Spiritual Transformation Character

In the four-circle schema of The Great Mother, the third circle is the spiritual transformation character — the stage “in which the development of feminine psychology reaches its culmination” (Neumann 1955, par. 34). It is not a supplement to the elementary and transformative characters but their telos. “Spiritual transformation, i.e., a fundamental change of the personality and consciousness, occurs only through the crucial emergence of an archetype” (Neumann 1955, par. 31).

The spiritual transformation character belongs to the “feminine spirit” — the wisdom that the patriarchal consciousness, boasting of “the immaterial and invisible spirit,” misreads as “merely of the soul” (Neumann 1955, par. 25). Against Bachofen’s three-stage scheme of tellurian-lunar-solar ascent — in which the solar-patriarchal stage claims priority retroactively — Neumann reads the matriarchal stratum as holding its own mysteries of illumination: “the matriarchal world is far from being, as Bachofen supposed, merely that of the lower level, of earthly transience and darkness. In the mysteries of rebirth the individual is also raised to the light and immortalized” (Neumann 1955, par. 26).

The character’s classical exemplars include the Eleusinian initiation through demeter-persephone, the Isis-mysteries of resurrection, and the figure of sophia as divine wisdom. Its Christian exemplar is Mary as the vessel of the Word at the Annunciation. Its alchemical exemplar is the lapis in the retort. “In the sphere of spiritual transformation, not only does the Archetypal Feminine creatively unite the elementary and the transformative character in itself, but it passes beyond them to the ‘feminine spirit,’ the highest phase in the development of the ‘matriarchal consciousness’” (Neumann 1955, par. 31). The character is the schema’s answer to the charge that matriarchal consciousness is merely pre-egoic: it names the form of spiritual realization the Feminine holds in its own right.

Relationships

• elementary-and-transformative-character
• matriarchal-consciousness
• sophia
• individuation
• neumann-great-mother

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)