792. The spring belongs to the idea as a whole.

793. This idea expresses the divine-infantile blessedness, as in Hyperion’s “Song of Fate.”

794. This portion is especially noteworthy. In childhood everything was given him, and man is disinclined to obtain it once more for himself, because it is won only through “toil and compulsion”: even love costs trouble. In childhood the well of the libido gushed forth in bubbling fulness. In later life it involves hard work to even keep the stream flowing for the onward striving life, because with increasing age the stream has a growing inclination to flow back to its source, if effectual mechanisms are not created to hinder this backward movement or at least to organize it. In this connection belongs the generally accepted idea, that love is absolutely spontaneous; only the infantile type of love is something absolutely spontaneous. The love of an adult man allows itself to be purposefully directed. Man can also say “I will love.” The heights of culture are conditioned by the capacity for displacement of the libido.

795. Motive of immortality in the fable of the death of Empedocles. Horace: Deus immortalis haberi—Dum cupit Empedocles ardentem frigidus Aetnam—Insiluit (Empedocles deliberately threw himself into the glowing Aetna because he wanted to be believed an immortal god).

796. Compare the beautiful passage in the journey to Hades of Odysseus, where the hero wishes to embrace his mother.

The underworld, hell, is indeed the place of unfulfilled longing. The Tantalus motive is found through all of hell.

797. Spielrein’s patient (Jahrbuch, III, p. 345) speaks in connection with the significance of the communion of “the water mixed with childishness; spermatic water, blood and wine.” P. 368 she says: “The souls fallen into the water are saved by God, they fall into the deep abyss—The souls were saved by the son of God.”

798. The φάρμακον ἀθανασίας, the drink of Soma, the Haoma of the Persians, might have been made from Ephedra vulgaris. Spiegel: “Erân. Altertumskunde,” I, p. 433.

799. Like the heavenly city in Hauptmann’s “Hannele”:

800. Richter: 15, 17.

801. Prellwitz: “Griech. Etym.,” s. σκήπτω.

802. Of the father.

803. Fate.

804. Chances and fates.

805. This was really the purpose of all mysteries. They create symbolisms of death and rebirth for the practical application and education of the infantile libido. As Frazer (“The Golden Bough,” I, p. 442) points out, exotic and barbaric peoples have in their initiatory mysteries the same symbolism of death and resurrection, just as Apuleius (“Metam.,” XI, 23) says of the initiation of Lucius into the Isis mysteries: “Accessi confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia vectus elementa remeavi” (I have reached the confines of death and trodden the threshold of Proserpina; passing through all the elements, I have returned). Lucius died figuratively (ad instar voluntariae mortis) and was born anew (renatus).

806. This does not hinder the modern neurasthenic from making work a means of repression and worrying about it.

807. Compare Genesis xlix: 17: “Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”

808. Compare with this the Egyptian representation of the Heaven as woman and cow.

809. Freud: “Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens,” 1912 Jahrbuch, p. 1 ff.

810. This form of question recalls the well-known Indian symbol of the world-bearing animal: an elephant standing upon a tortoise. The elephant has chiefly masculine-phallic significance and the tortoise, like every shell animal, chiefly feminine significance.

811. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Vol. II, p. 171.

812. The neurotic Don Juan is no evidence to the contrary. That which the “habitué” understands by love is merely an infirmity and far different from that which love means!

813. Spiegel: “Erân. Altertumskunde,” II, 667.

814. Freud: “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci,” p. 57: “The almighty, just God and benevolent nature appear to us as a great sublimation of father and mother, rather than revivals and reproductions of the early childish ideas of them. Religiousness leads biologically back to the long-continued helplessness and need of the offspring of man, who, when later he has recognized his real loneliness, and weakness against the great powers of life, feels his condition similar to that of childhood, and seeks to disavow this forlorn state by regressive renewal of the infantile protective powers.”

