In its struggle against this Mother Goddess,
Erich Neumann
Woman’s fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse – or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood.
Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics.
Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness.
Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth.
However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics.
The basic phenomenon – that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases – is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it.
To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 272-273
Devaluation of the Earth, hostility towards the Earth, fear of the Earth: these are all from the psychological point of view the expression of a weak patriarchal consciousness that knows no other way to help itself than to withdraw violently from the fascinating and overwhelming domain of the Earthly.
For we know that the archetypal projection of the Masculine experiences, not without justice, the Earth as the unconscious-making, instinct-entangling, and therefore dangerous Feminine.
At the same time the projection of the masculine anima is mingled with the living image of the Earth archetype in the unconscious of man; and the more one-sidedly masculine man’s conscious mind is the more primitive, unreliable, and therefore dangerous his anima will be.
However, the Earth archetype, in compensation to the divinity of the archetype of Heaven and the Father, that determined the consciousness of medieval man, is fused together with the archaic image of the Mother Goddess.
Yet in its struggle against this Mother Goddess, the conscious mind, in its historical development, has had great difficulty in asserting itself so as to reach its – patriarchal – independence.
The insecurity of this conscious mind-and we have profound experience of how insecure the position of the conscious mind still is in modern man-is always bound up with fear of the unconscious, and no well-meaning theory “against fear” will be able to rid the world of this deeply rooted anxiety, which at different times has been projected on different objects.
Whether this anxiety expresses itself in a religious form as the medieval fear of demons or witches, or politically as the modern fear of war with the State beyond the Iron Curtain, in every case we are dealing with a projection, though at the same time the anxiety is justified.
In reality, our small ego-consciousness is justifiably afraid of the superior power of the collective forces, both without and within.
In the history of the development of the conscious mind, for reasons which we cannot pursue here, the archetype of the Masculine Heaven is connected positively with the conscious mind, and the collective powers that threaten and devour the conscious mind both from without and within, are regarded as Feminine.
A negative evaluation of the Earth archetype is therefore necessary and inevitable for a masculine, patriarchal conscious mind that is still weak.
But this validity only applies in relation to a specific type of conscious mind; it alters as the integration of the human personality advances, and the conscious mind is strengthened and extended.
A one-sided conscious mind, such as prevailed in the medieval patriarchal order, is certainly radical, even fanatical, but in a psychological sense it is by no means strong.
As a result of the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, the human personality becomes involved in an equally one-sided opposition to its own unconscious, so that actually a split occurs.
Even if, for example, the Masculine principle identifies itself with the world of Heaven, and projects the evil world of Earth outwards on the alien Feminine principle, both worlds are still parts of the personality, and the repressing masculine spiritual world of Heaven and of the values of the conscious mind is continually undermined and threatened by the repressed but constantly attacking opposite side.
That is why the religious fanaticism of the representatives of the patriarchal World of Heaven reached its climax in the Inquisition and the witch trials, at the very moment when the influence of the archetype of Heaven, which had ruled the Middle Ages and the previous period, began to wane, and the opposite image of the Feminine Earth archetype began to emerge. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 171-173
The archetypal image of the redeemer serpent is certainly placed here in opposition to the serpents of evil that battle with it.
But why do they both have the same form if there is only oppositIOn between them?
What does it mean that they both dwell in the same place, the depth of the great abyss?
Are they not possibly two aspects of the same thing?
We know this image of the redeemer serpent not only from Gnosis and from the Sabbataian myth, but we know of the same serpent rising from below, redeeming and to be redeemed, as the Kundalini serpent in India, and finally from alchemy as the serpens Mercurii, the ambiguous serpent whose significance was first made clear to us by Jung’s researches.
Since Jung’s work on alchemy we know two things.
The first is that in its “magnum opus” alchemy dealt with a redemption of matter itself.
The second is that pari passu with this redemption of matter, a redemption of the individual psyche was not only unconsciously carried out but was also consciously intended.
As we know, the serpent is a primeval symbol of the Spirit, as primeval and ambiguous as the Spirit itself.
The emergence of the Earth archetype of the Great Mother brings with it the emergence of her companion, the Great Serpent.
And, strangely enough, it seems as though modern man is confronted with a curious task, a task which is essentially connected with what mankind, rightly or wrongly, has feared most, namely the Devil. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page
The orientation of the meaning of the whole has been lost to such an extent that today it is already al most forbidden to pose the problem of meaning at all; it is the question.
