death as the hero, and is even called “faithful brother” by the latter.
These allusions point to a remarkable similarity between horse and
rider. There seems to exist an intimate connection between the two,
which guides them to the same destiny. We already have seen that the
symbolization of “the libido in resistance” through the “terrible
mother” in some places runs parallel with the horse.[574] Strictly
speaking, it would be incorrect to say that the horse is, or means, the
mother. The mother idea is a libido symbol, and the horse is also a
libido symbol, and at some points the two symbols intersect in their
significances. The common feature of the two ideas lies in the libido,
especially in the libido repressed from incest. The hero and the horse
appear to us in this setting like an artistic formation of the idea of
humanity with its repressed libido, whereby the horse acquires the
significance of the animal unconscious, which appears domesticated and
subjected to the will of man. Agni upon the ram, Wotan upon Sleipneir,
Ahuramazda upon Angromainyu,[575] Jahwe upon the monstrous seraph,
Christ upon the ass,[576] Dionysus upon the ass, Mithra upon the horse,
Men upon the human-footed horse, Freir upon the golden-bristled boar,
etc., are parallel representations. The chargers of mythology are always
invested with great significance; they very often appear
anthropomorphized. Thus, Men’s horse has human forelegs; Balaam’s ass,
human speech; the retreating bull, upon whose back Mithra springs in
order to strike him down, is, according to a Persian legend, actually
the God himself. The mock crucifix of the Palatine represents the
crucified with an ass’s head, perhaps in reference to the ancient legend
that in the temple of Jerusalem the image of an ass was worshipped. As
Drosselbart (horse’s mane) Wotan is half-human, half-horse.[577] An old
German riddle very prettily shows this unity between horse and
horseman.[578] “Who are the two, who travel to Thing? Together they have
three eyes, ten feet[579] and one tail; and thus they travel over the
land.” Legends ascribe properties to the horse, which psychologically
belong to the unconscious of man; horses are clairvoyant and
clairaudient; they show the way when the lost wanderer is helpless; they
have mantic powers. In the Iliad the horse prophesies evil. They hear
the words which the corpse speaks when it is taken to the grave—words
which men cannot hear. Cæsar learned from his human-footed horse
(probably taken from the identification of Cæsar with the Phrygian Men)
that he was to conquer the world. An ass prophesied to Augustus the
victory of Actium. The horse also sees phantoms. All these things
correspond to typical manifestations of the unconscious. Therefore, it
is perfectly intelligible that the horse, as the image of the wicked
animal component of man, has manifold connections with the devil. The
devil has a horse’s foot; in certain circumstances a horse’s form. At
crucial moments he suddenly shows a cloven foot (proverbial) in the same
way as in the abduction of Hadding, Sleipneir suddenly looked out from
behind Wotan’s mantle.[580] Just as the nightmare rides on the sleeper,
so does the devil, and, therefore, it is said that those who have
nightmares are ridden by the devil. In Persian lore the devil is the
steed of God. The devil, like all evil things, represents sexuality.
Witches have intercourse with him, in which case he appears in the form
of a goat or horse. The unmistakably phallic nature of the devil is
communicated to the horse as well; hence this symbol occurs in
connections where this is the only meaning which would furnish an
explanation. It is to be mentioned that Loki generates in the form of a
horse, just as does the devil when in horse’s form, as an old fire god.
Thus the lightning was represented theriomorphically as a horse.[581] An
uneducated hysteric told me that as a child she had suffered from
extreme fear of thunder, because every time the lightning flashed she
saw immediately afterwards a huge black horse reaching upwards as far as
the sky.[582] It is said in a legend that the devil, as the divinity of
lightning, casts a horse’s foot (lightning) upon the roofs. In
accordance with the primitive meaning of thunder as fertilizer of the
earth, the phallic meaning is given both to lightning and the horse’s
foot. In mythology the horse’s foot really has the phallic function as
in this dream. An uneducated patient who originally had been violently
forced to coitus by her husband very often dreams (after separation)
that a wild horse springs upon her and kicks her in the abdomen with his
hind foot. Plutarch has given us the following words of a prayer from
the Dionysus orgies:
ἐλθεῖν ἥρως Διόνυσε Ἄλιον ἐς ναὸν ἁγνὸν σὺν Χαρίτεσσιν ἐς ναὸν τῷ βοέῳ
ποδὶ θύων, ἄξιε ταῦρε, ἄξιε ταῦρε.[583][584]
Pegasus with his foot strikes out of the earth the spring Hippocrene.
Upon a Corinthian statue of Bellerophon, which was also a fountain, the
water flowed out from the horse’s hoof. Balder’s horse gave rise to a
spring through his kick. Thus the horse’s foot is the dispenser of
fruitful moisture.[585] A legend of lower Austria, told by Jaehns,
informs us that a gigantic man on a white horse is sometimes seen riding
over the mountains. This means a speedy rain. In the German legend the
goddess of birth, Frau Holle, appears on horseback. Pregnant women near
confinement are prone to give oats to a white horse from their aprons
and to pray him to give them a speedy delivery. It was originally the
custom for the horse to rub against the woman’s genitals. The horse
(like the ass) had in general the significance of a priapic animal.[586]
Horse’s tracks are idols dispensing blessing and fertility. Horse’s
tracks established a claim, and were of significance in determining
boundaries, like the priaps of Latin antiquity. Like the phallic
Dactyli, a horse opened the mineral riches of the Harz Mountains with
his hoof. The horseshoe, an equivalent for horse’s foot,[587] brings
luck and has apotropaic meaning. In the Netherlands an entire horse’s
foot is hung up in the stable to ward against sorcery. The analogous
effect of the phallus is well known; hence the phalli at the gates. In
particular the horse’s leg turned lightning aside, according to the
principle “similia similibus.”
Horses also symbolize the wind, that is to say, the tertium
comparationis is again the libido symbol. The German legend recognizes
the wind as the wild huntsman in pursuit of the maiden. Stormy regions
frequently derive their names from horses, as the White Horse Mountain
of the Lüneburger heath. The centaurs are typical wind gods, and have
been represented as such by Böcklin’s artistic intuition.[588]
Horses also signify fire and light. The fiery horses of Helios are an
example. The horses of Hector are called Xanthos (yellow, bright),
Podargos (swift-footed), Lampos (shining) and Aithon (burning). A very
pronounced fire symbolism was represented by the mystic Quadriga,
mentioned by Dio Chrysostomus. The supreme God always drives his chariot
in a circle. Four horses are harnessed to the chariot. The horse driven
on the periphery moves very quickly. He has a shining coat, and bears
upon it the signs of the planets and the Zodiac.[589] This is a
representation of the rotary fire of heaven. The second horse moves more
slowly, and is illuminated only on one side. The third moves still more
slowly, and the fourth rotates around himself. But once the outer horse
set the second horse on fire with his fiery breath, and the third
flooded the fourth with his streaming sweat. Then the horses dissolve
and pass over into the substance of the strongest and most fiery, which
now becomes the charioteer. The horses also represent the four elements.
The catastrophe signifies the conflagration of the world and the deluge,
whereupon the division of the God into many parts ceases, and the divine
unity is restored.[590] Doubtless the Quadriga may be understood
astronomically as a _symbol of time_. We already saw in the first part
that the stoic representation of Fate is a fire symbol. It is,
therefore, a logical continuation of the thought, when time, closely
related to the conception of destiny, exhibits this same libido
symbolism. Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad, i: 1, says:
“The morning glow verily is the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun
his eye, the wind his breath, the all-spreading fire his mouth, the
year is the belly of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back, the
atmosphere the cavern of his body, the earth the vault of his belly.
The poles are his sides, in between the poles his ribs, the seasons
his limbs, the months and fortnights his joints. Days and nights are
his feet, stars his bones, clouds his flesh. The food he digests is
the deserts, the rivers are his veins, the mountains his liver and
lungs, the herbs and trees his hair; the rising sun is his fore part,
the setting sun his after part. The ocean is his kinsman, the sea his
cradle.”
The horse undoubtedly here stands for a time symbol, and also for the
entire world. We come across in the Mithraic religion, a strange God of
Time, Aion, called Kronos or Deus Leontocephalus, because his
stereotyped representation is a lion-headed man, who, standing in a
rigid attitude, is encoiled by a snake, whose head projects forward from
behind over the lion’s head. The figure holds in each hand a key, on the
chest rests a thunderbolt, upon his back are the four wings of the wind;
in addition to that, the figure sometimes bears the Zodiac on his body.
Additional attributes are a cock and implements. In the Carolingian
psalter of Utrecht, which is based upon ancient models, the Sæculum-Aion
is represented as a naked man with a snake in his hand. As is suggested
by the name of the divinity, he is a symbol of time, most interestingly
composed from libido symbols. The lion, the zodiac sign of the greatest
summer heat,[591] is the symbol of the most mighty desire. (“My soul
roars with the voice of a hungry lion,” says Mechthild of Magdeburg.) In
the Mithra mystery the serpent is often antagonistic to the lion,
corresponding to that very universal myth of the battle of the sun with
the dragon.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tum is even designated as a he-cat,
because as such he fought the snake, Apophis. The encoiling also means
the engulfing, the entering into the mother’s womb. Thus time is defined
by the rising and setting of the sun, that is to say, through the death
and renewal of the libido. The addition of the cock again suggests time,
and the addition of implements suggests the creation through time.
(“Durée créatrice,” Bergson.) Oromazdes and Ahriman were produced
through Zrwanakarana, the “infinitely long duration.” Time, this empty
and purely formal concept, is expressed in the mysteries by
transformations of the creative power, the libido. Macrobius says:
“Leonis capite monstratur praesens tempus—quia conditio ejus valida
fervensque est.”[592]
Philo of Alexandria has a better understanding:
“Tempus ab hominibus pessimis putatur deus volentibus Ens essentiale
abscondere—pravis hominibus tempus putatur causa rerum mundi,
sapientibus vero et optimis non tempus sed Deus.”[593][594]
In Firdusi[595] time is often the symbol of fate, the libido nature of
which we have already learned to recognize. The Hindoo text mentioned
above includes still more—its symbol of the horse contains the whole
world; his kinsman and his cradle is the sea, the mother, similar to the
world soul, the maternal significance of which we have seen above. Just
as Aion represents the libido in an embrace, that is to say, in the
state of death and of rebirth, so here the cradle of the horse is the
sea, i. e. the libido is in the mother, dying and rising again, like the
symbol of the dying and resurrected Christ, who hangs like ripe fruit
upon the tree of life.
We have already seen that the horse is connected through Ygdrasil with
the symbolism of the tree. The horse is also a “tree of death”; thus in
the Middle Ages the funeral pyre was called St. Michael’s horse, and the
neo-Persian word for coffin means “wooden horse.”[596] The horse has
also the rôle of psycho-pompos; he is the steed to conduct the souls to
the other world—horsewomen fetch the souls (Valkyries). Neo-Greek songs
represent Charon on a horse. These definitions obviously lead to the
mother symbolism. The Trojan horse was the only means by which the city
could be conquered; because only he who has entered the mother and been
reborn is an invincible hero. The Trojan horse is a magic charm, like
the “Nodfyr,” which also serves to overcome necessity. The formula
evidently reads, “In order to overcome the difficulty, thou must commit
incest, and once more be born from thy mother.” It appears that striking
a nail into the sacred tree signifies something very similar. The “Stock
im Eisen” in Vienna seems to have been such a palladium.
Still another symbolic form is to be considered. Occasionally the devil
rides upon a three-legged horse. The Goddess of Death, Hel, in time of
pestilence, also rides upon a three-legged horse.[597] The gigantic ass,
which is three-legged, stands in the heavenly rain lake Vourukasha; his
urine purifies the water of the lake, and from his roar all useful
animals become pregnant and all harmful animals miscarry. The Triad
further points to the phallic significance. The contrasting symbolism of
Hel is blended into one conception in the ass of Vourukasha. The libido
is fructifying as well as destroying.
These definitions, as a whole, plainly reveal the fundamental features.
The horse is a libido symbol, partly of phallic, partly of maternal
significance, like the tree. It represents the libido in this
application, that is, the libido repressed through the incest
prohibition.
In the Miller drama an Indian approaches the hero, ready to shoot an
arrow at him. Chiwantopel, however, with a proud gesture, exposes his
breast to the enemy. This idea reminds the author of the scene between
Cassius and Brutus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Cæsar.” A misunderstanding
has arisen between the two friends, when Brutus reproaches Cassius for
withholding from him the money for the legions. Cassius, irritable and
angry, breaks out into the complaint:
“Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come,
Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius,
For Cassius is a-weary of the world:
Hated by one he loves: braved by his brother:
Check’d like a bondman; _all his faults observed_:
Set in a note-book, learn’d and conn’d by rote,
To cast into my teeth. O I could weep
My spirit from mine eyes!—There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast; within, a heart
Dearer than Plutus’ mine, richer than gold:
If that thou beest a Roman, take it forth:
I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart.
Strike, as thou didst at Cæsar; for I know
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lov’dst him better
Than ever thou lov’dst Cassius.”
The material here would be incomplete without mentioning the fact that
this speech of Cassius shows many analogies to the agonized delirium of
Cyrano (compare Part I), only Cassius is far more theatrical and
overdrawn. Something childish and hysterical is in his manner. Brutus
does not think of killing him, but administers a very chilling rebuke in
the following dialogue:
BRUTUS: Sheathe your dagger:
Be angry when you will, it shall have scope:
Do what you will, dishonor shall be humor.
_O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb_
That carries anger as the flint bears fire:
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again.
CASSIUS: Hath Cassius liv’d
To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus
When grief and blood ill-tempered vexeth him?
BRUTUS: When I spoke that, I was ill-tempered too.
CASSIUS: Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.
BRUTUS: And my heart too.
CASSIUS: O Brutus!
BRUTUS: What’s the matter?
CASSIUS: Have not you love enough to bear with me
When that rash humor _which my mother gave me_
Makes me forgetful?
BRUTUS: Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth
When you are over earnest with your Brutus,
He’ll think your mother chides and leave you so.
The analytic interpretation of Cassius’s irritability plainly reveals
that at these moments he identifies himself with the mother, and his
conduct, therefore, is truly feminine, as his speech demonstrates most
excellently. For his womanish love-seeking and desperate subjection
under the proud masculine will of Brutus calls forth the friendly remark
of the latter, that Cassius is yoked with a lamb, that is to say, has
something very weak in his character, which is derived from the mother.
One recognizes in this without any difficulty the analytic hall-marks of
an infantile disposition, which, as always, is characterized by a
prevalence of the parent-imago, here the mother-imago. An infantile
individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or
not at all, from the childish environment, that is, from his adaptation
to his parents. Therefore, on one side, he reacts falsely towards the
world, as a child towards his parents, always demanding love and
immediate reward for his feelings; on the other side, on account of the
close connection to the parents, he identifies himself with them. The
infantile individual behaves like the father and mother. He is not in a
condition to live for himself and to find the place to which he belongs.
Therefore, Brutus very justly takes it for granted that the “mother
chides” in Cassius, not he himself. The psychologically valuable fact
which we gather here is the information _that Cassius is infantile and
identified_ with the mother. The hysterical behavior is due to the
circumstance that Cassius is still, in part, a lamb, and _an innocent
and entirely harmless child_. He remains, as far as his emotional life
is concerned, still far behind himself. This we often see among people
who, as masters, apparently govern life and fellow-creatures; they have
remained children in regard to the demands of their love nature.
The figures of the Miller dramas, being children of the creator’s
phantasy, depict, as is natural, those traits of character which belong
to the author. The hero, the wish figure, is represented as most
distinguished, because the hero always combines in himself all
wished-for ideals. Cyrano’s attitude is certainly beautiful and
impressive; Cassius’s behavior has a theatrical effect. Both heroes
prepare to die effectively, in which attempt Cyrano succeeds. This
attitude betrays a wish for death in the unconscious of our author, the
meaning of which we have already discussed at length as the motive for
her poem of the moth. The wish of young girls to die is only an indirect
expression, which remains a pose, even in case of real death, for death
itself can be a pose. Such an outcome merely adds beauty and value to
the pose under certain conditions. That the highest summit of life is
expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact; for
creation beyond one’s self means personal death. The coming generation
is the end of the preceding one. This symbolism is frequent in erotic
speech. The lascivious speech between Lucius and the wanton servant-maid
in Apuleius (“Metamorphoses,” lib. ii: 32) is one of the clearest
examples:
“Proeliare, inquit, et fortiter proeliare: nec enim tibi cedam, nec
terga vortam. Cominus in aspectum, si vir es, dirige; et grassare
naviter, et occide moriturus. Hodierna pugna non habet
missionem.—Simul ambo corruimus inter mutuos amplexus animas
anhelantes.”[598]
This symbolism is extremely significant, because it shows how easily a
contrasting expression originates and how equally intelligible and
characteristic such an expression is. The proud gesture with which the
hero offers himself to death may very easily be an indirect expression
which challenges the pity or sympathy of the other, and thus is doomed
to the calm analytic reduction to which Brutus proceeds. The behavior of
Chiwantopel is also suspicious, because the Cassius scene which serves
as its model betrays indiscreetly that the whole affair is merely
infantile and one which owes its origin to an overactive mother imago.
When we compare this piece with the series of mother symbols brought to
light in the previous chapter, we must say that the Cassius scene merely
confirms once more what we have long supposed, that is to say, that the
motor power of these symbolic visions arises from an infantile mother
transference, that is to say, from an undetached bond to the mother.
In the drama the libido, in contradistinction to the inactive nature of
the previous symbols, assumes a threatening activity, a conflict
becoming evident, in which the one part threatens the other with murder.
The hero, as the ideal image of the dreamer, is inclined to die; he does
not fear death. In accordance with the infantile character of this hero,
it would most surely be time for him to take his departure from the
stage, or, in childish language, to die. Death is to come to him in the
form of an arrow-wound. Considering the fact that heroes themselves are
very often great archers or succumb to an arrow-wound (St. Sebastian, as
an example), it may not be superfluous to inquire into the meaning of
death through an arrow.
We read in the biography of the stigmatized nun Katherine Emmerich[599]
the following description of the evidently neurotic sickness of her
heart:
“When only in her novitiate, she received as a Christmas present from
the holy Christ a very tormenting heart trouble for the whole period
of her nun’s life. God showed her inwardly the purpose; it was on
account of the decline of the spirit of the order, especially for the
sins of her fellow-sisters. But what rendered this trouble most
painful was the gift which she had possessed from youth, namely, to
see before her eyes the inner nature of man as he really was. She felt
the heart trouble physically as if her heart was continually pierced
by arrows.[600] These arrows—and this represented the still worse
mental suffering—she recognized as the thoughts, plots, secret
speeches, misunderstandings, scandal and uncharitableness, in which
her fellow-sisters, wholly without reason and unscrupulously, were
engaged against her and her god-fearing way of life.”
It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and long-suffering
nature will not readily bear such a violation, and defends itself in its
own way. The companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true
saint can live. We know from analytic experience that these temptations
can pass unconsciously, so that only their equivalents would be produced
in consciousness in the form of symptoms. We know that it is proverbial
that heart and smart (Herz and Schmerz) rhyme. It is a well-known fact
that hysterics put a physical pain in place of a mental pain. The
biographer of Emmerich has comprehended that very correctly. Only her
interpretation of the pain is, as usual, projected. It is always the
others who secretly assert all sorts of evil things about her, and this
she pretended gave her the pains.[601] The case, however, bears a
somewhat different aspect. The very difficult renunciation of all life’s
joys, this death before the bloom, is generally painful, and especially
painful are the unfulfilled wishes and the attempts of the animal nature
to break through the power of repression. The gossip and jokes of the
sisters very naturally centre around these most painful things, so that
it must appear to the saint as if her symptoms were caused by this.
Naturally, again, she could not know that gossip tends to assume the
rôle of the unconscious, which, like a clever adversary, always aims at
the actual gaps in our armor.
A passage from Gautama Buddha embodies this idea:[602]
“A wish earnestly desired
Produced by will, and nourished
When gradually it must be thwarted,
Burrows like an arrow in the flesh.”
The wounding and painful arrows do not come from without through gossip,
which only attacks externally, but they come from ambush, from our own
unconscious. This, rather than anything external, creates the
defenseless suffering. It is our _own repressed and unrecognized desires
which fester like arrows in our flesh_.[603] In another connection this
was clear to the nun, and that most literally. It is a well-known fact,
and one which needs no further proof to those who understand, that these
mystic scenes of union with the Saviour generally are intermingled with
an enormous amount of sexual libido.[604] Therefore, it is not
astonishing that the scene of the stigmata is nothing but an incubation
through the Saviour, only slightly changed metaphorically, as compared
with the ancient conception of “unio mystica,” as cohabitation with the
god. Emmerich relates the following of her stigmatization:
“I had a contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, and implored him
to let me feel with him his sorrows, and prayed five paternosters to
the honor of the five sacred wounds. Lying on my bed with outstretched
arms, I entered into a great sweetness and into an endless thirst for
the torments of Jesus. Then I saw a light descending upon me: it came
obliquely from above. It was a crucified body, living and transparent,
with arms extended, but without a cross. The wounds shone brighter
than the body; they were five circles of glory, coming forth from the
whole glory. I was enraptured and my heart was moved with great pain
and yet with sweetness from longing to share in the torments of my
Saviour. And my longings for the sorrows of the Redeemer increased
more and more on gazing on his wounds, and passed from my breast,
through my hands, sides and feet to his holy wounds: then from the
hands, then from the sides, then from the feet of the figure threefold
shining red beams ending below in an arrow, shot forth to my hands,
sides and feet.”
The beams, in accordance with the phallic fundamental thought, are
threefold, terminating below in an arrow-point.[605] Like Cupid, the
sun, too, has its quiver, full of destroying or fertilizing arrows, sun
rays,[606] which possess phallic meaning. On this significance evidently
rests the Oriental custom of designating brave sons as arrows and
javelins of the parents. “To make sharp arrows” is an Arabian expression
for “to generate brave sons.” The Psalms declare (cxxvii:4):
“Like as the arrows in the hands of the giant; even so are the young
children.”
(Compare with this the remarks previously made about “boys.”) Because of
this significance of the arrow it is intelligible why the Scythian king
Ariantes, when he wished to prepare a census, demanded an arrow-head
from each man. A similar meaning attaches equally to the lance. Men are
descended from the lance, because the ash is the mother of lances.
Therefore, the men of the Iron Age are derived from her. The marriage
custom to which Ovid alludes (“Comat virgineas hasta recurva
comas”—_Fastorum_, lib. ii: 560) has already been mentioned. Kaineus
issued a command that his lance be honored. Pindar relates in the legend
of this Kaineus:
“He descended into the depths, splitting the earth with a straight
foot.”[607]
He is said to have originally been a maiden named Kainis, who, because
of her complaisance, was transformed into an invulnerable man by
Poseidon. Ovid pictures the battle of the Lapithæ with the invulnerable
Kaineus; how at last they covered him completely with trees, because
they could not otherwise touch him. Ovid says at this place:
“Exitus in dubio est: alii sub inania corpus
Tartara detrusum silvarum mole ferebant,
Abnuit Ampycides: medioque ex aggere fulvis
Vidit avem pennis liquidas exire sub auras.”[608]
Roscher considers this bird to be the golden plover (Charadrius
pluvialis), which borrows its name from the fact that it lives in the
χαράδρα, a crevice in the earth. By his song he proclaims the
approaching rain. Kaineus was changed into this bird.
We see again in this little myth the typical constituents of the libido
myth: original bisexuality, immortality (invulnerability) through
entrance into the mother (splitting the mother with the foot, and to
become covered up) and resurrection as a bird of the soul and a bringer
of fertility (ascending sun). When this type of hero causes his lance to
be worshipped, it probably means that his lance is a valid and
equivalent expression of himself.
From our present standpoint, we understand in a new sense that passage
in Job, which I mentioned in Chapter IV of the first part of this book:
“He has set me up for his mark.
“His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and
doth not spare:—he poureth out my gall upon the ground.
“He breaketh me with breach upon breach: he runneth upon me like a
giant.”—_Job_ xvi:12–13–14.
Now we understand this symbolism as an expression for the soul torment
caused by the onslaught of the unconscious desires. The libido festers
in his flesh, a cruel god has taken possession of him and pierced him
with his painful libidian projectiles, with thoughts, which
overwhelmingly pass through him. (As a dementia præcox patient once said
to me during his recovery: “To-day a thought suddenly thrust itself
through me.”) This same idea is found again in Nietzsche in Zarathustra:
_The Magician_
Stretched out, shivering
Like one half dead whose feet are warmed,
Shaken alas! by unknown fevers,
Trembling from the icy pointed arrows of frost,
Hunted by Thee, O Thought!
Unutterable! Veiled! Horrible One!
Thou huntsman behind the clouds!
Struck to the ground by thee,
Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark!
—————— Thus do I lie
Bending, writhing, tortured
With all eternal tortures,
Smitten
By thee, crudest huntsman,
Thou unfamiliar God.
Smite deeper!
Smite once more:
Pierce through and rend my heart!
What meaneth this torturing
With blunt-toothed arrows?
Why gazeth thou again,
Never weary of human pain,
With malicious, God-lightning eyes,
Thou wilt not kill,
But torture, torture?
No long-drawn-out explanation is necessary to enable us to recognize in
this comparison the old, universal idea of the martyred sacrifice of
God, which we have met previously in the Mexican sacrifice of the cross
and in the sacrifice of Odin.[609] This same conception faces us in the
oft-repeated martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where, in the delicate-glowing
flesh of the young god, all the pain of renunciation which has been felt
by the artist has been portrayed. An artist always embodies in his
artistic work a portion of the mysteries of his time. In a heightened
degree the same is true of the principal Christian symbol, the crucified
one pierced by the lance, the conception of the man of the Christian era
tormented by his wishes, crucified and dying in Christ.
This is not torment which comes from without, which befalls mankind; but
that he himself is the hunter, murderer, sacrificer and sacrificial
knife is shown us in another of Nietzsche’s poems, wherein the apparent
dualism is transformed into the soul conflict through the use of the
same symbolism:
“Oh, Zarathustra,
Most cruel Nimrod!
Whilom hunter of God
The snare of all virtue,
An arrow of evil!
Now
Hunted by thyself
Thine own prey
Pierced through thyself,
Now
Alone with thee
Twofold in thine own knowledge
Mid a hundred mirrors
False to thyself,
Mid a hundred memories
Uncertain
Ailing with each wound
Shivering with each frost
Caught in thine own snares,
Self knower!
Self hangman!
“Why didst thou strangle thyself
With the noose of thy wisdom?
Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the Paradise of the old serpent?
Why hast thou crept
Into thyself, thyself?...”
The deadly arrows do not strike the hero from without, but it is he
himself who, in disharmony with himself, hunts, fights and tortures
himself. Within himself will has turned against will, libido against
libido—therefore, the poet says, “Pierced through thyself,” that is to
say, wounded by his own arrow. Because we have discerned that the arrow
is a libido symbol, the idea of “penetrating or piercing through”
consequently becomes clear to us. It is a phallic act of union with
one’s self, a sort of self-fertilization (introversion); also a
self-violation, a self-murder; therefore, Zarathustra may call himself
his own hangman, like Odin, who sacrifices himself to Odin.
