From Bachofen’s Mutterrecht to Neumann’s Great Mother

The classical-philological precedent for Neumann’s Great Mother is J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1861), which read the myths and legal remnants of antiquity as evidence of an archaic matriarchal stratum of human culture. Neumann does not adopt Bachofen’s ethnography as historical fact. He takes the Mutterrecht hypothesis as an archetypal finding dressed in sociological clothes and reframes it psychologically.

Martin Liebscher’s 2015 foreword makes the lineage explicit: most archaeological scholars today agree that an ancient cult of the Goddess “was to a great extent a creation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academics from Bachofen via Jung, Campbell, and Neumann to Gimbutas” (Neumann 1955, par. 1). This is not a refutation of Neumann — it is the correct register for reading him. The matriarchy is psychological fact whether or not it is historical fact. The Great Mother is to be read “not as a contribution to a failed archaeological theory of an ancient cult of the Goddess, but as an exemplary study of archetypal psychology” (Neumann 1955, par. 1).

The thread is load-bearing for the way the Jungian tradition uses classical material generally: not as archaeology but as archetypal evidence — the myths tell us what the psyche is, not what Bronze Age Crete was.

Sources

• johann-jakob-bachofen: the matriarchal hypothesis, Mutterrecht (1861)
• erich-neumann: the psychological re-reading in The Great Mother (1955)
• carl-jung: the archetypal theory that licenses the re-reading