The Mother, the Psyche, and the Cosmic Tree

TLDR
​Jung ends his essay on the mother archetype by teaching that the unconscious is the mother, the form into which all experience is poured. The mother image is both good and terrible, and when we split them apart, evil ends up inside us. The Assumption of Mary symbolizes the healing of this split by uniting matter and spirit. Finally, the cosmic tree stands as the eternal symbol of life that reconciles all opposites and shows us how to live whole again.

I've been sitting with pages 101 through 110 of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. This section is Jung’s conclusion on the mother archetype, and it's some of the most interesting content I've come across so far. 

He covers a lot of ground here, but if I had to summarize it in one line, it would be this: our souls cannot be whole unless we learn to live with opposites held together — light and dark, matter and spirit, heaven and earth.

The Unconscious as Mother
Jung starts with a simple but important observation. Myths from every culture, when stripped of their details, all point back to the same thing: the unconscious. He says, “All the statements of mythology on this subject as well as the observed effects of the mother-complex, when stripped of their confusing detail, point to the unconscious as their place of origin” (CW 9i, p. 101).

Think of it this way. Imagine a child looking up at the sky. She notices that the sun rises and sets. Day turns into night. Summer turns into winter. The child then imagines that the world itself is divided between a bright side and a dark side, good and bad, safe and dangerous. Jung is saying that this pattern of thinking didn’t come from the outside world alone. It came from inside. Human beings are the ones who divided the cosmos because they were already experiencing divisions inside their own souls — between consciousness and the deep, unknown unconscious.

That's why Goethe could say, “All that is outside, also is inside” (p. 101). The psyche has its own built-in form, almost like a mold that gives shape to every experience. Jung calls this precondition “the mother, the matrix, the form into which all experience is poured” (p. 101). 

That may sound lofty, but it is simple if you think about it. A newborn baby does not meet life as a blank slate. Already the child relates to the world through the mother, whether she's present, absent, nurturing, or neglectful. The mother is the lens through which the child first experiences existence. And long after infancy, that pattern remains in the unconscious as the matrix through which we experience reality itself.

The Double Mother: Good and Bad
Jung then explains why the mother shows up in myths and stories with two faces. Sometimes she is the Good Mother, the one who feeds, protects, and blesses. Other times she is the Terrible Mother, the witch who devours, the dark goddess who destroys. “We then get a good fairy and a wicked fairy, or a benevolent goddess and one who is malevolent and dangerous” (p. 102).

You can see this in fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel. The witch lives in a gingerbread house. At first she seems to offer sweetness and abundance. But soon she reveals herself as the devouring mother, fattening the children to eat them. The same figure offers life and death.

Ancient cultures were not scandalized by this paradox. Jung notes, “In Western antiquity and especially in Eastern cultures the opposites often remain united in the same figure, though this paradox does not disturb the primitive mind in the least” (p. 102). In other words, they could accept that life itself is double-edged, that the same mother who gives birth also brings death, that love and danger are intertwined.

But modern people dislike paradox. We want everything neatly divided. And so in theology and culture we often split the image of the mother into separate figures. Light is all good. Darkness is all bad. God is pure goodness, and evil is pushed into a figure like the Devil.

The Danger of Splitting Good and Evil
At first this sounds reassuring. God is good, the Devil is evil, and the line between them is clear. But Jung says this split comes at a cost. “The morally ambiguous Yahweh became the exclusively good God, while everything evil was united in the devil” (p. 103).

And here's the problem with that...once we exile evil from God, it has nowhere else to go except into us. Darkness doesn't disappear just because we pretend it's gone. It sneaks back into human beings. Jung warns, “The world of darkness has thus been abolished for God and all, and nobody realizes what a poisoning this is of man’s soul” (p. 103).

Think about how often we see this play out. A church community proclaims God’s goodness but refuses to face its own shadow. Soon the shadow shows up in hidden abuses, hypocrisies, or scandals. Or think about an individual who insists they are perfectly righteous and without fault. Inevitably, the denied shadow bursts out in anger, addiction, or cruelty. When we split light and dark too cleanly, we do not get rid of evil. We carry it inside us, unacknowledged.

Scripture captures this, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). Evil cannot be cast out like a bad tenant. It must be faced, integrated, and redeemed.

The Assumption as Symbol of Wholeness
It's at this point that Jung brings in Catholic theology. In 1950 Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary as dogma. This meant that Mary was taken up into heaven body and soul. For Jung, this was not just a theological detail. It was a symbol of the psyche’s attempt to heal itself.

He writes, "The Assumption…indicates a union of earth and heaven, or of matter and spirit” (p. 108). For centuries the West had despised matter, treating it as base and corrupt, while elevating spirit as holy. The Assumption reverses that imbalance. It proclaims that matter is not excluded from God but is gathered into heaven itself.

Think of what that means. A woman’s body is not despised but honored. The ordinary flesh we live in is not garbage to be discarded but is destined for glory. In Jung’s eyes, this is a way of saying that heaven and earth belong together, that body and spirit cannot be torn apart forever.

He even notes that science longs for the same thing. Physicists try to unify the laws of matter with the mystery of life. Alchemists once sought the same union in their symbolic marriage of opposites. The Assumption, Jung says, is the religious image of this universal longing for wholeness.

The Cosmic Tree
Finally, Jung ends with the image of the cosmic tree. He writes, “This tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible” (p. 110).

The tree has roots in the earth and branches reaching toward heaven. It is both grounded and transcendent. It holds together what we cannot: life and death, light and dark, matter and spirit.

We know this image well from the Bible. In Genesis, the Tree of Life grows in Eden. In Proverbs, Wisdom is called a tree of life. Jesus calls himself the vine, and we are the branches. In Revelation, the Tree of Life appears again, its leaves for the healing of the nations. And of course at the center of Christian faith stands the cross, which early Christians often called the true tree of life.

Jung ends with a warning. When people cannot find their way back to symbolic reality, they become strangers in the world. He says, “It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own existence, and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger” (p. 110).

Put simply, if we cut ourselves off from symbols like the tree, we lose our way. But if we live with them, we rediscover that we belong to the world and that life holds us together.

Bringing It Home
So what's Jung really saying to us in these pages?

First, he's saying that all our experiences flow from a deep matrix within the psyche, symbolized by the mother. This is why the mother figure is so powerful in myth and in our own lives.

Second, he's saying that the mother is always double. She's both good and terrible. If we try to separate these opposites too neatly, we end up carrying the evil inside us.

Third, he's saying that the Assumption of Mary is a profound symbol of healing. It reunites what had been split apart: body and soul, earth and heaven.

And finally, he's saying that the cosmic tree is the eternal symbol of life itself. It shows us that wholeness comes not from eliminating opposites, but from holding them together in one living reality.

For us, this means that we must learn not to fear our own shadow, not to despise our bodies, and not to think of God as far removed from the ordinary world. Instead we are called to stand under the tree, with our feet in the soil of our own unconscious and our arms stretched toward heaven, and discover that we belong.