The wounding by one’s own arrow means, first of all, _the state of
introversion_. What this signifies we already know—the libido sinks into
its “own depths” (a well-known comparison of Nietzsche’s) and finds
there below, in the shadows of the unconscious, the substitute for the
upper world, which it has abandoned: _the world of memories_ (“’mid a
hundred memories”), the strongest and most influential of which are the
early infantile memory pictures. It is the world of the child, this
paradise-like state of earliest childhood, from which we are separated
by a hard law. In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of
home and the endless hopes of all that is to be. As Heinrich in the
“Sunken Bell,” by Gerhart Hauptmann, says, in speaking of his miraculous
work:
“There is a song lost and forgotten,
A song of home, a love song of childhood,
Brought up from the depths of the fairy well,
Known to all, but yet unheard.”
However, as Mephistopheles says, “The danger is great.” These depths are
enticing; they are the mother and—death. When the libido leaves the
bright upper world, whether from the decision of the individual or from
decreasing life force, then it sinks back into its own depths, into the
source from which it has gushed forth, and turns back to that point of
cleavage, the umbilicus, through which it once entered into this body.
This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her comes the
source of the libido. Therefore, when some great work is to be
accomplished, before which weak man recoils, doubtful of his strength,
his libido returns to that source—and this is the dangerous moment, in
which the decision takes place between annihilation and new life. If the
libido remains arrested in the wonder kingdom of the inner world,[610]
then the man has become for the world above a phantom, then he is
practically dead or desperately ill.[611] But if the libido succeeds in
tearing itself loose and pushing up into the world above, then a miracle
appears. This journey to the underworld has been a fountain of youth,
and new fertility springs from his apparent death. This train of thought
is very beautifully gathered into a Hindoo myth: Once upon a time,
Vishnu sank into an ecstasy (introversion) and during this state of
sleep bore Brahma, who, enthroned upon the lotus flower, arose from the
navel of Vishnu, bringing with him the Vedas, which he diligently read.
(Birth of creative thought from introversion.) But through Vishnu’s
ecstasy a devouring flood came upon the world. (Devouring through
introversion, symbolizing the danger of entering into the mother of
death.) A demon taking advantage of the danger, stole the Vedas from
Brahma and hid them in the depths. (Devouring of the libido.) Brahma
roused Vishnu, and the latter, transforming himself into a fish, plunged
into the flood, fought with the demon (battle with the dragon),
conquered him and recaptured the Vedas. (Treasure obtained with
difficulty.)
Self-concentration and the strength derived therefrom correspond to this
primitive train of thought. It also explains numerous sacrificial and
magic rites which we have already fully discussed. Thus the impregnable
Troy falls because the besiegers creep into the belly of a wooden horse;
for he alone is a hero who is reborn from the mother, like the sun. But
the danger of this venture is shown by the history of Philoctetes, who
was the only one in the Trojan expedition who knew the hidden sanctuary
of Chryse, where the Argonauts had sacrificed already, and where the
Greeks planned to sacrifice in order to assure a safe ending to their
undertaking. Chryse was a nymph upon the island of Chryse; according to
the account of the scholiasts in Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” this nymph
loved Philoctetes, and cursed him because he spurned her love. This
characteristic projection, which is also met with in the Gilgamesh epic,
should be referred back, as suggested, to the repressed incest wish of
the son, who is represented through the projection as if the mother had
the evil wish, for the refusal of which the son was given over to death.
In reality, however, the son becomes mortal by separating himself from
the mother. His fear of death, therefore, corresponds to the repressed
wish to turn back to the mother, and causes him to believe that the
mother threatens or pursues him. The teleological significance of this
_fear of persecution_ is evident; _it is to keep son and mother apart_.
The curse of Chryse is realized in so far that Philoctetes, according to
one version, when approaching his altar, injured himself in his foot
with one of his own deadly poisonous arrows, or, according to another
version[612] (this is better and far more abundantly proven), _was
bitten in his foot by a poisonous serpent_.[613] From then on he is
ailing.[614]
This very typical wound, which also destroyed Rê, is described in the
following manner in an Egyptian hymn:
“The ancient of the Gods moved his mouth,
He cast his saliva upon the earth,
And what he spat, fell upon the ground.
With her hands Isis kneaded that and the soil
Which was about it, together:
From that she created a venerable worm,
And made him like a spear.
She did not twist him living around her face,
But threw him coiled upon the path,
Upon which the great God wandered at ease
Through all his lands.
“The venerable God stepped forth radiantly,
The gods who served Pharaoh accompanied him,
And he proceeded as every day.
Then the venerable worm stung him....
The divine God opened his mouth
And the voice of his majesty echoed even to the sky.
And the gods exclaimed: Behold!
Thereupon he could not answer,
His jaws chattered,
All his limbs trembled
And the poison gripped his flesh,
As the Nile seizes upon the land.”
In this hymn Egypt has again preserved for us a primitive conception of
the serpent’s sting. The aging of the autumn sun as an image of human
senility is symbolically traced back to the mother through the poisoning
by the serpent. The mother is reproached, because her malice causes the
death of the sun-god. The serpent, the primitive symbol of fear,[615]
illustrates the repressed tendency to turn back to the mother, because
the only possibility of security from death is possessed by the mother,
as the source of life.
Accordingly, only the mother can cure him, sick unto death, and,
therefore, the hymn goes on to depict how the gods were assembled to
take counsel:
“And Isis came with her wisdom:
Her mouth is full of the breath of life,
Her words banish sorrow,
And her speech animates those who no longer breathe.
She said: ‘What is that; what is that, divine father?
Behold, a worm has brought you sorrow——’
“‘Tell me thy name, divine father,
Because the man remains alive, who is called by his name.’”
Whereupon Rê replied:
“‘I am he, who created heaven and earth, and piled up the hills,
And created all beings thereon.
I am he, who made the water and caused the great flood,
Who produced the bull of his mother,
Who is the procreator,’ etc.
“The poison did not depart, it went further,
The great God was not cured.
Then said Isis to Rê:
‘Thine is not the name thou hast told me.
Tell me true that the poison may leave thee,
For he whose name is spoken will live.’”
Finally Rê decides to speak his true name. He is approximately healed
(imperfect composition of Osiris); but he has lost his power, and
finally he retreats to the heavenly cow.
The poisonous worm is, if one may speak in this way, a “negative”
phallus, a deadly, not an animating, form of libido; therefore, a wish
for death, instead of a wish for life. The “true name” is soul and magic
power; hence a symbol of libido. What Isis demands is the retransference
of the libido to the mother goddess. This request is fulfilled
literally, for the aged god turns back to the divine cow, the symbol of
the mother.[616] This symbolism is clear from our previous explanations.
The onward urging, living libido which rules the consciousness of the
son, demands separation from the mother. The longing of the child for
the mother is a hindrance on the path to this, taking the form of a
psychologic resistance, which is expressed empirically in the neurosis
by all manners of fears, that is to say, the fear of life. The more a
person withdraws from adaptation to reality, and falls into slothful
inactivity, the greater becomes his anxiety (cum grano salis), which
everywhere besets him at each point as a hindrance upon his path. The
fear springs from the mother, that is to say, from the longing to go
back to the mother, which is opposed to the adaptation to reality. This
is the way in which the mother has become apparently the malicious
pursuer. Naturally, it is not the actual mother, although the actual
mother, with the abnormal tenderness with which she sometimes pursues
her child, even into adult years, may gravely injure it through a
willful prolonging of the infantile state in the child. It is rather the
mother-imago, which becomes the Lamia. The mother-imago, however,
possesses its power solely and exclusively from the son’s tendency not
only to look and to work forwards, but also to glance backwards to the
pampering sweetness of childhood, to that glorious state of
irresponsibility and security with which the protecting mother-care once
surrounded him.[617]
The retrospective longing acts like a paralyzing poison upon the energy
and enterprise; so that it may well be compared to a poisonous serpent
which lies across our path. Apparently, it is a hostile demon which robs
us of energy, but, in reality, it is the individual unconscious, the
retrogressive tendency of which begins to overcome the conscious forward
striving. The cause of this can be, for example, the natural aging which
weakens the energy, or it may be great external difficulties, which
cause man to break down and become a child again, or it may be, and this
is probably the most frequent cause, the woman who enslaves the man, so
that he can no longer free himself, and becomes a child again.[618] It
may be of significance also that Isis, as sister-wife of the sun-god,
creates the poisonous animal from the spittle of the god, which is
perhaps a substitute for sperma, and, therefore, is a symbol of libido.
She creates the animal from the libido of the god; that means she
receives his power, making him weak and dependent, so that by this means
she assumes the dominating rôle of the mother. (Mother transference to
the wife.) This part is preserved in the legend of Samson, in the rôle
of Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair, the sun’s rays, thus robbing him
of his strength.[619] Any weakening of the adult man strengthens the
wishes of the unconscious; therefore, the decrease of strength appears
directly as the backward striving towards the mother.
There is still to be considered one more source of the reanimation of
the mother-imago. We have already met it in the discussion of the mother
scene in “Faust,” that is to say, _the willed introversion of a creative
mind_, which, retreating before its own problem and inwardly collecting
its forces, dips at least for a moment into the source of life, in order
there to wrest a little more strength from the mother for the completion
of its work. It is a mother-child play with one’s self, in which lies
much weak selfadmiration and self-adulation (“Among a hundred
mirrors”—Nietzsche); _a Narcissus state_, a strange spectacle, perhaps,
for profane eyes. The separation from the mother-imago, the birth out of
one’s self, reconciles all conflicts through the sufferings. This is
probably meant by Nietzsche’s verse:
“Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the Paradise of the old serpent?
Why hast thou crept
Into thyself, thyself?...
“A sick man now
Sick of a serpent’s poison,[620]
A captive now
Whom the hardest destiny befell
In thine own pit;
Bowed down as thou workest
Encaved within thyself,
Burrowing into thyself,
Helpless,
Stiff,
A corpse.
Overwhelmed with a hundred burdens,
Overburdened by thyself.
A wise man,
A self-knower,
The wise Zarathustra;
Thou soughtest the heaviest burden
And foundest thou thyself....”
The symbolism of this speech is of the greatest richness. He is buried
in the depths of _self, as if in the earth_; really a dead man who has
turned back to mother earth;[621] a Kaineus “piled with a hundred
burdens” and pressed down to death; the one who groaning bears the heavy
burden of his own libido, of that libido which draws him back to the
mother. Who does not think of the Taurophoria of Mithra, who took his
bull (according to the Egyptian hymn, “the bull of his mother”), that
is, his love for his mother, the heaviest burden upon his back, and with
that entered upon the painful course of the so-called Transitus![622]
This path of passion led to the cave, in which the bull was sacrificed.
Christ, too, had to bear the cross,[623] the symbol of his love for the
mother, and he carried it to the place of sacrifice where the lamb was
slain in the form of the God, the infantile man, a “self-executioner,”
and then to burial in the subterranean sepulchre.[624]
That which in Nietzsche appears as a poetical figure of speech is really
a primitive myth. It is as if the poet still possessed a dim idea or
capacity to feel and reactivate those imperishable phantoms of long-past
worlds of thought in the words of our present-day speech and in the
images which crowd themselves into his phantasy. Hauptmann also says:
“Poetic rendering is that which allows the echo of the primitive word to
resound through the form.”[625]
The sacrifice, with its mysterious and manifold meaning, which is rather
hinted at than expressed, passes unrecognized in the unconscious of our
author. The arrow is not shot, the hero Chiwantopel is not yet fatally
poisoned and ready for death through self-sacrifice. We now can say,
according to the preceding material, this sacrifice means renouncing the
mother, that is to say, _renunciation of all bonds and limitations which
the soul has taken with it from the period of childhood into the adult
life_. From various hints of Miss Miller’s it appears that at the time
of these phantasies she was still living in the circle of the family,
evidently at an age which was in urgent need of independence. That is to
say, man does not live very long in the infantile environment or in the
bosom of his family without real danger to his mental health. Life calls
him forth to independence, and he who gives no heed to this hard call
because of childish indolence and fear is threatened by a neurosis, and
once the neurosis has broken out it becomes more and more a valid reason
to escape the battle with life and to remain for all time in the morally
poisoned infantile atmosphere.
The phantasy of the arrow-wound belongs in this struggle for personal
independence. The thought of this resolution has not yet penetrated the
dreamer. On the contrary, she rather repudiates it. After all the
preceding, it is evident that the symbolism of the arrow-wound through
direct translation must be taken as a coitus symbol. The “Occide
moriturus” attains by this means the sexual significance belonging to
it. Chiwantopel naturally represents the dreamer. But nothing is
attained and nothing is understood through one’s reduction to the coarse
sexual, because it is a commonplace that the unconscious shelters coitus
wishes, the discovery of which signifies nothing further. _The coitus
wish under this aspect is really a symbol for the individual
demonstration of the libido separated from the parents, of the conquest
of an independent life._ This step towards a new life means, at the same
time, the death of the past life.[626] Therefore, Chiwantopel is the
infantile hero[627] (the son, the child, the lamb, the fish) who is
still enchained by the fetters of childhood and who has to die as a
symbol of the incestuous libido, and with that sever the retrogressive
bond. For the entire libido is demanded for the battle of life, and
there can be no remaining behind. The dreamer cannot yet come to this
decision, which will tear aside all the sentimental connections with
father and mother, and yet it must be made in order to follow the call
of the individual destiny.
CHAPTER VII
THE DUAL MOTHER RÔLE
After the disappearance of the assailant, Chiwantopel begins the
following monologue:
“From the extreme ends of these continents, from the farthest
lowlands, after having forsaken the palace of my father, I have been
wandering aimlessly during a hundred moons, always pursued by my mad
desire to find ‘her who will understand.’ With jewels I have tempted
many fair ones, with kisses I have tried to snatch the secret of their
hearts, with acts of bravery I have conquered their admiration. (He
reviews the women he has known.) Chita, the princess of my race ...
she is a little fool, vain as a peacock, having nought in her head but
jewels and perfume. Ta-nan, the young peasant, ... bah, a mere sow, no
more than a breast and a stomach, caring only for pleasure. And then
Ki-ma, the priestess, a true parrot, repeating hollow phrases learnt
from the priests; all for show, without real education or sincerity,
suspicious poseur and hypocrite!... Alas! Not one who understands me,
not one who resembles me, not one who has a soul sister to mine. There
is not one among them all who has known my soul, not one who could
read my thought; far from it; not one capable of seeking with me the
luminous summits, or of spelling with me the superhuman word, love.”
