The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, by Erich Neumann
Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List
In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.
The Great Mother by Erich Neumann, is an exploration of the feminine archetype. It builds upon his earlier work, The Origins and History of Consciousness, by focusing in on one particular aspect of our journey through consciousness.
What really struck me is how deeply imbedded in our psychological evolution the concept of male/female is. That’s in part what makes new age concepts of gender being a social construct completely unrelated to underlying realities, so toxic. Once you hold that view, it makes the entire history of our psychological evolution, as read through our artifacts across all cultures, completely irrelevant and impossible to understand. It essentially rejects evolution.
In exploring the concept of the feminine archetype, it’d be helpful to first understand what archetype and feminine mean.
Archetype refers to a typical example of a person or thing. For this specific exploration it is a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. Or it could be said that the recurrent symbols are used to explore and define the archetype through its manifestations in human culture. To know what the human mind is made of, let’s see what it produces.
Feminine would be anything related to the spirit accompanying females as opposed to males. It encompasses whatever characteristics typically make us different. Within each human being is contained both the spirit of the masculine and the feminine, and each society is characterized the same way. The extent to which these are balanced can also differ within each individual and any society, and can change throughout time.
The feminine archetype will then be a typical example of the feminine spirit, here expressed as visions which have manifest in literature and art over thousands of years.
Archetypes can be large or small as in very specific or all encompassing. A small or specific archetype would be something akin to the typical American soccer mom. That might conjure up pictures in your mind of an active brunette unloading several kids from a minivan who likely has something to say at each PTA meeting. Or you may have a negative vision of a pushy lady speeding down the avenue with no regard for politeness. Archetypes can be positive or negative and can change based on each individual experience.
As we pull back from small, specific archetypes, they become more and more all encompassing. That’s what The Great Mother attempts to describe. Neumann conducts an archeological dig through the expressions of humanity to find the empirical evidence of this idea.
This mental dig sifts through art, literature, and culture examining the products of our ancestors as a means to place the evolution of this archetype along a timeline while describing what it represents. Imagine that the human mind is grasping to understand and explain something. You can then look at the products of humanity, gather them into a large pile, and use them as evidence of our nature. These beings created these items which are a reflection of their mind, so what does this tell us about their minds? Its expressions through art, literature and speech are evidence that is gathered in order to put together a map of its understanding of the world.
If you’re familiar with Neumann’s previous work on the development of consciousness, you’ll understand that consciousness is a product, in part, of identifying the self in relation to all other humans. Once humanity is self-aware, each human seeks to know who they are. To understand the self, we compare ourselves to each other. This starts a process of identification and differentiation, which requires categories. The first archetypal category Neumann describes in this process is The Great Mother.
Now there is something preceeding The Great Mother — the uroboros — but that is a description of everything in the world and not a category because it encompasses everything and there is no differentiation. I imagine taking every piece of material and non-material reality, putting it in a blender, and pureeing it until you have a sea of liquid darkness.
The uroboros is a symbol of the whole universe that contains that darkness. It’s most commonly expressed as a circle, often as a snake eating its own tail. The first thing in human consciousness to be expressed and described within the uroboros is The Great Mother.
In The Origins of History and Consciousness, Neumann describes humanity’s experience of this departure from the uroboros into self-consciousness as being a tiny speck of light floating in a sea of darkness. The only difference is the awareness of the self existing within that sea.
There isn’t any orienting principle. We don’t know if we’re coming or going. All that’s known is our existence.
Life and death come and go just as naturally as day and night. The thing from which our consciousness is born, this dark tumultuous sea is The Great Mother. She is both life and death, good and evil. She is from where we come in birth and where we go in death. She nurtures us and deprives us just the same. All positive and negative aspects at once exist within her.
It’s helpful to imagine yourself being an ancient human being. You don’t understand the process by which new life occurs. All you know is that womens’ midsections slowly expand and eventually a tiny human being comes out. From the feminine unknown springs new life. A new life that is unaware of its surroundings and unaware that it is a unique being amongst others.
This is exactly why the unknown from which all life is created is feminine. We took what we knew and applied it to what we were seeking to understand and explain. That tiny little speck of consciousness floating in a dark, tumultuous sea of whatever that was our minds is now looking back at the feminine unknown from which it came.