There is no religion and no philosophy that can give us a comprehensive answer to the whole of our problems, and the abandonment and isolation of the individual who is given no answer, or only inadequate answers, to his question lead to a situation in which more and more cheap, obvious solutions and answers are sought and provided.
As, everywhere and in all departments of life, there are contradictory schools and parties, and an equal number of contradictory answers, one of the most frequent reactions is that modern man ceases to ask questions and takes refuge in a conception that considers only the most obvious, superficial aspects, and becomes skeptical, nihilistic, and egocentric.
Or, alternatively, he tries to solve all his problems by plunging headlong into a collective situation and a collective conviction, and seeks to redeem himself in this way. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 184-185
On the lowest level, this loss of soul turns the man into the hen-pecked husband who lives with his wife as though she were his mother upon whom he is solely dependent in all things having to do with emotions and the inner life.
But even the relatively positive case where the woman is the mistress of the inner domain and mother of the home who simultaneously has the responsibility for dealing with all the man’s questions and problems having to do with emotions and the inner life, even this leads to a lack of emotional vitality and sterile one-sidedness in the man. He discharges only the “outer” and “rational” affairs of life, profession, politics, etc.
Owing to his loss of soul, the world he has shaped becomes a patriarchal world that, in its soullessness, presents an unprecedented danger for humanity.
In this context we cannot delve further into the significance of a full development of the archetypal feminine potential for a new, future society. ― Erich Neumann, Fear of the Feminine Page 184-185
As the Great Creatrix, the feminine is no vessel and passage for an alien, masculine Other that condescends towards her, enters into her, and favors her with the seed of living.
Life originates in her and issues from her, and the light that appears projected on the night sky, which she is herself, is rooted in her depths.
For she is not only the protomantis, the first and great Prophetess, but also she who gives birth to the Spirit-Light, which, like consciousness and the illumination that arises in transformation, is rooted in her creative efficacy.
She is the creative Earth, which not only brings forth and swallows life, but as that which transforms also lets the dead thing be resurrected and leads the lower to the higher.
All developments and transformations that lead from the simple and insignificant through all gradations of life to the complicated and intricately differentiated fall under her sovereignty.
This matriarchal world is geocentric; the stars and signs of the zodiac are the heavenly girdle of the Earth Goddess and are arranged around her as the true center around which everything revolves. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 204
While the Eternal Feminine in Faust II still appears in personalized form as the Madonna, she works her effects in The Magic Flute as an invisible spiritual power, as music.
But this music is the expression of divine love itself, which unites law and freedom, above and below, in the wisdom of the heart and of love.
As harmony, it grants humankind divine peace and rules the world as the highest divinity.
From the earliest times, magic and music have stood under the rule of the Archetypal Feminine, which in myth and fairy tale is also the mistress of transformation, intoxication, and enchanting sound.
Thus it is quite understandable that it is precisely this feminine principle that bestows the magical instruments.
The Orpheus motif of the magical taming of the animal energies through music belongs to her, for as mistress of the animals the Great Goddess rules the world of wild as well as tame creatures.
She can transform things and people into animal form, tame the animal, and enchant it because, like music, she is able to make the tame wild and the wild tame with the power of her magic.
In contrast to Sarastro’s patriarchally colored imago of her, in which the Queen of the Night simply represents the feminine as thenegative, an essentially positive group of qualities of Queen and Goddess of the Night has asserted itself in both text and action in The Magic Flute. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 157-158
However, the natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us.
The psyche certainly does not use an “object” of nature as a “symbol,” but rather the experience of an “object” itself is always already symbolic experience.
The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience.
For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this.
That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit.
We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 212-213
The result of this one-sided patriarchal stance, demonstrable in all areas of life, is an un integrated man who is attacked by his repressed side and often enough overwhelmed by it.
This transpires not only in the fate of the individual man as seduction by a “lower” anima, but equally through seduction by a compensatory ideology, for example materialism, to which “spirit” men are especially susceptible.
The man wants to remain exclusively masculine and out of fear rejects the transformative contact with a woman of equal status.
Negativizing the Feminine in the patriarchate prevents the man from experiencing woman as a thou of equal but different status, and hence from coming to terms with her.
The consequence of the patriarchal male’s haughtiness toward women leads to the inability to make any genuine contact with the Feminine, i.e., not only in a real woman but also with the Feminine in himself, the unconscious.
