Ratio Matris

Ratio matris — the reason of the mother — is the cognitive mode proper to the maternal ground of psyche. The Latin ratio preserves its medieval breadth: measure, proportion, principle of relation. The term is Peterson’s, formulated for the Seba Method as one of four ratios; it gathers under a single name what the depth tradition has long described in scattered registers — erich-neumann‘s matriarchal consciousness, carl-jung‘s mother-archetype in its constructive aspect, marion-woodman‘s conscious femininity, and the maternal mystery dramatized at Eleusis.

Ratio matris names a knowing that gestates rather than analyzes, that contains rather than divides, that ripens what it holds rather than dissecting it. Its grammar is lunar and cyclic: gestation, containment, transformation in the dark, timely release. Jung describes the qualities the ratio gathers as “the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility” (Jung 1959). Transcend reason is precise: not irrational but a measure other than the discriminating intellect’s.

The classical ground is the neumann-great-mother as cosmogonic principle — Hesiod’s gaia-as-foundation, Demeter at Eleusis, the Great Round of Neumann’s analysis. The constructive face of the mother-archetype, it stands in contrast to the devouring-mother as the maternal substrate’s destructive inversion, and is distinguished from mother-complex as the genuine measure is distinguished from its unmetabolized substitute. As one of four ratios in the Seba Method, ratio matris is set alongside three other modes of measure without subordination — the maternal ratio is not a developmental stage to be surpassed but a permanent mode of cognition the soul keeps available.

Relationships

• matriarchal-consciousness
• neumann-great-mother
• mother-archetype
• devouring-mother
• mother-complex
• demeter-persephone
• anima-mundi
• four-ratios-seba-method

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959)
• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949 / 2019 reissue)
• woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993)
• hillman-anima-anatomy-personified (Hillman 1985)