Here Chiwantopel himself says that his journeying and wandering is a
quest for that other, and for the meaning of life which lies in union
with her. In the first part of this work we merely hinted gently at this
possibility. The fact that the seeker is masculine and the sought-for of
feminine sex is not so astonishing, because the chief object of the
unconscious transference is the mother, as has probably been seen from
that which we have already learned. The daughter takes a male attitude
towards the mother. The genesis of this adjustment can only be suspected
in our case, because objective proof is lacking. Therefore, let us
rather be satisfied with inferences. “She who will understand” means the
mother, in the infantile language. At the same time, it also means the
life companion. As is well known, the sex contrast concerns the libido
but little. The sex of the object plays a surprisingly slight rôle in
the estimation of the unconscious. The object itself, taken as an
objective reality, is but of slight significance. (But it is of greatest
importance whether the libido is transferred or introverted.) The
original concrete meaning of _erfassen_, “to seize,” _begreifen_, “to
touch,” etc., allows us to recognize clearly the under side of the
wish—to find a congenial person. But the “upper” intellectual half is
also contained in it, and is to be taken into account at the same time.
One might be inclined to assume this tendency if it were not that our
culture abused the same, for the misunderstood woman has become almost
proverbial, which can only be the result of a wholly distorted
valuation. On the one side, our culture undervalues most extraordinarily
the importance of sexuality; on the other side, sexuality breaks out as
a direct result of the repression burdening it at every place where it
does not belong, and makes use of such an indirect manner of expression
that one may expect to meet it suddenly almost anywhere. Thus the idea
of the intimate comprehension of a human soul, which is in reality
something very beautiful and pure, is soiled and disagreeably distorted
through the entrance of the indirect sexual meaning.[628] The secondary
meaning or, better expressed, the misuse, which repressed and denied
sexuality forces upon the highest soul functions, makes it possible, for
example, for certain of our opponents to scent in psychoanalysis
prurient erotic confessionals. These are subjective wish-fulfilment
deliria which need no contra arguments. This misuse makes the wish to be
“understood” highly suspicious, if the natural demands of life have not
been fulfilled. Nature has _first claim_ on man; only long afterwards
does the luxury of intellect come. The mediæval ideal of life for the
sake of death needs gradually to be replaced by a natural conception of
life, in which the normal demands of men are thoroughly kept in mind, so
that the desires of the animal sphere may no longer be compelled to drag
down into their service the high gifts of the intellectual sphere in
order to find an outlet. We are inclined, therefore, to consider the
dreamer’s wish for understanding, first of all, as a repressed striving
towards the natural destiny. This meaning coincides absolutely with
psychoanalytic experience, that there are countless neurotic people who
apparently are prevented from experiencing life because they have an
unconscious and often also a conscious repugnance to the sexual fate,
under which they imagine all kinds of ugly things. There is only too
great an inclination to yield to this pressure of the unconscious
sexuality and to experience the dreaded (unconsciously hoped for)
disagreeable sexual experience, so as to acquire by that means a
legitimately founded horror which retains them more surely in the
infantile situation. This is the reason why so many people fall into
that very state towards which they have the greatest abhorrence.
That we were correct in our assumption that, in Miss Miller, it is a
question of the battle for independence is shown by her statement that
the hero’s departure from his father’s house reminds her of the fate of
the young Buddha, who likewise renounced all luxury to which he was born
in order to go out into the world to live out his destiny to its
completion. Buddha gave the same heroic example as did Christ, who
separated from his mother, and even spoke bitter words (Matthew, chap.
x. v. 34):
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send
peace, but a sword.
(35) “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and
the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law.
(36) “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
(37) “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me.”
Or _Luke_, chap. xii, v. 51:
“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay:
but rather division.
(52) “For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided,
three against two, and two against three.
(53) “The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against
the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against
the mother; the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law, and the
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
Horus snatched from his mother her head adornment, the power. Just as
Adam struggled with Lilith, so he struggles for power. Nietzsche, in
“Human, All Too Human,” expressed the same in very beautiful words:
“One may suppose that a mind, in which the ‘type of free mind’ is to
ripen and sweeten at maturity, has had its decisive crisis in a great
detachment, so that before this time it was just so much the more a
fettered spirit and appeared chained forever to its corner and its
pillar.[629] What binds it most firmly? What cords are almost
untearable? Among human beings of a high and exquisite type, it would
be duties: that reverence, which is suitable for youth, that modesty
and tenderness for all the old honored and valued things, that
thankfulness for the earth from which they grew, for the hand which
guided them, for the shrine where they learnt to pray:—their loftiest
moments themselves come to bind them the firmest, to obligate them the
most permanently. The great detachment comes suddenly for people so
bound.
“‘Better to die than to live here,’—thus rings the imperative voice of
seduction: and this here, this ‘at home’ is all, that it (the soul)
has loved until now! A sudden terror and suspicion against that which
it has loved, a lightning flash of scorn towards that which is called
‘duty,’ a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanic, impelling desire for
travelling, for strange countries, estrangements, coolness, frigidity,
disillusionments, a hatred of love, perhaps a sacrilegious touch and
glance backwards[630] there where just now it adored and loved,
perhaps a blush of shame over what it has just done, and at the same
time an exultation over having done it, an intoxicating internal
joyous thrill, in which a victory reveals itself—a victory? Over what?
Over whom? An enigmatic, doubtful, questioning victory, but the first
triumph. Of such woe and pain is formed the history of the great
detachment. It is like a disease which can destroy men,—this first
eruption of strength and will towards self-assertion.”[631]
The danger lies, as is brilliantly expressed by Nietzsche, in isolation
in one’s self:
“Solitude surrounds and embraces him ever more threatening, ever more
constricting, ever more heart-strangling, the terrible Goddess and
Mater sæva cupidinum.”
The libido taken away from the mother, who is abandoned only
reluctantly, becomes threatening as a serpent, the symbol of death, for
the relation to the mother must cease, _must die, which itself almost
causes man’s death_. In “Mater sæva cupidinum” the idea attains rare,
almost conscious, perfection.
I do not presume to try to paint in better words than has Nietzsche the
psychology of the wrench from childhood.
Miss Miller furnishes us with a further reference to a material which
has influenced her creation in a more general manner; this is the great
Indian epic of Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha.”
If my readers have had patience to read thus far, and to reflect upon
what they have read, they frequently must have wondered at the number of
times I introduce for comparison such apparently foreign material and
how often I widen the base upon which Miss Miller’s creations rest.
Doubts must often have arisen whether it is justifiable to enter into
important discussions concerning the psychologic foundations of myths,
religions and culture in general on the basis of such scanty
suggestions. It might be said that behind the Miller phantasies such a
thing is scarcely to be found. I need hardly emphasize the fact that I,
too, have sometimes been in doubt. I had never read “Hiawatha” until, in
the course of my work, I came to this part. “Hiawatha,” a poetical
compilation of Indian myths, gives me, however, a justification for all
preceding reflections, because this epic contains an unusual number of
mythologic problems. This fact is probably of great importance for the
wealth of suggestions in the Miller phantasies. We are, therefore,
compelled to obtain an insight into this epic.
Nawadaha sings the songs of the epic of the hero Hiawatha, the friend of
man:
“There he sang of Hiawatha,
Sang the songs of Hiawatha,
Sang his wondrous birth and being,
How he prayed and how he fasted,
How he lived and toiled and suffered,
That the tribes of men might prosper,
That he might advance his people.”
The teleological meaning of the hero, as that symbolic figure which
unites in itself libido in the form of admiration and adoration, in
order to lead to higher sublimations by way of the symbolic bridges of
the myths, is anticipated here. Thus we become quickly acquainted with
Hiawatha as a savior, and are prepared to hear all that which must be
said of a savior, of his marvellous birth, of his early great deeds, and
his sacrifice for his fellow-men.
The first song begins with a fragment of evangelism: Gitche Manito, the
“master of life,” tired of the quarrels of his human children, calls his
people together and makes known to them the joyous message:
“I will send a prophet to you,
A Deliverer of the nations,
Who shall guide you and shall teach you,
Who shall toil and suffer with you.
If you listen to his counsels,
You will multiply and prosper.
If his warnings pass unheeded,
You will fade away and perish!”
Gitche Manito, the Mighty, “the creator of the nations,” is represented
as he stood erect “on the great Red Pipestone quarry.”
“From his footprints flowed a river,
Leaped into the light of morning,
O’er the precipice plunging downward
Gleamed like Ishkoodah, the comet.”
The water flowing from his footsteps sufficiently proves the phallic
nature of this creator. I refer to the earlier utterances concerning the
phallic and fertilizing nature of the horse’s foot and the horse’s
steps, and especially do I recall Hippocrene and the foot of
Pegasus.[632] We meet with the same idea in Psalm lxv, vv. 9 to 11:
“Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it; thou makest it very
plenteous.
“The river of God is full of water; thou preparest their corn, for so
thou providest for the earth.
“Thou waterest her furrows: thou sendest rain into the little valleys
thereof; thou makest it soft with the drops of rain, and blessest the
increase of it.
“Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop
fatness.”
Wherever the fertilizing God steps, there is fruitfulness. We already
have spoken of the symbolic meaning of treading in discussing the
nightmares. Kaineus passes into the depths, “splitting the earth with a
foot outstretched.” Amphiaraus, another chthonic hero, sinks into the
earth, which Zeus has opened for him by a stroke of lightning. (Compare
with that the above-mentioned vision of a hysterical patient, who saw a
black horse after a flash of lightning: identity of horse’s footstep and
flash of lightning.) By means of a flash of lightning heroes were made
immortal.[633] Faust attained the mothers when he stamped his foot.
“Stamp and descend, stamping thou’lt rise again.”
The heroes in the sun-devouring myths often stamp at or struggle in the
jaws of the monster. Thus Tor stamped through the ship’s bottom in
battle with the monster, and _went as far as the bottom of the sea_.
(Kaineus.) (Concerning “kicking” as an infantile phantasy, see above.)
The regression of the libido to the presexual stage makes this
preparatory action of treading either a substitution for the coitus
phantasy or for the phantasy of re-entrance into the mother’s womb. The
comparison of water flowing from the footsteps with a comet is a light
symbolism for the fructifying moisture (sperma). According to an
observation by Humboldt (Kosmos), certain South American Indian tribes
call the meteors “urine of the stars.” Mention is also made of how
Gitche Manito makes fire. He blows upon a forest, so that the trees,
rubbing upon each other, burst into flame. This demon is, therefore, an
excellent libido symbol; he also produced fire.
After this prologue in the second song, the hero’s previous history is
related. The great warrior, Mudjekeewis (Hiawatha’s father), has
cunningly overcome the great bear, “the terror of the nations,” and
stolen from him the magic “belt of wampum,” a girdle of shells. Here we
meet the motive of the “treasure attained with difficulty,” which the
hero rescues from the monster. Who the bear is, is shown by the poet’s
comparisons. Mudjekeewis strikes the bear on his head after he has
robbed him of the treasure.
“With the heavy blow bewildered
Rose the great Bear of the mountains,
But his knees beneath him trembled,
And he whimpered _like a woman_.”
Mudjekeewis said derisively to him:
“Else you would not cry, and whimper,
Like a _miserable woman_!
· · · · ·
But you, Bear! sit here and whimper,
And disgrace your tribe by crying,
Like a wretched Shaugodaya,
Like a _cowardly old woman_!”
These three comparisons with a woman are to be found near each other on
the same page. Mudjekeewis has, like a true hero, once more torn life
from the jaws of death, from the all-devouring “terrible mother.” This
deed, which, as we have seen, is also represented as a journey to hell,
“night journey through the sea,” the conquering of the monster from
within, signifies at the same time entrance into the mother’s womb, a
rebirth, the results of which are perceptible also for Mudjekeewis. As
in the Zosimos vision, here too the entering one becomes the breath of
the wind or spirit. Mudjekeewis becomes the west wind, the fertilizing
breath, the father of winds.[634] His sons become the other winds. An
intermezzo tells of them and of their love stories, of which I will
mention only the courtship of Wabuns, the East Wind, because here the
erotic wooing of the wind is pictured in an especially beautiful manner.
Every morning he sees a beautiful girl in a meadow, whom he eagerly
courts:
“Every morning, gazing earthward,
Still the first thing he beheld there
Was her blue eyes looking at him,
Two blue lakes among the rushes.”
The comparison with water is not a matter of secondary importance,
because “from wind and water” shall man be born anew.
“And he wooed her with caresses,
Wooed her with his smile of sunshine,
With his flattering words he wooed her,
With his sighing and his singing,
Gentlest whispers in the branches,
Softest music, sweetest odors,” etc.
In these onomatopoetic verses the wind’s caressing courtship is
excellently expressed.[635]
The third song presents the previous history of Hiawatha’s mother. His
grandmother, when a maiden, lived in the moon. There she once swung upon
a liana, but a jealous lover cut off the liana, and Nokomis, Hiawatha’s
grandmother, fell to earth. The people, who saw her fall downwards,
thought that she was a _shooting star_. This marvellous descent of
Nokomis is more plainly illustrated by a later passage of this same
song; there little Hiawatha asks the grandmother what is the moon.
