THE DUAL MOTHER RÔLE

Psychology of the Unconscious by C. G. Jung, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE DUAL MOTHER RÔLE

CHAPTER VII - THE DUAL MOTHER RÔLE

After the disappearance of the assailant, Chiwantopel begins the following monologue:

“From the extreme ends of these continents, from the farthest lowlands, after having forsaken the palace of my father, I have been wandering aimlessly during a hundred moons, always pursued by my mad desire to find ‘her who will understand.’ With jewels I have tempted many fair ones, with kisses I have tried to snatch the secret of their hearts, with acts of bravery I have conquered their admiration. (He reviews the women he has known.) Chita, the princess of my race ... she is a little fool, vain as a peacock, having nought in her head but jewels and perfume. Ta-nan, the young peasant, ... bah, a mere sow, no more than a breast and a stomach, caring only for pleasure. And then Ki-ma, the priestess, a true parrot, repeating hollow phrases learnt from the priests; all for show, without real education or sincerity, suspicious poseur and hypocrite!... Alas! Not one who understands me, not one who resembles me, not one who has a soul sister to mine. There is not one among them all who has known my soul, not one who could read my thought; far from it; not one capable of seeking with me the luminous summits, or of spelling with me the superhuman word, love.”

Here Chiwantopel himself says that his journeying and wandering is a quest for that other, and for the meaning of life which lies in union with her. In the first part of this work we merely hinted gently at this possibility. The fact that the seeker is masculine and the sought-for of 342feminine sex is not so astonishing, because the chief object of the unconscious transference is the mother, as has probably been seen from that which we have already learned. The daughter takes a male attitude towards the mother. The genesis of this adjustment can only be suspected in our case, because objective proof is lacking. Therefore, let us rather be satisfied with inferences. “She who will understand” means the mother, in the infantile language. At the same time, it also means the life companion. As is well known, the sex contrast concerns the libido but little. The sex of the object plays a surprisingly slight rôle in the estimation of the unconscious. The object itself, taken as an objective reality, is but of slight significance. (But it is of greatest importance whether the libido is transferred or introverted.) The original concrete meaning of erfassen, “to seize,” begreifen, “to touch,” etc., allows us to recognize clearly the under side of the wish—to find a congenial person. But the “upper” intellectual half is also contained in it, and is to be taken into account at the same time. One might be inclined to assume this tendency if it were not that our culture abused the same, for the misunderstood woman has become almost proverbial, which can only be the result of a wholly distorted valuation. On the one side, our culture undervalues most extraordinarily the importance of sexuality; on the other side, sexuality breaks out as a direct result of the repression burdening it at every place where it does not belong, and makes use of such an indirect manner of expression that one may expect to meet it suddenly almost anywhere. Thus the 343idea of the intimate comprehension of a human soul, which is in reality something very beautiful and pure, is soiled and disagreeably distorted through the entrance of the indirect sexual meaning.[628] The secondary meaning or, better expressed, the misuse, which repressed and denied sexuality forces upon the highest soul functions, makes it possible, for example, for certain of our opponents to scent in psychoanalysis prurient erotic confessionals. These are subjective wish-fulfilment deliria which need no contra arguments. This misuse makes the wish to be “understood” highly suspicious, if the natural demands of life have not been fulfilled. Nature has first claim on man; only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect come. The mediæval ideal of life for the sake of death needs gradually to be replaced by a natural conception of life, in which the normal demands of men are thoroughly kept in mind, so that the desires of the animal sphere may no longer be compelled to drag down into their service the high gifts of the intellectual sphere in order to find an outlet. We are inclined, therefore, to consider the dreamer’s wish for understanding, first of all, as a repressed striving towards the natural destiny. This meaning coincides absolutely with psychoanalytic experience, that there are countless neurotic people who apparently are prevented from experiencing life because they have an unconscious and often also a conscious repugnance to the sexual fate, under which they imagine all kinds of ugly things. There is only too great an inclination to yield to this pressure of the unconscious sexuality and to experience the dreaded (unconsciously hoped 344for) disagreeable sexual experience, so as to acquire by that means a legitimately founded horror which retains them more surely in the infantile situation. This is the reason why so many people fall into that very state towards which they have the greatest abhorrence.

That we were correct in our assumption that, in Miss Miller, it is a question of the battle for independence is shown by her statement that the hero’s departure from his father’s house reminds her of the fate of the young Buddha, who likewise renounced all luxury to which he was born in order to go out into the world to live out his destiny to its completion. Buddha gave the same heroic example as did Christ, who separated from his mother, and even spoke bitter words (Matthew, chap. x. v. 34):

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

(35) “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

(36) “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

(37) “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

Or Luke, chap. xii, v. 51:

“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay: but rather division.

(52) “For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.

(53) “The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother-in-law against the 345daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”

Horus snatched from his mother her head adornment, the power. Just as Adam struggled with Lilith, so he struggles for power. Nietzsche, in “Human, All Too Human,” expressed the same in very beautiful words:

“One may suppose that a mind, in which the ‘type of free mind’ is to ripen and sweeten at maturity, has had its decisive crisis in a great detachment, so that before this time it was just so much the more a fettered spirit and appeared chained forever to its corner and its pillar.[629] What binds it most firmly? What cords are almost untearable? Among human beings of a high and exquisite type, it would be duties: that reverence, which is suitable for youth, that modesty and tenderness for all the old honored and valued things, that thankfulness for the earth from which they grew, for the hand which guided them, for the shrine where they learnt to pray:—their loftiest moments themselves come to bind them the firmest, to obligate them the most permanently. The great detachment comes suddenly for people so bound.

“‘Better to die than to live here,’—thus rings the imperative voice of seduction: and this here, this ‘at home’ is all, that it (the soul) has loved until now! A sudden terror and suspicion against that which it has loved, a lightning flash of scorn towards that which is called ‘duty,’ a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanic, impelling desire for travelling, for strange countries, estrangements, coolness, frigidity, disillusionments, a hatred of love, perhaps a sacrilegious touch and glance backwards[630] there where just now it adored and loved, perhaps a blush of shame over what it has just done, and at the same time an exultation over having done it, an intoxicating internal joyous thrill, in which a victory reveals itself—a victory? Over what? Over whom? An enigmatic, doubtful, questioning victory, but the first triumph. Of such woe and pain is formed the history of the great detachment. It is like a disease which can destroy men,—this first eruption of strength and will towards self-assertion.”[631]

346The danger lies, as is brilliantly expressed by Nietzsche, in isolation in one’s self:

“Solitude surrounds and embraces him ever more threatening, ever more constricting, ever more heart-strangling, the terrible Goddess and Mater sæva cupidinum.”

The libido taken away from the mother, who is abandoned only reluctantly, becomes threatening as a serpent, the symbol of death, for the relation to the mother must cease, must die, which itself almost causes man’s death. In “Mater sæva cupidinum” the idea attains rare, almost conscious, perfection.

I do not presume to try to paint in better words than has Nietzsche the psychology of the wrench from childhood.

Miss Miller furnishes us with a further reference to a material which has influenced her creation in a more general manner; this is the great Indian epic of Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha.”

If my readers have had patience to read thus far, and to reflect upon what they have read, they frequently must have wondered at the number of times I introduce for comparison such apparently foreign material and how often I widen the base upon which Miss Miller’s creations rest. Doubts must often have arisen whether it is justifiable to enter into important discussions concerning the psychologic foundations of myths, religions and culture in general on the basis of such scanty suggestions. It might be said that behind the Miller phantasies such a 347thing is scarcely to be found. I need hardly emphasize the fact that I, too, have sometimes been in doubt. I had never read “Hiawatha” until, in the course of my work, I came to this part. “Hiawatha,” a poetical compilation of Indian myths, gives me, however, a justification for all preceding reflections, because this epic contains an unusual number of mythologic problems. This fact is probably of great importance for the wealth of suggestions in the Miller phantasies. We are, therefore, compelled to obtain an insight into this epic.

Nawadaha sings the songs of the epic of the hero Hiawatha, the friend of man:

“There he sang of Hiawatha,

Sang the songs of Hiawatha,

Sang his wondrous birth and being,

How he prayed and how he fasted,

How he lived and toiled and suffered,

That the tribes of men might prosper,

That he might advance his people.”

The teleological meaning of the hero, as that symbolic figure which unites in itself libido in the form of admiration and adoration, in order to lead to higher sublimations by way of the symbolic bridges of the myths, is anticipated here. Thus we become quickly acquainted with Hiawatha as a savior, and are prepared to hear all that which must be said of a savior, of his marvellous birth, of his early great deeds, and his sacrifice for his fellow-men.

The first song begins with a fragment of evangelism: Gitche Manito, the “master of life,” tired of the quarrels 348of his human children, calls his people together and makes known to them the joyous message:

“I will send a prophet to you,

A Deliverer of the nations,

Who shall guide you and shall teach you,

Who shall toil and suffer with you.

If you listen to his counsels,

You will multiply and prosper.

If his warnings pass unheeded,

You will fade away and perish!”

Gitche Manito, the Mighty, “the creator of the nations,” is represented as he stood erect “on the great Red Pipestone quarry.”

“From his footprints flowed a river,

Leaped into the light of morning,

O’er the precipice plunging downward

Gleamed like Ishkoodah, the comet.”

The water flowing from his footsteps sufficiently proves the phallic nature of this creator. I refer to the earlier utterances concerning the phallic and fertilizing nature of the horse’s foot and the horse’s steps, and especially do I recall Hippocrene and the foot of Pegasus.[632] We meet with the same idea in Psalm lxv, vv. 9 to 11:

“Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it; thou makest it very plenteous.

“The river of God is full of water; thou preparest their corn, for so thou providest for the earth.

“Thou waterest her furrows: thou sendest rain into the little valleys thereof; thou makest it soft with the drops of rain, and blessest the increase of it.

“Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness.”

349Wherever the fertilizing God steps, there is fruitfulness. We already have spoken of the symbolic meaning of treading in discussing the nightmares. Kaineus passes into the depths, “splitting the earth with a foot outstretched.” Amphiaraus, another chthonic hero, sinks into the earth, which Zeus has opened for him by a stroke of lightning. (Compare with that the above-mentioned vision of a hysterical patient, who saw a black horse after a flash of lightning: identity of horse’s footstep and flash of lightning.) By means of a flash of lightning heroes were made immortal.[633] Faust attained the mothers when he stamped his foot.

“Stamp and descend, stamping thou’lt rise again.”

The heroes in the sun-devouring myths often stamp at or struggle in the jaws of the monster. Thus Tor stamped through the ship’s bottom in battle with the monster, and went as far as the bottom of the sea. (Kaineus.) (Concerning “kicking” as an infantile phantasy, see above.) The regression of the libido to the presexual stage makes this preparatory action of treading either a substitution for the coitus phantasy or for the phantasy of re-entrance into the mother’s womb. The comparison of water flowing from the footsteps with a comet is a light symbolism for the fructifying moisture (sperma). According to an observation by Humboldt (Kosmos), certain South American Indian tribes call the meteors “urine of the stars.” Mention is also made of how Gitche Manito makes fire. He blows upon a forest, so that the trees, rubbing upon each other, burst into 350flame. This demon is, therefore, an excellent libido symbol; he also produced fire.

After this prologue in the second song, the hero’s previous history is related. The great warrior, Mudjekeewis (Hiawatha’s father), has cunningly overcome the great bear, “the terror of the nations,” and stolen from him the magic “belt of wampum,” a girdle of shells. Here we meet the motive of the “treasure attained with difficulty,” which the hero rescues from the monster. Who the bear is, is shown by the poet’s comparisons. Mudjekeewis strikes the bear on his head after he has robbed him of the treasure.

“With the heavy blow bewildered

Rose the great Bear of the mountains,

But his knees beneath him trembled,

And he whimpered like a woman.”

Mudjekeewis said derisively to him:

“Else you would not cry, and whimper,

Like a miserable woman!

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

But you, Bear! sit here and whimper,

And disgrace your tribe by crying,

Like a wretched Shaugodaya,

Like a cowardly old woman!”

These three comparisons with a woman are to be found near each other on the same page. Mudjekeewis has, like a true hero, once more torn life from the jaws of death, from the all-devouring “terrible mother.” This deed, which, as we have seen, is also represented as 351a journey to hell, “night journey through the sea,” the conquering of the monster from within, signifies at the same time entrance into the mother’s womb, a rebirth, the results of which are perceptible also for Mudjekeewis. As in the Zosimos vision, here too the entering one becomes the breath of the wind or spirit. Mudjekeewis becomes the west wind, the fertilizing breath, the father of winds.[634] His sons become the other winds. An intermezzo tells of them and of their love stories, of which I will mention only the courtship of Wabuns, the East Wind, because here the erotic wooing of the wind is pictured in an especially beautiful manner. Every morning he sees a beautiful girl in a meadow, whom he eagerly courts:

“Every morning, gazing earthward,

Still the first thing he beheld there

Was her blue eyes looking at him,

Two blue lakes among the rushes.”

The comparison with water is not a matter of secondary importance, because “from wind and water” shall man be born anew.

“And he wooed her with caresses,

Wooed her with his smile of sunshine,

With his flattering words he wooed her,

With his sighing and his singing,

Gentlest whispers in the branches,

Softest music, sweetest odors,” etc.

In these onomatopoetic verses the wind’s caressing courtship is excellently expressed.[635]

352The third song presents the previous history of Hiawatha’s mother. His grandmother, when a maiden, lived in the moon. There she once swung upon a liana, but a jealous lover cut off the liana, and Nokomis, Hiawatha’s grandmother, fell to earth. The people, who saw her fall downwards, thought that she was a shooting star. This marvellous descent of Nokomis is more plainly illustrated by a later passage of this same song; there little Hiawatha asks the grandmother what is the moon. Nokomis teaches him about it as follows: The moon is the body of a grandmother, whom a warlike grandson has cast up there in wrath. Hence the moon is the grandmother. In ancient beliefs, the moon is also the gathering place of departed souls,[636] the guardian of seeds; therefore, once more a place of the origin of life of predominantly feminine significance. The remarkable thing is that Nokomis, falling upon the earth, gave birth to a daughter, Wenonah, subsequently the mother of Hiawatha. The throwing upwards of the mother, and her falling down and bringing forth, seems to contain something typical in itself. Thus a story of the seventeenth century relates that a mad bull threw a pregnant woman as high as a house, and tore open her womb, and the child fell without harm upon the earth. On account of his wonderful birth, this child was considered a hero or doer of miracles, but he died at an early age. The belief is widespread among lower savages that the sun is feminine and the moon masculine. Among the Namaqua, a Hottentot tribe, the opinion is prevalent that the sun consists of transparent bacon.

353“The people, who journey on boats, draw it down by magic every evening, cut off a suitable piece and then give it a kick so that it flies up again into the sky.”—Waitz: “Anthropologie,” II, 342.

The infantile nourishment comes from the mother. In the Gnostic phantasies we come across a legend of the origin of man which possibly belongs here: the female archons bound to the vault of Heaven are unable, on account of its quick rotation, to keep their young within them, but let them fall upon the earth, from which men arise. Possibly there is here a connection with barbaric midwifery, the letting fall of the parturient. The assault upon the mother is already introduced with the adventure of Mudjekeewis, and is continued in the violent handling of the “grandmother,” Nokomis, who, as a result of the cutting of the liana and the fall downwards, seems in some way to have become pregnant. The “cutting of the branch,” the plucking, we have already recognized as mother incest. (See above.) That well-known verse, “Saxonland, where beautiful maidens grow upon trees,” and phrases like “picking cherries in a neighbor’s garden,” allude to a similar idea. The fall downwards of Nokomis deserves to be compared to a poetical figure in Heine.

“A star, a star is falling

Out of the glittering sky!

The star of Love! I watch it

Sink in the depths and die.

“The leaves and buds are falling

From many an apple-tree;

354I watch the mirthful breezes

Embrace them wantonly...”

Wenonah later was courted by the caressing West Wind, and becomes pregnant. Wenonah, as a young moon-goddess, has the beauty of the moonlight. Nokomis warns her of the dangerous courtship of Mudjekeewis, the West Wind. But Wenonah allows herself to become infatuated, and conceives from the breath of the wind, from the πνεῦμα, a son, our hero.

“And the West-Wind came at evening,

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

Found the beautiful Wenonah,

Lying there amid the lilies,

Wooed her with his words of sweetness,

Wooed her with his soft caresses,

Till she bore a son in sorrow,

Bore a son of love and sorrow.”

Fertilization through the breath of the spirit is already a well-known precedent for us. The star or comet plainly belongs to the birth scene as a libido symbol; Nokomis, too, comes to earth as a shooting star. Mörike’s sweet poetic phantasy has devised a similar divine origin.

“And she who bore me in her womb,

And gave me food and clothing.

She was a maid—a wild, brown maid,

Who looked on men with loathing.

“She fleered at them and laughed out loud,

And bade no suitor tarry;

‘I’d rather be the Wind’s own bride

Than have a man and marry.’

355“Then came the Wind and held her fast

His captive, love-enchanted;

And lo, by him a merry child

Within her womb was planted.”

Buddha’s marvellous birth story, retold by Sir Edwin Arnold, also shows traces of this.[637]

“Maya, the Queen ...

Dreamed a strange dream, dreamed that a star from heaven—

Splendid, six-rayed, in color rosy-pearl,

Whereof the token was an Elephant

Six-tusked and white as milk of Kamadhuk—

Shot through the void; and shining into her,

Entered her womb upon the right.”[638]

During Maya’s conception a wind blows over the land:

“A wind blew

With unknown freshness over lands and seas.”

After the birth the four genii of the East, West, South and North come to render service as bearers of the palanquin. (The coming of the wise men at Christ’s birth.) We also find here a distinct reference to the “four winds.” For the completion of the symbolism there is to be found in the Buddha myth, as well as in the birth legend of Christ, besides the impregnation by star and wind, also the fertilization by an animal, here an elephant, which with its phallic trunk fulfilled in Maya the Christian method of fructification through the ear or the head. It is well known that, in addition to the dove, the unicorn is also a procreative symbol of the Logos.

Here arises the question why the birth of a hero always 356had to take place under such strange symbolic circumstances? It might also be imagined that a hero arose from ordinary surroundings and gradually grew out of his inferior environment, perhaps with a thousand troubles and dangers. (And, indeed, this motive is by no means strange in the hero myth.) It might be said that superstition demands strange conditions of birth and generation; but why does it demand them?

The answer to this question is: that the birth of the hero, as a rule, is not that of an ordinary mortal, but is a rebirth from the mother-spouse; hence it occurs under mysterious ceremonies. Therefore, in the very beginning, lies the motive of the two mothers of the hero. As Rank[639] has shown us through many examples, the hero is often obliged to experience exposure, and upbringing by foster parents, and in this manner he acquires the two mothers. A striking example is the relation of Hercules to Hera. In the Hiawatha epic Wenonah dies after the birth and Nokomis takes her place. Maya dies after the birth[640] and Buddha is given a stepmother. The stepmother is sometimes an animal (the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus, etc.). The twofold mother may be replaced by the motive of twofold birth, which has attained a lofty significance in the Christian mythology; namely, through baptism, which, as we have seen, represents rebirth. Thus man is born not merely in a commonplace manner, but also born again in a mysterious manner, by means of which he becomes a participator of the kingdom of God, of immortality. Any one may become a hero in this way who is generated anew through his own 357mother, because only through her does he share in immortality. Therefore, it happened that the death of Christ on the cross, which creates universal salvation, was understood as “baptism”; that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, the mysterious tree of death. Christ says:

“But I have a baptism to be baptized with: and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”—Luke xii: 50.

He interprets his death agony symbolically as birth agony.

The motive of the two mothers suggests the thought of self-rejuvenation, and evidently expresses the fulfilment of the wish that it might be possible for the mother to bear me again; at the same time, applied to the heroes, it means one is a hero who is borne again by her who has previously been his mother; that is to say, a hero is he who may again produce himself through his mother.

The countless suggestions in the history of the procreation of the heroes indicate the latter formulations. Hiawatha’s father first overpowered the mother under the symbol of the bear; then himself becoming a god, he procreates the hero. What Hiawatha had to do as hero, Nokomis hinted to him in the legend of the origin of the moon; he is forcibly to throw his mother upwards (or throw downwards?); then she would become pregnant by this act of violence and could bring forth a daughter. This rejuvenated mother would be allotted, according to the Egyptian rite, as a daughter-wife to the sun-god, the father of his mother, for self-reproduction. What action 358Hiawatha takes in this regard we shall see presently. We have already studied the behavior of the pre-Asiatic gods related to Christ. Concerning the pre-existence of Christ, the Gospel of St. John is full of this thought. Thus the speech of John the Baptist:

“This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me; for he was before me.”—John i: 30.

Also the beginning of the gospel is full of deep mythologic significance:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

(3) “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

(4) “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

(5) “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

(6) “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

(7) “The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light.

(8) “He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

(9) “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

This is the proclamation of the reappearing light, the reborn sun, which formerly was, and which will be again. In the baptistry at Pisa, Christ is represented bringing the tree of life to man; his head is surrounded by a sun halo. Over this relief stand the words Introitus Solis.

Because the one born was his own procreator, the history of his procreation is strangely concealed under symbolic 359events, which are meant to conceal and deny it; hence the extraordinary assertion of the virgin conception. This is meant to hide the incestuous impregnation. But do not let us forget that this naïve assertion plays an unusually important part in the ingenious symbolic bridge, which is to guide the libido out from the incestuous bond to higher and more useful applications, which indicate a new kind of immortality; that is to say, immortal work.

The environment of Hiawatha’s youth is of importance:

“By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest,

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them.

Bright before it beat the water,

Beat the clear and sunny water,

Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.”

In this environment Nokomis brought him up. Here she taught him the first words, and told him the first fairy tales, and the sounds of the water and the wood were intermingled, so that the child learned not only to understand man’s speech, but also that of Nature:

“At the door on summer evenings

Sat the little Hiawatha;

Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,

Heard the lapping of the water,

Sounds of music, words of wonder:

‘Minne-wawa!’[641] said the pine-trees,

‘Mudway-aushka!’[642] said the water.”

360Hiawatha hears human speech in the sounds of Nature; thus he understands Nature’s speech. The wind says, “Wawa.” The cry of the wild goose is “Wawa.” Wah-wah-taysee means the small glowworm which enchants him. Thus the poet paints most beautifully the gradual gathering of external nature into the compass of the subjective,[643] and the intimate connection of the primary object to which the first lisping words were applied, and from which the first sounds were derived, with the secondary object, the wider nature which usurps imperceptibly the mother’s place, and takes possession of those sounds heard first from the mother, and also of those feelings which we all discover later in ourselves in all the warm love of Mother Nature. The later blending, whether pantheistic-philosophic or æsthetic, of the sentimental, cultured man with nature is, looked at retrospectively, a reblending with the mother, who was our primary object, and with whom we truly were once wholly one.[644] Therefore, it is not astonishing when we again see emerging in the poetical speech of a modern philosopher, Karl Joël, the old pictures which symbolize the unity with the mother, illustrated by the confluence of subject and object. In his recent book, “Seele und Welt” (1912), Joël writes as follows, in the chapter called “Primal Experience”[645]:

“I lay on the seashore, the shining waters glittering in my dreamy eyes; at a great distance fluttered the soft breeze; throbbing, shimmering, stirring, lulling to sleep comes the wave beat to the shore—or to the ear? I know not. Distance and nearness become blurred into one; without and within glide into each 361other. Nearer and nearer, dearer and more homelike sounds the beating of the waves; now, like a thundering pulse in my head it strikes, and now it beats over my soul, devours it, embraces it, while it itself at the same time floats out like the blue waste of waters. Yes, without and within are one. Glistening and foaming, flowing and fanning and roaring, the entire symphony of the stimuli experienced sounds in one tone, all thought becomes one thought, which becomes one with feeling; the world exhales in the soul and the soul dissolves in the world. Our small life is encircled by a great sleep—the sleep of our cradle, the sleep of our grave, the sleep of our home, from which we go forth in the morning, to which we again return in the evening; our life but the short journey, the interval between the emergence from the original oneness and the sinking back into it! Blue shimmers the infinite sea, wherein dreams the jelly fish of the primitive life, toward which without ceasing our thoughts hark back dimly through eons of existence. For every happening entails a change and a guarantee of the unity of life. At that moment when they are no longer blended together, in that instant man lifts his head, blind and dripping, from the depths of the stream of experience, from the oneness with the experience; at that moment of parting when the unity of life in startled surprise detaches the Change and holds it away from itself as something alien, at this moment of alienation the aspects of the experience have been substantialized into subject and object, and in that moment consciousness is born.”

