CHILD. The child is a universal symbol of future potentiality as well as the carrier of the heritage of the past. The child is symbolic of the past, coming into being from generative forces that preceded it, yet for it the future is an open possibility. In Essays on a Science of Mythology (1949), Károly Kerényi states that the image of the primordial child represents the childhood of the world itself, even the origin of life. There is a mystery about the child, for what it will be as an adult is not yet and cannot be known. The child represents innocence, purity, wonder, receptivity, freshness, noncalculation, the absence of narrow ambition and purpose. As yet innocent of life, the child portrays the beginning, the origin of all. It symbolizes a primordial unity, before differentiation has taken place. Gender differences are mainly in potentiality; consciousness has not...