Womb-Tomb Identity

At the negative pole of the elementary character, the vessel is at once womb and tomb. “The cave is a dwelling as well as a tomb; the vessel character of the Feminine” holds the dead as it holds the living (Neumann 1955, par. 21). The archetypal identification is exact: the chamber that bears and the chamber that buries are the same chamber. Cave, urn, coffin, ship, underworld, magic caldron — each is the Mother-Vessel in one of its phases.

The identification grounds the mythologem of the night-sea journey. Rebirth is possible, Neumann writes, only when what is to be transformed “dies in returning to the Mother Vessel, whether this be earth, water, underworld, urn, coffin, cave, mountain, ship, or magic caldron. Usually several of these containing symbols are combined; but all of them in turn are encompassed in the all-embracing psychic reality, the womb of night or of the unconscious” (Neumann 1955, par. 86). The labyrinth belongs here: its presiding personage, Layard observes in Neumann’s citation, “is always a woman,” and the way through it is “the descent of the male following the sun into the devouring underworld, into the deathly womb of the Terrible Mother” (Neumann 1955, par. 54).

The concept is load-bearing because it refuses the moral bifurcation of the Mother into Good and Terrible. The Good Mother who bears and the Terrible Mother who devours are the same Mother at two moments of a single process; the vessel that nourishes is the vessel that takes back. Sleep, incubation, healing dream, Asclepian serpent-cult, the descent into the dolmen — these are enactments of the womb-tomb identity, rehearsals of the death that is the condition of rebirth.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• vessel-symbolism
• devouring-mother
• chthonic-mother
• katabasis

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)