Theotokos -- Gk: bearer of God, i.e. Mother of God
Historically, the title said more about the controversies over the nature of Christ than about the nature of Mary, but in its implications about the nature of Mary it points to deeper psychological meaning.
Hence, it is worthwhile to revisit the very tedious historical permutations of the doctrines of the nature (Gk: physis) of Christ, here in rough outline (from various articles in Encyclopedia Britannica):
Nestorians objected to calling Mary "Theotokos" because that term expresses that the two natures, divine and human, became intimately one in the incarnation. The political struggle between Nestorius and Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, was played out at the Council of Ephesus, 431. Cyril --pointedly and politically-- defended the Theotokos title.The Theotokos title was used by the Council of Chalcedon, 451: God conferred the divine aspect, and Theotokos the human aspect of the incarnation, "the distinction of the natures being by no means taken away by the union."
The schism led to the formation of the Coptic, Syrian Orthodox, and Armenian Churches. They affirm that Christ was perfect man and perfect God, and his manhood was real, perfect, and dynamic, being different only in that he was sinless, his human experiences (joy, suffering, happiness, sorrow, etc) as real as that of any human. The "monophysite" and "orthodox" positions as to the nature of Christ have become quite close, each having moved somewhat toward the other's position.
Interesting observations from a theological source predating the theory of the collective unconscious. He treats the emergence of the feminine aspect as "diffusionistic" rather than archetypal, but he has a modern psychological sensitivity about spiritual dynamics:
Walter F. Adeney [Lancashire College, Manchester, 1908]. The Greek and Eastern Churches. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons/International Theological Library series, 1928
The way for the church's worship of the Queen of Heaven, the Theotokos, the "mother of God" was prepared by a general spiritual impulse [during Augustan rule] "That arose in the East and swept in wave after wave of religious excitement across to the demoralised, enervated West." He cites worship of Isis as Queen of Heaven, and the Roman Cybele as "mother of God." (Further, Mithra as Sun-god was absorbed into the Babylonian worship of Bel and then into worship of the Roman emperor until Constantine; he quotes Renan: "If the world had not become Christian it would have become Mithrastic.") [p.10]
The term Theotokos was "the watchword of anti-Nestorianism" -- "With this, and powerfully aided by it, came the growing cult of the Virgin, especially welcome in Egypt, the original home of the Mother-god Isis." (tomb images of Isis with Horus in her arms) [p. 105]
[A]ll through the later patristic period and down into the Middle Ages the humanity of Christ became more and more shadowy, and his Divinity increasingly dominated the minds of the Church teachers, so that sorrowful people who were craving for human sympathy turned from the awful [i.e. held remotely in awe] Byzantine Christ to the compassionate Mary, and found in the mother that actual human sympathy which it had been the object of the now neglected incarnation to bring them in her Son. It is hardly too much to say that Mary became to all intents and purposes the incarnate Saviour, while the humanity of Christ, and his incarnation were lost in the grandeur of his divinity. [p 105]
Were these prolonged controversies about the nature of Christ merely ego games, political wranglings of no current interest? What is their psychological dimension? What do they add to the understanding of psyche?
Do they say something important about the ego-self-anima(us)-shadow "quaternity"? Or the ego-self axis? Of the way God-image (self) indwells and interacts with the "human" (ego) aspect of the person.
What is born from that interaction? A "Christ": Consciousness is the "anointed" aspect of the psyche, that which is designated and separated from the collective unconscious. (Christ = Messiah = "the anointed one")
Theotokos as vessel ("Grail") of consciousness of the indwelling divine which must (continually) give birth to divine agency in the world; at the same time giving birth to new consciousness in the Godhead (the All)
Collective dimension of theotokos; "second" incarnation in collective consciousness, moving now from one to many
Individuation requires cultivation of the "theotokos" aspect of personhood: individuation = christification = bearing the divine = giving birth to the "divine substance" of consciousness
And what is the larger theological dimension of "theotokos"? Of the creative nature of Godhead Itself? Primal Theotokos as affirmation of cosmic feminine. The Logos element emerging from the Feminine.
Genesis 1:1: Earth (though unformed) apparently a preexisting presence with Elohim (she became formed after he hovered over her); formation of bodily Christ thus symbolically a parallel to the formation of physical creation itself from a "feminine" nuocontinuum, which is a cosmic Theotokos; physical cosmos as body of the cosmic Christ
These questions about the "nature of Christ" come to the forefront once again if we do indeed face a "new dispensation" based on depth psychology [Edinger]
The nuocontinuum and the psychological perspective give us the opportunity now to foresee a resolution between the "orthodox" and "monophysite" points of view, with respect both to cosmos and the nature of humanity. This would be an important shift of consciousness, an enantiodromia, a new perspective which runs contrary to its opposite (its complementary pole) yet lives in tension with it.
To the exclusive emphasis on the incarnation of God into the physical world we can add the concept of the intheation of the physical world in God; and it is from the creative mystical tension between the two that new creation and new consciousness arise.
Psychologically speaking, Theotokos is both divine feminine who
bears creation, and created feminine who bears Logos as new
consciousness; and that Logos/Son having "returned" to the Father, the
divineSelf as Holy Spirit then joins "Theotokos" in yet more creation.
Such a view recognizes the mystical marriage of the trinitarian Masculine with its equal Feminine, without allowing the ascendency of one aspect of deity over the other; and the concept is consonant with the view of the organicity of physical creation arising from an all-embracing all-nurturing nonlocal reality.