Archetype of the Turtle/Tortoise
Archetype of the Turtle/Tortoise: a creature that both embodies a the world and carry’s the world on his back, “comprising the totality of the cosmos… Folk etymology attributes the names ‘turtle’ and ‘tortoise’ to the Latin Tarturus, or underworld, conveying the sense of psyche's subterranean ground supporting all the ascending levels of life and consciousness.“
“Hundreds of millions of years are carried in the archaic form of a Galapagos turtle… able to bear 200 times its bodyweight and as heavy and beautiful as stone. Dignified of bearing, paced and deliberate in its rituals, a tortoise may live to an exceptionally old age.
Myths and legends depict it as earth's immense antiquity, solidity, continuity and wisdom, or in its domelike upper, and flattened lower shell, comprising the totality of the cosmos…
The tortoise traded fins for short legs, and the plates or scales on its back gradually increased in size as a defense and grew together to form a hard, domed shell into which it can eftectively retract its head, legs and tail from predators... An Iroquois myth tells how primordial water birds bring up bits of earth and place it on the back of a tortoise floating on the surface of the sea, and the earth grows and expands with the tortoise as the supporting torce of its center. In Hinduism, the world rests on the back of a tortoise as the chthonic form of the creator and preserver Vishnu… In alchemy it signifies the primal matter to which the things of the spirit must be linked if they are to become incarnate…
The tortoise also evoles those meditative or introverted states in which, as process or protection, libido is withdrawn from the world in order to devote its heat or moisture to the interior...
Mythic lore has associated the turtle especially with the fertility and sageness of the great goddess, the moist, shadowy, lunar qualities of yin, and the prime val waters in which all things have their (supported) beginning.”