Joël paints here, in unmistakable symbolism, the confluence of subject and object as the reunion of mother and child. The symbols agree with those of mythology, even in their details. The encircling and devouring motive is distinctly suggested. The sea, devouring the sun and giving birth to it anew, is already an old acquaintance. The moment of the rise of consciousness, the separation of subject and object is a birth; truly philosophical 362thought hangs with lame wings upon the few great primitive pictures of human speech, above the simple, all-surpassing greatness of which no thought can rise. The idea of the jelly fish is not “accidental.” Once when I was explaining to a patient the maternal significance of water at this contact with the mother complex, she experienced a very unpleasant feeling. “It makes me squirm,” she said, “as if I touched a jelly fish.” Here, too, the same idea! The blessed state of sleep before birth and after death is, as Joël observed, something like old shadowy memories of that unsuspecting, thoughtless state of early childhood, where as yet no opposition disturbed the peaceful flow of dawning life, to which the inner longing always draws us back again and again, and from which the active life must free itself anew with struggle and death, so that it may not be doomed to destruction. Long before Joël, an Indian chieftain had said the same thing in similar words to one of the restless wise men:

“Ah, my brother, you will never learn to know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing: this is next to sleep; this is the most delightful thing there is. Thus we were before birth, thus we shall be after death.”[646]

We shall see in Hiawatha’s later fate how important his early impressions are in his choice of a wife. Hiawatha’s first deed was to kill a roebuck with his arrow:

“Dead he lay there in the forest,

By the ford across the river.”

This is typical of Hiawatha’s deeds. Whatever he kills, for the most part, lies next to or in the water, sometimes 363half in the water and half on the land.[647] It seems that this must well be so. The later adventures will teach us why this must be so. The buck was no ordinary animal, but a magic one; that is to say, one with an additional unconscious significance. Hiawatha made for himself gloves and moccasins from its hide; the gloves imparted such strength to his arms that he could crumble rocks to dust, and the moccasins had the virtue of the seven-league boots. By enwrapping himself in the buck’s skin he really became a giant. This motive, together with the death of the animal at the ford,[648] in the water, reveals the fact that the parents are concerned, whose gigantic proportions as compared with the child are of great significance in the unconscious. The “toys of giants” is a wish inversion of the infantile phantasy. The dream of an eleven-year-old girl expresses this:

“I am as high as a church steeple; then a policeman comes. I tell him, ‘If you say anything, I will cut off your head.’”

The “policeman,” as the analysis brought out, referred to the father, whose gigantic size was over-compensated by the church steeple. In Mexican human sacrifices, the gods were represented by criminals, who were slaughtered, and flayed, and the Corybantes then clothed themselves in the bloody skins, in order to illustrate the resurrection of the gods.[649] (The snake’s casting of his skin as a symbol of rejuvenation.)

Hiawatha has, therefore, conquered his parents, primarily the mother, although in the form of a male animal (compare the bear of Mudjekeewis); and from that 364comes his giant’s strength. He has taken on the parent’s skin and now has himself become a great man. Now he started forth to his first great battle to fight with the father Mudjekeewis, in order to avenge his dead mother Wenonah. Naturally, under this figure of speech hides the thought that he slays the father, in order to take possession of the mother. Compare the battle of Gilgamesh with the giant Chumbaba and the ensuing conquest of Ishtar. The father, in the psychologic sense, merely represents the personification of the incest prohibition; that is to say, resistance, which defends the mother. Instead of the father, it may be a fearful animal (the great bear, the snake, the dragon, etc.) which must be fought and overcome. The hero is a hero because he sees in every difficulty of life resistance to the forbidden treasure, and fights that resistance with the complete yearning which strives towards the treasure, attainable with difficulty, or unattainable, the yearning which paralyzes and kills the ordinary man.

Hiawatha’s father is Mudjekeewis, the west wind; the battle, therefore, takes place in the west. Thence came life (impregnation of Wenonah); thence also came death (death of Wenonah). Hiawatha, therefore, fights the typical battle of the hero for rebirth in the western sea, the battle with the devouring terrible mother, this time in the form of the father. Mudjekeewis, who himself had acquired a divine nature, through his conquest of the bear, now is overpowered by his son:

“Back retreated Mudjekeewis,

Rushing westward o’er the mountains,

365Stumbling westward down the mountains,

Three whole days retreated fighting,

Still pursued by Hiawatha

To the doorways of the West-Wind,

To the portals of the Sunset,

To the earth’s remotest border,

Where into the empty spaces

Sinks the sun, as a flamingo

Drops into her nest at nightfall.”

The “three days” are a stereotyped form representing the stay in the sea prison of night. (Twenty-first until twenty-fourth of December.) Christ, too, remained three days in the underworld. “The treasure, difficult to attain,” is captured by the hero during this struggle in the west. In this case the father must make a great concession to the son; he gives him divine nature,[650] that very wind nature, the immortality of which alone protected Mudjekeewis from death. He says to his son:

“I will share my kingdom with you,

Ruler shall you be henceforward,

Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,

Of the home-wind, the Keewaydin.”

That Hiawatha now becomes ruler of the home-wind has its close parallel in the Gilgamesh epic, where Gilgamesh finally receives the magic herb from the wise old Utnapishtim, who dwells in the West, which brings him safe once more over the sea to his home; but this, when he is home again, is retaken from him by a serpent.

When one has slain the father, one can obtain possession of his wife, and when one has conquered the mother, one can free one’s self.

366On the return journey Hiawatha stops at the clever arrow-maker’s, who possesses a lovely daughter:

“And he named her from the river,

From the water-fall he named her,

Minnehaha, Laughing Water.”

When Hiawatha, in his earliest childhood dreaming, felt the sounds of water and wind press upon his ears, he recognized in these sounds of nature the speech of his mother. The murmuring pine trees on the shore of the great sea, said “Minnewawa.” And above the murmuring of the winds and the splashing of the water he found his earliest childhood dreams once again in a woman, “Minnehaha,” the laughing water. And the hero, before all others, finds in woman the mother, in order to become a child again, and, finally, to solve the riddle of immortality.

The fact that Minnehaha’s father is a skilful arrow-maker betrays him as the father of the hero (and the woman he had with him as the mother). The father of the hero is very often a skilful carpenter, or other artisan. According to an Arabian legend, Tare,[651] Abraham’s father, was a skilful master workman, who could carve arrows from any wood; that is to say, in the Arabian form of speech, he was a procreator of splendid sons.[652] Moreover, he was a maker of images of gods. Tvashtar, Agni’s father, is the maker of the world, a smith and carpenter, the discoverer of fire-boring. Joseph, the father of Jesus, was also a carpenter; likewise Kinyras, Adonis’s father, who is said to have invented 367the hammer, the lever, roofing and mining. Hephaestus, the father of Hermes, is an artistic master workman and sculptor. In fairy tales, the father of the hero is very modestly the traditional wood-cutter. These conceptions were also alive in the cult of Osiris. There the divine image was carved out of a tree trunk and then placed within the hollow of the tree. (Frazer: “Golden Bough,” Part IV.) In Rigveda, the world was also hewn out of a tree by the world-sculptor. The idea that the hero is his own procreator[653] leads to the fact that he is invested with paternal attributes, and reversedly the heroic attributes are given to the father. In Mânî there exists a beautiful union of the motives. He accomplishes his great labors as a religious founder, hides himself for years in a cave, he dies, is skinned, stuffed and hung up (hero). Besides he is an artist, and has a crippled foot. A similar union of motives is found in Wieland, the smith.

Hiawatha kept silent about what he saw at the old arrow-maker’s on his return to Nokomis, and he did nothing further to win Minnehaha. But now something happened, which, if it were not in an Indian epic, would rather be sought in the history of a neurosis. Hiawatha introverted his libido; that is to say, he fell into an extreme resistance against the “real sexual demand” (Freud); he built a hut for himself in the wood, in order to fast there and to experience dreams and visions. For the first three days he wandered, as once in his earliest youth, through a forest and looked at all the animals and plants:

368“‘Master of life!’ he cried, desponding,

‘Must our lives depend on these things?’”

The question whether our lives must depend upon “these things” is very strange. It sounds as if life were derived from these things; that is to say, from nature in general. Nature seems suddenly to have assumed a very strange significance. This phenomenon can be explained only through the fact that a great amount of libido was stored up and now is given to nature. As is well known, men of even dull and prosy minds, in the springtime of love, suddenly become aware of nature, and even make poems about it. But we know that libido, prevented from an actual way of transference, always reverts to an earlier way of transference. Minnehaha, the laughing water, is so clearly an allusion to the mother that the secret yearning of the hero for the mother is powerfully touched. Therefore, without having undertaken anything, he goes home to Nokomis; but there again he is driven away, because Minnehaha already stands in his path.

He turns, therefore, even further away, into that early youthful period, the tones of which recall Minnehaha most forcibly to his thoughts, where he learnt to hear the mother-sounds in the sounds of nature. In this very strange revival of the impressions of nature we recognize a regression to those earliest and strongest nature impressions which stand next to the subsequently extinguished, even stronger, impressions which the child received from the mother. The glamour of this feeling for her is transferred to other objects of the childish environment 369(father’s house, playthings, etc.), from which later those magic blissful feelings proceed, which seem to be peculiar to the earliest childish memories. When, therefore, Hiawatha hides himself in the lap of nature, it is really the mother’s womb, and it is to be expected that he will emerge again new-born in some form.

