroic deeds.
Neumann interprets the winged horse as the archetypal symbol of libido’s release from chthonic maternal containment and its sublimation into spiritual heroic energy.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
Is the one ascending the spiritual impetus of the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of the spirit—Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun’s chariot out of control.
Hillman identifies the winged figure as the archetypal imago of the puer aeternus, whose ascent encodes both spiritual aspiration and the fatal hubris of unchecked upward drive.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
On one part of the tablet there is a winged bird and a bird without wings. The winged bird is above and the other below; the text says the latter prevents the winged bird from flying away.
Von Franz reads the alchemical pair of winged and wingless birds as the fundamental tension between volatile psychic fantasy (spirit) and fixed instinctual drive (matter) that must be held in productive conflict.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
That would be the psychological aspect, and would correspond to the winged bird. But when you have done that a terrible conflict begins. Our text says that the wingless bird prevents the winged bird from flying away.
Von Franz explicates the winged bird as the fantasied, spiritualized dimension of a drive that, once elaborated, enters irresolvable conflict with its earthbound counterpart.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
Erinyes also tend to have wings. The Eumenides’ priestess says they look like wingless Harpies. Winglessness is easier to stage. Vase-painters, however, give Erinyes wings, which are presumably fun to paint, and also truer to the language’s sense of daemonic aerial attack.
Padel demonstrates that wings on the Erinyes are not decorative but express the core Greek intuition of daemonic forces as aerial, swooping assailants of the psyche from above.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
The mind ‘flies’ in passion. Feelings hover, flit, swoop, outside in the world, inside in the mind, like wind, like winged words, songs, dreams, curses.
Padel synthesizes the Greek tragic field in which ‘winged’ names the aerial mobility of passions, curses, and daemonic forces that assail or inhabit the mind.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
The figure of the Jung boy in the winged egg, called Erikapaios or Phanes and thus reminiscent as a spiritual figure of the Orphic Gods. Art and science also belong to this spiritual realm, the first represented as a winged serpent and the second as a winged mouse.
Jung deploys ‘winged’ in the Red Book cosmology to mark entities belonging to the spiritual upper pole of the psychic macrocosm, from the Orphic Phanes to the domains of art and science.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
Eros’ wings mark a critical difference between gods and men, for they defy human expression. Our words are too small, our rhythms too restrictive.
Carson argues that Eros’s wings are the sign of a divine excess that surpasses mortal formal capacity, marking the unbridgeable ontological gap between desire as humanly expressed and desire in its true divine nature.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986supporting
The presence or absence of wings in a lover’s story determines his erotic strategy. That miserly and mortal sōphrosynē by which Lysias measures out his erotic experience is a tactic of defense against the change of self that eros imposes.
Carson establishes wings as the decisive marker in Platonic erotic psychology, distinguishing the transformative, self-losing lover from the defended, wingless calculator of desire.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986supporting
The shadow companion equips the hero with wings so that now he can fly in the world of the anima. This means a new conscious attitude, a certain spiritualization, because wings belong to a fantasy being rather than an earthly being.
Von Franz interprets the gift of wings in fairy tale as a symbolic spiritualization of consciousness, granting the hero access to the anima’s imaginal realm through detachment from profane reality.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
As Mercurius is winged, so can Cronus-Saturn, as Aion, or on tombstones, be winged. Both are related to the dead, to time and eternity, and to the Golden Age.
Hillman notes that the winged attribute crosses the senex-puer boundary, appearing on both Mercurius and Saturn-Aion, linking wings to time, eternity, and the dead rather than exclusively to youthful upward aspiration.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
These figures of tragic language interact with wind images of passion, and also with iconography of winged creatures. Birds tear both animal flesh and, in a culture intimate with battlefields, human flesh.
Padel situates winged creatures in Greek tragic iconography as figures of predatory violence where daemonic passion, divine punishment, and the physical vulnerability of the human body converge.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
The winged figure of the egg-born Eros can likewise hardly be separated from the winged goddesses of archaic times, and the meaning of this figure lies where ritual and cosmogonic hermaphroditism.
Jung and Kerényi anchor the winged figure of Eros in Orphic cosmogony, connecting it to the bisexual primal being and to archaic winged goddess imagery as a site of ritual and cosmological meaning.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
Winged dragons combine the transcendent symbolism of the snake and the bird. Right, an image of spiritual transcendence: Mahomet on the winged mare Buraqq flies through the celestial spheres.
Jung identifies winged composite creatures as symbols that unite chthonic and aerial registers, embodying the transcendent aspiration toward higher spiritual spheres.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
Psyche’s wings burnt, or the burnt moth or butterfly, whose name in Greek gives them symbolic identity. A woman dreams that she tries to burn a wormlike insect in a bonfire; but it proves indestructible, and out comes a winged butterfly.
Hillman shows that the burning and re-emergence of winged creatures in both ancient iconography and contemporary dreams encodes the psyche’s tormented but ultimately indestructible aspiration toward transformation.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Now you are flying, and though you are sane you are not thinking sanely. Is the flying element still in your soul? Both are a ‘flying’ in the mind.
Padel documents the Bacchae’s use of ‘flying’ as the Greek tragic metaphor for both resistant ego-madness and Dionysiac possession, demonstrating that winged movement in the mind signals loss of rational control.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Assyrian Winged Genie with six-flowered plant and scepter. 885–860 B.C. Alabaster wall panel. Griffin-demon Winged Genie. Guardian Lion-bull Winged Genie.
Campbell’s iconographic catalogue situates the winged genie figures of Assyrian palatial art within the broader mythic image of apotropaic, guardian, and cosmological winged beings across ancient Near Eastern culture.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside
In mythology, feathers generally represent something very similar to the bearer of the feathers—the bird. According to the principle of pars pro toto, a magical form of thinking, the feather signifies the bird, and birds in general represent psychic entities of an intuitive and thinking character.
Von Franz establishes a metonymic chain linking feathers to birds to winged psychic entities, grounding the symbolic logic by which the winged quality signals intuitive, spiritual, and soul-like qualities in fairy-tale hermeneutics.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970aside