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The Great Mother forms a fitting sequel to The Origins and History of Consciousness, in which Neumann drew, as it were, a picture map of the whole field of the collective unconscious and in which, as Jung said in his Introduction, “he has succeeded in constructing a unique history of the evolution of consciousness, and at the same time in representing the body of myths as the phenomenology of this same evolution. In this way he arrives at conclusions and insights which are among the most important ever to be reached in this field.”
In this earlier book Neumann developed the theme of the parental uroboros, representing the first stage of consciousness which develops out of that chaotic layer of the unconscious, where psyche merges into the unknown psychoid matrix of life, and in which male and female, above and below, positive and negative and all the other opposites, are mingled together in the primal darkness. For the ego cannot penetrate there with its tiny torch of awareness. Practically every cosmogonic myth starts with such a formless chaos, and they all recount how some god or hero, representing the first glimmering of ego-consciousness, arises, who rebels at his impotence and struggles to separate “father heaven” from his eternal embrace with “mother earth”. Thus through the momentous deed of a heroic son the one, the cosmic egg, the great round, is divided and the two are created. These two are the maternal uroboros and the paternal uroboros.
In the present book Neumann takes up the story of the maternal uroboros, which represents one half of the psychic universe, and shows how its development takes place in definite stages, corresponding to the stadial development of culture, and to the corresponding stages in the evolution of consciousness in the individual. For this maternal uroboros is the earliest representation of the feminine archetype, whose dynamic effect “… is manifested in energic processes within the psyche, processes that take place both in the un