Within the depth-psychological corpus, ‘primordial’ designates not merely temporal anteriority but ontological priority — the condition of a stratum, image, force, or time prior to differentiation, form, and consciousness. Jung’s deployment of the term spans two registers: the structural (‘primordial image’ as the mythologically charged, collective variety of archetypal image) and the cosmogonic (the Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon, Anthropos, as the pre-individual totality from which individual psyche is excerpted). Neumann extends the cosmogonic sense into a matriarchal register, locating primordial darkness — the uroboric Great Mother — as the condition of possibility for all subsequent consciousness. Eliade approaches the primordial as sacred time (illud tempus), a mythological dimension that ritual repetition seeks to reactualize. Von Franz, reading across alchemy and mythology, finds the primordial persisting as an ‘other’ temporal dimension accessible only in altered psychic states. The Taoist I Ching tradition, via Liu I-ming, frames the primordial as the energetic and ontological ground distinguishable from the temporal through disciplined discernment. Tension runs throughout: is the primordial a recoverable origin or an irreducibly inaccessible ground? Is return to it liberation or regression? These questions animate the deepest disagreements among Neumann, Jung, and the comparativists, making ‘primordial’ one of the most semantically charged terms in the entire field.