This is an exceedingly dangerous time and we are confronted with a problem which has never been known in the conscious history of man… This is not a light but a darkness; the powers of darkness are coming up…”
Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
According to Carl Jung, the primary forces which shape history are not cultural, economic, or political, but psychological. Specifically, he believed that the archetypes, the unconscious forces that organize the psyche of man and pattern his behavior, are the key factors that shape the rise and fall, vitality and decay, of civilizations.
“The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events.”
Carl Jung, Tavistock Lectures
In this video, we examine Jung’s claim that the rise of Nazi Germany was driven by the archetype of Wotan possessing the minds of the German masses. We then draw on the work of Jung’s student Erich Neumann to argue that the social and political pathologies of our age are outward signs that the archetype of the Terrible Mother grips the minds of many Western men and women.
“The Terrible Mother is an enchantress who confuses the senses and drives men out of their minds.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Jung distinguished two primary layers of the unconscious. The first is the personal unconscious, which holds the forgotten memories, repressed emotions, and other elements of one’s individual history that lie outside of conscious awareness. The second is the collective unconscious. Unlike the personal unconscious, which is unique to each person, the collective unconscious is universal and shared by all of humanity. It consists of the inherited structures of the psyche—timeless patterns that exist independently of personal experience. Chief among these are the archetypes: primordial images, forces, and patterns that shape how we experience, interpret, and respond to the world. As Jung wrote:
“The archetypes are formal factors responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes: they are “patterns of behaviour.” At the same time they have a “specific charge” and develop numinous effects which express themselves as affects.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
Because archetypes dwell in the collective unconscious, they cannot be directly observed. They disclose themselves only indirectly, through the spontaneous symbols they generate – symbols that rise into consciousness in dreams and fantasies, and that find outward expression in the creations of artists, mystics, and myth-makers. Myths and religions are steeped in these archetypal symbols, which is why the most fitting way to speak of the archetypes is not in the language of science or rational analysis, but through the symbolic imagery and motifs of mythology. For as Jung writes:
“Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings…They are the archetypal contents of the unconscious.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 9
While all the archetypes are housed in the collective unconscious, not all archetypes act on the conscious mind, some lie dormant for centuries having little effect on the life of man. But under certain social and environmental conditions, specifically, periods of mass insecurity, confusion, anxiety, or fear, dormant archetypes can become activated in the unconscious; and when they do, the result is groundbreaking historical events, major social transformations, or civilizational pathologies. Or as Jung wrote:
“What the unconscious really contains are the great collective events of the time. In the collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself; and when the archetypes are activated in a number of individuals and come to the surface, we are in the midst of history…and everybody is seized by it… As a rule, when the collective unconscious becomes really constellated in larger social groups, the result is a public craze, a mental epidemic that may lead to revolution or war or something of the sort. These movements are exceedingly contagious.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18
For example, Jung believed the rise of Nazism was fueled by the activation of an archetype in the collective unconscious of the German people which in mythology is represented as the ancient storm-god Wotan. In 1931 Jung remarked:
“And in Germany, those National Socialists, those Swastika people, are building Wotan’s fires again.”
Carl Jung, Wotan
Or as Jung continued:
“Wotan is an archetype—and an archetype is like an old river-bed in which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed.”
Carl Jung, Wotan
In Germanic mythology, Wotan, or Odin, was a god linked to frenzy, inspiration, war, and destruction. He represents the wild and irrational forces of the psyche: the ecstasy of the berserker, the prophetic trance of the seer, the restlessness of the wanderer, and the fury of unbridled emotion. Wotan stands as a symbol of the archetype that can seize the minds of entire populations and drive them into war, revolutionary upheaval, or collective madness.
When Christianity displaced paganism in the West, the archetype embodied by the pagan figure of Wotan was repressed in the psyche of Western man. Or as Jung noted: “Wotan was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will o’ the wisp through the stormy night” (Carl Jung, Wotan). But the collective trauma and upheaval that shook the nation of Germany following the First World War, coupled with the decreasing influence of Christianity, led to the reawakening of the archetype of Wotan in the German psyche. Or as Jung wrote in his 1936 essay on Wotan:
“But it is curious, to say the least of it, in fact piquant, that an old god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to a new activity, in a civilized country…the anti-Semitic movement has coincided with the reawakening of Wotan.”
