Roles
What a figure is for in its tales, such as trickster, shadow or threshold.
A role is what a figure is for in the tales that carry it — not a picture it happens to fit. No reference work prints these as headwords, so unlike every other vocabulary here the wording is ours; what is not ours is the reading, which was made from the works that name each figure and is cited on every claim. 606 figure-role pairs carried, 581 met, over 474 of 692 figures.
- Anima 35 carry · 3 meet
The alluring ambivalent soul-image: the figure draws a man out of himself toward longing, and the drawing is itself the danger -- unattainable, fatal, or both.
- Circle 18 carry · 6 meet
Closed wholeness and eternal return: the figure's story turns on encircling, on a cycle that completes and begins again, on a ring that binds, or on a totality with no outside.
- Death 40 carry · 96 meet
Mortality as an office: the figure exists to end life, to announce an end, or to conduct the dead onward.
- Earth 14 carry · 30 meet
The ground as generative and receiving power: the figure personifies soil, mountain or the buried world, gives fertility, or claims the dead back into the ground.
- Father 23 carry · 49 meet
Generative and law-giving authority: the figure begets a line, fathers a people or race, or gives the command and judgement that orders others.
- Hero 10 carry · 277 meet
The one who sets out and confronts: the figure undertakes the ordeal, fights the monstrous thing, and wins or dies in the attempt.
- Queen 16 carry · 8 meet
Sovereign feminine authority: the figure rules, commands, presides or holds a court, and others are subject to her.
- Serpent 56 carry · 7 meet
The coiled ambivalent power: renewal by shedding, guardian coiled around a treasure or a threshold, the encircler, the tempter, the poison that also heals.
- Shadow 156 carry · 9 meet
The disowned counterpart that returns: the figure carries what its own culture refuses to own -- its appetite, cruelty, or shame -- and is often the dark double of something respectable.
- Threshold 52 carry · 13 meet
The crossing point personified or guarded: the figure holds a door, gate, bridge, shore or boundary between states, and passage depends on it.
- Trickster 119 carry · 26 meet
The boundary-crosser: the figure deceives, inverts order, shifts shape and appetite, and is both the maker and the spoiler of what it touches.
- Water 41 carry · 44 meet
The formless dissolving deep as a power in its own right: the figure personifies water, is the river or sea itself, or acts as water acts -- drowning, engulfing, dissolving, carrying away.
- Wise Old Man 26 carry · 13 meet
The guide who bestows: the figure gives counsel, knowledge, a warning or the needed object, and the one who receives it goes on changed.
The figures with no role here are not figures without one. 218 of the 692 carry none — some because no reference-work passage on them is reachable, so nothing was judged at all, and the rest because the reading found none. Which of the two a given figure is, this page does not say. How this was made.