Nokomis teaches him about it as follows: The moon is the body of a
_grandmother_, whom a warlike grandson has cast up there in wrath. Hence
the moon is the _grandmother_. In ancient beliefs, the moon is also the
gathering place of departed souls,[636] the guardian of seeds;
therefore, once more a place of the origin of life of predominantly
feminine significance. The remarkable thing is that Nokomis, falling
upon the earth, gave birth to a daughter, Wenonah, subsequently the
mother of Hiawatha. The throwing upwards of the mother, and her falling
down and bringing forth, seems to contain something typical in itself.
Thus a story of the seventeenth century relates that a mad bull threw a
pregnant woman as high as a house, and tore open her womb, and the child
fell without harm upon the earth. On account of his wonderful birth,
this child was considered a hero or doer of miracles, but he died at an
early age. The belief is widespread among lower savages that the sun is
feminine and the moon masculine. Among the Namaqua, a Hottentot tribe,
the opinion is prevalent that the sun consists of transparent bacon.
“The people, who journey on boats, draw it down by magic every
evening, cut off a suitable piece and then give it _a kick so that it
flies up again into the sky_.”—_Waitz_: “Anthropologie,” II, 342.
The infantile nourishment comes from the mother. In the Gnostic
phantasies we come across a legend of the origin of man which possibly
belongs here: the female archons bound to the vault of Heaven are
unable, on account of its quick rotation, to keep their young within
them, but let them fall upon the earth, from which men arise. Possibly
there is here a connection with barbaric midwifery, the letting fall of
the parturient. The assault upon the mother is already introduced with
the adventure of Mudjekeewis, and is continued in the violent handling
of the “grandmother,” Nokomis, who, as a result of the cutting of the
liana and the fall downwards, seems in some way to have become pregnant.
The “cutting of the branch,” the plucking, we have already recognized as
mother incest. (See above.) That well-known verse, “Saxonland, where
beautiful maidens grow upon trees,” and phrases like “picking cherries
in a neighbor’s garden,” allude to a similar idea. The fall downwards of
Nokomis deserves to be compared to a poetical figure in Heine.
“A star, a star is falling
Out of the glittering sky!
The star of Love! I watch it
Sink in the depths and die.
“The leaves and buds are falling
From many an apple-tree;
I watch the mirthful breezes
Embrace them wantonly...”
Wenonah later was courted by the caressing West Wind, and becomes
pregnant. Wenonah, as a young moon-goddess, has the beauty of the
moonlight. Nokomis warns her of the dangerous courtship of Mudjekeewis,
the West Wind. But Wenonah allows herself to become infatuated, and
conceives from the breath of the wind, from the πνεῦμα, a son, our hero.
“And the West-Wind came at evening,
· · · · ·
Found the beautiful Wenonah,
Lying there amid the lilies,
Wooed her with his words of sweetness,
Wooed her with his soft caresses,
Till she bore a son in sorrow,
Bore a son of love and sorrow.”
Fertilization through the breath of the spirit is already a well-known
precedent for us. The star or comet plainly belongs to the birth scene
as a libido symbol; Nokomis, too, comes to earth as a shooting star.
Mörike’s sweet poetic phantasy has devised a similar divine origin.
“And she who bore me in her womb,
And gave me food and clothing.
She was a maid—a wild, brown maid,
Who looked on men with loathing.
“She fleered at them and laughed out loud,
And bade no suitor tarry;
‘I’d rather be the Wind’s own bride
Than have a man and marry.’
“Then came the Wind and held her fast
His captive, love-enchanted;
And lo, by him a merry child
Within her womb was planted.”
Buddha’s marvellous birth story, retold by Sir Edwin Arnold, also shows
traces of this.[637]
“Maya, the Queen ...
Dreamed a strange dream, dreamed that a star from heaven—
Splendid, six-rayed, in color rosy-pearl,
Whereof the token was an Elephant
Six-tusked and white as milk of Kamadhuk—
Shot through the void; and shining into her,
Entered her womb upon the right.”[638]
During Maya’s conception a wind blows over the land:
“A wind blew
With unknown freshness over lands and seas.”
After the birth the four genii of the East, West, South and North come
to render service as bearers of the palanquin. (The coming of the wise
men at Christ’s birth.) We also find here a distinct reference to the
“four winds.” For the completion of the symbolism there is to be found
in the Buddha myth, as well as in the birth legend of Christ, besides
the impregnation by star and wind, also the fertilization by an animal,
here an elephant, which with its phallic trunk fulfilled in Maya the
Christian method of fructification through the ear or the head. It is
well known that, in addition to the dove, the unicorn is also a
procreative symbol of the Logos.
Here arises the question why the birth of a hero always had to take
place under such strange symbolic circumstances? It might also be
imagined that a hero arose from ordinary surroundings and gradually grew
out of his inferior environment, perhaps with a thousand troubles and
dangers. (And, indeed, this motive is by no means strange in the hero
myth.) It might be said that superstition demands strange conditions of
birth and generation; but why does it demand them?
The answer to this question is: that the birth of the hero, as a rule,
is not that of an ordinary mortal, but is a rebirth from the
mother-spouse; hence it occurs under mysterious ceremonies. Therefore,
in the very beginning, lies the motive of the two mothers of the hero.
As Rank[639] has shown us through many examples, the hero is often
obliged to experience exposure, and upbringing by foster parents, and in
this manner he acquires the two mothers. A striking example is the
relation of Hercules to Hera. In the Hiawatha epic Wenonah dies after
the birth and Nokomis takes her place. Maya dies after the birth[640]
and Buddha is given a stepmother. The stepmother is sometimes an animal
(the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus, etc.). The twofold mother may be
replaced by the motive of twofold birth, which has attained a lofty
significance in the Christian mythology; namely, through baptism, which,
as we have seen, represents rebirth. Thus man is born not merely in a
commonplace manner, but also born again in a mysterious manner, by means
of which he becomes a participator of the kingdom of God, of
immortality. Any one may become a hero in this way who is generated anew
through his own mother, because only through her does he share in
immortality. Therefore, it happened that the death of Christ on the
cross, which creates universal salvation, was understood as “baptism”;
that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, the mysterious
tree of death. Christ says:
“But I have a baptism to be baptized with: and how am I straitened
till it be accomplished!”—_Luke_ xii: 50.
He interprets his death agony symbolically as birth agony.
The motive of the two mothers suggests the thought of self-rejuvenation,
and evidently expresses the fulfilment of the wish that it _might be
possible for the mother to bear me again_; at the same time, applied to
the heroes, it means one is a hero who is borne again by her who has
previously been his mother; that is to say, _a hero is he who may again
produce himself through his mother_.
The countless suggestions in the history of the procreation of the
heroes indicate the latter formulations. Hiawatha’s father first
overpowered the mother under the symbol of the bear; then himself
becoming a god, he procreates the hero. What Hiawatha had to do as hero,
Nokomis hinted to him in the legend of the origin of the moon; he is
forcibly to throw his mother upwards (or throw downwards?); then she
would become pregnant by this act of violence and could bring forth a
daughter. This rejuvenated mother would be allotted, according to the
Egyptian rite, as a daughter-wife to the sun-god, the father of his
mother, for self-reproduction. What action Hiawatha takes in this regard
we shall see presently. We have already studied the behavior of the
pre-Asiatic gods related to Christ. Concerning the pre-existence of
Christ, the Gospel of St. John is full of this thought. Thus the speech
of John the Baptist:
“This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred
before me; for he was before me.”—_John_ i: 30.
Also the beginning of the gospel is full of deep mythologic
significance:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
(3) “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything
made that was made.
(4) “In him was life, and the _life_ was the _light of men_.
(5) “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth
it not.
(6) “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
(7) “The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light.
(8) “He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that
Light.
(9) “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh
into the world.”
This is the proclamation of the reappearing light, the reborn sun, which
formerly was, and which will be again. In the baptistry at Pisa, Christ
is represented bringing the tree of life to man; his head is surrounded
by a sun halo. Over this relief stand the words INTROITUS SOLIS.
Because the one born was his own procreator, the history of his
procreation is strangely concealed under symbolic events, which are
meant to conceal and deny it; hence the extraordinary assertion of the
virgin conception. This is meant to hide the incestuous impregnation.
But do not let us forget that this naïve assertion plays an unusually
important part in the ingenious symbolic bridge, which is to guide the
libido out from the incestuous bond to higher and more useful
applications, which indicate a new kind of immortality; that is to say,
immortal work.
The environment of Hiawatha’s youth is of importance:
“By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them.
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.”
In this environment Nokomis brought him up. Here she taught him the
first words, and told him the first fairy tales, and the sounds of the
water and the wood were intermingled, so that the child learned not only
to understand man’s speech, but also that of Nature:
“At the door on summer evenings
Sat the little Hiawatha;
Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,
Heard the lapping of the water,
Sounds of music, words of wonder:
‘Minne-wawa!’[641] said the pine-trees,
‘Mudway-aushka!’[642] said the water.”
Hiawatha hears human speech in the sounds of Nature; thus he understands
Nature’s speech. The wind says, “Wawa.” The cry of the wild goose is
“Wawa.” Wah-wah-taysee means the small glowworm which enchants him. Thus
the poet paints most beautifully the gradual gathering of external
nature into the compass of the subjective,[643] and the intimate
connection of the primary object to which the first lisping words were
applied, and from which the first sounds were derived, with the
secondary object, the wider nature which usurps imperceptibly the
mother’s place, and takes possession of those sounds heard first from
the mother, and also of those feelings which we all discover later in
ourselves in all the warm love of Mother Nature. The later blending,
whether pantheistic-philosophic or æsthetic, of the sentimental,
cultured man with nature is, looked at retrospectively, a reblending
with the mother, who was our primary object, and with whom we truly were
once wholly one.[644] Therefore, it is not astonishing when we again see
emerging in the poetical speech of a modern philosopher, Karl Joël, the
old pictures which symbolize the unity with the mother, illustrated by
the confluence of subject and object. In his recent book, “Seele und
Welt” (1912), Joël writes as follows, in the chapter called “Primal
Experience”[645]:
“I lay on the seashore, the shining waters glittering in my dreamy
eyes; at a great distance fluttered the soft breeze; throbbing,
shimmering, stirring, lulling to sleep comes the wave beat to the
shore—or to the ear? I know not. Distance and nearness become blurred
into one; without and within glide into each other. Nearer and nearer,
_dearer and more homelike sounds the beating of the waves_; now, like
a thundering pulse in my head it strikes, and now it beats over my
soul, devours it, embraces it, while it itself at the same time floats
out like the blue waste of waters. Yes, without and within are one.
Glistening and foaming, flowing and fanning and roaring, the entire
symphony of the stimuli experienced sounds in one tone, all thought
becomes one thought, which becomes one with feeling; the world exhales
in the soul and the soul dissolves in the world. Our small life is
encircled by a great sleep—_the sleep of our cradle, the sleep of our
grave, the sleep of our home, from which we go forth in the morning,
to which we again return in the evening_; our life but the short
journey, the interval between the emergence from the original oneness
and the sinking back into it! Blue shimmers the infinite sea, wherein
dreams the jelly fish of the primitive life, toward which without
ceasing our thoughts hark back dimly through eons of existence. For
every happening entails a change and a guarantee of the unity of life.
At that moment when they are no longer blended together, in that
instant man lifts his _head, blind and dripping, from the depths_ of
the stream of experience, from the oneness with the experience; at
that moment of parting when the unity of life in startled surprise
detaches the Change and holds it away from itself as something alien,
at this moment of alienation the aspects of the experience have been
substantialized into subject and object, and in that moment
consciousness is born.”
Joël paints here, in unmistakable symbolism, the confluence of subject
and object as the reunion of mother and child. The symbols agree with
those of mythology, even in their details. The encircling and devouring
motive is distinctly suggested. The sea, devouring the sun and giving
birth to it anew, is already an old acquaintance. The moment of the rise
of consciousness, the separation of subject and object is a birth; truly
philosophical thought hangs with lame wings upon the few great primitive
pictures of human speech, above the simple, all-surpassing greatness of
which no thought can rise. The idea of the jelly fish is not
“accidental.” Once when I was explaining to a patient the maternal
significance of water at this contact with the mother complex, she
experienced a very unpleasant feeling. “It makes me squirm,” she said,
“as if I touched a jelly fish.” Here, too, the same idea! The blessed
state of sleep before birth and after death is, as Joël observed,
something like old shadowy memories of that unsuspecting, thoughtless
state of early childhood, where as yet no opposition disturbed the
peaceful flow of dawning life, to which the inner longing always draws
us back again and again, and from which the active life must free itself
anew with struggle and death, so that it may not be doomed to
destruction. Long before Joël, an Indian chieftain had said the same
thing in similar words to one of the restless wise men:
“Ah, my brother, you will never learn to know the happiness of
thinking nothing and doing nothing: this is next to sleep; this is the
most delightful thing there is. Thus we were before birth, thus we
shall be after death.”[646]
We shall see in Hiawatha’s later fate how important his early
impressions are in his choice of a wife. Hiawatha’s first deed was to
kill a roebuck with his arrow:
“Dead he lay there in the forest,
By the ford across the river.”
This is typical of Hiawatha’s deeds. Whatever he kills, for the most
part, lies _next to or in the water_, sometimes half in the water and
half on the land.[647] It seems that this must well be so. The later
adventures will teach us why this must be so. The buck was no ordinary
animal, but a magic one; that is to say, one with an additional
unconscious significance. Hiawatha made for himself gloves and moccasins
from its hide; the gloves imparted such strength to his arms that he
could crumble rocks to dust, and the moccasins had the virtue of the
seven-league boots. By enwrapping himself in the buck’s skin he really
became a giant. This motive, together with the death of the animal at
the ford,[648] in the water, reveals the fact that the parents are
concerned, whose gigantic proportions as compared with the child are of
great significance in the unconscious. The “toys of giants” is a wish
inversion of the infantile phantasy. The dream of an eleven-year-old
girl expresses this:
“I am as high as a church steeple; then a policeman comes. I tell him,
‘If you say anything, I will cut off your head.’”
