Psychology of the Unconscious A Study of the...

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):

“To the wise man he said:

A lamb is the substitute for a man.

He gives a lamb for his life,

He gives the heads of lambs for the heads of men,” etc.

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.