815. Nietzsche: “Fröhliche Wissenschaft,” Aphorism 157. “Mentiri—give heed!—he muses: immediately he will have a lie prepared. This is a stage of culture, upon which whole peoples have stood. One should ponder over what the Romans meant by mentiri!” Actually the Indo-Germanic root méntis, men, is the same for mentiri, memini and mens. See Walde: “Lat. Etym.,” sub. mendax, memini und mens.

816. See Freud: Jahrbuch, Vol. III, p. 60.

817. Bundehesh, XV, 27. The bull Sarsaok was sacrificed at the destruction of the world. But Sarsaok was the originator of the race of men: he had brought nine of the fifteen human races upon his back through the sea to the distant points of the compass. The primitive bull of Gayomart has, as we saw above, most undoubtedly female and maternal significance on account of his fertility.

818. If for Silberer the mythological symbolism is a process of cognition on the mythological stage (Jahrbuch, Vol. III, p. 664), then there exists, between this view and mine, only a difference of standpoint, which determines a different manner of expression.

819. This series of representations begins with the totem meal.

820. Taurus is astrologically the Domicilium Veneris.

821. There comes from the library of Asurbanipal an interesting Sumeric-Assyrian fragment (Cuneiform Inscr., I, IV, 26, 6. Quoted by Gressmann: “Altorient. Text. und Bild.,” I, p. 101):

822. Compare the remarkable account in Pausanias: VI, 17, 9 ff. “While sleeping, the sperma of Zeus has flowed down upon the earth; in time has arisen from this a demon, with double generative organs; that of a man, and that of a woman. They gave him the name of Agdistis. But the gods changed Agdistis and cut off the male organs. Now when the almond tree which sprang forth from this bore ripe fruit, the daughter of the spring, Sangarios, took of the fruit. When she placed it in her bosom, the fruit disappeared at once; but she found herself pregnant. After she had given birth to the child, a goat acted as protector: when he grew up, he was of superhuman beauty, so that Agdistis fell in love with the boy. His relatives sent the full-grown Attis to Pessinus, in order to marry the king’s daughter. The wedding song was beginning when Agdistis appeared and in delirium Attis castrated himself.”

823. Beloved of the mother of the gods, inasmuch as the Cybeline Attis sheds his human shape in this way and stiffens into this tree trunk.

824. Firmicus: “De error. prof. rel.,” XXVIII. Quoted by Robertson: “Evang. Myths,” p. 136, and Creuzer: “Symbolik,” II, 332.

825. Pentheus, as a hero with a serpent nature; his father was Echion, the adder.

826. The typical sacrificial death in the Dionysus cult.

827. In the festival processions they wore women’s clothes.

828. In Bithynia Attis was called πάπας (papa, pope) and Cybele, Mã. In the early Asiatic religions of this mother-goddess, there existed fish worship and prohibition against fish as food for the priests. In the Christian religion, it is noteworthy that the son of Atargatis, identified with Astarte, Cybele, etc., is called Ἰχθύς (Creuzer: “Symbolik,” II, 60). Therefore, the anagram of the name of Christ = ΙΕΣΟΥΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΘΕΟΥ ΥΙΟΣ ΣΩΤΕΡ = ΙΧΘΥΣ.

829. Spiegel: “Erân. Altertumskunde,” 2, 76.

830. A. Nagel: “Der chinesische Küchengott Tsau-kyun.” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, XI, 23 ff.

831. In Spiegel’s “Parsigrammatik,” pp. 135, 166.

832. Porphyrius says: ὡς καὶ ὁ ταῦρος δημιουργὸς ὡν ὁ Μίθρας καὶ γενέσεως δεσπότης (As the bull is the Creator, Mithra is the Lord of birth).

833. The death of the bull is voluntary and involuntary. When Mithra strangles the bull, a scorpion bites the bull in the testicles (autumn equinox).

834. Benndorf: “Bildwerke des Lateran Museum,” No. 547.

835. “Textes et Monuments,” I, 182.

