The Seba library treats Wrestling in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Bly, Robert, Arthur W.H. Adkins).
there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day… he touched the hollow of his thigh… Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men
Jung’s annotation of Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling with the angel establishes the wound, the renaming, and the blessing as the archetypal structure of transformative encounter with the numinous Other.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
When the playful verbal combats disappear, then warriorhood becomes reduced or restricted to wrestling, football, the martial arts, guerrilla warfare, blood-and-guts movies.
Bly argues that the eclipse of ritual verbal and intellectual combat impoverishes warriorhood, confining it to purely physical forms such as wrestling that lack the cultural and initiatory depth of genuine contest.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
I would not reckon a man as being of any account because of the arete of his feet or for his wrestling… not even if a man has all these qualities, not even if he had every ground for fame but fierce valour
Tyrtaeus’s deliberate demotion of wrestling from a mark of aretê in favour of martial courage reveals how somatic contest was subordinated to civic and military virtue under conditions of existential threat.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Of wrestling we have spoken in part; that women ought not to neglect military matters, but that all citizens, male and female alike, shall attend to them.
Plato treats wrestling as a component of civic military education to be extended to women, positioning it as a practical discipline rather than a purely masculine or symbolic one.
, Laws, -348supporting
an apparent bout of wrestling ensues, in which one animal winds up on its back with the other animal on top. This ‘pinning’ posture can also be easily quantified
Panksepp grounds wrestling in the mammalian PLAY system, demonstrating that the pattern of mutual grappling and pinning is a neurobiologically conserved behaviour quantifiable as a measure of social solicitation.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
When a man and a woman are standing toe-to-toe arguing, what is it that the man wants? Often he does not know. He wants the conflict to end because he is afraid, because he doesn’t know how to fight
Bly extends the wrestling metaphor into relational combat, suggesting that the inability to sustain conscious conflict in intimate life reflects a deficit in the internalized warrior capable of disciplined engagement.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside