SOURCE: "Kore," in Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and The Mysteries of Eleusis, by C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, translated by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series, XXII, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 101-55.

In the following excerpt, from an essay originally published in 1949, Kerényi analyzes the nature of "maiden goddesses" and their role and function in Greek mythology. Kerényi describes the Kore, or maiden goddess, as a paradox, in that she represents both mother and maiden, both "begetter and begotten."

How can a man know what a woman's life is? A woman's life is quite different from a man's. God has ordered it so. A man is the same from the time of his circumcision to the time of his withering. He is the same before he has sought out a woman for the first time, and...