Great Round

this aimless cycle is a form of the Great Round, whose positive form, in India as elsewhere, is the great containing World Mother who, like the Boeotian goddess, the Vierge Ouvrante, and the Madonna of Mercy, raises her outstretched arms shelteringly.

Neumann defines the Great Round as encompassing both the negative aimless cycle of samsara and the positive containing World Mother, establishing the archetype's constitutive ambivalence.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Our last representation of the Feminine in its character of Great Round is a bronze Etruscan lamp, in the center of which the Gorgon's head is surrounded by an intricate wreath of figures.

Neumann reads the Etruscan Gorgon lamp as a cosmological icon of the Great Round, with concentric circles of predation, lunar waters, and aerial fire radiating from the terrible face of the Great Mother.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the secret unity of attachment and loss, holding and losing, is wonderfully expressed in Rilke's poem appropriately titled 'Autumn'... He contents himself in that great round of attachment and loss, which seem disparate but are somehow aspects of the same thing.

Hollis invokes the great round as a unifying existential structure in which loss and attachment, far from being opposites, are aspects of a single encompassing cycle.

Hollis, James, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

The positive side of the Great Mother seems to be embodied in this stage of the uroboros. Only at a very much higher level will the 'good' Mother appear again... she reveals herself anew as Sophia, the 'gracious' Mother.

Neumann situates the positive Great Mother within the uroboric stage of pre-ego containment, tracing her reappearance at the individuated level as Sophia — a developmental arc framing the Great Round's transformative potential.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.

Edinger cites Black Elk to ground the circular archetype in lived indigenous experience, supporting the universality of the Great Round as a psychic structure underlying the sacred hoop.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the idea of a revolving wheel, platform, or castle is an essential feature... the Buddhist 'wheel of being,' this also has six spokes.

Campbell documents the revolving wheel as a cross-cultural symbol — Celtic, Buddhist, and Grail — that shares structural kinship with Neumann's Great Round as a cosmological container of cyclic existence.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

from time immemorial mankind has projected one part of the archetypal 'inner' world into 'heaven,' and another part into 'hell.' But despite these projections the characteristic relatedness to the image of the body-vessel 'in' which the content lives is clearly preserved.

Neumann grounds the Great Round's vessel symbolism in the universal body-container image, establishing the psychic basis from which the cosmic feminine circle emerges.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the Terrible Devouring Mother, whose psychic attraction is so great because of its energetic charge that the charge of the ego complex, unable to withstand it, 'sinks' and is 'swallowed up.'

Neumann's description of the devouring Mother's gravitational pull on the ego contextualizes the negative pole of the Great Round as an archaic regressive force against which heroic consciousness must struggle.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the world of the spirit as something born, as a product of creative nature itself, has its most abstract symbol in the form that leads from mouth to breath, and from breath to word, the logos.

Neumann traces the transformative symbolism radiating outward from the Great Round's vessel-body matrix into alchemical, spiritual, and logocentric forms.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →