The Primordial Child stands at the intersection of mythological scholarship and depth-psychological theory, functioning in the corpus simultaneously as a cross-cultural mythologem, an archetypal structure of the collective unconscious, and a symbol of psychic wholeness. Kerényi’s contribution to the Jung–Kerényi collaboration establishes the figure comparatively — tracing it through Orphic cosmogony, Vedic Narayana, Finnish Kalevala, and the Greek divine youths (Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus, Zeus) — insisting on its ‘timeless quality’ rather than chronological priority. Jung’s psychological reading reframes this mythological universality as evidence for the child-archetype as a structural element of the psyche: the Primordial Child symbolises both the pre-conscious origins and the post-conscious anticipation of the self, making it simultaneously ‘beginning and end.’ A central tension runs through the corpus between Kerényi’s anti-biographical stance — the Primordial Child never ‘becomes’ anything but coexists eternally alongside the divine youth — and Neumann’s evolutionary, stadial reading, which situates the child-stage as a transitional moment between uroboros and emerging ego-consciousness. The hermaphroditic nature of the Primordial Child further complicates straightforward identification, linking it to Dionysian androgyny and the coniunctio. Hillman extends the figure into clinical phenomenology through the puer, resisting reduction to a mother complex. The term thus organises debates about archetype, time, mythology, and selfhood across the entire tradition.