Before turning to this new creation arising from introversion, there is still a further significance of the preceding question to be considered: whether life is dependent upon “these things”? Life may depend upon these things in the degree that they serve for nourishment. We must infer in this case that suddenly the question of nutrition came very near the hero’s heart. (This possibility will be thoroughly proven in what follows.) The question of nutrition, indeed, enters seriously into consideration. First, because regression to the mother necessarily revives that special path of transference; namely, that of nutrition through the mother. As soon as the libido regresses to the presexual stage, there we may expect to see the function of nutrition and its symbols put in place of the sexual function. Thence is derived an essential root of the displacement from below upwards (Freud), because, in the presexual stage, the principal value belongs not to the genitals, but to the mouth. Secondly, because the hero fasted, his hunger becomes predominant. Fasting, as is well known, is employed to silence sexuality; also, it expresses symbolically the resistance against sexuality, translated into the language of the presexual stage. On the fourth day of his fast the hero ceased to address himself to nature; 370he lay exhausted, with half-closed eyes, upon his couch, sunk deep in dreams, the picture of extreme introversion.

We have already seen that, in such circumstances, an infantile internal equivalent for reality appears, in the place of external life and reality. This is also the case with Hiawatha:

“And he saw a youth approaching,

Dressed in garments green and yellow,

Coming through the purple twilight,

Through the splendor of the sunset;

Plumes of green bent o’er his forehead,

And his hair was soft and golden.”

This remarkable apparition reveals himself in the following manner to Hiawatha:

“From the Master of Life descending,

I, the friend of man, Mondamin,

Come to warn you and instruct you,

How by struggle and by labor

You shall gain what you have prayed for.

Rise up from your bed of branches;

Rise, O youth, and wrestle with me!”

Mondamin is the maize: a god, who is eaten, arising from Hiawatha’s introversion. His hunger, taken in a double sense, his longing for the nourishing mother, gives birth from his soul to another hero, the edible maize, the son of the earth mother. Therefore, he again arises at sunset, symbolizing the entrance into the mother, and in the western sunset glow he begins again the mystic struggle with the self-created god, the god who has originated entirely from the longing for the nourishing mother. 371The struggle is again the struggle for liberation from this destructive and yet productive longing. Mondamin is, therefore, equivalent to the mother, and the struggle with him means the overpowering and impregnation of the mother. This interpretation is entirely proven by a myth of the Cherokees, “who invoke it (the maize) under the name of ‘The Old Woman,’ in allusion to a myth that it sprang from the blood of an old woman killed by her disobedient sons”:[654]

“Faint with famine, Hiawatha

Started from his bed of branches,

From the twilight of his wigwam

Forth into the flush of sunset

Came, and wrestled with Mondamin;

At his touch he felt new courage

Throbbing in his brain and bosom,

Felt new life and hope and vigor

Run through every nerve and fibre.”

The battle at sunset with the god of the maize gives Hiawatha new strength; and thus it must be, because the fight for the individual depths, against the paralyzing longing for the mother, gives creative strength to men. Here, indeed, is the source of all creation, but it demands heroic courage to fight against these forces and to wrest from them the “treasure difficult to attain.” He who succeeds in this has, in truth, attained the best. Hiawatha wrestles with himself for his creation.[655] The struggle lasts again the charmed three days. The fourth day, just as Mondamin prophesied, Hiawatha conquers him, and Mondamin sinks to the ground in death. As Mondamin 372previously desired, Hiawatha digs his grave in mother earth, and soon afterwards from this grave the young and fresh maize grows for the nourishment of mankind.

Concerning the thought of this fragment, we have therein a beautiful parallel to the mystery of Mithra, where first the battle of the hero with his bull occurs. Afterwards Mithra carries in “transitus” the bull into the cave, where he kills him. From this death all fertility grows, all that is edible.[656] The cave corresponds to the grave. The same idea is represented in the Christian mysteries, although generally in more beautiful human forms. The soul struggle of Christ in Gethsemane, where he struggles with himself in order to complete his work, then the “transitus,” the carrying of the cross,[657] where he takes upon himself the symbol of the destructive mother, and therewith takes himself to the sacrificial grave, from which, after three days, he triumphantly arises; all these ideas express the same fundamental thoughts. Also, the symbol of eating is not lacking in the Christian mystery. Christ is a god who is eaten in the Lord’s Supper. His death transforms him into bread and wine, which we partake of in grateful memory of his great deed.[658] The relation of Agni to the Somadrink and that of Dionysus to wine[659] must not be omitted here. An evident parallel is Samson’s rending of the lion, and the subsequent inhabitation of the dead lion by honey bees, which gives rise to the well-known German riddle:

“Speise ging von dem Fresser und Süssigkeit von dem Starken (Food went from the glutton and sweet from the strong).”[660]

373In the Eleusinian mysteries these thoughts seem to have played a rôle. Besides Demeter and Persephone, Iakchos is a chief god of the Eleusinian cult; he was the “puer æternus,” the eternal boy, of whom Ovid says the following:

“Tu puer æternus, tu formosissimus alto

Conspiceris cœlo tibi, cum sine cornibus astas,

Virgineum caput est,” etc.[661]

In the great Eleusinian festival procession the image of Iakchos was carried. It is not easy to say which god is Iakchos, possibly a boy, or a new-born son, similar to the Etrurian Tages, who bears the surname “the freshly ploughed boy,” because, according to the myth, he arose from the furrow of the field behind the peasant, who was ploughing. This idea shows unmistakably the Mondamin motive. The plough is of well-known phallic meaning; the furrow of the field is personified by the Hindoos as woman. The psychology of this idea is that of a coitus, referred back to the presexual stage (stage of nutrition). The son is the edible fruit of the field. Iakchos passes, in part, as son of Demeter or of Persephone, also appropriately as consort of Demeter. (Hero as procreator of himself.) He is also called τῆς Δήμητρος δαίμων (Δαίμων equals libido, also Mother libido.) He was identified with Dionysus, especially with the Thracian Dionysus-Zagreus, of whom a typical fate of rebirth was related. Hera had goaded the Titans against Zagreus, 374who, assuming many forms, sought to escape them, until they finally took him when he had taken on the form of a bull. In this form he was killed (Mithra sacrifice) and dismembered, and the pieces were thrown into a cauldron; but Zeus killed the Titans by lightning, and swallowed the still-throbbing heart of Zagreus. Through this act he gave him existence once more, and Zagreus as Iakchos again came forth.

Iakchos carries the torch, the phallic symbol of procreation, as Plato testifies. In the festival procession, the sheaf of corn, the cradle of Iakchos, was carried. (λῖκνον, mystica vannus Iacchi.) The Orphic legend[662] relates that Iakchos was brought up by Persephone, when, after three years’ slumber in the λῖκνον,[663] he awoke. This statement distinctly suggests the Mondamin motive. The 20th of Boedromion (the month Boedromion lasts from about the 5th of September to the 5th of October) is called Iakchos, in honor of the hero. On the evening of this day the great torchlight procession took place on the seashore, in which the quest and lament of Demeter was represented. The rôle of Demeter, who, seeking her daughter, wanders over the whole earth without food or drink, has been taken over by Hiawatha in the Indian epic. He turns to all created things without obtaining an answer. As Demeter first learns of her daughter from the subterranean Hecate, so does Hiawatha first find the one sought for, Mondamin,[664] in the deepest introversion (descent to the mother). Hiawatha produces from himself, Mondamin, as a mother produces the son. The 375longing for the mother also includes the producing mother (first devouring, then birth-giving). Concerning the real contents of the mysteries, we learn through the testimony of Bishop Asterius, about 390 A.D., the following:

“Is not there (in Eleusis) the gloomiest descent, and the most solemn communion of the hierophant and the priestess; between him and her alone? Are the torches not extinguished, and does not the vast multitude regard as their salvation that which takes place between the two in the darkness?”[665]

That points undoubtedly to a ritual marriage, which was celebrated subterraneously in mother earth. The Priestess of Demeter seems to be the representative of the earth goddess, perhaps the furrow of the field.[666] The descent into the earth is also the symbol of the mother’s womb, and was a widespread conception under the form of cave worship. Plutarch relates of the Magi that they sacrificed to Ahriman, εἰς τόπον ἀνήλιον.[667] Lukian lets the magician Mithrobarzanes εἰς χωρίον ἔρημον καὶ ὑλῶδες καὶ ἀνήλιον,[668] descend into the bowels of the earth. According to the testimony of Moses of the Koran, the sister Fire and the brother Spring were worshipped in Armenia in a cave. Julian gave an account from the Attis legend of a κατάβασις εἰς ἄντρον,[669] from whence Cybele brings up her son lover, that is to say, gives birth to him.[670] The cave of Christ’s birth, in Bethlehem (‘House of Bread’), is said to have been an Attis spelæum.

