This poem betrays the secret longing for the maternal depths.^[795]

He would like to be sacrificed in the chalice, dissolved in wine like pearls (the “crater” of rebirth), yet love holds him within the light of day. The libido still has an object, for the sake of which life is worth living. But were this object abandoned, then the libido would sink into the realm of the subterranean, the mother, who brings forth again:

This distinctly suggests a renunciation, an envy of one’s own youth, that time of freedom which one would like to retain through a deep-rooted dislike to all duty and endeavor which is denied an immediate pleasure reward. Painstaking work for a long time and for a remote object is not in the nature of child or primitive man. It is difficult to say if this can really be called laziness, but it seems to have not a little in common with it, in so far as the psychic life on a primitive stage, be it of an infantile or archaic type, possesses an extreme inertia and irresponsibility in production and non-production.

The last stanza portends evil, a gazing towards the other land, the distant coast of sunrise or sunset; love no longer holds the poet, the bonds with the world are torn and he calls loudly for assistance to the mother:

These poems describe more plainly than could be depicted with meagre words the persistent arrest and the constantly growing estrangement from life, the gradual deep immersion into the maternal abyss of the individual being. The apocalyptic song of Patmos is strangely related to these songs of retrogressive longing. It enters as a dismal guest surrounded by the mist of the depths, the gathering clouds of insanity, bred through the mother. In it the primitive thoughts of the myth, the suggestion clad in symbols, of the sun-like death and resurrection of life, again burst forth. Similar things are to be found in abundance among sick people of this sort.

I reproduce some significant fragments from Patmos:

These words mean that the libido has now sunk to the lowest depths, where “the danger is great.” (Faust, Part II, Mother scene.) There “the God is near”; there man may find the inner sun, his own nature, sun-like and self-renewing, hidden in the mother-womb like the sun in the nighttime:

With these words the dark phantastic poem passes on. The eagle, the bird of the sun, dwells in darkness—the libido has hidden itself, but high above it the inhabitants of the mountains pass, probably the gods (“Ye are walking above in the light”), symbols of the sun wandering across the sky, like the eagle flying over the depths:

The first is a gloomy picture of the mountains and of time—although caused by the sun wandering over the mountains, the following picture a nearness, and at the same time separation, of the lovers, and seems to hint at life in the underworld,^[796] where he is united with all that once was dear to him, and yet cannot enjoy the happiness of reunion, because it is all shadows and unreal and devoid of life. Here the one who descends drinks the waters of innocence, the waters of childhood, the drink of rejuvenation,^[797] so wings may grow, and, winged, he may soar up again into life, like the winged sun, which arises like a swan from the water (“Wings, to pass across and to return again”):

After the dark and obscure words of the introduction, wherein the poet expresses the prophecy of what is to come, the sun journey begins (“night journey in the sea”) towards the east, towards the ascent, towards the mystery of eternity and rebirth, of which Nietzsche also dreams, and which he expressed in significant words:

“Oh, how could I not be ardent for eternity, and for the nuptial ring of rings—the ring of the return! Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wish children, unless she would be this woman whom I love; for I love thee, O eternity.”

Hölderlin expresses this same longing in a beautiful symbol, the individual traits of which are already familiar to us:

The symbol is apocalyptic, the maternal city in the land of eternal youth, surrounded by the verdure and flowers of imperishable spring.^[799] The poet identifies himself here with John, who lived on Patmos, who was once associated with “the sun of the Highest,” and saw him face to face:

The fundamental pictures are the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Christ, like the self-sacrifice of the sun, which voluntarily breaks its sceptre, the fructifying rays, in the certain hope of resurrection. The following comments are to be noted in regard to “the sceptre of rays”: Spielrein’s patient says, “God pierces through the earth with his rays.” The earth, in the patient’s mind, has the meaning of woman. She also comprehends the sunbeam in mythologic fashion as something solid: “Jesus Christ has shown me his love, by striking against the window with a sunbeam.” Among other insane patients I have come across the same idea of the solid substance of the sunbeam. Here there is also a hint of the phallic nature of the instrument which is associated with the hero. Thor’s hammer, which, cleaving the earth, penetrates deeply into it, may be compared to the foot of Kaineus. The hammer is retained in the interior of the earth, like the treasure, and, in the course of time, it gradually comes again to the surface (“the treasure blooms”), meaning that it was born again from the earth. (Compare what has been said concerning the etymology of “swelling.”) On many monuments Mithra holds a peculiar object in his hands, which Cumont compares to a half-filled tube. Dieterich proves from his papyrus text that the object is the shoulder of the bull, the bear constellation. The shoulder has an indirect phallic meaning, for it is the part which is wanting in Pelops. Pelops was slaughtered by his father, Tantalus, dismembered, and boiled in a kettle, to make a meal for the gods. Demeter had unsuspectingly eaten the shoulder from this feast, when Zeus discovered the outrage. He had the pieces thrown back into the kettle, and, with the help of the life-dispensing Clotho, Pelops was regenerated, and the shoulder which was missing was replaced by an ivory one. This substitution is a close parallel to the substitution of the missing phallus of Osiris. Mithra is represented in a special ceremony, holding the bull’s shoulder over Sol, his son and vice-regent. This scene may be compared to a sort of dedication, or accolade (something like the ceremony of confirmation). The blow of the hammer as a generating, fructifying, inspiring function is retained as a folk-custom and expressed by striking with the twig of life, which has the significance of a charm of fertility. In the neuroses, the sexual meaning of castigation plays an important part, for among many children castigation may elicit a sexual orgasm. The ritual act of striking has the same significance of generating (fructifying), and is, indeed, merely a variant of the original phallic ceremonial. Of similar character to the bull’s shoulder is the cloven hoof of the devil, to which a sexual meaning also appertains. The ass’s jawbone wielded by Samson has the same worth. In the Polynesian Maui myth the jawbone, the weapon of the hero, is derived from the man-eating woman, Muriranga-whenua, whose body swells up enormously from lusting for human flesh (Frobenius). Hercules’ club is made from the wood of the maternal olive tree. Faust’s key also “knows the mothers.” The libido springs from the mother, and with this weapon alone can man overcome death.

It corresponds to the phallic nature of the ass’s jawbone, that at the place where Samson threw it God caused a spring to gush forth^[800] (springs from the horse’s tread, footsteps, horse’s hoof). To this relation of meanings belongs the magic wand, the sceptre in general. Σκῆτρον belongs to σκᾶπος, σκηπάνων, σκήπων = staff; σκηπτός = stormwind; Latin scapus = shaft, stock, scapula, shoulder; Old High German Scaft = spear, lance.^[801] We meet once more in this compilation those connections which are already well known to us: Sun-phallus as tube of the winds, lance and shoulder-blade.

The passage from Asia through Patmos to the Christian mysteries in the poem of Hölderlin is apparently a superficial connection, but in reality a very ingenious train of thought; namely, the entrance into death and the land beyond as a self-sacrifice of the hero, for the attainment of immortality. At this time, when the sun has set, when love is apparently dead, man awaits in mysterious joy the renewal of all life:

Wisdom dwells in the depths, the wisdom of the mother: being one with it, insight is obtained into the meaning of deeper things, into all the deposits of primitive times, the strata of which have been preserved in the soul. Hölderlin, in his diseased ecstasy, feels once more the greatness of the things seen, but he does not care to bring up to the light of day that which he had found in the depths—in this he differs from Faust.

He allows only one hope to glimmer through, formed in scanty words:

But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the west land, was robbed of his treasure by the demon serpent, so does Hölderlin’s poem die away in a painful lament, which betrays to us that no victorious resurrection will follow his descent to the shadows:

This recognition, that man must sacrifice the retrogressive longing (the incestuous libido) before the “heavenly ones” tear away the sacrifice, and at the same time the entire libido, came too late to the poet. Therefore, I take it to be a wise counsel which the unconscious gives our author, to sacrifice the infantile hero. This sacrifice is best accomplished, as is shown by the most obvious meaning, through a complete devotion to life, in which all the libido unconsciously bound up in familial bonds, must be brought outside into human contact. For it is necessary for the well-being of the adult individual, who in his childhood was merely an atom revolving in a rotary system, to become himself the centre of a new system. That such a step implies the solution or, at least, the energetic treatment of the individual sexual problem is obvious, for unless this is done the unemployed libido will inexorably remain fixed in the incestuous bond, and will prevent individual freedom in essential matters. Let us keep in mind that Christ’s teaching separates man from his family without consideration, and in the talk with Nicodemus we saw the specific endeavor of Christ to procure activation of the incest libido. Both tendencies serve the same goal—the liberation of man; the Jew from his extraordinary fixation to the family, which does not imply higher development, but greater weakness and more uncontrolled incestuous feeling, produced the compensation of the compulsory ceremonial of the cult and the religious fear of the incomprehensible Jehovah. When man, terrified by no laws and no furious fanatics or prophets, allows his incestuous libido full play, and does not liberate it for higher purposes, then he is under the influence of unconscious compulsion. For compulsion is the unconscious wish. (Freud.) He is under the dominance of the libido εἱμαρμένη^[803] and his destiny does not lie in his own hands; his adventures, Τύχαι καὶ Μοῖραι,^[804] fall from the stars. His unconscious incestuous libido, which thus is applied in its most primitive form, fixes the man, as regards his love type, in a corresponding primitive stage, the stage of ungovernableness and surrender to the emotions. Such was the psychologic situation of the passing antiquity, and the Redeemer and Physician of that time was he who endeavored to educate man to the sublimation of the incestuous libido.^[805] The destruction of slavery was the necessary condition of that sublimation, for antiquity had not yet recognized the duty of work and work as a duty, as a social need of fundamental importance. Slave labor was compulsory work, the counterpart of the equally disastrous compulsion of the libido of the privileged. It was only the obligation of the individual to work which made possible in the long run that regular “drainage” of the unconscious, which was inundated by the continual regression of the libido. Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds. The best liberation is through regular work.^[806] Work, however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion. In this respect, religious ceremony appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time as the forerunner of modern work.

Miss Miller’s vision treats the problem of the sacrifice of the infantile longing, in the first place, as an individual problem, but if we cast a glance at the form of this presentation, then we will become aware that here it must concern something, which is also a problem of humanity in general. For the symbols employed, the serpent which killed the horse^[807] and the hero voluntarily sacrificing himself, are primitive figures of phantasies and religious myths streaming up from the unconscious.

In so far as the world and all within it is, above all, a thought, which is credited with transcendental “substance” through the empirical need of the same, there results from the sacrifice of the regressive libido the creation of the world; and, psychologically speaking, the world in general. For him who looks backward the world, and even the infinite starry sky, is the mother^[808] who bends over and encloses him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this idea and from the longing for this idea arises the image of the world. From this most simple fundamental thought, which perhaps appears strange to us only because it is conceived according to the principle of desire and not the principle of reality,^[809] results the significance of the cosmic sacrifice. A good example of this is the slaying of the Babylonian primitive mother Tiâmat, the dragon, whose body is destined to form the heaven and the earth. We come upon this thought in its most complete form in Hindoo philosophy of the most ancient date; namely, in songs of Rigveda. In Rigveda 10: 81, 4, the song inquires:

Viçvakarman, the All-Creator, who created the world from the unknown tree, did so as follows:

Rigveda 10: 90, gives answer to these questions. Purusha is the primal being who

One sees that Purusha is a sort of Platonic world soul, who surrounds the world from without. Of Purusha it is said:

The mother symbolism is plain, it seems to me, in the idea of Purusha. He represents the mother-imago and the libido of the child clinging to her. From this assumption all that follows is very easily explained:

This verse is very remarkable; if one wishes to stretch this mythology out on the procrustean bed of logic, sore violence would have to be committed. It is an incredibly phantastic conception that, beside the gods, ordinary “wise men” unite in sacrificing the primitive being, aside from the circumstance that, beside the primitive being, nothing had existed in the beginning (that is to say, before the sacrifice), as we shall soon see. If the great mystery of the mother sacrifice is meant thereby, then all becomes clear:

