Ravens at the Threshold: On Archetypes, Jung & Lost Whisperings

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Crows and ravens have long found their way to me, in moments of quiet knowing, when life shifts on its hinges and something darker or deeper stirs beneath the surface.. Their black wings don’t just pass overhead—they announce themselves.

They’ve appeared at life's thresholds: before a death, after a truth, during that strange stillness that follows emotional rupture.

It's never been frightening, not quite.

More like a hush that wraps around the bones—a presence that says:

Pay attention.

Something is ending. 

Or...

Now you begin again.

And always, I listen.

Jung spoke of the collective unconscious—the idea that we all share a well of archetypal meaning, older than any single life.

Animals are among its oldest messengers.

They show up in dreams, myths, and stories because they speak directly to the deep mind—the part that isn’t interested in politeness or reason, only truth.

Birds, especially, have always had a foot in both worlds. They live in the trees but move through the sky, and so they become symbols of transcendence, of insight, of that barely-articulated something more.

Their flight reflects our longing—to rise, to understand, to escape what’s too heavy to carry.

But crows and ravens aren’t the white-winged doves of peace or purity.

They’re something else.

They arrive robed in shadow.

In Jungian terms, they speak to the shadow self—the parts of us we push away.

Anger.

Grief.

Fear.

Power.

The truths we’d rather not claim.

The raven doesn’t flinch.

It eats what is dead and decaying.

It lives on the threshold of life and death.

It doesn’t pretend.

In many traditions—from Norse to Celtic to Indigenous myth—raven is the trickster, the prophet, the goddess of fate.

She doesn’t warn you to stop.

She says:

Go deeper.

Let what must leave, leave.

Then you must rise.

I’ve come to see them this way: not as omens, but as invitations.

Each time they’ve crossed my path—whether on a fence, in a dream, or circling a memory—it’s marked a turning.

An ending.

A necessary shedding.

Not all animals carry shadow.

The butterfly speaks of hope, the lion of strength. But I’ve never trusted symbols that come without pain.

The ones that change us are the ones that confront us. That hold up a mirror in the dark.

And so I’ve grown fond of the raven’s kind of wisdom.

The kind that doesn’t promise ease, but offers depth.

That reminds me transformation isn’t gentle—it’s often grief-soaked, raw, and solitary.

But it is transformation.

Even now, they visit.

Sometimes just one.

Sometimes a whole parliament of them, perched like sentinels on the chimney pot.

I watch them with the same quiet awe I felt as a child listening for ghosts in the wind.

I no longer ask what they mean.

I simply receive.

Because I know now that to meet the raven is to meet a part of myself.

The older self.

The knowing self.

The one who has walked through fire and come back laden with stories.