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The figures corresponding to Demeter and Hecate are supra-ordinate, not to say over-life-size “Mothers” ranging from the Pietà type to the Baubo type. The unconscious, which acts as a counterbalance to woman’s conventional innocuousness, proves to be highly inventive in this latter respect. I can recall only very few cases where Demeter’s own noble figure in its pure form breaks through as an image rising spontaneously from the unconscious. I remember a case, in fact, where a maiden-goddess appears clad all in purest white, but carrying a black monkey in her arms. The Earth Mother is always chthonic and is occasionally related to the moon, either through the blood-sacrifice already mentioned, or through a child-sacrifice, or else because she is adorned with a sickle moon.5 In pictorial or plastic representations the Mother is dark deepening to black, or red (these being her principal colours), and with a primitive or animal expression of face; in form she not infrequently resembles the neolithic ideal of the “Venus” of Brassempouy or that of Willendorf, or again the sleeper of Hal Saflieni.6 Now and then I have come across multiple breasts, arranged like those of a sow. The Earth Mother plays an important part in the woman’s unconscious, for all her manifestations are described as “powerful.” This shows that in such cases the Earth Mother element in the conscious mind is abnormally weak and requires strengthening.
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