|| Date: 19-02-03 || Back to index ||
|| Tag: book-summary ||
|| Author: Erich Neumann ||

The Origins and History of Consciousness

The dialectic between conscious and unconscious, the relation of the ego to the unconscious, and the personal to the transpoersonal.

The Urobouros, the infinite circle, the cosmogenic godhead is the simple of the snake eating it’s own tail. This is the genesis of creation myths. The image is better at arteculating the message rather than words since those were varied and would require logic to properly convey the message. The World Snake, Urobouros, is that which is complete, with form and without form. Existing eternally and before time.

The Urobouros also symbolizes the maternal womb, where everything existed pre-nataly and will return to it in the end. Whatever is inside this circle, or space or cavern or hollowness is part of it, just like an unborn child is part of the mother and dependent on her for practically everything. The only thing that an unborn child can do is to emit distress, to which the mother must feed and care for them. There is, however, no “breath of life” or conscious nature. The unborn child is part of the mother and it is still, in the complete sense of the word, unconscious.

There is a maternal pull to always remain unconscious, just like there is an paternal pull to become conscious. The author referred to the maternal pull to come back to unconsciousness as the “Urobourous Incest”. The mystic aims for that with an ascetic renunciation and union with the infinite. The drunkard gets there with the help of a bottle. The modern world is no stranger to the varied ways of losing consciousness and going back to a union with Urobourous and the material womb where all his fears and doubts are enveloped away and swept under the carpet.