a mountain, where Wotan has put her to sleep[702] with the magic thorn
(Edda), surrounded by the flames of Wotan’s fire (equal to libido[703]),
which wards off every one. But Mime becomes Siegfried’s enemy and wills
his death through Fafner. Here Mime’s dynamic nature is revealed; he is
a masculine representation of the terrible mother, also a foster-mother
of demoniac nature, who places the poisonous worm (Typhon) in her son’s
(Horus’s) path. Siegfried’s longing for the mother drives him away from
Mime, and his travels begin with the mother of death, and lead through
vanquishing the “terrible mother”[704] to the woman:
_Siegfried_:
Off with the imp!
I ne’er would see him more!
Might I but know what my mother was like
That will my thought never tell me!
Her eyes’ tender light
Surely did shine
Like the soft eyes of the doe!
Siegfried decides to separate from the demon which was the mother in the
past, and he gropes forward with the longing directed towards the
mother. Nature acquires a hidden maternal significance for him (“doe”);
in the tones of nature he discovers a suggestion of the maternal voice
and the maternal language:
_Siegfried_:
Thou gracious birdling,
Strange art thou to me!
Dost thou in the wood here dwell?
Ah, would that I could take thy meaning!
Thy song something would say—
Perchance—of my loving mother!
This psychology we have already encountered in Hiawatha. By means of his
dialogue with the bird (bird, like wind and arrow, represents the wish,
the winged longing) Siegfried entices Fafner from the cave. His desires
turn back to the mother, and the chthonic demon, the cave-dwelling
terror of the woods, appears. Fafner is the protector of the treasure;
in his cave lies the hoard, the source of life and power. The mother
possesses the libido of the son, and jealously does she guard it.
Translated into psychological language, this means the positive
transference succeeds only through the release of the libido from the
mother-imago, the incestuous object in general. Only in this manner is
it possible to gain one’s libido, the incomparable treasure, and this
requires a mighty struggle, the whole battle of adaptation.[705] The
Siegfried legend has abundantly described the outcome of this battle
with Fafner. According to the Edda, Siegfried eats Fafner’s heart, the
seat of life. He wins the magic cap, through whose power Alberich had
changed himself into a serpent. This refers to the motive of casting the
skin, rejuvenation. By means of the magic cap one can vanish and assume
different shapes. The vanishing probably refers to dying and to the
invisible presence; that is, existence in the mother’s womb. A
luck-bringing cap, amniotic covering, the new-born child occasionally
wears over his head (the caul). Moreover, Siegfried drinks the dragon’s
blood, which makes it possible for him to understand the language of
birds, and consequently he enters into a peculiar relation with Nature,
a dominating position, the result of his knowledge, and finally wins the
treasure.
_Hort_ is a mediæval and Old High German word with the meaning of
“collected and guarded treasure”; Gothic, _huzd_; Old Scandinavian,
_hodd_; Germanic _hozda_, from pre-Germanic _kuzdhó_—for _kudtho_—“the
concealed.” Kluge[706] adds to this the Greek κεύθω, έκυθον = “to hide,
to conceal.” Also _hut_ (_hut_, to guard; English, hide), Germanic root
_hud_, from Indo-Germanic _kuth_ (questionable), to Greek κεύθω and
κύσθος, “cavity,” feminine genitals. Prellwitz,[707] too, traces Gothic
_huzd_, Anglo-Saxon _hyde_, English hide and hoard, to Greek κεύθω.
Whitley Stokes traces English hide, Anglo-Saxon _hydan_, New High German
_Hütte_, Latin _cûdo_ = helmet; Sanskrit _kuhara_ (cave?) to primitive
Celtic _koudo_ = concealment; Latin, _occultatio_.
The assumption of Kluge is also supported in other directions; namely,
from the point of view of the primitive idea:
“There exists in Athens[708] a sacred place (a Temenos) of Ge, with
the surname Olympia. Here the ground is torn open for about a yard in
width; and they say, after the flood at the time of Deucalion, that
the water receded here; and every year they throw into the fissure
wheatmeal, kneaded with honey.”
We have observed previously that among the Arrhetophorian, pastry in the
form of snakes and phalli, was thrown into a crevice in the earth. This
was mentioned in connection with the ceremonies of fertilizing the
earth. We have touched slightly already upon the sacrifice in the earth
crevice among the Watschandies. The flood of death has passed
characteristically into the crevice of the earth; that is, back into the
mother again; because from the mother the universal great death has come
in the first place. The flood is simply the counterpart of the vivifying
and all-producing water: Ὠκεανοῦ, ὅσπερ γένεσις πάντεσσι τέτυκται.[709]
One sacrifices the honey cake to the mother, so that she may spare one
from death. Thus every year in Rome a gold sacrifice was thrown into the
lacus Curtius, into the former fissure in the earth, which could only be
closed through the sacrificial death of Curtius. He was the typical
hero, who has journeyed into the underworld, in order to conquer the
danger threatening the Roman state from the opening of the abyss.
(Kaineus, Amphiaraos.) In the Amphiaraion of Oropos those healed through
the temple incubation threw their gifts of gold into the sacred well, of
which Pausanias says:
“If any one is healed of a sickness through a saying of the oracle,
then it is customary to throw a silver or gold coin into the well;
because here Amphiaraos has ascended as a god.”
It is probable that this oropic well is also the place of his
“Katabasis” (descent into the lower world). There were many entrances
into Hades in antiquity. Thus near Eleusis there was an abyss, through
which Aidoneus passed up and down, when he kidnapped Cora. (Dragon and
maiden: the libido overcome by resistance, life replaced by death.)
There were crevices in the rocks, through which souls could ascend to
the upper world. Behind the temple of Chthonia in Hermione lay a sacred
district of Pluto, with a ravine through which Hercules had brought up
Cerberus; in addition, there was an “Acherusian” lake.[710] This ravine
was, therefore, the entrance to the place where death was conquered. The
lake also belongs here as a further mother symbol, for symbols appear
massed together, as they are surrogates, and, therefore, do not afford
the same satisfaction of desire as accorded by reality, so that the
unsatisfied remnant of the libido must seek still further symbolic
outlets. The ravine in the Areopagus in Athens was considered the seat
of inhabitants of the lower world. An old Grecian custom[711] suggests a
similar idea. Girls were sent into a cavern, where a poisonous snake
dwelt, as a test of virginity. If they were bitten by the snake, it was
a token that they were no longer chaste. We find this same motive again
in the Roman legend of St. Silvester, at the end of the fifth
century:[712]
“Erat draco immanissimus in monte Tarpeio, in quo est Capitolium
collocatum. Ad hunc draconem per CCCLXV gradus, quasi ad infernum,
magi cum virginibus sacrilegis descendebant semel in mense cum
sacrificiis et lustris, ex quibus esca poterat tanto draconi inferri.
Hic draco subito ex improviso ascendebat et licet non ingrederetur
vicinos tamen aeres flatu suo vitiabat. Ex quo mortalitas hominum et
maxima luctus de morte veniebat infantum. (Lilith motive.) Sanctus
itaque Silvester cum haberet cum paganis pro defensione veritatis
conflictum, ad hoc venit ut dicerent ei pagani: ‘Silvester descende ad
draconem et fac eum in nomine Dei tui vel uno anno ab interfectione
generis humani cessare.’”[713]
St. Peter appeared to Silvester in a dream and advised him to close his
door to the underworld with chains, according to the model in
Revelation, chap, xx:
(1) “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the
bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand.
(2) “And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the
Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.
(3) “And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a
seal upon him.”
The anonymous author of a writing, “De Promissionibus,”[714] of the
beginning of the fifth century, mentions a very similar legend:
“Apud urbem Romam specus quidam fuit in quo draco miræ magnitudinis
mechanica arte formatus, gladium ore gestans,[715] oculis rutilantibus
gemmis[716] metuendus ac terribilis apparebat. Hinc annuæ devotæ
virgines floribus exornatæ, eo modo in sacrificio dabantur, quatenus
inscias munera deferentes gradum scalæ, quo certe ille arte diaboli
draco pendebat, contingentes impetus venientis gladii perimeret, ut
sanguinem funderet innocentem. Et hunc quidam monachus, bene ob
meritum cognitus Stiliconi tunc patricio, eo modo subvertit; baculo,
manu, singulos gradus palpandos inspiciens, statim ut illum tangens
fraudem diabolicam repperit, eo transgresso descendens, draconem
scidit, misitque in partes: ostendens et hie deos non esse qui manu
fiunt.”[717]
The _hero battling with the dragon has much in common with the dragon_,
and also he takes over his qualities; for example, invulnerability. As
the footnotes show, the similarity is carried still further (sparkling
eyes, sword in his mouth). Translated psychologically, the dragon is
merely the son’s repressed longing, striving towards the mother;
therefore, the son is the dragon, as even Christ is identified with the
serpent, which, once upon a time, similia similibus, had controlled the
snake plague in the Wilderness. John iii: 14. _As a serpent he is to be
crucified; that is to say, as one striving backwards towards the mother,
he must die hanging or suspended on the mother tree._ Christ and the
dragon of the Antichrist are in the closest contact in the history of
their appearance and their cosmic meaning. (Compare Bousset, the
Antichrist.) The legend of the dragon concealed in the Antichrist myth
belongs to the life of the hero, and, therefore, is immortal. In none of
the newer forms of myth are the pairs of opposites so perceptibly near
as in that of Christ and Antichrist. (I refer to the remarkable
psychologic description of this problem in Mereschkowski’s romance,
“Leonardo da Vinci.”) That the dragon is only an artifice is a useful
and delightfully rationalistic conceit, which is most significant for
that period. In this way the dismal gods were effectually vulgarized.
The schizophrenic insane readily make use of this mechanism, in order to
depreciate efficient personalities. One often hears the stereotyped
lament, “It is all a play, artificial, made up,” etc. A dream of a
“schizophrenic” is most significant; he is sitting in a dark room, which
has only a single small window, through which he can see the sky. The
sun and moon appear, but they are only made artificially from oil paper.
(Denial of the deleterious incest influence.)
The descent of the three hundred and sixty-five steps refers to the
sun’s course, to the cavern of death and rebirth. That this cavern
actually stands in a relation to the subterranean mother of death can be
shown by a note in Malalas, the historian of Antioch,[718] who relates
that Diocletian consecrated there a crypt to Hecate, to which one
descends by three hundred and sixty-five steps. Cave mysteries seem to
have been celebrated for Hecate in Samothrace as well. The serpent also
played a great part as a regular symbolic attribute in the service of
Hecate. The mysteries of Hecate flourished in Rome towards the end of
the fourth century, so that the two foregoing legends might indeed
relate to her cult. Hecate[719] is a real spectral goddess of night and
phantoms, a Mar; she is represented as riding, and in Hesiod occurs as
the _patron_ of riders. She sends the horrible nocturnal fear phantom,
the Empusa, of whom Aristophanes says that she appears inclosed in a
_bladder swollen with blood_. According to Libanius, the mother of
Aischines is also called Empusa, for the reason that “ἐκ σκοτεινῶν τόπων
τοῖς παισὶν καὶ ταῖς γυναιξίν ὡρμᾶτο.”[720]
Empusa, like Hecate, has _peculiar_ feet; one foot is made of brass, the
other of ass’ dung. Hecate has snakelike feet, which, as in the triple
form ascribed to Hecate, points to her phallic libido nature.[721] In
Tralles, Hecate appears next to Priapus; there is also a Hecate
Aphrodisias. Her symbols are the key,[722] the whip,[723] the
snake,[724] the dagger[725] and the torch.[726] As mother of death, dogs
accompany her, the significance of which we have previously discussed at
length. As guardian of the door of Hades and as Goddess of dogs, she is
of threefold form, and really identified with Cerberus. Thus Hercules,
in bringing up Cerberus, brings the conquered mother of death into the
upper world. As spirit mother (moon!), she sends madness, lunacy. (This
mythical observation states that “the mother” sends madness; by far the
majority of the cases of insanity consist, in fact, in the domination of
the individual by the material of the incest phantasy.) In the mysteries
of Cerberus, a rod, called λευκόφυλλος,[727] was broken off. This rod
protected the purity of virgins, and caused any one who touched the
plant to become insane. We recognize in this the motive of the sacred
tree, which, as mother, must not be touched, an act which only an insane
person would commit. Hecate, as nightmare, appears in the form of
Empusa, in a vampire rôle, or as Lamia, as devourer of men; perhaps,
also, in that more beautiful guise, “The Bride of Corinth.” She is the
mother of all charms and witches, the patron of Medea, because the power
of the “terrible mother” is magical and irresistible (working upward
from the unconscious). In Greek syncretism, she plays a very significant
rôle. She is confused with Artemis, who also has the surname ἑκάτη,[728]
“the one striking at a distance” or “striking according to her will,” in
which we recognize again her superior power. Artemis is the huntress,
with hounds, and so Hecate, through confusion with her, becomes
κυνηγετική, the wild nocturnal huntress. (God, as huntsman, see above.)
She has her name in common with Apollo, ἕκατος ἑκάεργος.[729] From the
standpoint of the libido theory, this connection is easily
understandable, because Apollo merely symbolizes the more positive side
of the same amount of libido. The confusion of Hecate with Brimo as
subterranean mother is understandable; also with Persephone and Rhea,
the primitive all-mother. Intelligible through the maternal significance
is the confusion with Ilithyia, the midwife. Hecate is also the direct
goddess of births, κουροτρόφος,[730] the multiplier of cattle, and
goddess of marriage. Hecate, orphically, occupies the centre of the
world as Aphrodite and Gaia, even as the world soul in general. On a
carved gem[731] she is represented carrying the cross on her head. The
beam on which the criminal was scourged is called ἑκάτη.[732] To her, as
to the Roman Trivia, the triple roads, or _Scheideweg_, “forked road,”
or crossways were dedicated. And where roads branch off or unite
sacrifices of dogs were brought her; there the bodies of the executed
were thrown; the sacrifice occurs at the _point of crossing_.