And now the orientation process starts. Where are you? Who are you? You start to notice the world around you now that you realize that you exist.
This process of evolution repeats itself with every birth, even today. The Great Mother archetype is what an infant sees in its mother. She is all nourishing and the child is of her, and completely dependent on her. She is not simply the objective human being in the home. The infant has no language to conceptualize anything. It doesn’t even understand that it exists outside of the mother.
You can see this when infants feel pain. They don’t grab at, or in any way refer to the area that hurts. They just cry and parents scramble to figure out what’s wrong. They have no concept of their body to refer to so they just feel generalized pain and discomfort. This is akin to the stage in the evolution of consciousness Neumann describes as humans start to pull away from that inability to differentiate themselves from their environment and slowly become aware of themselves. They then seek to describe the sea of darkness they are floating in. We’re staring back at our Great Mother and expressing our visions of her with art.
This is why the feminine is associated with the unconscious and chaos.
The unconscious is a dark unknown, full of potential. Much like a womb. It’s like the darkness of sleep we fall into every night that is still accompanied by unconsciousness. The chaotic element is not necessarily negative, but simply undefined. It is the opposite of order which is known and strictly defined in its place. This is the basis for understanding the difference between the masculine and the feminine. It’s the difference between chaos and order.
Often people will assume one is negative and the other positive, usually bothered by the idea that the feminine is associated with chaos. But there are two important things to remember here.
First thing is that masculine and feminine are not the same as male and female. They are descriptions of the spirits associated with male and female but all humans have both the masculine and feminine within them. Secondly, chaos is chaotic because it is unknown and undefined, but it is also pure potential and the creator of all new things, including new life. All ordered things come from it. Both the masculine and feminine have their own positive and negative aspects.
Now let’s look at some practical examples of these expressions.
“When the unconscious content is perceived, it confronts consciousness in the symbolic form of an image.” — This is the process by which the visions manifest as art. Our unconscious minds produce a vision and our conscious minds perceive it and can create a material version of that vision.
To understand these expressions, a template might help. Early man expressed the feminine as: Woman = body = vessel = world
You can see that in the center of the preceding schema. All concepts, all ideas, from the depths of hell to the heavens are all rooted in and come from a vessel that simultaneously produces and contains them. The difference between now and then - ancient man pre-consciousness and post consciousness - is that all of these items have always existed, but they started out all contained within that one central vessel. Consciousness gives us an ability to reflect on the world, define and differentiate it into all of its constituent parts as we see here. Progress is the process of defining and differentiating. The more we do so, the more we understand the world and can manipulate it for human flourishing.
Genesis does the same thing. It starts with a great unknown, a sea of darkness, and from that comes the separation of opposites. The world is defined and differentiated into light and dark, day and night, male and female, and so on. It describes the birth of consciousness with literature just as our ancestors have with art.
You can see the image of the vessel from the schema represented in several early sculptures that represent The Great Mother.
Obvious are the similarities with the curve of the vessel and the curve of the feminine hips, and exaggeration of their breasts which nourish that new life. They are all the woman, body, vessel and world.
The Greeks had a saying that the first vessel, or bowl, was a woman’s breast. You can see that represented here in real terms with a Greek mastos, which is a vessel for drinking in the shape of a breast. It contains undifferentiated liquid that nourishes life.
One of the great concepts I took away from this exploration is that the images are consistent throughout the world. This means that there is a process of psychological evolution we all share. Those images from the unconscious of so many people in so many times throughout the world are so similar in meaning because they all come from the same place. This is a great example of what Jung refers to as the collective unconscious. Because we all have common ancestors, those ancestors shared with each other, and now with us, a common origin which is stored in the very structure of our minds.
Neumann starts with this first exploration and then differentiates into its positive and negative elements as our cultural expressions become more and more defined and differentiated. He then concludes with The Spiritual Transformation.
It’s much like the picture of an ape walking on all fours and the subsequent pictures leading up to homo sapiens walking completely upright. But instead of physical evolution, it’s psychological evolution through the lens of what our minds have produced over thousands of years.
I hope this short introduction can help you decide if it’s something you too would like to read. If you have read it, let me know what you thought and what kind of ideas it sparked for you.