Thus the terrible aspect of the Feminine always includes the uroboric snake woman, the woman with the phallus, the unity of childbearing and begetting, of life and death. The Gorgon is endowed with every male attribute: the snake, the tooth, the boar's tusks, the outthrust tongue, and sometimes even with a beard. In Greece the Gorgon as Artemis-Hecate is also the mistress of the night road, of fate, and of the world of the dead. As Enodia she is the (Fig. 40) guardian of crossroads and gates,55 and as Hecate she is the snake-entwined moon goddess of ghosts and the dead, surrounded, like Artemis, the wild goddess of the hunt, by a swarm of female demons. Her principal animal is the dog, the howler by night, the finder of tracks, which in Egypt, as in Greece or Mexico, is the companion of the dead. As mistress of the way down and of the lower way, she has for symbol the key, the phallic opening power of the male, the emblem of the Goddess, who is mistress of birth and conception. Thus, when she is angry, the Goddess, as Demeter or Ishtar, as Hathor or Hecate, can close the wombs of living creatures, and all life stands still. As Good Mother, she is mistress of the East Gate, the gate of (Pl. 79) birth; as Terrible Mother, she is mistress of the West Gate, the gate of death, the engulfing entrance to the underworld. Gate, door, gully, (Figs. 30-31) ravine, abyss are the symbols of the feminine earth-womb; they are the numinous places that mark the road into the mythical darkness of the underworld.56 In its negative aspect the cave, one of the earliest examples (Pl. 81) of feminine vessel symbolism, is hell and Hel, the Germanic goddess of the underworld. Characteristically, Hel is the sister of the uroboric Midgard serpent of the ocean that girds the earth, and also of the devouring Fenris-wolf;57 she is the gaping abyss that untiringly swallows up mortal men. In Christian myth the Devil is correlated with hell as the devouring maw of the earth; among the Aztecs he has his correspondence in Xiuhtecuhtli, the lord of fire, sitting at the center of the earth. In appearance the Christian Devil has much of the pagan Pan and satyrs about him; his early precursor is the Egyptian Set, enemy of the soul, adversary of Osiris and Horus. In the Book of the Dead, he appears in conjunction with the serpent Apopis as the masculine destroying aspect of the underworld. He is the slaughterer, the destroyer, the render in pieces, partner of the soul-devouring Am-mit. He is called "The fiend, red of hair and eyes, who cometh forth by night, and doth fetter the fiend in his lair."58 He is the evil one, the adversary, associated with red, which is not only the positive color of fertility but also the color of calamity, evil, blood, death, and the desert, where, thousands of years later, the Devil appeared to tempt the elect. Hell and the underworld as vessels of death are forms of the negative death-bringing belly-vessel, corresponding exactly to its life-bringing side. The opening of the vessel of doom is the womb, the gate, the gullet, which actively swallows, devours, rends, and kills. Its sucking power is mythologically symbolized by its lure and attraction for man, for life and consciousness and the individual male, who can evade it only if he is a hero, and even then not always. This is very aptly expressed in Germanic myth and its etymological correspondences. Old Norse gīna, 'yawn,' Old High German ginēn and geinōn, are related to ON. gin, 'gullet,' 'cleft'; Old English giwian, 'demand'; ON. gjā, 'cleft' and "voluptuous life'; OE. gipian, 'to yap,' and gīpen, "to gasp for air, to strive for something.'59 The yawning, avid character of the gullet and the cleft represents in mythological apperception the unity of the Feminine, which as avid womb attracts the male and kills the phallus within itself in order to achieve satisfaction and fecundation, and which as the earth-womb of the Great Goddess, as womb of death, attracts and draws in all living things, likewise for its own satisfaction and fecundation. Here the profoundest experience of life combines with human anxiety to form an archetypal unity. A male immature in his development, who experiences himself only as male and phallic,60 perceives the feminine as a castrator, a murderer of the phallus. The projection of his own masculine desire and, on a still deeper level, of his own trend toward uroboric incest, toward voluptuous self-dissolution in the primordial Feminine and Motherly, intensifies the terrible character of the Feminine. Thus the Terrible Goddess rules over desire and over the seduction that leads to sin and destruction; love and death are aspects of one and the same Goddess.
— Erich Neumann
Neumann is tracking something the soul knows before the mind catches up: that what draws and what destroys are not two forces but one. The Gorgon carries boar's tusks and a phallus not as paradox but as precision — the Feminine archetype is prior to the division between giving and taking, between gate and gullet, between the East Gate of birth and the West Gate of death. Hecate holds the key not despite being the mistress of the dead but because of it; the phallic opening power belongs to the one who presides over both entrances.
What the passage doesn't let you escape is the etymology. Old Norse *gīna*, to yawn — the gullet, the cleft, the voluptuous life, the gasp for air, the striving. The abyss doesn't wait; it attracts. The sucking power is also the lure, mythologically inseparable from it. Whatever in a man experiences the Feminine only as threat is, Neumann says, projecting his own inclination toward dissolution — the pull toward what he fears is a pull that already lives in him, re-encountered from outside. The Terrible Goddess rules over desire because desire already carries death in its etymology: *de-sidera*, from the stars, separated from what was already volatilized and lost. Love and death as aspects of one goddess is not a metaphor. It is a structural description of what longing actually is.
Erich Neumann·The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype·1955