Etymologically, _scheide_, “sheath”; for example, sword-sheath, sheath
for water-shed and sheath for vagina, is identical with _scheiden_, “to
split,” or “to separate.” The meaning of a sacrifice at this place
would, therefore, be as follows: to offer something to the mother at the
place of junction or at the fissure. (Compare the sacrifice to the
chthonic gods in the abyss.) The Temenos of Ge, the abyss and the well,
are easily understood as the gates of life and death,[733] “past which
every one gladly creeps” (Faust), and sacrifices there his obolus or his
πελανοί,[734] instead of his body, just as Hercules soothes Cerberus
with the honey cakes. (Compare with this the mythical significance of
the dog!) Thus the crevice at Delphi, with the spring, Castalia, was the
seat of the chthonic dragon, Python, who was conquered by the sun-hero,
Apollo. (Python, incited by Hera, pursued Leta, pregnant with Apollo;
but she, on the floating island of Delos [nocturnal journey on the sea],
gave birth to her child, who later slew the Python; that is to say,
conquered in it the spirit mother.) In Hierapolis (Edessa) the temple
was erected above the crevice through which the flood had poured out,
and in Jerusalem the foundation stone of the temple covered the great
abyss,[735] just as Christian churches are frequently built over caves,
grottoes, wells, etc. In the Mithra grotto,[736] and all the other
sacred caves up to the Christian catacombs, which owe their significance
not to the legendary persecutions but to the worship of the dead,[737]
we come across the same fundamental motive. The burial of the dead in a
holy place (in the “garden of the dead,” in cloisters, crypts, etc.) is
restitution to the mother, with the certain hope of resurrection by
which such burial is rightfully rewarded. The animal of death which
dwells in the cave had to be soothed in early times through human
sacrifices; later with natural gifts.[738] Therefore, the Attic custom
gives to the dead the μελιτοῦττα, to pacify the dog of hell, the
three-headed monster at the gate of the underworld. A more recent
elaboration of the natural gifts seems to be the obolus for Charon, who
is, therefore, designated by Rohde as the second Cerberus, corresponding
to the Egyptian dog-faced god Anubis.[739] Dog and serpent of the
underworld (Dragon) are likewise identical. In the tragedies, the
Erinnyes are serpents as well as dogs; the serpents Tychon and Echnida
are parents of the serpents—Hydra, the dragon of the Hesperides, and
Gorgo; and of the dogs, Cerberus, Orthrus, Scylla.[740] Serpents and
dogs are also protectors of the treasure. The chthonic god was probably
always a serpent dwelling in a cave, and was fed with πελανοί.[741] In
the Asclepiadean of the later period, the sacred serpents were scarcely
visible, meaning that they probably existed only figuratively.[742]
Nothing was left but the hole in which the snake was said to dwell.
There the πελανοί[743] were placed; later the obolus was thrown in. The
sacred cavern in the temple of Kos consisted of a rectangular pit, upon
which was laid a stone lid, with a square hole; this arrangement serves
the purpose of a treasure house. The snake hole had become a slit for
money, a “sacrificial box,” and the cave had become a “treasure.” That
this development, which Herzog traces, agrees excellently with the
actual condition is shown by a discovery in the temple of Asclepius and
Hygieia in Ptolemais:
“An encoiled granite snake, with arched neck, was found. In the middle
of the coil is seen a narrow slit, polished by usage, just large
enough to allow a coin of four centimeters diameter at most to fall
through. At the side are holes for handles to lift the heavy pieces,
the under half of which is used as a cover.”—_Herzog_, _Ibid._, p.
212.
The serpent, as protector of the hoard, now lies on the treasure house.
The fear of the maternal womb of death has become the guardian of the
treasure of life. That the snake in this connection is really a symbol
of death, that is to say, of the dead libido, results from the fact that
the souls of the dead, like the chthonic gods, appear as _serpents_, as
dwellers in the kingdom of the mother of death.[744] This development of
symbol allows us to recognize easily the transition of the originally
very primitive significance of the crevice in the earth as mother to the
meaning of treasure house, and can, therefore, support the etymology of
_Hort_, “hoard, treasure,” as suggested by Kluge, κεύθω, belonging to
κὲῦθος, means the innermost womb of the earth (Hades); κύσθος, that
Kluge adds, is of similar meaning, cavity or womb. Prellwitz does not
mention this connection. Fick,[745] however, compares New High German
_hort_, Gothic _huzd_, to Armenian _kust_, “abdomen”; Church Slavonian
_čista_, Vedic _kostha_ = abdomen, from the Indo-Germanic root
_koustho -s_ = viscera, lower abdomen, room, store-room. Prellwitz
compares κύσθος κύστις = urinary bladder, bag, purse; Sanskrit
_kustha-s_ = cavity of the loins; then κύτος = cavity, vault; κύτις =
little chest, from κυέω = I am pregnant. Here, from κύτος = cave, κύυαρ
= hole, κύαθος = cup, κύλα - depression under the eye, κῦμα = swelling,
wave, billow, κῦρος = power, force, κύριος = lord, Old Iranian _caur_,
_cur_ = hero; Sanskrit _çura -s_ = strong, hero. The fundamental
Indo-Germanic roots[746] are _kevo_ = to swell, to be strong. From that
the above-mentioned κυέω, κύαρ, κῦρος and Latin _cavus_ = hollow,
vaulted, cavity, hole; _cavea_ = cavity, enclosure, cage, scene and
assembly; _caulæ_ = cavity, opening, enclosure, stall[747]; _kuéyô_ =
swell; participle, _kueyonts_ = swelling; _en-kueyonts_ = pregnant,
ἐγηυέων = Latin _inciens_ = pregnant; compare Sanskrit _vi-çvá-yan_ =
swelling; _kûro -s_ (_kevaro -s_), strong, powerful hero.
The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is swelling
life; it is himself, the hero, new-born from the anxiety of pregnancy
and the birth throes. Thus the Hindoo fire-bringer is called Mâtariçvan,
meaning the one swelling in the mother. The _hero striving towards the
mother is the dragon, and when he separates from the mother he becomes
the conqueror of the dragon_.[748] This train of thought, which we have
already hinted at previously in Christ and Antichrist, may be traced
even into the details of Christian phantasy. There is a series of
mediæval pictures[749] in which the communion cup contains a dragon, a
snake or some sort of small animal.[750]
The cup is the receptacle, the maternal womb, of the god resurrected in
the wine; the cup is the cavern where the serpent dwells, the god who
sheds his skin, in the state of metamorphosis; for Christ is also the
serpent. These symbolisms are used in an obscure connection in I
Corinthians, verse 10: Paul writes of the Jews who “were all baptized
unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (also reborn) and “did all drink
the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual rock that
followed them, and that rock was Christ.” They drank from the mother
(the generative rock, birth from the rock) the milk of rejuvenation, the
mead of immortality, and this Rock was Christ, here identified with the
mother, because he is the symbolic representative of the mother libido.
When we drink from the cup, then we drink from the mother’s breast
immortality and everlasting salvation. Paul wrote of the Jews that they
ate and then rose up to dance and to indulge in fornication, and then
twenty-three thousand of them were swept off by the plague of serpents.
The remedy for the survivors, however, was the sight of a serpent
hanging on a pole. From it was derived the cure.
[Illustration: THE DRAGON IN THE GOBLET]
“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the
blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of
the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body; for
we are all partakers of one bread.”—_I Corinthians_ x: 16, 17.
Bread and wine are the body and the blood of Christ; the food of the
immortals who are brothers with Christ, ἀδελφοί, those who come from the
same womb. We who are reborn again from the mother are all heroes
together with Christ, and enjoy immortal food. As with the Jews, so too
with the Christians, there is imminent danger of unworthy partaking, for
this mystery, which is very closely related psychologically with the
subterranean Hierosgamos of Eleusis, involves a mysterious union of man
in a spiritual sense,[751] which was constantly misunderstood by the
profane and was retranslated into his language, where mystery is
equivalent to orgy and secrecy to vice.[752] A very interesting
blasphemer and sectarian of the beginning of the nineteenth century
named Unternährer has made the following comment on the last supper:
“The communion of the devil is in this brothel. All they sacrifice
here, they sacrifice to the devil and not to God. There they have the
devil’s cup and the devil’s dish; _there they have sucked the head of
the snake_,[753] there they have fed upon the iniquitous bread and
drunken the wine of wickedness.”[754]
Unternährer is an adherent or a forerunner of the “theory of living
one’s own nature.” He dreams of himself as a sort of priapic divinity;
he says of himself:
“Black-haired, very charming and handsome in countenance, and every
one enjoys listening to thee on account of the amiable speeches which
come from thy mouth; therefore the maids love thee.”
He preaches “the cult of nakedness.”
“Ye fools and blind men, behold God has created man in his image, as
male and female, and has blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth, and make it subject to thee.’ Therefore,
he has given the greatest honor to these poor members and has placed
them naked in the garden,” etc.
“Now are the fig leaves and the covering removed, because thou hast
turned to the Lord, for the Lord is the Spirit, and where the spirit
of the Lord is, there is freedom,[755] there the clearness of the Lord
is mirrored with uncovered countenance. This is precious before God,
and this is the glory of the Lord, and the adornment of our God, when
you stand in the image and honor of your God, as God created you,
naked and not ashamed.
“Who can ever praise sufficiently in the sons and daughters of the
living God those parts of the body which are destined to procreate?
“In the lap of the daughters of Jerusalem is the gate of the Lord, and
the Just will go into the temple there, to the altar.[756] And in the
lap of the sons of the living God is the water-pipe of the upper part,
which is a tube, like a rod, to measure the temple and altar. And
under the water-tube the sacred stones are placed, as a sign and
testimony of the Lord, who has taken to himself the seed of Abraham.
“Out of the seeds in the chamber of the mother, God creates a man with
his hands, as an image of himself. Then the mother house and the
mother chamber is opened in the daughters of the Living God, and God
himself brings forth a child through them. Thus God creates children
from the stones, for the seed comes from the stones.”[757]
History teaches in manifold examples how the religious mysteries are
liable to change suddenly into sexual orgies because they have
originated from an overvaluation of the orgy. It is characteristic that
this priapic divinity[758] returns again to the old symbol of the snake,
which in the mystery enters into the faithful, fertilizing and
spiritualizing them, although it originally possessed a phallic
significance. In the mysteries of the Ophites, the festival was really
celebrated with serpents, in which the animals were even kissed.
(Compare the caressing of the snake of Demeter in the Eleusinian
mysteries.) In the sexual orgies of the modern Christian sects the
phallic kiss plays a very important rôle. Unternährer was an
uncultivated, crazy peasant, and it is unlikely that the Ophitic
religious ceremonies were known to him.
The phallic significance is expressed negatively or mysteriously through
the serpent, which always points to a secret related thought. This
related thought connects with the mother; thus, in a dream a patient
found the following imagery: “A serpent shot out from a moist cave and
bit the dreamer in the region of the genitals.” This dream took place at
the instant when the patient was convinced of the truth of the analysis,
and began to free himself from the bond of his mother complex. The
meaning is: I am convinced that I am inspired and poisoned by the
mother. The contrary manner of expression is characteristic of the
dream. At the moment when he felt the impulse to go forwards he
perceived the attachment to the mother. Another patient had the
following dream during a relapse, in which the libido was again wholly
introverted for a time: “She was entirely filled within by a great
snake; only one end of the tail peeped out from her arm. She wanted to
seize it, but it escaped her.” A patient with a very strong introversion
(catatonic state) complained to me that a snake was stuck in her
throat.[759] This symbolism is also used by Nietzsche in the “vision” of
the shepherd and the snake:[760]
“And verily, what I saw was like nothing I ever saw before. I saw a
young shepherd, writhing, choking, twitching with a convulsed face,
from whose mouth hung a black, heavy serpent.
“Did I ever see so much disgust and pallid fear upon a
countenance?[761] Might he have been sleeping, and the snake crept
into his mouth—there it bit him fast?
“My hand tore at the serpent and tore—in vain!—I failed to tear the
serpent out of his mouth. Then there cried out of me: ‘Bite! Bite! Its
head off! Bite!’ I exclaimed; all my horror, my hate, my disgust, my
compassion, all the good and bad cried out from me in one voice.
“Ye intrepid ones around me! solve for me the riddle which I saw, make
clear to me the vision of the lonesomest one.
“For it was a vision and a prophecy; what did then I behold in
parable? And who is it who is still to come?
“Who is the shepherd into whose mouth crept the snake? Who is the man
into whose throat all the heaviness and the blackest would creep?[762]
“But the shepherd bit, as my cry had told him; he bit with a huge
bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—and sprang up.
“No longer shepherd, no longer man, a transfigured being, an
illuminated being, who laughed! Never yet on earth did a man laugh as
he laughed!
“O my brethren, I heard a laugh which was no human laughter—and now a
thirst consumeth me, a longing that is never allayed.
“My longing for this laugh eats into me. Oh, how can I suffer still to
live! And how now can I bear to die!”[763]
The snake represents the introverting libido. Through introversion one
is fertilized, inspired, regenerated and reborn from the God. In Hindoo
philosophy this idea of creative, intellectual activity has even
cosmogenic significance. The unknown original creator of all things is,
according to Rigveda 10, 121, Prajâpati, the “Lord of Creation.” In the
various Brahmas, his cosmogenic activity was depicted in the following
manner
“Prajâpati desired: ‘I will procreate myself, I will be manifold.’ He
performed Tapas; after he had performed Tapas he created these
worlds.”
The strange conception of Tapas is to be translated, according to
Deussen,[764] as “he heated himself with his own heat,[765] with the
sense of ‘he brooded, he hatched.’” Here the hatcher and the hatched are
not two, but one and the same identical being. As Hiranyagarbha,
Prajâpati is the egg produced from himself, the world-egg, from which he
hatches himself. He creeps into himself, he becomes his own uterus,
becomes pregnant with himself, in order to give birth to the world of
multiplicity. Thus Prajâpati through the way of introversion changed
into something new, the multiplicity of the world. It is of especial
interest to note how the most remote things come into contact. Deussen
observes:
“In the degree that the conception of Tapas (heat) becomes in hot
India the symbol of exertion and distress, the ‘tapo atapyata’ began
to assume the meaning of self-castigation and became related to the
idea that creation is an act of _self-renunciation_ on the part of the
Creator.”
