Apollo & Dionysus V: Mother Earth and the Heavenly Father
In Erich Neumann’s Origins of Consciousness, Neumann describes the moment in human history, and in the history of every individual, where the primordial unity (represented by the ouroboros depicted below) splits into opposites. In mythologies around the world, this moment is known as a cosmogony; i.e. ‘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 World Parents become Mother Earth and the Heavenly Father, the unconscious bodily instincts and conscious ascetic transcendence.
Mother Earth, or the ‘Great Mother’, is an archetypal goddess that governs anything deep: ‘abyss, valley, ground, also the sea and the bottom of the sea, fountains, lakes and pools, the earth, the underworld, the cave, the house, and the city… Anything big and embracing which contains, surrounds, enwraps, shelters, preserves, and nourishes anything small belongs to [this] primordial matriarchal realm’.
But this beneficent aspect is just one side of the Great Mother. She is a nourishing goddess who gives and sustains life, but she is also a goddess of ‘savagery…