Whenever an integral relationship to the Feminine remains undeveloped, however, this means that, due to his fear, the male is unable to break through to his own wholeness that also embraces the Feminine.
Thus the patriarchal culture’s separation from the Feminine and from the unconscious becomes one of the essential causes for the crisis of fear in which the patriarchal world now finds itself. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 264-265
If we are enveloped in images, we are also enveloped in forms, in spirit, which is nature, and in nature, which is spirit.
Daily and continually we associate with this unified world of nature and spirit without knowing it.
But only the person to whom this association has become clear understands what is meant when we talk of Sophia as a heightened and spiritualized earth. But this formulation is already distorted as well.
The earth has not changed at all, it is neither heightened and spiritualized: it remains what is always was.
Only the person who experiences this Earth Spirit has transformed himself, he alone is changed by it and has, perhaps, been heightened and spiritualized.
However, he too remains what he always was and has only become, along with the earth, more transparent to himself in his own total reality.
Here also we must differentiate between the reality of our total existence and the differentiating formulations of our consciousness.
Certainly, our consciousness makes the attempt to separate a spiritual from a natural world and to set them in opposition, but this mythical division and opposition of heaven and earth proves more and more impracticable.
If, in the process of integration, consciousness allies itself with the contents of the unconscious and the mutual interpenetration of both systems leads to a transformation of the personality, a return to the primordial symbolism of the myth ensues.
Above and below, heaven and earth, spirit and nature, are experienced again as coniunctio, and the calabash that contains them is the totality of reality itself. ― Erich Neumann, Fear of the Feminine, Page 215-216
Assimilation of the feminine side is indeed a decisive problem in a man’s individuation, but it remains his “private affair” since our patriarchal culture not only does not demand individuation but tends actually to reject it in the male.
Assimilation of the archetypally masculine animus side of woman’s nature, however, is a different matter.
In modern times patriarchal culture, which no longer oppresses her and hinders her cultural participation, motivates woman to develop the opposite side of her psyche from childhood onwards. This means that women are forced into a certain degree of Self-estrangement for the sake of conscious development. Initially more is demanded of them than of men. From woman both femininity and masculinity are required, while from him only masculinity.
We are speaking here of one of the complications but also one of the opportunities inherent in woman’s situation for our culture that has led to there being such a high percentage of women involved in the development of modern psychology, actively through their collaboration and passively through their conflicts. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 55
A crisis of this sort, even if it is to take place within a marriage, must involve both partners because, for a woman, a change in the relationship between man and woman also always presupposes a corresponding transformation of her male partner.
An extremely common cause of marital conflicts and divorces lies in the fact that the development toward a new phase of relationship, vitally necessary for one partner, is tragically doomed to failure owing to the other partner’s lack of understanding or inability to participate in the development. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 51
Thus the hero’s rescue of the captive corresponds to the discovery of a psychic world.
This world is already of vast extent as the world of Eros, embracing everything that man has ever done for woman, everything that he has xperienced and created for her sake.
The world of art, of epic deeds, poesy, and song which revolves round the liberated captive spreads out like a virgin continent that has broken away from the world of the First Parents.
Great tracts of human culture, and not of art alone, spring from this interplay and counterplay of the sexes, or rather, of masculine and feminine.
But the symbolism associated with the rescue of the captive goes even further.
For, with the liberation of the captive, a portion of the alien, hostile, feminine world of the unconscious enters into friendly alliance with the man’s personality, if not actually with his consciousness.
Personality is built up largely by acts of introjection: contents that were before experienced outside are taken inside. Such “external objects,” as well as being contents of the objective world without, i.e., things and persons, can also be contents of the psychic world of objects within.
In this sense the liberation of the captive and the dismemberment of the dragon mean not merely an “analysis” of the unconscious, but its assimilation, resulting in the formation of the anima as one authority within the personality. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 205
The form of representation peculiar to the unconscious is not that of the conscious mind.
It neither attempts nor is able to seize hold of and define its objects in a series of discursive explanations, and reduce them to clarity by logical analysis.
The way of the unconscious is different. Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted.
The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides.
Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning.
Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express.
The symbolic story of the beginning, which speaks to us from the mythology of all ages, is the attempt made by man’s childlike, prescientific consciousness to master problems and enigmas which are mostly beyond the grasp of even our developed modern consciousness.