Self-incubation and self-castigation and introversion are very closely
connected ideas.[766] The Zosimos vision mentioned above betrays the
same train of thought, where it is said of the place of transformation:
ὁ τόπος τῆς ἀσκήσεως.[767] We have already observed that the place of
transformation is really the uterus. Absorption in one’s self
(introversion) is an entrance into one’s own uterus, and also at the
same time asceticism. In the philosophy of the Brahmans the world arose
from this activity; among the post-Christian Gnostics it produced the
revival and spiritual rebirth of the individual, who was born into a new
spiritual world. The Hindoo philosophy is considerably more daring and
logical, and assumes that creation results from introversion in general,
as in the wonderful hymn of Rigveda, 10, 29, it is said:
“What was hidden in the shell,
Was born through the power of fiery torments.
From this first arose love,
As the germ of knowledge,
The wise found the roots of existence in non-existence,
By investigating the hearts impulses.”[768]
This philosophical view interprets the world as an emanation of the
libido, and this must be widely accepted from the theoretic as well as
the psychologic standpoint, for the function of reality is an
instinctive function, having the character of biological adaptation.
When the insane Schreber brought about the end of the world through his
libido-introversion, he expressed an entirely rational psychologic view,
just as Schopenhauer wished to abolish through negation (holiness,
asceticism) the error of the primal will, through which the world was
created. Does not Goethe say:
“You follow a false trail;
Do not think that we are not serious;
Is not the kernel of nature
In the hearts of men?”
The hero, who is to accomplish the rejuvenation of the world and the
conquest of death, is the libido, which, brooding upon itself in
introversion, coiling as a snake around its own egg, apparently
threatens life with a poisonous bite, in order to lead it to death, and
from that darkness, conquering itself, gives birth to itself again.
Nietzsche knows this conception:[769]
“How long have you sat already upon your misfortune.
Give heed! lest you hatch an egg,
A basilisk egg
Of your long travail.”
The hero is himself a serpent, himself a sacrificer and a sacrificed.
The hero himself is of _serpent nature_; therefore, Christ compares
himself with the serpent; therefore, the redeeming principle of the
world of that Gnostic sect which styled itself the Ophite was the
serpent. The serpent is the Agatho and Kako demon. It is, indeed,
intelligible, when, in the Germanic saga, they say that the heroes had
serpents’ eyes.[770] I recall the parallel previously drawn between the
eyes of the Son of man and those of the Tarpeian dragon. In the already
mentioned mediæval pictures, the dragon, instead of the Lord, appeared
in the cup; the dragon who with changeful, serpent glances[771] guarded
the divine mystery of renewed rebirth in the maternal womb. In Nietzsche
the old, apparently long extinct idea is again revived:[772]
“Ailing with tenderness, just as the thawing wind,
Zarathustra sits waiting, waiting on his hill,
Sweetened and cooked in his own juice,
Beneath his summits,
Beneath his ice he sits,
Weary and happy,
A Creator on his seventh day.
Silence!
It is my truth!
From hesitating eyes—
From velvety shadows
Her glance meets mine,
Lovely, mischievous, the glance of a girl.
She divines the reason of my happiness,
She divines me—ha! what is she plotting?
A purple dragon lurks
In the abyss of her maiden glance.[773]
Woe to thee, Zarathustra,
Thou seemest like some one
Who has swallowed gold,
Thy belly will be slit open.”[774]
In this poem nearly all the symbolism is collected which we have
elaborated previously from other connections. Distinct traces of the
primitive identity of serpent and hero are still extant in the myth of
Cecrops. Cecrops is himself half-snake, half-man. Originally, he
probably was the Athenian snake of the citadel itself. As a buried god,
he is like Erechtheus, a chthonic snake god. Above his subterranean
dwelling rises the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess (compare
the analogous idea of the Christian church). The casting of the skin of
the god, which we have already mentioned in passing, stands in the
closest relation to the nature of the hero. We have spoken already of
the Mexican god who casts his skin. It is also told of Mani, the founder
of the Manichaean sect, that he was killed, skinned, stuffed and hung
up.[775] That is the death of Christ, merely in another mythological
form.[776]
Marsyas, who seems to be a substitute for Attis, the son-lover of
Cybele, was also skinned.[777] Whenever a Scythian king died, slaves and
horses were slaughtered, skinned and stuffed, and then set up
again.[778] In Phrygia, the representatives of the father-god were
killed and skinned. The same was done in Athens with an ox, who was
skinned and stuffed and again hitched to the plough.
In this manner the revival of the fertility of the earth was
celebrated.[779]
This readily explains the fragment from the Sabazios mysteries,
transmitted to us by Firmicus:[780] Ταῦρος δράκοντος καὶ πατὴρ ταύρου
δράκων[781].
The active fructifying (upward striving) form of the libido is changed
into the negative force striving downwards towards death. The hero as
zodion of spring (ram, bull) conquers the depths of winter; and beyond
the summer solstice is attacked by the unconscious longing for death,
and is bitten by the snake. However, he himself is the snake. But he is
at war with himself, and, therefore, the descent and the end appear to
him as the malicious inventions of the mother of death, who in this way
wishes to draw him to herself. The mysteries, however, consolingly
promise that there is no contradiction[782] or disharmony when life is
changed into death: ταῦρος δράκοντος καὶ πατήρ ταύρου δράκων.
Nietzsche, too, gives expression to this mystery:[783]
“_Here do I sit now_,
That is, I’m swallowed down
By this the smallest oasis—
—It opened up just yawning,
Its loveliest maw agape.
Hail! hail! to that whalefish,
When he for his guests’ welfare
Provided thus!
· · · · ·
Hail to his belly
If he had also
Such a lovely oasis belly—
The desert grows, woe to him
Who hides the desert!
Stone grinds on stone, the desert
Gulps and strangles.
The monstrous death gazes, glowing brown,
And chews—his life is his chewing ...
Forget not, O man, burnt out by lust,
Thou art the stone, the desert,
Thou art death!”
The serpent symbolism of the Last Supper is explained by the
identification of the hero with the serpent: The god is buried in the
mother: as fruit of the field, as food coming from the mother and at the
same time as drink of immortality he is received by the mystic, or as a
serpent he unites with the mystic. All these symbols represent the
liberation of the libido from the incestuous fixation through which new
life is attained. The liberation is accomplished under symbols, which
represent the activity of the incest wish.
It might be justifiable at this place to cast a glance upon
psychoanalysis as a method of treatment. In practical analysis it is
important, first of all, to discover the libido lost from the control of
consciousness. (It often happens to the libido as with the fish of Moses
in the Mohammedan legend; it sometimes “takes its course in a marvellous
manner into the sea.”) Freud says in his important article, “Zur Dynamik
der Übertragung”:[784]
“The libido has retreated into regression and again revives the
infantile images.”
This means, mythologically, that the sun is devoured by the serpent of
the night, the treasure is concealed and guarded by the dragon:
substitution of a present mode of adaptation by an infantile mode, which
is represented by the corresponding neurotic symptoms. Freud continues:
“Thither the analytic treatment follows it and endeavors to seek out
the libido again, to render it accessible to consciousness, and
finally to make it serviceable to reality. Whenever the analytic
investigation touches upon the libido, withdrawn into its
hiding-place, a struggle must break out; all the forces, which have
caused the regression of the libido, will rise up as resistance
against the work, in order to preserve this new condition.”
Mythologically this means: the hero seeks the lost sun, the fire, the
virgin sacrifice, or the treasure, and fights the typical fight with the
dragon, with the libido in resistance. As these parallels show,
psychoanalysis mobiles a part of the life processes, the fundamental
importance of which properly illustrates the significance of this
process.
After Siegfried has slain the dragon, he meets the father, Wotan,
plagued by gloomy cares, for the primitive mother, Erda, has placed in
his path the snake, in order to enfeeble his sun. He says to Erda:
_Wanderer_:
All-wise one,
Care’s piercing sting by thee was planted
In Wotan’s dauntless heart
With fear of shameful ruin and downfall.
Filled was his spirit by tidings
Thou didst foretell.
Art thou the world’s wisest of women?
Tell to me now
How a god may conquer his care.
_Erda_:
Thou art not
What thou hast said.
It is the same primitive motive which we meet Wagner: the mother has
robbed her son, the sun-god, of the joy of life, through a poisonous
thorn, and deprives him of his power, which is connected with the name.
Isis demands the name of the god; Erda says, “Thou art not what thou
hast said.” But the “Wanderer” has found the way to conquer the fatal
charm of the mother, the fear of death:
“The eternals’ downfall
No more dismays me,
Since their doom I willed.
“I leave to thee, loveliest Wälsung,
Gladly my heritage now.
To the ever-young
In gladness yieldeth the god!”
These wise words contain, in fact, the saving thought. It is not the
mother who has placed the poisonous worm in our path, but our libido
itself wills to complete the course of the sun to mount from morn to
noon, and, passing beyond noon, to hasten towards evening, not at war
with itself, but willing the descent and the end.[785]
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra teaches:
“I praise thee, my death, the free death, which comes to me because I
want it.
“And when shall I want it?
“He who has a goal and an heir wants death at the proper time for his
goal and his heir.
“And this is the great noonday, when man in the middle of his course
stands between man and superman, and celebrates his path towards
evening as his highest hope: because it is the path to a new morning.
“He who is setting will bless his own going down because it is a
transition: and the sun of his knowledge will be at high noon.”
Siegfried conquers the father Wotan and takes possession of Brunhilde.
The first object that he sees is her horse; then he believes that he
beholds a mail-clad man. He cuts to pieces the protecting coat of mail
of the sleeper. (Overpowering.) When he sees it is a woman, terror
seizes him:
“My heart doth falter and faint;
On whom shall I call
That he may help me?
Mother! Mother!
Remember me!
“Can this be fearing?
Oh, mother! Mother!
Thy dauntless child!
A woman lieth asleep:—
And she now has taught him to fear!
“Awaken! Awaken!
Holiest maid!
Then life from the sweetness of lips
Will I win me—
E’en tho’ I die in a kiss.”
In the duet which follows the mother is invoked:
“O mother, hail!
Who gave thee thy birth!”
The confession of Brunhilde is especially characteristic:
“O knewest thou—joy of the world,
How I have ever loved thee!
Thou wert my gladness,
My care wert thou!
Thy life I sheltered;
Or ere it was thine,
Or ere thou wert born,
My shield was thy guard.”[786]
The pre-existence of the hero and the pre-existence of Brunhilde as his
wife-mother are clearly indicated from this passage.
Siegfried says in confirmation:
“Then death took not my mother?
Bound in sleep did she lie?”
The mother-imago, which is the symbol of the dying and resurrected
libido, is explained by Brunhilde to the hero, as his own will:
“Thyself am I
If blest I be in thy love.”
The great mystery of the Logos entering into the mother for rebirth is
proclaimed with the following words by Brunhilde:
“O Siegfried, Siegfried,
Conquering light!
I loved thee ever,
For I divined
The thought that Wotan had hidden—
The thought that I dared
Not to whisper—[787]
That all unclearly
Glowed in my bosom
Suffered and strove;
For which I flouted
Him, who conceived it:[787]
For which in penance
Prisoned I lay,
While thinking it not
And feeling only,
For, in my thought,
Oh, should you guess it?
Was only my love for thee.”
The erotic similes which now follow distinctly reveal the motive of
rebirth:
_Siegfried_:
“A glorious flood
Before me rolls.
With all my senses
I only see
Its buoyant, gladdening billows.
Though in the deep
I find not my face,
Burning, I long
For the water’s balm;
And now as I am,
Spring in the stream.[788]
O might its billows
Engulf me in bliss.”
The motive of plunging into the maternal water of rebirth (baptism) is
here fully developed. An allusion to the “terrible mother” imago, the
mother of heroes, who teaches them fear, is to be found in Brunhilde’s
words (the horse-woman, who guides the dead to the other side):
“Fearest thou, Siegfried?
Fearest thou not
The wild, furious woman?”
The orgiastic “Occide moriturus” resounds in Brunhilde’s words:
“Laughing let us be lost—
Laughing go down to death!”
And in the words
“Light-giving love,
Laughing death!”
is to be found the same significant contrast.
The further destinies of Siegfried are those of the Invictus: the spear
of the gloomy, one-eyed Hagen strikes Siegfried’s vulnerable spot. The
old sun, who has become the god of death, the one-eyed Wotan, smites his
offspring, and once again ascends in eternal rejuvenation. The course of
the invincible sun has supplied the mystery of human life with beautiful
and imperishable symbols; it became a comforting fulfilment of all the
yearning for immortality, of all desire of mortals for eternal life.
Man leaves the mother, the source of libido, and is driven by the
eternal thirst to find her again, and to drink renewal from her; thus he
completes his cycle, and returns again into the mother’s womb. Every
obstacle which obstructs his life’s path, and threatens his ascent,
wears the shadowy features of the “terrible mother,” who paralyzes his
energy with the consuming poison of the stealthy, retrospective longing.
In each conquest he wins again the smiling love and life-giving
mother—images which belong to the intuitive depths of human feeling, the
features of which have become mutilated and irrecognizable through the
progressive development of the surface of the human mind. The stern
necessity of adaptation works ceaselessly to obliterate the last traces
of these primitive landmarks of the period of the origin of the human
mind, and to replace them along lines which are to denote more and more
clearly the nature of real objects.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SACRIFICE
After this long digression, let us return to Miss Miller’s vision. We
can now answer the question as to the significance of Siegfried’s
longing for Brunhilde. It is the striving of the libido away _from the
mother towards the mother_. This paradoxical sentence may be translated
as follows: as long as the libido is satisfied merely with phantasies,
it moves in itself, in its own depths, in the mother.[789] When the
longing of our author rises in order to escape the magic circle of the
incestuous and, therefore, pernicious, object, and it does not succeed
in finding reality, then the object is and remains irrevocably the
mother. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings the
deliverance from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible
source of life for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and
sluggish.
