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THE UROBOROS

The first cycle of myth is the creation myth. Here the mythological projection of psychic material appears in cosmogonic form, as the mythology of creation. The world and the unconscious predominate and form the object of myth. Ego and man are only nascent as yet, and their birth, suffering, and emancipation constitute the phases of the creation myth.

At the stage of the separation of the World Parents, the germ of ego consciousness finally asserts itself. While yet in the fold of the creation myth it enters upon the second cycle, namely, the hero myth, in which the ego, consciousness, and the human world become conscious of themselves and of their

In the beginning is perfection, wholeness. This original perfection can only be “circumscribed,” or described symbolically; its nature defies any description other than a mythical one, because that which describes, the ego, and that which is described, the beginning, which is prior to any ego, prove to be incommensurable quantities as soon as the ego tries to grasp its object conceptually, as a content of consciousness.

For this reason a symbol always stands at the beginning, the most striking feature of which is its multiplicity of meanings, its indeterminate and indeterminable character.

The beginning can be laid hold of in two “places”: it can be conceived in the life of mankind as the earliest dawn of human history, and in the life of the individual as the earliest dawn of childhood. The self-representation of the dawn of human history can be seen from its symbolic description in ritual and myth. The earliest dawn of childhood, like that of mankind, is depicted in the images which rise up from the depths of the unconscious and reveal themselves to the already individualized ego.

The dawn state of the beginning projects itself mythologically in cosmic form, appearing as the beginning of the world, as the mythology of creation. Mythological accounts of the beginning must invariably begin with the outside world, for world and psyche are still one. There is as yet no reflecting, self-conscious ego that could refer anything to itself, that is, reflect. Not only is the psyche open to the world, it is still identical with and undifferentiated from the world; it knows itself as world and in the world and experiences its own becoming as a world-becoming, its own images as the starry heavens, and its own contents as the world-creating gods.

in all peoples and in all religions, creation appears as the creation of light. Thus the coming of consciousness, manifesting itself as light in contrast to the darkness of the unconscious, is the real “object” of creation mythology. Cassirer has likewise shown that in the different stages of mythological consciousness the first thing to be discovered is subjective reality, the formation of the ego and individuality. The beginning of this development, mythologically regarded as the beginning of the world, is the coming of light, without which no world process could be seen at all.

But the earliest dawn is still prior to this birth of light out of darkness, and a wealth of symbols surrounds it.

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 question of the beginning is also the question “Whence?” It is the original and fateful question to which cosmology and the creation myths have ever tried to give new and different answers. This original question about the origin of the world is at the same time the question about the origin of man, the origin of consciousness and of the ego; it is the fateful question “Where did I come from?” that faces every human being as soon as he arrives upon the threshold of self-consciousness.

One symbol of original perfection is the circle. Allied to it are the sphere, the egg, and the rotundum—the “round” 2 of alchemy. It is Plato’s round that was there in the beginning:

Therefore the demiurge made the world in the shape of a sphere, giving it that figure which of all is the most perfect and the most equal to itself.3

Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of the Self-contained, which is without beginning and end; in its preworldly perfection it is prior to any process, eternal, for in its roundness there is no before and no after, no time; and there is no above and no below, no space. All this can only come with the coming of light, of consciousness, which is not yet present; now all is under sway of the unmanifest godhead, whose symbol is therefore the circle.

3Plato, Timaeus (based on the Comford trans.).

The round is the egg, the philosophical World Egg, the nucleus of the beginning, and the germ from which, as humanity teaches everywhere, the world arises.4 It is also the perfect state in which the opposites are united—the perfect beginning because the opposites have not yet flown apart and the world has not yet begun, the perfect end because in it the opposites have come together again in a synthesis and the world is once more at rest.

The container of opposites is the Chinese t’ai chi, a round containing black and white, day and night, heaven and earth, male and female. Lao-tzu says of it:

There was something formless yet complete,

That existed before heaven and earth;

Without sound, without substance,

Dependent on nothing, unchanging,

All pervading, unfailing.

One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.5

Each of these pairs of opposites forms the nucleus of a group of symbols which cannot be described here in any great detail; a few examples must suffice.

The round is the calabash containing the World Parents.6 In Egypt as in New Zealand, in Greece as in Africa and India, the World Parents, heaven and earth, lie one on top of the other in the round, spacelessly and timelessly united, for as yet nothing has come between them to create duality out of the original unity. The container of the masculine and feminine opposites is the great hermaphrodite, the primal creative element, the Hindu purusha who combines the poles in himself:

In the beginning this world was Soul (Atman) alone in the form of a person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself. He said first: “I am.” … He was, indeed, as large as a woman and a man closely embraced. He caused that self to fall (pat) into two pieces. Therefrom arose a husband (pati) and a wife (patni).7

What is said here of the deity recalls Plato’s Original Man; there too the hermaphroditic round stands at the beginning.

7 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1. 4. 1–3, trans. by Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.

This perfect state of being, in which the opposites are contained, is perfect because it is autarchic. Its self-sufficiency, self-contentment, and independence of any “you” and any “other” are signs of its self-contained eternality. We read in Plato:

And he established the universe a sphere revolving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to bear itself company, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance.8

8 Plato, Timaeus, 34 (based on the Cornford trans.).

The perfection of that which rests in itself in no way contradicts the perfection of that which circles in itself. Although absolute rest is something static and eternal, unchanging and therefore without history, it is at the same time the place of origin and the germ cell of creativity. Living the cycle of its own life, it is the circular snake, the primal dragon of the beginning that bites its own tail, the self-begetting 8a

8a Hereinafter transcribed as “uroboros.”

This is the ancient Egyptian symbol 9 of which it is said: “Draco interfecit se ipsum, maritat se ipsum, impraegnat se ipsum.” 10 It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.

As the Heavenly Serpent, the uroboros was known in ancient Babylon; 11 in later times, in the same area, it was often depicted by the Mandaeans (illus. 2); its origin is ascribed by Macrobius to the Phoenicians.12 It is the archetype of the the All One, appearing as Leviathan and as Aion, as Oceanus (illus. 3 and 5) and also as the Primal Being that says: “I am Alpha and Omega.” As the Kneph of antiquity it is the Primal Snake, the “most ancient deity of the prehistoric world.” 13 The uroboros can be traced in the Revelation of St. John and among the Gnostics 14 as well as among the Roman syncretists; 15 there are pictures of it in the sand paintings of the Navajo Indians 16 and in Giotto; 17 it is found in Egypt (illus. 4), Africa (illus. 6), Mexico (illus. 7), and India (illus. 8), among the gypsies as an amulet,18 and in the alchemical texts (illus. 9).19

11 Leisegang, “The Mystery of the Serpent.”

12 Numerous examples of representations were collected in the Eranos Archives, Ascona, Switzerland; a duplicate of the Archives is in the possession of the Bollingen Foundation, New York, and the Warburg Institute, London.

13 Kees, Der Götterglaube im alten Aegypten, p. 347.

14 Pistis Sophia, trans, by Horner, pp. 160-64 and 166-68.

15 Kerényi, “Die Gottin Natur.”

16 Cf. Newcomb and Reichard, Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant, especially PI. XIII.

17 See his “Envy,” one of the Vices in the frescoes (c. 1305) of the Arena Chapel, Padua: the figure is of a horned, bat-eared witch, from whose mouth a serpent issues, circling back to bite her face.

18 Ciba-Zeitschrift, No. 31, illustration, “Heil-Aberglaube der Zigeuner.”

19 See also illustrations in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy and “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon.”

The symbolic thinking portrayed in these images of the round endeavors to grasp contents which even our present-day consciousness can only understand as paradoxes, precisely because it cannot grasp them. If we give the name of “all” or “nothing” to the beginning, and speak in this connection of wholeness, unity, nondifferentiation, and the absence of opposites, all these “concepts,” if we look at them more closely and try to “conceive” them instead of just going on thinking them, are found to be images derived and abstracted from these basic symbols. Images and symbols have this advantage over the paradoxical philosophical formulations of infinite unity and unimaged wholeness, that their unity can be seen and grasped as a unity at one glance.

the self who has gone beyond the opposites, will reappear in the image of the round, the mandala.20

20 Cf. the work of Jung and his school on the mandala in normal and pathological people, children (illus. 5), etc.

This round and this existence in the round, existence in the uroboros, is the symbolic self-representation of the dawn state, showing the infancy both of mankind and of the child. The validity and reality of the uroboros symbol rest on a collective basis. It corresponds to an evolutionary stage which can be “recollected” in the psychic structure of every human being. It functions as a transpersonal factor that was there as a psychic stage of being before the formation of an ego. Moreover, its reality is re-experienced in every early childhood, and the child’s personal experience of this pre-ego stage retraces the old track trodden by humanity.

An embryonic and still undeveloped germ of ego consciousness slumbers in the perfect round and awakens.

Since the ego has and can have no experiences of its own in the embryonic state, not even psychic experiences—for its experiencing consciousness still slumbers in the germ—the later ego will describe this earlier state, of which it has indefinite but symbolically graspable knowledge, as a “prenatal” time. It is the time of existence in paradise where the psyche has her preworldly abode, the time before the birth of the ego, the time of unconscious envelopment, of swimming in the ocean of the unborn.

The time of the beginning, before the coming of the opposites, must be understood as the self-description of that great epoch when there was still no consciousness. It is the wu chi of Chinese philosophy, whose symbol is the empty circle.21 Everything is still in the “now and for ever” of eternal being; sun, moon, and stars, these symbols of time and therefore of mortality, have not yet been created; and day and night, yesterday and tomorrow, genesis and decay, the flux of life and birth and death, have not yet entered into the world. This prehistoric state of being is not time, but eternity, just as the time before the coming of man and before birth and begetting is eternity. And just as there is no time before the birth of man and ego, only eternity, so there is no space, only infinity.

The question “Whence?”–which is both the original question and the question about the origin—has but one answer, and of this there are two interpretations. The answer is: the round, and the two interpretations: the womb and the parents.

It is crucial for every psychology, and especially for every psychology of childhood, to understand this problem and its symbolism.

The uroboros appears as the round “container,” i.e., the maternal womb, but also as the union of masculine and feminine opposites, the World Parents joined in perpetual cohabitation.

The question about the origin, however, must always be answered by “womb,” for it is the immemorial experience of mankind that every newborn creature comes from a womb. Hence the “round” of mythology is also called the womb and uterus, though this place of origin should not be taken concretely. In fact, all mythology says over and over again that this womb is an image, the woman’s womb being only a partial aspect of the primordial symbol of the place of origin from whence we come. This primordial symbol means many things at once: it is not just one content or part of the body, but a plurality, a world or cosmic region where many contents hide and have their essential abode. “The Mothers” are not a mother.

Anything deep—abyss, valley, ground, also the sea and the bottom of the sea, fountains, lakes and pools, the earth (illus. 10), the underworld, the cave, the house, and the city—all are parts of this archetype. Anything big and embracing which contains, surrounds, enwraps, shelters, preserves, and nourishes anything small belongs to the primordial matriarchal realm.22 When Freud saw that everything hollow was feminine, he would have been right if only he had grasped it as a symbol. By interpreting it as the “female genitalia” he profoundly misunderstood it, because female genitalia are only a tiny part of the archetype of the Primordial Mother.

22 Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.”

Compared with this maternal uroboros, human consciousness feels itself embryonic, for the ego feels fully contained in this primordial symbol. It is only a tiny helpless newcomer. In the pleromatic phase of life, when the ego swims about in the round like a tadpole, there is nothing but the uroboros in existence. Humanity does not yet exist, there is only divinity; only the world has being. Naturally, then, the first phases of man’s evolving ego consciousness are under the dominance of the uroboros. They are the phases of an infantile ego consciousness which, although no longer entirely embryonic and already possessing an existence of its own, still lives in the round, not yet detached from it and only just beginning to differentiate itself from it. This initial stage when ego consciousness is still on the infantile level is marked by the predominance of the maternal side of the uroboros.

The world is experienced as all-embracing, and in it man experiences himself, as a self, sporadically and momentarily only. Just as the infantile ego, living this phase over again, feebly developed, easily tired, emerges like an island out of the ocean of the unconscious for occasional moments only, and then sinks back again, so early man experiences the world. Small, feeble, and much given to sleep, i.e., for the most part unconscious, he swims about in his instincts like an animal. Enfolded and up-borne by great Mother Nature, rocked in her arms, he is delivered over to her for good or ill. Nothing is himself; everything is world. The world shelters and nourishes him, while he scarcely wills and acts at all. Doing nothing, lying inert in the unconscious, merely being there in the inexhaustible twilit world, all needs effortlessly supplied by the great nourisher—such is that early, beatific state.

All the positive maternal traits are in evidence at this stage, when the ego is still embryonic and has no activity of its own. The uroboros of the maternal world is life and psyche in one; it gives nourishment and pleasure, protects and warms, comforts and forgives. It is the refuge for all suffering, the goal of all desire. For always this mother is she who fulfills, the bestower and helper. This living image of the Great and Good Mother has at all times of distress been the refuge of humanity and ever shall be; for the state of being contained in the whole, without responsibility or effort, with no doubts and no division of the world into two, is paradisal, and can never again be realized in its pristine happy-go-luckiness in adult life.

The positive side of the Great Mother seems to be embodied in this stage of the uroboros. Only at a very much higher level will the “good” Mother appear again. Then, when she no longer has to do with an embryonic ego, but with an adult personality matured by rich experience of the world, she reveals herself anew as Sophia, the “gracious” Mother, or, pouring forth her riches in the creative fullness of true productivity, as the “Mother of All Living.”

The dawn state of perfect containment and contentment was never an historical state (Rousseau was still projecting this psychic phase into the historical past, as the “natural state” of the savage.) It is rather the image of a psychic stage of humanity, just discernible as borderline image. However much the world forced early man to face reality, it was with the greatest reluctance that he consciously entered into this reality. Even today we can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.

Yet even this is a false formulation, since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and self-evident thing. But fixation in unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing. There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction. One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea. The ascent toward consciousness is the “unnatural” thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens. The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man’s conscious development.

So long as the infantile ego consciousness is weak and feels the strain of its own existence as heavy and oppressive, while drowsiness and sleep are felt as delicious pleasure, it has not yet discovered its own reality and differentness. So long as this continues, the uroboros reigns on as the great whirling wheel of life, where everything not yet individual is submerged in the union of opposites, passing away and willing to pass away.

Man is not yet thrown back upon himself, against nature, nor the ego against the unconscious; being oneself is still a wearisome and painful experience, still the exception that has to be overcome. It is in this sense that we speak of “uroboric incest.” It goes without saying that the term “incest” is to be understood symbolically, not concretistically and sexually. Wherever the incest motif appears, it is always a prefiguration of the hieros gamos, of the sacred marriage consummation which attains its true form only with the hero.

Uroboric incest is a form of entry into the mother, of union with her, and it stands in sharp contrast to other and later forms of incest. In uroboric incest, the emphasis upon pleasure and love is in no sense active, it is more a desire to be dissolved and absorbed; passively one lets oneself be taken, sinks into the pleroma, melts away in the ocean of pleasure—a Liebestod. The Great Mother takes the little child back into herself, and always over uroboric incest there stand the insignia of death, signifying final dissolution in union with the Mother. Cave, earth, tomb, sarcophagus, and coffin are symbols of this ritual recombination, which begins with burial in the posture of the embryo in the barrows of the Stone Age and ends with the cinerary urns of the moderns.

Many forms of nostalgia and longing signify no more than a return to uroboric incest and self-dissolution, from the unio mystica of the saint to the drunkard’s craving for unconsciousness and the “death-romanticism” of the Germanic races. The incest we term “uroboric” is self-surrender and regression. It is the form of incest taken by the infantile ego, which is still close to the mother and has not yet come to itself; but the sick ego of the neurotic can also take this form and so can a later, exhausted ego that creeps back to the mother after having found fulfillment.

Man’s consciousness rightly feels itself to be the child of these primordial depths; for not only in the history of mankind is consciousness a late product of the womb of the unconscious, but in every individual life, consciousness re-experiences its emergence from the unconscious in the growth of childhood, and every night in sleep, dying with the sun, it sinks back into the depths of the unconscious, to be reborn in the morning and to begin the day anew.

The uroboros, the great round, is not only the womb, but the World Parents. The World Father is joined to the World Mother in uroboric union, and they are not to be divided. They are still under the rule of the primordial law: above and below, father and mother, heaven and earth, God and world, reflect one another and cannot be put apart. How could the conjunction of opposites, as the initial state of existence, ever be represented mythologically except by the symbol of the conjoined World Parents!

Thus the World Parents, who are the answer to the question about the origin, are themselves the universe and the prime symbol of everlasting life. They are the perfection from whence everything springs; the eternal being that begets, conceives, and brings itself to birth, that kills and revivifies. Their unity is a state of existence transcendent and divine, independent of the opposites—the inchoate “En-Soph” of the cabala, which means “unending plenitude” and “nothingness.” The tremendous force of this primordial symbol of the psyche does not lie only in the fact that it contains in itself the non-differentiated state of union beyond the opposites. The uroboros also symbolizes the creative impulse of the new beginning; it is the “wheel that rolls of itself,” the initial, rotatory movement in the upward spiral of evolution.23

This initial movement, the procreative thrust, naturally has an affinity with the paternal side of the uroboros and with the beginning of evolution in time, and is far harder to visualize than the maternal side.

