You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
…
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.…
… The book was originally intended as an explanatory introduction to the Eranos Archive, collected by Frau Froebe-Kaptyn, which was about to be published. But ‘it soon became clear’, as Neumann writes, ‘that the work was undergoing a transformation… and an exposition of the Archetypal Feminine was assuming paramount importance’ (p. vii). The picture series of the Archive, greatly enlarged and annotated, furnishes the steps of the ladder on which Neumann's conception of the feminine archetype mounts from the earliest beginnings in the Stone Age statues of the Great Woman, through many transitions, beginning with the feminine as vessel, container and nourisher, symbolized by a pot, or pot-shaped figure, which represents the womb, in which the unborn child sleeps in a paradisal state, but which reappears as funerary urn, where he sleeps at death, once more in the womb of the Great Mother. There follow many succeeding representations, each stage adding definition and form to the experience of the archetypal feminine. Beneficent figures of goddesses r