archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Classical (Jung) · an archetype

Kore (the Maiden)

The daughter who goes down, and comes back changed.

Jung’s name, taken from the Greek for “maiden” and from Persephone’s title, for the archetypal young girl of myth and dream. He read her through the Demeter–Kore pair, as an anima figure in a man and a figure of the self in a woman.

The Kore, in Jung’s usage, is the archetypal figure of the maiden. The word is Greek for “girl” and was the cult title of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter carried off to the underworld by Hades and restored to her mother for part of every year. Jung met the figure in two places: in that myth and the mysteries at Eleusis built on it, and in the dreams and fantasies of his patients, where she appears as an unknown young girl exposed to danger. He never treated her apart from her mother. In the Demeter–Kore pair, as he read it, mother and daughter are two aspects of one feminine figure, and he added a third, Hecate, so that the figure is threefold: maiden, mother and Hecate.

Go deeper

At the threshold

A lady all alone, who went alongSinging and culling floweret after floweret,With which her pathway was all painted over.Thou makest me remember where and whatProserpina that moment was when lostHer mother her, and she herself the Spring.”

Public domain · Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII (Matilda in the earthly paradise), trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867)

A girl gathering flowers in a meadow calls up the instant Proserpina was lost, the moment of the maiden at its brightest just before the ground gives way.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Demeter and Kore

    Jung, The Psychological Aspects of the Kore (CW 9i ¶306), 1941

    Mother and maiden as two faces of one figure, with Hecate as the third.

  2. Jung’s example

    The unknown girl

    Jung, The Psychological Aspects of the Kore (CW 9i ¶311, as given in Sharp, Jung Lexicon), 1941

    The endangered young girl of women’s dreams, more sharply drawn than the maiden of myth.

  3. Jung’s example

    The Kore of the Korion

    Jung, Aion (CW 9ii ¶164), 1951

    The virgin who, Epiphanius reports, was hailed in Alexandria as having given birth to the Aeon.

  4. Jung’s example

    Kore, daughter of the light

    Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14 ¶498), 1955

    The heavenly goddess of the Acts of Thomas, mother and maiden at once.

  5. a later reading

    Psyche

    Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche, 1952

    The girl in Apuleius tempted back to the deathlike beauty of the Kore; a later reading.

  6. a later reading

    Inanna

    Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess, 1981

    The Sumerian goddess whose descent Perera sets beside Kore-Persephone’s; a later reading.

The wider sky

Where the Kore (the Maiden) has been seen

29 exemplars across 12 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Afar away the light that brings cold cheerUnto this wall,—one instant and no moreAdmitted at my distant palace-door.Afar the flowers of Enna from this drearDire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.Afar those skies from this Tartarean greyThat chills me: and afar, how far away,The nights that shall be from the days that were.

Public domain · Rossetti, Proserpina (for a Picture) (1881)

Speaking from below, the taken girl measures the cost of the fruit in distance: from the light, from Enna’s flowers, and from the self she was.

She bends for one more flower, and the field opens under her.

Below, she tastes the fruit and is no longer only someone’s daughter.

Each spring she climbs back to her mother, carrying a little of the dark.

The deep layer · what was written

Kore (the Maiden): the entry

Definition

The Kore, in Jung’s usage, is the archetypal figure of the maiden. The word is Greek for “girl” and was the cult title of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter carried off to the underworld by Hades and restored to her mother for part of every year. Jung met the figure in two places: in that myth and the mysteries at Eleusis built on it, and in the dreams and fantasies of his patients, where she appears as an unknown young girl exposed to danger. He never treated her apart from her mother. In the Demeter–Kore pair, as he read it, mother and daughter are two aspects of one feminine figure, and he added a third, Hecate, so that the figure is threefold: maiden, mother and Hecate.

His central claim is double. Seen in a man’s psychology, the Kore belongs to the anima. Seen in a woman’s, she is a figure of what Jung called the supraordinate personality, the self, because she widens a woman’s consciousness into the generations before and after her. Two things the definition excludes. The Kore is not a personality type; Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Persephone (1984) is a separate construct in a separately organised taxonomy. And the figure is not Jung’s alone: his essay was written as a psychological commentary on the classicist Karl Kerényi’s mythology of the maiden.

History

The figure appears in Jung’s work before the essay. The 1938 lecture on the mother archetype lists “the mother who reappears as the maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore” among the archetype’s variants (CW 9i ¶156), and in describing a daughter wholly identified with her mother it says, half in jest, that this was how Pluto carried Persephone away from the inconsolable Demeter (¶169).

The essay came out of the collaboration with Kerényi that also produced the child essay. Kerényi’s study of the primordial maiden and Jung’s commentary appeared as Das göttliche Mädchen in the series Albae Vigiliae (VIII/IX, 1941), and the same year the two collaborations were combined as Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie; the English edition, Essays on a Science of Mythology, followed in 1949, and Jung’s text was collected as CW 9i ¶306–383. It opens by calling Demeter and the Kore, in their threefold aspect as maiden, mother and Hecate, “something of a practical problem” for the psychology of the unconscious, and gives the Kore her psychological counterparts in the self and the anima (¶306). It then sets out Jung’s method of classifying recurrent figures by type, and names “the maiden” in his own list of chief personified archetypes, beside the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother and the anima and animus (¶309), with a footnote defending such types as no less real than plant families (¶309n, as quoted in Samuels 1985). The central claim follows:

The figure of the Kore that interests us here belongs, when observed in a man, to the anima type; and when observed in a woman to the type of supraordinate personality. — C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore” (1941), CW 9i ¶310

