The Great Mother as Archetypal Method

Martin Liebscher’s 2015 foreword to the Princeton Classics edition makes the methodological case the book needs a half-century after its publication: The Great Mother is not a work of comparative archaeology but a work of archetypal psychology, and its survival depends on being read as such. “The 1960s saw a rise of skeptical studies by archaeologists who questioned the existence of an ancient Great Mother cult. Though there was a brief revival of the theory when Maria Gimbutas’s The Language of the Goddess came out in 1989, most archaeological scholars today agree 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” (Neumann 1955, par. 1).

Liebscher’s reframing is decisive: “It is therefore important today to read Neumann’s study 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 book’s phenomenological claim is independent of its historical claim. The iconographic continuities Neumann traces — vessel, cave, labyrinth, grail, retort — are not evidence for a lost cult but evidence for a persistent archetypal structure legible wherever human beings have made images of the feminine.

The thread matters for how the Lineage reads other first-generation Jungian monographs. esther-harding‘s Woman’s Mysteries and joseph-campbell‘s treatments of the Goddess share the same methodological vulnerability and the same psychological durability. The move Liebscher performs on Neumann is the move any honest reading of the first-generation literature now requires.

Sources

• erich-neumann (1955, par. 1): the book itself as structural phenomenology, not archaeology
• johann-jakob-bachofen (1861): the classical-philological precedent Neumann reframes psychologically
• Liebscher, M. (2015 foreword in Neumann 1955, par. 1): “an exemplary study of archetypal psychology”