It is evident that by this is meant not a physical, but a psychological cosmogony. The world arises when man discovers it. He discovers it when he sacrifices the mother; that is to say, when he has freed himself from the midst of his unconscious lying in the mother. That which impels him forward to this discovery may be interpreted psychologically as the so-called “Incest barrier” of Freud. The incest prohibition places an end to the childish longing for the food-giving mother, and compels the libido, gradually becoming sexual, into the path of the biological aim. The libido forced away from the mother by the incest prohibition seeks for the sexual object in the place of the forbidden mother. In this wider psychologic sense, which expresses itself in the allegoric language of the “incest prohibition,” “mother,” etc., must be understood Freud’s paradoxical sentence, “Originally we have known only sexual objects.”^[811] This sentence must be understood psychologically throughout, in the sense of a world image created from within outwards, which has, in the first place, nothing to do with the so-called “objective” idea of the world. This is to be understood as a new edition of the subjective idea of the world corrected by reality. Biology, as a science of objective experience, would have to reject unconditionally Freud’s proposition, for, as we have made clear above, the function of reality can only be partly sexual; in another equally important part it is self-preservation. The matter appears different for that thought which accompanies the biological function as an epiphenomenon. As far as our knowledge reaches, the individual act of thought is dependent wholly or in greatest part on the existence of a highly differentiated brain, whereas the function of reality (adaptation to reality) is something which occurs in all living nature as wholly independent from the act of thought. This important proposition of Freud’s applies only to the act of thought, for thinking, as we may recognize from manifold traces, arose dynamically from the libido, which was split off from the original object at the “incest barrier” and became actual when the first budding sexual emotions began to flow in the current of the libido which goes to the mother. Through the incest barrier the sexual libido is forced away from the identification with the parents, and introverted for lack of adequate activity. It is the sexual libido which forces the growing individual slowly away from his family. If this necessity did not exist, then the family would always remain clustered together in a solid group. Hence the neurotic always renounces a complete erotic experience,^[812] in order that he may remain a child. Phantasies seem to arise from the introversion of the sexual libido. Since the first childish phantasies most certainly do not attain the quality of a conscious plan, and as phantasies likewise (even among adults) are almost always the direct derivates of the unconscious, it is, therefore, highly probable that the first phantastic manifestations arise from an act of regression. As we illustrated earlier, the regression goes back to the presexual stage, as many traces show. Here the sexual libido obtains again, so to speak, that universal capacity of application, or capacity for displacement, which it actually possessed at that stage when the sexual application was not yet discovered. Naturally, no adequate object is found in the presexual stage for the regressive sexual libido, but only surrogates, which always leave a wish; namely, the wish to have the surrogate as similar as possible to the sexual goal. This wish is secret, however, for it is really an incest wish. The unsatisfied unconscious wish creates innumerable secondary objects, symbols for the primitive object, the mother (as the Rigveda says, the creator of the world, “hiding his origin,” enters into things). From this the thought or the phantasies proceed, as a desexualized manifestation of an originally sexual libido.

From the standpoint of the libido, the term “incest barrier” corresponds to one aspect, but the matter, however, may be considered from another point of view.

The time of undeveloped sexuality, about the third and the fourth year, is, at the same time, considered externally, the period when the child finds himself confronted with increased demands from the world of reality. He can walk, speak and independently attend to a number of other things. He sees himself in a relation to a world of unlimited possibilities, but in which he dares to do little or nothing, because he is as yet too much of a baby and cannot get on without his mother. At this time mother should be exchanged for the world. Against this the past rises as the greatest resistance; this is always so whenever man would undertake a new adaptation. In spite of all evidence and against all conscious resolutions, the unconscious (the past) always enforces its standpoint as resistance. In this difficult position, precisely at this period of developing sexuality, we see the dawning of the mind. The problem of the child at this period is the discovery of the world and of the great transsubjective reality. For that he must lose the mother; every step out into the world means a step away from the mother. Naturally, all that which is retrogressive in men rebels against this step, and energetic attempts are made against this adaptation in the first place. Therefore, this period of life is also that in which the first clearly developed neuroses arise. The tendency of this age is one directly opposed to that of dementia præcox. The child seeks to win the world and to leave the mother (this is a necessary result). The dementia præcox patient, however, seeks to leave the world and to regain the subjectivity of childhood. We have seen that in dementia præcox the recent adaptation to reality is replaced by an archaic mode of adaptation; that is to say, the recent idea of the world is rejected in favor of an archaic idea of the world. When the child renounces his task of adaptation to reality, or has considerable difficulties in this direction, then we may expect that the recent adaptation will again be replaced by archaic modes of adaptation. It would, therefore, be conceivable that through regression in children archaic products would naturally be unearthed; that is to say, old ways of functioning of the thought system, which is inborn with the brain differentiation, would be awakened.

