The Origins And History Of Consciousness (International Library of Psychology)

by Erich Neumann

Many primitive peoples do not recognize the connection between sexual intercourse and birth.

This seems highly unlikely and is more of a reflection of neumanns ignorance when it comes to said "primitive people"

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.

The many as the mother

pleromatic

This initial stage when ego consciousness is still on the infantile level is marked by the predominance of the maternal side of the uroboros.

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.

twilit

The uroboros of the maternal world is life and psyche in one; it gives nourishment and pleasure, protects and warms, comforts and forgives.

The Great Mother

of the Great and Good Mother has at all times of

Sophia,

the image of a psychic stage of humanity, just discernible as borderline image.

desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.

There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction.

The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man’s conscious development.

hieros gamos

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—

Liebestod.

unio mystica

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.

inchoate

En-Soph

ca...

It symbolizes the creative element, not personal genitality.

It is only personalistic misunderstanding that makes these sacral contents “obscene.”

The desecration of pagan values in the struggle for monotheism and for a conscious ethic was necessary, and historically an advance; but it resulted in a complete distortion of the primordial world of those times.

Logos—

Word of god

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.

Just as the maternal side of the uroboros gives birth without procreation, so the paternal side procreates without the maternal womb.

creation is something not altogether expressible in the symbols of sexuality, and they proceed to formulate the unformulable in an image.

wind-ruach-pneuma-animus,

wind,

Creative element of wind

midrash

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.

But existence after death and prenatal existence in the uroboros are the same thing.

all knowing is “memory.”

saddik,

Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement dating from the end of the eighteenth century:

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.

ancestral knowledge,

“the deposit of ancestral experience.”

Jungs defintition of the transpersonal

Kundalini yoga

In both cases thinking is emotional, bound up with affects and passions.

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.

the center of the per...

The heart

haruspicy

alimentary

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.

“tail-eater,”

The instinctual side of the uroboros

alimentary canal

abeyance,