The “policeman,” as the analysis brought out, referred to the father,
whose gigantic size was over-compensated by the church steeple. In
Mexican human sacrifices, the gods were represented by criminals, who
were slaughtered, and flayed, and the Corybantes then clothed themselves
in the bloody skins, in order to illustrate the resurrection of the
gods.[649] (The snake’s casting of his skin as a symbol of
rejuvenation.)
Hiawatha has, therefore, conquered his parents, primarily the mother,
although in the form of a male animal (compare the bear of Mudjekeewis);
and from that comes his giant’s strength. He has taken on the parent’s
skin and now has himself become a great man. Now he started forth to his
first great battle to fight with the father Mudjekeewis, in order to
avenge his dead mother Wenonah. Naturally, under this figure of speech
hides the thought that he slays the father, in order to take possession
of the mother. Compare the battle of Gilgamesh with the giant Chumbaba
and the ensuing conquest of Ishtar. The father, in the psychologic
sense, merely represents the personification of the incest prohibition;
that is to say, resistance, which defends the mother. Instead of the
father, it may be a fearful animal (the great bear, the snake, the
dragon, etc.) which must be fought and overcome. The hero is a hero
because he sees in every difficulty of life resistance to the forbidden
treasure, and fights that resistance with the complete yearning which
strives towards the treasure, attainable with difficulty, or
unattainable, the yearning which paralyzes and kills the ordinary man.
Hiawatha’s father is Mudjekeewis, the west wind; the battle, therefore,
takes place in the west. Thence came life (impregnation of Wenonah);
thence also came death (death of Wenonah). Hiawatha, therefore, fights
the typical battle of the hero for rebirth in the western sea, the
battle with the devouring terrible mother, this time in the form of the
father. Mudjekeewis, who himself had acquired a divine nature, through
his conquest of the bear, now is overpowered by his son:
“Back retreated Mudjekeewis,
Rushing westward o’er the mountains,
Stumbling westward down the mountains,
Three whole days retreated fighting,
Still pursued by Hiawatha
To the doorways of the West-Wind,
To the portals of the Sunset,
To the earth’s remotest border,
Where into the empty spaces
Sinks the sun, as a flamingo
Drops into her nest at nightfall.”
The “three days” are a stereotyped form representing the stay in the sea
prison of night. (Twenty-first until twenty-fourth of December.) Christ,
too, remained three days in the underworld. “The treasure, difficult to
attain,” is captured by the hero during this struggle in the west. In
this case the father must make a great concession to the son; he gives
him divine nature,[650] that very wind nature, the immortality of which
alone protected Mudjekeewis from death. He says to his son:
“I will share my kingdom with you,
Ruler shall you be henceforward,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
Of the home-wind, the Keewaydin.”
That Hiawatha now becomes ruler of the home-wind has its close parallel
in the Gilgamesh epic, where Gilgamesh finally receives the magic herb
from the wise old Utnapishtim, who dwells in the West, which brings him
safe once more over the sea to his home; but this, when he is home
again, is retaken from him by a serpent.
When one has slain the father, one can obtain possession of his wife,
and when one has conquered the mother, one can free one’s self.
On the return journey Hiawatha stops at the clever arrow-maker’s, who
possesses a lovely daughter:
“And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water.”
When Hiawatha, in his earliest childhood dreaming, felt the sounds of
water and wind press upon his ears, he recognized in these sounds of
nature the speech of his mother. The murmuring pine trees on the shore
of the great sea, said “Minnewawa.” And above the murmuring of the winds
and the splashing of the water he found his earliest childhood dreams
once again in a woman, “Minnehaha,” the laughing water. And the hero,
before all others, finds in woman the mother, in order to become a child
again, and, finally, to solve the riddle of immortality.
The fact that Minnehaha’s father is a skilful arrow-maker betrays him as
the father of the hero (and the woman he had with him as the mother).
The father of the hero is very often a skilful carpenter, or other
artisan. According to an Arabian legend, Tare,[651] Abraham’s father,
was a skilful master workman, who could carve arrows from any wood; that
is to say, in the Arabian form of speech, he was a procreator of
splendid sons.[652] Moreover, he was a maker of images of gods.
Tvashtar, Agni’s father, is the maker of the world, a smith and
carpenter, the discoverer of fire-boring. Joseph, the father of Jesus,
was also a carpenter; likewise Kinyras, Adonis’s father, who is said to
have invented the hammer, the lever, roofing and mining. Hephaestus, the
father of Hermes, is an artistic master workman and sculptor. In fairy
tales, the father of the hero is very modestly the traditional
wood-cutter. These conceptions were also alive in the cult of Osiris.
There the divine image was carved out of a tree trunk and then placed
within the hollow of the tree. (Frazer: “Golden Bough,” Part IV.) In
Rigveda, the world was also hewn out of a tree by the world-sculptor.
The idea that the hero is his own procreator[653] leads to the fact that
he is invested with paternal attributes, and reversedly the heroic
attributes are given to the father. In Mânî there exists a beautiful
union of the motives. He accomplishes his great labors as a religious
founder, hides himself for years in a cave, he dies, is skinned, stuffed
and hung up (hero). Besides he is an artist, and has a crippled foot. A
similar union of motives is found in Wieland, the smith.
Hiawatha kept silent about what he saw at the old arrow-maker’s on his
return to Nokomis, and he did nothing further to win Minnehaha. But now
something happened, which, if it were not in an Indian epic, would
rather be sought in the history of a neurosis. Hiawatha introverted his
libido; that is to say, he fell into an extreme resistance against the
“real sexual demand” (Freud); he built a hut for himself in the wood, in
order to fast there and to experience dreams and visions. For the first
three days he wandered, as once in his earliest youth, through a forest
and looked at all the animals and plants:
“‘Master of life!’ he cried, desponding,
‘Must our lives depend on these things?’”
The question whether our lives must depend upon “these things” is very
strange. It sounds as if life were derived from these things; that is to
say, from nature in general. Nature seems suddenly to have assumed a
very strange significance. This phenomenon can be explained only through
the fact that a great amount of libido was stored up and now is given to
nature. As is well known, men of even dull and prosy minds, in the
springtime of love, suddenly become aware of nature, and even make poems
about it. But we know that libido, prevented from an actual way of
transference, always reverts to an earlier way of transference.
Minnehaha, the laughing water, is so clearly an allusion to the mother
that the secret yearning of the hero for the mother is powerfully
touched. Therefore, without having undertaken anything, he goes home to
Nokomis; but there again he is driven away, because Minnehaha already
stands in his path.
He turns, therefore, even further away, into that early youthful period,
the tones of which recall Minnehaha most forcibly to his thoughts, where
he learnt to hear the mother-sounds in the sounds of nature. In this
very strange revival of the impressions of nature we recognize a
regression to those earliest and strongest nature impressions which
stand next to the subsequently extinguished, even stronger, impressions
which the child received from the mother. The glamour of this feeling
for her is transferred to other objects of the childish environment
(father’s house, playthings, etc.), from which later those magic
blissful feelings proceed, which seem to be peculiar to the earliest
childish memories. When, therefore, Hiawatha hides himself in the lap of
nature, it is really the mother’s womb, and it is to be expected that he
will emerge again new-born in some form.
Before turning to this new creation arising from introversion, there is
still a further significance of the preceding question to be considered:
whether life is dependent upon “these things”? Life may depend upon
these things in the degree that they serve _for nourishment_. We must
infer in this case that suddenly the question of nutrition came very
near the hero’s heart. (This possibility will be thoroughly proven in
what follows.) The question of nutrition, indeed, enters seriously into
consideration. First, because regression to the mother necessarily
revives that special path of transference; namely, that of nutrition
through the mother. As soon as the libido regresses to the presexual
stage, there we may expect to see the function of nutrition and its
symbols put in place of the sexual function. Thence is derived an
essential root of the displacement from below upwards (Freud), because,
in the presexual stage, the principal value belongs not to the genitals,
but to the mouth. Secondly, because the hero fasted, his hunger becomes
predominant. Fasting, as is well known, is employed to silence
sexuality; also, it expresses symbolically the resistance against
sexuality, translated into the language of the presexual stage. On the
fourth day of his fast the hero ceased to address himself to nature; he
lay exhausted, with half-closed eyes, upon his couch, sunk deep in
dreams, the picture of extreme introversion.
We have already seen that, in such circumstances, an infantile internal
equivalent for reality appears, in the place of external life and
reality. This is also the case with Hiawatha:
“And he saw a youth approaching,
Dressed in garments green and yellow,
Coming through the purple twilight,
Through the splendor of the sunset;
Plumes of green bent o’er his forehead,
And his hair was soft and golden.”
This remarkable apparition reveals himself in the following manner to
Hiawatha:
“From the Master of Life descending,
I, the friend of man, Mondamin,
Come to warn you and instruct you,
How by struggle and by labor
You shall gain what you have prayed for.
Rise up from your bed of branches;
Rise, O youth, and wrestle with me!”
Mondamin is the maize: a god, who is eaten, arising from Hiawatha’s
introversion. His hunger, taken in a double sense, his longing for the
nourishing mother, gives birth from his soul to another hero, the edible
maize, the son of the earth mother. Therefore, he again arises at
sunset, symbolizing the entrance into the mother, and in the western
sunset glow he begins again the mystic struggle with the self-created
god, the god who has originated entirely from the longing for the
nourishing mother. The struggle is again the struggle for liberation
from this destructive and yet productive longing. Mondamin is,
therefore, equivalent to the mother, and the struggle with him means the
overpowering and impregnation of the mother. This interpretation is
entirely proven by a myth of the Cherokees, “who invoke it (the maize)
under the name of ‘The Old Woman,’ in allusion to a myth that it sprang
from the blood of an old woman killed by her disobedient sons”:[654]
“Faint with famine, Hiawatha
Started from his bed of branches,
From the twilight of his wigwam
Forth into the flush of sunset
Came, and wrestled with Mondamin;
At his touch he felt new courage
Throbbing in his brain and bosom,
Felt new life and hope and vigor
Run through every nerve and fibre.”
The battle at sunset with the god of the maize gives Hiawatha new
strength; and thus it must be, because the fight for the individual
depths, against the paralyzing longing for the mother, gives creative
strength to men. Here, indeed, is the source of all creation, but it
demands heroic courage to fight against these forces and to wrest from
them the “treasure difficult to attain.” He who succeeds in this has, in
truth, attained the best. Hiawatha wrestles with himself for his
creation.[655] The struggle lasts again the charmed three days. The
fourth day, just as Mondamin prophesied, Hiawatha conquers him, and
Mondamin sinks to the ground in death. As Mondamin previously desired,
Hiawatha digs his grave in mother earth, and soon afterwards from this
grave the young and fresh maize grows for the nourishment of mankind.
Concerning the thought of this fragment, we have therein a beautiful
parallel to the mystery of Mithra, where first the battle of the hero
with his bull occurs. Afterwards Mithra carries in “transitus” the bull
into the cave, where he kills him. From this death all fertility grows,
all that is edible.[656] The cave corresponds to the grave. The same
idea is represented in the Christian mysteries, although generally in
more beautiful human forms. The soul struggle of Christ in Gethsemane,
where he struggles with himself in order to complete his work, then the
“transitus,” the carrying of the cross,[657] where he takes upon himself
the symbol of the destructive mother, and therewith takes himself to the
sacrificial grave, from which, after three days, he triumphantly arises;
all these ideas express the same fundamental thoughts. Also, the symbol
of eating is not lacking in the Christian mystery. Christ is a god who
is eaten in the Lord’s Supper. His death transforms him into bread and
wine, which we partake of in grateful memory of his great deed.[658] The
relation of Agni to the Somadrink and that of Dionysus to wine[659] must
not be omitted here. An evident parallel is Samson’s rending of the
lion, and the subsequent inhabitation of the dead lion by honey bees,
which gives rise to the well-known German riddle:
“Speise ging von dem Fresser und Süssigkeit von dem Starken (Food went
from the glutton and sweet from the strong).”[660]
In the Eleusinian mysteries these thoughts seem to have played a rôle.
Besides Demeter and Persephone, Iakchos is a chief god of the Eleusinian
cult; he was the “puer æternus,” the eternal boy, of whom Ovid says the
following:
“Tu puer æternus, tu formosissimus alto
Conspiceris cœlo tibi, cum sine cornibus astas,
Virgineum caput est,” etc.[661]
In the great Eleusinian festival procession the image of Iakchos was
carried. It is not easy to say which god is Iakchos, possibly a boy, or
a new-born son, similar to the Etrurian Tages, who bears the surname
“the freshly ploughed boy,” because, according to the myth, he arose
from the furrow of the field behind the peasant, who was ploughing. This
idea shows unmistakably the Mondamin motive. The plough is of well-known
phallic meaning; the furrow of the field is personified by the Hindoos
as woman. The psychology of this idea is that of a coitus, referred back
to the presexual stage (stage of nutrition). The son is the edible fruit
of the field. Iakchos passes, in part, as son of Demeter or of
Persephone, also appropriately as consort of Demeter. (Hero as
procreator of himself.) He is also called τῆς Δήμητρος δαίμων (Δαίμων
equals libido, also Mother libido.) He was identified with Dionysus,
especially with the Thracian Dionysus-Zagreus, of whom a typical fate of
rebirth was related. Hera had goaded the Titans against Zagreus, who,
assuming many forms, sought to escape them, until they finally took him
when he had taken on the form of a bull. In this form he was killed
(Mithra sacrifice) and dismembered, and the pieces were thrown into a
cauldron; but Zeus killed the Titans by lightning, and swallowed the
still-throbbing heart of Zagreus. Through this act he gave him existence
once more, and Zagreus as Iakchos again came forth.