For instance, when we read in Egyptian theology such passages as:

Atum, who indulged himself in Heliopolis, took his phallus in his hand in order to arouse pleasure. A brother and sister were produced, Shu and Tefnut.24

or:

I copulated in my hand, I joined myself to my shadow and spurted out of my own mouth. I spewed forth as Shu and spat forth as Tefnut.25

this clearly expresses the difficulty of grasping the creative beginning in a symbol. What is meant would nowadays be called spontaneous generation or the self-manifestation of a god. The original force of the images still shines through our rather more abstract terms. The uroboric mode of propagation, where begetter and conceiver are one, results in the image of immediate genesis from the semen, without partner and without duality.

24 Pyramid Texts, spell 1248, in Sethe, Pyramidentexte.

25 Book of Apopis, in Roeder, Urkunden zur Religion des alten Aegypten, p. 108.

The image of the self-fecundating primal god undergoes new variations in Egypt and India, and in both cases there is a move in the direction of spiritualization. But this spiritualization is the same as the endeavor to apprehend the nature of the creative force that was there in the beginning:

It is the heart which makes all that results, to come out, and it is the tongue which repeats (expresses) the thought of the heart… . That is what causes all the gods to be born. Atum with his Ennead, and every divine utterance manifests itself in the thought of the heart and speech of the tongue.28

Or:

The Demiurge who created all the gods and their Kas is in his heart and in his tongue.27

And finally we come to the most abstract and spiritual symbolism of all, where God is the “breath of life”:

He did not bring me forth from his mouth, nor conceive me in his hand, but he breathed me forth from his nostrils.28

26 Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, p. 376.

27 Kees, Aegypten, p. ii.

28 Kees, Götterglaube, p. 312 n.

The transition from image to idea in this formulation of the creative principle becomes doubly clear when one knows that in the hieroglyphs “thought” is written with the image for “heart” and “speech” with that for “tongue.”

At this point in Egyptian mythology and its wrestlings with the problem of creation, we have the first beginnings of what was to be expressed several thousand years later as the “Word of God” in the Bible story of the creation and in the doctrine of the Logos—an expression that was never able to break away altogether from the primordial image of the “self-manifesting” and “self-expressing” god.

Understandably enough, the creative principle that brings the world into being is derived from the creative nature of man himself. Just as a man—our figures of speech say the same thing today—brings forth his creations from his own depths and “expresses” himself, so do the gods. In like manner Vishnu the Boar scoops the earth out of the sea, and the god ponders the world in his heart and expresses it in the creative word. The word, speech, is a higher product, the utterance of one sunk in himself, in his own depths. When we talk of “introversion” we say the same thing. In India, tapas, “inward heat” and “brooding,” is the creative force with whose help everything is made. The self-incubating effect of introversion, a fundamental experience of the self-generating spirit, is clearly expressed in the following text:

He, Prajapati, took to praying and fasting, because he desired offspring, and he made himself fruitful.29

An Egyptian text says:

My name was “he who created himself, first god of first gods.” 30

The same principle of “heating” is described in another Brahmana as the way of creation:

In the beginning this world was nothing at all. Heaven was not, nor earth, nor space. Because it was not, it bethought itself: I will be. It emitted heat.

After describing a long series of cosmogonic heatings and the production of elements, the text goes on:

He found foothold on the earth. When he had found a firm foothold there, he thought: I will propagate myself. He emitted heat and became pregnant.31

29 Shatapatha Brahmana 11. 1. 6. 7, trans. from Geldner, Vedismus und Brahmanismus.

30 Book of Apopis, in Roeder, op. cit.

31 Taittiriya Brahmana 2. 2. 9. 5, trans. from Geldner, op. cit., p. 90.

Just as the maternal side of the uroboros gives birth without procreation, so the paternal side procreates without the maternal womb. The two sides are complementary and belong together. The original question asks about the origin of that which moves all life. To this question the creation myths give one answer: they say that creation is something not altogether expressible in the symbols of sexuality, and they proceed to formulate the unformulable in an image.

The creative word, creative breath—that is creative spirit. But this breath concept is only an abstraction from the image of the procreative wind-ruach-pneuma-animus, which animates through “inspiration.” The solar phallus symbolizing the creative element is the source of the wind, both in an Egyptian magic papyrus and in the vision of a modern psychotic.32 This wind, in the form of the ruach-dove of the Holy Ghost, is wafted under the robe of the immaculately conceiving Virgin Mary, through a tube held out to her by God the Father in the sun. The wind is the fructifying bird known to the primitives, the ancestral spirit that blows upon the women, and also upon tortoises and female vultures, and makes them fruitful.33

32 Jung, “The Structure of the Psyche,” p. 150.

33 Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. II, p. 452.

Animals as fructifiers, gods as fructifiers, gods as animals, animals as gods—everywhere the enigma of fructification is ranged alongside that of creative “inspiration.” Mankind asks about the origin of life, and immediately life and soul fuse into one, as living psyche, power, spirit, motion, breath, and the life-giving mana. This One who stands at the beginning is the creative force contained in the uroboric unity of the World Parents, from whom it blows, begets, gives birth, moves, breathes, and speaks. “As the wind blows, everything grows,” says the Upanishad.34

34 Brihadaranyaka 3. 9. 9, in The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. by W. B. Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami.

Although the ego experiences—and must experience—the uroboros as the terrible dark power of the unconscious, mankind does not by any means associate this stage of its preconscious existence only with feelings of dread and drowsiness. Even if, for the conscious ego, light and consciousness cleave together, like darkness and unconsciousness, man still has inklings of another and, so he thinks, a deeper “extraworldly” knowledge. In mythology this illumination is usually projected into a knowledge acquired before birth or after death.

In the Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the dead man receives instruction, and the instruction culminates in the doctrine that he shall know himself identical with the great white light that shines beyond life and death:

Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light–Buddha Amitabha.35

Note: “experience your death”

35 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 96.

This knowledge is postconscious, outside and not of this world, a knowing and being in the perfection that comes after death, but it is also preconscious, preworldly, and prenatal. This is what the Jewish midrash means when it ascribes knowledge to the unborn babe in the womb, saying that over its head there burns a light in which it sees all the ends of the world.36 Also, existence in the time before the beginning is supposedly connected with foreknowledge. The creature that still exists in the round participates in the knowledge of the unformed, is merged in the ocean of wisdom. The primal ocean, likewise an origination symbol—for as a ring-snake the uroboros is also the ocean—is the source not only of creation but of wisdom too. Hence the early culture heroes often come up from the sea in the shape of a half fish, like the Babylonian Oannes, and bring their wisdom as a revelation to mankind.

36 Wünsche, Kleine Midraschim, Vol. III, pp. 213 f..

Since the original wisdom is preworldly, i.e., prior to the ego and the coming of consciousness, the myths say it is prenatal. But existence after death and prenatal existence in the uroboros are the same thing. The ring of life and death is a closed circuit; it is the wheel of rebirth, and the dead man instructed in the Bardo Thödol will infallibly be born again if he fails to attain to the highest knowledge in his afterlife. So for him the instruction after death is equally a prenatal one.

The mythological theory of foreknowledge also explains the view that all knowing is “memory.” Man’s task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness. In this sense it is said of the saddik, the “perfect righteous man” of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement dating from the end of the eighteenth century:

The Saddik finds that which has been lost since birth and restores it to men.37

37 Horodezky, Rabbi Nachman von Brazlaw, p. 188.

It is the same conception as Plato’s philosophical doctrine of the prenatal vision of ideas and their remembrance. The original knowledge of one who is still enfolded in the perfect state is very evident in the psychology of the child. For this reason many primitive peoples treat children with particular marks of respect. In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to him; indeed, many of his sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge which still derives from his prenatal existence. It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from “over there.” Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forebear.

The theory of heredity, proving that the child has the ancestral heritage biologically in himself, and to a large extent actually “is” this heritage, also has a psychological justification. Jung therefore defines the transpersonal–or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious—as “the deposit of ancestral experience.” 38 Hence the child, whose life as a prepersonal entity is largely determined by the collective unconscious, actually is the living carrier of this ancestral experience.

38 “Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung,” p. 376.

In the dawn world of consciousness, where the feebly developed ego is still under the dominance of the unconscious, there rules, besides the symbolism whose mythological stages we are trying to describe, another set of symbols which correspond to the magic body image in the psyche. Certain groups of symbols are co-ordinated with certain regions of the body. Even today, the primitive body scheme of belly, breast, and head is used in ordinary psychology, where “belly” is an abbreviation for the instinctual world, “breast” and “heart” for the zone of feeling, and “head” and “brain” for the zone of spirit. Modern psychology and language have been influenced to this day by this original body scheme. The scheme is most developed in Indian psychology; in Kundalini yoga the ascending consciousness rouses and activates the different body-soul centers. The diaphragm is supposed to correspond to the earth’s surface, and development beyond this zone is co-ordinated with the “rising sun,” the state of consciousness that has begun to leave behind the unconscious and all ties with it.

The body scheme, as the archetype of the original man in whose image the world was created, is the basic symbol in all systems where parts of the world are co-ordinated with regions of the body. This co-ordination is to be found everywhere, in Egypt as in Mexico, in Indian literature as in the cabala. Not God alone, but the whole world is created in man’s image. The relation of the world and the gods to the body scheme is the earliest concretistic form of the “anthropocentric world picture,” with man standing in the middle or “at the heart” of the world. It derives from one’s own body sensations, which are charged with mana and are commonly misunderstood as narcissistic.

The mana-charge originally associated with everything that belongs to the body is expressed in primitive man’s fear of magical influences, due to the fact that every part of the body, from hair to excrement, can stand for the body as a whole and bewitch it. Also, the symbolism of the creation myths, where everything that comes out of the body is creative, derives from the latter’s mana potency. Not only the semen, but urine and spittle, sweat, dung, and breath, words and flatus, are heavy with creation. Out of it all comes the world, and the whole “turn-out” is “birth.”

For primitive man and the child, with his overemphasized unconscious, the main accent falls on the visceral region and its dead weight of vegetative life. The “heart” is for him the highest center, representing what the thinking head means for us. For the Greeks, the midriff was the seat of consciousness, for the Indians and Hebrews, the heart. In both cases thinking is emotional, bound up with affects and passions. The dissolution of emotional components is not yet complete (see Part II). Only if a thought is a passion that grips the heart can it reach ego consciousness and be perceived; consciousness is only affected by the proximity of the idea to the archetype. But the heart is also the seat of ethical decision; it symbolizes the center of the personality, and, in the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead, it was weighed. The heart plays the same role in Jewish mysticism,39 and even today we still speak of a man having a “good heart” as though it were an ethical organ.

39 Bischoff, Die Elemente der Kabbalah, Vol. I, p. 234.

Anything situated lower down than the heart belongs to the realm of instinct. The liver and the kidneys are visceral centers of great importance for psychic life. “God trieth the heart and reins” of the man whose conscious and unconscious are to be searched, and the examination of the liver as the divinatory center in haruspicy is as well known as the fate of Prometheus, who, for the theft of fire and the hybristic overextension of his consciousness, was punished with the “agenbite of inwit” by Zeus, who sent an eagle to feed upon his liver.

But all visceral centers, which also function as affective centers controlling sexuality, are already centers of a higher order. Deeper down lies the psychic plane of intestinal processes of the alimentary tract. The instinct to eat—hunger—is one of the most elementary of man’s psychic instincts, and the psychology of the belly plays a correspondingly large part with primitives and children. One’s state of mind is the more dependent upon whether one is satisfied or not, or thirsty or not, the less one’s consciousness and one’s ego are developed. For the embryonic ego the nutritional side is the only important factor, and this sphere is still very strongly accentuated for the infantile ego, which regards the maternal uroboros as the source of food and satisfaction.

The uroboros is properly called the “tail-eater,” and the symbol of the alimentary canal dominates this whole stage. The “swamp” stage of the uroboros and early matriarchate, as described by Bachofen, is a world in which every creature devours every other. Cannibalism is symptomatic of this state of affairs. On this level, which is pregenital because sex is not yet operative and the polar tension of the sexes still in abeyance, there is only a stronger that eats and a weaker that is eaten. In this animal world—since rutting is relatively rare—the visceral psychology of hunger occupies the foreground. Hunger and food are the prime movers of mankind.

Everywhere we find in the initial creation myths a pregenital food symbolism, transpersonal because sprung from the original collective layer of symbols. The systole and diastole of human existence center on the functions of the digestive tract. Eating = intake, birth = output, food the only content, being nourished the fundamental form of vegetative-animal existence–that is the motto. Life = power = food, the earliest formula for obtaining power over anything, appears in the oldest of the Pyramid Texts. They say of the risen dead:

The sky clouds over, the stars rain down (?); the mountains stir themselves, the cattle of the Earth-god tremble … at the sight of him, as he appears before them with the living soul of a god, who lives upon his fathers and devours his mothers.

It is he who devours men and lives upon the gods… . The catcher of skulls … he catches them for him. He of the resplendent head watches them for him and drives them to him (?) … .

Their great ones are for his breakfast, their lesser ones for his dinner, and their little ones for his supper.

Whomsoever he meets on his ways, he eats raw.

He has taken away the hearts of the gods. He has eaten the Red Crown and swallowed the Green Crown. He eats the lungs of wise men; he is content to live upon hearts and their magic; he rejoices (?) … if he can devour those who are in the Red Crown. He flourishes and their magic is in his body, and his glory is not taken from him. He has devoured the understanding of all the gods… .40

40 Spells 273–74, in Erman, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians.

We find a corresponding symbolism in India. In one account of the creation, the first divinities fall headlong into the sea, and “Hunger” and “Thirst” are delivered up to the negative powers of the primeval waters. The account continues:

Hunger and Thirst said to him (the Self): “For us two also find an abode.”

To them he said: “I assign you two a part among these divinities. I make you two partakers among them.” Therefore to whatever divinity an oblation is made, hunger and thirst become partakers in it.

He bethought himself: “Here now are worlds and world-guardians. Let me create food for them.”

He brooded upon the waters. And out of them that were brooded upon there arose a form. The form that arose is food.41

Food becomes a “cosmic content” to be seized hold of, and when the Self finally managed to seize it with apana (the digestive breath), “he consumed it.” In another passage hunger is symbolized as death; he is the eater and devourer, as we know from the deadly and devouring aspect of the uroboros.

41 Aitareya Upanishad 2. 5.–3. 2 (based on Hume and Deussen translations).

Even today language cannot get away from these elementary images. Eating, devouring, hunger, death, and maw go together; and we still speak, just like the primitive, of “death’s maw,” a “devouring war,” a “consuming disease.” “Being swallowed and eaten” is an archetype that occurs not only in all the medieval paintings of hell and the devil; we ourselves express the swallowing of something small by something big in the same imagery, when we say that a man is “consumed” by his work, by a movement or an idea, or “eaten up” with jealousy.

On this level, where the uroboros is co-ordinated with cosmogony, the world or cosmic content to be “assimilated” is food. Food is a phase of Brahma:

From food all creatures are produced,

All creatures that dwell on earth.

By food they live

And into food they finally pass.

Food is the chief among beings,

Therefore they call it the panacea.

Verily he obtains all food

Who worships Brahma as food.

For food is the chief among beings,

Therefore they call it the panacea.

All creatures are born of food,

By food they continue to grow.

Creatures feed on it, it upon creatures,

Therefore is it called food.42

Brahma arises through tapas.

From Brahma comes food,

From food—breath, spirit, truth,

Worlds, and in works, immortality.43

42 Taittiriya Upanishad 2. 2.

43Mundaka Upanishad 1. 1. 8 (both based on Hume and Deussen translations).

The same symbolism is used in the Maitrayana Upanishad,44 where the relation between the world and God is equivalent to that between food and the eater of food. God, once glorified as the world nourisher, is now seen as the world devourer, for the world is God’s sacrificial food.

44 6. 9. 1 ff.

Just as in primitive psychology and mythology the “alimentary uroboros” is a cosmic quantity, so its symbolism also appears in the relatively late philosophical speculations of India for the purpose of clarifying the relations between God as “subject” and world as “object,” and vice versa.

In this connection we must mention the “sacrifice” that is offered to the god in the form of food and “eaten” by him. It is at once an act of incorporation or “inward digestion,” and of seizure for increase of power.

So the world in India is the “food of the gods.” As Deussen has explained, the world, according to an early Vedic idea, was created by Prajapati, who is at once life and death—or hunger. It was created in order to be eaten as the sacrifice which he himself offers to himself. This is how the horse sacrifice is interpreted,45 the horse standing for the universe, like the bull in other cultures:

Whatever he brought forth, he resolved to eat. Because he eats (ad) everything, he is called infinite (aditi). Therefore he who knows the essence of aditi, becomes the eater of the world; everything becomes food for him.46

45 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1. 1. 1.

46 Ibid., 1. 2. 5 (based on Hume and Deussen translations).

From this it is clear that a later age, correctly interpreting the old symbolism, has spiritualized it, or “inwardly digested” it; for the act of eating, digesting, and assimilating the world now appears as a means to possess and obtain power over it. To “know the essence of aditi” is to experience the infinite being of the creator who “eats” the world he has created. Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind “assimilating” an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.

