The Great Mother is uroboric: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative
Let us take as an example the archetype of the Great Mother. It combines a bewildering variety of contradictory aspects.
If we regard these aspects as qualities of the Great Mother and list them as qualities of the archetype, that is itself the result of the process we are describing.
A developed consciousness can recognize these qualities, but originally the archetype acted upon the ego en masse, in all the undifferentiated profusion of its paradoxical nature.
This is the chief reason why the ego is overwhelmed, and consciousness disoriented, by the archetype, whose emergence from the depths is always new, different, unexpected, and terrifyingly vivid.
Thus the Great Mother is uroboric: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young.
This original bivalence of the archetype with its juxtaposed opposites is tom asunder when consciousness separates the World Parents.
To the left, there is ranged a negative series of symbols-Deadly Mother, Great Whore of Babylon, Witch, Dragon, Moloch; to the right, a positive series in which we find the Good Mother who, as Sophia or Virgin, brings forth and nourishes, and leads the way to rebirth and salvation. Here Lilith, there Mary; here the toad, there the goddess; here a morass of blood, there the Eternal Feminine.― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 322
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