Iakchos carries the torch, the phallic symbol of procreation, as Plato
testifies. In the festival procession, the sheaf of corn, the cradle of
Iakchos, was carried. (λῖκνον, mystica vannus Iacchi.) The Orphic
legend[662] relates that Iakchos was brought up by Persephone, when,
after three years’ slumber in the λῖκνον,[663] he awoke. This statement
distinctly suggests the Mondamin motive. The 20th of Boedromion (the
month Boedromion lasts from about the 5th of September to the 5th of
October) is called Iakchos, in honor of the hero. On the evening of this
day the great torchlight procession took place on the seashore, in which
the quest and lament of Demeter was represented. The rôle of Demeter,
who, seeking her daughter, wanders over the whole earth without food or
drink, has been taken over by Hiawatha in the Indian epic. He turns to
all created things without obtaining an answer. As Demeter first learns
of her daughter from the subterranean Hecate, so does Hiawatha first
find the one sought for, Mondamin,[664] in the deepest introversion
(descent to the mother). Hiawatha produces from himself, Mondamin, as a
mother produces the son. The longing for the mother also includes the
producing mother (first devouring, then birth-giving). Concerning the
real contents of the mysteries, we learn through the testimony of Bishop
Asterius, about 390 A.D., the following:
“Is not there (in Eleusis) the gloomiest descent, and the most solemn
communion of the hierophant and the priestess; between him and her
alone? Are the torches not extinguished, and does not the vast
multitude regard as their salvation that which takes place between the
two in the darkness?”[665]
That points undoubtedly to a ritual marriage, which was celebrated
subterraneously in mother earth. The Priestess of Demeter seems to be
the representative of the earth goddess, perhaps the furrow of the
field.[666] The descent into the earth is also the symbol of the
mother’s womb, and was a widespread conception under the form of cave
worship. Plutarch relates of the Magi that they sacrificed to Ahriman,
εἰς τόπον ἀνήλιον.[667] Lukian lets the magician Mithrobarzanes εἰς
χωρίον ἔρημον καὶ ὑλῶδες καὶ ἀνήλιον,[668] descend into the bowels of
the earth. According to the testimony of Moses of the Koran, the sister
Fire and the brother Spring were worshipped in Armenia in a cave. Julian
gave an account from the Attis legend of a κατάβασις εἰς ἄντρον,[669]
from whence Cybele brings up her son lover, that is to say, gives birth
to him.[670] The cave of Christ’s birth, in Bethlehem (‘House of
Bread’), is said to have been an Attis spelæum.
A further Eleusinian symbolism is found in the festival of Hierosgamos,
in the form of the _mystic chests_, which, according to the testimony of
Clemens of Alexandria, may have contained pastry, salt and fruits. The
synthema (confession) of the mystic transmitted by Clemens is suggestive
in still other directions:
“I have fasted, I have drunk of the barleydrink, I have taken from the
chest and after I have labored, I have placed it back in the basket,
and from the basket into the chest.”
The question as to what lay in the chest is explained in detail by
Dieterich.[671] The labor he considers a phallic activity, which the
mystic has to perform. In fact, representations of the mystic basket are
given, wherein lies a phallus surrounded by fruits.[672] Upon the
so-called Lovatelli tomb vase, the sculptures of which are understood to
be Eleusinian ceremonies, it is shown how a mystic caressed the serpent
entwining Demeter. The caressing of the fear animal indicates a
religious conquering of incest.[673] According to the testimony of
Clemens of Alexandria, a serpent was in the chest. The serpent in this
connection is naturally of phallic nature, the phallus which is
forbidden in relation to the mother. Rohde mentions that in the
Arrhetophories, pastry, in the form of phalli and serpents, were thrown
into the cave near the Thesmophorion. This custom was a petition for the
bestowal of children and harvest.[674] The snake also plays a large part
in initiations under the remarkable title ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός.[675]
Clemens observes that the symbol of the Sabazios mysteries is ὁ διὰ
κόλπων θεός, δράκων δὲ ἐστι καὶ οὗτος διελκόμενος τοῦ κόλπου τῶν
τελουμένων.[676]
Through Arnobius we learn:
“Aureus coluber in sinum demittitur consecratis et eximitur rursus ab
inferioribus partibus atque imis.”[677]
In the Orphic Hymn 52, Bacchus is invoked by ὑποκόλπιε,[678] which
indicates that the god enters into man as if through the female
genitals.[679] According to the testimony of Hippolytus, the hierophant
in the mystery exclaimed ἱερον ἔτεκε πότνια κοῦρον, Βριμὼ βριμόν (the
revered one has brought forth a holy boy, Brimos from Brimo). This
Christmas gospel, “Unto us a son is born,” is illustrated especially
through the tradition[680] that the Athenians “secretly show to the
partakers in the Epoptia, the great and wonderful and most perfect
Epoptic mystery, _a mown stalk of wheat_.”[681]
The parallel for the motive of death and resurrection is the motive of
losing and finding. The motive appears in religious rites in exactly the
same connection, namely, in spring festivities similar to the
Hierosgamos, where the image of the god was hidden and found again. It
is an uncanonical tradition that Moses left his father’s house when
twelve years old to teach mankind. In a similar manner Christ is lost by
his parents, and they find him again as a teacher of wisdom, just as in
the Mohammedan legend Moses and Joshua lose the fish, and in his place
Chidher, the teacher of wisdom, appears (like the boy Jesus in the
temple); so does the corn god, lost and believed to be dead, suddenly
arise again from his mother into renewed youth. (That Christ was laid in
the manger is suggestive of fodder. Robertson, therefore, places the
manger as parallel to the liknon.)
We understand from these accounts why the Eleusinian mysteries were for
the mystic so rich in comfort for the hope of a better world. A
beautiful Eleusinian epitaph shows this:
“Truly, a beautiful secret is proclaimed by the blessed Gods!
Mortality is not a curse, but death a blessing!”
The hymn to Demeter[682] in the mysteries also says the same:
“Blessed is he, the earth-born man, who hath seen this!
Who hath not shared in these divine ceremonies,
He hath an unequal fate in the obscure darkness of death.”
Immortality is inherent in the Eleusinian symbol; in a church song of
the nineteenth century by Samuel Preiswerk we discover it again:
“The world is yours, Lord Jesus,
The world, on which we stand,
Because it is thy world
It cannot perish.
Only the wheat, before it comes
Up to the light in its fertility,
Must die in the bosom of the earth
First freed from its own nature.
“Thou goest, O Lord, our chief,
To heaven through thy sorrows,
And guide him who believes
In thee on the same path.
Then take us all equally
To share in thy sorrows and kingdoms,
Guide us through thy gate of death,
Bring thy world into the light.”
Firmicus relates concerning the Attis mysteries:
“Nocte quadam simulacrum in lectica supinum ponitur et per numeros
digestis fletibus plangitur; deinde cum se ficta lamentatione
satiaverint, lumen infertur: tunc a sacerdote omnium qui flebant
fauces unguentur, quibus perunctis sacerdos hoc lento murmure
susurrat: ‘Θαρρεῖτε μύσται τοῦ Θεοῦ σεσωσμένου ἔσται γὰρ ἡμῖν ἐκ πόνου
σωτηρία.’”[683]
Such parallels show how little human personality and how much divine,
that is to say, universally human, is found in the Christ mystery. No
man is or, indeed, ever was, a hero, for the hero is a god, and,
therefore, impersonal and generally applicable to all. Christ is a
“spirit,” as is shown in the very early Christian interpretation. In
different places of the earth, and in the most varied forms and in the
coloring of various periods, the Savior-hero appears as a fruit of the
entrance of the libido into the personal maternal depths. The Bacchian
consecrations represented upon the Farnese relief contain a scene where
a mystic wrapped in a mantle, drawn over his head, was led to Silen, who
holds the “λῖχνον” (chalice), covered with a cloth. The covering of the
head signifies death. The mystic dies, figuratively, like the seed corn,
grows again and comes to the corn harvest. Proclus relates that the
mystics were buried up to their necks. The Christian church as a place
of religious ceremony is really nothing but the grave of a hero
(catacombs). The believer descends into the grave, in order to rise from
the dead with the hero. That the meaning underlying the church is that
of the mother’s womb can scarcely be doubted. The symbols of Mass are so
distinct that the mythology of the sacred act peeps out everywhere. It
is the magic charm of rebirth. The veneration of the Holy Sepulchre is
most plain in this respect. A striking example is the Holy Sepulchre of
St. Stefano in Bologna. The church itself, a very old polygonal
building, consists of the remains of a temple to Isis. The interior
contains an artificial spelæum, a so-called Holy Sepulchre, into which
one creeps through a very little door. After a long sojourn, the
believer reappears reborn from this mother’s womb. An Etruscan ossuarium
in the archeological museum in Florence is at the same time a statue of
Matuta, the goddess of death; the clay figure of the goddess is hollowed
within as a receptacle for the ashes. The representations indicate that
Matuta is the mother. Her chair is adorned with sphinxes, as a fitting
symbol for the mother of death.
[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED HOLY SEPULCHRE OF S. STEFANO AT BOLOGNA]
Only a few of the further deeds of Hiawatha can interest us here. Among
these is the battle with Mishe-Nahma, the fish-king, in the eighth song.
This deserves to be mentioned as a typical battle of the sun-hero.
Mishe-Nahma is a fish monster, who dwells at the bottom of the waters.
Challenged by Hiawatha to battle, he devours the hero, together with his
boat:
“In his wrath he darted upward,
Flashing leaped into the sunshine,
Opened his great jaws, and swallowed
Both canoe and Hiawatha.
“Down into that darksome cavern
Plunged the headlong Hiawatha,
As a log on some black river
Shoots and plunges down the rapids,
Found himself in utter darkness,
Groped about in helpless wonder,
Till he felt a great heart beating,
Throbbing in that utter darkness.
And he smote it in his anger,
With his fist, the heart of Nahma,
Felt the mighty king of fishes
Shudder through each nerve and fibre.
· · · · ·
Crosswise then did Hiawatha
Drag his birch-canoe for safety,
Lest from out the jaws of Nahma,
In the turmoil and confusion,
Forth he might be hurled, and perish.”
It is the typical myth of the work of the hero, distributed over the
entire world. He takes to a boat, fights with the sea monster, is
devoured, he defends himself against being bitten or crushed[684]
(resistance or stamping motive); having arrived in the interior of the
“whale dragon,” he seeks the vital organ, which he cuts off or in some
way destroys. Often the death of the monster occurs as the result of a
fire which the hero secretly makes within him; he mysteriously creates
in the womb of death life, the rising sun. Thus dies the fish, which
drifts ashore, where, with the assistance of “birds,” the hero again
attains the light of day.[685] The bird in this sense probably means the
reascent of the sun, the longing of the libido, the rebirth of the
phœnix. (The longing is very frequently represented by the symbol of
hovering.) The sun symbol of the bird rising from the water is
(etymologically) contained in the singing swan. “Swan” is derived from
the root _sven_, like sun and tone. (See the preceding.) This act
signifies rebirth, and the bringing forth of life from the mother,[686]
and by this means the ultimate destruction of death, which, according to
a Negro myth, has come into the world, through the mistake of an old
woman, who, at the time of the general casting of skins (for men renewed
their youth through casting their skin like snakes), drew on, through
absent-mindedness, her old skin instead of a new one, and as a result
died. But the effect of such an act could not be of any duration. Again
and again troubles of the hero are renewed, always under the symbol of
deliverance from the mother. Just as Hera (as the pursuing mother) is
the real source of the great deeds of Hercules, so does Nokomis allow
Hiawatha no rest, and raises up new difficulties in his path, in form of
desperate adventures in which the hero may perhaps conquer, but also,
perhaps, may perish. The libido of mankind is always in advance of his
consciousness; unless his libido calls him forth to new dangers he sinks
into slothful inactivity or, on the other hand, childish longing for the
mother overcomes him at the summit of his existence, and he allows
himself to become pitifully weak, instead of striving with desperate
courage towards the highest. The mother becomes the demon, who summons
the hero to adventure, and who also places in his path the poisonous
serpent, which will strike him. Thus Nokomis, in the ninth song, calls
Hiawatha, points with her hand to the west, where the sun sets in purple
splendor, and says to him:
[Illustration: MATUTA, AN ETRUSCAN PIETÀ]
“Yonder dwells the great Pearl-Feather,
Megissogwon, the Magician,
Manito of Wealth and Wampum,
Guarded by his fiery serpents,
Guarded by the black pitch-water.
You can see his fiery serpents,
The Kenabeek, the great serpents,
Coiling, playing in the water.”
This danger lurking in the west is known to mean death, which no one,
even the mightiest, escapes. This magician, as we learn, also killed the
father of Nokomis. Now she sends her son forth to avenge the father
(Horus). Through the symbols attributed to the magician it may easily be
recognized what he symbolizes. Snake and water belong to the mother, the
snake as a symbol of the repressed longing for the mother, or, in other
words, as a symbol of resistance, encircles protectingly and defensively
the maternal rock, inhabits the cave, winds itself upwards around the
mother tree and guards the precious hoard, the “mysterious” treasure.
The black Stygian water is, like the black, muddy spring of Dhulqarnein,
the place where the sun dies and enters into rebirth, the maternal sea
of death and night. On his journey thither Hiawatha takes with him the
magic oil of Mishe-Nahma, which helps his boat through the waters of
death. (Also a sort of charm for immortality, like the dragon’s blood
for Siegfried, etc.)
First, Hiawatha slays the great serpent. Of the “night journey in the
sea” over the Stygian waters it is written:
“All night long he sailed upon it,
Sailed upon that sluggish water,
Covered with its mould of ages,
Black with rotting water-rushes,
Rank with flags, and leaves of lilies,
Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal,
Lighted by the shimmering moonlight
And by will-o’-the-wisps illumined,
Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled,
In their weary night encampments.”