The examples from Indian and Egyptian mythology could be multiplied at will, for this sort of elementary food symbolism is archetypal. Wherever liquor, fruit, herbs, etc., appear as the vehicles of life and immortality, including the “water” and “bread” of life, the sacrament of the Host, and every form of food cult down to the present day, we have this ancient mode of human expression before us. The materialization of psychic contents, by which contents that we would call “psychic”–like life, immortality, and death—take on material form in myth and ritual and appear as water, bread, fruit, etc., is a characteristic of the primitive mind.

Inside is projected outside, as we say. In reality there is a “psychization” of the object: everything outside us is experienced symbolically, as though saturated with a content which we co-ordinate with the psyche as something psychic or spiritual. This material object outside is then “assimilated,” i.e., eaten. Conscious realization is “acted out” in the elementary scheme of nutritive assimilation, and the ritual act of concrete eating is the first form of assimilation known to man.47 Over this whole sphere of symbolism looms the maternal uroboros in its mother-child aspect, where need is hunger and satisfaction means satiety.

47 [Cf. Guénon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta. It is here pointed out (p. 79, n. 2) that from the Latin word sapere, “to taste, perceive, know,” are ultimately derived two groups of words, namely, “sap,” Saft, sève, “savor,” “sapid,” etc., on the one hand, and savoir, “sapient,” “sage,” etc., on the other, “by reason of the analogy which exists between nutritive assimilation in the bodily order and cognitive assimilation in the mental and intellectual orders.”— TRANS.]

The body and its “autoerotic-narcissistic” sense of itself—we shall be reviewing this idea later on—is an uroboric closed circuit. In this pregenital stage self-gratification is not masturbation, but the satisfaction of being nourished, with the infant’s finger-sucking as a substitute.47a To “obtain” is to “eat,” it does not mean to “be fertilized”; to “produce,” to “express,” means to “excrete,” “spit,” “urinate”–later to “speak”–but not to “give birth” or “beget.” The masturbatory stage of uroboric creation is, on the other hand, genital in character, and precedes the sexual stage of the World Parents, which is the stage of propagation in duality, and both are preceded by the stage of the alimentary uroboros.

All the above bodily functions symbolize something that is at the same time a psychic process. The rites of cannibalism and the funeral feast, the eating of gods in the Pyramid Texts, and the communion mysteries, represent a spiritual act.

47a See illus. 1 (frontispiece). The creator god Vishnu as a child sucking his big toe combines in himself the living circuit of the uroboros and its autonomy.

The assimilation and ingestion of the “content,” the eaten food, produces an inner change. Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man. How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can turn into an alert, strong, and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink: this is, and must remain, a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.

The emergence of corresponding symbolisms does not mean “regression to the oral zone” in the sense that this is an “infantile-perverse” zone of sexual pleasure which we ought to overcome, but simply a return to uroboric symbolism (illus. 1), positively accented by the unconscious. Being fertilized by eating does not imply ignorance of the sexual act, nor is it in any sense an “unenlightened substitute”; it means “total assimilation” rather than “union with.” It is something different from the above-mentioned fertilization by the wind; in eating, the accent falls on the bodily intake, but in the latter case, on the invisibility of the animating and fertilizing agent.48

48 A psychoanalytical interpretation (Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido”; Jones, “Psychoanalysis of Christianity”) which would reduce the one to the cannibalistic oral stage of libido organization, and the other to flatus at the anal level, is profoundly hurtful to the man whose symbolic products are misunderstood and depreciated in this way.

Accordingly, at the stage of the maternal alimentary uroboros, the breasts are always emphasized, as for instance in the mythological pictures of the many-breasted Great Mother (illus. 12) or in the innumerable statues of the goddess who presses her breasts. Here the nourishing Great Mother is more generative than parturient. Breast and lactic flow are generative elements which can also appear in phallic form, because the milk is then understood symbolically as a fertilizing agent. The milk-giving mother, whose commonest symbol is the cow, is procreative and on that account may even have a paternal character. Her child, as something she “fertilizes,” is then receptive and feminine, regardless of its sex. The maternal uroboros is still hermaphroditic and presexual, like the child. So the mother propagates by nourishing, just as the child is fertilized by eating and gives birth by evacuating. For both of them the nutrient flow is a symbol of life without polar tension, and entirely unsexual.

The accentuation of the Mother’s breast and its phallic character, however, already forms the transition stage. The original situation is one of complete containment in the uroboros. When the phallic character of the breast emerges, or the Mother is seen as the phallus bearer, it is a sign that the infantile subject is beginning to differentiate himself. Active and passive strivings gradually become distinct; the opposites make their appearance. Conceiving by eating and giving birth by excreting are differentiated as separate acts within the nutrient flow, and the ego begins to distinguish itself from the uroboros. This means the end of that beatific uroboric state of autarchy, perfection, and absolute self-sufficiency. So long as the ego was swimming in the belly of the uroboros, a mere ego germ, it shared in that paradisal perfection.

This autarchy holds absolute sway in the womb, where unconscious existence is combined with absence of suffering. Everything is supplied of its own accord; there is no need of the slightest exertion, not even an instinctive reaction, let alone a regulating ego consciousness. One’s own being and the surrounding world—in this case, the mother’s body—exist in a participation mystique, never more to be attained in any environmental relationship. This state of egolessness, interrupted by no pleasure-pain reactions, is naturally experienced by the later ego consciousness as one of the most perfect forms of autarchy, bringing utter contentment.

Plato describes the formation of the world in words that recall this containment within the uroboros:

It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside it to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any orgar by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely within and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.

49Timaeus, 33 (based on the Cornford trans.).

Once more we meet the uroboric cycle of self-propagation on the alimentary level. Just as the uroboros fertilizes itself in the mouth by eating its own tail, so “its own waste provides its own food,” an ever-recurrent symbol of autonomy and self-sufficiency. This primordial image of the autarchic uroboros underlies the homunculus of alchemy, who is begotten in the round —the retort—by rotation of the elements, and it even underlies the perpetuum mobile of physics.

We shall have to concern ourselves with the problem of autarchy at all stages of our inquiry, because it is bound up with an important trend in man’s development, namely, with the problem of his self-formation. So far we have distinguished three stages of uroboric autarchy: the first is the pleromatic stage of paradisal perfection in the unborn, the embryonic stage of the ego, which a later consciousness will contrast with the sufferings of the nonautarchic ego in the world. The second stage is that of the alimentary uroboros, a closed circuit whose “own waste provides its own food.” The third, genital-masturbatory phase is that of Atum “copulating in his own hand.” All these images, like the self-incubation of one made pregnant through tapas—a later spiritual form of autarchy—are images of the self-contained creative principle.

Uroboric autarchy, even when it appears as a dominant archetype, must not be reduced to the level of autoeroticism and narcissism. Both these conceptions are only valid in cases of misdevelopment, when the evolutionary stage ruled by the uroboros persists for an unnaturally long time. But even then the positive aspect must be borne in mind. Autarchy is just as necessary a goal of life and development as is adaptation. Self-development, self-differentiation, and self-formation are trends of the libido no less legitimate than the extraverted relation to the object and the introverted relation to the subject. The negative evaluation implied by the terms “autoeroticism,” “autism,” and “narcissism” is only justified in pathological cases where there are deviations from this natural basic attitude; for the development of the ego, of consciousness, of personality, and, lastly, of individuality itself is actually fostered by the autarchy whose symbol is the uroboros. In many cases, therefore, the appearance of uroboric symbolism, especially if its formative and stabilizing character is strongly marked, as, for instance, in the mandala, indicates that the ego is moving toward the self, rather than in the direction of objective adaptation.

Detachment from the uroboros, entry into the world, and the encounter with the universal principle of opposites are the essential tasks of human and individual development. The process of coming to terms with the objects of the outer and inner worlds, of adapting to the collective life of mankind both within and without, governs with varying degrees of intensity the life of every individual. For the extravert, the accent lies on the objects outside, people, things, and circumstances; for the introvert, it lies on the objects inside, the complexes and archetypes. Even the introvert’s development, which relates mainly to the psychic background, is in this sense “bound to the object,” despite the fact that the objects lie inside him and not outside, being psychic forces rather than social, economic, or physical ones.

But besides this trend of development there is another, equally legitimate, which is self-related or “centroverted,” and which makes for the development of personality and for individual realization. This development may derive its contents from outside and inside equally, and is fed by introversion as much as by extraversion. Its center of gravity, however, lies not in objects and objective dealings, irrespective of whether the objects be external or internal, but in self-formation; that is to say, in the building up and filling out of a personality which, as the nucleus of all life’s activities, uses the objects of the inner and outer worlds as building material for its own wholeness. This wholeness is an end in itself, autarchic; it is quite independent of any utility value it may have either for the collective outside or for the psychic powers inside.

That we are nevertheless concerned here with a creative principle of decisive importance for civilization will be shown in its proper place.

Self-formation, whose effects in the second half of life Jung has termed “individuation,” 50 has its critical developmental pattern not only in the first half of life, but also back in childhood. The growth of consciousness and of the ego is largely governed by this pattern. The stability of the ego, i.e., its ability to stand firm against the disintegrative tendencies of the unconscious and the world, is developed very early, as is also the trend toward extension of consciousness, which is likewise an important prerequisite for self-formation. Although in the first half of life, ego and consciousness are mainly preoccupied with adaptation, and the self-formative trend seems to be in abeyance, yet the beginnings of this self-realization process, while it only becomes noticeable with increasing maturity, lie far back in childhood; and it is here that the first struggles for self-formation are decided. The allegedly narcissistic, autistic, autoerotic, egocentric, and, as we saw, anthropocentric stage of the uroboros, so obvious in the child’s autarchic and naïve self-relatedness, is the precondition of all subsequent self-development.

50 Psychology and Alchemy, index, s.v.

The same uroboric symbolism that stands at the beginning, before ego development starts, reappears at the end, when ego development is replaced by the development of the self, or individuation. When the universal principle of opposites no longer predominates, and devouring or being devoured by the world has ceased to be of prime importance, the uroboros symbol will reappear as the mandala in the psychology of the adult.

The goal of life now is to make oneself independent of the world, to detach oneself from it and stand by oneself. The autarchic character of the uroboros appears as a positive symbol pointing in a new direction. Whereas the uroboric incest of the neurotic and his pleromatic fixation denote an inability to break away from his origins and a refusal to be born into the world, the appearance of mandala and uroboros symbolism in the mature man is an indication that he must once more free himself from this world—for now he is “fed up” with it—and come to himself. He has, by a new process, to bear himself out of this world, just as he had to bear himself into it with his nascent ego.

Hence the “perfect” figure of the uroboros, standing as it does at the center of the unconscious world of the primitive and the child,51 is simultaneously the central symbol of the second half of life and the nucleus of the developmental trend we have called self-formation or centroversion. The symbol of the circular mandala stands at the beginning as at the end. In the beginning it takes the mythological form of paradise; in the end, of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The perfect figure of the circle from whose center radiate the four arms of a cross, in which the opposites are at rest, is a very early and a very late symbol historically. It is found in the sanctuaries of the Stone Age; it is the paradise where the four streams have their source, and in Canaanite mythology it is the central point where the great god El sits, “at the source of the streams, in the midst of the sources of the two seas.” 52

51 Cf. the role played by the circle in the earliest drawings of children (illus. 5).

52 Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, p. 72.

The uroboros, traceable in all epochs and cultures, then appears as the latest symbol of individual psychic development, signifying the roundedness of the psyche, life’s wholeness, and perfection regained. It is the place of transfiguration and illumination (illus. 11 ),of finality, as well as the place of mythological origination.

Thus the Great Round of the uroboros arches over man’s life, encompassing his earliest childhood and receiving him again, in altered form, at the end. But in his own individual life, too, the pleroma of universal unity can be sought and found in religious experience. In mysticism, where the self-re-entrant figure of the uroboros appears as the “ocean of Godhead,” there is often a dissolution of the ego, an ecstatic surrender which is equivalent to uroboric incest. But when, instead of the death ecstasy of the ego, the “Stirb und Werde” principle of rebirth predominates, and the theme of rebirth prevails over that of death, this is not a regression but a creative process.53 Its relation to the uroboric stage will be fully discussed elsewhere, for the distinction between creative and pathological processes is of the utmost importance in all depth psychology.

For both processes the uroboros is appropriate as a symbol of origination. In creative phenomena, too, and not only in religious phenomena, the life-spanning figure of the round signifies the regenerative sea and the source of higher life. It is, however, this same figure whose clinging embrace prevents the neurotic from being born into life. Then it is no longer the primordial figure of the uroboros, but, in the case of a more developed ego, the indication that a further stage has been reached, namely, the dominance of the uroboros over the ego, or the stage of the Great Mother.

THE GREAT MOTHER

WHEN THE EGO BEGINS to emerge from its identity with the uroboros, and the embryonic connection with the womb ceases, the ego takes up a new attitude to the world. The individual’s view of the world changes with every stage of his development, and the variation of archetypes and symbols, gods and myths, is the expression, but also the instrument, of this change.

Detachment from the uroboros means being born and descending into the lower world of reality, full of dangers and discomforts. The nascent ego becomes aware of pleasure-pain qualities, and from them it experiences its own pleasure and pain. Consequently the world becomes ambivalent. The unconscious life of nature, which is also the life of the uroboros, combines the most meaningless destruction with the supreme meaningfulness of instinctive creation; for the meaningful unity of the organism is as “natural” as the cancer which devours it.

The same applies to the unity of life within the uroboros, which, like the swamp, begets, gives birth, and slays again in an endless cycle. The world experienced by the waking ego of humanity is the world of J. J. Bachofen’s matriarchate with its goddesses of motherhood and destiny. The wicked, devouring mother and the good mother lavishing affection are two sides of the great uroboric Mother Goddess who reigns over this psychic stage.

This growing ambivalence gives rise to an equally ambivalent attitude on the part of the ego towards the archetype in whose power it lies.

The overwhelming might of the unconscious, i.e., the devouring, destructive aspect under which it may also manifest itself, is seen figuratively as the evil mother, whether as the bloodstained goddess of death, plague, famine, flood, and the force of instinct, or as the sweetness that lures to destruction. But, as the good mother, she is fullness and abundance; the dispenser of life and happiness, the nutrient earth, the cornucopia of the fruitful womb. She is mankind’s instinctive experience of the world’s depth and beauty, of the goodness and graciousness of Mother Nature who daily fulfills the promise of redemption and resurrection, of new life and new birth (illus. 12, 13, and 18).

Over against all this the ego—consciousness, the individual–remains small and impotent. It feels itself a tiny, defenseless speck, enveloped and helplessly dependent, a little island floating on the vast expanse of the primal ocean. At this stage, consciousness has not yet wrested any firm foothold from the flood of unconscious being. For the primitive ego, everything is still wrapped in the watery abyss, in whose eddyings it washes to and fro without orientation, with no sense of separateness, defenseless against this maelstrom of mysterious being which swamps it again and again from within and without.

Exposed to the dark forces of the world and the unconscious, early man’s life feeling is necessarily one of constant endangerment. Life in the psychic cosmos of the primitive is a life full of danger and uncertainty; and the daemonism of the external world, with its sickness and death, famines and floods, droughts and earthquakes, is heightened beyond measure when contaminated with what we call the inner world. The terrors of a world ruled by the irrationality of chance and mitigated by no knowledge of the laws of causality are made even more sinister by the spirits of the dead, by demons and gods, witches and magicians; invisible workings emanate from all these beings, and the reality of these all-pervading effluences shows itself in fears, emotional outbursts, orgiastic frenzies, and psychic epidemics; seasonal bouts of lust, murderous impulses, visions, dreams, and hallucinations. One has only to know how great, even today, is Western man’s primordial fear of the world despite his relatively highly developed consciousness, to understand the world fear of the primitive, and his feeling of endangerment.

This same horror of nameless, lurking forces is known also to the child, who is still incapable of conscious orientation and discrimination, confronting every event as though it were a devastating innovation, and exposed to every whim of the world and man. In him, too, there dwells this primitive dread which comes from an outside world contaminated with the inside and made mysterious by projection, as we see it in the dynamistic and animistic world picture. This dread is an expression of the dawn situation when a small and feeble ego consciousness pits itself against the cosmos. The supremacy of the world of objects and the world of the unconscious is an experience that has to be accepted. For this reason, fear is a normal phenomenon in the psychology of the child. Although it is outgrown as consciousness increases in strength, it provides at the same time a transpersonal incentive to such development. Vital components in the growth of the ego and in the evolution of consciousness, culture, religion, art, and science spring from the urge to overcome this fear by giving it concrete expression. It is therefore quite wrong to reduce it to personal or environmental factors and to seek to get rid of it in that way.

Owing to the disorientation of the infantile ego, the pleasure-pain components are experienced inseparately from one another, or at any rate the object of experience is colored by a mixture of both. The nonseparation of opposites and the resultant ambivalence of the ego towards all objects evoke a feeling of fear and impotence. The world is uroboric and supreme, whether this uroboric supremacy be experienced as the world or the unconscious, one’s environment, or one’s own body.

The dominance of the uroboros during the infantile phase of ego consciousness is what Bachofen describes as the time of the matriarchate, and all the symbols he associates with it still appear in this psychic stage. We must again emphasize that “stage” refers to a structural layer and not to any historical epoch. In individual development and perhaps also in that of the collective, these layers do not lie on top of one another in an orderly arrangement, but, as in the geological stratification of the earth, early layers may be pushed to the top and late layers to the bottom.

