Neumann is describing a transformation that never leaves the body — and that refusal is the point, not a defect. The matriarchal mysteries do not resolve toward spirit; they do not sublimate in the sense of escaping. The quintessence is still matter, still feminine, still earth-bound. Whatever gets refined stays inside the sphere that refined it.

This cuts directly against the inherited assumption that transformation means ascent. Most of what gets called spiritual development is a project of leaving: leaving symptoms behind, leaving grief behind, leaving the body's heaviness behind for something cleaner and more luminous. That project is old and genuinely effective, which is precisely why it does not notice what it abandons. The matriarchal mysteries noticed. They named a kind of change that keeps faith with what is being changed — where sublimation does not mean departure, where the quintessence is not a distillate freed from its source but the source made more fully itself.

The question this opens is whether you can tolerate transformation that does not take you anywhere higher. Whether the refinement happening inside the body, inside matter, inside what is still recognizably the same suffering — whether that registers as change at all, or only as more of the same weight.