Chthonic Mother

Jung distinguishes two iconographic registers of the maternal archetype: “the Urania type of mother-image predominates in masculine psychology, whereas in a woman the chthonic type, or Earth Mother, is the most frequent… A woman can identify directly with the Earth Mother, but a man cannot” (Jung 1959, CW 9i §193). The chthonic mother is the maternal archetype in its earth-bound, body-bound, generative-and-destructive register — the mother who is also the grave.

Hesiod gives the type its earliest Greek formulation. In Ruth Padel’s reading: “Hesiod’s Night is an archetypal lonely fertile blackness. ‘She did not lie with anyone,’ but bears (among others) Fate, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Deception, and Conflict… Hesiod’s Earth is mother to (among others) Erinyes, Cyclopes, and Giants. She makes within herself ‘the element of grey flint,’ which forms a sickle ‘with jagged teeth.’ This tool will castrate Heaven (that is, male Ouranos), whom Earth herself bore… ‘Dark Earth’ is from early times the ‘mother of all creatures.’ The archetypal dangerous mother” (Padel 1992, glossing Theogony 116–225).

The Greeks ritualized this register at chthonic shrines and in the Erinyes-cult; tragedy displays it where Electra invokes “Earth, who brings all things to birth, and having nourished them receives in turn their kuma” (Aeschylus, Choephoroe; Padel 1992). The chthonic mother is the classical root of what Neumann calls the elementary character of the neumann-great-mother — the mother as ground, as womb, as devouring container — and the substrate from which the negative pole of the mother-complex derives its energetic charge.

Relationships

• mother-complex
• neumann-great-mother
• devouring-mother
• demeter-persephone

Primary sources

• hesiod-homeric-hymns (Theogony 116–225, c. 700 BCE)
• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1992, ch. 5)
• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, CW 9i §193)