If our consciousness, with epistemological resignation, is constrained to regard the question of the beginning as unanswerable and therefore unscientific, it may be right; but the psyche, which can neither be taught nor led astray by the self-criticism of the conscious mind, always poses this question afresh as one that is essential to it. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 7
In these circumstances the disoriented, rationalistic consciousness of modern man, having become atomized and split off from the unconscious, gives up the fight because, understandably enough, his isolation in a mass which no longer offers him any psychic support becomes unendurable.
For him the hero’s task is too difficult, the task he ought to perform by following in the footsteps of humanity before him.
The fabric of the archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way, and real heroes capable of taking up the struggle for new values are naturally few and far between.
The renegade ego of modem man therefore succumbs to a reactionary mass-mindedness and falls victim to the collective shadow, to the mass man within.
Whereas in a homogeneous psyche the negative element has a meaningful place as decomposition and death, as chaos and prima materia as the leaden counterweight which roots growing things to the earth, in a fragmented psyche with a defeatist, regressing ego it becomes a cancer and a nihilistic danger.
With the disintegration of ego consciousness all the positions built up in the course of human development are regressively destroyed, as in psychosis. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 439-440
The patriarchal father-son relationship ousted the once dominant mother figure, Isis, in the religious, psychological, social, and political spheres.
Vestiges of the original matriarchal rule still remained, but in historical times they were already overshadowed by the father-king.
The investiture and enthronement of the son are based on the resurrection of Osiris and the defeat of his enemies. Horus’ struggle with the principle of evil -Set-is, in a sense, the prototype of “God’s holy war” which each of his sons has to wage.
With this, the ring closes and we come back to the hero myth and the dragon fight.
Only, we must read the Osiris myth in such a way as to include Horus, the hero, as part of Osiris.
We have seen that certain elements of the hero myth belong essentially together.
The hero is an ego hero; that is, he represents the struggles of consciousness and the ego against the unconscious.
The masculinization and strengthening of the ego, apparent in the hero’s martial deeds, enable him to overcome his fear of the dragon and give him courage to face the Terrible Mother-Isis-and her henchman Set.
The hero is the higher man, the “erected phallus,” whose potency is expressed in head, eye, and sun symbols.
His fight bears witness to his kinship with “heaven” and to his divine parentage, and sets up a dual relationship: on the one hand he needs the support of heaven in fighting the dragon, and, on the other, he has to fight it in order to prove himself worthy of such support.
As one regenerated through the fight, the hero is ritually identical with the father-god, and is his incarnation.
The reborn son is child of the divine father, father of himself, and, by fathering the rebirth of the father in himself, he also becomes his father’s father.
Thus all the essential elements of the hero myth are to be found in the myth of Horus and Osiris.
There is only one qualification, and that has to do with the patriarchal conquest of the Terrible Mother.
The myth contains traces of the terrible Isis, But the fact that Horus beheads her and commits incest with her in the Memphis festivities is clear proof that she has been overcome.
In general, however, her negative role is taken over by Set, and Isis becomes the “good mother.” ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 251-252
In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.
The fact that he is preconscious and preindividual leads him to experience and react to the world in a way that is more collective than individual, and more mythological than rational.
A mythological apperception of the world and an archetypal, instinctive mode of reaction are accordingly characteristic of the dawn man.
The collective and the group members do not experience the world objectively, but mythologically, in archetypal images and symbols; and their reaction to it is archetypal, instinctive, and unconscious, not individual and conscious.
The unconscious reactions of group members when contained in their group invariably lead to the hypostatization of a group soul, a collective consciousness, or some such thing.
This is justifiable enough, if we begin with the experience of the part who perceives the whole as a totality; in fact, we still speak of the nation, the people, etc., in exactly the same way.
And although this “nation” is an hypostasis, it is psychologically true and necessary to make such an hypostasis.
For, as an effective whole, the nation is psychologically something more and other than the sum of its parts, and is always experienced as such by each part of the group.
The more unconscious the whole of a man’s personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.
The ego germ and the group self are directly related, just as, conversely, individualization, ego development, and finally self-experience through individuation bring about the withdrawal of this projection.
The more unindividualized people are, the stronger the projection of the self upon the group, and the stronger, too, the unconscious participations of group members among themselves.
But, as the group becomes more individualized and the significance of the ego and of the individual increases, the more these interhuman relations must be made conscious and the unconscious participations broken down.
In the uroboric situation, however, the ego is still germinal and consciousness hasnot yet developed into a system. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 274-275
When we plunge back into the world of dreams, our ego and our consciousness, being late products of human development, are broken down again.