376A further Eleusinian symbolism is found in the festival of Hierosgamos, in the form of the mystic chests, which, according to the testimony of Clemens of Alexandria, may have contained pastry, salt and fruits. The synthema (confession) of the mystic transmitted by Clemens is suggestive in still other directions:

“I have fasted, I have drunk of the barleydrink, I have taken from the chest and after I have labored, I have placed it back in the basket, and from the basket into the chest.”

The question as to what lay in the chest is explained in detail by Dieterich.[671] The labor he considers a phallic activity, which the mystic has to perform. In fact, representations of the mystic basket are given, wherein lies a phallus surrounded by fruits.[672] Upon the so-called Lovatelli tomb vase, the sculptures of which are understood to be Eleusinian ceremonies, it is shown how a mystic caressed the serpent entwining Demeter. The caressing of the fear animal indicates a religious conquering of incest.[673] According to the testimony of Clemens of Alexandria, a serpent was in the chest. The serpent in this connection is naturally of phallic nature, the phallus which is forbidden in relation to the mother. Rohde mentions that in the Arrhetophories, pastry, in the form of phalli and serpents, were thrown into the cave near the Thesmophorion. This custom was a petition for the bestowal of children and harvest.[674] The snake also plays a large part in initiations under the remarkable title ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός.[675] Clemens observes that the symbol 377of the Sabazios mysteries is ὁ διὰ κόλπων θεός, δράκων δὲ ἐστι καὶ οὗτος διελκόμενος τοῦ κόλπου τῶν τελουμένων.[676]

Through Arnobius we learn:

“Aureus coluber in sinum demittitur consecratis et eximitur rursus ab inferioribus partibus atque imis.”[677]

In the Orphic Hymn 52, Bacchus is invoked by ὑποκόλπιε,[678] which indicates that the god enters into man as if through the female genitals.[679] According to the testimony of Hippolytus, the hierophant in the mystery exclaimed ἱερον ἔτεκε πότνια κοῦρον, Βριμὼ βριμόν (the revered one has brought forth a holy boy, Brimos from Brimo). This Christmas gospel, “Unto us a son is born,” is illustrated especially through the tradition[680] that the Athenians “secretly show to the partakers in the Epoptia, the great and wonderful and most perfect Epoptic mystery, a mown stalk of wheat.”[681]

The parallel for the motive of death and resurrection is the motive of losing and finding. The motive appears in religious rites in exactly the same connection, namely, in spring festivities similar to the Hierosgamos, where the image of the god was hidden and found again. It is an uncanonical tradition that Moses left his father’s house when twelve years old to teach mankind. In a similar manner Christ is lost by his parents, and they find him again as a teacher of wisdom, just as in the Mohammedan 378legend Moses and Joshua lose the fish, and in his place Chidher, the teacher of wisdom, appears (like the boy Jesus in the temple); so does the corn god, lost and believed to be dead, suddenly arise again from his mother into renewed youth. (That Christ was laid in the manger is suggestive of fodder. Robertson, therefore, places the manger as parallel to the liknon.)

We understand from these accounts why the Eleusinian mysteries were for the mystic so rich in comfort for the hope of a better world. A beautiful Eleusinian epitaph shows this:

“Truly, a beautiful secret is proclaimed by the blessed Gods!

Mortality is not a curse, but death a blessing!”

The hymn to Demeter[682] in the mysteries also says the same:

“Blessed is he, the earth-born man, who hath seen this!

Who hath not shared in these divine ceremonies,

He hath an unequal fate in the obscure darkness of death.”

Immortality is inherent in the Eleusinian symbol; in a church song of the nineteenth century by Samuel Preiswerk we discover it again:

“The world is yours, Lord Jesus,

The world, on which we stand,

Because it is thy world

It cannot perish.

Only the wheat, before it comes

Up to the light in its fertility,

Must die in the bosom of the earth

First freed from its own nature.

379“Thou goest, O Lord, our chief,

To heaven through thy sorrows,

And guide him who believes

In thee on the same path.

Then take us all equally

To share in thy sorrows and kingdoms,

Guide us through thy gate of death,

Bring thy world into the light.”

Firmicus relates concerning the Attis mysteries:

“Nocte quadam simulacrum in lectica supinum ponitur et per numeros digestis fletibus plangitur; deinde cum se ficta lamentatione satiaverint, lumen infertur: tunc a sacerdote omnium qui flebant fauces unguentur, quibus perunctis sacerdos hoc lento murmure susurrat: ‘Θαρρεῖτε μύσται τοῦ Θεοῦ σεσωσμένου ἔσται γὰρ ἡμῖν ἐκ πόνου σωτηρία.’”[683]

Such parallels show how little human personality and how much divine, that is to say, universally human, is found in the Christ mystery. No man is or, indeed, ever was, a hero, for the hero is a god, and, therefore, impersonal and generally applicable to all. Christ is a “spirit,” as is shown in the very early Christian interpretation. In different places of the earth, and in the most varied forms and in the coloring of various periods, the Savior-hero appears as a fruit of the entrance of the libido into the personal maternal depths. The Bacchian consecrations represented upon the Farnese relief contain 380a scene where a mystic wrapped in a mantle, drawn over his head, was led to Silen, who holds the “λῖχνον” (chalice), covered with a cloth. The covering of the head signifies death. The mystic dies, figuratively, like the seed corn, grows again and comes to the corn harvest. Proclus relates that the mystics were buried up to their necks. The Christian church as a place of religious ceremony is really nothing but the grave of a hero (catacombs). The believer descends into the grave, in order to rise from the dead with the hero. That the meaning underlying the church is that of the mother’s womb can scarcely be doubted. The symbols of Mass are so distinct that the mythology of the sacred act peeps out everywhere. It is the magic charm of rebirth. The veneration of the Holy Sepulchre is most plain in this respect. A striking example is the Holy Sepulchre of St. Stefano in Bologna. The church itself, a very old polygonal building, consists of the remains of a temple to Isis. The interior contains an artificial spelæum, a so-called Holy Sepulchre, into which one creeps through a very little door. After a long sojourn, the believer reappears reborn from this mother’s womb. An Etruscan ossuarium in the archeological museum in Florence is at the same time a statue of Matuta, the goddess of death; the clay figure of the goddess is hollowed within as a receptacle for the ashes. The representations indicate that Matuta is the mother. Her chair is adorned with sphinxes, as a fitting symbol for the mother of death.

Only a few of the further deeds of Hiawatha can interest us here. Among these is the battle with Mishe-Nahma, the fish-king, in the eighth song. This deserves to be mentioned as a typical battle of the sun-hero. Mishe-Nahma is a fish monster, who dwells at the bottom of the waters. Challenged by Hiawatha to battle, he devours the hero, together with his boat:

“In his wrath he darted upward,

Flashing leaped into the sunshine,

Opened his great jaws, and swallowed

Both canoe and Hiawatha.

“Down into that darksome cavern

Plunged the headlong Hiawatha,

As a log on some black river

Shoots and plunges down the rapids,

Found himself in utter darkness,

Groped about in helpless wonder,

Till he felt a great heart beating,

Throbbing in that utter darkness.

And he smote it in his anger,

With his fist, the heart of Nahma,

Felt the mighty king of fishes

Shudder through each nerve and fibre.

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

Crosswise then did Hiawatha

Drag his birch-canoe for safety,

Lest from out the jaws of Nahma,

In the turmoil and confusion,

Forth he might be hurled, and perish.”