We shall have to consider, later on, the contrast between masculine and feminine development. But one thing, paradoxical though it may seem, can be established at once as a basic law: even in woman, consciousness has a masculine character. The correlation “consciousness-light-day” and “unconsciousness-darkness-night” holds true regardless of sex, and is not altered by the fact that the spirit-instinct polarity is organized on a different basis in men and women. Consciousness, as such, is masculine even in women, just as the unconscious is feminine in men.1

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1 This does not contradict Jung’s statement that the ego of a woman has a feminine character, and her unconscious a masculine one. Woman fights part of the heroic struggle with the help of her masculine consciousness, or, in the language of analytical psychology, her “animus,” but for her this struggle is not the only one and not the final one. However, the problem of “matriarchal consciousness” here at issue can only be dealt with in my work on the psychology of the feminine.

Bachofen’s matriarchate stands for the stage when ego consciousness is undeveloped and still embedded in nature and the world. Consequently the uroboric principle is also associated with the predominance of earth and vegetation symbolism.

It is not the earth that imitates woman, but woman who imitates the earth. Marriage was regarded by the ancients as an agrarian matter; 2 the whole terminology of matrimonial law is borrowed from agriculture,

says Bachofen, recalling Plato’s remark:

In fertility and generation, woman does not set an example to the earth, but the earth sets an example to woman.3

These sayings recognize the priority of the transpersonal and the derivative nature of the personal. Even marriage, the regulation of the sexual principle of opposites, derives from the earth principle of the matriarchate.

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2 Bachofen, Urreligion und antike Symbole, Vol. II, p. 309.

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3 Plato, Menexenus, 238.

At this stage, food symbolism and the organs co-ordinated with it are of prime importance. This explains why Mother Goddess cultures and their mythologies are closely connected with fertility and growth, and particularly with agriculture, hence with the sphere of food, which is the material and bodily sphere.

The stage of the maternal uroboros is characterized by the child’s relation to its mother, who yields nourishment (illus. 12), but at the same time it is an historical period in which man’s dependence on the earth and nature is at its greatest. Connected with both aspects is the dependence of the ego and consciousness on the unconscious. The dependence of the sequence “childman-ego-consciousness” on the sequence “mother-earth-nature-unconscious” illustrates the relation of the personal to the transpersonal and the reliance of the one upon the other.

This stage of development is ruled by the image of the Mother Goddess with the Divine Child (illus. 13). It emphasizes the necessitous and helpless nature of the child and the protective side of the mother. In the form of a goat she suckles the Cretan boy Zeus and protects him from the devouring father; Isis brings the boy Horus back to life when he is stung by a scorpion; and Mary protects the Jesus child fleeing from Herod, just as Leto hides her divinely begotten children from the wrath of the hostile goddess. The child is the companion god of the Great Mother. As child and Cabir, it stands beside and beneath her, her dependent creature. Even for the youthful god, the Great Mother is fate. How much more, then, for the child, whose nature it is to be an appendage of her body.

This relationship is most vividly expressed in the “prehuman” symbols where the Mother is the sea, a lake, or a river, and the child a fish swimming in the enveloping waters.4

Little Horus the son of Isis, Hyacinthus, Erichthonius, and Dionysus, Melicertes the son of Ino, and countless other beloved children are all under the dominion of the all-powerful Mother Goddess. For them she is still the beneficent birth-giver and protectress, the young Mother, the Madonna. There is as yet no conflict, for the original containment of the child in the maternal uroboros is a state of uninterrupted reciprocal bliss. The adult ego connects the Madonna with this infantile stage, but the infantile ego, having as yet no central consciousness, still feels the amorphous pleromatic character of the maternal uroboros.

Nevertheless, this child suffers the same fate as the adolescent lover who succeeds him: he is killed. His sacrifice, death, and resurrection are the ritual center of all child-sacrifice cults. Born to die, dying to be reborn, the child is co-ordinated with the seasonal life of vegetation. The Cretan Zeus-child, nurtured by the Great Mother in the shape of a goat, cow, bitch, sow, dove, or bee,5 is born every year, only to die every year. But the boy is also light and therefore more than mere vegetation:

One myth, very original in its primitivity although only recorded in later times, tells us that the child was born every year, for it speaks of a light which every year shone forth from a grotto “when the blood flowed at the birth of Zeus.” 6

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5 Nilsson, “Die Griechen,” in Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, Vol. II, p. 319.

6 Ibid.

The fate of the dying and sacrificed child, however, is not tragic like that of the adolescent lover. In the return to the deadly Mother, the mater larum of the Romans, he finds shelter and comfort, for containment in the Great Mother enfolds the child, whether in life or in death.7

During the phase when consciousness begins to turn into self-consciousness, that is, to recognize and discriminate itself as a separate individual ego, the maternal uroboros overshadows it like a dark and tragic fate. Feelings of transitoriness and mortality, impotence and isolation, now color the ego’s picture of the uroboros, in absolute contrast to the original situation of contentment. Whereas, in the beginning, the waking state was sheer exhaustion for the feeble ego consciousness, and sleep was bliss, so that it could later surrender itself rapturously to uroboric incest and return to the Great Round, now this return becomes more and more difficult and is accomplished with increasing repugnance as the demands of its own independent existence grow more insistent. For the dawning light of consciousness, the maternal uroboros turns to darkness and night. The passage of time and the problem of death become a dominant life-feeling; Bachofen describes the mother-born, who know that they are born only of earth and mother, as being “sad by nature,” for decay and the necessity of death are one side of the uroboros just because its other side signifies birth and life. The world wheel, the humming loom of time, the Weird Sisters, and the wheel of birth and death, all these symbols express the sadness that rules over the life of the adolescent ego.

In this third phase, the ego germ has already attained a certain degree of autonomy. The embryonic and infantile stages are over, but although the adolescent no longer confronts the uroboros as a mere child, he has still not thrown off its suzerainty.

The development of the ego goes hand in hand with a heightened plastic representation of the objects to which the ego is related. The maternal uroboros, unformed in the sense that the human figure has a form, is now succeeded by the figure of the Great Mother.

The uroboric character of the Great Mother is apparent wherever she is worshiped in androgynous form, for instance as the bearded goddess in Cyprus and Carthage.8 The woman with the beard, or with the phallus, betrays her uroboric character in the nondifferentiation between male and female. Only later will this hybrid be replaced by sexually unequivocal figures, for its mixed and ambivalent character represents the earliest stage from which the opposites will subsequently be differentiated.

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8 Przyluski, “Ursprünge und Entwicklung des Kultes der Mutter-Göttin.”

Thus the infantile consciousness, constantly aware of its ties with, and dependence upon, the matrix from which it sprang, gradually becomes an independent system; consciousness becomes self-consciousness, and a reflecting ego having cognizance of itself emerges as the center of consciousness. Even before the centering of the ego there is consciousness of a sort, just as we can observe conscious acts in the infant before the appearance of ego consciousness. But only when the ego experiences itself as something distinct and different from the unconscious is the embryonic stage overcome, and only then can a conscious system be formed that stands entirely on its own.

This early stage of conscious-unconscious relations is reflected in the mythology of the Mother Goddess and her connection with the son-lover. The Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and Osiris figures 9 in the Near Eastern cultures are not merely born of a mother; on the contrary, this aspect is altogether eclipsed by the fact that they are their mother’s lovers: they are loved, slain, buried, and bewailed by her, and are then reborn through her. The figure of the son-lover follows on the stage of embryo and child. By differentiating himself from the unconscious and reaffirming his masculine otherness, he very nearly becomes the partner of the maternal unconscious; he is her lover as well as her son. But he is not yet strong enough to cope with her, he succumbs to her in death and is devoured. The mother-beloved turns into the terrible Death Goddess. She is still playing cat-and-mouse with him, and she overshadows even his rebirth.

Where, as the god who dies to rise again, he is connected with the fertility of the earth and vegetation, the sovereignty of the Earth Mother is as obvious as his own independence is questionable. The masculine principle is not yet a paternal tendency balancing the maternal-female principle; it is still youthful and vernal, the merest beginning of an independent movement away from the place of origin and the infantile relation.

These relations are summarized in Bachofen:

The mother is earlier than the son. The feminine has priority, while masculine creativity only appears afterwards as a secondary phenomenon. Woman comes first, but man “becomes.” The prime datum is the earth, the basic maternal substance. Visible creation proceeds from her womb, and it is only then that the sexes are divided into two, only then does the masculine form come into being. Thus, male and female do not appear simultaneously; they are not of the same order… . The female is primary, the male is only what comes out of her. He is part of the visible but ever-changing created world; he exists only in perishable form. Woman exists from everlasting, self-subsistent, immutable; man, evolving, is subject to continual decay. In the realm of the physical, therefore, the masculine principle is of second rank, subordinate to the feminine. Herein lies the prototype and justification of gynocracy; herein is rooted that age-old conception of an immortal mother who unites herself with a mortal father. She is perennially the same, but from the man the generations multiply themselves into infinity. Ever the same Great Mother mates with ever new men.

Visible creation, the offspring of Mother Earth, shapes itself into the idea of the Progenitor. Adonis, the image of the annually decaying and resurgent world of nature, becomes “Papas,” the only begetter of what he himself is. It is the same with Plutus. As Demeter’s son, Plutus is the visible, created world which continually renews itself. But as Penia’s husband he is its father and begetter. He is at once the riches teeming out of the womb of the earth, and the bestower of riches; the object and the active potency, creator and creature, cause and effect. But the first earthly manifestation of masculine power takes the form of the son. From the son, we infer the father; the existence and nature of masculine power are evidenced only by the son. On this rests the subordination of the masculine principle to that of the mother. The man appears as creature, not as creator; as effect, not cause. The reverse is true of the mother. She comes before the creature, appearing as cause, the prime giver of life, and not as an effect. She is not to be inferred from the creature, but is known in her own right. In a word, the woman first exists as a mother, and the man first exists as a son.10

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10 Bachofen, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 356–58.

Man then comes forth from woman by a miraculous metamorphosis of nature, which repeats itself in the birth of every male child. In the son, the mother appears transformed into the father. The he-goat, however, is merely Aphrodite’s attribute, subject to her and intended for her usage. (The daughter-sons of Entoria in Eratosthenes’ poem Erigone, quoted by Plutarch, have a similar meaning.) When a man is born of woman’s womb, the mother herself marvels at the new apparition. For she recognizes in the form of her son, the very image of that fecundating power to which she owes her motherhood. Her eyes linger with delight upon his limbs. Man becomes her plaything, the goat is her mount, the phallus her constant companion. Cybele the Mother overshadows Attis, Virbius is dwarfed by Diana, Phaeton by Aphrodite. Everywhere the material, feminine, natural principle has the advantage; it takes the masculine principle, which is secondary and subsists only in perishable form as an ever-changing epiphenomenon, into its lap, as Demeter took the cista.11

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11 Ibid., p. 359.

The young men whom the Mother selects for her lovers may impregnate her, they may even be fertility gods, but the fact remains that they are only phallic consorts of the Great Mother, drones serving the queen bee, who are killed off as soon as they have performed their duty of fecundation.

For this reason these youthful companion gods always appear in the form of dwarfs. The pygmies who were worshiped in Cyprus, Egypt, and Phoenicia—all territories of the Great Mother —display their phallic character just like the Dioscuri, the Cabiri, and the Dactyls, including even the figure of Harpocrates. The attendant serpent—apart from its numinous nature—is likewise a symbol of the fertilizing phallus. That is why the Great Mother is so often connected with snakes. Not only in Creto-Mycenaean culture and its Greek offshoots, but as far back as Egypt, Phoenicia, and Babylon and similarly in the Bible story of Paradise, the snake is the companion of woman.

In Ur and in Erech they found, in the lowest layer of excavations, primitive representations of very old cult images of the Mother Goddess with her child, both having the heads of snakes.12 The uroboric form of the oldest Mother Goddess is the snake, mistress of the earth, of the depths and the underworld, which is why the child who is still attached to her is a snake like herself. Both become humanized in the course of time, but retain the snake’s head. Then the lines of development diverge. The fully human end-figure, the human Madonna with the human child, has her forerunner in figures of the human mother with her companion snake in the form of a child or a phallus, as well as in figures of the human child with the big snake.

The uroboros as a ring-snake, for instance the Babylonian Tiamat and Chaos Serpent, or the Leviathan who, as the ocean, “twines his girdle of waves about the lands,” 13 later divides, or is divided, into two.

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12 Kaiser Wilhelm II, Studien zur Gorgo; Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East, Pl. XIIIc.

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13 Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos, p. 46.

When the Great Mother assumes human form, the masculine part of the uroboros–the snakelike phallus-demon–appears beside her as the residuum of the originally bisexual nature of the uroboros.

Now it is characteristic that the phallic youths, the vegetation deities, are not fertility deities only; as something sprung up from the earth, they are the vegetation itself. Their existence makes the earth fruitful, but as soon as they have reached maturity they must be killed, mown down and harvested. The Great Mother with the ear of corn, her corn son, is an archetype whose power extends as far as the mysteries of Eleusis, the Christian Madonna, and the wheaten Host in which the wheaten body of the son is eaten. The youths who belong to the Great Mother are gods of spring who must be put to death in order to be lamented by the Great Mother and reborn.

All lovers of Mother Goddesses have certain features in common: they are all youths whose beauty and loveliness are as striking as their narcissism. They are delicate blossoms, symbolized by the myths as anemones, narcissi, hyacinths, or violets, which we, with our markedly masculine-patriarchal mentality, would more readily associate with young girls. The only thing we can say about these youths, whatever their names may be, is that they please the amorous goddess by their physical beauty. Apart from that they are, in contrast to the heroic figures of mythology, devoid of strength and character, lacking all individuality and initiative. They are, in every sense of the word, obliging boys whose narcissistic self-attraction is obvious (illus. 14).

The myth of Narcissus makes it quite clear that this is an attraction to one’s own body. Especially characteristic of this adolescent stage is the narcissistic accentuation of the phallus as the epitome of the body and the narcissistic personality.

The cult of phallic fertility, like the phallic sexual orgy, is everywhere typical of the Great Mother. Fertility festivals and rites of spring are sacred to the youthful phallus and its rampant sexuality. Or rather, this would be better formulated the other way round: the phallus of the young god is sacred to the Great Mother. For originally she was not concerned with the youth at all, but with the phallus of which he is the bearer.14 Only later, with secondary personalization, is the primary sacrament of fertility with its gruesome castration rites replaced by the love motif. Then, instead of an impersonal and suprapersonal ritual cosmically guaranteeing the fertility of the earth for the community, we have myths relating to human beings. Only then do we hear tales about the adventures of gods and goddesses with mortals, and the line finally ends with the romantic novel and the love story which are better suited to the personalistic psychology of modern times.

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14 The earliest representation of such a fertility festival may well be the neolithic picture at Cogul, Spain (Hoernes, Urgeschichte der bildenden Kunst in Europa, pl. on p. 154, and p. 678), showing nine women dancing round a phallus-bearing youth. The number 9, if not accidental, further emphasizes the fertility character.

The grim contrast between these orgiastic feasts in which the youth and his phallus play the central part, and the subsequent ritual castration and killing, defines archetypally the situation of the adolescent ego under the dominance of the Great Mother. Although this situation is an historical and cultural one, it must be understood in terms of the psychological evolution of the ego. The relation of son-lover to Great Mother is an archetypal situation which is operative even today, and the overcoming of it is the precondition for any further development of ego consciousness.

Those flower-like boys are not sufficiently strong to resist and break the power of the Great Mother. They are more pets than lovers. The goddess, full of desire, chooses the boys for herself and rouses their sexuality. The initiative never comes from them; they are always the victims, dying like adorable flowers. The youth has at this stage no masculinity, no consciousness, no higher spiritual ego. He is narcissistically identified with his own male body and its distinguishing mark, the phallus. Not only does the Mother Goddess love him simply for his phallus, and, in castrating him, take possession of it to make herself fruitful, but he too is identified with the phallus and his fate is a phallic fate.

All these youths, with their weak egos and no personality, only have a collective fate, not a fate of their own; they are not yet individuals and so they have no individual existence, only a ritual one. Nor is the Mother Goddess related to an individual, but only to the youth as an archetypal figure.

Even rebirth through the Great Mother, her healing and positive aspect, is in this sense “unrelated.” It is not an ego, much less a self or a personality, that is reborn and knows itself to be reborn; rebirth is a cosmic occurrence, anonymous and universal like “life.” From the point of view of the Earth Mother or Great Mother, all vegetation is the same, every newborn creature is a mother’s darling who remains one and the same in every spring and in every birth, just as she remains one and the same. But this only means that for her the newborn is a reborn, and every beloved the same, the one beloved. And when the goddess ritually unites herself with every fertility king, with father, son, and grandchild, or with each of her archpriests, these are always one and the same for her, because for her sexual union means only one thing, no matter who the bearer of the phallus may be, which is the only thing that does matter. Similarly, in her priestesses, the sacred prostitutes, she is a multiple womb, but in reality she always remains herself, the one Goddess.

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.15 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.

The personal incarnation of this goddess, i.e., the particular woman, is of no consequence. For the man she is a kedesha, a holy one (kadosh = holy), the goddess who stirs up the deeper layers of his being in sexuality. Yoni and lingam, female and male, are two principles which come together beyond the person, in holiness, where the personal is shed away and remains insignificant.

The youths, who personify the spring, belong to the Great Mother. They are her bondslaves, her property, because they are the sons she has born. Consequently the chosen ministers and priests of the Mother Goddess are eunuchs. They have sacrificed the thing that is for her the most important—the phallus. Hence the phenomeon of castration associated with this stage appears here for the first time in its proper sense, because specifically related to the genital organ. The castration threat makes its appearance with the Great Mother and is deadly. For her, loving, dying, and being emasculated are the same thing. Only the priests, at least in later times, escape being put to death because, by castrating themselves, they have voluntarily submitted to a symbolical death for her sake (illus. 15).16

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15 Harding, Woman’s Mysteries.

An essential characteristic of this adolescent ego stage is that the female, under the aspect of the Great Mother, is experienced as having a negative fascination. Two features are especially common and well marked: the first is the bloody and savage nature of the great Mother Goddess, the second is her power as a sorceress and a witch.

Worshiped from Egypt to India, from Greece and Asia Minor to darkest Africa, the Great Mother was always regarded as a goddess of the chase and of war; her rites were bloody, her festivals orgiastic. All these features are essentially interconnected. This “blood layer” deep down in the great Earth Mother only makes it more understandable why the youths she loves should fear castration.

The womb of the earth clamors for fertilization, and blood sacrifices and corpses are the food she likes best. This is the terrible aspect, the deadly side of the earth’s character. In the earliest fertility cults, the gory fragments of the sacrificial victim were handed round as precious gifts and offered up to the earth, in order to make her fruitful. These human sacrifices for fertility occur all the world over quite independently of one another, in the rites of America and in the Eastern Mediterranean, in Asia and in northern Europe. Everywhere blood plays a leading part in fertility ritual and human sacrifice. The great terrestrial law that there can be no life without death was early understood, and still earlier represented in ritual, to mean that a strengthening of life can only be bought at the cost of sacrificial death. But the word “bought” is really a late and spurious rationalization. Slaughter and sacrifice, dismemberment and offerings of blood, are magical guarantees of earthly fertility. We misunderstand these rites if we call them cruel. For the early cultures, and even for the victims themselves, this sequence of events was necessary and self-evident.

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III

THE SEPARATION OF THE WORLD PARENTS: THE PRINCIPLE OF OPPOSITES

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This Maori creation myth contains all the elements of the stage in the evolution of human consciousness which follows that of uroboric dominance. The separation of the World Parents, the splitting off of opposites from unity, the creation of heaven and earth, above and below, day and night, light and darkness—the deed that is a monstrous misdeed and a sin—all the features that occur in isolation in numerous other myths are here molded into a unity.

Speaking of this separation of the World Parents, Frazer says:

It is a common belief of primitive peoples that sky and earth were originally joined together, the sky either lying flat on the earth or being raised so little above it that there was not room between them for people to walk upright. Where such beliefs prevail, the present elevation of the sky above the earth is often ascribed to the might of some god or hero, who gave the firmament such a shove that it shot up and has remained up above ever since.2

Elsewhere Frazer interprets the castration of the primordial father as the separation of the World Parents. In this we see a reference to the original uroboric situation where heaven and earth are known as “the two mothers.”

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2 The Worship of Nature, p. 26.

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Again and again we come back to the basic symbol, light, which is central to the creation myths. This light, the symbol of consciousness and illumination, is the prime object of the cosmogonies of all peoples. Accordingly, “in the creation legends of nearly all peoples and religions, the process of creation merges with the coming of the light.” 3 As the Maori text says: “The light, the light, the seeking, the searching, in chaos, in chaos.”

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3 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Manheim, Vol. II, p. 96.

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Only in the light of consciousness can man know. And this act of cognition, of conscious discrimination, sunders the world into opposites, for experience of the world is only possible through opposites.

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Consciousness = deliverance: that is the watchword inscribed above all man’s efforts to deliver himself from the embrace of the primordial uroboric dragon. Once the ego sets itself up as center and establishes itself in its own right as ego consciousness, the original situation is forcibly broken down. We can see what this self-identification of the waking human personality with the ego really means only when we remember the contrasted state of participation mystique ruled by uroboric unconsciousness. Trite as it seems to us, the logical statement of identity–“I am I”–the fundamental statement of consciousness, is in reality a tremendous achievement. This act, whereby an ego is posited and the personality identified with that ego–however fallacious that identification may later prove to be–alone creates the possibility of a self-orienting consciousness. In this connection we would again quote that passage from the Upanishads:

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4 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1. 4. 1—3, trans. by Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.

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If, as we saw earlier, existence in the uroboros was existence in participation mystique, this also means that no ego center had as yet developed to relate the world to itself and itself to the world. Instead, man was all things at once, and his capacity for change was well-nigh universal. He was at one and the same time part of his group, a “Red Cockatoo,” 5 and an embodied ancestral spirit. Everything inside was outside, that is to say, all his ideas came to him from outside, as commands from a spirit or magician or “medicine bird.” But also, everything outside was inside. Between the hunted animal and the will of the hunter there existed a magical, mystical rapport, just as it existed between the healing of the wound and the weapon that made it, since the wound deteriorated if the weapon were heated.

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This lack of differentiation was precisely what constituted the weakness and defenselessness of the ego, which in its turn reinforced the participation. Thus, in the beginning, everything was double and had a double meaning, as we have seen from the intermingling of male and female, good and bad, in the uroboros. But life in the uroboros meant being linked at the same time, at the deepest level, with the unconscious and with nature, between which there subsisted a fluid continuum that coursed through man like a current of life. He was caught up in this circuit flowing from the unconscious to the world and from the world back to the unconscious, and its tidal motion buffeted him to and fro in the alternating rhythm of life to which he was exposed without knowing it. Differentiation of the ego, separation of the World Parents, and dismemberment of the primordial dragon set man free as a son and expose him to the light, and only then is he born as a personality with a stable ego.

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In man’s original world picture, world unity was unimpaired. The uroboros was alive in everything. Everything was pregnant with meaning, or could at least become so. In this world continuum, single patches of life became visible here and there through their ever-changing capacity to evoke wonder and impress themselves as mana-charged contents. This “impressionability” was universal—that is to say, every part of the world was capable of making an impression, everything was potentially “holy” or, more accurately speaking, could turn out to be astonishing and thus charged with mana.

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The world begins only with the coming of light (illus. 20), which constellates the opposition between heaven and earth as the basic symbol of all other opposites. Before that, there reigns the “illimitable darkness,” as is said in the Maori myth. With the rising of the sun or—in the language of ancient Egypt—the creation of the firmament, which divides the upper from the lower, mankind’s day begins, and the universe becomes visible with all its contents.

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In relation to man and his ego, the creation of light and the birth of the sun are bound up with the separation of the World Parents and the positive and negative consequences which ensue for the hero who separates them.

There are, however, other accounts of the creation as an unrelated, cosmic phenomenon, a stage in the evolution of the world itself. But even in the version we shall now quote, taken from the Upanishads, we can see the personal agency at work behind the evolutionary process, though in this text it is not accentuated.

The sun is brahma–this is the teaching. Here is the explanation:

In the beginning, this world was nonbeing. This nonbeing became being. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay there for a year. It burst asunder. One part of the eggshell was of silver, the other part was of gold.

The silver part is the earth, the golden part is the sky… .

What was born of it, is yonder sun. When it was born there were shouts and hurrahs, all beings and all desires rose up to greet it. Therefore at its rising and at its every return, there are shouts and hurrahs, all beings and all desires rise up to greet it.6

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6 Chhandogya Upanishad 3. 19. 1–3 (based on Hume and Deussen translations).

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Cassirer has shown, with ample supporting material, how the opposition between light and darkness has informed the spiritual world of all peoples and molded it into shape. The sacred world order and the sacred space—precinct or sanctuary—were “oriented” by this opposition.7 Not only man’s theology, religion, and ritual, but the legal and economic orders that later grew out of them, the formation of the state and the whole pattern of secular life, down to the notion of property and its symbolism, are derived from this act of discrimination and the setting of boundaries made possible by the coming of light.

World-building, city-building, the layout of temples, the Roman military encampment, and the spatial symbolism of the Christian Church are all reflections of the original mythology of space, which, beginning with the opposition between light and darkness, classifies and arranges the world in a continuous series of opposites.

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Space only came into being when, as the Egyptian myth puts it, the god of the air, Shu, parted the sky from the earth by stepping between them (illus. 21). Only then, as a result of his light-creating and space-creating intervention, was there heaven above and earth below, back and front, left and right–in other words, only then was space organized with reference to an ego.

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Originally there were no abstract spatial components; they all possessed a magical reference to the body, had a mythical, emotional character, and were associated with gods, colors, meanings, allusions.8 Gradually, with the growth of consciousness, things and places were organized into an abstract system and differentiated from one another; but originally thing and place belonged together in a continuum and were fluidly related to an ever-changing ego. In this inchoate state there was no distinction between I and You, inside and outside, or between men and things, just as there was no clear dividing line between man and the animals, man and man, man and the world. Everything participated in everything else, lived in the same undivided and overlapping state in the world of the unconscious as in the world of dreams. Indeed, in the fabric of images and symbolic presences woven by dreams, a reflection of this early situation still lives on in us, pointing to the original promiscuity of human life.

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Not only space but time and the passage of time are oriented by the mythical space picture, and this formative capacity to orient oneself by the sequence of light and darkness, thus widening the scope of consciousness and one’s grasp of reality, extends from the phasal organization of primitive society, with its division into age groups, to the modern “psychology of life’s stages.” In practically all cultures, therefore, the division of the world into four, and the opposition of day and night, play an extremely important part. Because light, consciousness, and culture are made possible only by the separation of the World Parents, the original uroboros dragon often appears as the chaos dragon. From the standpoint of the orderly light-and-day world of consciousness, all that existed before was night, darkness, chaos, tohubohu. The inward as well as the outward development of culture begins with the coming of light and the separation of the World Parents. Not only do day and night, back and front, upper and lower, inside and outside, I and You, male and female, grow out of this development of opposites and differentiate themselves from the original promiscuity, but opposites like “sacred” and “profane,” “good” and “evil,” are now assigned their place in the world.

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The embedding of the germinal ego in the uroboros corresponds sociologically to the state in which collective ideas prevailed, and the group and group consciousness were dominant. In this state the ego was not an autonomous, individualized entity with a knowledge, morality, volition, and activity of its own; it functioned solely as part of the group, and the group with its superordinate power was the only real subject.

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The emancipation of the ego, when the “son” establishes itself as an ego and separates the World Parents, is accomplished on several different levels.

The fact that, at the beginning of conscious development, everything is still interfused, and that each archetypal stage of transformation such as the separation of the World Parents always reveals to us different levels of action, with different effects and values, makes the task of presentation extraordinarily difficult.

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The experience of “being different,” which is the primary fact of nascent ego consciousness and which occurs in the dawnlight of discrimination, divides the world into subject and object; orientation in time and space succeeds man’s vague existence in the dim mists of prehistory and constitutes his early history.

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Besides disentangling itself from its fusion with nature and the group, the ego, having now opposed itself to the nonego as another datum of experience, begins simultaneously to constellate its independence of nature as independence of the body. Later we shall have to come back to the question of how the ego and consciousness experience their own reality by distinguishing themselves from the body. This is one of the fundamental facts of the human mind and its discovery of itself as something distinct from nature. Early man is in the same case as the infant and small child: his body and his “inside” are part of an alien world.

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The acquisition of voluntary muscular movement, i.e., the fact that the ego discovers, in its own “person,” that its conscious will can control the body, may well be the basic experience at the root of all magic. The ego, having its seat, as it were, in the head, in the cerebral cortex, and experiencing the nether regions of the body as something strange to it, an alien reality, gradually begins to recognize that essential portions of this nether corporeal world are subject to its will and volition. It discovers that the “sovereign power of thought” is a real and actual fact: the hand in front of my face, and the foot lower down, do what I will.

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The obviousness of these facts should not blind us to the enormous impression which this very early discovery must make, and unquestionably has made, on every infantile ego nucleus. If technics are an extension of the “tool” as a means for dominating the world around us, then the tool in its turn is nothing but an extension of the voluntary musculature. Man’s will to dominate nature is but an extension and projection of that fundamental experience of the ego’s potential power over the body, discovered in the voluntariness of muscular movement.

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Opposition between ego and body is, as we have said, an original condition. Containment in the uroboros and its supremacy over the ego mean, on the bodily level, that ego and consciousness are at the outset continually at the mercy of the instincts, impulses, sensations, and reactions deriving from the world of the body. To begin with, this ego, existing first as a point and then as an island, knows nothing of itself and consequently nothing of its difference. As it grows stronger, it detaches itself more and more from the world of the body. This leads finally, as we know, to a state of systematized ego consciousness where the entire bodily realm is to a large extent unconscious, and the conscious system is split off from the body as the representative of unconscious processes. Though the split is not in effect so drastic as this, the illusion of it is so powerful and so real for the ego that the body region and the unconscious can only be rediscovered with a great effort. In yoga, for instance, a strenuous attempt is made to reconnect the conscious mind with the unconscious bodily processes. This exercise may, if overdone, lead to illness, but in itself it is quite sensible.

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In the beginning, the realm of ego consciousness and the spiritual and psychic realm are indissolubly united with the body. Instinct and volition are as little divided as instinct and consciousness. Even in modern man, depth psychology has found that the division which has resulted between these two spheres in the course of cultural development—for their mutual tensions constitute what we call culture—is largely an illusion. The activity of instinct lies behind actions which the ego coordinates with its sphere of decision and volition, and to an even higher degree instincts and archetypes are at the back of our conscious attitudes and orientations.

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But, whereas in modern man there is at any rate the possibility of decision and conscious orientation, the psychology of archaic man and of the child is marked by a mingling of these spheres. Volitions, moods, emotions, instincts, and somatic reactions are still for all practical purposes fused together. The same applies to the original ambivalence of affects, which are later resolved into antithetical positions. Love and hate, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, yes and no, are at first juxtaposed and interfused, and do not possess the antithetical character they subsequently appear to have.

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Depth psychology has made the discovery that even today the opposites lie closer together and are more intimately connected than their actual degree of separation would lead one to suppose. Not only in the neurotic, but in the normal person too, the poles are hard side by side; pleasure turns to pain, hate to love, sorrow to joy, far more readily than we would expect. This can be seen most clearly in children. Laughing and crying, starting a thing and then stopping it, liking and disliking, follow fast on one another’s heels. No position is fixed, and none is a flat contradiction of its opposite, but both exist peaceably side by side and are realized in closest succession. Influences stream in and out from all sides; environment, ego, and interior world, objective tendencies, consciousness, and bodily tendencies operate simultaneously, and all the while no ego worth mentioning, or only a very diminutive ego, arranges, centers, accepts and rejects.

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It is the same with the pair of opposites male and female. Man’s original hermaphroditic disposition is still largely conserved in the child. Without the disturbing influences from outside which foster the visible manifestation of sexual differences at an early date, children would just be children; and actively masculine features are in fact as common and effective in girls as are passively feminine ones in boys. It is only cultural influences, whose differentiating tendencies govern the child’s early upbringing, that lead to an identification of the ego with the monosexual tendencies of the personality and to the suppression, or repression, of one’s congenital contrasexuality. (See Part II.)

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The split between inside and outside in archaic man and the child is no more complete than that between good and evil. The fancied playmate is real and unreal at once, like everything else, and the image in the dream as real as the reality outside. Here the true “Reality of the Soul” 9 still holds sway, that versatile make-believe of which the wizardry of art and fairy tale is a reflection. Here each of us can be all things, and so-called external reality has not yet made us forget the equally powerful reality within.

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Yet whereas the child’s world is entirely governed by these laws, in the world of archaic man only certain portions of his reality have remained childish and original in this sense. There is a world reality besides, where he masters his surroundings rationally and practically, organizes and elaborates; in other words, has the sort of culture we find intensified in modern man.

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Nor, as we have said, is the division between good and evil present in the beginning. Man and world have not yet been divided into pure and impure, good and bad; there is at most the difference between that which works, is pregnant with mana and loaded with taboo, and that which does not work. But what works is pre-eminent, beyond good and evil. Whatever works is powerful, be it black or white, or both, simultaneously or by turns. The consciousness of archaic man is no more discriminating than a child’s. There are good magicians and bad magicians, but their range of action seems far more important than the goodness or badness of the act. What we find so difficult to understand is the credulous intensity of this level of existence, where seeming evil is accepted as readily as good, and there is, apparently, not even the beginning of what man subsequently claims to experience and recognize as a moral world order.

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Within the original uroboric unity there were numerous organic and symbolic layers lying close together, which only became distinct and visible at the stage of separation. This confirms Jung’s view of the polyvalence of a developmentally early constitution, and hence of the infantile constitution. In later stages different layers of symbols detach themselves from the original promiscuity and confront the ego. World and nature, the unconscious and the body, the group and the family, are all different systems of relationship which, as independent parts separated off from the ego and from one another, now exert a variety of effects and build up a multiplicity of systems operating together with the ego. But this unfolding of position and counterposition only partly describes the situation that has arisen at the stage of the separation of the World Parents.

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The transition from the uroboros to the adolescent stage was characterized by the emergence of fear and the death feeling, because the ego, not yet invested with full authority, felt the supremacy of the uroboros as an overwhelming danger. This change of emotional tonality must be emphasized at all phases of conscious development, and its presence as an undertone indicates emotional components whose significance has still to be discussed.