In our dreams we inhabit an interior world without being aware that we do so, for all the figures in the dream are the images, symbols, and projections of interior processes.
Similarly the world of the dawn man is very largely an interior world experienced outside himself, a condition in which inside and outside are not discriminated from one another.
The feeling of oneness with the universe, the ability of all contents to change shape and place, in accordance with the laws of similarity and symbolic affinity, the symbolic character of the world, and the symbolic meaning of all spatial dimensions -high and low, left and right, etc.-the significance of colors, and so forth, all this the world of dreams shares with the dawn period of mankind.
Here as there, spiritual things take on “material” form, becoming symbols and objects.
Light stands for illumination, clothes stand for personal qualities, and so on.
Dreams can only be understood in terms of the psychology of the dawn period, which, as our dreams show, is still very much alive in us today.
The phase in which the ego germ is contained in the unconscious, like the embryo in the womb, when the ego has not yet appeared as a conscious complex and there is no tension between the ego system and the unconscious, is the phase we have designated as uroboric and pleromatic.
Uroboric, because it is dominated by the symbol of the circular snake, standing for total nondifferentiation, everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything, depending on everything, and connecting with everything; pleromatic, because the ego germ still dwells in the pleroma, in the “fullness” of the unformed God, and, as consciousness unborn, slumbers in the primordial egg, in the bliss of paradise.
The later ego deems this pleromatic existence to be man’s first felicity, for at this stage there is no suffering; suffering only comes into the world with the advent of the ego and ego experience ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 276-277
Although consciousness is a product of the unconscious, it is a product of a very special sort,
All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves.
Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido.
We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where “the work” absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself.
We find the same process in normal life, too, when an idea-love, work, patriotism, or whatever else-comes to the top and asserts itself at the cost of others.
One-sidedness, fixation, exclusiveness, etc., are the consequences of this tendency of all complexes to make themselves the center.
The peculiarity of the ego complex, however, is twofold; unlike all other complexes it tends to aggregate as the center of consciousness and to group the other conscious contents about itself; and secondly, it is oriented towards wholeness far more than any other complex.
Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and more the representative of wholeness.
That is to say, the ego fights against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence in relation to both inside and outside. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 298
Among primitives, and wherever the conditions are primitive, the conflict between individual consciousness and the collective tendencies of the unconscious is resolved in favor of the collective and at the cost of the individual.
In contrast with this, however, the development of consciousness also serves the interests of the individual.
While the ego is coming to terms with the unconscious, more and more attempts are made to protect the personality, to consolidate the conscious system, and to dam up the danger of inundation and invasion from the unconscious side.
Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.
For this reason there is sound sense in the tendency to separate the reaction from the perceptual image which releases it and to break down the original reflex arc until the material and the dynamic components of the collective unconscious are finally segregated.
If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious.
Consciousness with all its four functions, introverted as well as extraverted, is the cognitive organ par excellence, and its differentiation and that of the functions is possible only when the emotional components of the unconscious are excluded.
The sure aim of the differentiated function is continually being obscured by the intrusion of emotional components. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 333-334
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
This category of Great Individuals serves as a model for the development of individuality in humankind generally.
The individual fate of the hero-and the creative Great Individual is indeed a hero-may be the exception, but he is also the exemplar of a process which subsequently affects all individuals in varying degree.
The average ego, the average individual, remains fixed in the group, although in the course of development he is compelled to give up the original security of the unconscious, to evolve a conscious system, and to take upon himself all the complications and sufferings which such development entails.
For the primary security of the unconscious he exchanges the secondary security of the group.
He becomes a group member, and the average man spends at least half his life-the essential part of his development- adapting to the group and allowing himself to be molded by collective trends.
The role played by the collective in the human culture is decisive.
Society, with its conscious postulates, sets up an authority, a spiritual tradition which, spoken or unspoken, forms the background of education, The individual is molded by the collective through its ethos, its customs, laws, morality, its ritual and religion, its institutions and collective undertakings.
When one considers the original submergence of the individual in the collective, one sees why all collective orientations are so binding and are accepted without question. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 426-427
The fact that fear is a symptom of centroversion, an alarm signal sent out to warn the ego, can be seen most clearly from the fear of regressing to an older ego form which would destroy the new, and with it the new system of ego consciousness.