Carl Jung, Wotan
When the archetype of Wotan re-activated in the collective unconscious of the German people, it crystallized most powerfully in their leader – Adolf Hitler. Jung attended a meeting in Berlin where both Mussolini and Hitler were present, and he used the occasion to draw a psychological contrast between the two men. His observations, recorded in letters and conversations, note that he regarded Mussolini as a relatively normal man playing the role of a dictator. But he thought of Hitler as something altogether different. According to Jung, Hitler was not a real human being but a vessel of Wotan. He was totally possessed by the archetype. Or as Jung wrote:
“What an amazing difference there is between Hitler and Mussolini! I couldn’t help liking Mussolini…With Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man: because there is nobody there…Mussolini is all that he is on the surface, whereas Hitler, on the surface, is all that he is not. Hitler is sinister—like the mild little schoolmaster who has lived and taught all his life in a quiet village, and whom everyone presumes to be harmless. Then, suddenly, this mild little man ups and murders his whole family. Mussolini’s life is a reality, and everything that he is in the foreground: it is in his face and manner and in his every gesture. Hitler is just the contrary…Hitler is infected by the Unconscious and only a person who is ‘infected’ can ‘infect’.”
C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters
While we like to think we are rational animals guided by the light of science and reason, in times of social instability and upheaval, there is the possibility of an archetype awakening on a mass scale and leading not just to individual disturbance and irrationality but collective pathologies that engulf civilization.
“There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall a prey to.”
Carl Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious
According to Marie-Louise von Franz, in a letter written in 1960 “Jung referred to World War II as a “Wotanic experiment” and expressed the fear that we are now in the process of preparing ourselves for a new Wotanic experiment, but this time a worldwide one” (Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche). While Jung seems to have been prescient in predicting that an archetype would soon activate on a global scale, instead of the re-activation of the archetype of Wotan, it seems as though the pathologies of our age are the result of the awakening of the archetype of the Terrible Mother.
In his magnum opus, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann explained that one of the most ancient archetypes in the collective unconscious is that of the Great Mother. The Great Mother archetype is ambivalent in the sense that it embodies both the positive, nurturing, and fecundating principles of the feminine, along with the terrible, devouring, and destructive. Or as Neumann wrote, in mythology the Great Mother goddess is depicted as both “terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young” (Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness)
Or as he further explained in his book The Great Mother:
“Just as world, life, nature, and soul have been experienced as a generative and nourishing, protecting and warming Femininity, so their opposites are also perceived in the image of the Feminine; death and destruction, danger and distress, hunger and nakedness, appear as helplessness in the presence of the Dark and Terrible Mother.”
Erich Neumann, The Great Mother
As human consciousness evolved over millennia, the contrasting elements of the Great Mother archetype fractured into opposing poles, giving rise to two distinct archetypes: the Good Mother and the Terrible Mother. This fragmentation of the archetypes is a process that occurs naturally in the human psyche. By splitting the archetypes into more specific and differentiated forms, it becomes easier for the conscious mind to confront and integrate their contents, which leads to the evolution of consciousness. Or as Erich Neumann writes:
“…the “fragmentation of archetypes” is a process whereby consciousness seeks to wrest from the unconscious the material content of the archetypes in order to supply the needs of its own system…Fragmentation occurs in the sense that, for consciousness, the primordial archetype breaks down into a sizable group of related archetypes and symbols…The split-off archetypes and symbols are now easier to grasp and assimilate, so that they no longer overpower ego consciousness.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
While the nurturing and protective aspects of the Great Mother—those that crystallized into the archetype of the Good Mother—were readily absorbed into Western consciousness, her darker counterpart, the Terrible Mother, was far too threatening, destructive, and chthonic to be confronted directly. For a civilization striving to impose order on both the psyche and society, acknowledging the suffocating and devouring forces of the Terrible Mother would have been too dangerous, risking regression and chaos. Out of this necessity, Western culture assumed a patriarchal form. In both culture and psyche, it permitted only the outward expression of the feminine’s nurturing and compliant aspects, while excluding the wild, unpredictable, and destructive. In doing so, it exalted the life-giving energies of the Good Mother, while repressing the archetype of the Terrible Mother into the unconscious. As Neumann explains:
“The growth of self-consciousness and the strengthening of masculinity thrust the image of the Great Mother into the background; the patriarchal society splits it up, and while only the picture of the good Mother is retained in consciousness, her terrible aspect is relegated to the unconscious…In the Greek myths we can see how…the terrible aspect of the Great Mother is almost wholly repressed and only fleeting glimpses of it can be caught.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Archetypal energies that are repressed do not disappear – they find expression in the external world via projections. Throughout Western history the energies associated with the archetype of the Terrible Mother were projected in myths, folklore, as well as superstitions and fears of witches, female demons, and other monstrous feminine figures.
