21. The Growth of Consciousness in Mythology II

Once the ego starts to separate from the unconscious, we enter the stage of the Great Mother archetype (who later splits into Good Mother and Terrible Mother, the first kindly and bounteous, the second wicked and devouring). This stage is first reflected in the relation between the Mother Goddess and her son-lover. Although the young man is able to affirm his masculine otherness, he is not yet strong enough to cope with her because he's afraid of cutting himself off from his union with her.

Caravaggio's Narcissus

Then follows a transitional phase when the ego germ attains a certain degree of autonomy. Examples are the myths of Narcissus, the young man who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool; and of Hippolytus, who as he rejects the advances of his stepmother Phaedra (the Great Mother) is becoming conscious of his ‘higher’ (as opposed to sexual) masculinity. Symbolized by light, sun, eye, this stage is a pre-condition for all self-development, a first sign of ‘centroversion,’ the ego’s move towards self-formation (which Jung calls ‘individuation’). It’s not, Neumann insists, a sign of auto-eroticism unless it is prolonged.

The Hero.
But only after the third phase, when the Hero fights the Dragon (or other monster), rescues the Captive and raises the buried treasure of Knowledge, are consciousness and ego finally established. The dragon fight, which symbolizes the slaying of the mother and the conquest of fear (the latter is pictured as entry into the cave, descent into the underworld or as being swallowed), is central to the evolution of both the individual and humankind as a whole. Because in killing the Great Mother the hero destroys the image of the Terrible Mother and saves a positive feminine element.

Being both a real woman and the soul itself, the Captive unites the hero’s ego consciousness with the creative side of his soul--his own feminine counterpart. And the hero, now an adult male and no longer a tool of the Earth Mother, can join with a woman his own age and kind, a separate ego-conscious individual and a spiritual being like himself.

In some myths a friendly, sisterly female (e.g., Medea, Ariadne, Athena) helps the hero kill the monster. In the Theseus myth, the hero who kills the Minotaur finds his way out of the labyrinth thanks to the ball of thread that Ariadne has given him. In the hero myth of Perseus, Athena lends Perseus her shield in which he sees reflected the head of the Gorgon Medusa (the Great Mother). If he’d faced Medusa, she’d have turned him to stone, but now he can kill her and rescue the captive, Andromeda.

The Hero slaying the Dragon and saving the Captive

Perseus and Athena with Medusa's head

Again, the hero’s masculinity (like earlier the Great Mother’s femininity) is purely symbolic because his fate reflects the personal development of both sexes, which is to conquer the inertia of the unconscious and identify with the independent ego. At this stage, then, human beings are no longer puppets of the unconscious but have fully  conscious minds and can join with other fully conscious minds to strike out new paths.

In principle anyway. Because, as I see it, we never grew into adult personalities. Unable to establish the kind of equal social order that would characterize a grown-up stage, we haven’t moved beyond the adolescent level of emotional development typical of the matriarchal era. Or, differently put, we haven’t saved enough of the positive ‘feminine’ element to make it possible. Thousands of years after coming of age as a species, we’re still limping along in a regressive society weakened by a never-ending struggle between two kinds of discrimination: the overt by men against women and the covert by women against men. The Adulthood of Humankind that should mark the Age of Consciousness is still a mere figment on the horizon.

Let’s now return to the malevolent matriarchy and dig deeper into why I see its goddess cult as a catalyst for the male inferiority complex. See next post.

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