The “self-preservative tendency” of a system determines its pleasurepain reaction.” The pleasurable qualities associated with the previous ego phase, once that system is outgrown, become painful for the ego of the next phase.
Thus uroboric incest is pleasurable only for the feeble ego nucleus still embedded in the uroboros.
But as the ego grows stronger, uroboric pleasure becomes uroboric fear of the Great Mother, since this pleasure harbors the danger of regression and matriarchal castration which would mean its extinction.
The conquest of fear is therefore the essential characteristic of the ego-hero who dares the evolutionary leap to the next stage and does not, like the average man who clings to the conservatism of the existing system, remain the inveterate enemy of the new.
Herein lies the real revolutionary quality of the hero. He alone, by overcoming the old phase, succeeds in casting out fear and changing it into joy. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 311-312
The Great Mother is a virgin, too, in a sense other than that intended by the patriarchate, which later misunderstood her as the symbol of chastity.
Precisely in virtue of her fruitfulness, she is a virgin, that is, unrelated and not dependent upon any man.
la In Sanskrit, “independent woman” is a synonym for a harlot. Hence the woman who is unattached to a man is not only a universal feminine type but a sacral type in antiquity.
The Amazon is unattached in her independence, but so is the woman who represents and is responsible for the fertility of the earth.
She is the mother of all that has been born or will be born; but only in a brief access of passion, if at all, does she burn for the male, who is simply a means to an end, the bearer of the phallus.
All phallus cults-and they are invariably solemnized by women-harp on the same thing: the anonymous power of the fertilizing agent, the phallus that stands by itself.
The human element, the individual, is merely the bearer-the passing and interchangeable bearer-of that which does not pass away and cannot be interchanged because it is ever the self-same phallus.
Accordingly, the fertility goddess is both mother and virgin, the hetaera who belongs to no man but is ready to give herself to any man.
She is there for anybody who, like herself, stands in the service of fertility.
By turning to her womb, he serves her, the sacred representative of the great fertility principle.
The ‘%bridal veil” must be understood in this sense, as the symbol of kedesha, the harlot. She is “unknown,” i.e., anonymous.
To be “unveiled” means to be naked, but this is only another form of anonymity.
Always the goddess, the transpersonal, is the real and operative factor. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 52-53
The tests of masculinity and the proofs of ego stability, will power, bravery, knowledge of “heaven,” and so forth, which are demanded of the hero, have their historical equivalent in the rites of puberty.
Just as the problem of the First Parents isresolved in the dragon fight, and is in turn succeeded by the hero’s encounter with woman as his partner and his soul, so, through the initiation ceremony, the neophyte is detached from the parental sphere, and becomes a marriageable young man capable of founding a family.
But what happens in myth and in history also happens in the individual, and on the basis of the same archetypal determinism.
The central feature of puberty psychology is the syndrome of the dragon fight.
Time and again the failure of the dragon fight, i.e., involvement in the problem of the First Parents, proves to be the central problem for neurotics during the first half of life and the cause of their inability to establish relations with a partner.
The personal aspects of this situation, a small part of which has been formulated psychoanalytically as the personalistic Oedipus complex, are merely surface aspects of the conflict with the First Parents, i.e., with the parental archetypes.
And in this process, not only the man, but, as will be shown elsewhere, the woman, too, has to “kill the parents” by overthrowing the tyranny of the parental archetypes.
Only by killing the First Parents can a way be found out of the conflict into personal life.
To get stuck in this conflict and to yield to its fascination is characteristic of a large group of neurotics, and also of a certain spiritual type of man whose limitations lie precisely in his failure to master the feminine psyche in his fight with the dragon. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 205
It is a known fact that the “functional” gods of religion eventually become functions of consciousness.
Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc.-of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood these things.
By means of ceremonial invocation, the ego activated the “help of the god” and thus conducted the flow of libido from the unconscious to the conscious system.
The progressive development of consciousness assimilates the functional gods, who go on living as qualities and capacities of the conscious individual who plows, harvests, hunts, and wages war as and when he pleases.
It is evident, however, that when the conscious manipulation is not successful, as in war, the war god continues to act as a functional god even today.
Just as a symbolic multiplicity of gods surrounds the primordial God, so, as consciousness develops, every archetype surrounds itself with its appropriate group of symbols.
The original unity breaks down into a solar system of archetypes and symbols grouped round a nuclear archetype, and the archetypal nexus of the collective unconscious comes forth from the darkness into the light.
