Pottery occupies a remarkably layered position in the depth-psychology and comparative-mythology corpus. At its most fundamental it is read — most powerfully by Erich Neumann — as the material embodiment of the Great Mother archetype: the vessel, the belly, the containing womb translated into fired clay, a symbol so archaic and geographically pervasive that G. E. Smith's formulation, cited by Neumann, designates the 'Mother Pot' a fundamental conception in virtually all religions. Joseph Campbell treats pottery from a different but complementary angle: for him, the sudden appearance of fine, geometrically decorated ceramic wares at the high neolithic horizon (c. 5000–3500 B.C.) — particularly the Halaf, Samarra, and Obeid styles — constitutes a psycho-historical event demanding explanation. The ordered abstraction of painted vessel surfaces signals a new mode of consciousness coinciding with settled village life. Julian Jaynes adduces pottery stylistics as archaeological evidence for the migration and transformation of bicameral civilizations. Hesiod's epigrams, meanwhile, preserve the oldest literary witness to the potter's craft as a site of divine rivalry and cursing. The corpus thus holds pottery simultaneously as archetypal symbol, archaeological index of cognitive and cultural transformation, and ordinary craft liable to divine interference — a tension between the numinous container and the historical artifact that gives the term its interpretive richness.
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The Mother Pot is really a fundamental conception in all religions, and is almost world-wide in its distribution. The pot's identity with the Great Mother is deeply rooted in ancient belief through the greater part of the world.
Neumann, drawing on G. E. Smith and Briffault, argues that the pot is the primary material symbol of the Great Mother archetype, universally identifying the ceramic vessel with the divine womb and the goddess herself.
Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
the evidence of a new great leap ahead appears in the pottery, the finely fashioned, very beautiful painted pottery of the next phase: The high neolithic (c. 5000–3500 b. c.), when the elegant geometrically organized designs of the pottery styles of Halaf, Samarra, and Obeid appear.
Campbell identifies the emergence of highly decorated neolithic pottery as a pivotal psychological and cultural threshold, evidence of a new capacity for abstract, geometrically organized thought coinciding with settled village life.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
the pottery becomes suddenly — very suddenly — extraordinarily fine and beautifully decorated; showing, moreover, a totally new concept of ornamental art and of the organization of aesthetic forms, one such as had never before appeared in the history of the world.
Campbell frames the qualitative leap in high-neolithic pottery decoration as an unprecedented aesthetic-psychological event, marking the appearance of the first naked female figurines and a new organizing principle in human symbolic life.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
at Çatal Hüyük, circa 6500 b. c., ceramic wares suddenly appear, and, as the excavator, Dr. James Mellaart, observes: 'we can actually study the transition from an aceramic Neolithic with baskets and wooden vessels to a ceramic Neolithic with the first pottery.'
Campbell situates the invention of pottery at Çatal Hüyük as a datable historical threshold, associating the emergence of ceramic culture with the earliest known neolithic goddess figurines and a domestic skull cult.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
It is the sudden intrusion of brightly decorated polychrome pottery among the burnished monochrome pottery of the Cappadocian plateau in the archaelogical record dating about 2100 B.C. that is taken to be the indication of their arrival.
Jaynes employs the archaeological signature of polychrome pottery displacing monochrome wares as evidence for the Hittites' arrival and the transmission of bicameral civilization across cultural boundaries.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Derivation, by way of Iran, from the Mesopotamian mythogenetic zone is indicated by the painted pottery styles, but the level of civilization was considerably below that of the contemporary high neolithic and hieratic city states of Mesopotamia.
Campbell uses painted pottery styles as the primary material index for tracing the diffusion of Mesopotamian mythological culture into the pre-Harappan Indian subcontinent.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
two of the pottery shards discovered show that writing was now known — in two scripts that have not yet been deciphered. The evidence of the next stratum, though, is much more abundant: the level, namely, of the white pottery of the Shang Dynasty.
Campbell treats the distinctive white pottery of the Shang Dynasty as a stratigraphic and cultural marker enabling reconstruction of the early Chinese empire's continuities with Mesopotamian civilization.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Neumann cites Cushing's study of Pueblo pottery as evidence for the archetypal basis of the face-vessel identification — the rendering of the Mother Goddess's features in ceramic form — across geographically disparate cultures.
Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
let them make sad havoc of the pots and overthrow the kiln, and let the potters see the mischief and be grieved; but I will gloat as I behold their luck
Hesiod's kiln-curse epigram preserves the oldest literary treatment of pottery as a craft subject to divine destruction, framing the potter's vulnerability to supernatural interference within a context of professional rivalry and curse-magic.
Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting
Ion. χύτρη, Hell. also χύδρα [f.] 'earthen pot' with χύτρις … -εύς [m.] 'potter' … -ίζω (also κατα-, ἐν-, ἐκ-) [v.] 'to abandon a child (in a pot), to put into a pot (for burning)'
Beekes' etymological analysis of the Greek word-family for 'earthen pot' documents the range of social and ritual uses attached to ceramic vessels in antiquity, including infant exposure and burning — practices with direct bearing on depth-psychological discussions of vessel symbolism.
Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside
κρωσσός [m.] 'water pail, pitcher, salve bottle, cinerary urn' … Previously, Celtic and Germanic words for 'jar, pot' were compared, e.g. Mlr. crocem, OE crocca, OHG kruog
Beekes traces the Pre-Greek etymology of a term spanning the semantic range from water pail to cinerary urn, implicitly connecting the ceramic vessel with death ritual across Indo-European and pre-Indo-European linguistic strata.
Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside