Johann Jakob Bachofen

Johann Jakob Bachofen was the Swiss classical philologist and jurist whose Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World, 1861) supplied Neumann’s archetypal reading of the feminine with its primary scholarly source (Neumann 1955, Liebscher foreword). Bachofen read the ancient world as governed by successive religious-juridical principles — the tellurian and chthonic feminine anterior to the uranian and Apollonian masculine — and accumulated a vast documentary apparatus of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian material to ground the claim.

Bachofen’s mature archaeology has not survived as ethnographic history; the skeptical studies of the 1960s established that “there is no evidence for ancient worship of the Great Mother goddess, and that it was to a great extent a creation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academics from Bachofen via Jung, Campbell, and Neumann to Gimbutas” (Liebscher foreword to Neumann 1955). But as psychology his work is load-bearing, and the instruction by which depth psychology appropriates him is Jung’s: “Bachofen is overall a treasure chest of psychological knowledge, if one understands him — his merits as an historian aside — as a modern researcher of the soul, something he himself was not aware of. For instance, as soon as you read the tellurian region as the unconscious and oppose it to the uranian region of consciousness, all of his findings — interpreted symbolically and not historically — gain a new and highly modern significance” (Jung, quoted in Liebscher foreword to Neumann 1955).

erich-neumann executes precisely this reading. The Great Mother (1955) is dedicated to Jung and is structurally Bachofen’s Mutterrecht transposed into the register of archetypal psychology. The contrast of matriarchal-consciousness and patriarchal consciousness, the elementary-and-transformative-character of the Feminine, and the phenomenology of the chthonic goddesses all take their documentary spine from Bachofen even where Neumann’s conclusions are reached by a different method.

Key concepts

Major works

Mutterrecht (1861) — not held directly in the library; attested only through Neumann’s and Jung’s citations