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We have already seen, when dealing with the adolescent, how the change from passivity to activity at first took the form of resistance, defiance, and a self-division which, at that stage, led to self-destruction. Similarly, at the stage of the son who separates the World Parents, and its equivalent the fight with the dragon, there is not only a change of content but a changed level of emotionality.

The action of the ego in separating the World Parents is a struggle, a creative act, and in later sections devoted to the fight with the dragon we shall give prominence to this aspect, and also to the decisive change of personality that follows from this resolve to overcome the danger.

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For the moment, however, we shall concern ourselves with the other aspect of this deed: the fact that it is experienced as guilt, and moreover as original guilt, a fall. But first we have to discuss the emotional situation, and to understand that this deed, though it manifests itself as the coming of light, and as the creation of the world and of consciousness, is vitiated by a sense of suffering and loss so strong as almost to offset the creative gain.

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Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord. With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace. We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world. Other myths dwell on the “effortlessness” of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the “everlastingness,” the deathlessness, of such an existence.

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The factor common to all these early stages is that psychologically they tell us something about a pre-ego stage when there was no division into a conscious and an unconscious world. To that extent all these stages are pre-individual and collective. There was no feeling of loneliness, which is the necessary concomitant of egohood and particularly of an ego conscious of its own existence.

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Ego consciousness not only brings a sense of loneliness; it also introduces suffering, toil, trouble, evil, sickness, and death into man’s life as soon as these are perceived by an ego. By discovering itself, the lonely ego simultaneously perceives the negative and relates to it, so that it at once establishes a connection between these two facts, taking its own genesis as guilt, and suffering, sickness, and death as condign punishment. The whole life feeling of primitive man is haunted by the negative influences all around him, and at the same time by the consciousness that he is to blame for everything negative that befalls.

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This is as much as to say that for primitive man chance does not exist; everything negative comes from the infringement of a taboo, even though the infringement be unconscious. His Weltanschauung, or his conception of cause and effect, is for the most part emotionally colored, because based on a life feeling that has been profoundly disturbed by the growth of ego consciousness. Gone is the original uroboric life feeling, for the more differentiated and self-related his ego consciousness becomes, the more it feels its own pettiness and impotence, with the result that dependence on the powers that be becomes the dominant feeling. The torpor of the animal, but also, as Rilke says, its “open” gaze, is now lost.

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And yet within the warm and watchful beast

is weight and care of some great melancholy.

For, to the beast as well, there always clings

what often overwhelms us—memory,

as though the goal to which we strive had once

been nearer and more trustful, and its contact

immeasurably tender. All is distance here;

there it was breath. Compared with that first home

the second seems a hybrid thing and windy.

O rapture of the little creature which

stays ever in the womb that brought it forth!

Joy of the gnat that on its wedding day

is womb-enspasmed still—for womb is all.

But for the creature that has become an ego, only the “other” counts:

This is called fate: this being opposite

and being ever more in opposition.10

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10 Rainer Maria Rilke, Eighth Elegy.

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This being opposite and no longer contained in the womb is the dark feeling that pervades consciousness wherever the ego finds itself isolated and alone.

It is the mark of man to be pitted against the world, it is his sorrow and his specialty; for what at first seems loss turns out a positive gain. But not only that; on a higher level there falls to man, and to man alone, the essential mark of “relatedness,” because he, as an individual, enters into relations with an object, be it another man, a thing, the world, his own soul, or God. He then becomes part of a higher and qualitatively different unity, which is no longer the pre-egoid unity of uroboric containment, but an alliance in which the ego, or rather the self, the totality of the individual, is preserved intact. But this new unity is likewise based on the “opposition” that came into the world with the separation of the World Parents and the dawning of ego consciousness.

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Only with the separation of the World Parents was the world made dual, as is said in the Jewish midrash. This separation is due to the fundamental cleavage into a conscious portion of the personality, whose center is the ego, and a far greater unconscious portion. The partition also causes a modification of the ambivalence principle. Whereas, originally, the opposites could function side by side without undue strain and without excluding one another, now, with the development and elaboration of the opposition between conscious and unconscious, they fly apart. That is to say, it is no longer possible for an object to be loved and hated at the same time. Ego and consciousness identify themselves in principle with one side of the opposition and leave the other in the unconscious, either preventing it from coming up at all, i.e., consciously suppressing it, or else repressing it, i.e., eliminating it from consciousness without being aware of doing so. Only deep psychological analysis can then discover the unconscious counterposition. But so long as the ego at the prepsychological level is unaware of this, it remains oblivious of the other side, and consequently loses the wholeness and completeness of its world picture.

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This loss of wholeness and of total unconscious integration with the world is experienced as the primary loss; it is the original deprivation which occurs at the very outset of the ego’s evolution.

We could call this primary loss the primary castration. It must be emphasized, however, that primary castration, in contrast to castration on the matriarchal level, has no genital reference. In the former case the separation and loss is like being cut off from a larger context; on the personalistic level, for instance, it is felt as separation from the mother’s body. It is a self-imposed loss, a severance accomplished by the ego itself but nevertheless experienced as loss and guilt. This self-liberation is a severing of the umbilical cord, not a mutilation; but with it the greater unity, the mother-child identity within the uroboros, is shattered for good.

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The threat of matriarchal castration impends over an ego that has not yet broken its tie with the Great Mother, and we showed how, for such an ego, self-loss was symbolically identical with loss of the penis. But the primary loss at the stage of the separation of the World Parents concerns a complete individual who makes himself independent by this very act. Here the loss has an emotional coloring, is expressed in guilt feelings, and has its source in the loss of participation mystique.

The sloughing off of the bisexual uroboros can have either a paternal or a maternal accent, and may be felt as a severance from the father-god or from the paradisal mother situation, or both.

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Primary castration is correlated with original sin and the loss of paradise. In the Judaeo-Christian sphere of culture the old mythological motifs were consciously modified and reinterpreted, so that we find only vestiges of the myth of the separation of the World Parents. Nor does the literature contain anything more than a faint echo of the Babylonian version, where the divine hero Marduk cuts up the serpent Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, and builds the world from the pieces. In accordance with the Hebrew conception of God and the world, the moral element now occupies the foreground, knowledge of good and evil is accounted a sin, and relinquishment of the pristine uroboric state is degraded to a punitive expulsion from paradise.

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The theme is not, however, confined to non-Greek cultures. Among the pre-Socratics, Anaximander held that the principle of original guilt is cosmic. In this sense is interpreted his saying:

The origin of all things is the Boundless. And into that from which they arise they pass away once more, as is meet; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.10a

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.

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10a Trans. by Burnet, in Early Greek Philosophy, p. 52.

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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 lower 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.

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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 countermovement 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.

Thus, in a treatise on the doctrine of evil in the Lurian cabala, we read:

Man is not only the end purpose of creation, nor is his dominion limited to this world alone, but on him depends the perfection of the higher worlds and of God himself.

This saying, emphasizing as it does the distinctly anthropcentric standpoint of the cabala, forms the basis of the following declaration:

In the view of the cabala, original sin consisted essentially in this: that damage was done to the Deity. Concerning the nature of this damage there are various views. The most widely accepted is that the First Man, Adam Kadmon, made a division between King and Queen, and that he sundered the Shekinah from union with her spouse, and from the whole hierarchy of the Sephiroth.11

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11 Tishby, “The Doctrine of Evil and the ‘Klipah’ in the Lurian Cabala.”

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Here we have the old archetype of the separation of the World Parents, but in a state of purity unknown even to the Gnostics, by whom the cabala may conceivably have been influenced. Generally speaking, the influence of Gnosticism seems highly questionable in those numerous passages where archetypal formulations and images occur in the cabalistic writings, as for instance in Nathan of Gaza, the disciple and inspirer of Sabbatai Zebi.12 We must resign ourselves to the fact that this influence, like the migration theory, is secondary, and we shall have to substitute for it Jung’s discovery, since confirmed by all depth-psychological analysis, that archetypal images are operative in every man and appear spontaneously whenever the layer of the collective unconscious is activated.

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12 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 283 f.

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In the great religions, the primal deed, the separation of the World Parents, is theologized. An attempt is made to rationalize and moralize the undeniable sense of deficiency that attaches to the emancipated ego. Interpreted as sin, apostasy, rebellion, disobedience, this emancipation is in reality the fundamental liberating act of man which releases him from the yoke of the unconscious and establishes him as an ego, a conscious individual. But because this act, like every act and every liberation, entails sacrifice and suffering, the decision to take such a step is all the more momentous.

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The separation of the World Parents is not merely an interruption of the original cohabitation, and a destruction of the perfect cosmic state symbolized by the uroboros. This in itself, or in conjunction with what we have called the primary loss, would be enough to induce a feeling of original guilt, precisely because the uroboric state is by nature a state of wholeness, embracing the world and man. The decisive thing, however, is that this separation is not experienced only as passive suffering and loss, but also as an actively destructive deed. It is symbolically identical with killing, sacrifice, dismemberment, and castration.

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Now it is a very striking fact that what was done to the youthful lover by the maternal uroboros is at this point done to the uroboros itself. In mythology it happens just as often that the son-god castrates the father-god as that he cuts up the primordial dragon and builds the world from it. Mutilation—a theme which also occurs in alchemy—is the condition of all creation. So here we come upon two archetypal motifs that belong absolutely together and appear in all creation myths. Without the slaying of the old parents, their dismemberment and neutralization, there can be no beginning. We shall have to examine at some length this problem of parental murder. Obviously it entails a genuine and necessary guilt.

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The emancipation of the youthful lover from the uroboros begins with an act which was shown to be a negative act, an act of destruction. Its psychological interpretation then enabled us to understand the symbolical nature of the “masculinity” which lies at the root of all consciousness.

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We described the adolescent’s advance towards independence and liberation as “self-division.” To become conscious of oneself, to be conscious at all, begins with saying “no” to the uroboros, to the Great Mother, to the unconscious. And when we scrutinize the acts upon which consciousness and the ego are built up, we must admit that to begin with they are all negative acts. To discriminate, to distinguish, to mark off, to isolate oneself from the surrounding context—these are the basic acts of consciousness. Indeed, experimentation as the scientific method is a typical example of this process: a natural connection is broken down and something is isolated and analyzed, for the motto of all consciousness is determinatio est negatio. As against the tendency of the unconscious to combine and melt down, to say to everything “tat tvam asi”–“that art thou”– consciousness strikes back with the reply “I am not that.”

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Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the nonego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.

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The breakdown of the uroboric initial state leads to differentiation in duality, decombination of the original ambivalence, division of the hermaphroditic constitution, and the splitting of the world into subject and object, inside and outside, and to the creation of good and evil, which are only discriminated with the expulsion from the uroboric Garden of Paradise where the opposites lie down together. Naturally enough, as soon as man becomes conscious and acquires an ego, he feels himself a divided being, since he also possesses a formidable other side which resists the process of becoming conscious. That is, he finds himself in doubt, and so long as his ego remains immature, this doubt may drive him to desperation and even to suicide, which always means a murder of the ego and a self-mutilation that culminates with his death in the Great Mother.

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Until it has finally consolidated itself and is able to stand on its own feet, which, as we shall see, is only possible after the successful fight with the dragon, the adolescent ego remains insecure. Its insecurity derives from the internal split into two opposed psychic systems, and of these the conscious system, with which the ego identifies itself, is still feeble, undeveloped, and somewhat hazy about the meaning of its specific principle. This inner insecurity, taking the form, as we have said, of doubt, produces two complementary phenomena that are characteristic of the adolescent phase. The first is narcissism with its excessive egocentricity, self-complacency, and self-absorption; the other is Weltschmerz.

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Narcissism is a necessary transitional phase during the consolidation of the ego. The emancipation of ego consciousness from thralldom to the unconscious leads, like all emancipation, to an exaggeration of one’s own position and importance. The “puberty of ego consciousness” is accompanied by a depreciation of the place from which one came—the unconscious. This deflation of the unconscious tends in the same direction as secondary personalization and the exhaustion of emotional components (cf. Part II). The meaning of all these processes lies in strengthening the principle of ego consciousness. But the danger inherent in this line of development is exaggerated self-importance, a megalomaniac ego consciousness which thinks itself independent of everything, and which begins by devaluing and repressing the unconscious and ends by denying it altogether. Overvaluation of the ego, as a symptom of immature consciousness, is compensated by a depressive self-destruction which, in the form of Weltschmerz and self-hatred, often culminates in suicide, all these being characteristic symptoms of puberty.

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An analysis of this state discloses a feeling of guilt whose source is transpersonal; i.e., it goes back beyond the entanglements of the personalistic “family romance.” The heinous deed of separating the World Parents appears as original guilt. But–and this is the important thing—it is in a sense the World Parents, the unconscious itself, which makes the accusation, and not the ego. As a representative of the ancient law, the uroboric unconscious struggles hard to prevent the emancipation of her son, consciousness, and so once again we find ourselves back in the orbit of the Terrible Mother who wants to destroy the son. So long as the conscious ego bows down before this accusation and accepts the death sentence, it is behaving like the son-lover and, like him, will end in self-destruction.

196

It is very different when the son turns the tables upon the Terrible Mother and adopts her destructive attitude, directing it not against himself but against her. This process is represented mythologically in the fight with the dragon. Summing up the change of personality which we shall be examining later as a consequence of this fight, we can say that the process corresponds psychologically to the formation of the conscious, “higher ego” of the hero, and to the raising of the buried treasure, Knowledge. Nevertheless the ego is bound to feel its aggression as guilt, because killing, dismemberment, castration, and sacrifice remain guilt even though they serve the necessary purpose of vanquishing such an enemy as the uroboros dragon.

196

This destruction is closely associated with the act of eating and assimilation, and is often represented as such. The formation of consciousness goes hand-in-hand with a fragmentation of the world continuum into separate objects, parts, figures, which can only then be assimilated, taken in, introjected, made conscious—in a word, “eaten.” When the sun-hero, having been swallowed by the dragon of darkness, cuts out its heart and eats it, he is taking into himself the essence of this object. Consequently aggression, destruction, dismemberment, and killing are intimately associated with the corresponding bodily functions of eating, chewing, biting, and particularly with the symbolism of the teeth as instruments of these activities, all of which are essential for the formation of an independent ego. In this lies the deeper meaning of aggression during the early phases of development. Far from being sadistic, it is a positive and indispensable preparation for the assimilation of the world.

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But, precisely because of its elemental bond with the world of nature, the primitive mind has always regarded killing, even the destruction of animals and plants, as an outrage upon the world order that cried out for expiation. The spirits of the slain take their revenge unless propitiated. Fear of the vengeance of the powers that be for the separation of the World Parents and for man’s criminal emancipation from the power of the divine uroboros, this is the feeling of dread and guilt, this the original sin, with which the history of mankind opens.

197

The struggle against this fear, against the danger of being swallowed up again in the initial chaos through a regression that undoes the work of emancipation, is enacted in all its modulations in the fight with the dragon. Not until then will the ego and consciousness be firmly established. The son of the World Parents has to prove himself a hero in this fight; the ego, newborn and helpless, has to transform itself into a procreator and conqueror. The victorious hero stands for a new beginning, the beginning of creation, but a creation which is the work of man and which we call culture, as opposed to natural creation which is given to man at the outset and overshadows his beginnings.

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As we have already pointed out, it is consistent with the conscious-unconscious structure of the opposites that the unconscious should be regarded as predominantly feminine, and consciousness as predominantly masculine. This correlation is self-evident, because the unconscious, alike in its capacity to bring to birth and to destroy through absorption, has feminine affinities. The feminine is conceived mythologically under the aspect of this archetype; uroboros and Great Mother are both feminine dominants, and all the psychic constellations over which they rule are under the dominance of the unconscious. Conversely, its opposite, the system of ego consciousness, is masculine. With it are associated the qualities of volition, decision, and activity as contrasted with the determinism and blind “drives” of the preconscious, egoless state.

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The development of ego consciousness, as we have sketched it, consisted in its gradual emancipation from the overpowering embrace of the unconscious, which was exerted to the full by the uroboros and to a lesser degree by the Great Mother. Observing the process more closely, we found that its central features were the growing independence of masculinity, originally present only in the germ, and the systematization of ego consciousness, of which, in the early history of mankind as in early infancy, only the smallest beginnings could be detected.13

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The stage of separation of the World Parents which initiates the independence of the ego and consciousness by giving rise to the principle of opposites is therefore also the stage of increasing masculinity. Ego consciousness stands in manly opposition to the feminine unconscious. This strengthening of consciousness is borne out by the laying down of taboos and of moral attitudes which delimit the conscious from the unconscious by substituting knowing action for unwitting impulse.

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The meaning of ritual, irrespective of the useful effects which primitive man expects from it, lies precisely in strengthening the conscious system. The magical forms by means of which archaic man comes to terms with his surroundings are, all other considerations apart, anthropocentric systems of world domination. In his rituals he makes himself the responsible center of the cosmos; on him depends the rising of the sun, the fertility of crops, and all the doings of the gods. These projections and the various procedures by which the Great Individuals distinguish themselves from the herd as chiefs, medicine men, or divine kings, and the demons, spirits, and gods are crystallized out from a welter of indeterminate “powers,” we know to be expressions of a centering process that imposes order upon the chaos of unconscious events and leads to the possibility of conscious action.