According to my available but as yet unpublished material, a remarkably archaic and at the same time generally applicable character seems to appertain to infantile phantasy, quite comparable with the products of dementia præcox. It does not seem improbable that through regression at this age those same associations of elements and analogies are reawakened which formerly constituted the archaic idea of the world. When we now attempt to investigate the nature of these elements, a glance at the psychology of myths is sufficient to show us that the archaic idea was chiefly sexual anthropomorphism. It appears that these things in the unconscious childish phantasy play an extraordinary rôle, as we can recognize from examples taken at random. Just as the sexualism of neuroses is not to be taken literally but as regressive phantasy and symbolic compensation for a recent unachieved adaptation, so is the sexualism of the early infantile phantasy, especially the incest problem, a regressive product of the revival of the archaic modes of function, outweighing actuality. On this account I have expressed myself very vaguely in this work, I am sure, in regard to the incest problem. This is done in order not to be responsible for the idea that I understand by it a gross sexual inclination towards the parents. The true facts of the case are much more complicated, as my investigations point out. Originally incest probably never possessed particularly great significance as such, because cohabitation with an old woman for all possible motives could hardly be preferred to mating with a young woman. It seems that the mother has acquired incestuous significance only psychologically. Thus, for example, the incestuous unions of antiquity were not a result of a love inclination, but of a special superstition, which is most intimately bound up with the mythical ideas here treated. A Pharaoh of the second dynasty is said to have married his sister, his daughter and his granddaughter; the Ptolemies were accustomed also to marriage with sisters; Kambyses married his sister; Artaxerxes married his two daughters; Qobad I (sixth century A. D.) married his daughter. The Satrap Sysimithres married his mother. These incestuous unions are explained by the circumstance that in the Zend Avesta the marriage of relatives was directly commanded;^[813] it emphasized the resemblance of rulers to the divinity, and, therefore, was more of an artificial than a natural arrangement, because it originated more from a theoretical than from a biological inclination. (A practical impetus towards that lay often in the peculiar laws of inheritance left over from the Mutter recht, “maternal right” [matriarchal], period.) The confusion which certainly frequently involved the barbarians of antiquity in regard to the choice of their sexual objects cannot very well be measured by the standard of present-day love psychology. In any case, the incest of the semi-animal past is in no way proportionate to the enormous significance of the incest phantasy among civilized people. This disproportion enforces the assumption that the incest prohibition which we meet even amongst relatively lower races concerns rather the mythical ideas than the biological damage; therefore, the ethnical prohibition almost always concerns the mother and seldom the father. Incest prohibition can be understood, therefore, as a result of regression, and as the result of a libidinous anxiety, which regressively attacks the mother. Naturally, it is difficult or impossible to say from whence this anxiety may have come. I merely venture to suggest that it may have been a question of a primitive separation of the pairs of opposites which are hidden in the will of life: the will for life and for death. It remains obscure what adaptation the primitive man tried to evade through introversion and regression to the parents; but, according to the analogy of the soul life in general, it may be assumed that the libido, which disturbed the initial equilibrium of becoming and of ceasing to be, had been stored up in the attempt to make an especially difficult adaptation, and from which it recedes even to-day.

After this long digression, let us turn back to the song of the Rigveda. Thinking and a conception of the world arose from a shrinking back from stern reality, and it is only after man has regressively assured himself again of the protective parental power^[814] that he enters life wrapped in a dream of childhood shrouded in magic superstitions; that is to say, “thinking,”^[815] for he, timidly sacrificing his best and assuring himself of the favor of the invisible powers, step by step develops to greater power, in the degree that he frees himself from his retrogressive longing and the original lack of harmony in his being.

Rigveda 10, 90, concludes with the exceedingly significant verse, which is of greatest importance for the Christian mysteries as well:

Through the sacrifice a fulness of power was attained, which extends up to the power of the “parents.” Thus the sacrifice has also the meaning of a psychologic maturation process.

In the same manner that the world originated through sacrifice, through the renunciation of the retrospective mother libido, thus, according to the teachings of the Upanishads, is produced the new condition of man, which may be termed the immortal. This new condition is again attained through a sacrifice; namely, through the sacrificial horse which is given a cosmic significance in the teaching of the Upanishads. What the sacrificial horse means is told by Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad 1: 1:

“1. The dawn is truly the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun his eye, the wind his breath, his mouth the all-spreading fire, the year is the body of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back, the atmosphere his body cavity, the earth the vault of his belly, the poles are his sides, the space between the poles his ribs, the seasons his limbs, the months and half-months his joints, day and night his feet, the stars his bones, the clouds his flesh, the food, which he digests, are the deserts; the rivers, his veins; liver and lungs, the mountains; the herbs and trees, his hair; the rising sun is his forepart, the setting sun his hind-part. When he shows his teeth, that is lightning; when he trembles, that is thunder; when he urinates, that is rain; his voice is speech.

“2. The day, in truth, has originated for the horse as the sacrificial dish, which stands before him; his cradle is in the world-sea towards the East; the night has originated for him as the sacrificial dish, which stands behind him; its cradle is in the world-sea of the evening; these two dishes originated in order to surround the horse. As a charger he generated the gods, as champion he produced the Gandharvas, as a racer the demons, as horse mankind. The Ocean is his relative, the ocean his cradle.”