The description plainly shows the character of a water of death. The
contents of the water point to an already mentioned motive, that of
encoiling and devouring. It is said in the “Key to Dreams of
Jagaddeva”:[687]
“Whoever in dreams surrounds his body with bast, creepers or ropes,
with snake-skins, threads, or tissues, dies.”
I refer to the preceding arguments in regard to this. Having come into
the west land, the hero challenges the magician to battle. A terrible
struggle begins. Hiawatha is powerless, because Megissogwon is
invulnerable. At evening Hiawatha retires wounded, despairing for a
while, in order to rest:
“Paused to rest beneath a pine-tree,
From whose branches trailed the mosses,
And whose trunk was coated over
With the Dead-man’s Moccasin-leather,
With the fungus white and yellow.”
This protecting tree is described as coated over with the moccasin
leather of the dead, the fungus. This investing of the tree with
anthropomorphic attributes is also an important rite wherever tree
worship prevails, as, for example, in India, where each village has its
sacred tree, which is clothed and in general treated as a human being.
The trees are anointed with fragrant waters, sprinkled with powder,
adorned with garlands and draperies. Just as among men, the piercing of
the _ears was performed as an apotropaic charm against death, so does it
occur with the holy tree_. Of all the trees of India there is none more
sacred to the Hindoos than the Aswatha (Ficus religiosa). It is known to
them as Vriksha Raja (king of trees), Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesvar live
in it, and the worship of it is the worship of the triad. Almost every
Indian village has an Aswatha,[688] etc. This “village linden tree,”
well known to us, is here clearly characterized as the mother symbol; it
contains the three gods.
Hence, when Hiawatha retires to rest under the pine-tree,[689] it is a
dangerous step, because he resigns himself to the mother, whose garment
is the garment of death (the devouring mother). As in the whale-dragon,
the hero also in this situation needs a “helpful bird”; that is to say,
the helpful animals, which represent the benevolent parents:
“Suddenly from the boughs above him
Sang the Mama, the woodpecker;
‘Aim your arrows, Hiawatha,
At the head of Megissogwon,
Strike the tuft of hair upon it,
At their roots the long black tresses;
There alone can he be wounded.’”
Now, amusing to relate, Mama hurried to his help. It is a peculiar fact
that the woodpecker was also the “Mama” of Romulus and Remus, who put
nourishment into the mouths of the twins with his beak.[690] (Compare
with that the rôle of the vulture in Leonardo’s dream. The vulture is
sacred to Mars, like the woodpecker.) With the maternal significance of
the woodpecker, the ancient Italian folk-superstition agrees: that from
the tree upon which this bird nested any nail which has been driven in
will soon drop out again.[691] The woodpecker owes its special
significance to the circumstance that he _hammers holes into trees_.
(“To drive nails in,” as above!) It is, therefore, understandable that
he was made much of in the Roman legend as an old king of the country, a
possessor or ruler of the holy tree, the primitive image of the
Paterfamilias. An old fable relates how Circe, the spouse of King Picus,
transformed him into the Picus Martius, the woodpecker. The sorceress is
the “new-creating mother,” who has “magic influence” upon the
sun-husband. She kills him, transforms him into the soul-bird, the
unfulfilled wish. Picus was also understood as the wood demon and
incubus, as well as the soothsayer, all of which fully indicate the
mother libido.[692] Picus was often placed on a par with Picumnus by the
ancients. Picumnus is the inseparable companion of Pilumnus, and both
are actually called _infantium dii_, “the gods of little children.”
Especially it was said of Pilumnus that he defended new-born children
against the destroying attacks of the wood demon, Silvanus. (Good and
bad mother, the motive of the two mothers.)
The benevolent bird, a wish thought of deliverance which arises from
introversion,[693] advises the hero to shoot the magician under the
hair, which is the only vulnerable spot. This spot is the “phallic”
point,[694] if one may venture to say so; it is at _the top of the
head_, at the _place where the mystic birth from the head takes place_,
which even to-day appears in children’s sexual theories. Into that
Hiawatha shoots (one may say, very naturally) three arrows[695] (the
well-known phallic symbol), and thus kills Megissogwon. Thereupon he
steals the magic wampum armor, which renders him invulnerable (means of
immortality). He significantly leaves the dead lying in the
water—because the magician is the fearful mother:
“On the shore he left the body,
Half on land and half in water,
In the sand his feet were buried,
And his face was in the water.”
Thus the situation is the same as with the fish king, because the
monster is the personification of the water of death, which in its turn
represents the devouring mother. This great deed of Hiawatha’s, where he
has vanquished the mother as the death-bringing demon,[696] is followed
by his marriage with Minnehaha.
A little fable which the poet has inserted in the later song is
noteworthy. An old man is transformed into a youth, by _crawling through
a hollow oak tree_.
In the fourteenth song is a description of how Hiawatha discovers
writing. I limit myself to the description of two hieroglyphic tokens:
“Gitche Manito the Mighty,
He, the Master of Life, was painted
As an egg, with points projecting
To the four winds of the heavens.
Everywhere is the Great Spirit,
Was the meaning of this symbol.”
The world lies in the egg, which encompasses it at every point; it is
the cosmic woman with child, the symbol of which Plato as well as the
Vedas has made use of. This mother is like the air, which is everywhere.
But air is spirit; the mother of the world is a spirit:
“Mitche Manito the Mighty,
He the dreadful Spirit of Evil,
As a serpent was depicted,
As Kenabeek, the great serpent.”
But the spirit of evil is fear, is the forbidden desire, the adversary
who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its
struggle for eternal duration as well, and who introduces into our body
the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the
serpent. It is all that is retrogressive, and as the model of our first
world is our mother, all retrogressive tendencies are towards the
mother, and, therefore, are disguised under the incest image.
In both these ideas the poet has represented in mythologic symbols the
libido arising from the mother and the libido striving backward towards
the mother.
There is a description in the fifteenth song how Chibiabos, Hiawatha’s
best friend, the amiable player and singer, the embodiment of the joy of
life, was enticed by the evil spirits into ambush, fell through the ice
and was drowned. Hiawatha mourns for him so long that he succeeds, with
the aid of the magician, in calling him back again. But the revivified
friend is only a spirit, and he becomes master of the land of spirits.
(Osiris, lord of the underworld; the two Dioscuri.) Battles again
follow, and then comes the loss of a second friend, Kwasind, the
embodiment of physical strength.
In the twentieth song occur famine and the death of Minnehaha, foretold
by two taciturn guests from the land of death; and in the twenty-second
song Hiawatha prepares for a final journey to the west land:
“I am going, O Nokomis,
On a long and distant journey,
To the portals of the Sunset,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind Keewaydin.
“One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward, Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapors,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.
“Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the kingdom of Ponemah,
To the land of the Hereafter!”
The sun, victoriously arising, tears itself away from the embrace and
clasp, from the enveloping womb of the sea, and sinks again into the
maternal sea, into night, the all-enveloping and the all-reproducing,
leaving behind it the heights of midday and all its glorious works. This
image was the first, and was profoundly entitled to become the symbolic
carrier of human destiny; in the morning of life man painfully tears
himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through
battle to his heights. Not seeing his worst enemy in front of him, but
bearing him within himself as a deadly longing for the depths within,
for drowning in his own source, for becoming absorbed into the mother,
his life is a constant struggle with death, a violent and transitory
delivery from the always lurking night. This death is no external enemy,
but a deep personal longing for quiet and for the profound peace of
non-existence, for a dreamless sleep in the ebb and flow of the sea of
life. Even in his highest endeavor for harmony and equilibrium, for
philosophic depths and artistic enthusiasm, he seeks death, immobility,
satiety and rest. If, like Peirithoos, he tarries too long in this place
of rest and peace, he is overcome by torpidity, and the poison of the
serpent paralyzes him for all time. If he is to live he must fight and
sacrifice his longing for the past, in order to rise to his own heights.
And having reached the noonday heights, he must also _sacrifice the love
for his own achievement_, for he may not loiter. The sun also sacrifices
its greatest strength in order to hasten onwards to the fruits of
autumn, which are the seeds of immortality; fulfilled in children, in
works, in posthumous fame, in a new order of things, all of which in
their turn begin and complete the sun’s course over again.
The “Song of Hiawatha” contains, as these extracts show, a material
which is very well adapted to bring into play the abundance of ancient
symbolic possibilities, latent in the human mind, and to stimulate it to
the creation of mythologic figures. But the products always contain the
same old problems of humanity, which rise again and again in new
symbolic disguise from the shadowy world of the unconscious. Thus Miss
Miller is reminded through the longing of Chiwantopel, of another mythic
cycle which appeared in the form of Wagner’s “Siegfried.” Especially is
this shown in the passage in Chiwantopel’s monologue, where he exclaims,
“There is not one who understands me, not one who resembles me, not one
who has a soul sister to mine.” Miss Miller observes that the sentiment
of this passage has the greatest analogy with the feelings which
Siegfried experienced for Brunhilde.
This analogy causes us to cast a glance at the song of Siegfried,
especially at the relation of Siegfried and Brunhilde. It is a
well-recognized fact that Brunhilde, the Valkyr, gives protection to the
birth (incestuous) of Siegfried, but while Sieglinde is the human
mother, Brunhilde has the rôle of “spiritual mother” (mother-imago);
however, unlike Hera towards Hercules, she is not a pursuer, but
benevolent. This sin, in which she is an accomplice, by means of the
help she renders, is the reason for her banishment by Wotan. The strange
birth of Siegfried from the sister-wife distinguishes him as Horus, as
the _reborn son_, a reincarnation of the retreating Osiris—Wotan. The
birth of the young son, of the hero, results, indeed, from mankind, who,
however, are merely the human bearers of the cosmic symbolism. Thus the
birth is protected by the spirit mother (Hera, Lilith): she sends
Sieglinde with the child in her womb (Mary’s flight) on the “night
journey on the sea” to the east:
“Onward, hasten;
Turn to the East.
· · · · ·
O woman, thou cherishest
The sublimest hero of the world
In thy sheltering womb.”
The motive of dismemberment is found again in the broken sword of
Siegmund, which was kept for Siegfried. From the dismemberment life is
pieced together again. (The Medea wonder.) Just as a smith forges the
pieces together, so is the dismembered dead again put together. (This
comparison is also found in “Timaios” of Plato: the parts of the world
joined together with pegs.) In the Rigveda, 10, 72, the creator of the
world, Brahmanaspati, is a smith.
“Brahmanaspati, as a blacksmith,
Welded the world together.”
The sword has the significance of the phallic sun power; therefore, a
sword proceeds from the mouth of the apocalyptic Christ; that is to say,
the procreative fire, the word, or the procreative Logos. In Rigveda,
Brahmanaspati is also a prayer-word, which possessed an ancient creative
significance:[697]
“And this prayer of the singers, expanding from itself,
Became a cow, which was already there before the world,
Dwelling together in the womb of this god,
Foster-children of the same keeper are the gods.”
—_Rigveda_ x: 31.
The Logos became a cow; that is to say, the mother, who is pregnant with
the gods. (In Christian uncanonical phantasies, where the Holy Ghost has
feminine significance, we have the well-known motive of the two mothers,
the earthly mother, Mary, and the spiritual mother, the Holy Ghost.) The
transformation of the Logos into the mother is not remarkable in itself,
because the origin of the phenomenon fire-speech seems to be the
mother-libido, according to the discussion in the earlier chapter. The
_spiritual is the mother-libido_. The significance of the sword, in the
Sanskrit conception, têjas, is probably partly determined by its
sharpness, as is shown above, in its connection with the libido
conception. The motive of pursuit (the pursuing Sieglinde, analogous to
Leto) is not here bound up with the spiritual mother, but with Wotan,
therefore corresponding to the Linos legend, where the father of the
wife is also the pursuer. Wotan is also the father of Brunhilde.
Brunhilde stands in a peculiar relation to Wotan. Brunhilde says to
Wotan:
“Thou speakest to the will of Wotan By telling me what thou wishest:
Who ... am I Were I not thy will?”
_Wotan_:
I take counsel only with myself, When I speak with thee....
Brunhilde is also somewhat the “angel of the face,” that creative will
or word,[698] emanating from God, also the Logos, which became the
child-bearing woman. God created the world through his word; that is to
say, his mother, the woman who is to bring him forth again. (He lays his
own egg.) This peculiar conception, it seems to me, can be explained by
assuming that the libido overflowing into speech (thought) has preserved
its sexual character to an extraordinary degree as a result of the
inherent inertia. In this way the “word” had to execute and fulfil all
that was denied to the sexual wish; namely, the return into the mother,
in order to attain eternal duration. The “word” fulfils this wish by
itself becoming the daughter, the wife, the mother of the God, who
brings him forth anew.[699]
Wagner has this idea vaguely in his mind in Wotan’s lament over
Brunhilde:
“None as she knew my inmost thought;
None knew the source of my will
As she;
She herself was
The creating womb of my wish;
And so now she has broken
The blessed union!”
Brunhilde’s sin is the favoring of Siegmund, but, behind this, lies
incest: this is projected into the brother-sister relation of Siegmund
and Sieglinde; in reality, and archaically expressed, Wotan, the father,
has entered into his self-created daughter, in order to rejuvenate
himself. But this fact must, of course, be veiled. Wotan is rightly
indignant with Brunhilde, for she has taken the Isis rôle and through
the birth of the son has deprived the old man of his power. The first
attack of the death serpent in the form of the son, Siegmund, Wotan has
repelled; he has broken Siegmund’s sword, but Siegmund rises again in a
grandson. This inevitable fate is always helped by the woman; hence the
wrath of Wotan.
At Siegfried’s birth Sieglinde dies, as is proper. The
foster-mother[700] is apparently not a woman, but a chthonic god, a
crippled dwarf, who belongs to that tribe which renounces love.[701] The
Egyptian god of the underworld, the crippled shadow of Osiris (who
celebrated a melancholy resurrection in the sexless semi-ape
Harpocrates), is the tutor of Horus, who has to avenge the death of his
father.