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The same paragraph says that in a woman the figure is usually double, mother and maiden, and that the feminine so outweighs the masculine in the myth that the man’s part is reduced to seducer or conqueror. The essay then describes the Kore as she appears in women’s material: an unknown girl, helpless and endangered, sometimes on a descent into Hades, more sharply drawn than the flower-like maiden of myth (¶311, as given in Sharp 1991). It defines the supraordinate personality as the self, the whole of which the ego is a part (¶314–315), and gives the line most often quoted from it:

every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother — C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore” (1941), CW 9i ¶316, as given in Sharp (1991)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

For Jung this extension backward and forward is the beginning of a woman’s sense of living outside time. Later works use the name in passing. Aion (1951) cites Epiphanius on a festival at the Korion in Alexandria, where worshippers announced that the Kore, the virgin, had given birth to the Aeon (CW 9ii ¶164), and Mysterium Coniunctionis recalls the heavenly goddess of the Acts of Thomas, both mother and “Kore, daughter of the light” (CW 14 ¶498).

The debate

The first disagreement was built into the book. Kerényi wrote as a mythologist about a goddess; Jung wrote as a psychologist about an image in the unconscious, and their essays sit side by side without being reconciled. Kerényi kept the archetypal vocabulary in his own later monograph, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (1967).

The classical writers extended the figure into a stage of feminine development. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche (1952; English 1956) reads every marriage, from the matriarchal standpoint, as a rape of the Kore by Hades, and treats the deathlike beauty of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White as the beauty of the Kore to which Psyche is tempted to regress. Marie-Louise von Franz (1970) reads Psyche herself as a variant of the Kore and recalls that the Kore of Eleusis gave birth to a mystical child.

Feminist Jungians made the mother–daughter bond the centre. Nor Hall (1980) builds her account of the maiden on the Eleusinian story and on Jung’s line about mothers containing daughters. Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) describes “daughters of the patriarchy” who cannot relate to the Demeter–Kore myth at all, because they cannot believe any mother would mourn them. Marion Woodman (1982) reads the abduction as the pattern by which a woman is separated from her mother.

The archetypal school questioned Jung’s division by sex. James Hillman’s Anima (1985) treats the maiden as an anima figure in women as well as men, and rejects deriving her from a father-complex: fathers create daughters, he writes, but daughters create fathers too. The trauma literature took the abduction as a model of the split that follows trauma, with Hades as diabolical but initiatory (Kalsched 1996). The general objection applies here with particular force: Andrew Samuels (1993) charges Jung’s psychology of women and men with presenting a cultural moment as eternal, and the Kore essay’s claim about what the figure means “in a woman” is a case of it.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the Kore as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. The nearest scholarly work on mother–daughter continuity, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), is psychoanalytic sociology and makes no use of Jung’s figure.

Appearances

The primary text is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the source for the abduction, the pomegranate seed and the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries; Edinger (1972) reads the myth as concerned with death and rebirth. Jung’s own instances are the myth, the Korion festival and the Acts of Thomas. Later readers added Psyche in Apuleius (Neumann, von Franz), the fairy-tale sleepers (Neumann) and the Sumerian Inanna, whom Perera sets beside Kore-Persephone as a descent to the goddess. The visual tradition includes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) and Frederic Leighton’s The Return of Persephone (1891); recent retellings include Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown and Rachel Smythe’s webcomic Lore Olympus. The archaic Greek statues called korai share the word but depict maidens in general, and whether any represents a goddess is disputed. Apart from Jung’s own examples, all of these are readings.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1941). Zum psychologischen Aspekt der Korefigur. In C. G. Jung & K. Kerényi, Das göttliche Mädchen (Albae Vigiliae VIII/IX). Pantheon. English as The psychological aspects of the Kore, CW 9i ¶306–383; ¶306–310 checked against a transcription of the Princeton text, https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/?p=160699
  • Jung, C. G., & Kerényi, K. (1949). Essays on a Science of Mythology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Bollingen Series XXII. Revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1963. ISBN 978-0-691-09851-7.
  • Jung, C. G. (1954). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (Eranos lecture 1938). CW 9i ¶156, ¶169.
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶164.
  • Jung, C. G. (1955–56). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14 ¶498.
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Kore” (¶311, ¶316) and “Supraordinate personality” (¶314–315). https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 2, for CW 9i ¶309n.
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 6, “Fathers”.
  • Kerényi, K. (1967). Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press edition 1991. ISBN 978-0-691-01915-4.
  • Neumann, E. (1956). Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (R. Manheim, Trans.). Bollingen Series LIV. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01772-3.
  • von Franz, M.-L. (1992). The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (rev. ed.; lectures first published 1970). Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-523-6.
  • Hall, N. (1980). The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090793-8. Chapter “Mothers and Daughters”.
  • Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2.
  • Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-11-3.
  • Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-316-3. Pp. 63–65, excerpted in A Blue Fire (1989), pp. 219–220.
  • Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7.
  • Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Putnam for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Shambhala edition 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2. P. 205.
  • Chodorow, N. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03892-9.
  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8.
  • Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Rossetti, D. G. (1874). Proserpine. Oil on canvas. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-proserpine-n05064

Leaving

Faint as a climate-changing bird that fliesAll night across the darkness, and at dawnFalls on the threshold of her native land,And can no more, thou camest, O my child,Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumbWith passing thro’ at once from state to state,

Public domain · Tennyson, Demeter and Persephone (In Enna) (1889)

The mother speaks as the daughter returns from the underworld, dazed by the crossing from one state to another, which is the Kore’s whole movement in a sentence.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◉ Great MotherLoving and terrible, the first world.Return to the void