Vessel Symbolism

At the center of The Great Mother’s iconographic schema stands the vessel. The body of the woman, “which we do in fact know as a real vessel,” furnishes the primary metaphor for how psychic reality is experienced as contained (Neumann 1955, par. 21). Mouth, breasts, and womb mark the vessel’s openings; the belly and the heart mark its interior zones. What is “inside” a person — inwardness, soul, psychic contents — is imagined as held in a body-vessel, and what is outside is itself a world-body-vessel with heaven above and underworld below (Neumann 1955, par. 20).

Neumann’s central iconographic claim is that the transformative character runs a single unbroken chain of vessel-symbols across traditions: “the vessel in which this spiritual birth takes place appears as a magic vessel and as a vessel of transformation, as baptismal font, as grail, and finally as alchemistic retort” (Neumann 1955, par. 26). The chain is not diffusionist but archetypal. Eleusinian kernos, Christian font, Grail of Perceval, the alchemist’s vas hermeticum — these are images issuing from the same psychic structure, not cultural borrowings.

The vessel has a negative pole. The cave is dwelling and tomb; the womb is chamber and grave; the vessel “holds fast and takes back” as readily as it nourishes and releases. “The Feminine contains opposites, and the world actually lives because it combines earth and heaven, night and day, death and life” (Neumann 1955, par. 21). The Annunciation icon gathers the chain at its spiritual pole: Mary is herself the vessel; the lily of the Cretan virgin goddess rises above the host bearing the divine son’s name (Neumann 1955, par. 95). The Gnostic krater receives what is to be transformed; Sophia becomes its personification.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• elementary-and-transformative-character
• coniunctio
• hierosgamos
• uroboros

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)