“…from a psychological point of view [mythological] figures are projections of the…archetypal structures of the unconscious. Thus the terrifying figure of the Gorgon [Medusa] with the snakes writhing round her head—the sight of whom turns men to stone—is a projection of the Terrible Mother.”
Erich Neumann, The Great Mother
Over the last century Western society has become less patriarchal, and so the psychological restraints that for centuries kept the archetype of the Terrible Mother repressed in the unconscious have weakened. When coupled with the economic, political, and cultural upheavals of our age, this loosening of restraints has created fertile ground for the awakening of the Terrible Mother archetype within the collective unconscious. No longer confined to myths of terrible feminine figures or paranoid fears of witches, there is evidence that the archetype of the Terrible Mother is now influencing, and in some cases seizing complete control of, modern man’s psyche.
In 1935, Jung was asked what happens when people are “seized by the fascinating power of an archetype.” And he explained that:
‘One cannot resist it… your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped. It is a power that fascinates people from within, it is the collective unconscious which is activated, it is an archetype which is common to them all that has come to life.”
Carl Jung, Tavistock Lectures
Or as Erich Neumann echoed:
“The tendency of unconscious contents to swamp consciousness corresponds to the danger of being “possessed”; it is one of the greatest “perils of the soul” even today. …Possession by an unconscious content entails loss of consciousness and has an intoxicating effect, so that one smitten by it is under the sway of the Terrible Mother.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
One of the clearest indications that the Terrible Mother has been activated within the collective unconscious is the growing cultural assault on masculinity. As Neumann observed:
“…the Terrible Mother possesses an animosity toward all things masculine.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Traits once regarded as the hallmarks of healthy masculinity – assertiveness, independence, risk-taking, physical strength, willpower, and the courage to confront danger – are increasingly stigmatized as “toxic.” Boys are discouraged from cultivating their masculine potential, while men are routinely portrayed as inherently suspect, dangerous, or oppressive. At its most extreme, this manifests in strains of radical feminism where hostility toward men verges on a form of insanity.
If such hostility arose solely from women, it could be dismissed as a product of gender conflict. But countless men have also taken up a war against masculinity, and this male self-hate suggests that what we are dealing with is a collective pathology. The Terrible Mother archetype has seized control of the psyche of many modern men and women and is seeking to destroy the masculine principle in both the psyche and culture. For as Neumann explained:
“…the fecundation of the Terrible Mother presupposes the death of the male.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
In the realm of the psyche, the Terrible Mother destroys masculinity by attacking the conscious ego, which is a masculine psychological structure. As Neumann explains: “…even in woman, consciousness has a masculine character…just as the unconscious is feminine in men…the system of ego consciousness is masculine. With it are associated the qualities of volition, decision, and activity” (Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness) When the Terrible Mother archetype is activated, overwhelming emotions and regressive energies flood the psyche and overwhelm the ego, usurping its governing capacity and destroying its willpower. The result is a state of psychological impotence – a condition Erich Neumann described as psychological castration.
“A deep psychological analysis then reveals the irruption of an archetype, e.g., the Terrible Devouring Mother, whose psychic attraction is so great because of its energetic charge that the charge of the ego complex, unable to withstand it, ‘sinks’ and is ‘swallowed up.’”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Or as Neumann continues:
“…castration by the Terrible Mother…in psychological terms…means the ego’s dissolution in the unconscious…this ‘submersion in the unconscious’ causes a certain disorientation of the ego and consciousness…castration by the Terrible Mother involves loss of masculine consciousness, deflation, and degradation of the ego. Its symptoms are depression, a flowing off of libido [psychological energy] into the unconscious, anemia of the conscious system…”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
One of the most visible consequences of psychological castration is the modern epidemic of apathy and inertia. Countless men and women have lost their willpower and capacity for conscious, directed action. Instead of embracing responsibility and independence, they are retreating into passivity and despondency. Increasing numbers are living at home with their parents well into their 20s and 30s, and even more are eagerly surrendering their freedom in exchange for the womblike safety and security promised by modern governments.
