Maiden, Mother, Crone

Mother’s Day is approaching. Why do we feel so strongly about honoring mother? Mother is an archetype from the source field that presents itself through humans. It is personified as Mother, mom, mama, and mommy. It’s sister archetypes maiden and crone, are personified through the virgin child and Grandmother respectively. Archetypes are of two varieties, personified, meaning they can be seen as personalities in people, and transformational, meaning they are part of processes. Mother, maiden and crone are both. Personified mother is mom, the one who nurtures (Generally of course. I know that not everyone has a nurturing mother), loves and heals us. Transformational mother is the universal source field giving birth to a new level of consciousness after a journey into the underworld. That journey into the underworld, and by that I mean an unsettling period of emotional strife that forces you to grow and change, is a gestation period after which a new piece of the universal source field becomes part of one’s psyche, births a higher consciousness and spiritual maturation. This is the great mother process of nurturance that doesn’t feel like nurturance. It is this transformational nurturance that takes one from maiden to crone. Mother is so much more than a woman who tends to your needs and wishes. Mother is a divine force that guides, protects and gives true life in ways the ego cannot usually understand or comprehend. The great mother takes each of us from maiden child to mother to crone through a series of life events that can be boiled down to micro hero’s journey within a macro hero’s journey that is one incarnation in length. Mother asks us to go into our depths, to the unconscious shadows and mine for nuggets of gold beyond our highest valued objects to create new life and give birth to a new self that integrates the conscious and the unconscious. Carl Jung (1959) wrote, “the more numerous and the more significant the unconscious contents which are assimilated to the ego, the closer the approximation of the ego to the Self” (p. 23). In other words, the more you delve into your own depths and make known the unknown parts of you, the closer your ego becomes to the reality of spirit. Balancing and merging the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious, is the role of the great mother. A therapist is the mother archetype, personified too in that he or she nurtures you along the journey of merging your personal light and dark selves into one cohesive Christ. The patriarchal culture is starving for the feminine to bring balance and we see it as a rise in seeking depth through various therapy modalities. Reference Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Research into the phenomenology of the self. New York, NY: Princeton University Press