Whoever is acquainted with psychoanalysis knows how often neurotics cry
out against their parents. To be sure, such complaints and reproaches
are often justified on account of the common human imperfections, but
still more often they are reproaches which should really be directed
towards themselves. Reproach and hatred are always futile attempts to
free one’s self apparently from the parents, but in reality from one’s
own hindering longing for the parents. Our author proclaims through the
mouth of her infantile hero Chiwantopel a series of insults against her
own family. We can assume that she must renounce all these tendencies,
because they contain an unrecognized wish. This hero, of many words, who
performs few deeds and indulges in futile yearnings, is the libido which
has not fulfilled its destiny, but which turns round and round in the
kingdom of the mother, and, in spite of all its longing, accomplishes
nothing. Only he can break this magic circle who possesses the courage
of the will to live and the heroism to carry it through. Could this
yearning hero-youth, Chiwantopel, but put an end to his existence, he
would probably rise again in the form of a brave man seeking real life.
This necessity imposes itself upon the dreamer as a wise counsel and
hint of the unconscious in the following monologue of Chiwantopel. He
cries sadly:
“In all the world, there is not a single one! I have sought among a
hundred tribes. I have watched a hundred moons, since I began. Can it
be that there is not a solitary being who will ever know my soul? Yes,
by the sovereign God, yes! But ten thousand moons will wax and wane
before that pure soul is born. And it is from another world that her
parents will come to this one. She will have pale skin and pale locks.
She will know sorrow before her mother bears her. Suffering will
accompany her; she will seek also, and she will find, no one who
understands her. Temptation will often assail her soul—but she will
not yield. In her dreams, I will come to her, and she will understand.
_I have kept my body inviolate._ I have come ten thousand moons before
her epoch, and she will come ten thousand moons too late. But she will
understand! There is only once in all the ten thousand moons that a
soul like hers is born.”
Thereupon a green _serpent darts from the bushes, glides towards him and
stings him on the arm, then attacks the horse, which succumbs first_.
Then Chiwantopel says to his horse:
“‘Adieu, faithful brother! Enter into rest! I have loved you, and you
have served me well. Adieu. Soon I will rejoin you!’ Then to the
snake: ‘Thanks, little sister, you have _put an end to my
wanderings_.’”
Then he cried with grief and spoke his prayer:
“‘Sovereign God, take me soon! I have tried to know thee, and to keep
thy law! O, do not suffer my body to fall into corruption and decay,
and to furnish the vultures with food!’ A smoking crater is perceived
at a distance, the rumbling of an earthquake is heard, followed by a
trembling of the ground.”
Chiwantopel cries in the delirium of suffering, while the earth covers
his body:
“I have kept my body inviolate. Ah! She understands. Ja-ni-wa-ma,
Ja-ni-wa-ma, thou who comprehendeth me.”
Chiwantopel’s prophecy is a repetition of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” where
the poet could not escape sentimentality, and at the close of the career
of the hero, Hiawatha, he brings in the Savior of the white people, in
the guise of the arriving illustrious representatives of the Christian
religion and morals. (One thinks of the work of redemption of the
Spaniards in Mexico and Peru!) With this prophecy of Chiwantopel, the
personality of the author is again placed in the closest relation to the
hero, and, indeed, as the real object of Chiwantopel’s longing. Most
certainly the hero would have married her, had she lived at his time;
but, unfortunately, she comes too late. The connection proves our
previous assertion that the libido moves round in a circle. The author
loves herself; that is to say, she, as the hero, is sought by one who
comes too late. This motive of coming too late is characteristic of the
infantile love: the father and the mother cannot be overtaken. The
separation of the two personalities by ten thousand moons is a wish
fulfilment; with that the incest relation is annulled in an effectual
manner. This white heroine will seek without being understood. (She is
not understood, because she cannot understand herself rightly.) And she
will not find. But in dreams, at least, they will find each other, “and
she will understand.” The next sentence of the text reads:
“I have kept my body inviolate.”
This proud sentence, which naturally only a woman can express, because
man is not accustomed to boast in that direction, again confirms the
fact that all enterprises have remained but dreams, that the body has
remained “inviolate.” When the hero visits the heroine in a dream, it is
clear what is meant. This assertion of the hero’s, that he has remained
inviolate, refers back to the unsuccessful attempt upon his life in the
previous chapter (huntsman with the arrow), and clearly explains to us
what was really meant by this assault; that is to say, the refusal of
the coitus phantasy. Here the wish of the unconscious obtrudes itself
again, after the hero had repressed it the first time, and thereupon he
painfully and hysterically utters this monologue. “Temptation will often
assail her soul—but it will not yield.” This very bold assertion
reduces—noblesse oblige—the unconscious to an enormous infantile
megalomania, which is always the case when the libido is compelled,
through similar circumstances, to regressions. “Only once in all the ten
thousand moons is a soul born like mine!” Here the unconscious ego
expands to an enormous degree, evidently in order to cover with its
boastfulness a large part of the neglected duty of life. But punishment
follows at its heels. Whoever prides himself too much on having
sustained no wound in the battle of life lays himself open to the
suspicion that his fighting has been with words only, whilst actually he
has remained far away from the firing-line. This spirit is just the
reverse of the pride of those savage women, who point with satisfaction
to the countless scars which were given them by their men in the sexual
fight for supremacy. In accordance with this, and in logical
continuation of the same, all that follows is expressed in figurative
speech. The orgiastic “Occide moriturus” in its admixture with the
reckless laughter of the Dionysian frenzy confronts us here in sorry
disguise with a sentimental stage trickery worthy of our posthumous
edition of “Christian morals.” In place of the positive phallus, the
negative appears, and leads the hero’s horse (his libido animalis), not
to satisfaction, but into eternal peace—also the fate of the hero. This
end means that the mother, represented as the jaws of death, devours the
libido of the daughter. Therefore, instead of life and procreative
growth, only phantastic self-oblivion results. This weak and inglorious
end has no elevating or illuminating meaning so long as we consider it
merely as the solution of an individual erotic conflict. The fact that
the symbols under which the solution takes place have actually a
significant aspect, reveals to us that behind the individual mask,
behind the veil of “individuation,” a primitive idea stands, the severe
and serious features of which take from us the courage to consider the
sexual meaning of the Miller symbolism as all-sufficient.
It is not to be forgotten that the _sexual phantasies of the neurotic
and the exquisite sexual language of dreams_ are regressive phenomena.
The sexuality of the unconscious is not what it seems to be; _it is
merely a symbol_; it is a thought bright as day, clear as sunlight, a
decision, a step forward to every goal of life—but expressed in the
unreal sexual language of the unconscious, and in the thought form of an
earlier stage; a resurrection, so to speak, of earlier modes of
adaptation. When, therefore, the unconscious pushes into the foreground
the coitus wish, negatively expressed, it means somewhat as follows:
under similar circumstances primitive man acted in such and such a
manner. The mode of adaptation which to-day is unconscious for us is
carried on by the savage Negro of the present day, whose undertakings
beyond those of nutrition appertain to sexuality, characterized by
violence and cruelty. Therefore, in view of the archaic mode of
expression of the Miller phantasy, we are justified in assuming the
correctness of our interpretation for the lowest and nearest plane only.
A deeper stratum of meaning underlies the earlier assertion that the
figure of Chiwantopel has the character of Cassius, who has a lamb as a
companion. Therefore, Chiwantopel is the portion of the dreamer’s libido
bound up with the mother (and, therefore, masculine); hence he is her
infantile personality, the childishness of character, which as yet is
unable to understand that one must leave father and mother, when the
time is come, in order to serve the destiny of the entire personality.
This is outlined in Nietzsche’s words:
“Free dost thou call thyself? Thy dominant thought would I hear and
not that thou hast thrown off a yoke. Art thou one who had the right
to throw off a yoke? There are many who throw away their last value
when they throw away their servitude.”
Therefore, when Chiwantopel dies, it means that herein is a fulfilment
of a wish, that this infantile hero, who cannot leave the mother’s care,
may die. And if with that the bond between mother and daughter is
severed, a great step forward is gained both for inner and outer
freedom. But man wishes to remain a child too long; he would fain stop
the turning of the wheel, which, rolling, bears along with it the years;
man wishes to keep his childhood and eternal youth, rather than to die
and suffer corruption in the grave. (“O, do not suffer my body to fall
into decay and corruption.”) Nothing brings the relentless flight of
time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our
consciousness than an inactive and empty life. _Idle dreaming is the
mother of the fear of death_, the sentimental deploring of what has been
and the vain turning back of the clock. Although man can forget in the
long- (perhaps too long) guarded feelings of youth, in the dreamy state
of stubbornly held remembrances, that the wheel rolls onward,
nevertheless mercilessly does the gray hair, the relaxation of the skin
and the wrinkles in the face tell us, that whether or not we expose the
body to the destroying powers of the whole struggle of life, the poison
of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies, which,
alas! we so dearly love. Nor does it help if we cry out with the
melancholy hero Chiwantopel, “I have kept my body inviolate”; flight
from life does not free us from the law of age and death. The neurotic
who seeks to get rid of the necessities of life wins nothing and lays
upon himself the frightful burden of a premature age and death, which
must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and
meaninglessness of his life. If the libido is not permitted to follow
the progressive life, which is willing to accept all dangers and all
losses, then it follows the other road, sinking into its own depths,
working down into the old foreboding regarding the immortality of all
life, to the longing for rebirth.
Hölderlin exemplifies this path in his poetry and his life. I leave the
poet to speak in his song:
_To the Rose._
“In the Mother-womb eternal,
Sweetest queen of every lea,
Still the living and supernal
Nature carries thee and me.
“Little rose, the storm’s fierce power
Strips our leaves and alters us;
Yet the deathless germ will tower
To new blooms, miraculous.”
The following comments may be made upon the parable of this poem: The
rose is the symbol of the beloved woman (“Haidenröslein,” heather rose
of Goethe). The rose blooms in the “rose-garden” of the maiden;
therefore, it is also a direct symbol of the libido. When the poet
dreams that he is with the rose in the mother-womb of nature, then,
psychologically, the fact is that his libido is with the mother. Here is
an eternal germination and renewal. We have come across this motive
already in the Hierosgamos hymn (Iliad XIV): The nuptials in the blessed
West; that is to say, the union in and with the mother. Plutarch shows
us this motive in naïve form in his tradition of the Osiris myth; Osiris
and Isis copulating in the mother’s womb. This is also perceived by
Hölderlin as the enviable prerogative of the gods—to enjoy everlasting
infancy. Thus, in Hyperion, he says:
“Fateless, like the sleeping nursling,
Breathe the Heavenly ones;
Chastely guarded in modest buds,
Their spirits blossom eternally,
And their quiet eyes
Gaze out in placid
Eternal serenity.”
This quotation shows the meaning of heavenly bliss. Hölderlin never was
able to forget this first and greatest happiness, the dreamy picture of
which estranged him from real life. Moreover, in this poem, the ancient
_motive of the twins_ in the mother’s womb is intimated. (Isis and
Osiris in the mother’s womb.) The motive is archaic. There is a legend
in Frobenius of how the great serpent (appearing from the little serpent
in the hollow tree, through the so-called stretching out of the serpent)
has finally devoured all men (devouring mother—death), and only a
pregnant woman remains alive; she digs a ditch, covers it with a stone
(grave—mother’s womb), and, living there, she gives birth to twins, the
subsequent dragon-killers (the hero in double form, man and phallus, man
and woman, man with his libido, the dying and rising sun).
This existence together in the mother is to be found also very
beautifully expressed in an African myth (Frobenius):
“In the beginning, Obatala, the heaven, and Odudua, the earth, his
wife, lay pressed firmly together in a calabas.”
The guarding “in a modest bud” is an idea which has appeared already in
Plutarch, where it is said that the sun was born in the morning from a
flower bud. Brahma, too, comes from the bud, which also gave birth in
Assam to the first human pair.
_Humanity._
(An unfinished poem.)
“Scarcely sprouted from the waters, O Earth,
Are thy old mountain tops and diffuse odors,
While the first green islands, full of young woods, breathe delight
Through the May air over the Ocean.
“And joyfully the eye of the Sun-god looked down
Upon the firstlings of the trees and flowers;
Laughing children of his youth, born from thee;
When on the fairest of the islands....
· · · · ·
Once lay thy most beautiful child under the grapes;
Lay after a mild night; in the dawn,
In the daybreak a child born to thee, O Earth!
And the boy looks up familiarly
To his Father, Helios,
And, tasting the sweet grapes,
He picked the sacred vine for his nurse,
And soon he is grown; the beasts
Fear him, for he is different from them:
This man; he is not like thee, the father,
For the lofty soul of the father,
Is in him boldly united with thy pleasures,
And thy sadness, O Earth,
He may resemble the eternal Nature,
The mother of Gods, the terrible Mother.
“Ah! therefore, O Earth,
His presumption drives him away from thy breast,
And thy gifts are vain, the tender ones;
Ever and ever too high does the proud heart beat.
“Out from the sweet meadow of his shores
Man must go into the flowerless waters,
And tho his groves shine with golden fruit,
Like the starry night, yet he digs,
He digs caves in the mountains, and seeks in the mines,
Far from the sacred rays of his father,
Faithless also to the Sun-god,
Who does not love weaklings, and mocks at cares.
“Ah! freer do the birds of the wood breathe:
Although the breast of man heaves wilder and more proudly,
His pride becomes fear, and the tender flowers
Of his peace do not bloom for long.”
This poem betrays to us the beginning of the discord between the poet
and nature; he begins to be estranged from reality, the natural actual
existence. It is a remarkable idea how the little child chooses “the
vine for his nurse.” This Dionysian allusion is very old. In the
significant blessing of Jacob it is said of Judah (Genesis, chap. xlix,
verse 11):
“Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice
vine.”
A Gnostic gem has been preserved upon which there is a representation of
an ass suckling her foal, above which is the symbol of Cancer, and the
circumscription D.N.I.H.Y.X.P.S.: Dominus Noster Jesus Christus, with
the supplement Dei filius. As Justinus Martyr indignantly observes, the
connections of the Christian legend with that of Dionysus are
unmistakable. (Compare, for example, the miracle of the wine.) In the
last-named legend the ass plays an important rôle. Generally speaking,
the ass has an entirely different meaning in the Mediterranean countries
than with us—an economic one. Therefore, it is a benediction when Jacob
says (Genesis, chap. xlix, verse 14):
“Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens.”