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Although nature and the unconscious are ordinarily experienced by primitive man as a field of unseen forces which leave no room for chance, life remains chaotic for the germinal ego, dark and impenetrable, so long as no orientation is possible with regard to these forces. But orientation comes through ritual, through the subjugation of the world by magic, which imposes world order. Even though this order is different from the kind we impose, the connection between our conscious order and the magical order of early man can be proved at all points. The important thing is that consciousness as the acting center precedes consciousness as the cognitive center, in the same way as ritual precedes myth, or magic ceremonial and ethical action precede the scientific view of the world and anthropological knowledge.

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The center common to conscious action through the will and to conscious knowledge through cognition is, however, the ego. From being acted upon by external forces, it develops slowly into the agent, just as it ascends from the state of being overpowered by revealed knowledge into the light of conscious knowledge. Once again, this process is first accomplished not in the collective parts of the group, but only in the great, i.e., differentiated, individuals who are the representative bearers of the group’s consciousness. They are the institutional forerunners and leaders whom the group follows. The ritual marriage between fructifier and earth goddess, between king and queen, becomes the model for all marriages between members of the collective. The immortal soul of the divine king Osiris becomes the immortal soul of each and every Egyptian, even as Christ the Saviour becomes the Christ-soul of every Christian, the self within us. In the same way, the function of the chief, which is to will and to decide, becomes the model for all subsequent acts of free will in the ego of the individual; and the law-making function, originally attributed to God and later to the mana personality, has in modern man become his inner court of conscience.

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We shall be discussing this process of introjection later, but for the moment we shall formulate the masculinization of consciousness and its theoretic importance thus: through the masculinization and emancipation of ego consciousness the ego becomes the “hero.” The story of the hero, as set forth in the myths, is the history of this self-emancipation of the ego, struggling to free itself from the power of the unconscious and to hold its own against overwhelming odds.

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B. The Hero Myth

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THE BIRTH OF THE HERO

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WITH THE HERO MYTH we enter upon a new phase of stadial development. A radical shift in the center of gravity has occurred. In all creation myths the dominant feature was the cosmic quality of the myth, its universality; but now the myth focuses attention upon the world as the center of the universe, the spot upon which man stands. This means, in terms of stadial development, not only that man’s ego consciousness has achieved independence, but that his total personality has detached itself from the natural context of the surrounding world and the unconscious. Although the separation of the World Parents is, strictly speaking, an integral part of the hero myth, the developments which, at that stage, could only be represented in cosmic symbols now enter the phase of humanization and personality formation. Thus the hero is the archetypal forerunner of mankind in general. His fate is the pattern in accordance with which the masses of humanity must live, and always have lived, however haltingly and distantly; and however short of the ideal man they have fallen, the stages of the hero myth have become constituent elements in the personal development of every individual.

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The process of masculinization finally crystallizes out at this point and proves to be decisive for the structure of ego consciousness. With the birth of the hero the primordial struggle begins—the struggle with the First Parents. This problem, in personal and transpersonal form, dominates the hero’s whole existence, his birth, his fight with the dragon, and his transformation. By gaining possession of the masculine and feminine sides of himself, which are not to be thought of as “paternal” and “maternal,” and building up an inner core of personality in whose structure the old and the new stages are integrated, the hero completes a pattern of development which is collectively embodied in the mythological projections of the hero myth, and has also left individual traces in the growth of human personality (Part II).

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The real significance of the dragon fight, or rather of that part of it which is concerned with the slaying of the World Parents, can only be understood when we have looked more deeply into the nature of the hero. The nature of the hero, however, is closely connected with his birth and with the problem of his dual parentage.

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The fact that the hero has two fathers or two mothers is a central feature in the canon of the hero myth. Besides his personal father there is a “higher,” that is to say an archetypal, father figure, and similarly an archetypal mother figure appears beside the personal mother. This double descent, with its contrasted personal and suprapersonal parental figures, constellates the drama of the hero’s life. An important part of the analysis of the dragon fight has already been set forth in Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious;1 but the early form of this work requires that the problem it broaches be corrected, supplemented, and systematized from the standpoint of the later developments of analytical psychology.

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1 [The author cites the original version, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (trans. as Psychology of the Unconscious), because the 1952 revision, Symbole der Wandlung, had not been published when he wrote. The original version is therefore also cited here, although the (very considerably) revised version is now available in German, as Symbole der Wandlung, and in English, as Symbols of Transformation. See bibliography.—TRANS.]

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The ambiguity of the problem of the First Parents, with its dual and even contradictory meanings, has brought confusion into our analytical procedures right down to the present day. The final laying of the ghost which, in the form of the Oedipus complex, haunts our Western minds must be made the basis for any genuine understanding of the psychic phenomena we are concerned with here. These phenomena are fundamental so far as the future psychological development of Western man is concerned, and hence they also affect his ethical and religious development.

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As A. Jeremias 2 has pointed out and amply proved, the essence of the mythological canon of the hero-redeemer is that he is fatherless or motherless, that one of the parents is often divine, and that the hero’s mother is frequently the Mother Goddess herself or else betrothed to a god.

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2 Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, pp. 205 f. The mythological material is supplemented and supported by ethnological data. Belief in the virgin birth of the hero, as Briffault (The Mothers, Vol. II, p. 450) has shown, is worldwide, prevailing in North and South America, Polynesia Asia, Europe, and Africa.

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These mothers are virgin mothers, which is not to say that what psychoanalysis has attempted to read into this fact is necessarily correct.2a As everywhere in the ancient world, virginity simply means not belonging to any man personally; virginity is in essence sacred, not because it is a state of physical inviolateness, but because it is a state of psychic openness to God. We have seen that virginity was an essential aspect of the Great Mother, of her creative power, which is not dependent on any personal mate. But there is also a procreative masculine element at work in her. At the uroboric level this element is anonymous; later it becomes subordinated to the Great Mother as phallic energy, and still later it appears by her side as her consort. Finally, in the patriarchal world, she is dethroned by her prince consort and is herself subordinated.3 But always she retains her archetypal effectiveness.

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2a Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

3 Przyluski, “Ursprünge und Entwicklung des Kultes der Mutter-Gottin.”

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The hero’s birth is expressly attributed to a virgin. The virgin and the leviathan which the hero has to conquer (illus. 22 and 23) are two aspects of the mother archetype: beside the dark and terrible mother there stands another, bright and beneficent. And just as the fearful dragon aspect of the Great Mother, the “Old Woman of the West,” is, as an archetypal image of humanity, eternal, so the friendly aspect, the bountiful, immortally beautiful Virgin Mother of the sun-hero has its eternal archetype in the “Maid of the East,” regardless of the changeover from matriarchate to patriarchate.4

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4 Cf. Drews, Die Marienmythe, for a wealth of material. But when Drews derives the birth of the sun-hero from the constellation Virgo, which rises in the east on December 24 at the lowest point of the winter solstice, he is confusing cause and effect. The designation of this constellation with the name Virgo is only a projection of the virgin archetype upon the heavens. It was called Virgo because in it the sun-hero is born every year as the sun.

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The kedeshoth, like all the virgin mothers of heroes down to the Virgin Mary, are typical examples of identification with the female deity–Ashtaroth, for instance—who, in the embrace of the male, is willing to surrender only to something suprapersonal, to the god and nothing but the god. The peculiarity of feminine psychology that manifests itself here will have to be discussed in another place. In the present context, only its relation to the transpersonal is of importance.

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Consequently, besides the virgin mothers, there are other mothers for whom the men are mere ciphers, as Joseph was for Mary, or who only appear as the mortal fathers of a mortal twin. Whether the procreating deity appears as a monster or as the Dove of the Holy Ghost, and whether Zeus is transmogrified into lightning, a golden shower (illus. 24), or an animal, is of no consequence. Always the important thing about the hero’s birth is that its extraordinary, suprahuman, or nonhuman nature proceeds from something extraordinary, suprahuman, or nonhuman—in other words, he is believed to have been begotten by a demon or a divinity.

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At the same time the utter absorption of the mother in the experience of birth, and especially the birth of a hero, forms the essence of the myth. Her astonishment at having given birth to something extraordinary is only an intensification of the birth experience as such—an intensification, in particular, of the miracle that a female is able to produce a male out of herself. This miracle was, as we know, originally ascribed by primitive woman to the numinosum, to the wind or the ancestral spirits. It is a prepatriarchal experience that antedates the time when procreation was felt to be causally connected with sexual intercourse and hence with a man.

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Woman’s primary experience of birth is matriarchal. It is not the man who is father to the child: the miracle of procreation springs from God. Thus the matriarchal phase is ruled, not by a personal father, but by a suprapersonal progenitor or power. The creative energy of woman comes alive in the miracle of birth, by virtue of which she becomes the “Great Mother” and “Earth Goddess.” At the same time, it is precisely at this deepest and most archaic level that the virgin mother and bride of God is a living reality. Briffault has shown how impossible it is to understand the early history of mankind from the patriarchal standpoint, which is a late product of development bringing with it numerous revaluations. Accordingly, the primordial images which represent the mothers of heroes as virgins betrothed to a deity embody essential elements of woman’s prepatriarchal experience.

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This early matriarchal stage can be recognized most easily from the modifications of the hero myth in its later patriarchal form. Whereas, to begin with, the Great Mother was the only true creator—like Isis who regenerates the dead Osiris (illus. 29)–later she is impregnated by a suprapersonal and divine progenitor. As we have seen, this god first appears in the old fertility ritual as the deified King, gradually strengthening his position until he finally becomes the patriarchal God-King. The earliest matriarchal stage is to be found in Egypt, at the Feast of Edfu,5 where, to the accompaniment of orgies, the solemn “consummation of the embrace of Horus” led to the immediate conception of the young Horus King. Here begetter and begotten are still one, as we found to be the case in the domain of the Great Mother.

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5 Blackman, “Myth and Ritual in Ancient Egypt,” in Hooke, Myth and Ritual, p. 34.

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The figure of the virgin bride of God has an analogy in the Luxor festival, where the royal priestess of Hathor joins herself, in an age-old predynastic ritual, to the sun-god for the production of the divine son. Later, in patriarchal times, this role was taken over by the king, representing the sun-god. The double nature of god and king is clearly expressed in the words: “They found her as she slept in the beauty of the palace.” After the word “they” Blackman adds, in parentheses, “the combination of god and king.” The double nature of the father is reproduced in the Horus son he begets, who is “the son of his father and yet at the same time a son of the supreme God.” 6

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6 Erman, Religion, p. 53.

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This dual structure of the hero reappears in the archetypal motif of the Twin Brothers, one mortal, the other immortal, the most obvious instance being the Greek myth of the Dioscuri. Their mother, in the same night, conceived the immortal son in the embrace of Zeus and the mortal son in the embrace of her husband Tyndarus. Again, Herakles was begotten by Zeus, and his twin brother by Amphitryon. We are also told that the mother of Theseus was impregnated in the same night by Poseidon and by King Aegeus. There are countless other heroes who are the sons of mortal mothers and immortal gods. Besides Herakles and the Dioscuri, we would only mention as examples Perseus, Ion, and Romulus, Buddha, Karna, and Zoroaster.7 It is evident that in all these cases the experience of the hero’s dual nature, which became a factor of such extraordinary historical importance, no longer derives exclusively from woman’s own experience of birth.

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7 Rank, op. cit.

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In the first place it is mankind itself, the collective, to whom the hero, just because he deviates from the human norm, appears as a hero and a divinely begotten being. Secondly, the idea of the hero’s intrinsically dual nature derives from his own experience of himself. He is a human being like the others, mortal and collective like them, yet at the same time he feels himself a stranger to the community. He discovers within himself something which, although it “belongs” to him and is as it were part of him, he can only describe as strange, unusual, godlike. In the process of being exalted above the common level, in his heroic capacity as doer, seer, and creator, he feels himself like one “inspired,” altogether extraordinary and the son of a god. Thus, through his difference from others, the hero experiences his suprapersonal progenitor as quite different from his personal earthly father with whom he shares his corporal and collective nature.

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From this point of view we can also understand the doubling of the mother figure. The feminine correlate of the hero’s divine progenitor is no longer the “personal mother,” but likewise a suprapersonal figure. The mother responsible for his existence as a hero is the virgin mother to whom the god appeared. She too is a “spiritual” figure with transpersonal characteristics. She exists side by side with the personal mother who bore him in the body and, whether as animal or nurse, suckled him. Thus both the parental figures are there twice over for the hero, personally and transpersonally. Their confusion with one another, and particularly the projection of the transpersonal image upon the personal parents, is an abiding source of problems in childhood.

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The transpersonal archetype can appear in three forms: as the bountiful and nourishing Earth Mother, as the Virgin Mother whom the god impregnates, and as the guardian of the soul’s treasure. In the myths this ambiguity is often expressed as the conflict between nurse and princess, etc. In the case of the father figure the situation is more complicated, because an archetypal Earth Father seldom appears in patriarchal times. For reasons still to be examined, the personal father generally turns up as an “obstructive” figure alongside the divine progenitor. The virgin mother, however, who gives birth to the hero after being impregnated by a god, is a spiritual-feminine figure who opens herself to heaven. She has many forms, ranging from the innocent virgin who is overwhelmed by the heavenly messenger and the young girl who receives the god in an ecstasy of longing, to the sorrowful figure of Sophia, who gives birth to the divine son, the Logos, knowing that he is sent by God and that the hero’s fate is suffering.

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The birth of the hero and his fight with the dragon only become intelligible if the significance of masculinity has been understood. Only with the hero myth does the ego really come into its own as the bearer of masculinity, and for this reason we must make clear the symbolic nature of this masculinity. Such a clarification is essential if we are to distinguish the “masculine” from the “paternal,” which is all the more necessary because the errors of psychoanalysis, with its false interpretation of the so-called Oedipus complex and of the totem mythology derived therefrom, have caused the greatest confusion.

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The awakening ego experiences its masculinity, i.e., its increasingly active self-consciousness, as good and bad at once. It is thrust out from the maternal matrix, and it finds itself by distinguishing itself from this matrix. In the sociological sense too, the male, once he grows up and becomes independent, is thrust out from the matrix to the degree that he experiences and accentuates his own difference and singularity. It is one of the fundamental experiences of the male that sooner or later he must experience the matrix, with which he originally lived in participation mystique, as the “You,” the nonego, something different and strange. Here as everywhere in this fundamental survey of conscious development, we must shake off the prejudice of the patriarchal family situation. The original situation of the human group is prepatriarchal, if we wish to avoid the somewhat dubious term matriarchal.

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Even among animals we frequently find that the young generation of males is driven off and that the mother stays with the young females.8 The original matriarchal family group of mothers and children presupposes from the start that the young male will have a strong propensity to roam. Even if he stays within the matriarchal group, he will associate with other males to form a hunter and fighter group which is co-ordinated with the feminine center of the matriarchate. This masculine group is necessarily mobile and enterprising; moreover, in the situation of constant danger in which it finds itself, it has an added inducement to develop its consciousness. Here already, perhaps, is fostered the contrast between the psychology of male groups and the matriarchal psychology of the female.

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8 Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. I, p. 122.

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The matriarchal group with its mass-emotionality between mothers and children, its stronger local ties and its greater inertia, is to a large extent bound to nature and the instincts. Menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation periods activate the instinctual side and strengthen woman’s vegetative nature, as the psychology of modern woman still shows. In addition, there is the powerful earth-tie which arises with the development of gardening and agriculture by women, and the dependence of these arts upon the natural rhythm. The strengthening of participation mystique as a consequence of the matriarchal group living all huddled together in caves, houses, and villages also plays its part. All these factors reinforce the submergence in the unconscious which is a characteristic feature of the female group.

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The male group, on the other hand, given to roaming, hunting, and making war, is a nomadic fighter group long before the domestication of animals produced the roving bands of cattlemen, even when the group is domiciled about a matriarchal family nucleus.

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The matriarchal system of exogamy hinders the formation of male groups, because the men are obliged to marry outside their tribe and thus get dispersed, having to live matrilocally, as strangers in the wife’s tribe.9 The man is an alien in the clan into which he has married, but as a member of his own clan he is alienated from his place of residence. That is to say, when, as was originally always the case, he lives matrilocally, in his wife’s place of residence, he is a tolerated stranger; but in his native place of residence, where his rights are still valid, he lives only occasionally. The autonomy of the female group is, as Briffault has shown, strengthened by this institution, since the line runs from grandmother to mother and from mother to daughter, while the formation of male groups is broken down. What Preuss says is therefore true of the male group, particularly if the nuclear group in the community is a matriarchal continuum of mothers, women, and children:

We must therefore conclude that brothers, as integral parts of a whole composed of parents and children, are at the outset in constant danger of succumbing to feminine influence, unless they can break free by holding themselves absolutely aloof… . All members of the exogamous group find themselves in this position.10

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9 Ibid., p. 251.

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10 Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker, p. 73.

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This is probably one of the reasons why men’s societies came into being. In the course of time the male group steadily gains in strength, and political, military, and economic considerations eventually lead to organized male groups in the nascent city and state. Within these groups the cultivation of friendships is more important than rivalry, and more stress is laid on male similarity, and on dissimilarity from the female, than on mutual jealousies.