In the late 20th century Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “…no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower…. how one can lose one’s spiritual strength, one’s will power and possessing freedom, not value it, not be willing to make sacrifices for it?” The answer to Solzhenitsyn’s question is that the conscious ego of Western men and women is being castrated by the archetype of the Terrible Mother. With a weak and impotent psyche one can no longer bear the burdens of independence or the responsibilities of freedom: so instead of fighting against authoritarian control, one eagerly embraces it.
“This is the stage of complete impotence against the Terrible mother…masculinity and consciousness have not yet won to independence…”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Or as Neumann continues:
“What the the terrible Feminine signifies archetypally is not only something passive; rather, as something devouring, it is also an enticing, seductive force sucking one downward. Because the ascending movement of ego-consciousness is heroically connected with suffering and accomplishment, the holding, detaining, captivating power of the [Terrible Mother archetype] may combine with a yearning for peace expressed as tiredness, surrender, and even suicide. The regressive tendency appears as a negative drive, as deadly incest with the Terrible Mother. The danger that issues from the negatively constellated unconscious, the Terrible Feminine, corresponds to the regressive drive “backward” of wishing to let go, to fall, and actively to hurl oneself into the abyss. This danger is the basis of what Freud attempted to interpret as the death instinct.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Another sign that many in our age are possessed by the archetype of the Terrible Mother is the growing acceptance – and even celebration – of the chemical castration and feminization of men. The myth of Adonis represents this modern phenomenon. Beloved by both Aphrodite, who personifies the Good Mother, and Persephone, who as the queen of death and the underworld represents the Terrible Mother, Adonis is a youthful and feminized-looking man who is trapped between the two poles of the Great Mother. Eventually he is killed by a wild boar, an animal associated with the castrating characteristic of the Terrible Mother archetype. Or as Neumann explains,
“In mythology the [Terrible Mother archetype] manifests itself as a dark homicidal male force, a savage animal, in particular the boar.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
In antiquity, this mythological drama was ritually reenacted in the Adonis cults of Syria, Crete, and Ephesus, where the male priests of the cults adorned women’s clothing, castrated themselves, and offered their phallus to the Great Mother goddess as a form of worship. That Adonis-figures now populate our society and are normalized and celebrated by increasing numbers of people, is further evidence that the psyche of modern man is possessed by the archetype of the Terrible Mother. Or as Neumann wrote:
“When the eunuch priests of the Great Mother perform their castrations and sacrifices…the Terrible Mother controls and uses them,…In the use of women’s clothing, known to have been worn by the Galli, the castrated priests of the Great Mother in Syria, Crete, Ephesus, etc… the sacrifice is carried to the point of identification. Not only is the male sacrificed to the Terrible Mother, but he becomes her representative, a female wearing her dress…overpowered by the Great Mother, the frenzied priests mutilate themselves and offer up the phallus to her as a sacrifice.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
A final, and perhaps most chilling, sign that the modern psyche is under the sway of the Terrible Mother is the emergence of contemporary death cults.
“…the Terrible Mother can only be made fruitful by death, killing, castration, and sacrifice.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Those who, under the guise of environmentalism, worship Mother Earth and believe the earth is overpopulated and that humanity is as a parasite that would be best dealt with by eradicating large swaths of it, belong to a Terrible Mother death cult. As do those who normalize or celebrate abortion and treat the taking of unborn life as an occasion of female empowerment rather than tragedy. Still others openly call for the assassination of public figures they oppose and revel in such deaths when they occur. This latter death cult echoes ancient rituals where men were sacrificed in the belief that their blood was needed to fertilize the Great Mother goddess. Today, clothed in new cultural forms, the same archetypal logic is playing out: those who are possessed by the Terrible Mother archetype are demanding death.
“…the Great Mother, as chthonic mistress of life and death, demands blood and appears to be dependent upon the shedding of blood…everything points to the fact that in ancient times a human victim…was always offered up to ensure the fertility of the earth…Originally the victim was the male, the fertilizing agent, since fertilization is only possible through libations of blood in which life is stored…Behind the archetype of the terrible Earth Mother looms the experience of death, when the earth takes back her progeny as the dead, divides and dissolves them in order to make herself fruitful.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
But the death cult of the Terrible Mother reveals itself most clearly in the symbols and imagery saturating the entertainment industry. It is often said that satanic motifs are common in music videos and live performances, yet these motifs are more directly tied to the archetype of the Terrible Mother. Today the concert stages and music videos of many mainstream artists are filled with dark, seductive figures enacting scenes that intertwine eroticism with displays of power, domination, and death. Often the scenes are populated with snakes and other sinister symbols that are common in myths of the Terrible Mother. All the while, in a hypnotized, intoxicated unconscious state, audiences who consume this dark-sexualized entertainment are oblivious to the fact that they are participating in a modern death cult ritual that is strengthening the Terrible Mother archetype’s dominance over the psyche. Or as Neumann writes:
“Were she terrible only, and a death-goddess, [the Terrible Mother’s] resplendent image would lack something that makes her perhaps even more terrible… For she is also the goddess who drives mad and fascinates, the seducer and bringer of delight, the sovereign enchantress. The fascination of sex and the drunken orgy culminating in unconsciousness and death are inextricably combined in her… Everywhere her rites are frenzied and orgiastic.”
If modern man is possessed by the archetype of the Terrible Mother, then what our age needs are more heroes – that is, individuals who strengthen their conscious ego to the point where it can resist the intoxicating emotions and regressive energies of the Terrible Mother.
“The hero is an ego hero; that is, he represents the struggles of consciousness and the ego against the unconscious. The masculinization and strengthening of the ego, apparent in the hero’s martial deeds, enable him to overcome his fear and…give him courage to face the Terrible Mother…Consciousness = deliverance: that is the watchword inscribed above all man’s efforts to deliver himself from the embrace of the Terrible Mother…”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Strengthening the ego demands discipline and the cultivation of willpower, which is achieved by renouncing fleeting comforts and pleasures in favor of purposeful action, struggle, and productive work. Or as Neumann writes:
“This strengthening of consciousness is borne out by the laying down of taboos and of moral attitudes which delimit the conscious from the unconscious by substituting knowing action for unwitting impulse…the ego can only conquer by dint of unremitting struggle, never at a single blow.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
This strengthening of the conscious ego has been symbolically depicted in universal hero myths which involve a hero slaying a monster or dragon – symbols of the Terrible Mother’s destructive powers – by cutting it up with a sword. Psychologically, this symbolizes the developmental stage at which the conscious ego has become so strong that it cuts up, i.e., fragments, the archetype of the Terrible Mother, so that it no longer has the power to overwhelm the psyche. When this occurs, the positive forces of the feminine principle – creativity, rebirth, and wisdom – return, nourish consciousness, and support its continued evolution.
The myth of Perseus illustrates this psychological process: by slaying a monster, he liberates a beautiful virgin princess – an image of the redeemed feminine. Or as Neumann writes:
“In a large number of myths the goal of the hero’s fight is the rescue of a female captive from the power of a monster…[This represents] a change in his relation to the female, symbolically expressed in the liberation of the captive from the dragon’s power… In other words, the feminine image extricates itself from the grip of the Terrible Mother, a process known in analytical psychology as the crystallization of the anima from the mother archetype…The freeing and winning of the captive form a further stage in the evolution of masculine consciousness.”
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
While the activation of the Terrible Mother archetype is manifesting collective pathologies, its emergence is an opportunity; it is a sign that the psyche of man is ready to break down the dark unconscious powers afflicting it and integrate them into the ego in the service of the evolution of consciousness. Yet this evolution is not guaranteed; if too many people flee from this task and fail to become heroes in their personal lives, the Terrible Mother will continue to possess the minds of the masses and progressively worse forms of collective chaos will ensue. Or as Erich Neumann warned:
“Midnight decides whether the sun will be born again as the hero, to shed new light on a world renewed, or whether he will be castrated and devoured by the Terrible Mother, who kills him by destroying the heavenly part that makes him a hero. He then remains in the darkness, a captive…and the world remains without a hero, and there is born, as Ernst Barlach says in his drama, a “dead day.””
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
