The Great Mother

The Great Mother, in Neumann’s analysis, is the archetype that presides over the pre-egoic stage of consciousness. Before consciousness has fragmented her, she is experienced en masse — “terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young” (Neumann 2019, par. 123). The paradoxical unity is torn asunder only by the hero’s separation of the World Parents, whereupon the archetype splits into a negative series — “Deadly Mother, Great Whore of Babylon, Witch, Dragon, Moloch” — and a positive series — “the Good Mother who, as Sophia or Virgin, brings forth and nourishes, and leads the way to rebirth and salvation” (Neumann 2019, par. 123).

The patriarchal development of Western consciousness proceeds by assimilating the Good Mother and repressing the Terrible. “It was reserved for an age versed in depth psychology to excavate the primeval world of the Terrible and Uroboric Mother,” Neumann writes — the repression was necessary while the fear of the abyss was still close, but its cost is the loss of the archetype’s full bivalent reality (Neumann 2019, par. 123).

Neumann’s structural analysis, developed at length in The Great Mother (1955), organizes the archetype through the elementary-and-transformative-character and traces its iconography across vessel-symbols from the magic vessel through the baptismal font and the grail to the alchemical retort (Neumann 1955, par. 26). The classical-philological precedent is Bachofen’s Mutterrecht; Neumann takes the matriarchy as an archetypal rather than historical finding.

Relationships

• uroboros
• elementary-and-transformative-character
• hero-myth
• anima
• johann-jakob-bachofen

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)