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The youth group, made up of young men who are all contemporaries, is the place where the male really discovers himself for the first time. When he feels himself a stranger among women and at home among men, we have the sociological situation that corresponds to the self-discovery of ego consciousness. But “masculine,” as we have said, is in no way identical with “father,” least of all with a personal father figure, which cannot be supposed to have been very effective in the prepatriarchal family. The old women, the mothers-in-law and the mothers, stand at the head of the female group; and, as with many animals, a self-contained unit is formed to which everything belongs, including the boys up to a certain age. Exogamous admission to this group, by emphasizing the alien character of the male, exposes him to the influence of the evil mother-in-law, who is always the object of a powerful taboo, but not to the influence of any masculine authority.

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In its original form, as a system of alliances among members of different age groups, the male group was organized on a strictly hierarchical basis. The rites that induct a man from one age group to another were accordingly rites of initiation. Everywhere these men’s societies are of the greatest importance, not only for the development of masculinity and of the man’s consciousness of himself, but for the development of culture as a whole.

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This horizontal organization of age groups obviates personal conflict in the sense of a hostile father-son relationship, because the terms “father” and “son” connote group characteristics and not personal relations. The older men are “fathers,” the young men “sons,” and this collective group-solidarity is paramount. Conflicts, so far as they exist at all, are between the age groups and have a collective and archetypal, rather than a personal and individual, character. The initiations enable the young men to rise up in the scale and to perform various functions within the group. The trials of endurance are tests of the virility and stability of the ego; they are not to be taken personalistically as the “vengeance of the old” upon the young, any more than our matriculation is the vengeance of old men upon the rising generation, but merely a certificate of maturity for entry into the collective. In almost all cases, age brings an increase in power and importance based on the increased knowledge gained through successive initiations, so that the old men have little cause for resentment.

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Male societies, secret societies, and friendly societies originated in matriarchal conditions. They are the natural complement to the supremacy of the matriarchate.11 The self-experience of the ego, recognizing its specific affinity with the world of men and its distinction from the feminine matrix, marks a decisive stage in its development and is the precondition of independence. The initiation into the men’s house, where the ego becomes conscious of itself, is a “mystery,” vouchsafing a secret knowledge that always gravitates round the “higher masculinity.” The higher masculinity here in point has no phallic or chthonic accent; its content is not, as in many initiations of young girls, sexuality, but its counterpole, spirit, which appears together with light, the sun, the head, and the eye as symbols of consciousness. This spirit is what is accentuated, and into it the initiations lead.

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11 Even today we almost always find, in cases of male homosexuality, a matriarchal psychology where the Great Mother is unconsciously in the ascendant.

12 Goldenweiser, Anthropology, p. 409.

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The men are ranked with the fathers, with the elders who are the “bulwark of law and order,” 12 and hence with a world system which we may call, symbolically, “heaven,” because it stands at the opposite pole to the feminine earth. The system embraces the whole sacrosanct and magical world order, down to the law and reality of the state. “Heaven” in this sense is not the abode of a deity, or a celestial locality; it simply denotes the spiritual pneuma principle which, in masculine cultures, gives birth not only to the patriarchal God, but to scientific philosophy as well. We use the symbolical expression “heaven” in order to characterize this complex realm in its entirety before it came to be differentiated, using for this purpose a comprehensive term in keeping with the mythological symbolism of early times.13

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13 Where, as in Egypt, we find a sky goddess and an earth god, Bachofen has correctly diagnosed a dominance of the Great Mother. The masculine principle, as yet undeveloped, lies dormant within her.

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It is immaterial whether this “heaven” is an indeterminate mass of “powers” or is animated by definite figures–spirits, ancestors, totem animals, gods. All these are representatives of the masculine spirit and the world of men, and they communicate themselves with or without violence to the neophyte on his expulsion from the maternal world. In the initiation rites, therefore, the young men are as it were swallowed up by the tutelary spirit of this masculine world and are reborn as children of the spirit rather than of the mother; they are sons of heaven, not just sons of earth. This spiritual rebirth signifies the birth of the “higher man” who, even on the primitive level, is associated with consciousness, the ego, and will power. Hence the fundamental correlation between heaven and masculinity.

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Therein lies the “higher activity” of conscious action, conscious knowledge, and conscious creation as distinct from the blind drive of unconscious forces. And precisely because the male group, in accordance not only with its “nature” but also with its sociological and psychological trends, requires the individual to act independently as a responsible ego, initiation into the men’s society is always bound up with the testing and strengthening of consciousness, with what—mythologically speaking–one might call the “generation of the higher masculinity.”

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Fire and other symbols of wakefulness and alertness play an important part in the rites of initiation, where the young men have to “watch and wake,” i.e., learn to overcome the body and the inertia of the unconscious by fighting against tiredness. Keeping awake and the endurance of fear, hunger, and pain go together as essential elements in fortifying the ego and schooling the will. Also, instruction and initiation into the traditional lore are as much part of the rites as the proofs of will power that have to be given. The criterion of manliness is an undaunted will, the ready ability to defend the ego and consciousness should need arise, and to master one’s unconscious impulses and childish fears. Even today the initiation rites of puberty still have the character of an initiation into the secret world of the masculine spirit. Whether this spirit lies hidden in the stock of ancestral myths, in the laws and ordinances of the collective, or in the sacraments of religion, is all one. They are all expressions, differing in rank and degree, of the same masculine spirit which is the specific property of the male group.

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This is the reason why women are forbidden, on pain of death, to be present at the initiations, and why they were originally excluded from the places of worship in all world-religions. The man’s world, representing “heaven,” stands for law and tradition, for the gods of aforetime, so far as they were masculine gods. It is no accident that all human culture, and not Western civilization alone, is masculine in character, from Greece and the Judaeo-Christian sphere of culture to Islam and India. Although woman’s share in this culture is invisible and largely unconscious, we should not underestimate its significance and scope. The masculine trend, however, is towards greater co-ordination of spirit, ego, consciousness, and will. Because man discovers his true self in consciousness, and is a stranger to himself in the unconscious, which he must inevitably experience as feminine, the development of masculine culture means development of consciousness.

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Historically speaking, it seems to us that the phenomenon of totemism is of great importance for the development of “heaven” and the spiritual world of man. For this phenomenon, even though it originated in the matriarchal epoch, is specifically masculine in spirit.

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Identification with the procreative spiritual principle is an extraordinarily important factor in the lives of primitives. Here, too, Freud made a vital discovery, though he distorted and misunderstood something even more vital. The totem is indeed partly a father, but it never has a personal character, let alone that of the personal father. On the contrary, the whole point of the ritual is that the procreative spirit should be experienced as something remote and different, and yet as “belonging.” That is why the totem is very often an animal, but it can also be a plant, or even a thing.

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Although the soul of the primitive is much closer to “things” than we are, he can only establish identity with them by means of magical rites. His ritual induction into the spiritual world of the ancestral totem with the aid of the transforming mask indicates that the transpersonal numinosum ought to be experienced as the source from which he, as an initiate, derives his being. That is the meaning of all rituals where the purely personal has to be transcended. The initiations of puberty, like all initiations, aim at producing something suprapersonal, namely that part of the individual which is transpersonal and collective. Hence the production of this part is a second birth, a new generation through the masculine spirit, and is accompanied by the inculcation of secret doctrines, ancestral knowledge, and cosmic lore, in order to sever all ties with the purely familial existence of the immature.

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The male group is the birthplace not only of consciousness and of the “higher masculinity,” but of individuality and the hero. We have referred more than once to the connection of centroversion with the development of the ego. The tendency towards wholeness which centroversion represents functions quite unconsciously in the earliest phase, but in the formative phase it manifests itself as a group tendency. This group wholeness is no longer entirely unconscious; it is experienced through projection upon the totem. The totem is an indefinable quantity to which the various parts of the group stand in a participatory relationship; in other words, they are unconsciously identical with it. On the other hand, there exists also a link running back over the generations: the totem is an ancestor, but more in the sense of a spiritual founder than a progenitor. Primarily he is a numinosum, a transpersonal, spiritual being. He is transpersonal because, although an animal, a plant, or whatever else, he is such not as an individual entity, not as a person, but as an idea, a species; that is to say, on the primitive level he is a spirit that has mana, works magic and is taboo, and must be approached with considerable ceremony.

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This totemic being forms the basis of a whole, a totem community which is not so much a natural biological unit as a spiritual or psychic structure. It is already an association or a brotherhood in the modern sense, that is, a sort of spiritual collective. The totem and the social order depending from it are totally different from the matriarchal group, which is a true biological unit, whereas these are “founded” and have come into being through a spiritual act.

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We know that among the North American Indians, but not among them alone, the essential content of initiation is the acquisition of an individual “guardian spirit.” 14 This spirit, who may be lodged in an animal or a thing, introduces into the life of the initiate who experiences him a whole sequence of ritual obligations and observances, and plays a decisive role among all shamans, priests, and prophetic figures in primitive societies and throughout the classical world. This universal phenomenon is the

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of a “personal revelation” of God, which can occur at all levels and take any number of forms.

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The growth of totemism is to be regarded as a missionary religion of a primitive kind, for we may suppose that the individual who has been granted the vision of a spirit in the initiation rites will form a group with others of like mind, whom he draws with him into communion with the spirit. This mode of group formation can be seen at work to this day in the founding of sects; and the initiation ceremonies of primitives, the mystery religions of the ancient world, and the great institutional religions all arise in the same way. In totemism, the early form of institutional religion, the founder is the priest-prophet; he enjoys primary intercourse with his individual spirit and hands on its cult. As the myths tell us over and over again, he is the hero in the annals of his totem, and the spiritual ancestor.

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He and the totem belong together, and this is particularly true from the standpoint of the community which later groups itself round them. The hero and founder as the personal, experiencing ego, and the totem experienced by him as a spiritual being, belong together not only in the psychological sense in which the spiritual “self” appears in some form to the ego, but for the community also these two figures always coincide. Thus Moses, for example, acquires the features of Jehovah, and the God of Love is worshiped in the figure of Christ. The sacred formula “I and the Father are one” always subsists psychologically between the ego and the transpersonal manifestation it experiences, whether this manifestation takes the form of an animal, a spirit, or a father figure.

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Hence the spirit totem and the ancestor to whom it first appeared often merge in the figure of the spiritual “Founding Father,” where the word “founding” is to be taken literally, as denoting a spiritual creator or originator. That this founding is inspirational can be seen from the description and analysis of every initiation rite and every totemistic ceremony.

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The spiritual collective as we find it in all initiations and all secret societies, sects, mysteries, and religions is essentially masculine and, despite its communal character, essentially individual in the sense that each man is initiated as an individual and undergoes a unique experience that stamps his individuality. This individual accent and the elect character of the group stand in marked contrast to the matriarchal group, where the archetype of the Great Mother and the corresponding stage of consciousness are dominant.

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The opposed group of male societies and secret organizations is dominated by the archetype of the hero and by the dragon-fight mythology, which represents the next stage of conscious development. The male collective is the source of all the taboos, laws, and institutions that are destined to break the dominance of the uroboros and Great Mother. Heaven, the father, and the spirit go hand in hand with masculinity and represent the victory of the patriarchate over the matriarchate. This is not to say that the matriarchate knows no law; but the law by which it is informed is the law of instinct, of unconscious, natural functioning, and this law subserves the propagation, preservation, and evolution of the species rather than the development of the single individual.

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As the masculine ego consciousness increases in strength, the biological weakness of the female group of pregnant or nursing mothers, children, etc., tends to heighten the power consciousness of the protective fighter group. The situation of the males fortifies the ego and consciousness, just as that of the females fortifies the instinct and the group. Hunting and war are conducive to the development of an individual ego capable of acting responsibly in a dangerous situation, and equally conducive to the development of the leader principle. Whether the leader is chosen to cope with a given situation, say for the specific purpose of canoe-building or for a hunting expedition, or to act as the permanent leader, the situation of leader and led is bound to arise sooner or later in the male group, even when this is still co-ordinated with a matriarchal nucleus.

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With the emergence and stabilization of leadership the group becomes further individualized. Not only is the leader set up as a hero, but the figures of spiritual progenitor, creator-god, ancestor, ideal leader, etc. begin to crystallize out from the mistiness of the primitive totem-image. It is a characteristic of the “god in the background”–a very early figure in the history of religion—that he is regarded not as a forefather, but more as the father who is the “author of all things.” He is a spiritual figure not primarily connected with nature; he belongs to the primordial age, to the dawn of history, and steps out of it to bring culture and salvation to mankind. He is timeless in the sense that he does not enter into time, but dwells in the background of time, in the primordial time that regulates our earthly chronology. Characteristic, too, is his relation to history and morality; for, as the tribal ancestor, he is directly related to the medicine men and the elders, the representatives of authority, power, wisdom, and esoteric knowledge.15

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14 Goldenweiser, op. cit., p. 242.

15 Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Ch. 20.

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This creator figure is a numinous projection from whom is derived the God-King figure of the hero. Generally speaking, the hero appears as the son of a god, if he is not the god himself. The creator-god is, as a figure, identical with the mythological “heaven,” namely the masculine, spiritual, supreme, uroboric background, though “heavenly” is not to be taken as identical with a heavenly god. The fusion of the ancestor with the creator-god and the culture hero is due to this process of personalization, which gives form to the unformed.

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Not until the hero identifies himself with what we have called the masculine “heaven” can he enter upon his fight with the dragon. The identification culminates in the feeling that he is the son of God, embodying in himself the whole mightiness of heaven. This is as much as to say that all heroes are god-begotten. Heavenly succor, the feeling of being rooted up aloft in the father divinity, who is not just head of the family but a creative spirit, alone makes possible the fight with the dragon of the Great Mother. Representing and upholding this spiritual world in the face of the dragon, the hero becomes the liberator and savior, the innovator and bringer of wisdom and culture.

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Jung has demonstrated that the hero’s incest implements his rebirth, that only as one twice-born is he the hero, and that conversely anyone who has suffered the double birth must be regarded as a hero. It is not only among primitives that rebirth is the sole object of the initiation rites. As one initiated into the mysteries every Gnostic, every Indian Brahman, and every baptized Christian is a man reborn. For, by submitting to heroic incest and entering into the devouring maw of the unconscious, the ego is changed in its essential nature and is reborn “another.”

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The transformation of the hero through the dragon fight is a transfiguration, a glorification, indeed an apotheosis, the central feature of which is the birth of a higher mode of personality. This qualitative and essential change is what distinguishes the hero from the normal person. As we have said, mythology represents the hero as having two fathers: a personal father who does not count or is the father of the carnal lower man, of the mortal part; and a heavenly father who is the father of the heroic part, of the higher man, who is “extraordinary” and immortal.

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Hence the archetype of the hero myth is often a sun myth or even a moon myth. Glorification means deification. The hero is the sun or moon, i.e., a divinity. As a mere mortal, he is in reality the son of a purely personal father, but as the hero he is the son of a god and is identified, or identifies himself, with him.

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Perhaps the earliest historical example of this is to be found, once again, in the Egyptian Pharaoh. The kings of Egypt were on their fathers’ side sons of Horus, the heirs of Osiris, and, as the kingship developed, they were identified not only with Osiris, the moon, but with Ra, the sun. The king styled himself “the god Horus.” People spoke of him as “God,” and this is not, as Erman thinks, a “fine phrase” merely, but a symbolic fact which degenerated into a phrase only in modern times, with the “divine right of kings.”

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In the same way the king was called “the living sun” and “the living image of God upon earth.” As early as the Fourth Dynasty the king was at the same time the son of Ra. This also belonged to his stock of titles.

The expression goes back to the idea, which we also find in other places and in other epochs, that the king, although outwardly the son of his father, is simultaneously a son of the supreme God.16

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Modern man’s failure to understand this phenomenon of “double fatherhood,” also displayed by the psychoanalysts, is painfully evident in Erman, who adds in conclusion: “Naturally we, with our limited understanding, must not seek to fathom how such a thing can be possible.”

Thus the “enlightened” comment of an investigator nearly two thousand years after the birth of Christ. The phenomenon of psychic duality plainly expressed in Egyptian ritual and formulated theologically thousands of years later in the famous dialogue between Nicodemus and Christ 17 is still alive today in the not uncommon feeling that one is a “child of God,” although a son or daughter of Mr. X. The dual parentage evidently corresponds to some duality in human nature, here represented by the hero.

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16 Erman, Religion, p. 53.

17 John, Ch. 3.

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The mother and father archetypes originally appeared in connection with the hero and his fate, i.e., someone who was extraordinary and unique. But here again, as was once the case with the immortality of Osiris, the hieros gamos, etc., what was unique and symbolic later becomes the common property of the collective. With the progressive individualization of humanity and its emergence from the inchoate state of participation mystique the ego of each man takes on clearer definition; but, in the process, the individual becomes the hero and has in his turn to exemplify the myth of the dragon fight.

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It must be emphasized yet again that the mythological fate of the hero portrays the archetypal fate of the ego and of all conscious development. It serves as a model for the subsequent development of the collective, and its stages are recapitulated in the development of every child.

If, in the course of our exposition, we “personify,” speaking for example of the hero’s own experience, or describing a mythological situation from the feminine point of view, it is to be understood that we are speaking figuratively and in abbreviated form. Our retrospective psychological interpretation corresponds to no point of view consciously maintained in earlier times; it is the conscious elaboration of contents that were once extrapolated in mythological projections, unconsciously and symbolically. These symbols, however, can be interpreted as psychic contents, and from this we can read the psychic situation which underlies the production of such symbols.

The slaying of the mother is no less relevant to a consideration of the hero and his dual parentage than the slaying of the father, for, besides a suprapersonal father, he must also acquire a suprapersonal mother.

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