The Mother Goddess
Celebrating Mother’s Day by Acknowledging the Mother Goddess Archetype in Mythology
The Mother Goddess
“The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-goddess”
-Carl Jung
Mother Goddesses, also known and referred to as the Earth Mother, can be found in many religions and cultural mythologies.
Many share similar attributes which include fertility, child-birth, life, nurturing, sustenance, protection, intuition, spiritual wisdom, rebirth and regeneration.
Examples of the Mother-Goddess in mythology include Gaea, Rhea, Sophia, The Virgin Mary, Isis, and Hathor.
The Mother Goddess is often depicted with and can be distinguished in art and antiquity through a variety of symbols. (These vary among each)
Her association with fertility, sustenance, life and birth lead many to be attributed with objects of nature including the earth, the sea, the woods, still water, trees, mountains, plants, animals and caves.
Another essential aspect of the Great Goddess is her relation to the world of animals as Lady of the Beasts“.
-Erich Neumann
The Mother Goddess’s association with animals and plants is a symbol of how she is the creatress and provider for all living things on earth.
“The large number of animal figures belonging to these representations shows that this figure of the Great Goddess of birth is the mother of all living things, of animals as well as men.”
-Erich Neumann
Caves and certain flowers like roses and lotuses are attributed with the Mother Goddess as they are believed to hold some resemblance to (and therefore are a symbol of) the womb and Yoni.
Other items that are symbols of the Mother Goddess’s womb and fertility properties are vessel like objects, which includes vases, jars, ovens, cooking tools and ships.
“At the center of the feminine energy in which the woman contains & protects, nourishes & gives birth, stands the vessel”.
-Erich Neumann
The Dark Goddess & Terrible Mother
“A goddess represented in this way (Mother Goddess) is never a goddess only of fertility, but is always at the same time a goddess of death and the dead.”
-Erich Neumann
Mother Goddesses are not solely goddesses of light attributed with positive like qualities, they are also goddesses of death, evil, the night, darkness.
When engaged in such qualities, she is referred to as either the Dark Goddess or Terrible Mother.
As the Dark Goddess, she is associated with the underworld, the land of the dead, capable of bringing death to all her creations.
“The negative side of the archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces and poisons”.
-Erich Neumann
Symbols of the Terrible Mother or Dark Goddess include sarcophagi, graves, the deep sea, and devouring & waves.
The Dark Goddess and her archetype in mythology is not always depicted in her typical goddess form. She will often take on the form of a witch, crone, specter, beast, hermaphrodite and or even an ogre.
Examples of Dark Goddesses and Terrible Mothers in mythology include Kali, The Morai, Hecate, Lilith, Medea, and Prosperina.
Although the Dark Goddess does possess negative connotations, she represents one aspect of a completed whole.
Demeter and Persephone as the Whole
The goddesses and myth that perfectly depicts the two aspects of the Mother archetype is Demeter and her journey to reunite with her daughter Persephone.
“The whole is permeated by the self-contained transformative unity of mother and daughter, Demeter and Kore”
-Erich Neumann
The black horse in the image above, like the goddess and myth, is a symbol of duality that represents both good and evil and life and death.
Demeter (and her Roman counterpart Ceres) is the Goddess of Agriculture, Grain and the Harvest, responsible for providing humanity with an abundance of healthy crops, food, and the overall fertility and fruitfulness of nature and the earth. She is often depicted with a sheaf of wheat, a cornucopia and or near fields of crops and grains. She was also considered to be the most generous and nurturing of all goddesses.
When her daughter Persephone was abducted by the lord of the world Hades, the Harvest Goddess withdrew her gifts of fertility and abundance from the earth until her daughter was returned to her.
“As a consequence, nothing could grow and nothing could be born. Famine threatened to destroy the human race, depriving the Olympian gods and goddesses of their offerings and sacrifices”.
-Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D
Demeter was informed by the Sun God Helios about her daughter’s whereabouts and later accompanied the God Hermes to retrieve her.
Unfortunately, Hades had offered Persephone a pomegranate in which when eaten and unbeknown to her would only partially restore her to her mother and the land of the living. Meaning that Persephone would be required to spend a fraction of the year in the underworld with Hades.
“After mother and daughter were reunited, Demeter restored fertility and growth to the earth. She then provided the Eleusinian Mysteries…through the mysteries, people gained a reason to live in joy and die without fearing death.”
-Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D
Demeter’s gift of the Eleusinian Mysteries is significant as she now was not only the Goddess of Agriculture, Grain and Harvest who provided food to fulfill physical needs, she also became a goddess responsible for providing emotional support and spiritual sustenance.
Persephone, like her mother, was a Goddess of Agriculture who presided over vegetation. This myth has also led Persephone to serve as Mistress of the Dead, as well as the Goddess of Spring and Resurrection.
Pomegranates
This myth has also led to pomegranates being adopted as a significant symbol of duality, as well as a major symbol of Persephone as both the Mistress of the Dead and Goddess of Spring.
As a symbol for the Mistress of the Dead, pomegranates are deemed the food of the dead due to this item being responsible for causing Persephone to return to the underworld yearly.
“The place of magical transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants are presided over by the mother.”
-Carl Jung
As a symbol for the Goddess of Spring, the pomegranate is associated with fertility, The fruit as whole symbolizes the woman’s womb, while its seeds represent fertility and the goddess’s blessings.
Overall this fruit, just like our myth and goddesses, is a symbol of birth, death, rebirth and the overall Mother Goddess archetype.
“Virgin and Mother stand to one another and essentially belong together in their transformation to one another.”
-Erich Neumann
