Matriarchal vs Patriarchal Consciousness

Neumann reads the sun-moon polarity as a schematization of two modes of consciousness. “We correlate the sun with the patriarchal consciousness and the moon with the matriarchal consciousness” (Neumann 1955, par. 25). The correlation is archetypal rather than gendered in any simple sense: the modes operate in men and women alike, shifting in dominance with culture and stage of life.

The patriarchal consciousness claims the “immaterial and invisible spirit” — the solar, abstracting, detached intellect that, “in its Apollonian-Platonic and Jewish-Christian form has led to the abstract conceptuality of modern consciousness” (Neumann 1955, par. 25). Its telos is separation, clarity, the unambiguous word. Its risk is the hypertrophy of consciousness “at the expense of the whole man” — the one-sidedness that, in Neumann’s 1955 diagnosis, is “threatening the existence of Western mankind” (Neumann 1955, par. 25).

The matriarchal consciousness is lunar: participatory, receptive, held open to the processes of the unconscious. “The spontaneity of the unconscious and also the receptivity of consciousness are here greater than in the relation between the relatively detached patriarchal consciousness… and the unconscious” (Neumann 1955, par. 31). It is not pre-consciousness but a consciousness of a different form — nocturnal, cyclical, mantic. Its risks are inundation and loss of form; its achievements are mystery, poetry, vision. Against Bachofen’s developmentalism, which reads the tellurian-lunar-solar sequence as evolutionary ascent, Neumann preserves the matriarchal form as a permanently operative psychic register, not a stage outgrown (Neumann 1955, par. 25).

Relationships

Primary sources

neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)