836. In another place Cumont speaks of “the sorrowful and almost morbid grace of the features of the hero.”

837. Infantilism is merely the result of the much deeper state of introversion of the Christian in contrast to the other religions.

838. The libido nature of the sacrificed is unquestionable. In Persia, a ram helped the first people to the first sin, cohabitation: it is also the first animal which they sacrificed (Spiegel: “Erân. Altertumskunde,” Vol. I, p. 511). The ram is the same as the paradisical serpent, which was Christ according to the Manichaean version. The ancient Meliton of Sardes taught that Christ was a lamb, similar to the ram in the bush, which Abraham sacrificed in place of his son. Here the bush is analogous to the cross (Fragment V, quoted by Robertson: Ibid).

839. See above. “Blood bridegroom of the mother.” From Joshua v: 2 we learn that Joshua again instituted the circumcision and redemption of the first-born: “With this he must have substituted for the sacrifice of children, which earlier it was the custom to offer up to Jehovah, the sacrifice of the male foreskin” (Drews: “Christusmythe,” I, p. 47).

840. See Cumont: Ibid., p. 100.

841. The Zodiacal sign of the sun’s greatest heat.

842. This solution apparently concerns only the dogmatic symbolism. I merely intimate that this sacrificial death was related to a festival of vegetation or of Spring, from which the religious legend originated. The folk customs contain in variations these same fundamental thoughts. (Compare with that Drews: “Christusmythe,” I, p. 37).

843. A similar sacrificial death is that of Prometheus. He was chained to a rock. In another version his chains were drawn through a pillar, which hints at the enchainment to a tree. That punishment was his which Christ took upon himself willingly. The fate of Prometheus therefore recalls the misfortune of Theseus and Peirithoos, who remain bound to the rock, the chthonic mother. According to Athenaeus, Jupiter commanded Prometheus, after he had freed him, to wear a willow crown and an iron ring, by which his lack of freedom and slavery was symbolically represented. (Phoroneus, who in Argos was worshipped as the bringer of fire, was the son of Melia, the ash, therefore tree-enchained.) Robertson compares the crown of Prometheus to the crown of thorns of Christ. The devout carry crowns in honor of Prometheus, in order to represent the captivity (“Evangelical Myths,” p. 126). In this connection, therefore, the crown means the same as the betrothal ring. These are the requisites of the old Hierosgamos with the mother; the crown of thorns (which is of Egyptian derivation according to Athenaeus) has the significance of the painful ascetic betrothal.

844. Hecate.

845. The spear wound given by Longinus to Christ is the substitute for the dagger thrust in the Mithraic bull sacrifice: “The jagged tooth of the brazen wedge” was driven through the breast of the enchained and sacrificed Prometheus (Aeschylus: “Prometheus”).

846. Mention must also be made of the fact that North German mythology was acquainted with similar thoughts regarding the fruitfulness of the sacrificial death on the mother: Through hanging on the tree of life, Odin obtained knowledge of the Runes and the inspiring, intoxicating drink which invested him with immortality.

847. I have refrained in the course of this merely orienting investigating from referring to the countless possibilities of relationship between dream symbolism and the material disclosed in these connections. That is a matter of a special investigation. But I cannot forbear mentioning here a simple dream, the first which a youthful patient brought to me in the beginning of her analysis. “She stands between high walls of snow upon a railroad track with her small brother. A train comes, she runs before it in deadly fear and leaves her brother behind upon the track. She sees him run over, but after the train has passed, the little fellow stands up again uninjured.” The meaning of the dream is clear: the inevitable approach of the “impulse.” The leaving behind of the little brother is the repressed willingness to accept her destiny. The acceptance is symbolized by the sacrifice of the little brother (the infantile personality) whose apparently certain death becomes, however, a resurrection. Another patient makes use of classical forms: she dreamed of a mighty eagle, which is wounded in beak and neck by an arrow. If we go into the actual transference phantasy (eagle = physician, arrow = erotic wish of the patient), then the material concerning the eagle (winged lion of St. Mark, the past splendor of Venice; beak = remembrances of certain perverse actions of childhood) leads us to understand the eagle as a composition of infantile memories, which in part are grouped around the father. The eagle, therefore, is an infantile hero who is wounded in a characteristic manner on the phallic point (beak). The dream also says: I renounce the infantile wish, I sacrifice my infantile personality (which is synonymous with: I paralyze it, castrate the father or the physician). In the Mithra mysteries, in the introversion the mystic himself becomes ἀετός, the eagle, this being the highest degree of initiation. The identification with the unconscious libido animal goes very far in this cult, as Augustine relates: “alii autem sicut aves alas percutiunt vocem coracis imitantes, alii vero leonum more fremunt” (Some move the arms like birds the wings, imitating the voice of the raven, some groan like lions).

