Yellowjackets and the Great Mother

Yellowjackets — a show about a group of teenagers stuck in the wilderness after a plane crash — has a scene in season one where the group, inadvertently tripping on psilocybin, attacks one of the only male members:

Through the drugs — but also through hunger and desperation — the group regresses to an earlier stage of psychic development; namely, the preconscious stage governed by the Great Mother. They spontaneously enact a fertility ritual, intended to render the earth fruitful. Led by the shaman-like Lottie, they ensnare and (attempt to) devour their human sacrifice. As Eric Neumann writes in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, the Great Mother ‘generates life and all living things on earth’, but she is also the one who ‘takes them back into herself, who pursues her victims and captures them with snare and net’. She is the ‘hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses […] voraciously licking up the blood seed of men and beasts and, once fecundated and sated, casting it out again in new birth’.

In this scene, seduction and consumption overlap. They caress their victim and then begin to rend him. Again, as Eric Neumann points out, even today ‘sexual symbolism is still colored by alimentary symbolism’ (alimentary meaning related to nourishment):

In the fertility ritual sexuality and nourishment are related; the sexual act, which induces fertility, guarantees the fertility of the earth and hence man’s nourishment, and linguistically the two spheres are also connected. Hunger and satiety, desire and satisfaction, thirst and its slaking, are symbolic concepts that are equally valid for both of them