Again, just as the digestive system decomposes food into its basic elements, so consciousness breaks up the great archetype into archetypal groups and symbols which can later be assimilated as split-off attributes and qualities by the perceptive and organizing powers of the conscious mind.
With progressive abstraction the symbols turn into attributes of varying importance. Thus the animal nature of the archetypal deity appears alongside him as his “companion animal.”
With further rationalization the “human” element-i.e., his propinquity to the ego comes so much to the fore that the god frequently fights against this animal, the animal side of himself the abstraction, or exhaustion of the symbol’s content by the assimilating conscious-ness, is carried still further, then the symbol turns into a quality.
For instance Mars, whose original meaning, like that of every god, was exceedingly complex, becomes the quality “martial.”
This fragmentation of the symbol group tends in the direction of rationalization.
The more complex a content is, the less it can be grasped and measured by consciousness, whose structure is so one-sided that it can attain to clarity only over a limited area.
In this respect consciousness is built analogously to the eye.
There is one spot where vision is sharpest, and larger areas can be perceived clearly only by continuous eye-movements.
In the same way, consciousness can only keep a small segment sharply in focus; consequently it has to break up a large content into partial aspects, experiencing them piecemeal, one after the other, and then learn to get a synoptic view of the whole terrain by comparison and abstraction. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 325-326
The original unity of the world and God is supposed to have been cleft asunder by some prehuman guilt, and the world born of this rupture must accordingly suffer punishment.
The same principle runs through Orphism and Pythagoreanism.
In the view of the Gnostics this feeling of privation became the driving force of the world process, though they introduced a highly paradoxical twist, the reasons for which cannot be analyzed more closely here.
On account of this complex feeling of loss, existence in the world meant being alone and cut off; man was utterly forsaken, abandoned to the alien element.
His original pleromatic home, from which was derived the part worthy of redemption, is clearly uroboric, although too much stress is laid on the spirit-pneuma aspect.
The fundamental dualistic conception, in Gnosticism, of a higher spiritual part and a tower material part presupposes the separation of the World Parents.
Despite that, the pleroma has the uroboric character of completeness,wholeness, undifferentiatedness, wisdom, primordiality, etc., except that here the uroboros has more of a masculine and paternal nature, with feminine Sophia features shining through, in contrast to the maternal uroboros where the transpicuous features are masculine.
Consequently, in Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.
How powerful these basic archetypal images of the psyche are can be seen from the cabala more clearly than from any other cultural phenomenon.
Judaism has always tried to eliminate the mythologizing tendency and the whole realm of the psyche in favor of consciousness and morality.
But in the esoteric doctrines of the cabala, which is the hidden, pulsing lifeblood of Judaism, a compensatory counter-movement persisted underground.
Not only does the cabala reveal a large number of archetypal dominants, but, through them, it has had an important effect on the development and history of Judaism. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 118-119
The ego will receive the reward of moral recognition by the collective to the exact extent to which it succeeds in identifying with the persona, the collectivized façade personality – the simple reason being that this façade personality is the visible sign of agreement with the values of the collective. ― Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Page 38
“by identifying his personal ego with the transpersonal in the shape of the collective values, the limited individual loses contact with his own limitations and becomes inhuman.” ― Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Page 43
I must quote from Dr. Faustus, with which the tragedy ends: “Often he talked of eternal grace, the poor man, and I don’t know if it will be enough. But an understanding heart, believe me, is enough for everything.
Let us understand these words correctly. They are not proud or arrogant; on the contrary they are desperately modest. We really do not know any longer whether grace is enough, precisely because we are as we are and are beginning to see ourselves as we are. But at a time of overwhelming crisis, the questionable nature of grace, or rather our knowledge that we are unworthy of grace, compels us to understand and love mankind, the fallible mankind that we ourselves are.
Behind this abysmal crisis, the archetype of the Eternal Feminine as earth and as Sophia would seem to be discernible; it is no accident that these words are spoken by Frau Schweigestill, the mother. That is to say, it is precisely in chaos, in hell, that the New makes its appearance. Did not Kwanyin descend into hell rather than spend her time with the serene music makers in heaven?” ― Erich Neumann, Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks
“…our aim has been to provide anyone who is seriously interested with an introduction to the world of the archetypes, and to make this introduction as simple as possible. For this reason we have included… a number of schemas, or diagrams, which as experience has shown, make things much easier for most people, though by no means for all.” ~Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, p.xii.
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