It is the typical myth of the work of the hero, distributed over the entire world. He takes to a boat, fights with the sea monster, is devoured, he defends himself against being bitten or crushed[684] (resistance or stamping motive); having arrived in the interior of the “whale dragon,” he seeks the vital organ, which he cuts off 382or in some way destroys. Often the death of the monster occurs as the result of a fire which the hero secretly makes within him; he mysteriously creates in the womb of death life, the rising sun. Thus dies the fish, which drifts ashore, where, with the assistance of “birds,” the hero again attains the light of day.[685] The bird in this sense probably means the reascent of the sun, the longing of the libido, the rebirth of the phœnix. (The longing is very frequently represented by the symbol of hovering.) The sun symbol of the bird rising from the water is (etymologically) contained in the singing swan. “Swan” is derived from the root sven, like sun and tone. (See the preceding.) This act signifies rebirth, and the bringing forth of life from the mother,[686] and by this means the ultimate destruction of death, which, according to a Negro myth, has come into the world, through the mistake of an old woman, who, at the time of the general casting of skins (for men renewed their youth through casting their skin like snakes), drew on, through absent-mindedness, her old skin instead of a new one, and as a result died. But the effect of such an act could not be of any duration. Again and again troubles of the hero are renewed, always under the symbol of deliverance from the mother. Just as Hera (as the pursuing mother) is the real source of the great deeds of Hercules, so does Nokomis allow Hiawatha no rest, and raises up new difficulties in his path, in form of desperate adventures in which the hero may perhaps conquer, but also, perhaps, may perish. The libido of mankind is always in advance of his consciousness; unless his libido calls him forth to new dangers he sinks into slothful inactivity or, on the other hand, childish longing for the mother overcomes him at the summit of his existence, and he allows himself to become pitifully weak, instead of striving with desperate courage towards the highest. The mother becomes the demon, who summons the hero to adventure, and who also places in his path the poisonous serpent, which will strike him. Thus Nokomis, in the ninth song, calls Hiawatha, points with her hand to the west, where the sun sets in purple splendor, and says to him:

“Yonder dwells the great Pearl-Feather,

Megissogwon, the Magician,

Manito of Wealth and Wampum,

Guarded by his fiery serpents,

Guarded by the black pitch-water.

You can see his fiery serpents,

The Kenabeek, the great serpents,

Coiling, playing in the water.”

This danger lurking in the west is known to mean death, which no one, even the mightiest, escapes. This magician, as we learn, also killed the father of Nokomis. Now she sends her son forth to avenge the father (Horus). Through the symbols attributed to the magician it may easily be recognized what he symbolizes. Snake and water belong to the mother, the snake as a symbol of the repressed longing for the mother, or, in other words, as a symbol of resistance, encircles protectingly and defensively the maternal rock, inhabits the cave, winds itself upwards around the mother tree and guards 384the precious hoard, the “mysterious” treasure. The black Stygian water is, like the black, muddy spring of Dhulqarnein, the place where the sun dies and enters into rebirth, the maternal sea of death and night. On his journey thither Hiawatha takes with him the magic oil of Mishe-Nahma, which helps his boat through the waters of death. (Also a sort of charm for immortality, like the dragon’s blood for Siegfried, etc.)

First, Hiawatha slays the great serpent. Of the “night journey in the sea” over the Stygian waters it is written:

“All night long he sailed upon it,

Sailed upon that sluggish water,

Covered with its mould of ages,

Black with rotting water-rushes,

Rank with flags, and leaves of lilies,

Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal,

Lighted by the shimmering moonlight

And by will-o’-the-wisps illumined,

Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled,

In their weary night encampments.”

The description plainly shows the character of a water of death. The contents of the water point to an already mentioned motive, that of encoiling and devouring. It is said in the “Key to Dreams of Jagaddeva”:[687]

“Whoever in dreams surrounds his body with bast, creepers or ropes, with snake-skins, threads, or tissues, dies.”

I refer to the preceding arguments in regard to this. Having come into the west land, the hero challenges the magician to battle. A terrible struggle begins. Hiawatha 385is powerless, because Megissogwon is invulnerable. At evening Hiawatha retires wounded, despairing for a while, in order to rest:

“Paused to rest beneath a pine-tree,

From whose branches trailed the mosses,

And whose trunk was coated over

With the Dead-man’s Moccasin-leather,

With the fungus white and yellow.”

This protecting tree is described as coated over with the moccasin leather of the dead, the fungus. This investing of the tree with anthropomorphic attributes is also an important rite wherever tree worship prevails, as, for example, in India, where each village has its sacred tree, which is clothed and in general treated as a human being. The trees are anointed with fragrant waters, sprinkled with powder, adorned with garlands and draperies. Just as among men, the piercing of the ears was performed as an apotropaic charm against death, so does it occur with the holy tree. Of all the trees of India there is none more sacred to the Hindoos than the Aswatha (Ficus religiosa). It is known to them as Vriksha Raja (king of trees), Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesvar live in it, and the worship of it is the worship of the triad. Almost every Indian village has an Aswatha,[688] etc. This “village linden tree,” well known to us, is here clearly characterized as the mother symbol; it contains the three gods.

Hence, when Hiawatha retires to rest under the pine-tree,[689] it is a dangerous step, because he resigns himself to the mother, whose garment is the garment of death (the devouring mother). As in the whale-dragon, the 386hero also in this situation needs a “helpful bird”; that is to say, the helpful animals, which represent the benevolent parents:

“Suddenly from the boughs above him

Sang the Mama, the woodpecker;

‘Aim your arrows, Hiawatha,

At the head of Megissogwon,

Strike the tuft of hair upon it,

At their roots the long black tresses;

There alone can he be wounded.’”

Now, amusing to relate, Mama hurried to his help. It is a peculiar fact that the woodpecker was also the “Mama” of Romulus and Remus, who put nourishment into the mouths of the twins with his beak.[690] (Compare with that the rôle of the vulture in Leonardo’s dream. The vulture is sacred to Mars, like the woodpecker.) With the maternal significance of the woodpecker, the ancient Italian folk-superstition agrees: that from the tree upon which this bird nested any nail which has been driven in will soon drop out again.[691] The woodpecker owes its special significance to the circumstance that he hammers holes into trees. (“To drive nails in,” as above!) It is, therefore, understandable that he was made much of in the Roman legend as an old king of the country, a possessor or ruler of the holy tree, the primitive image of the Paterfamilias. An old fable relates how Circe, the spouse of King Picus, transformed him into the Picus Martius, the woodpecker. The sorceress is the “new-creating mother,” who has “magic influence” upon the sun-husband. She kills him, transforms 387him into the soul-bird, the unfulfilled wish. Picus was also understood as the wood demon and incubus, as well as the soothsayer, all of which fully indicate the mother libido.[692] Picus was often placed on a par with Picumnus by the ancients. Picumnus is the inseparable companion of Pilumnus, and both are actually called infantium dii, “the gods of little children.” Especially it was said of Pilumnus that he defended new-born children against the destroying attacks of the wood demon, Silvanus. (Good and bad mother, the motive of the two mothers.)

The benevolent bird, a wish thought of deliverance which arises from introversion,[693] advises the hero to shoot the magician under the hair, which is the only vulnerable spot. This spot is the “phallic” point,[694] if one may venture to say so; it is at the top of the head, at the place where the mystic birth from the head takes place, which even to-day appears in children’s sexual theories. Into that Hiawatha shoots (one may say, very naturally) three arrows[695] (the well-known phallic symbol), and thus kills Megissogwon. Thereupon he steals the magic wampum armor, which renders him invulnerable (means of immortality). He significantly leaves the dead lying in the water—because the magician is the fearful mother:

“On the shore he left the body,

Half on land and half in water,

In the sand his feet were buried,

And his face was in the water.”

Thus the situation is the same as with the fish king, because the monster is the personification of the water 388of death, which in its turn represents the devouring mother. This great deed of Hiawatha’s, where he has vanquished the mother as the death-bringing demon,[696] is followed by his marriage with Minnehaha.

A little fable which the poet has inserted in the later song is noteworthy. An old man is transformed into a youth, by crawling through a hollow oak tree.

In the fourteenth song is a description of how Hiawatha discovers writing. I limit myself to the description of two hieroglyphic tokens:

“Gitche Manito the Mighty,

He, the Master of Life, was painted

As an egg, with points projecting

To the four winds of the heavens.

Everywhere is the Great Spirit,

Was the meaning of this symbol.”

The world lies in the egg, which encompasses it at every point; it is the cosmic woman with child, the symbol of which Plato as well as the Vedas has made use of. This mother is like the air, which is everywhere. But air is spirit; the mother of the world is a spirit:

“Mitche Manito the Mighty,

He the dreadful Spirit of Evil,

As a serpent was depicted,

As Kenabeek, the great serpent.”

But the spirit of evil is fear, is the forbidden desire, the adversary who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its struggle for eternal duration as well, and who introduces into our body the poison of weakness 389and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent. It is all that is retrogressive, and as the model of our first world is our mother, all retrogressive tendencies are towards the mother, and, therefore, are disguised under the incest image.

In both these ideas the poet has represented in mythologic symbols the libido arising from the mother and the libido striving backward towards the mother.

There is a description in the fifteenth song how Chibiabos, Hiawatha’s best friend, the amiable player and singer, the embodiment of the joy of life, was enticed by the evil spirits into ambush, fell through the ice and was drowned. Hiawatha mourns for him so long that he succeeds, with the aid of the magician, in calling him back again. But the revivified friend is only a spirit, and he becomes master of the land of spirits. (Osiris, lord of the underworld; the two Dioscuri.) Battles again follow, and then comes the loss of a second friend, Kwasind, the embodiment of physical strength.

In the twentieth song occur famine and the death of Minnehaha, foretold by two taciturn guests from the land of death; and in the twenty-second song Hiawatha prepares for a final journey to the west land:

“I am going, O Nokomis,

On a long and distant journey,

To the portals of the Sunset,

To the regions of the home-wind,

Of the Northwest-Wind Keewaydin.

“One long track and trail of splendor,

Down whose stream, as down a river,

390Westward, westward, Hiawatha

Sailed into the fiery sunset,

Sailed into the purple vapors,

Sailed into the dusk of evening.

“Thus departed Hiawatha,

Hiawatha the Beloved,

In the glory of the sunset,

In the purple mists of evening,

To the regions of the home-wind,

Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,

To the Islands of the Blessed,

To the kingdom of Ponemah,

To the land of the Hereafter!”

The sun, victoriously arising, tears itself away from the embrace and clasp, from the enveloping womb of the sea, and sinks again into the maternal sea, into night, the all-enveloping and the all-reproducing, leaving behind it the heights of midday and all its glorious works. This image was the first, and was profoundly entitled to become the symbolic carrier of human destiny; in the morning of life man painfully tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his heights. Not seeing his worst enemy in front of him, but bearing him within himself as a deadly longing for the depths within, for drowning in his own source, for becoming absorbed into the mother, his life is a constant struggle with death, a violent and transitory delivery from the always lurking night. This death is no external enemy, but a deep personal longing for quiet and for the profound peace of non-existence, for a dreamless sleep in the ebb and flow of the sea of life. Even in his highest endeavor for harmony and equilibrium, for philosophic 391depths and artistic enthusiasm, he seeks death, immobility, satiety and rest. If, like Peirithoos, he tarries too long in this place of rest and peace, he is overcome by torpidity, and the poison of the serpent paralyzes him for all time. If he is to live he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past, in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must also sacrifice the love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun also sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onwards to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of immortality; fulfilled in children, in works, in posthumous fame, in a new order of things, all of which in their turn begin and complete the sun’s course over again.

The “Song of Hiawatha” contains, as these extracts show, a material which is very well adapted to bring into play the abundance of ancient symbolic possibilities, latent in the human mind, and to stimulate it to the creation of mythologic figures. But the products always contain the same old problems of humanity, which rise again and again in new symbolic disguise from the shadowy world of the unconscious. Thus Miss Miller is reminded through the longing of Chiwantopel, of another mythic cycle which appeared in the form of Wagner’s “Siegfried.” Especially is this shown in the passage in Chiwantopel’s monologue, where he exclaims, “There is not one who understands me, not one who resembles me, not one who has a soul sister to mine.” Miss Miller observes that the sentiment of this passage has the greatest analogy with the feelings which Siegfried experienced for Brunhilde.

392This analogy causes us to cast a glance at the song of Siegfried, especially at the relation of Siegfried and Brunhilde. It is a well-recognized fact that Brunhilde, the Valkyr, gives protection to the birth (incestuous) of Siegfried, but while Sieglinde is the human mother, Brunhilde has the rôle of “spiritual mother” (mother-imago); however, unlike Hera towards Hercules, she is not a pursuer, but benevolent. This sin, in which she is an accomplice, by means of the help she renders, is the reason for her banishment by Wotan. The strange birth of Siegfried from the sister-wife distinguishes him as Horus, as the reborn son, a reincarnation of the retreating Osiris—Wotan. The birth of the young son, of the hero, results, indeed, from mankind, who, however, are merely the human bearers of the cosmic symbolism. Thus the birth is protected by the spirit mother (Hera, Lilith): she sends Sieglinde with the child in her womb (Mary’s flight) on the “night journey on the sea” to the east:

“Onward, hasten;

Turn to the East.

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

O woman, thou cherishest

The sublimest hero of the world

In thy sheltering womb.”

The motive of dismemberment is found again in the broken sword of Siegmund, which was kept for Siegfried. From the dismemberment life is pieced together again. (The Medea wonder.) Just as a smith forges the pieces together, so is the dismembered dead again put together. (This comparison is also found in 393“Timaios” of Plato: the parts of the world joined together with pegs.) In the Rigveda, 10, 72, the creator of the world, Brahmanaspati, is a smith.

“Brahmanaspati, as a blacksmith,

Welded the world together.”

The sword has the significance of the phallic sun power; therefore, a sword proceeds from the mouth of the apocalyptic Christ; that is to say, the procreative fire, the word, or the procreative Logos. In Rigveda, Brahmanaspati is also a prayer-word, which possessed an ancient creative significance:[697]

“And this prayer of the singers, expanding from itself,

Became a cow, which was already there before the world,

Dwelling together in the womb of this god,

Foster-children of the same keeper are the gods.”

—Rigveda x: 31.

The Logos became a cow; that is to say, the mother, who is pregnant with the gods. (In Christian uncanonical phantasies, where the Holy Ghost has feminine significance, we have the well-known motive of the two mothers, the earthly mother, Mary, and the spiritual mother, the Holy Ghost.) The transformation of the Logos into the mother is not remarkable in itself, because the origin of the phenomenon fire-speech seems to be the mother-libido, according to the discussion in the earlier chapter. The spiritual is the mother-libido. The significance of the sword, in the Sanskrit conception, têjas, is probably partly determined by its sharpness, as is shown above, in its connection with the libido conception. 394The motive of pursuit (the pursuing Sieglinde, analogous to Leto) is not here bound up with the spiritual mother, but with Wotan, therefore corresponding to the Linos legend, where the father of the wife is also the pursuer. Wotan is also the father of Brunhilde. Brunhilde stands in a peculiar relation to Wotan. Brunhilde says to Wotan:

“Thou speakest to the will of Wotan By telling me what thou wishest: Who ... am I Were I not thy will?”

Wotan:

I take counsel only with myself, When I speak with thee....

Brunhilde is also somewhat the “angel of the face,” that creative will or word,[698] emanating from God, also the Logos, which became the child-bearing woman. God created the world through his word; that is to say, his mother, the woman who is to bring him forth again. (He lays his own egg.) This peculiar conception, it seems to me, can be explained by assuming that the libido overflowing into speech (thought) has preserved its sexual character to an extraordinary degree as a result of the inherent inertia. In this way the “word” had to execute and fulfil all that was denied to the sexual wish; namely, the return into the mother, in order to attain eternal duration. The “word” fulfils this wish by itself becoming the daughter, the wife, the mother of the God, who brings him forth anew.[699]

395Wagner has this idea vaguely in his mind in Wotan’s lament over Brunhilde:

“None as she knew my inmost thought;

None knew the source of my will

As she;

She herself was

The creating womb of my wish;

And so now she has broken

The blessed union!”

Brunhilde’s sin is the favoring of Siegmund, but, behind this, lies incest: this is projected into the brother-sister relation of Siegmund and Sieglinde; in reality, and archaically expressed, Wotan, the father, has entered into his self-created daughter, in order to rejuvenate himself. But this fact must, of course, be veiled. Wotan is rightly indignant with Brunhilde, for she has taken the Isis rôle and through the birth of the son has deprived the old man of his power. The first attack of the death serpent in the form of the son, Siegmund, Wotan has repelled; he has broken Siegmund’s sword, but Siegmund rises again in a grandson. This inevitable fate is always helped by the woman; hence the wrath of Wotan.

At Siegfried’s birth Sieglinde dies, as is proper. The foster-mother[700] is apparently not a woman, but a chthonic god, a crippled dwarf, who belongs to that tribe which renounces love.[701] The Egyptian god of the underworld, the crippled shadow of Osiris (who celebrated a melancholy resurrection in the sexless semi-ape Harpocrates), is the tutor of Horus, who has to avenge the death of his father.

396Meanwhile Brunhilde sleeps the enchanted sleep, like a Hierosgamos, upon 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!

397Dost 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, 398Siegfried 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 399in 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 400and 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 401in 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 402diabolicam 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 403in 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 404legends 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 405the 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, 406and 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 407it 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 408the 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 409meaning 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. 410Thus 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.

“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:

412“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 413because 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 414peeped 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]

415The 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.”

416Self-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 417through 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 418Lord, 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 419of 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 420malicious 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 421the 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 422typical 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.

423“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?

424Mother! 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?”

425The 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.

426With 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: 427the 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.

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