The maternal earth is coded as a dark abyss that threatens to engulf man

Evidence

Thus, Mother Earth has a face of darkness: she is chaos, where everything comes from and must return to one day; she is Nothingness. The many aspects of the world that the day uncovers commingle in the night: night of spirit locked up in the generality and opacity of matter, night of sleep and nothing. At the heart of the sea, it is night: woman is the Mare tenebrarum dreaded by ancient navigators; it is night in the bowels of the earth. Man is threatened with being engulfed in this night, the reverse of fertility, and it horrifies him. He aspires to the sky, to light, to sunny heights, to the pure and crystal clear cold of blue; and underfoot is a moist, hot, and dark gulf ready to swallow him; many legends have the hero falling and forever lost in maternal darkness: a cave, an abyss, hell. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 327

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the Mother/night/chaos/Nothingness cluster that grounds Beauvoir’s immanence-theme vocabulary.
• XREF: Connects to Jung’s maternal archetype and to the hero-falls-into-cave motif later in Parable of the Sower, which literalizes the engulfing earth.