The above-mentioned thought is altogether Oriental. Just as in Egypt the
new-born sun is a bull-calf, in the rest of the Orient it can easily be
an ass’s foal, to whom the vine is the nurse. Hence the picture in the
blessing of Jacob, where it is said of Judah:
“His eyes are ruddy with wine and his teeth white with milk.”
The mock crucifix of the Palatine, with an ass’s head, evidently alludes
to a very significant background.
_To Nature._
“While about thy veil I lingered, playing,
And, like any bud, upon thee hung,[790]
Still I felt thy heart in every straying
Sound about my heart that shook and clung.
While I groped with faith and painful yearning,
To your picture, glowing and unfurled,
Still I found a place for all my burning
Tears, and for my love I found a world!
“To the Sun my heart, before all others,
Turned and felt its potent magicry;
And it called the stars its little brothers,[791]
And it called the Spring, God’s melody;
And each breeze in groves or woodlands fruity
Held thy spirit—and that same sweet joy
Moved the well-springs of my heart with beauty—
Those were golden days without alloy.
“Where the Spring is cool in every valley,[792]
And the youngest bush and twig is green,
And about the rocks the grasses rally,
And the branches show the sky between,
There I lay, imbibing every flower
In a rapt, intoxicated glee,
And, surrounded by a golden shower,
From their heights the clouds sank down to me.[793]
“Often, as a weary, wandering river
Longs to join the ocean’s placid mirth,
I have wept and lost myself forever
In the fulness of thy love, O Earth!
Then—with all the ardor of my being—
Forth I rushed from Time’s slow apathy,
Like a pilgrim home from travel, fleeing
To the arms of rapt Eternity.
“_Blessed be childhood’s golden dreams, their power
Hid from me Life’s dismal poverty_:
_All the heart’s rich germs ye brought to flower;
Things I could not reach, ye gave to me!_[794]
In thy beauty and thy light, O Nature,
Free from care and from compulsion free,
Fruitful Love attained a kingly stature,
Rich as harvests reaped in Arcady.
“That which brought me up, is dead and riven,
Dead the youthful world which was my shield;
And this breast, which used to harbor heaven,
Dead and dry as any stubble-field.
Still my Springlike sorrows sing and cover
With their friendly comfort every smart—
But the morning of my life is over
And the Spring has faded from my heart....
“Shadows are the things that once we cherished;
Love itself must fade and cannot bide;
Since the golden dreams of youth have perished,
Even friendly Nature’s self has died.
Heart, poor heart, those days could never show it—
How far-off thy home, and where it lies ...
Now, alas, thou nevermore wilt know it
If a dream of it does not suffice.”
_Palinodia._
“What gathers about me, Earth, in your dusky, friendly green?
What are you blowing towards me, Winds, what do you bring again?
There is a rustling in all the tree-tops....
· · · · ·
“Why do you wake my soul?
Why do ye stir in me the past, ye Kind ones?
Oh, spare me, and let them rest; oh, do not mock
Those ashes of my joy....
“O change your changeless gods—
And grow in your youth over the old ones.
And if you would be akin to the mortals
The young girls will blossom for you.
And the young heroes will shine;
And, sweeter than ever,
Morning will play upon the cheeks of the happy ones;
And, ravishing-sweet, you will hear
The songs of those who are without care....
“Ah, once the living waves of song
Surged out of every bush to me;
And still the heavenly ones glanced down upon me,
Their eyes shining with joy.”
· · · · ·
The separation from the blessedness of childhood, from youth even, has
taken the golden glamour from nature, and the future is hopeless
emptiness. But what robs nature of its glamour, and life of its joy, is
the poison of the retrospective longing, which harks back, in order to
sink into its own depths:
_Empedocles._
“Thou seekest life—and a godly fire springs to thee,
Gushing and gleaming, from the deeps of the earth;
And, with shuddering longing,
Throws thee down into the flames of Aetna.
“So, through a queen’s wanton whim,
Pearls are dissolved in wine—restrain her not!
Didst thou not throw thy riches, Poet,
Into the bright and bubbling cup!
“Still thou art holy to me, as the Power of Earth
Which took thee away, lovely assassin!...
And I would have followed the hero to the depths,
Had Love not held me.”
This poem betrays the secret longing for the maternal depths.[795]
He would like to be sacrificed in the chalice, dissolved in wine like
pearls (the “crater” of rebirth), yet love holds him within the light of
day. The libido still has an object, for the sake of which life is worth
living. But were this object abandoned, then the libido would sink into
the realm of the subterranean, the mother, who brings forth again:
_Obituary._
(Unfinished poem.)
“Daily I go a different path.
Sometimes into the green wood, sometimes to the bath in the spring;
Or to the rocks where the roses bloom.
From the top of the hill I look over the land,
Yet nowhere, thou lovely one, nowhere in the light do I find thee;
And in the breezes my words die away,
The sacred words which once we had.
“Aye, thou art far away, O holy countenance!
And the melody of thy life is kept from me,
No longer overheard. And, ah, where are
Thy magic songs which once soothed my heart
With the peace of Heaven?
How long it is, how long!
The youth is aged; the very earth itself, which once smiled on me,
Has grown different.
“Oh, farewell! The soul of every day departs, and, departing, turns to
thee—
And over thee there weeps
The eye that, becoming brighter,
Looks down,
There where thou tarriest.”
This distinctly suggests a renunciation, an envy of one’s own youth,
that time of freedom which one would like to retain through a
deep-rooted dislike to all duty and endeavor which is denied an
immediate pleasure reward. Painstaking work for a long time and for a
remote object is not in the nature of child or primitive man. It is
difficult to say if this can really be called laziness, but it seems to
have not a little in common with it, in so far as the psychic life on a
primitive stage, be it of an infantile or archaic type, possesses an
extreme inertia and irresponsibility in production and non-production.
The last stanza portends evil, a gazing towards the other land, the
distant coast of sunrise or sunset; love no longer holds the poet, the
bonds with the world are torn and he calls loudly for assistance to the
mother:
_Achilles._
“Lordly son of the Gods! Because you lost your loved one,
You went to the rocky coast and cried aloud to the flood,
Till the depths of the holy abyss heard and echoed your grief,
From the far reaches of your heart. Down, deep down, far from the clamor
of ships,
Deep under the waves, in a peaceful cave,
Dwelt the beautiful Thetis, she who protected you, the Goddess of the
Sea,
Mother of the youth was she; the powerful Goddess,
She who once had lovingly nursed him,
On the rocky shore of his island; she who had made him a hero
With the might of her strengthening bath and the powerful song of the
waves.
And the mother, mourning, hearkened to the cry of her child,
And rose, like a cloud, from the bed of the sea,
Soothing with tender embraces the pains of her darling;
And he listened, while she, caressing, promised to soften his grief.
“Son of the Gods! Oh, were I like you, then could I confidently
Call on the Heavenly Ones to hearken to my secret grief.
But never shall I see this—I shall bear the disgrace
As if I never belonged to her, even though she thinks of me with tears.
Beneficent Ones! And yet Ye hear the lightest prayers of men.
Ah, how rapt and fervently I worshipped you, holy Light,
Since I have lived, the Earth and its fountains and woodlands,
Father Ether—and my heart has felt you about me, so ardent and pure—
Oh, soften my sorrows, ye Kind Ones,
That my soul may not be silenced, may not be struck dumb too early;
That I may live and thank Ye, O Heavenly Powers,
With joyful songs through all the hurrying days.
Thank ye for gifts of the past, for the joys of vanished Youth—
And then, pray, take me, the lonely one,
Graciously, unto yourselves.”
These poems describe more plainly than could be depicted with meagre
words the persistent arrest and the constantly growing estrangement from
life, the gradual deep immersion into the maternal abyss of the
individual being. The apocalyptic song of Patmos is strangely related to
these songs of retrogressive longing. It enters as a dismal guest
surrounded by the mist of the depths, the gathering clouds of insanity,
bred through the mother. In it the primitive thoughts of the myth, the
suggestion clad in symbols, of the sun-like death and resurrection of
life, again burst forth. Similar things are to be found in abundance
among sick people of this sort.
I reproduce some significant fragments from Patmos:
“Near is the God
And hard to comprehend,
But where Danger threatens
The Rescuer appears.”
These words mean that the libido has now sunk to the lowest depths,
where “the danger is great.” (Faust, Part II, Mother scene.) There “the
God is near”; there man may find the inner sun, his own nature, sun-like
and self-renewing, hidden in the mother-womb like the sun in the
nighttime:
“... In Chasms
And in darkness dwell
The eagles; and fresh and fearlessly
The Sons of the Alps pass swiftly over the abyss
Upon lightly swinging bridges.”
With these words the dark phantastic poem passes on. The eagle, the bird
of the sun, dwells in darkness—the libido has hidden itself, but high
above it the inhabitants of the mountains pass, probably the gods (“Ye
are walking above in the light”), symbols of the sun wandering across
the sky, like the eagle flying over the depths:
“... Above and around are reared
The summits of Time,
And the loved ones, though near,
Live on deeply separated mountains.
So give us waters of innocence,
And give us wings of true understanding,
With which to pass across and to return again.”
The first is a gloomy picture of the mountains and of time—although
caused by the sun wandering over the mountains, the following picture a
nearness, and at the same time separation, of the lovers, and seems to
hint at life in the underworld,[796] where he is united with all that
once was dear to him, and yet cannot enjoy the happiness of reunion,
because it is all shadows and unreal and devoid of life. Here the one
who descends drinks the waters of innocence, the waters of childhood,
the drink of rejuvenation,[797] so wings may grow, and, winged, he may
soar up again into life, like the winged sun, which arises like a swan
from the water (“Wings, to pass across and to return again”):
“... So I spoke, and lo, a genie
Carried me off, swifter than I had imagined,
And farther than ever I had thought
From my own house!
It grew dark
As I went in the twilight.
The shadowy wood,
And the yearning brooks of my home-land
Grew vague behind me—
And I knew the country no longer.”
After the dark and obscure words of the introduction, wherein the poet
expresses the prophecy of what is to come, the sun journey begins
(“night journey in the sea”) towards the east, towards the ascent,
towards the mystery of eternity and rebirth, of which Nietzsche also
dreams, and which he expressed in significant words:
“Oh, how could I not be ardent for eternity, and for the nuptial ring
of rings—the ring of the return! Never yet have I found the woman from
whom I wish children, unless she would be this woman whom I love; for
I love thee, O eternity.”
Hölderlin expresses this same longing in a beautiful symbol, the
individual traits of which are already familiar to us:
“... But soon in a fresh radiance
Mysteriously
Blossoming in golden smoke,
With the rapidly growing steps of the sun,
Making a thousand summits fragrant,
Asia arose!
And, dazzled,
I sought one whom I knew;
For unfamiliar to me were the broad roads,
Where from Tmolus
Comes the gilded Pactol,
And Taurus stands and Messagis—
And the gardens are full of flowers.
But high up in the light
The silvery snow gleams, a silent fire;
And, as a symbol of eternal life,
On the impassable walls,
Grows the ancient ivy.[798]
And carried by columns of living cedars and laurels
Are the solemn, divinely built palaces.”
The symbol is apocalyptic, the maternal city in the land of eternal
youth, surrounded by the verdure and flowers of imperishable
spring.[799] The poet identifies himself here with John, who lived on
Patmos, who was once associated with “the sun of the Highest,” and saw
him face to face:
“There at the Mystery of the Vine they met,
There at the hour of the Holy Feast they gathered,
And—feeling the approach of Death in his great, quiet soul,
The Lord, pouring out his last love, spoke,
And then he died.
Much could be said of it—
How his triumphant glance,
The happiest of all,
Was seen by his companions, even at the last.
· · · · ·
Therefore he sent the Spirit unto them,
And the house trembled, solemnly;
And, with distant thunder,
The storm of God rolled over the cowering heads
Where, deep in thought,
The heroes of death were assembled....
Now, when he, in parting,
Appeared once more before them,
Then the kingly day, the day of the sun, was put out,
And the gleaming sceptre, formed of his rays,
Was broken—and suffered like a god itself.
Yet it shall return and glow again
When the right time comes.”
The fundamental pictures are the sacrificial death and the resurrection
of Christ, like the self-sacrifice of the sun, which voluntarily breaks
its sceptre, the fructifying rays, in the certain hope of resurrection.
The following comments are to be noted in regard to “the sceptre of
rays”: Spielrein’s patient says, “God pierces through the earth with his
rays.” The earth, in the patient’s mind, has the meaning of woman. She
also comprehends the sunbeam in mythologic fashion as something solid:
“Jesus Christ has shown me his love, by striking against the window with
a sunbeam.” Among other insane patients I have come across the same idea
of the solid substance of the sunbeam. Here there is also a hint of the
phallic nature of the instrument which is associated with the hero.
Thor’s hammer, which, cleaving the earth, penetrates deeply into it, may
be compared to the foot of Kaineus. The hammer is retained in the
interior of the earth, like the treasure, and, in the course of time, it
gradually comes again to the surface (“the treasure blooms”), meaning
that it was born again from the earth. (Compare what has been said
concerning the etymology of “swelling.”) On many monuments Mithra holds
a peculiar object in his hands, which Cumont compares to a half-filled
tube. Dieterich proves from his papyrus text that the object is the
shoulder of the bull, the bear constellation. The shoulder has an
indirect phallic meaning, for it is the part which is wanting in Pelops.
Pelops was slaughtered by his father, Tantalus, dismembered, and boiled
in a kettle, to make a meal for the gods. Demeter had unsuspectingly
eaten the shoulder from this feast, when Zeus discovered the outrage. He
had the pieces thrown back into the kettle, and, with the help of the
life-dispensing Clotho, Pelops was regenerated, and the shoulder which
was missing was replaced by an ivory one. This substitution is a close
parallel to the substitution of the missing phallus of Osiris. Mithra is
represented in a special ceremony, holding the bull’s shoulder over Sol,
his son and vice-regent. This scene may be compared to a sort of
dedication, or accolade (something like the ceremony of confirmation).
