Quotes from Erich Neumann

Individualization, ego formation, and heroism belong to the very life of the male group and are in fact its expressions.

Consciousness of the bond between the male opponents is the beginning of masculine self-consciousness.

The self-generating power of the soul is man's true and final secret, by virtue of which he is made in the likeness of God the creator and distinguished from all other living things. These images, ideas, values, and potentialities of the treasure hidden in the unconscious are brought to birth and realized by the hero in his various guises—savior and man of action, seer and sage, founder and artist, inventor and discoverer, scientist and leader.

the motto of all consciousness is determinatio est negatio.

Whenever the energy-charge of unconscious contents becomes excessive, they discharge themselves from the unconscious and are projected.

Ego consciousness is a sense organ which perceives the world and the unconscious by means of images, but this image-forming capacity is itself a psychic product, not a quality of the world. Image formation alone makes perception and assimilation possible.

All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves. Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido.

In the celebration of these anniversaries, the priestesses of Aphrodite worked themselves up into a wild state of frenzy, and the term Hysteria became identified with the state of emotional derangement associated with such orgies…. The word Hysteria was used in the same sense as Aphro-disia, that is, as a synonym for the festivals of the goddess.86

Ego-accentuation leads from the uroboric to the hermaphroditic, and so to the narcissistic stage, which is autoerotic at first and represents a primitive form of centroversion. The next stage is that of phallic-chthonic masculinity, dominated by the body sphere, and this in turn is succeeded by a masculinity in which the activity of consciousness has become the specific activity of an autonomous ego.

The rite of marriage derives from the part played by the king in the old fertility ritual. The union of the Earth Goddess with the god-king becomes the prototype of marriage, and only with the institution of this symbolic ritual did the act of sexual union, endlessly repeated for millions of years, begin to be understood consciously.

The background events in the soul are projected outwards and are experienced through the object, as a synthetic unity compounded of external reality and the psychic activation of this reality.

As the generations succeed one another, and yet remain magically connected, the patriarchal line of fathers and sons is seen to rest upon the spiritual phenomenon of their identity, which transcends their differences. Every king was once Horus and becomes Osiris (tikis. 30); every Osiris was once Horus. Horus and Osiris are one.

Its link with the transpersonal invests a mindless natural occurrence with the solemn significance of a ritual act.

Hence the "captive," as an interior quantity, can be experienced both personalistically and transperson-ally on the subjective level, just as it can be experienced personalistically and transpersonally as an exterior feminine quantity. A personalistic interpretation is no more identical with the objective level than a transpersonal interpretation with the subjective level.

Although they appear as inner events, the victory and transformation of the hero are valid for all mankind; they are held up for our contemplation, to be lived out in our own lives, or at least re-experienced by us.

Compared with the uniform frightfulness of the mother dragon, the father dragon is a culturally stratified structure. From this angle also she is nature, he is culture. The Terrible Male, like the Terrible Female

the initiate becomes an "ennoos," one who possesses nous, or whom the nous possesses, a "pneumaHkos." 71

The aim of this fight is to combine the phallic-chthonic with the spiritual-heavenly masculinity, and the creative union with the anima in the hieros gamos is symptomatic of this.

some ceremony or course of action, always precedes the formulation of the myth, and it is obvious that action must come before knowledge, the unconscious deed before the spoken content.

Historically speaking, however, the synthetic path of development—which includes the stage of the hero fight—was never followed in Christianity as it grew up under Gnostic influences, but only in alchemy, the cabala, and above all in Hasidism.

But first we have to discuss the emotional situation, and to understand that this deed, though it manifests itself as the coming of light, and as the creation of the world and of consciousness, is vitiated by a sense of suffering and loss so strong as almost to offset the creative gain.

Not until we have familiarized ourselves with the dominant images which direct the course of human development shall we be able to understand the variants and sidelines which cluster round the main track.

Carpentry, too, as a sacred process, belongs to this canon. Wood, like milk and wine, was thought to be a life-principle of Horus-Osiris (cf. Blackman, op. cit., p. 30), and cedar oil with its preservative and hardening qualities played an important part in embalming.

The margin of conscious alertness in modern man is relatively narrow, the intensity of his active performance is limited, and illness, strain, old age, and all psychic disturbances take their toll of this alertness.