848. Miss Miller’s snake is green. The snake of my patient is also green. In “Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” p. 161, she says: “Then a little green snake came into my mouth; it had the finest, loveliest sense, as if it had human understanding; it wanted to say something to me, almost as if it had wished to kiss me.” Spielrein’s patient says of the snake: “It is an animal of God, which has such wonderful colors, green, blue and white. The rattlesnake is green; it is very dangerous. The snake can have a human mind, it can have God’s judgment; it is a friend of children. It will save those children who are necessary for the preservation of human life” (Jahrbuch, Vol. III, p. 366). Here the phallic meaning is unmistakable. The snake as the transformed prince in the fairy tale has the same meaning. See Riklin: “Wish Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales.”

849. A patient had the phantasy that she was a serpent which coiled around the mother and finally crept into her.

850. The serpent of Epidaurus is, in contrast, endowed with healing power. Similia similibus.

851. This Bleuler has designated as Ambivalence or ambitendency. Stekel as “Bi-polarity of all psychic phenomena” (“Sprache des Traumes,” p. 535).

852. I am indebted for permission to publish a picture of this statuette to the kindness of the director of the Veronese collection of antiques.

853. The “Deluge” is of one nature with the serpent. In the Wöluspa it is said that the flood is produced when the Midgard serpent rises up for universal destruction. He is called “Jörmungandr,” which means, literally, “the all-pervading wolf.” The destroying Fenris wolf has also a connection with the sea. Fen is found in Fensalir (Meersäle), the dwelling of Frigg, and originally meant sea (Frobenius: Ibid., p. 179). In the fairy stories of Red Riding Hood, a wolf is substituted in place of a serpent or fish.

854. Compare the longing of Hölderlin expressed in his poem “Empedocles.” Also the journey to hell of Zarathustra through the crater of the volcano. Death is the entrance into the mother, therefore the Egyptian king, Mykerinos, buried his daughter in a gilded wooden cow. That was the guarantee of rebirth. The cow stood in a state apartment and sacrifices were brought to it. In another apartment near the cow were placed the images of the concubines of Mykerinos (Herodotus, II, p. 129 f).

855. Kluge: “Deutsche Etymologie.”

856. The whistling and snapping is a tasteless, archaic relic, an allurement for the theriomorphic divinity, probably also an infantile reminiscence (quieting the child by whistling and snapping). Of similar significance is the roaring at the divinity. (“Mithr. Lit.,” p. 13): “You are to look at him and give forth a long roar, as with a horn, using all your breath, pressing your sides, and kiss the amulet ... etc.” “My soul roars with the voice of a hungry lion,” says Mechthild von Magdeburg. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after God.”—Psalms xlii: 2. The ceremonial custom, as so often happens, has dwindled into a figure of speech. Dementia praecox, however, revivifies the old custom, as in the “Roaring miracle” of Schreber. See the latter’s “Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken,” by which he demands that God, i.e. the Father, so inadequately oriented with humanity, take notice of his existence.

The infantile reminiscence is clear, that is, the childish cry to attract the attention of the parent to himself; the whistling and smacking for the allurement of the theriomorphic attribute, the “helpful animal.” (See Rank: “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.”)