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

by Erich Neumann

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. Notwithstanding its own dissolution and the deadly aspect of the uroboros, the embryonic ego does not experience uroboric incest as anything hostile, even though it be annihilated. The return to the great round is a happening full of passive, childlike confidence; for the infantile ego consciousness always feels its reawakening, after having been immersed in death, as a rebirth. It feels protected by the maternal depths even when the ego has disappeared and there is no consciousness of itself. 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.

And the wheel of the year.