As Deussen remarks, the sacrificial horse has the significance of a renunciation of the universe. When the horse is sacrificed, then the world is sacrificed and destroyed, as it were—a train of thought which Schopenhauer also had in mind, and which appears as a product of a diseased mind in Schreber.^[816] The horse in the above text stands between two sacrificial vessels, from one of which it comes and to the other of which it goes, just as the sun passes from morning to evening. The horse, therefore, signifies the libido, which has passed into the world. We previously saw that the “mother libido” must be sacrificed in order to produce the world; here the world is destroyed by the repeated sacrifice of the same libido, which once belonged to the mother. The horse can, therefore, be substituted as a symbol for this libido, because, as we saw, it had manifold connections with the mother.^[817] The sacrifice of the horse can only produce another state of introversion, which is similar to that before the creation of the world. The position of the horse between the two vessels, which represent the producing and the devouring mother, hint at the idea of life enclosed in the ovum; therefore, the vessels are destined to “surround” the horse. That this is actually so the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad 3: 3 proves:

“1. From where have the descendants of Parikshit come, that I ask thee, Yâjñavalkya! From where came the descendants of Parikshit?

“2. Yâjñavalkya spake: ‘He has told thee, they have come from where all come, who offer up the sacrificial horse. That is to say, this world extends so far as two and thirty days of the chariot of the Gods (the sun) reach. This (world) surrounds the earth twice around. This earth surrounds the ocean twice around. There is, as broad as the edge of a razor or as the wing of a fly, a space between (the two shells of the egg of the world). These were brought by Indra as a falcon to the wind: and the wind took them up into itself and carried them where were the offerers of the sacrificial horse. Somewhat like this he spoke (Gandharva to thee) and praised the wind.’

“Therefore is the wind the special (vyashti) and the wind the universal (samashti). He, who knows this, defends himself from dying again.”

As this text tells us, the offerers of the sacrificial horse come in that narrowest fissure between the shells of the egg of the world, at that place, where the shells unite and where they are divided. The fissure (vagina) in the maternal world soul is designated by Plato in “Timaeus” by Χ, the symbol of the cross. Indra, who as a falcon has stolen the soma (the treasure attainable with difficulty), brings, as Psychopompos, the souls to the wind, to the generating pneuma, which carries them forward to the fissure or vagina, to the point of union, to the entrance into the maternal egg. This train of thought of the Hindoo philosophy briefly and concisely summarizes the sense of innumerable myths; at the same time it is a striking example of the fact that philosophy is internally nothing else but a refined and sublimated mythology. It is brought to this refined state by the influence of the corrector of reality.^[818] We have emphasized the fact that in the Miller drama the horse is the first to die, as the animal brother of the hero. (Corresponding to the early death of the half-animal Eabani, the brother friend of Gilgamesh.) This sacrificial death recalls the whole category of mythological animal sacrifices. Volumes could be filled with parallels, but we must limit ourselves here to suggestions. The sacrificial animal, where it has lost the primitive meaning of the simple sacrificial gift, and has taken a higher religious significance, stands in a close relation to both the hero and the divinity. The animal represents the god himself;^[819] thus the bull^[820] represents Zagreus, Dionysus and Mithra; the lamb represents Christ,^[821] etc. As we are aware, the animal symbols represent the animal libido. The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature. This is most clearly expressed in the religious legend of Attis. Attis is the son lover of the divine mother, Agdistis Cybele. Agdistis was characteristically androgynous,^[822] as symbol of the mother-libido, like the tree; really a clear indication that the mother-imago has in addition to the significance of the likeness of the real mother the meaning of the mother of humanity, the libido in general. Driven mad by the insanity-breeding mother enamored of him, he emasculates himself, and that under a pine tree. (The pine tree plays an important rôle in his service. Every year a pine tree was wreathed about and upon it an image of Attis was hung, and then it was cut down, which represents the castration.) The blood, which spurted to the earth, was transformed into budding violets. Cybele now took this pine tree, bore it into her cavern and there wept over it. (Pietà.) The chthonic mother takes her son with her into the cavern—namely, into the womb—according to another version. Attis was transformed into the pine tree. The tree here has an essentially phallic meaning; on the contrary, the attaching of the image of Attis to the tree refers also to the maternal meaning. (“To be attached to the mother.”) In Ovid (“Metamorphoses,” Book X) the pine tree is spoken of as follows: