The Great Mother
"The Great Mother as a primordial image of
the human psyche. In his landmark book The Great Mother -
An Analysis of the Archetype, Erich
Neumann draws on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and
fantasies to examine how this archetype has been outwardly expressed in
many cultures and periods since prehistory. He shows how the feminine
has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun,
vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a
universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an
experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness,
symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized
by the Great Mother." The Book of Symbols
" She is the force that drives creation and destruction, fecundity but also the barren womb. The Great Mother is Mother Nature
who brings us fruit and grain but also hurricanes, drought, and
locusts. She is Gaia, Demeter, Isis, and all the other goddesses from
the beginning of time who have been worshipped and propitiated, demonized
and thrown out. She is not our birth mother, she is the psychic
heritage of what motherhood attains, and she carries within her the
poles of good and bad mothers that come down to us through fairy tales
and myths." Dale M.Kushner, Trancending the past.
“These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and
nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian
depths.” Carl Jung, Four Archetypes.
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