The blow of the hammer as a generating, fructifying, inspiring function
is retained as a folk-custom and expressed by striking with the twig of
life, which has the significance of a charm of fertility. In the
neuroses, the sexual meaning of castigation plays an important part, for
among many children castigation may elicit a sexual orgasm. The ritual
act of striking has the same significance of generating (fructifying),
and is, indeed, merely a variant of the original phallic ceremonial. Of
similar character to the bull’s shoulder is the cloven hoof of the
devil, to which a sexual meaning also appertains. The ass’s jawbone
wielded by Samson has the same worth. In the Polynesian Maui myth the
jawbone, the weapon of the hero, is derived from the man-eating woman,
Muriranga-whenua, whose body swells up enormously from lusting for human
flesh (Frobenius). Hercules’ club is made from the wood of the maternal
olive tree. Faust’s key also “knows the mothers.” The libido springs
from the mother, and with this weapon alone can man overcome death.
It corresponds to the phallic nature of the ass’s jawbone, that at the
place where Samson threw it God caused a spring to gush forth[800]
(springs from the horse’s tread, footsteps, horse’s hoof). To this
relation of meanings belongs the magic wand, the sceptre in general.
Σκῆτρον belongs to σκᾶπος, σκηπάνων, σκήπων = staff; σκηπτός =
stormwind; Latin _scapus_ = shaft, stock, scapula, shoulder; Old High
German _Scaft_ = spear, lance.[801] We meet once more in this
compilation those connections which are already well known to us:
Sun-phallus as tube of the winds, lance and shoulder-blade.
The passage from Asia through Patmos to the Christian mysteries in the
poem of Hölderlin is apparently a superficial connection, but in reality
a very ingenious train of thought; namely, the entrance into death and
the land beyond as a self-sacrifice of the hero, for the attainment of
immortality. At this time, when the sun has set, when love is apparently
dead, man awaits in mysterious joy the renewal of all life:
“... And Joy it was
From now on
To live in the loving night and see
The eyes of innocence hold the unchanging
Depths of all wisdom.”
Wisdom dwells in the depths, the wisdom of the mother: being one with
it, insight is obtained into the meaning of deeper things, into all the
deposits of primitive times, the strata of which have been preserved in
the soul. Hölderlin, in his diseased ecstasy, feels once more the
greatness of the things seen, but he does not care to bring up to the
light of day that which he had found in the depths—in this he differs
from Faust.
“And it is not an evil, if a few
Are lost and never found, and if the speech
Conceals the living sound;
Because each godly work resembles ours;
And yet the Highest does not plan it all—
The great pit bears two irons,
And the glowing lava of Aetna....
Would I had the power
To build an image and see the Spirit—
See it as it was!”
He allows only one hope to glimmer through, formed in scanty words:
“He wakes the dead;
They who are not enchained and bound,
They who are not unwrought.
... And if the Heavenly Ones
Now, as I believe, love me—
... Silent is his sign[802]
In the dusky sky. And one stands under it
His whole life long—for Christ still lives.”
But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the west land,
was robbed of his treasure by the demon serpent, so does Hölderlin’s
poem die away in a painful lament, which betrays to us that no
victorious resurrection will follow his descent to the shadows:
“... Ignominiously
A power tears our heart away,
For sacrifices the heavenly ones demand.”
This recognition, that man must sacrifice the retrogressive longing (the
incestuous libido) before the “heavenly ones” tear away the sacrifice,
and at the same time the entire libido, came too late to the poet.
Therefore, I take it to be a wise counsel which the unconscious gives
our author, to sacrifice the infantile hero. This sacrifice is best
accomplished, as is shown by the most obvious meaning, through a
complete devotion to life, in which all the libido unconsciously bound
up in familial bonds, must be brought outside into human contact. For it
is necessary for the well-being of the adult individual, who in his
childhood was merely an atom revolving in a rotary system, to become
himself the centre of a new system. That such a step implies the
solution or, at least, the energetic treatment of the individual sexual
problem is obvious, for unless this is done the unemployed libido will
inexorably remain fixed in the incestuous bond, and will prevent
individual freedom in essential matters. Let us keep in mind that
Christ’s teaching separates man from his family without consideration,
and in the talk with Nicodemus we saw the specific endeavor of Christ to
procure activation of the incest libido. Both tendencies serve the same
goal—the liberation of man; the Jew from his extraordinary fixation to
the family, which does not imply higher development, but greater
weakness and more uncontrolled incestuous feeling, produced the
compensation of the compulsory ceremonial of the cult and the religious
fear of the incomprehensible Jehovah. When man, terrified by no laws and
no furious fanatics or prophets, allows his incestuous libido full play,
and does not liberate it for higher purposes, then he is under the
influence of unconscious compulsion. For compulsion is the unconscious
wish. (Freud.) He is under the dominance of the libido εἱμαρμένη[803]
and his destiny does not lie in his own hands; his adventures, Τύχαι καὶ
Μοῖραι,[804] fall from the stars. His unconscious incestuous libido,
which thus is applied in its most primitive form, fixes the man, as
regards his love type, in a corresponding primitive stage, the stage of
ungovernableness and surrender to the emotions. Such was the psychologic
situation of the passing antiquity, and the Redeemer and Physician of
that time was he who endeavored to educate man to the sublimation of the
incestuous libido.[805] The destruction of slavery was the necessary
condition of that sublimation, for antiquity had not yet recognized the
duty of work and work as a duty, as a social need of fundamental
importance. Slave labor was compulsory work, the counterpart of the
equally disastrous compulsion of the libido of the privileged. It was
only the obligation of the individual to work which made possible in the
long run that regular “drainage” of the unconscious, which was inundated
by the continual regression of the libido. Indolence is the beginning of
all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has
abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create
compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous
bonds. The best liberation is through _regular work_.[806] Work,
however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself
nothing of infantile compulsion. In this respect, religious ceremony
appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time
as the forerunner of modern work.
Miss Miller’s vision treats the problem of the sacrifice of the
infantile longing, in the first place, as an individual problem, but if
we cast a glance at the form of this presentation, then we will become
aware that here it must concern something, which is also a problem of
humanity in general. For the symbols employed, the serpent which killed
the horse[807] and the hero voluntarily sacrificing himself, are
primitive figures of phantasies and religious myths streaming up from
the unconscious.
In so far as the world and all within it is, above all, a thought, which
is credited with transcendental “substance” through the empirical need
of the same, there results from the sacrifice of the regressive libido
the creation of the world; and, psychologically speaking, the world in
general. For him who looks backward the world, and even the infinite
starry sky, is the mother[808] who bends over and encloses him on all
sides, and from the renunciation of this idea and from the longing for
this idea arises the image of the world. From this most simple
fundamental thought, which perhaps appears strange to us only because it
is conceived according to the _principle of desire and not the principle
of reality_,[809] results the significance of the cosmic sacrifice. A
good example of this is the slaying of the Babylonian primitive mother
Tiâmat, the dragon, whose body is destined to form the heaven and the
earth. We come upon this thought in its most complete form in Hindoo
philosophy of the most ancient date; namely, in songs of Rigveda. In
Rigveda 10: 81, 4, the song inquires:
“What was the tree, what wood in sooth produced it, from which they
fashioned out the earth and heaven?
Ye thoughtful men inquire within your spirit, whereon he stood when he
established all things.”
Viçvakarman, the All-Creator, who created the world from the unknown
tree, did so as follows:
“He who, sacrificing, entered into all these beings
As a wise sacrificer, our Father, who,
Striving for blessings through prayer,
Hiding his origin,
Entered this lowly world,
What and who has served him
As a resting-place and a support?”[810]
Rigveda 10: 90, gives answer to these questions. Purusha is the primal
being who
“... covered earth on every side and
Spread ten fingers’ breadth beyond.”
One sees that Purusha is a sort of Platonic world soul, who surrounds
the world from without. Of Purusha it is said:
“Being born he overtopped the earth
Before, behind, and in all places.”
The mother symbolism is plain, it seems to me, in the idea of Purusha.
He represents the mother-imago and the libido of the child clinging to
her. From this assumption all that follows is very easily explained:
“As sacrificial animal on the bed of straw
Was dedicated the Purusha,
Who was born on the straw,
Whom the Gods, the Blest, and the Wise,
Meeting there, sacrificed.”
This verse is very remarkable; if one wishes to stretch this mythology
out on the procrustean bed of logic, sore violence would have to be
committed. It is an incredibly phantastic conception that, beside the
gods, ordinary “wise men” unite in sacrificing the primitive being,
aside from the circumstance that, beside the primitive being, nothing
had existed in the beginning (that is to say, before the sacrifice), as
we shall soon see. If the great mystery of the mother sacrifice is meant
thereby, then all becomes clear:
“From that great general sacrifice
The dripping fat was gathered up.
He formed the creatures of the air,
And animals both wild and tame.
From that great general sacrifice
Richas and Sama-hymns were born;
Therefrom the metres were produced,
The Yajus had its birth from it.
“The moon was gendered from his mind
And from his eye the Sun had birth;
Indra and Agni from his mouth
Were born, and Vâyu from his breath.
“Forth from his navel came midair;
The sky was fashioned from his head;
Earth from his feet, and from his ears
The regions. Thus they formed the worlds.”
It is evident that by this is meant not a physical, but a psychological
cosmogony. The world arises when man discovers it. He discovers it when
he sacrifices the mother; that is to say, when he has freed himself from
the midst of his unconscious lying in the mother. That which impels him
forward to this discovery may be interpreted psychologically as the
so-called “Incest barrier” of Freud. The incest prohibition places an
end to the childish longing for the food-giving mother, and compels the
libido, gradually becoming sexual, into the path of the biological aim.
The libido forced away from the mother by the incest prohibition seeks
for the sexual object in the place of the forbidden mother. In this
wider psychologic sense, which expresses itself in the allegoric
language of the “incest prohibition,” “mother,” etc., must be understood
Freud’s paradoxical sentence, “Originally we have known only sexual
objects.”[811] This sentence must be understood psychologically
throughout, in the sense of a world image created from within outwards,
which has, in the first place, nothing to do with the so-called
“objective” idea of the world. This is to be understood as a new edition
of the subjective idea of the world corrected by reality. Biology, as a
science of objective experience, would have to reject unconditionally
Freud’s proposition, for, as we have made clear above, the function of
reality can only be partly sexual; in another equally important part it
is self-preservation. The matter appears different for that thought
which accompanies the biological function as an epiphenomenon. As far as
our knowledge reaches, the individual act of thought is dependent wholly
or in greatest part on the existence of a highly differentiated brain,
whereas the function of reality (adaptation to reality) is something
which occurs in all living nature as wholly independent from the act of
thought. This important proposition of Freud’s applies only to the act
of thought, for thinking, as we may recognize from manifold traces,
arose dynamically from the libido, which was split off from the original
object at the “incest barrier” and became actual when the first budding
sexual emotions began to flow in the current of the libido which goes to
the mother. Through the incest barrier the sexual libido is forced away
from the identification with the parents, and introverted for lack of
adequate activity. It is the sexual libido which forces the growing
individual slowly away from his family. If this necessity did not exist,
then the family would always remain clustered together in a solid group.
Hence the neurotic always renounces a complete erotic experience,[812]
in order that he may remain a child. Phantasies seem to arise from the
introversion of the sexual libido. Since the first childish phantasies
most certainly do not attain the quality of a conscious plan, and as
phantasies likewise (even among adults) are almost always the direct
derivates of the unconscious, it is, therefore, highly probable that the
first phantastic manifestations arise from an act of regression. As we
illustrated earlier, the regression goes back to the presexual stage, as
many traces show. Here the sexual libido obtains again, so to speak,
that universal capacity of application, or capacity for displacement,
which it actually possessed at that stage when the sexual application
was not yet discovered. Naturally, no adequate object is found in the
presexual stage for the regressive sexual libido, but only surrogates,
which always leave a wish; namely, the wish to have the surrogate as
similar as possible to the sexual goal. This wish is secret, however,
for it is really an incest wish. The unsatisfied unconscious wish
creates innumerable secondary objects, symbols for the primitive object,
the mother (as the Rigveda says, the creator of the world, “hiding his
origin,” enters into things). From this the thought or the phantasies
proceed, as a desexualized manifestation of _an originally sexual
libido_.
From the standpoint of the libido, the term “incest barrier” corresponds
to one aspect, but the matter, however, may be considered from another
point of view.
The time of undeveloped sexuality, about the third and the fourth year,
is, at the same time, considered externally, the period when the child
finds himself confronted with increased demands from the world of
reality. He can walk, speak and independently attend to a number of
other things. He sees himself in a relation to a world of unlimited
possibilities, but in which he dares to do little or nothing, because he
is as yet too much of a baby and cannot get on without his mother. At
this time mother should be exchanged for the world. Against this the
past rises as the greatest resistance; this is always so whenever man
would undertake a new adaptation. In spite of all evidence and against
all conscious resolutions, the unconscious (the past) always enforces
its standpoint as resistance. In this difficult position, precisely at
this period of developing sexuality, we see the dawning of the mind. The
problem of the child at this period is the discovery of the world and of
the great transsubjective reality. For that he must lose the mother;
every step out into the world means a step away from the mother.
Naturally, all that which is retrogressive in men rebels against this
step, and energetic attempts are made against this adaptation in the
first place. Therefore, this period of life is also that in which the
first clearly developed neuroses arise. The tendency of this age is one
directly opposed to that of dementia præcox. The child seeks to win the
world and to leave the mother (this is a necessary result). The dementia
præcox patient, however, seeks to leave the world and to regain the
subjectivity of childhood. We have seen that in dementia præcox the
recent adaptation to reality is replaced by an archaic mode of
adaptation; that is to say, the recent idea of the world is rejected in
favor of an archaic idea of the world. When the child renounces his task
of adaptation to reality, or has considerable difficulties in this
direction, then we may expect that the recent adaptation will again be
replaced by archaic modes of adaptation. It would, therefore, be
conceivable that through regression in children archaic products would
naturally be unearthed; that is to say, old ways of functioning of the
thought system, which is inborn with the brain differentiation, would be
awakened.
According to my available but as yet unpublished material, a remarkably
archaic and at the same time generally applicable character seems to
appertain to infantile phantasy, quite comparable with the products of
dementia præcox. It does not seem improbable that through regression at
this age those same associations of elements and analogies are
reawakened which formerly constituted the archaic idea of the world.
When we now attempt to investigate the nature of these elements, a
glance at the psychology of myths is sufficient to show us that the
archaic idea was chiefly sexual anthropomorphism. It appears that these
things in the unconscious childish phantasy play an extraordinary rôle,
as we can recognize from examples taken at random. Just as the sexualism
of neuroses is not to be taken literally but as regressive phantasy and
symbolic compensation for a recent unachieved adaptation, so is the
sexualism of the early infantile phantasy, especially the incest
problem, a regressive product of the revival of the archaic modes of
function, outweighing actuality. On this account I have expressed myself
very vaguely in this work, I am sure, in regard to the incest problem.
This is done in order not to be responsible for the idea that I
understand by it a gross sexual inclination towards the parents. The
true facts of the case are much more complicated, as my investigations
point out. Originally incest probably never possessed particularly great
significance as such, because cohabitation with an old woman for all
possible motives could hardly be preferred to mating with a young woman.
It seems that the mother has acquired incestuous significance only
psychologically. Thus, for example, the incestuous unions of antiquity
were not a result of a love inclination, but of a special superstition,
which is most intimately bound up with the mythical ideas here treated.
A Pharaoh of the second dynasty is said to have married his sister, his
daughter and his granddaughter; the Ptolemies were accustomed also to
marriage with sisters; Kambyses married his sister; Artaxerxes married
his two daughters; Qobad I (sixth century A. D.) married his daughter.
The Satrap Sysimithres married his mother. These incestuous unions are
explained by the circumstance that in the Zend Avesta the marriage of
relatives was directly commanded;[813] it emphasized the resemblance of
rulers to the divinity, and, therefore, was more of an artificial than a
natural arrangement, because it originated more from a theoretical than
from a biological inclination. (A practical impetus towards that lay
often in the peculiar laws of inheritance left over from the _Mutter
recht_, “maternal right” [matriarchal], period.) The confusion which
certainly frequently involved the barbarians of antiquity in regard to
the choice of their sexual objects cannot very well be measured by the
standard of present-day love psychology. In any case, the incest of the
semi-animal past is in no way proportionate to the enormous significance
of the incest phantasy among civilized people. This disproportion
enforces the assumption that the incest prohibition which we meet even
amongst relatively lower races concerns rather the mythical ideas than
the biological damage; therefore, the ethnical prohibition almost always
concerns the mother and seldom the father. Incest prohibition can be
understood, therefore, as a result of regression, and as the result of a
libidinous anxiety, which regressively attacks the mother. Naturally, it
is difficult or impossible to say from whence this anxiety may have
come. I merely venture to suggest that it may have been a question of a
primitive separation of the pairs of opposites which are hidden in the
will of life: the will for life and for death. It remains obscure what
adaptation the primitive man tried to evade through introversion and
regression to the parents; but, according to the analogy of the soul
life in general, it may be assumed that the libido, which disturbed the
initial equilibrium of becoming and of ceasing to be, had been stored up
in the attempt to make an especially difficult adaptation, and from
which it recedes even to-day.
After this long digression, let us turn back to the song of the Rigveda.
Thinking and a conception of the world arose from a shrinking back from
stern reality, and it is only after man has regressively assured himself
again of the protective parental power[814] that he enters life wrapped
in a dream of childhood shrouded in magic superstitions; that is to say,
“thinking,”[815] for he, timidly sacrificing his best and assuring
himself of the favor of the invisible powers, step by step develops to
greater power, in the degree that he frees himself from his
retrogressive longing and the original lack of harmony in his being.
Rigveda 10, 90, concludes with the exceedingly significant verse, which
is of greatest importance for the Christian mysteries as well:
“Gods, sacrificing, rendered homage to the sacrifice: these were the
earliest holy ordinances,
The mighty ones attained the height of heaven, there where the Sâdhyas,
goddesses of old, are dwelling.”
Through the sacrifice a fulness of power was attained, which extends up
to the power of the “parents.” Thus the sacrifice has also the meaning
of a psychologic maturation process.
In the same manner that the world originated through sacrifice, through
the renunciation of the retrospective mother libido, thus, according to
the teachings of the Upanishads, is produced the new condition of man,
which may be termed the immortal. This new condition is again attained
through a sacrifice; namely, through the sacrificial horse which is
given a cosmic significance in the teaching of the Upanishads. What the
sacrificial horse means is told by Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad 1: 1:
“_Om!_
“1. The dawn is truly the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun his
eye, the wind his breath, his mouth the all-spreading fire, the year
is the body of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back, the
atmosphere his body cavity, the earth the vault of his belly, the
poles are his sides, the space between the poles his ribs, the seasons
his limbs, the months and half-months his joints, day and night his
feet, the stars his bones, the clouds his flesh, the food, which he
digests, are the deserts; the rivers, his veins; liver and lungs, the
mountains; the herbs and trees, his hair; the rising sun is his
forepart, the setting sun his hind-part. When he shows his teeth, that
is lightning; when he trembles, that is thunder; when he urinates,
that is rain; his voice is speech.
“2. The day, in truth, has originated for the horse as the sacrificial
dish, which stands before him; his cradle is in the world-sea towards
the East; the night has originated for him as the sacrificial dish,
which stands behind him; its cradle is in the world-sea of the
evening; these two dishes originated in order to surround the horse.
As a charger he generated the gods, as champion he produced the
Gandharvas, as a racer the demons, as horse mankind. The Ocean is his
relative, the ocean his cradle.”
As Deussen remarks, the sacrificial horse has the significance of a
_renunciation of the universe_. When the horse is sacrificed, then the
world is sacrificed and destroyed, as it were—a train of thought which
Schopenhauer also had in mind, and which appears as a product of a
diseased mind in Schreber.[816] The horse in the above text stands
between two sacrificial vessels, from one of which it comes and to the
other of which it goes, just as the sun passes from morning to evening.
The horse, therefore, signifies the libido, which has passed into the
world. We previously saw that the “mother libido” must be sacrificed in
order to produce the world; here the world is destroyed by the repeated
sacrifice of the same libido, which once belonged to the mother. The
horse can, therefore, be substituted as a symbol for this libido,
because, as we saw, it had manifold connections with the mother.[817]
The sacrifice of the horse can only produce another state of
introversion, which is similar to that before the creation of the world.
The position of the horse between the two vessels, which represent the
producing and the devouring mother, hint at the idea of life enclosed in
the ovum; therefore, the vessels are destined to “surround” the horse.
That this is actually so the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad 3: 3 proves:
“1. From where have the descendants of Parikshit come, that I ask
thee, Yâjñavalkya! From where came the descendants of Parikshit?
“2. Yâjñavalkya spake: ‘He has told thee, they have come from where
all come, who offer up the sacrificial horse. That is to say, this
world extends so far as two and thirty days of the chariot of the Gods
(the sun) reach. This (world) surrounds the earth twice around. This
earth surrounds the ocean twice around. There is, as broad as the edge
of a razor or as the wing of a fly, a space between (the two shells of
the egg of the world). These were brought by Indra as a falcon to the
wind: and the wind took them up into itself and carried them where
were the offerers of the sacrificial horse. Somewhat like this he
spoke (Gandharva to thee) and praised the wind.’
“Therefore is the wind the special (vyashti) and the wind the
universal (samashti). He, who knows this, defends himself from dying
again.”
As this text tells us, the offerers of the sacrificial horse come in
that _narrowest fissure_ between the shells of the egg of the world, at
that place, where the shells _unite and where they are divided_. The
fissure (_vagina_) in the maternal world soul is designated by Plato in
“Timaeus” by Χ, the symbol of the cross. Indra, who as a falcon has
stolen the soma (the treasure attainable with difficulty), brings, as
Psychopompos, the souls to the wind, to the generating pneuma, which
carries them forward to the fissure or vagina, to the point of union, to
the entrance into the maternal egg. This train of thought of the Hindoo
philosophy briefly and concisely summarizes the sense of innumerable
myths; at the same time it is a striking example of the fact that
philosophy is internally nothing else but a refined and sublimated
mythology. It is brought to this refined state by the influence of the
corrector of reality.[818] We have emphasized the fact that in the
Miller drama the horse is the first to die, as the animal brother of the
hero. (Corresponding to the early death of the half-animal Eabani, the
brother friend of Gilgamesh.) This sacrificial death recalls the whole
category of mythological animal sacrifices. Volumes could be filled with
parallels, but we must limit ourselves here to suggestions. The
sacrificial animal, where it has lost the primitive meaning of the
simple sacrificial gift, and has taken a higher religious significance,
stands in a close relation to both the hero and the divinity. The animal
represents the god himself;[819] thus the bull[820] represents Zagreus,
Dionysus and Mithra; the lamb represents Christ,[821] etc. As we are
aware, the animal symbols represent the animal libido. The sacrifice of
the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature. This is
most clearly expressed in the religious legend of Attis. Attis is the
son lover of the divine mother, Agdistis Cybele. Agdistis was
characteristically androgynous,[822] as symbol of the mother-libido,
like the tree; really a clear indication that the mother-imago has in
addition to the significance of the likeness of the real mother the
meaning of the mother of humanity, the libido in general. Driven mad by
the insanity-breeding mother enamored of him, he emasculates himself,
and that under a pine tree. (The pine tree plays an important rôle in
his service. Every year a pine tree was wreathed about and upon it an
image of Attis was hung, and then it was cut down, which represents the
castration.) The blood, which spurted to the earth, was transformed into
budding violets. Cybele now took this pine tree, bore it into her cavern
and there wept over it. (Pietà.) The chthonic mother takes her son with
her into the cavern—namely, into the womb—according to another version.
Attis was transformed into the pine tree. The tree here has an
essentially phallic meaning; on the contrary, the attaching of the image
of Attis to the tree refers also to the maternal meaning. (“To be
attached to the mother.”) In Ovid (“Metamorphoses,” Book X) the pine
tree is spoken of as follows:
“Grata deum matri, siquidem Cybeleius Attis
Exuit hac hominem, truncoque induruit illo.”[823]
The transformation into the pine tree is evidently a burial in the
mother, just as Osiris was overgrown by the heather. Upon the Attis
bas-relief of Coblenz Attis appears _growing out of a tree_, which is
interpreted by Mannhardt as the “life-principle” of vegetation inherent
in the tree. It is probably a tree birth, just as with Mithra. (Relief
of Heddernheim.) As Firmicus observes, in the Isis and Osiris cult and
also in the cult of the virgin Persephone, tree and image had played a
rôle.[824] Dionysus had the surname Dendrites, and in Boeotia he is said
to have been called ἔνδενδρος, meaning “in a tree.” (At the birth of
Dionysus, Megaira planted the pine tree on the Kithairon.) The Pentheus
myth bound up with the Dionysus legend furnishes the remarkable and
supplementary counterpart to the death of Attis, and the subsequent
lamentation. Pentheus,[825] curious to espy the orgies of the Maenades,
_climbed upon a pine tree_, but he was observed by his mother; the
Maenades cut down the tree, and Pentheus, taken for an animal, was torn
by them in frenzy,[826] his own mother being the first to rush upon him.
In this myth the phallic meaning of the tree (cutting down, castration)
and its maternal significance (mounting and the sacrificial death of the
son) is present; at the same time the supplementary counterpart to the
Pietà is apparent, the “terrible mother.” The feast of Attis was
celebrated as a lamentation and then as a joy in the spring. (Good
Friday and Easter.) The priests of Attis-Cybele worship were often
eunuchs, and were called Galloi.[827] The archigallus was called Atys
(Attis).[828] Instead of the animal castration, the priests merely
scratched their arms until they bled. (Arm in place of phallus, “the
twisting of arms.”) A similar symbolism of the sacrificial impulse is
met in the Mithraic religion, where essential parts of the mysteries
consist in the catching and the subduing of the bull.
A parallel figure to Mithra is the primitive man Gayomard. He was
created together with his bull, and the two lived for six thousand years
in a blissful state. But when the world came into the cycle of the
seventh sign of the Zodiac (Libra) the evil principle entered. Libra is
astrologically the so-called positive domicile of Venus; the evil
principle, therefore, came under the dominion of the goddess of love
(destruction of the sun-hero through the mother-wife—snake, whore, etc).
As a result, after thirty years, Gayomard and his bull died. (The trials
of Zartusht lasted also thirty years; compare the span of Christ’s
life.) Fifty-five species of grain came from the dead bull, twelve kinds
of salubrious plants, etc. The sperma of the bull entered into the moon
for purification, but the sperma of Gayomard entered into the sun. This
circumstance possibly suggests a rather feminine meaning of bull. Gosh
or Drvâçpa is the soul of the bull, and was worshipped as a female
divinity. She would not, at first, from diffidence, become the goddess
of the herds, until the coming of Zarathustra was announced to her as
consolation. This has its parallel in the Hindoo Purâna, where the
coming of Krishna was promised the earth. (A complete analogy to
Christ.[829]) She, too, travels in her chariot, like Ardvîçûra, the
goddess of love. The soul of the bull is, therefore, decidedly feminine.
This myth of Gayomard repeats only in an altered form the primitive
conception of the closed ring of a male-female divinity, self-begetting
and forth-bringing.
Like the sacrificial bull, the fire, the sacrifice of which we have
already discussed in Chapter III, has a feminine nature among the
Chinese, according to the commentaries[830] of the philosopher
Tschwang-Tse:
“The spirit of the hearth is called Ki. He is clad in bright red,
which resembles fire, and appears as a lovely, attractive maiden.”
In the “Book of Rites” it is said:
“Wood is burned in the flames for the spirit of Au. This sacrifice to
Au is a sacrifice to old departed women.”
These spirits of the hearth and fire are the souls of departed cooks
and, therefore, are called “old women.” The kitchen god develops from
this pre-Buddhistic tradition and becomes later (male sex) the ruler of
the family and the _mediator between family and god_. Thus the old
feminine fire spirit becomes a species of Logos. (Compare with this the
remarks in Chapter III.)
From the bull’s sperma the progenitors of the cattle came, as well as
two hundred and seventy-two species of useful animals. According to
Mînôkhired, Gayomard had destroyed the Dév Azûr, who was considered the
demon of evil appetites.[831] In spite of the efforts of Zarathustra,
this demon remained longest on the earth. He was destroyed at last at
the resurrection, like Satan in the Apocalypse of John. In another
version it is said that Angromainyus and the serpent were left until the
last, so as to be destroyed by Ahuramazda himself. According to a
surmise by Kern, Zarathustra may mean “golden-star” and be identical
with Mithra. Mithra’s name is connected with neo-Persian _Mihr_, which
means “sun and love.”
In Zagreus we see that the bull is also identical with the god; hence
the bull sacrifice is a god sacrifice, but on a primitive stage. The
animal symbol is, so to speak, only a part of the hero; he sacrifices
only his animal; therefore, symbolically, renounces only his animal
nature. The internal participation in the sacrifice[832] is expressed
excellently in the anguished ecstatic countenance of the bull-slaying
Mithra. He does it willingly and unwillingly[833] hence the somewhat
hysterical expression which has some similarity to the well-known
mawkish countenance of the Crucified of Guido Reni. Benndorf says:[834]
“The features, which, especially in the upper portion, bear an
absolutely ideal character, have an extremely morbid expression.”
Cumont[835] himself says of the facial expression of the Tauroctonos:
“The countenance, which may be seen in the best reproductions, is that
of a young man of an almost feminine beauty; the head has a quantity
of curly hair, which, rising up from the forehead, surrounds him as
with a halo; the head is slightly tilted backwards, so that the glance
is directed towards the heavens, and the contraction of the brows and
the lips give a strange expression of sorrow to the face.”[836]
The Ostian head of Mithra Tauroctonos, illustrated in Cumont, has,
indeed, an expression which we recognize in our patients as one of
sentimental resignation. _Sentimentality is repressed brutality._ Hence
the exceedingly sentimental pose, which had its counterpart in the
symbolism of the shepherd and the lamb of contemporaneous Christianity,
with the addition of infantilism.[837]
Meanwhile, it is only his animal nature which the god sacrifices; that
is to say, his sexuality,[838] always in close analogy to the course of
the sun. We have learned in the course of this investigation that the
part of the libido which erects religious structures is in the last
analysis fixed in the mother, and really represents that tie through
which we are permanently connected with our origin. Briefly, we may
designate this amount of libido as “Mother Libido.” As we have seen,
this libido conceals itself in countless and very heterogeneous symbols,
also in animal images, no matter whether of masculine or feminine
nature—differences of sex are at bottom of a secondary value and
psychologically do not play the part which might be expected from a
superficial observation.
The annual sacrifice of the maiden to the dragon probably represented
the most ideal symbolic situation. In order to pacify the anger of the
“terrible mother” the most beautiful woman was sacrificed as symbol of
man’s libido. Less vivid examples are the sacrifice of the first-born
and various valuable domestic animals. A second ideal case is the
self-castration in the service of the mother (Dea Syria, etc.), a less
obvious form of which is circumcision. By that at least only a portion
is sacrificed.[839] With these sacrifices, the object of which in ideal
cases is to symbolize the libido drawing away from the mother, life is
symbolically renounced in order to regain it. By the sacrifice man
ransoms himself from the fear of death and reconciles the destroying
mother. In those later religions, where the hero, who in olden times
overcomes all evil and death through his labors, has become the divine
chief figure, he becomes the priestly sacrificer and the regenerator of
life. But as the hero is an imaginary figure and his sacrifice is a
transcendental mystery, the significance of which far exceeds the value
of an ordinary sacrificial gift, this deepening of the sacrificial
symbolism regressively resumes the idea of the human sacrifice. This is
partly due to the preponderance of phantastic additions, which always
take their subject-matter from greater depths, and partly due to the
higher religious occupation of the libido, which demanded a more
complete and equivalent expression. Thus the relation between Mithra and
his bull is very close. It is the hero himself in the Christian
mysteries who sacrifices himself voluntarily. The hero, as we have
sufficiently shown, is the infantile personality longing for the mother,
who as Mithra sacrifices the wish (the libido), and as Christ gives
himself to death both willingly and unwillingly. Upon the monuments of
the Mithraic religion we often meet a strange symbol: a crater (mixing
bowl) encoiled by a serpent, sometimes with a lion, who as antagonist
opposes the serpent.[840] It appears as if the two were fighting for the
crater. The crater symbolizes, as we have seen, the mother, the serpent
the resistance defending her, and the lion the greatest strength and
strongest will.[841] The struggle is for the mother. The serpent takes
part almost regularly in the Mithraic sacrifice of the bull, moving
towards the blood flowing from the wound. It seems to follow from that
that the life of the bull (blood) is sacrificed to the serpent.
Previously we have pointed out the mutual relationship between serpent
and bull, and found there that the bull symbolizes the living hero, the
shining sun, but that the serpent symbolizes the dead, buried or
chthonic hero, the invisible sun. As the hero is in the mother in the
state of death, the serpent is also, as the symbol of the fear of death,
the sign of the devouring mother. The sacrifice of the bull to the
serpent, therefore, signifies a willing renunciation of life, in order
to win it from death. Therefore, after the sacrifice of the bull,
wonderful fertility results. The antagonism between serpent and lion
over the crater is to be interpreted as a battle over the fruitful
mother’s womb, somewhat comparable to the more simple symbolism of the
Tishtriya song, where the demon Apaosha, the black horse, has possession
of the rain lake, and the white horse, Tishtriya, must banish him from
it. Death from time to time lays its destroying hand upon life and
fertility and the libido disappears, by entering into the mother, from
whose womb it will be born renewed. It, therefore, seems very probable
that the significance of the Mithraic bull sacrifice is also that of the
sacrifice of the mother who sends the fear of death. As the contrary of
the Occide moriturus is also intended here, so is the act of sacrifice
an impregnating of the mother; the chthonic snake demon drinks the
blood; that is to say, the libido (sperma) of the hero committing
incest. Life is thus immortalized for the hero because, like the sun, he
generates himself anew. After all the preceding materials, it can no
longer be difficult to recognize in the Christian mysteries the human
sacrifice, or the sacrifice of the son to the mother.[842] Just as Attis
emasculates himself on account of the mother, so does Christ himself
hang upon the tree of life,[843] the wood of martyrdom, the ἑκάτη,[844]
the chthonic mother, and by that redeems creation from death. By
entering again into the mother’s womb (Matuta, Pietà of Michelangelo) he
redeems in death the sin in life of the primitive man, Adam, in order
symbolically through his deed[845] to procure for the innermost and most
hidden meaning of the religious libido its highest satisfaction and most
pronounced expression. The martyrdom of Christ has in Augustine as well
actually the meaning of a Hierosgamos with the mother (corresponding to
the Adonis festival, where Venus and Adonis were laid upon the nuptial
couch):
“Procedit Christus quasi sponsus de thalamo suo, præsagio nuptiarum
exiit ad campum sæculi; pervenit usque ad crucis torum (torus has the
meaning of bed, pillow, concubine, bier) et ibi firmavit ascendendo
conjugium: ubi cum sentiret anhelantem in suspiriis creaturam
commercio pietatis se pro conjuge dedit ad pœnam et copulavit sibi
perpetuo iure matronam.”
This passage is perfectly clear. A similar death overtakes the Syrian
Melcarth, who, riding upon a sea horse, was annually burned. Among the
Greeks he is called Melicertes, and was represented riding upon a
dolphin. The dolphin is also the steed of Arion. We have learned to
recognize previously the maternal significance of dolphin, so that in
the death of Melcarth we can once more recognize the negatively
expressed Hierosgamos with the mother. (Compare Frazer “Golden Bough,”
IV, p. 87.) This figurative expression is of the greatest teleological
significance. Through its symbol it leads that libido which inclines
backward into the original, primitive and impulsive upwards to the
spiritual by investing it with a mysterious but fruitful function. It is
superfluous to speak of the effect of this symbol upon the unconscious
of Occidental humanity. A glance over history shows what creative forces
were released in this symbol.[846]
The comparison of the Mithraic and the Christian sacrifice plainly shows
wherein lies the superiority of the Christian symbol; it is the frank
admission that not only are the lower wishes to be sacrificed, but the
whole personality. The Christian symbol demands complete devotion; it
compels a veritable self-sacrifice to a higher purpose, while the
Sacrificium Mithriacum, remaining fixed on a primitive symbolic stage,
is contented with an animal sacrifice. The religious effect of these
symbols must be considered as an orientation of the unconscious by means
of imitation.
In Miss Miller’s phantasy there is internal compulsion, in that she
passes from the horse sacrifice to the self-sacrifice of the hero.
Whereas the first symbolizes renunciation of the sexual wishes, the
second has the deeper and ethically more valuable meaning of the
sacrifice of the infantile personality. The object of psychoanalysis has
frequently been wrongly understood to mean the renunciation or the
gratification of the ordinary sexual wish, while, in reality, the
problem is the sublimation of the infantile personality, or, expressed
mythologically, a sacrifice and rebirth of the infantile hero.[847] In
the Christian mysteries, however, the resurrected one becomes a
supermundane spirit, and the invisible kingdom of God, with its
mysterious gifts, are obtained by his believers through the sacrifice of
himself on the mother. In psychoanalysis the infantile personality is
deprived of its libido fixations in a rational manner; the libido which
is thus set free serves for the building up of a personality matured and
adapted to reality, who does willingly and without complaint everything
required by necessity. (It is, so to speak, the chief endeavor of the
infantile personality to struggle against all necessities and to create
coercions for itself where none exist in reality.)
The serpent as an instrument of sacrifice has already been abundantly
illustrated. (Legend of St. Silvester, trial of the virgins, wounding of
Rê and Philoctetes, symbolism of the lance and arrow.) It is the
destroying knife; but, according to the principle of the “Occide
moriturus” also the phallus, the sacrificial act represents a coitus act
as well.[848] The religious significance of the serpent as a
cave-dwelling, chthonic animal points to a further thought; namely, to
the creeping into the mother’s womb in the form of a serpent.[849] As
the horse is the brother, so the serpent is the sister of Chiwantopel.
This close relation refers to a fellowship of these animals and their
characters with the hero. We know of the horse that, as a rule, he is
not an animal of fear, although, mythologically, he has at times this
meaning. He signifies much more the living, positive part of the libido,
the striving towards continual renewal, whereas the serpent, as a rule,
represents the fear, the fear of death,[850] and is thought of as the
antithesis to the phallus. This antithesis between horse and serpent,
mythologically between bull and serpent, represents an opposition of the
libido within itself, a striving forwards and a striving backwards at
one and the same time.[851] It is not only as if the libido might be an
irresistible striving forward, an endless life and will for
construction, such as Schopenhauer has formulated in his world will,
death and every end being some malignancy or fatality coming from
without, but the libido, corresponding to the sun, also wills the
destruction of its creation. In the first half of life its will is for
growth, in the second half of life it hints, softly at first, and then
audibly, at its will for death. And just as in youth the impulse to
unlimited growth often lies under the enveloping covering of a
resistance against life, so also does the will of the old to die
frequently lie under the covering of a stubborn resistance against the
end.
[Illustration: PRIAPUS AND SERPENT]
This apparent contrast in the nature of the libido is strikingly
illustrated by a Priapic statuette in the antique collection at
Verona.[852] Priapus smilingly points with his finger to a snake biting
off his “membrum.” He carries a basket on his arm, filled with oblong
objects, probably phalli, evidently prepared as substitutes.
A similar motive is found in the “Deluge” of Rubens (in the Munich Art
Gallery), where a serpent emasculates a man. This motive explains the
meaning of the “Deluge”; the maternal sea is also the devouring
mother.[853] The phantasy of the world conflagration, of the cataclysmic
end of the world in general, is nothing but a mythological projection of
a personal individual will for death; therefore, Rubens could represent
the essence of the “Deluge” phantasy in the emasculation by the serpent;
for the serpent is our own repressed will for the end, for which we find
an explanation only with the greatest difficulty.
Concerning the symbolism of the serpent in general, its significance is
very dependent upon the time of life and circumstances. The repressed
sexuality of youth is symbolized by the serpent, because the arrival of
sexuality puts an end to childhood. To age, on the contrary, the serpent
signifies the repressed thought of death. With our author it is the
insufficiently expressed sexuality which as serpent assumes the rôle of
sacrificer and delivers the hero over to death and rebirth.
As in the beginning of our investigation the hero’s name forced us to
speak of the symbolism of Popocatepetl as belonging to the creating part
of the human body, so at the end does the Miller drama again give us an
opportunity of seeing how the volcano assists in the death of the hero
and causes him to disappear by means of an earthquake into the depths of
the earth. As the volcano gave birth and name to the hero, so at the end
of the day it devours him again.[854] We learn from the last words of
the hero that _his longed-for beloved_, she who alone understands him,
is called Ja-ni-wa-ma. We find in this name those lisped syllables
familiar to us from the early childhood of the hero, Hiawatha, Wawa,
wama, mama. The only one who really understands us is the mother. For
_verstehen_, “to understand” (Old High German _firstân_), is probably
derived from a primitive Germanic prefix _fri_, identical with περὶ,
meaning “roundabout.” The Old High German _antfristôn_, “to interpret,”
is considered as identical with _firstân_. From that results a
fundamental significance of the verb _verstehen_, “to understand,” as
“standing round about something.”[855] _Comprehendere_ and
κατασυλλαμβάνειν express a similar idea as the German _erfassen_, “to
grasp, to comprehend.” The thing common to these expressions is the
surrounding, the enfolding. And there is no doubt that there is nothing
in the world which so completely enfolds us as the mother. When the
neurotic complains that the world has no understanding, he says
indirectly that he misses the mother. Paul Verlaine has expressed this
thought most beautifully in his poem, “Mon Rêve Familier”: