SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
the shining, fiery day-star. This gives the words of John the Baptist a special significance (Matthew 3: 11): 
I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier than I ... he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire. 
	293 	Following Vollers, we may compare Khidr and Elias (or 
Moses and his servant Joshua) with Gilgamesh and his brother Eabani (Enkidu). Gilgamesh wanders through the world, driven by fear and longing, to find immortality. (PI. XIX.) His journey takes him across the sea to the wise Utnapishtim (Noah), who knows how to cross the waters of death. There Gilgamesh has to dive down to the bottom of the sea for the magical herb that is to lead him back to the land of men. On the return journey he is accompanied by an immortal mariner, who, banished by the curse of Utnapishtim, has been forbidden to return to the land of the blessed. But when Gilgamesh arrives home, a serpent steals the magic herb from him (i.e., the fish slips back into the sea). Because of the loss of the magic herb, Gilgamesh's journey has been in vain; instead he comes back in the company of an immortal, whose fate we cannot learn from the fragments of the epic. J ensen 51 believes that this banished immortal is the prototype of Ahasuerus. 
	294 	Once again we meet the motif of the Dioscuri: mortal and 
immortal, the setting and rising sun. The Mithraic bull-sacrifice is often represented as flanked by the two dadophors, Cautes and Cautopates, one with a raised and the other with a lowered torch. (Cf. pI. xxb.) They form a pair of brothers whose characters are revealed by the symbolic position of the torches. Cumont not unjustly connects them with the sepulchral Erotes, who as genies with inverted torches have a traditional meaning. One would stand for death, the other for life. There are certain points of resemblance between the Mithraic sacrifice (where the bull in the centre is flanked on either side by dadophors) and the Christian sacrifice of the lamb (or ram). The Crucified 51 Gilgamesch-Epos, I, p. 50. When revi~ing this book, I left the above account, which is based mainly on Jensen, in its original form, though certain details could have been Sll pplemented by the results of recent research. I refer the reader to Heidel, The Gilgamesh EPic and Old Testament Parallels; Schott, Das Gilgamesch-Epos; Speiser's version in Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts; and especially to Thompson's remarkable trans., The EPic of Gilgamish. 
200 

IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE HERO 
is traditionally flanked by two thieves, one of whom ascends to paradise while the other descends to hell.52 The Semitic gods were often flanked by two paredroi; for instance, the Baal of Edessa was accompanied by Aziz and Monimos (Baal" being astrologically interpreted as the sun, and Aziz and Monimos as Mars and Mercury). According to the Babylonian view, the gods are grouped into triads. Thus the two thieves somehow go together with Christ. The two dadophors are, as Cumont has shown, offshoots 53 from the main figure of Mithras, who was supposed to have a secret triadic character. Dionysius the Areopagite reports that the magicians held a feast in honour of TOU Tpt-7rAarJ[OV MWpov 54 (the threefold Mithras). 
	295 	As Cumont observes, 55 Cautes and Cautopates sometimes 
carry in their hands the head of a bull and of a scorpion respectively. Taurus and Scorpio are equinoctial signs, 56 and this is a clear indication that the sacrifice was primarily connected with the sun cycle: the rising sun that sacrifices itself at the summer solstice, and the setting sun. Since it was not easy to represent sunrise and sunset in the sacrificial drama, this idea had to be shown outside it.57 
	296 	We have already pointed out that the Dioscuri represent a 
similar idea in somewhat different form: one sun is mortal, the other immortal. As this whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an 52 The difference between this and the Mithraic sacrifice is significant. The dadophors are harmless gods of light who take no part in the sacrifice. The Christian scene is much more dramatic. The inner relation of the dadophors to Mithras, of which I will speak later, suggests that there was a similar relation between Christ and the two thieves. 
53 For instance, there is the following dedication on a monument: "D[eo] I[nvicto] M[ithrae] Cautopati." One finds that "Deo Mithrae Caute" or "Deo Mithrae Cautopati" is interchangeable with "Deo Invicto Mithrae" or "Deo Invicto," or simply "Invicto." Sometimes the dadophors are equipped with knife and bow, the attributes of Mithras. From this we can conclude that the three figures represent three different states, as it were, of a single person. CL Cumont, Textes, I, pp. 208f. 
54 Ibid., p. 208f .• , 55 Ibid., p. 210. 
56 For the period from 4300 to 2150 H.C. SO, although these signs had long been superseded, they were preserved in the cults until well into the Christian era. 57 The triadic symbolism of the drama is discussed in my "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity." 
201 

IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE HERO 
knobs, which, like the fingers we mentioned earlier,. have a phallic meaning. It seems to be a phallic wheel such as was not unknown in antiquity. There are obscene gems on which Cupid is shown turning a wheel consisting entirely of phalli.60 As to what the sun signifies, I discovered in the collection of antiquities at Verona a late Roman inscription with the following symbols: 61 
The symbolism is plain: sun = phallus, moon = vessel (uterus). This interpretation is confirmed by another monument from the same collection. The symbols are the same, except that the vessel 62 has been replaced by the figure of a woman. Certain symbols on coins can probably be interpreted in a similar manner. In Lajard's Recherches sur la culle de Venus there is a coin from Perga, showing Artemis as a conical stone flanked by a masculine figure (alleged to be the deity Men) and a female figure (alleged to be Artemis). Men (otherwise called Lunus) appears on an Attic bas-relief with a spear, flanked by Pan with a club, and a female figure.63 From this it is clear that sexuality as well as the sun can be used to symbolize the libido. 
One further point deserves mention here. The dadophor Cautopates is often represented with a cock 64 and pine-cones. These are the attributes of the Phrygian god Men (pI. XXIa) , whose cult was very widespread. He was shown with the pileus 65 (or "Phrygian cap") and pine-cones, riding on the cock, and also 
60 An illustration of the periodicity or rhythm expressed in sexuality. 
61 Reproduced not from a photograph, but from a drawing I myself made. 
62 In a myth of the Bakairi Indians, of Brazil, a woman appears who sprang from a corn mortar. A Zulu mxth tells a woman to catch a drop of blood in a pot, then close the pot, put it aside for eight months, and open it again in the ninth month. She follows this advice, opens the pot in the ninth month, and finds a child inside it. (Frobenius, I, p. 237.) 
63 Roscher, Lexikon, n, 2733/4, s.v. "Men." 
	64 A well-known sun-animal. 	65 Like Mithras and the dadophors. 
203 
297 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal. Man is mortal, yet there are exceptions who are immortal, or there is something immortal in us. Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de SaintGermain, are our immortal part which continues intangibly to exist. The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of alllife.58 The life of the psyche is the life of mankind. Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race, since the individual is, biologically speaking, only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted. 
The psychic life-force, the libido, symbolizes itself in the sun 59 or personifies itself in figures of heroes with solar attributes. At the same time it expresses itself through phallic symbols. Both possibilities are found on a late Babylonian gem from Lajard's collection (fig. 19). In the middle stands an androgynous deity. On the masculine side there is a snake with a sun halo round its head; on the feminine side another snake with a sickle moon above it. This picture has a symbolic sexual nuance: on the masculine side there is a lozenge, a favourite symbol of the female genitals, and on the feminine side a wheel without its rim. The spokes are thickened at the ends into 68 The Shvetashvatara Upanished (4, 6ff.) uses the following parable to describe the individual and the universal soul, the personal and transpersonal atman: 
Behold, upon the selfsame tree, 
Two birds, fast-bound campanions, sit. This one enjoys the ripened fruit, 
The other looks, but does not eat. 
On such a tree my spirit crouched, Deluded by its powerlessness, 
Till seeing with joy how great its Lord, It found from sorrow swift release ...• 
Hymns, sacrifices, Vedic lore, 
Past, future, all by him are taught. The Maya-Maker thinks the world In which by Maya we are caught. 
(Trans. based on Hume, pp. 403f.) 119 Among the elements composing man, the Mithraic liturgy lays particular stress on fire as the divine element, describing it as TO Eis lj.lr,v Kpa,TtV (Jroa':"p7/TOV (the divine gift in my composition). Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, p. 58. 
202 

298 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
in the form of a boy, just as the dadophors were boyish figures. (This latter characteristic relates both them and Men to the Cabiri and Dactyls.) Now Men has affinities with Attis, the son and lover of Cybele. In Imperial times Men and Attis merged into one. Attis also wears the pileus like Men, Mithras, and the dadophors. As the son and lover of his mother he raises the incest problem. Incest leads logically to ritual castration in the Attis-Cybele cult; for according to legend the hero, driven mad by his mother, mutilates himself. I must refrain from going into 
this question more deeply at present, as I would prefer to discuss the incest problem at the end of this book. Here I would only point out that the incest motif is bound to arise, because when the regressing libido is introverted for internal or external reasons it always reactivates the parental imagos and thus apparently re-establishes the infantile relationship. But this relationship cannot be re-established, because the libido is an adult libido which is already bound to sexuality and inevitably imports an incompatible, incestuous character into the reactivated relationship to the parents.66 It is this sexual character that now gives rise to the incest symbolism. Since incest must be avoided at all costs, the result is either the death of the sonlover or his self-castration as punishment for the incest he has 
66 This explanation is not satisfactory, because I found it impossible to go into the archetypal incest problem and all its complications here. I have dealt with it at some length in my "Psychology of the Transference." 
204 

Fig. 19. Androgynous divinity Late Babylonian gem 

IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE HERO 
committed, or else the sacrifice of instinctuality, and especial of sexuality, as a means of preventing or expiating the incest ous longing. (Cf. fig. 20.) Sex being one of the most obvio examples of instinctuality, it is sex which is liable to be mo affected by these sacrificial measures, i.e., through abstinenc The heroes are usually wanderers,67 and wandering is a symh of longing,68 of the restless urge which never finds its objec of nostalgia for the lost mother. The sun comparison can easil be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sUI from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a sola myth. It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a sel representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its ur quenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciow ness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being le! astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will 0' th, wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep well of being and for unconscious communion with life in all it countless forms. Here I must make way for the master, who ha: plumbed to the root of these Faustian longings: 
Fig. 20. Cybele and her son-lover Attis Roman coin 
MEPHISTOPHELES: This lofty mystery I must now unfold. 
Goddesses throned in solitude, sublime, Set in no place, still less in any time, 
At the mere thought of them my blood runs cold. They are the Mothers! 
Goddesses, unknown to mortal mind, And named indeed with dread among our kind. 
To reach them you must plumb earth's deepest vault; That we have need of them is your own fault. 
F AUST: Where leads the way? 
	MEPHIsToPHELEs: 	There's none! To the un trodden, 
Untreadable regions-the unforgotten 
And unforgettable-for which prepare! 
There are.tlO bolts, no hatches to be lifted, Through endless solitudes you shall be drifted. Can you imagine Nothing everywhere? 
67 Like Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Heracles, Mithras, etc. 
68 Cf. Graf, Richard Wagner im Fliegenden Holliinder. 
205 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO Supposing you had swum across the ocean And gazed upon the immensity of space, 
Still you would see wave after wave in motion, 
And even though you feared the world should cease, You'd still see something-in the limpid green 
Of the calm deep are gliding dolphins seen, 
The flying clouds above, sun, moon, and star. 
But blank is that eternal Void afar. 
You do not hear your footfall, and you meet No solid ground on which to set your feet. 
Here, take this key. 
.............. 
The key will smell the right place from all others: 
Follow it down, it leads you to the Mothers. 
.......................... 
Then to the depthsl-I could as well say height: 
It's all the same. From the Existent fleeing, 
Take the free world of forms for your delight, Rejoice in things that long have ceased from being. The busy brood will weave like coiling cloud, 
But swing your key to keep away the crowd! 
A fiery tripod warns you to beware, 
This is the nethermost place where now you are. You shall behold the Mothers by its light, 
Some of them sit, some walk, some stand upright, Just as they please. Formation, transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation. 
Thronged round with images of things to be, They see you not, shadows are all they see. Then pluck up heart, the danger here is great, Approach the tripod, do not hesitate, 
And touch it with the key.69 
69 Trans. based on MacNeice, pp. 175ff., and on an unpubl. trans. by Philip Wayne. 
206 

v 
SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	300 	The vision that follows the birth of the hero is described by 
Miss Miller as a "swarm of people." We know that this image symbolizes a secret,l or rather, the unconscious. The possession of a secret cuts a person off from his fellow human beings. Since it is of the utmost importance for the economy of the libido that his rapport with the environment should be as complete and as unimpeded as possible, the possession of subjectively important secrets usually has a very disturbing effect. It is therefore especially beneficial for the neurotic if he can at last disburden himself of his secrets during treatment. I have often noticed that the symbol of the crowd, and particularly of a streaming mass of people in motion, expresses violent motions of the unconscious. Such symbols always indicate an activation of the unconscious and an incipient dissociation between it and the ego. 
	3°1 	The vision of the swarm of people undergoes further de- 
velopment: horses appear, and a battle is fought. 
	3°2 	For the time being, I would like to follow Silberer and place 
the meaning of these visions in the "functional" category, because, fundamentally, the idea of the swarming crowd is an expression for the mass of thoughts now rushing in upon consciousness. The same is true of the battle, and possibly of the horses, which symbolize movement or energy. The deeper meaning of the horses will only become apparent in our treatment of mother-symbols. The next vision has a more definite character and a more significant content: Miss Miller sees a "dreamcity." The pictur-e is similar to one she had seen a short time before on the cover of a magazine. Unfortunately, further details are lacking. But one can easily imagine that this dream-city is something very beautiful and ardently longed for-a kind of 1 Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 245-46, 288. 
207 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
heavenly Jerusalem, as the poet of the Apocalypse dreamt it.2 (Cf. pI. XXlIa.) 
	303 	The city is a maternal symbol, a woman who harbours the 
inhabitants in herself like children. It is therefore understandable that the three mother-goddesses, Rhea, Cybele, and Diana, all wear the mural crown (pI. xXIvb). The Old Testament treats the cities of Jerusalem, Babylon, etc. just as if they were women. Isaiah (47 : df.) cries out: 
Come down, and sit in the dust, 0 virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne, 0 daughter of the Chaldaeans: for thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate. 
Take the millstones, and grind meal: uncover thy locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers. 
Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen: 
I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man ... - 
Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, 0 daughter of the Chaldaeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. 
	304 	Jeremiah (so: 12) says of Babylon: 
Your mother shall be sore confounded; she that bare you shall be ashamed. 
	305 	Strong, unconquered cities are virgins; colonies are sons and 
daughters. Cities are also harlots; Isaiah (23: 16) says of Tyre: 
Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten, 
and (1 : 21): 
How is the faithful city become an harlot! 
	306 	We find a similar symbolism in the myth of Ogyges, the pre- 
historic king of Egypt who reigned in Thebes, and whose wife was appropriately called Thebe. The Boeotian city of Thebes founded by Cadmus received on that account the cognomen "Ogygian." This cognomen was also applied to the great Flood, which was called "Ogygian" because it happened under Ogyges. We shall see later on that this coincidence can hardly be accidental. The fact that the city and the wife of Ogyges both have the same name indicates that there must be some relation between the city and the woman, which is not difficult to under2 Today we would call it a mandala symbol of the self. 
208 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
stand because the city is identical with the woman. There is a similar idea in Hindu mythology, where Indra appears as the husband of Urvara. But Urvara means the "fertile land." In the same way the seizure of a country by the king was regarded as his marriage with the land. Similar ideas must also have existed in Europe. Princes at their accession had to guarantee a good harvest. The Swedish king Domaldi was actually killed as a result of failure of the crops (Ynglinga Saga, 18). In the Hindu Ramayana, the hero Rama marries Sita, the furrow. To the same circle of ideas belongs the Chinese custom of the emperor's having to plough a furrow on ascending the throne. The idea of the soil as feminine also embraces the idea of continuous cohabitation with the woman, a physical interpenetration. The god Shiva, as Mahadeva and Parvati, is both male and female: he has even given one half of his body to his wife Parvati as a dwelling-place (pI. XXIII). The motif of continuous cohabitation is expressed in the well-known lingam symbol found everywhere in Indian temples: the base is a female symbol, and within it standls the phallus.3 (PI. xxv.) This symbol is rather like the phallic baskets and chests of the Greeks. The chest or casket is a female symbol (cf. fig. 21 and pI. un), i.e., the womb, a common enough conception in the older mythologies.4 The chest, barrel, or basket with its precious contents was often thought of as floating on the water, thus forming an analogy to the course of the sun. The sun sails over the sea like an immortal god who every evening is immersed in the maternal waters and is born anew in the morning. 
	3°7 	Frobenius writes: 
If, then, we find the blood-red sunrise connected with the idea that a birth is taking place, the birth of the young sun, the question im mediately arises: Whose is the paternity? How did the woman become pregnant? And since this woman symbolizes the same idea as 
3 Another form of the same motif is the Persian idea of the tree of life, which stands in the lake of rain, Vouru-Kasha. The seeds of this tree were mixed with the water and s~ maintained the fertility of the earth. The Vendidad, 5, 17fL (trans. by Darmesteter, P< 54), says that the waters flow "to the sea Vouru-Kasha, towards the well-watered tree, whereon grow the seeds of my plants of every kind. ... Those plants 1, Ahura-Mazda, rain down upon the earth, to bring food to the faithful, and fodder to the beneficent cow." Another tree of life is the white haoma, which grows in the spring Ardvisura, the water of life. Spiegel, Eraniscne 
	Altertumskunde, I, pp. 465ff. 	4 Examples in Rank, Birth of the Hero. 
209 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
309 
the fish, which means the sea (on the assumption that the sun descends into the sea as well as rises out of it), the strange primitive answer is that the sea has previously swallowed the old sun. The resulting myth is that since the sea-woman devoured the sun and now brings a new sun into the world, she obviously became pregnant in that way.5 

All these sea-going gods are solar figures. They are enclosed in a chest or ark for the "night sea journey" (Frobenius),.often in the company of a woman (pI. xxnb)-an inversion of the actual situation, but linking up with the theme of continuous cohabitation we met above. During the night sea journey the sun-god is shut up in the mother's womb, and often threatened by all kinds of dangers. 
Instead of using numerous separate examples, I shall content myself with reproducing the diagram which Frobenius constructed from numberless myths of this sort: 
	311 	A very close parallel is Noah's journey over the Flood that 
killed all living things; only he and his animals lived to experience a new Creation. A Polynesian myth 7 tells how the hero, in the belly of Kombili, the King Fish, seized his obsidian knife and cut open the fish's belly. "He slipped out and beheld a splendour. Then he sat down and began to think. 'I wonder where I am?' he said to himself. Then the sun rose up with a bound and threw itself from one side to the other." The sun had again slipped out. Frobenius cites from the Ramayana the story of the ape Hanuman, who represents the sun-hero: 
3°8 
", 
The sun, travelling through the air with Hanuman in it, cast a shadow on the sea, a sea-monster seized hold of it and drew Hanuman down from the sky. But when Hanuman saw that the monster was about to devour him, he stretched himself out to enormous size, and the monster followed suit. Then Hanuman shrank to the size of a thumb, slipped into the huge body of the monster, and came out on the other side.7a Hanuman thereupon resumed his flight, and encountered a new obstacle in another sea monster, who was the mother of Rahu, the sun-devouring demon. She also drew Hanuman down to her by his shadow.8 Once more he had recourse to his earlier stratagem, made himself small, and slipped into her body; but scarcely was he inside than he swelled up to gigantic size, burst her, and killed her, and so made his escape.9 
Heat and hair 
	Devouring (WEST 	EAST I Slipping out 
			7( 	Opening 
		. ~".'i~ 		Landing 
o,\p· 
tnovement (sea 1 
~It,"" .ov" ~It,'> 'i 

310 
Frobenius gives the following legend by way of illustration: 

A hero is devoured by a water-monster in the West (devouring). The animal travels with him to the East (sea journey). Meanwhile, the hero lights a fire in the belly of the monster (fire-lighting), and feeling hungry, cuts himself a piece of the heart (cutting off of heart). Soon afterwards, he notices that the fish has glided on to dry land (landing); he immediately begins to cut open the animal from within (opening); then he slips out (slipping out). It was so hot in the fish's belly that all his hair has fallen out (heat and hair). The hero may at the same time free all those who were previously devoured by the monster.6 
	5 Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, p. 30. 	6 Ibid., p. 4111. 
210 
We now understand why the Indian fire-bringer Matarisvan is called "he who swells in the mother." The ark (fig. 21), chest, casket, barrel, ship, ete. is an analogy of the womb, like the sea into which the sun sinks for rebirth. That which swells in the mother can also signify her conquest and death. Fire-making is a pre-eminently conscious act and therefore "kills" the dark state of union with the mother. 
3U In the light of these ideas we can understand the mythological statements about Ogyges: it is he who possesses the mother, the city, and is thus united with the mother; therefore under him came the great flood, for it is typical of the sun myth that the hero, once he is united with the woman "hard to attain," is 
-, 
7 Ibid., pp. 6of. 
7a Elsewhere in the poem we are told that he came out of the monster's right ear (like Rabelais' Gargantua, who was born from the ear of his mother). 

8 This probably means simply his souL No moral considerations are implied. 9 Frobenius, pp. 173f. 
211 
{

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATlON: TWO 

exposed in a cask and thrown out to sea, and then lands on a distant shore to begin a new life. The middle section, the night sea journey in the ark, is lacking in the Ogyges tradition. But the rule in mythology is that the typical parts of a myth can be fitted together in every conceivable variation, which makes it 

Fig, 21. Noah in the Ark 
Enamelled altar of Nicholas of Verdun, I186, Klostel'neuburg, near Vienna 

extraordinarily difficult to interpret one myth without a knowledge of all the others. The meaning of this cycle of myths is clear enough: it is the longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, and to become immortal like the sun. This longing for the mother is amply expressed in the literature of the Bible. I cite first the passage in Galatians 4 : 26ft and 5 : 1: 
212 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. 
Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. 
But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. 
Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman sh::tll not be heir with the son of the freewoman. 
So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. 
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free ... 
	313 	The Christians are children of the Higher City, not sons of 
the earthly city-mother, who is to be cast out; for those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after. the spirit, who are not born from the fleshly mother but from a symbol of the mother. Here again one thinks of the American Indians who say that the first man was born from a sword-hilt and a shuttle. The symbol-creating process substitutes for the mother the city, the well, the cave, the Church, ete. (Cf. pIs. xxna, xxxa.) This substitution is due to the fact that the regression of libido reactivates the ways and habits of childhood, and above all the relation to the mother; 10 but what was natural and useful to the child is a psychic danger for the adult, and this is expressed by the symbol of incest. Because the incest taboo opposes the libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for the libido to be canalized into the mother analogies thrown up by the unconscious. In that way the libido becomes progressive again, and even attains a level of consciousness higher than before. The meaning and purpose of this canalization are particularly evident when the city appears in place of the mother: the infantile attachment (whether primary or secondary) is a crippling limita,tion for the adult, whereas attachment to the city fosters his civic virtues and at least enables him to lead a useful existence. In primitives the tribe takes the place of the city. We find a well-developed city symbolism in the Johannine Apocalypse, where two cities play a great part, one being cursed 10 And, of course, .0 the father, though the relation to the mother naturally takes first place, being on a deeper level. 

213 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
and execrated, the other ardently desired. We read in the Revelation (17: Iff.): 
Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgement of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: 
With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. 
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. 
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 
And upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. 
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with a great admiration. [Fig. 22.] 
	;14 	There now follows a barely intelligible interpretation of 
the vision, the main points of interest being that the seven heads of the dragon signify "seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth." This is probably a direct allusion to Rome, the city whose temporal power oppressed the world at that time. "The waters where the whore [the mother] sitteth" are "peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues," and this too seems to refer to Rome, for she is the mother of peoples and possesses all lands. Just as colonies are called "daughters," so the peoples subject to Rome are like members of a family ruled over by the mother. In another scene the kings of the earth, i.e., the "sons," commit fornication with her. The Apocalypse continues (18: 2££.): 
Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. 
For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her. 
	:15 	This mother, then, is not only the mother of all abomina- 
tions, but the receptacle of all that is wicked and unclean. The 
214 

Fig. 22. The Great Whore of Babylon 
New Testament engraving by H. Burgkmaier, Augsburg, I52J 
birds are soul-images,l1 by which are meant the souls of the damned and evil spirits. Thus the mother becomes the underworld, the City of the Damned. In this primordial image of the woman on the draK~n 12 we recognize Echidna, the mother of 11 In the Babylonian underworld, for instance, the souls wear feather-dresses like birds. Cf. the Gilgamesh Epic. 
12 In a 14th-century copy of the gospels, at Bruges. there is a miniature which shows the "woman," beautiful as the mother of God, standing with the lower half of her body in a dragon. 
21& 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
every hellish horror. Babylon is the symbol of the Terrible Mother, who leads the peoples into whoredom with her devilish temptations and makes them drunk with her wine (cf. fig. 22). Here the intoxicating drink is closely associated with fornication, for it too is a libido symbol, as we have already seen in the soma-fire-sun parallel. 
	316 	After the fall and curse of Babylon, we find the hymn (Rev. 
Ig: 6ff.) which brings us from the lower half of the mother to the upper half, where everything that incest would have made impossible now becomes possible: 
Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. 
Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb 13 is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. 
And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. 
And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. 
13 The Greek text has 1"0 apvlov, 'little goat, kid: a diminutive of the obsolete 6.p~v, 'ram.' (Theophrastus uses it in the sense of "young scion" of a family.) The related word atVlS characterizes a festival held annually in Argos in honour of Linus, where the so-called Linus lament was sung. Linus, the child of Psamathe and Apollo, was exposed at birth by his mother from fear of her father Crotopus, and was torn to pieces by dogs. In revenge Apollo sent a dragon, Poine, into the land of Crotopus, and the oracle at Delphi commanded a yearly lament by the women and maidens for the dead Linus. Honour was also paid to Psamathe. The Linus lament, as Herodotus shows (11, 79), was analogous to the lamentation for Adonis and Tammuz in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt. In Egypt, Linus was called Maneros. Brugsch thinks that the name Maneros comes from the Egyptian cry of lamentation maa-n-chru, 'come to the call: The dragon Poine had the disagreeable habit of tearing children out of their mothers' wombs. All these motifs are to be found in Revelation 12: If., where the child of the sun-woman was threatened by a dragon and afterwards "caught up" to God. Herod's massacre of the innocents is the "human" form of this primordial image. (Cf. Brugsch, Adonisklage und Linoslied.) Dieterich, in Abraxas, refers to the parallel myth of Apollo and Python, of which he gives the following version (based on Hyginus): 
Python, the son of the earth and a mighty dragon. had been told by an oracle that he would be slain by the son of Leto. Leto was with child by Zeus, but Hera arranged matters so that she could only give birth where the sun did not shine. When Python saw that Leto was near her time, he began to pursue her in order to compass her death; but Boreas carried her to Poseidon, who brought her to Ortygia and covered the island wifh waves. Python, unable to find Leto, went back to Parnassus, and Poseidon raised the island out of the sea. Here Leto brought forth. Four days later, Apollo took his revenge and killed Python. 
216 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	317 	The Lamb is the Son of Man who celebrates his nuptials 
with the "woman." Who the "woman" is remains obscure at first, but Rev. 21 : gff. shows us which "woman" is the bride, the Lamb's wife: 
Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb's wife.14 
And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. [Cf. pI. xxna.] 
	318 	After all that has gone before, it is evident from this passage 
that the City, the heavenly bride who is here promised to the Son, is the mother or mother-imago.15 In Babylon the impure maid was cast out, according to Galatians, in order that the mother-bride might be the more surely attained in the heavenly Jerusalem. It is proof of the most delicate psychological perception that the Church Fathers who compiled the canon did not allow the Apocalypse to get lost, for it is a rich mine of primitive Christian symbols.16 The other attributes that are heaped on the heavenly Jerusalem put its mother significance beyond doubt (Rev. 22: If.): 
And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 
14 Rev. 21: 2: "And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down frol;ll God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." 
15 The legend of Shaktideva, related by Somadeva Bhatta, tells how the hero, after he had escaped being devoured by a huge fish (terrible mother), finally sees the golden city and marries his beloved princess. (Frobenius. p. 175.) 
16 In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas (2nd century), the Church is thought of as the virgin mother-wife of Christ. One of the apostle's invocations says (trans. by Walker, p. 404): "Come, holy name of Christ, which is above every name; ;tome, power of the Most High, and perfect compassion; come, grace most high; ~ome, compassionate mother; come, thou that hast charge of the male child; come!Lthou who revealest secret mysteries .... " Another invocation says: "Come, prfect compassion; come, spouse of [lit. "communion with"] man; come, woman I who knowest the mystery of the chosen one; come, woman who layest bare the hidden things, and makest manifest things not to be spoken, holy dove which fuath brought forth twin nestlings; come, secret mother .. :' (trans. by Walker, m~)(li, fied). Cf. also Conybeare. "Die jungfrauliche Kirche und die jungfrauliche Mutter." The connection of the Church with the mother is beyond all doubt (<;:f. pI. xxxa) , also the interpretation of the mother as the spouse. The "communidn with man" points to the motif of continuous cohabitation. The "twin nestlings/I refers to the old legend that Jesus and Thomas were twins, which was based on the Cop tic idea of Jesus and his ka. See the Pistis SoPhia. 
21'7 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 
And there shall be no more curse. 
	P9 	In this passage we meet the water-symbol which we found 
connected with the city in the case of Ogyges. The maternal significance of water (pI. XXVI) is one of the clearest interpretations of symbols in the whole field of mythology,17 so that even the ancient Greeks could say that "the sea is the symbol of generation." From water comes life; 18 hence, of the two deities who here interest us most, Christ and Mithras, the latter is represented as having been born beside a river, while Christ experienced his "rebirth" in the Jordan. Christ, moreover, was born of the rr7J'Y~/9 the sempiternal fons amoris or Mother of God, whom pagan-Christian legend turned into a nymph of the spring. The spring is also found in Mithraism. A Pannonian dedication reads "Fonti perenni." An inscription from Apulum is dedicated to the "Fons aeternus." 20 In Persian, Ardvisura is the fount of the water of life. Ardvisura-Anahita is a goddess of water and love (just as Aphrodite is the "foam-born"). In the Vedas, the waters are called matritamah) 'most maternal.' All living things rise, like the sun, from water, and sink into it again at evening. Born of springs, rivers, lakes, and seas, man at death comes to the waters of the Styx, and there embarks on the "night sea journey." Those black waters of death are the water of life, for death with its cold embrace is the maternal womb, just as the sea devours the sun but brings it forth again. Life knows no death; as the Spirit says in Faust: 
In flood of life, in action's storm I ply on my wave 
With weaving motion 
Birth and the grave, 
A boundless ocean, 
17 Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 399f£., and Abraham, Dreams and Myths, p. 23. 
18 Isaiah 48: I: "Hear ye this, 0 house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah ... " 
	19 Wirth, Aus orientalischen Chroniken. 	20 Cumont, Textes, pp. 106f. 
218 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
Ceaselessly giving Weft of living, Forms unending, 
Glowing and blending .... 21 
	320 	The projection of the mother-imago upon water endows the 
latter with a number of numinous or magical qualities peculiar to the mother. A good example of this is the baptismal water symbolism in the Church (pI. XXVII). In dreams and fantasies the sea or a large expanse of water signifies the unconscious. The maternal aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the latter (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother or matrix of consciousness. Hence the unconscious, when interpreted on the subjective level,22 has the same maternal significance as water. 
	1121 	Another equally common mother-symbol is the wood of life 
(~vXOJl fw~s), or tree of life. The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother. Numerous myths say that human beings came from trees, and many of them tell how the hero was enclosed in the maternal tree-trunk, like the dead Osiris in the cedar-tree, Adonis in the myrtle, ete. (Cf. fig. 23.) Numerous female deities were worshipped in tree form, and this led to the cult of sacred groves and trees. Hence when Attis castrates himself under a pine-tree, he did so because the tree has a maternal significance. Juno of Thespiae was a bough, Juno of Samos a plank, J uno of Argos a pillar, the Carian Diana was an unhewn block of wood, Athene of Lindus a polished column.23 Tertullian called the Ceres of Pharos "rudis palus et informe lignum sine effigie" (a rough and shapeless wooden stake with no face). Athenaeus remarks that the Latona at Delos was ~vAtJlOJl ap.oPcpoJl, 'an amorphous bit of wood.' Tertullian also describes an Attic Pallas as a "crucis stipes" (cross-post). The naked wooden pole, as the name itself indicates (cpaA7JS, palus) Pfahl) pale, pile), is phallic (cf. pLxxvm). The cpaAMs is a pole, a ceremoniallingam carved out of figwood, as are all the Roman statues of Priapus. <PaAOS means the peak or ridge of a helmet, later called KWJlOS, 21 Trans. by Way ne, p. 48. 
22 See my Psychological Types, De£. 52. 
23 Cones were sometimes used instead of columns, as in the cults of Aphrodite, Astarte, etc. 
219 

	323 	Here the various aspects of the psychic life-force, of the ex- 
traordinarily potent," the personified mana-concept, come together in the figure of Rudra: the fiery-white sun, the gorgeous helm, the puissant bull, and the urine (urere, 'to burn'). 
322 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
'cone.' <fJaAA17vo~ (from cpaXM~) means 'wooden'; cpaX-a'Y'Ywf.La is a cylinder; cpaXa'Y~, a round beam. The Macedonian shocktroops when drawn up in battle array were also known as a phalanx, and so is the finger-joint.24 Finally, we have to consider cpaM~, 'bright, shining.' The Indo-European root is '*' bhale, 'to bulge, swell.' 25 Who does not think of Faust's "It glows, it shines, increases in my hand!" 26 
This is "primitive" libido symbolism, which shows how direct is the connection between libido and light. We find much the same thing in the invocations to Rudra in the RigVeda: 
May we obtain favour of thee, 0 ruler of heroes, maker of bountiful water [i.e., urine]. ... 
We call down for our help the fiery Rudra, who fulfils the sacrifice, the seer who circles in the sky .... 
He who yields sweetness, who hears our invocations, the ruddyhued with the gorgeous helm, let him not deliver us into the power of jealousy. 
The bull of the Marut has gladdened me, the suppliant, with more 
vigorous health .... 
Let a great hymn of praise resound to the ruddy-brown bull, the white-shining (sun); let us worship the fiery god with prostrations; let us sing of the glorious being of Rudra. 
May the arrow of Rudra be turned from us; may the anger of the fiery god pass us by. Unbend thy firm bow (?) for the princes; thou who blessest with the waters of thy body, be gracious to our children and grandchildren.27 
24 For the symbolism of the finger-joint, see my remarks on the dactyls, pars. 180-84. Here I would like to add the following from a Bakairi myth: "Nimagakaniro swallowed two Bakairi finger-bones. There were many of these lying about the house, because Oka used them for tipping his arrows, and killed many Bakairi and ate their flesh. From these finger-bones, and not from Oka. the woman became pregnant." (Frobenius, p. 236.) 
	25 Further evidence in Prellwitz, Warterbuch. 	26 [CI. par. 180, above.] 
27 Respectively, in I, 114: 3 and 4: in 11, 33: 5, 6, 8, and 14. Trans. from Siecke. "Der Gott Rudra im Rigveda," pp. 237ff. 
220 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	324 	Not only the gods, but the goddesses, too, are libido-symbols, 
when regarded from the point of view of their dynamism. The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth. In this way the goddesses, as we have seen, come to possess phallic symbols, even though the latter are essentially masculine. One of the main reasons for this is that, just as the female lies hidden in the male (Pl. XXIX), so the male lies hidden in the female.28 The feminine quality of the tree that represents the goddess (cf. pI. XXXI) is contaminated with phallic symbolism, as is evident from the genealogical tree that grows out of Adam's body. In my Psychology and Alchemy I have reproduced, from a manuscript in Florence, a picture of Adam showing the membrum virile as a tree.29 Thus the tree has a bisexual character, as is also suggested by the fact that in Latin the names of trees have masculine endings and the feminine gender.30 
	325 	The tree in the following dream of a young woman patient 
brings out this hermaphroditism: 31 She was in a garden, where she found an exotic-looking tree with strange red fleshy flowers or fruits. She picked and ate them. Then, to her horror, she felt that she was poisoned. 
	326 	As a result of sexual difficulties in her marriage, the dream- 
er's fancy had been much taken by a certain young man of her acquaintance. The tree is the same tree that stood in Paradise, and it plays the same role in this dream as it did for our first parents. It is the tree of libido, which here represents the feminine as well as the masculine side, because it simply expresses the relationship of the two to one another. 
	327 	A Norwegian riddle runs: 
A tree stands on the Billinsberg, Drooping over a lake. 
Its branches shine like gold. You won't guess that today. 
28 Cf. the anima/animus theory in my later writings. 29 Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 131, p. 245. 
30 The fig-tree is phallic:'It is worth noting that Dionysus planted a fig-tree at the entrance to Hades, in the same way that phalloi were placed on graves. The cypress, sacred to Aphrodite, the Cyprian, became an emblem of death, and used to be placed at the door of houses where people were dying. 
31 Concerning hermaphroditism. see Psychology and Alchemy, index, s.v. "hermaphrodite." 
221 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	328 	In the evening the sun's daughter collects the golden 
branches that have dropped from the wonderful oak. 
Bitterly weeps the sun-child In the apple orchard. 
From the apple-tree has fallen The golden apple. 
Weep not, sun-child, 
God will make another 
Of gold or bronze, 
Or a little silver one. 
	129 	The various meanings of the tree-sun, tree of Paradise, 
mother, phallus-are explained by the fact that it is a libidosymbol and not an allegory of this or that concrete object. Thus a phallic symbol does not denote the sexual organ, but the libido, and however clearly it appears as such, it does not mean itself but is always a symbol of the libido. Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown. The tertium comparationis for all these symbols is the libido, and the unity of meaning lies in the fact that they are all analogies of the same thing. In this realm the fixed meaning of things comes to an end. The sole reality is the libido, whose nature we can only experience through its effect on us. Thus it is not the real mother who is symbolized, but the libido of the son, whose object was once the mother. We take mythological symbols much too concretely and are puzzled at every turn by the endless contradictions of myths. But we always forget that it is the unconscious creative force which wraps itself in images. When, therefore, we read: "His mother was a wicked witch," we must translate it as: the son is unable to detach his libido from the mother-imago, he suffers from resistances because he is tied to the mother. 
	3° 	The water and tree symbolism, which we found as further 
attributes of the symbol of the city, likewise refer to the libido that is unconsciously attached to the mother-imago. In certain passages of the Apocalypse we catch a clear glimpse of this longing for the mother.32 Also, the author's eschatological expecta32 The relationship of the son to the mother was the psychological basis of numerous cults. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 322) was struck by Christ's relationship to the two Marys, and he conjectures that it probably points 
222 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
tions end with the mother: "And there shall be no more curse." There shall be no more sin, no more repression, no more disharmony with oneself, no guilt, no fear of death and no pain of separation, because through the marriage of the Lamb the son is united with the mother-bride and the ultimate bliss is attained. This symbol recurs in the nuptiae chymicae} the coniunctio of alchemy.33 
	331 	Thus the Apocalypse dies away on that same note of radiant, 
mystic harmony which was re-echoed some two thousand years later in the last prayer of "Doctor Marianus": 
•	contrite hearts, seek with your eyes The face of your salvation; Blissful in that gaze, arise 
Through glad regeneration. 
Now may every pulse of good Seek to serve before Thy face, Virgin, Queen of Motherhood, 
Keep us, Goddess, in Thy grace.34 
	332 	The beauty and nobility of these feelings raises in our minds 
a question of principle: is the causal interpretation of Freud correct in believing that symbol-formation is to be explained solely by prevention of the primary incest tendency, and is thus a mere substitute product? The so-called "incest prohibition" which is supposed to operate here is not in itself a primary phenomenon, but goes back to something much more fundamental, namely the primitive system of marriage classes which, in its turn, is a vital necessity in the organization of the tribe. So it is more a question of phenomena requiring a teleological explanation than of simple causalities. Moreover it must be pointed out that the basis of the "incestuous" desire is not cohabitation, but, as every sun myth shows, the strange idea of 
to an old myth "in which a Palestinian God, perhaps named Joshua, figures in the changing relat.ions of lover and son towards a mythic Mary-a natural fluctuation in early theosophy and one which occurs with a difference in the myths of Mithras, Adonis, A,ttis, Osiris, and Dionysus, all of whom are connected with Mother-Goddesses and either a consort or a female double, the mother and consort being at times identified." 
33 [Cf. the "Psychology of the Transference" and the Mysterium Coniunctionis. -EDITORS.] 
34 Faust, Part 11, Act 5, based on an unpub. trans. by Philip Wayne. 223 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
becoming a child again, of returning to the parental shelter, and of entering into the mother in order to be reborn through her. But the way to this goal lies through incest, i.e., the necessity of finding some way into the mother's body. One of the simplest ways would be to impregnate the mother and beget oneself in identical form all over again. But here the incest prohibition intervenes; consequently the sun myths and rebirth myths devise every conceivable kind of mother-analogy for the purpose of canalizing the libido into new forms and effectively preventing it from regressing to actual incest. For instance, the mother is transformed into an animal, or is made young again,35 and then disappears after giving birth, i.e., is changed back into her old shape. It is not incestuous cohabitation that is desired, but rebirth. The incest prohibition acts as an obstacle and makes the creative fantasy inventive; for instance, there are attempts to make the mother pregnant by means of fertility magic. The effect of the incest-taboo and of the attempts at canalization is to stimulate the creative imagination, which gradually opens up possible avenues for the self-realization of libido. In this way the libido becomes imperceptibly spiritualized. The power which "always desires evil" thus creates spiritual life. That is why the religions exalt this procedure into a system. It is instructive to see the pains they take to further the translation into symbols.36 The New Testa35 Rank (Die Lohengrinsage) has found some beautiful examples of this in the myth of the swan-maiden. 
36 Muther (Geschichte der Malerei, n. p. 355) says. in his chapter on "The First Spanish Classics": "Tieck once wrote: 'Sexuality is the great mystery of our being. sensuality the first cog in our machinery. It stirs our whole being and makes it alive and joyful. All our dreams of beauty and nobility have their source here. Sensuality and sexuality constitute the essence of music. of painting, and of all the arts. All the desires of mankind revolve round this centre like moths round a flame. The sense of beauty and artistic feeling are only other dialects, other expressions. They signify nothing more than the sexual urge of mankind. I regard even piety as a diverted channel for the sexual impulse.' This clearly expresses what one should never forget when judging the old ecclesiastical art, that the struggle to efface the boundaries between earthly and heavenly love. to blend them into each other imperceptibly, has always been the guiding thought, the most powerful impulse of the Catholic Church." To this I would add that it is hardly possible to restrict this impulse to sexuality. It is primarily a question of primitive instinctuality. of insufficiently differentiated libido which prefers to take a sexual form. Sexuality is by no means the only form of the "full feeling of life." There are some passions that cannot be derived from sex. 
224 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
r.lent gives us an excellent example of this: in the dialogue about rebirth (John 3: 4ff.), Nicodemus cannot help taking the matter realistically: 
How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? 
	333 	Jesus tries to purify the sensuous cast of N icodemus' mind 
by rousing it from its dense materialistic slumbers, and translates the passage into the same, and yet not the same, words: 
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 
That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is sPirit. 
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. 
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. 
	334 	To be born of water simply means to be born of the mother's 
womb; to be born of the Spirit means to be born of the fructifying breath of the wind, as can be seen from the Greek text of the passages italicized above, where spirit and wind are expressed by the same word, 7rP€uJ.La: "7'0 'Y€'Y€PJ.I'T/J.LEPOP EK 7'~5 uapK05 uap~ EUrLP, Kat 7'0 'Y€'Y€PP'T/J.LEPOP EK 7'OU 7rP€/JJ.LaT05 7rP€UJ.La EUrLP •••• To 7rP€uJ.La inrov (JEAEL 7rP€L." 
	335 	T-hi-s--s.ymbG-l-ism-aH}s~jrom the same need as that which pro- 
duced the Egyptian leg-end of ~~y~ltures: they were femafe]mlyan<rwere-fertiTized by the wind. The basIsof these mytliological statements is an ethicardeniand-which'can beformulated thus: you should not say that your mother is impregnated by a man In the-or<Iinaryway,'but is impregnated in some extraordinary way by a spiritual being. As this stands in complete contrast: to t.he empinca1'truth, the myth bridges over the qifficulty by analogy: the son is said to have been a hero woo 
. ~ ~ -- - - "-- .- -- - ,- 
~d,~as born again in a remarkaole manner, and thus attained 
to immortafity. The need responsible for this demand is evi, dently a desire to trans<;end reality. A son may naturally believe that a father begot him in the flesh, but not that he himself can impregnate his mother and so cause himself to be born young again. Such a thought is prohibited by the danger of regression, and is therefore replaced by the above demand that 
225 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
one should, in certain circumstances, express the problem of rebirth in symbolical terms. We see the same thing in Jesus' cha,llenge to Nicodemus: Do not think carnally, or you will be flesh, but think symbolically, and then you will be spirit. It is evident that this compulsion towards the symbolical is a great educative force, for Nicodemus would remain stuck in banalities if he did not succeed in raising himself above his concretism. Had he been a mere Philistine, he would certainly have taken offence at the irrationality and unreality of this advice and understood it literally, only to reject it in the end as impossible and incomprehensible. The reason why Jesus' words have such great suggestive power is that they express the symbolical truths which are rooted in the very structure of the human psyche. The empirical truth never frees a man from his bondage to the senses; it only shows him that he was always so and cannot be otherwise. The symbolical truth, on the other hand, which puts water in place of the mother and spirit or fire in place of the father, frees the libido from the channel of the incest tendency, offers it a new gradient, and canalizes it into a spiritual form. Thus man, as a spiritual being, becomes a child again and is born into a circle of brothers and sisters: but his mother has become the "communion of saints," the Church (pI. xxxa) , and his brothers and sisters are humanity, with whom he is united anew in the common heritage of symbolical truth. It seems that this process was especially necessary at the time when Christianity originated; for that age, as a result of the appalling contrast between slavery and the freedom of the citizens and masters, had entirely lost consciousness of the unity of mankind. 
	336 	When we see how much trouble Jesus took to make the 
symbolical view of things acceptable to Nicodemus, as if throwing a veil over the crude reality, and how important it was-and still is-for the history of civilization that people should think in this way, then one is at a loss to understand why the concern of modern psychology with symbolism has met with such violent disapprobation in many quarters. It is as necessary today as it ever was to lead the libido away from the cult of rationalism and realism-not, indeed, because these things have gained the upper hand (quite the contrary), but because the guardians and custodians of symbolical truth, namely the religions, have 
226 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
been robbed of their efficacy by science. Even intelligent people no longer understand the value and purpose of symbolical truth, and the spokesmen of religion have failed to deliver an apologetic suited to the spirit of the age. Insistence on the bare concretism of dogma, or ethics for ethics' sake, or even a humanization of the Christ-figure coupled with inadequate attempts to write his biography, are singularly unimpressive. Symbolical truth is exposed undefended to the attacks of scientific thought, which can never do justice to such a subject, and in face of this competition has been unable to hold its ground. The truth, however, still remains to be proved. Exclusive appeals to faith are a hopeless petitio princiPii) for it is the manifest improbability of symbolical truth that prevents people from believing in it. Instead of insisting so glibly on the necessity of faith, the theologians, it seems to me, should see what can be done to make this faith possible. But that means placing symbolical truth on a new foundation-a foundation which appeals not only to sentiment, but to reason. And this can only be achieved by reflecting how it came about in the first place that humanity needed the improbability of religious statements, and what it signifies when a totally different spiritual reality is superimposed on the sensuous and tangible actuality of this world. 
	337 	The instincts operate most smoothly when there is no con- 
sciousness to conflict with them, or when what consciousness there is remains firmly attached to instinct. This condition no longer applies even to primitive man, for everywhere we find psychic systems at work which are in some measure opposed to pure instinctuality. And if a primitive tribe shows even the smallest traces of culture, we find that creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it towards analogical ideas. These systems have to be constituted in such a way that they offer the libido a kind of natural gradient. For the libido does not incline to anything) otherwise it would be possible to turn it in any direction one chose. But that is the case only with voluntary processes, and then only to a limited degree. The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow. The nature of these analogies is therefore a serious problem because, as we have said, they must be ideas which attract the libido. 
227 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
Their special character is, I believe, to be discerned in the fact that they are archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious. When Christ, for instance, speaks to Nicodemus of spirit and water, these are not just random ideas, but typical ones which have always exerted a powerful fascination on the mind. Christ is here touching on the archetype, and that, if anything, will convince Nicodemus, for the archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed. 
	338 	It is not possible to discuss the problem of symbol-formation 
without reference to the instinctual processes, because it is from them that the symbol derives its motive power. It has no meaning whatever unless it strives against the resistance of Instinct, just as undisciplined instincts would bring nothing but ruin to man if the symbol did not give them form. Hence a discussion of one of the strongest instincts, sexuality, is unavoidable, since perhaps the majority of symbols are more or less close analogies of this instinct. To interpret symbol-formation in terms of instinctual processes is a legitimate scientific attitude, which does not, however, claim to be the only possible one. I readily admit that the creation of symbols could also be explained from the spiritual side, but in order to do so, one would need the hypothesis that the "spirit" is an autonomous reality which commands a specific energy powerful enough to bend the instincts round and constrain them into spiritual forms. This hypothesis has its disadvantages for the scientific mind, even though, in the end, we still know so little about the nature of the psyche that we can think of no decisive reason against such an assumption. In accordance with my empirical attitude I nevertheless prefer to describe and explain symbol-formation as a natural process, though I am fully conscious of the probable one-sidedness of this point of view. 
	339 	As we have said, sex plays an important part in this process, 
even when the symbols are religious. It is less than two thousand years since the cult of sex was in full bloom. In those days, of course, they were heathens and did not know any better, but the nature of the symbol-creating forces does not change from age to age. If one has any conception of the sexual content of those ancient cults, and if one realizes that the experience of 
228 

340 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
union with God was understood in antiquity as a more or less concrete coitus, then one can no longer pretend that the forces motivating the production of symbols have suddenly become different since the birth of Christ. The fact that primitive Christianity resolutely turned away from nature and the instincts in general, and, through its asceticism, from sex in particular, clearly indicates the source from which its motive forces came. So it is not surprising that this transformation has left noticeable traces in Christian symbolism. Had it not done so, Christianity would never have been able to transform libido. It succeeded in this largely because its archetypal analogies were for the most part in tune with the instinctual forces it wanted to transform. Some people profess to be very shocked when I do not shrink from bringing even the sublimest spiritual ideas into relation with what they call the "subhuman." My primary concern, however, is to understand these religious ideas, whose value I appreciate far too deeply to dispose of them with rationalistic arguments. What do we want, anyway, with things that cannot be understood? They appeal only to people for whom thinking and understanding are too much bother. Instead, we ask for blind faith and praise it to the skies. But that, in the end, only means educating ourselves to thoughtlessness and lack of criticism. What the "blind faith" so long preached from the pulpit was able to do in Germany, when that country finally turned its back on Christian dogma, has been bloodily demonstrated before our eyes by contemporary history. The really dangerous people are not the great heretics and unbelievers, bilt the swarm of petty thinkers, the rationalizing intellectuals, who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are. Anything not understood is given short shrift, and the highest values of symbolic truth are irretrievably lost. What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ's sacrificial death, or the Trinity? 
The medical psychotherapist today must make clear to his more educated patients the foundations of religious experience, and set them on the-road to where such an experience becomes possible. If, therefore, as a doctor and scientist, I analyse abstruse religious symbols and trace them back to their origins, my sole purpose is to conserve, through understanding, the values they represent, and to enable people to think symbol- 
229 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
ically once more, as the early thinkers of the Church were still able to do. This is far from implying an arid dogmatism. It is only when we, today, think dogmatically, that our thought becomes antiquated and no longer accessible to modern man. Hence a way has to be found which will again make it possible for him to participate spiritually in the substance of the Christian message. 
	[1 	At a time when a large part of mankind is beginning to dis- 
card Christianity, it may be worth our while to try to understand why it was accepted in the first place. It was accepted as a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness of the ancient world. As soon as we discard it, the old brutality returns in force, as has been made overwhelmingly clear by contemporary events. This is not a step forwards, but a long step backwards into the past. It is the same with individuals who lay aside one form of adaptation and have no new form to turn to: they infallibly regress along the old path and then find themselves at a great disadvantage, because the world around them has changed considerably in the meantime. Consequently, any one who is repelled by the philosophical weakness of Christian dogmatism or by the barren idea of a merely historical J esusfor we know far too little about his contradictory personality and the little we do know only confuses our judgment-and who throws Christianity overboard and with it the whole basis of morality, is bound to be confronted with the age-old problem of brutality. We have had bitter experience of what happens when a whole nation finds the moral mask too stupid to keep up. The beast breaks loose, ahd a frenzy of demoralization sweeps over the civilized world.3T 
	42 	Today there are countless neurotics who are neurotic simply 
because they do not know why they cannot be happy in their own way-they do not even know that the fault lies with them. Besides these neurotics there are many more normal people, men and women of the better kind, who feel restricted and discontented because they have no symbol which would act as an outlet for their libido. For all these people a reductive analysis down to the primal facts should be undertaken, so that they can become acquainted with their primitive personality and learn how to take due account of it. Only in this way can cer8T [Cf. lung's "Wotan."-EDIToRS.] 
23° 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
tain requirements be fulfilled and others rejected as unreasonable because of their infantile character. vVe like to imagine that our primitive traits have long since disappeared without trace. In this we are cruelly disappointed, for never before has our civilization been so swamped with evil. This gruesome spectacle helps us to understand what Christianity was up against and what it endeavoured to transform. The transforming process took place for the most part unconsciously, at any rate in the later centuries. When I remarked earlier (par. 106) that an unconscious transformation of libido was ethically worthless, and contrasted it with the Christianity of the early Roman period, as a patent example of the immorality and brutalization against which Christians had to fight, I ought to have added that mere faith cannot be counted as an ethical ideal either, because it too is an unconscious transformation of libido. Faith is a charisma for those who possess it, but it is no way for those who need to understand before they can believe. This is a matter of temperament and cannot be discounted as valueless. For, ultimately, even the believer believes that God gave man reason, and for something better than to lie and cheat with. Although we naturally believe in symbols in the first place, we can also understand them, and this is indeed the only viable way for those who have not been granted the charisma of faith. 
	343 	The religious myth is one of man's greatest and most sig- 
nificant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe. Considered from the standpoint of realism, the symbol is not of course an external truth, but it is psychologically true, for it was and is the bridge to all that is best in humanity.38 
	344 	Psychological truth by no means excludes metaphysical 
truth, though psychology, as a science, has to hold aloof from all metaphysical assertions. Its subject is the psyche and its contents. Both are realities,because they work. Though we do not possess a physics of the soul, and are not even able to observe it and judge it from some Archimedean point "outside" ourselves, and can therefore know nothing objective about it since all knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic, in spite of all this the soul 88 For the functional significance of the symbol, see my "On Psychic Energy," sec. III (d), on symbol-making (Swiss edn., pp. 8off.). 
231 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
is the only experient of life and existence. It is, in fact, the only immediate experience we can have and the sine qua non of the subjective reality of the world. The symbols it creates are always grounded in the unconscious archetype, but their manifest forms are moulded by the ideas acquired by the conscious mind. The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves. The symbols act as transformers) their function being to convert libido from a "lower" into a "higher" form. This function is so important that feeling accords it the highest values. The symbol works by suggestion; that is to say, it carries conviction and at the same time expresses the content of that conviction. It is able to do this because of the numen, the specific energy stored up in the archetype. Experience of the archetype is not only impressive, it seizes and possesses the whole personality, and is naturally productive of faith. 
	345 	"Legitimate" faith must always rest on experience. There 
is, however, another kind of faith which rests exclusively on the authority of tradition. This kind of faith could also be called "legitimate," since the power of tradition embodies an experience whose importance for the continuity of culture is beyond question. But with this kind of faith there is always the danger of mere habit supervening-it may so easily degenerate into spiritual inertia and a thoughtless compliance which, if persisted in, threatens stagnation and cultural regression. This mechanical dependence goes hand in hand with a psychic regression to infantilism. The traditional contents gradually lose their real meaning and are only believed in as formalities, without this belief having any influence on the conduct of life. There is no longer a living power behind it. The much-vaunted "childlikeness" of faith only makes sense when the feeling behind the experience is still alive. If it gets lost, faith is only another word for habitual, infantile dependence, which takes the place of, and actually prevents, the struggle for deeper understanding. This seems to be the position we have reached today. 
	346 	Since faith revolves round those central and perennially im- 
portant "dominant ideas" which alone give life a meaning, the prime task of the psychotherapist must be to understand the 232 

v. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
symbols anew, and thus to understand the unconscious, compensatory striving of his patient for an attitude that reflects the totality of the psyche. 
	347 	After this digression, let us return to our author. 
	348 	The vision of the city is immediately followed by that of a 
"strange conifer with knotty branches." This image no longer seems strange to us after what we have learned about the tree of life and its association with the mother, the city, and the water of life. The attribute "strange" probably expresses, as in dreams, a peculiar emphasis or numinosity. Unfortunately the author gives us no individual material in this connection. As the tree already suggested in the symbolism of the city is specially emphasized in the further development of the visions, I feel it necessary to discuss at some length the history of tree symbolism. 
	349 	Trees, as is well known, have played a large part in religion 
and in mythology from the remotest times. (PI. XXXI.) Typical of the trees found in myth is the tree of paradise, or tree of life; most people know of the pine-tree of Attis, the tree or trees of Mithras, and the world-ash Yggdrasill of Nordic mythology, and so on. The hanging of Attis, in effigy, on a pine-tree (cf. fig. 42), the hanging of Marsyas, which became a popular theme for art, the hanging of Odin, the Germanic hanging sacrifices and the whole series of hanged gods-all teach us that the hanging of Christ on· the Cross is nothing unique in religious mythology, but belongs to the same circle of ideas. In this world of images the Cross is the Tree of Life and at the same time a Tree of Death-a coffin (cf. pI. XXXVI). Just as the myths tell us that human beings were descended from trees, so there were burial customs in which people were buried in hollow tree-trunks, whence the German Totenbaum) 'tree of death,' for coffin, which is still in use today. If we remember that the tree is predominantly a mother-symbol, then the meaning of this mode of burial becomes clear. The dead are delivered back to the mother for rebirth. (6f. fig. 23 and pI. XLII.) We meet this symbol in the myth of Os iris as handed down by Plutarch.39 Rhea was pregnant with Osiris and his twin sister Isis, and they mated together even in their mother's womb (night sea journey with 39 De [side et Osiride, in Babbitt trans., pp. 31-33. 
233 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
incest). Their son was Arueris, later called Horus. Isis is said to have been "born in the All-"\Vetness" (h 7ral'{rypots 'Y~l'k(1)at), and of Osiris it is related that a certain Pamyles of Thebes, whilst drawing water, heard a voice from the temple of Zeus which commanded him to proclaim that Osiris, "the great and beneficent king" (Ilhas (3aoLAdJs evep'YkT7Js), was born. In honour of this Pamyles the Pamylia were celebrated, similar to the Phallophoria. Pamyles seems, therefor~, to have been originally a phallic daimon, like Dionysus. In his phallic form he represents the creative power which "draws" things out of the unconscious (i.e., the water) and begets the god (Osiris) as a conscious content. This process can be understood both as an individual experience: Pamyles drawing water, and as a symbolic act or experience of the archetype: a drawing up from the depths. What is drawn up is a numinous, previously unconscious content which would remain dark were it not interpreted by the voice from above as the birth of a god. This type of experience recurs in the baptism in the Jordan, Matthew 3: 17. 
	350 	Osiris was killed in a crafty manner by the god of the under- 
world, Set (Typhon in Greek), who locked him in a chest. He was thrown into the Nile and carried out to sea. But in the underworld Osiris mated with his second sister, N ephthys. One can see from this how the symbolism is developed: already in his mother's womb, before his extra-uterine existence, Os iris commits incest; and in death, the second intra-uterine existence, he again commits incest, both times with a sister, for in remote antiquity brother-and-sister marriages were not only tolerated, but were a mark of the aristocracy. Zarathustra likewise recommended consanguineous marriages. 
	351 	The wicked Set lured Osiris into the chest by a ruse, in 
other words the original evil in man wants to get back into the mother again, and the illicit, incestuous longing for the mother is the ruse supposedly invented by Set. It is significant that it is "evil" which lures Osiris into the chest; for, in the light of teleology, the motif of containment signifies the latent state that precedes regeneration. Thus evil, as though cognizant of its imperfection, strives to be made perfect through rebirth-"Part of that power which would / Ever work evil, but engenders good!" 40 The ruse, too, is significant: man tries to sneak into 40 Faust, Part I, trans. by Wayne, p. 75, modified. 
234 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
rebirth by a subterfuge in order to become a child again. That is how it appears to the "rational" mind. An Egyptian hymn 41 even charges Isis with having struck down the sun god Ra by treachery: it was because of her ill will towards her son that she banished and betrayed him. The hymn describes how Isis fashioned a poisonous snake and set it in his path, and how the snake wounded the sun-god with its bite. From this wound he never recovered, so that he finally had to retire on the back of the heavenly cow. But the cow was the cow-headed mothergoddess (pI. xxxb), just as Osiris was the bull Apis. The mother is accused as though she were the cause of his having to fly to her in order to be cured of the wound she herself had inflicted. But the real cause of the wound is the incest-taboo,42 which cuts a man off from the security of childhood and early youth, from all those unconscious, instinctive happenings that allow the child to live without responsibility as an appendage of his parents. There must be contained in this feeling many dim memories of the animal age, when there was as yet no "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not," and everything just happened of itself. Even now a deep resentment seems to dwell in man's breast against the brutal law that once separated him from instinctive surrender to his desires and from the beautiful harmony of animal nature. This separation manifested itself in the incest prohibition and its correlates (marriage laws, food-taboos, etc.). So long as the child is in that state of unconscious identity with the mother, he is still one with the animal psyche and is just as unconscious as it. The development of consciousness inevitably leads not only to separation from the mother, but to separation from the parents and the whole family circle and thus to a relative degree of detachment from the unconscious and the world of instinct. Yet the longing for this lost world continues and, when difficult adaptations are demanded, is forever tempting one to make evasions and retreats, to regress to the infantile 
41 Erman, Lite in Ancient Egypt, p. 265. 
42 Here I must again rl;:!,Ilind the reader that I give the word "incest" a different meaning from that which properly belongs to it. Incest is the urge to get back to childhood. For the child, of course, this cannot be called incest; it is only for an adult with a fully developed sexuality that this backward striving becomes incest, because he is no longer a child but possesses a sexuality which cannot be allowed a regressive outlet. 
235 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
past, which then starts throwing up the incestuous symbolism. If only this temptation were perfectly clear, it would be possible, with a great effort of will, to free oneself from it. But it is far from clear, because a new adaptation or orientation of vital importance can only be achieved in accordance with the instincts. Lacking this, nothing durable results, only a convulsively willed, artificial product which proves in the long run to be incapable of life. No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is. When such a change becomes necessary, the previous mode of adaptation, already in a state of decay, is unconsciously compensated by the archetype of another mode. If the conscious mind now succeeds in interpreting the constellated archetype in a meaningful and appropriate manner, then a viable transformation can take place. Thus the most important relationship of childhood, the relation to the mother, will be compensated by the mother archetype as soon as detachment from the childhood state is indicated. One such successful interpretation has been, for instance, Mother Church (cf. pI. xxxa), but once this form begins to show signs of age and decay a new interpretation becomes inevitable. 
	352 	Even if a change does occur, the old form loses none of its 
attractions; for whoever sunders himself from the mother longs to get back to the mother. This longing can easily turn into a consuming passion which threatens all that has been won. The mother then appears on the one hand as the supreme goal, and on the other as the most frightful danger-the "Terrible Mother." 43 
	353 	After completing the night sea journey, the coffer contain- 
ing Osiris was cast ashore at Byblos and came to rest in the branches of a cedar-tree, which shot up and enclosed the coffer in its trunk (cf. fig. 23). The king of the country, admiring the splendid tree, caused it to be cut down and made into a pillar supporting the roof of his house.44 This period of Osiris' absence (the winter solstice) coincides with the age-old lament for 
43 Frobenius, Zeitalter. 
44 This recalls the phallic columns set up in the temples of Astarte. In fact, according to one version, the king's wife was named Astarte. This symbol is also reminiscent of the crosses which were aptly called ~'YK6A1I'La. (pregnant), because they had a secret reliquary inside them. 
236 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
the dead god, and his EVPECHS (finding) was celebrated as a feast of joy. 
	354 	Later on Set dismembered the body and scattered the pieces. 
We find this motif of dismemberment in numerous sun-myths 45 as a contrast to the putting together of the child in the mother's womb. Actually Isis collected the pieces together again with the help of the jackal-headed Anubis. Here the dogs and jackals, 

Fig. 23. Osiris in the cedar-coffin Relief, Dendera, Egypt 
devourers of corpses by night, assist in the reconstitution or reproduction of Osiris.46 To this necrophagous function the Egyptian vulture probably owes its symbolic mother significance. In ancient times the Persians used to throw out their corpses for the dogs to devour, just as, today in Tibet, the dead are left to the vultures,46a and in Bombay, where the Parsis expose their corpses on the "towers of silence." The Persians had the custom 
45 Spielrein (pp. 358ft.) found numerous allusions to this motif in an insane patient. Fragments of <i~fferent things and materials were "cooked" or "burnt." "The ashes can turn into a man," said the patient, and she also saw "dismembered children in glass coffins." 
46 Demeter collected the limbs of the dismembered Dionysus and put him together again. 
46a [CL Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet, p. 61.-EDITORS.] 
237 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
of leading a dog to the bedside of a dying man, who then had to give the dog a morsel to eatY This custom suggests that the morsel should belong to the dog, so that he will spare the body of the dying man, just as Cerberus was pacified with the honeycakes which Heracles gave him on his journey to hell. But when we consider the jackal-headed Anubis (pI. xxxIla) who rendered such good service in gathering together the remains of Osiris, and the mother significance of the vulture, the question arises whether this ceremony may not have a deeper meaning. This problem has been taken up by Creuzer,48 who comes to the conclusion that the deeper meaning is connected with the astral form of the dog ceremony, i.e., the appearance of the dog-star at the highest point of the solstice. Hence the bringing in of the dog would have a compensatory significance, death being made equal to the sun at its highest point. This is a thoroughly psychological interpretation, as can be seen from the fact that death is quite commonly regarded as an entry into the mother's womb (for rebirth). The interpretation would seem to be supported by the otherwise enigmatic function of the dog in the Mithraic sacrifice. In the monuments a dog is often shown leaping upon the bull killed by Mithras. In the light of the Persian legend, and on the evidence of the monuments themselves, this sacrifice should be conceived as the moment of supreme fruitfulness. This is most beautifully portrayed in the Mithraic relief at Heddernheim (pI. XXXIII). On one side of a large (formerly rotating) stone slab there is a stereotyped representation of the overthrow and sacrifice of the bull, while on the other side stand Sol with a bunch of grapes in his hand, Mithras with the cornucopia, and the dadophors bearing fruits, in accordance with the legend that from the dead bull comes all fruitfulness: fruits from his horns, wine from his blood, corn from his tail, cattle from his semen, garlic from his nostrils, and so forth. Over this scene stands Sylvanus, the beasts of the forest leaping away from him. 
	355 	In this context the dog might very well have the significance 
suspected by Creuzer. Moreover the goddess of the underworld, Hecate, is dog-headed, like Anubis. As Canicula, she received dog sacrifices to keep away the pest. Her close relation to the 47 Diodoms. Ill, 62 (cf. Oldfather and Geer trans., 11, pp. 285ff.). 
48 Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Viilker. 
238 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
moon-goddess suggests that she was a promoter of growth. Hecate was the first to bring Demeter news of her stolen daughter, another reminder of Anubis. Dog sacrifices were also offered to Eileithyia, the goddess of birth, and Hecate herself (cf. pI. LVIII) is, on occasion, a goddess of marriage and birth. The dog is also the regular companion of Aesculapius, the god of healing, who, while still a mortal, raised a man from the dead and was struck by a thunderbolt as a punishment. These associations help to explain the following passage in Petronius: 
I earnestly beseech you to paint a small dog round the foot of my statue ... so that by your kindness I may attain to life after death.49 
	356 	But to return to the myth of Osiris: although Isis had man- 
aged to collect the pieces of the body, its ,resuscitation was only partially successful because the phallus could not be found; it had been eaten by the fishes, and the reconstituted body lacked vital force.5o The phantom Osiris lay once more with Isis, but the fruit of their union was Harpocrates, who was weak "in the lower limbs" (yvLov), i.e., in the feet. In the above-mentioned hymn, Ra was wounded in the foot by the serpent of Isis. The foot, as the organ nearest the earth, represents in dreams the relation to earthly reality and often has a generative or phallic significance.51 The name Oedipus, 'Swell-foot,' is suspicious in this respect. Os iris, although only a phantom, now makes the young sun (his son Horus) ready for battle with Set, the evil spirit of darkness. Osiris and Horus represent the father-son symbolism mentioned at the beginning. Os iris is thus flanked by the comely Horus and the misshapen Harpocrates, who is mostly shown as a cripple, sometimes distorted to the point of 49 Satyricon, ch. 71. [Cf. HeseItine trans., pp. 136-37.] ("Valde te rogo, ut secundum pedes statuae meae catellam pingas ... ut mihi contingat tuo beneficio post mortem vivere.") 
60 Frobenius (Zeitalter, p. 393) observes that the fire-gods (sun-heroes) often have a limb missing. He gives the following parallel: "Just as the god wrenches out the ogre's arm, so Odysseus puts out the eye of the noble Polyphemus, whereupon the sun creeps mysteriQusly into the sky. Is there a connection between the twisting of the fire-sticks and the twisting out of the arm?" The main elements here are firstly a mutilation. and secondly a twisting movement, which Frobenius rightly connects with fire-boring. The mutilation is a castration in the case of Attis, and something similar in the case of Osiris. 
51 Cf. Aigremont, Fuss- und Schuhsymbolik. 
239 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
freakishness. It is just possible that the motif of the unequal brothers has something to do with the primitive conception that the placenta is the twin-brother of the new-born child. 
	357 	Osiris is frequently confused in tradition with Horus. The 
latter's real name is Horpi-chrud,52 which is composed of chrud (child), and Hor (from hri) 'up, above, on top'). The name thus signifies the "up-and-coming child," the rising sun, as opposed to Osiris, who personifies the setting sun, the sun "in the Western Land." So Osiris and Horpi-chrud are one being, both husband and son of the same mother. Khnum-Ra, the sun-god of Lower Egypt, is a ram, and his consort, the female divinity of the nome, is Hatmehit, who wears the fish on her head. She is the mother and spouse of Bi-neb-did ('ram,' the local name for Khnum-Ra). In the hymn of Hibis, Amon-Ra is invoked as follows: 
Thy Ram dwelleth in Mendes, united as the fourfold god Thmuis. He is the phallus, lord of the gods. The bull of his mother rejoiceth in the cow, and the husband maketh fruitful through his seed.53 
	358 	In other inscriptions 54 Hatmehit is called the "mother of 
Mendes." (Mendes is the Greek form of Bi-neb-did.) She is also invoked as "The Good," with the subsidiary meaning of tano/ert) "young woman." The cow as a mother-symbol (cf. pI. La) appears in all the innumerable forms and variations of HathorIsis (cf. pI. xxxb), and also in the feminine aspect of Nun (whose parallel is the primitive goddess Nit or Neith), the primary substance-moistl1re-which is both masculine and feminine by nature. Nun is therefore invoked 55 as "Amon, the primordial waters, 56 which was in the beginning." He is also called the father of fathers, the mother of mothers. The corresponding invocation to Nun-Amon's feminine aspect, Nit or Neith, says: 
Nit, the Ancient, the Mother of God, Mistress of Esne, Father of Fathers, Mother of Mothers, who is the Scarab and the Vulture, who was in the beginning. 
52 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, p. 354. 
	53 Ibid., p. 310. 	54 Ibid., p. 310. 	55 Ibid., pp. 112ft 
56 In Thebes the chief god Khnum, in his cosmogonic aspect, represented the wind·breath, from which the "spirit (7rVEUJ.la) of God moving over the waters" was later developed-the primitive idea of the World Parents lying pressed together until the son separates them. 
24° 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
Nit, the Ancient, the mother who bore Ra, the God of Light, who brought forth when there was nothing which brought forth. 
The Cow, the Ancient, who bore the sun and set the seeds of gods and men.57 [CL figs. 24, 25.] 
Fig. 24. Nut giving birth to the Sun Relief, Egypt 
	359 	The word nun means 'young, fresh, new,' and also the new 
flood-waters of the-1\f ile. In a metaphorical sense it is used for the chaotic waters of the beginning, and for the birth-giving primary substance,58 which is personified as the goddess Naunet. 
	57 Brugsch, pp. 114f. 	58 Ibid., pp. 128f. 
241 

	
Thus the fate of Osiris is eXplained: he enters into the mother's womb, into the coffer, the sea, the tree, the Astarte column; is dismembered, put together again, and reappears in his son Horpi-chrud. 
Before we enter upon the other mysteries which this myth has in store for us, it will be as well to say a few words more about the symbol of the tree. Os iris comes to rest in the branches of a tree, which grow up round him.59 The motif of embracing and entwining is often found in tl1e sun myths and rebirth myths, as in the story of Sleeping Beauty, or the legend of the girl who was imprisoned between the bark and the wood of a tree.60 A primitive myth tells of a sun-hero who has to be 
59 Cf. the similar motif in the Egyptian "Tale of the Two Brothers": Erman, Literature, p. 156. 
60 Serbian folksong, mentioned in Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, n, p. 65!!. 
242 
snp _;A 
lecommg a c~ ~1nd of enterj ~ 
er. But tr ~ 1; 
	• 	CL ,p. 
essay of' 'Y' ~ . , ? C" 
	lmplest% 	ip. 
neself Q-' rohy 
in' 
)" 

NSFORMATION: TWO 
-goddess, who is represented with 'ow dotted with stars (figs. 24, 25). 
\res on the back of the heavenly \k into the mother in order to l.g the goddess is the mother, at evening once more the ') her womb. 
Fig, 25. The Divine Cow From the tomb of Seti I, Egypt 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
freed from a creeping plant.61 The girl dreams that her lover has fallen into the water; she tries to rescue him, but first has to pull seaweed out of the water, then she catches him. In an African myth the hero, after his deed, has to be disentangled from the seaweed. In a Polynesian story the hero's canoe is caught in the tentacles of a giant polyp, just as Ra's barge was entwined by the nocturnal serpent on the night sea journey. The motif of entwining also occurs in Sir Edwin Arnold's poetic version af the story of Buddha's birth: 
Queen Maya stood at noon, her days fulfilled, Under a palsa in the palace-grounds, 
A stately trunk, straight as a temple-shaft, 
With crown of glossy leaves and fragrant blooms; And, knowing the time come-for all things knewThe conscious tree bent down its boughs to make A bower about Queen Maya's majesty: 
And Earth put forth a thousand sudden flowers To spread a couch; while, ready for the bath, The rock hard by gave out a limpid stream 
Of crystal flow. So brought she forth her child.62 
	!!6!! 	There is a very similar motif in the cult-legend of the 
Samian Hera. Every year her image "disappeared" from the temple, attached itself to a lygos-tree somewhere on the seashore, and was entwined in its branches. There it was "found" and regaled with wedding-cakes. This festival was undoubtedly a hieros gamos} for in Samos there was a legend that Zeus had previously had a long-drawn-out clandestine love-affair with Hera. In Plataea and Argos a wedding procession was staged in their honour with bridesmaids, wedding feast, etc. The festival took place in the "wedding month" of Gamelion (beginning of February). The image was carried to a lonely spot in the woods, which is in keeping with Plutarch's story that Zeus kidnapped Hera and hid her in a cave on Mount Cithaeron. After our pre- 
- viousremarks we have to conclude that there is still another 
61 Frobenius, Zeitalter. 
62 The Light of Asia, p. 5. cf.' the birth of the Germanic king Aschanes, where there is a similar conjunction of rock, tree, and water. [Cf. par. 368, below.] Spitteler uses the same motif of the loving tree in his Prometh'eus, to describe how nature receives the "jewel" that was brought to earth. The idea is taken from Buddha's birth· story. Cf. "Om mani padme hum" (the jewel is in the lotus). 
243 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
train of thought connected with the hieros gamosj namely, re· juvenation magic. The disappearance and hiding of the image in the wood, in the cave, on the seashore, its twining-about by the lygos-tree,63 all this points to death and rebirth. The early springtime, Gamelion, fits in very well with this theory. In fact, Pausanias 64 tells us that the Argive Hera became a virgin again by taking a yearly dip in the fountain of Kanathos. The significance of this bath is further increased by the report that, in the Plataean cult of Hera Teleia, Tritonian nymphs appeared as water-carriers. The Iliad describes Zeus' conjugal couch on Mount Ida as follows: 
As he spoke, the Son of Cronos took his wife in his arms; and the gracious earth sent up fresh grass beneath them, dewy lotus and crocuses, and a soft and crowded bed of hyacinths, to lift them off the ground. In this they lay, covered by a beautiful golden cloud, from which a rain of glistening dewdrops fell. ... The Father lay peacefully on top of Gargarus with his arms round his wife, conquered by sleep and love .... 65 
	364 	Drexler sees in this description 66 an allusion to the garden 
of the gods on the extreme Western shore of the ocean-an idea which might have been taken from a pre-Homeric hieros gamos hymn.67 The Western Land is the land of the setting sun; Heracles and Gilgamesh hasten thither, where the sun and the maternal sea are united in an eternally rej:Ivenating embrace. This seems to confirm our conjecture that the hieros gamos is connected with a rebirth myth. Pausanias mentions a related myth-fragment which says that the image of Artemis Orthia was also called Lygodesma) 'willow-captive,' 68 because it was found in a willow-tree. There seems to be Some connection here with the popular Greek festival of the hieros gamos and its abovementioned customs. 
63 Av')'os means 'willow,' or indeed any pliant twig or rod. AV-YcSw means 'to twist, 
	plait, weave.' 	64 Description of Greece, n, 38, 2. 
65 Book XIV, 346-52, trans. by Rieu, p. 266. 
66 Curiously enough, near this point (XIV, 28g-g1) there is a description of Sleep sitting high up in a fir-tree: "There he perched, hidden by the branches with their sharp needles, in the form of a songbird of the mountains" (Rieu, p. 264, modified). It looks as if this motif belonged to the hieros gamos. Cf. also the magic net with which Hephaestus caught Ares and Aphrodite in flagrante and kept them there for the entertainment of the gods. 
	67 See Itoscher, Lexikon, I, 2102, 52ff. 	68 Pausanias, Ill, 16, 11. 
244 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	365 	The motif of "devouring" (pIs. xxxnb, XXXIV), which Frobe 
nius has shown to be one of the commonest components of tht sun myth, is closely connected with embracing and entwining The "whale-dragon" always "devours" the hero, but the devour ing can also be partial. For instance, a six-year-old girl wh( hated going to school once dreamt that her leg was encirclec by a large red worm. Contrary to what might be expected, sht evinced a tender interest in the creature. Again, an adult pa tient who was unable to separate from an older woman frienc on account of a strong mother transference to her, dreamt tha! she had to cross a broad stream. There was no bridge, but sht found a place where she could step across. Just as she was aboUl to do so, a large crab that lay hidden in the water seized hol( of her foot and would not let gO.6\l 
	366 	This picture is borne out by etymology. There is an Indo 
European root *velu,} with the meaning of 'encircling, envelop ing, winding, turning.' From this are derived: Skr. val) valati 'to cover, envelop, surround, encircle'; valli} 'creeping plant' ulUta} 'boa-constrictor' = Lat. volutus; Lith. velu} velti = G wickeln) 'to wind, wrap'; Church Slav. vlina = OHG. wella 'a wave.' A related root is vlvo} 'covering, coil, membrane womb.' Skr. ulva) ulba} has the same meaning; Lat. volva volvula) vulva. Velu is also cognate with ulvora) 'fruitful field sheath or husk of a plant.' Skr. urvdrii} 'sown field'; Zend urvara 'plant.' The same root vel also has the meaning of G. wallen 'boil, undulate.' Skr. ulmuka} 'conflagration'; Gr. FaAl:a, FI:AU. Goth. vulan = wallen. OHG. and MHG. walm = 'warmth.' 7' (It is typical that in the state of "involution" the hero's hail always falls out with the heat.) Vel is also found with the mean ing 'to sound,' 71 and 'to will, wish.' 
	367 	The motif of entwining is a mother-symbol.72 The entwin 
69 See "On the Psychology of the Unconscious," pars. 123ff. 70 Fick, Worterbuch, pp. 13d. 
71 Cf. Goethe's "sonorous day-star," par. 235. 
72 This moti£" also includes that of the "clashing rocks" (Frobenius, p. 405)' Th, hero often has to ste~~ his ship between two rocks that clash together. (A simila idea is that of the biting door or the snapping tree-trunk.) In its passage th, stern of the ship (or the tail of the bird) is pinched off, another reminder of th, mutilation motif (twisting out the arm). The 19th-cent. German poet J. V. vo! Scheffel uses this image in his poem "A herring loved an oyster." The poem end with the oyster nipping off the herring's head in a kiss. The doves which brinl 
245 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
ing trees are at the same time birth-giving mothers (cf. pI. XXXIX), as in the Greek myth where the MEXLat pVMcf>at are ash-trees, the mothers of the men of the Bronze Age. The Bundahish symbolizes the first human beings, Mashya and Mashyoi, as the tree Rivas. According to a Nordic myth, God created man by breathing life into a substance called tre 73 (tree, wood).74 Gr. ~X17 also means 'wood.' In the wood of the world-ash Yggdrasill a human pair hide themselves at the end of the world, and from them will spring a new race of men.75 At the moment of universal destruction the world-ash becomes the guardian mother, the tree pregnant with death and life.76 The regenerative function of the world-ash helps to explain the image in the chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead called "The Gate of Knowledge of the Souls of the East": 
I am the pilot in the holy keel, I am the steersman who allows himself no rest in the ship of Ra.77 I know the tree of emerald green from whose midst Ra rises to the height of the cIouds.78 
	168 	Ship and tree (i.e., the ship of death and tree of death) are 
closely related here. (PI. xxxv.) The idea is that Ra rises up, born from the tree. The representations of the sun-god Mithras should probably be interpreted in the same way. In the Hed- 
Zeus his ambrosia have to pass through the clashing rocks. Frobenius points out that these rocks are closely connected with the rocks or caves that only open at a magic word. The most striking illustration of this is a South African myth (p. 407): "You must call the rock by name and cry loudly: 'Rock Untunjambili, open, so that I may enter.' .. But if the rock does not want to open, it answers: 
"The rock will not open to children, it opens to the swallows that fly in the air." The remarkable thing is that no human power can open the rock, only the magic word-or a bird. This formulation implies that opening the rock is an undertaking that can never be accomplished in reality, it can only be wished. Wunschen (wish) in Middle High German means the "power to do something extraordinary." The bird is a symbol of "wishful thinking." 
73 Grimm, II, p. 571. 
74 In Athens there was a family called At-rELporop.oL, 'hewn from the poplar.' 75 Herrmann, Nordische Mythologie, p. 589. 
76 Certain Javanese tribes set up their idols in trees that have been artificially hollowed out. In Persian myth, the white haoma is a celestial tree growing in the lake Vouru-Kasha, while the fish Kar-mahi circles round it and protects it from the frog of Ahriman. The tree gives eternal life, children to women, husbands to girls, and horses to men_ In the Mainyo-i-Khard it is called the "preparer of the corpse" (Spiegel, Eranische Altertumskunde, II, p. 1l5). 
77 I.e., the sun-ship, which accompanies the sun and the soul over the sea of 
	death towards the sunrise. 	78 Brugsch, p. 177. 
246 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
dernheim Relief (pI. XL) he is shown with half his body rising from the top of a tree, and in other monuments half his body is stuck in the rock, which dearly points to the rock-birth. Often there is a stream near his birthplace. This conglomeration of symbols 79 is also found in the birth of Aschanes, the first Saxon king, who grew from the Harz rocks in the middle of a wood near a fountain.so Here all the mother symbols are unitedearth, wood, and water. So it is only logical that in the Middle Ages the tree was poetically addressed with the honorific title of "Lady." Nor is it surprising that Christian legend transformed the tree of death, the Cross, into the Tree of Life, so that Christ is often shown hanging on a green tree among the fruit (pI. XXXVI). The derivation of the Cross from the Tree of Life, which was an authentic religious symbol even in Babylonian times, is considered entirely probable by Zockler,81 an authority on the history of the Cross. The pre-Christian meaning of so universal a symbol does not contradict this view; quite the contrary, for its meaning is life. Nor does the existence of the cross in the sun-cult (where the regular cross and the swastika represent the sun-wheel) and in the cult of the love-goddesses in any way contradict its historical significance. Christian legend has made abundant use of this symbolism. The student of medieval art will be familiar with the representation of the Cross growing from Adam's grave (pI. XXXVII), The legend says that Adam was buried on Golgotha, and that Seth planted on his grave a twig from the tree of Paradise, which grew into Christ's Cross, the Tree of Death.s2 As we know, it was through Adam's guilt that sin and death came into the world, and Christ through his death redeemed us from the guilt. If we ask, In what did Adam's guilt consist? the answer is that the unpardonable sin to be punished by death was that he dared to eat of the tree of Paradise.83 The 
79 Cf. Isaiah 51 : 1: " .•. look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." Further evidence in L6wis of Menar, "Nordkaukasische Steingeburtssagen," pp. 509lf. 
80 Grimm, I, p. 474. [For Aschanes, see also Grimm, II, p. 572.-EDITORS.] 81 The Cross of Christ. 
82 The legend of Seth is in ]ubinal, Mysteres inedits du xv. sihle, II, pp. 16lf. Cited in Z6ckler, p. 225. 
83 The Germanic sacred trees were under an absolute taboo: no leaf might be plucked from them, and nothing picked from the ground on which their shadow fell. 
247 

369 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO consequences of this are described in a Jewish legend: one who was permitted to gaze into Paradise after the Fall saw the tree and the four streams, but the tree was withered, and in its branches lay a babe. The "mother" had become pregnant.84 
This curious legend corresponds to the Jewish tradition that Adam, before he knew Eve, had a demon-wife called Lilith, with whom he strove for supremacy. But Lilith rose up into the air through the magic of God's name and hid herself in the sea. Adam forced her to come back with the help of three angels,85 whereupon Lilith changed into a nightmare or lamia (pI. xxxvma) who haunted pregnant women and kidnapped new-born infants. The parallel myth is that of the lamias, the nocturnal spectres who terrify children. The original legend is that Lamia seduced Zeus, but the jealous Hera caused her to bring only dead children into the world. Ever since then, the raging Lamia has persecuted children, whom she destroys whenever she can. This motif is a recurrent one in fairytales, where the mother often appears as a murderess 86 or eater of human flesh (cf. pI. xxxvlIIb); a well-known German paradigm is the story of Hansel and GreteI. Lamia is also the name of a large, Voracious fish,87 which links up with the whale-dragon motif worked out by Frobenius. Once again we meet the idea of the Terrible Mother in the form of a voracious fish, a personification of death.88 In Frobenius there are numerous examples of 84 According to German legend (Grimm, Ill, p. 969), the saviour will be born when he can be rocked in a cradle made from the wood of a tree that is now but a feeble shoot sprouting from a wall. The formula runs; "A limetree shall be planted, that shall throw out two plantschen [boughs] above, and out of their wood is a poie [buoy] to be made; the first child that therein lies is doomed to be brought from life to death by the sword, and then will salvation ensue." It is remarkable that in the German legends the heralding of the future event is connected with a budding tree. Christ was sometimes called a "branch" or a "rod." 85 Here we may discern, perhaps, the motif of the "helpful bird"-angels are really birds. Cf. the feather-dress of the "soul-birds" in the underworld. in the Mithraic sacrifice the messenger of the gods-the "angeI"-was a raven; the messenger is winged (Hermes). In Jewish tradition angels are masculine. The symbolism of the three angels is important because it signifies the upper, aerial, spiritual triad in conflict with the one lower, feminine power. Cf. my "Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales" (1954/55 edn., pp. 25ff.). 
86 Frobenius, Zeitalter. 87 Aap.6s, 'gorge' = gullet; Ta 'Aap.la, 'gorge' = ravine. 88 Note the close connection between {j.Xct>ls, 'dolphin,' and {j.Xq,Vs, 'womb.' In Delphi there was the Delphic gorge and the {j,Xct>,vls, a tripod with feet in the form of dolphins. Cf. Melicertes on the dolphin and MeIkarth's sacrifice by fire. 
248 

370 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
the monster devouring not only men (pI. xxxvmb), but animals, plants, and even an entire country, which are all delivered by the hero to a glorious rebirth. 
The lamias (cf. pI. xxxvma) are typical nightmares whose feminine nature is abundantly documented.89 Their universal peculiarity is that they ride their victims. Their counterpart$ are the spectral horses who carry their riders away at a mad gallop. One can easily recognize in these symbols the typical anxiety dream which, as Laistner 90 has shown, holds an important clue to the interpretation of fairytales. The riding takes on a special aspect in the light of researches into child psychology: the two contributions of Freud and myself 91 have established the fear-significance of horses on the one hand, and the sexual meaning of riding fantasies on the other. The essen. tial feature is the rhythm) which assumes a sexual significance only secondarily. If we take these factors into account, it will not surprise us to hear that the maternal world-ash Yggdrasill is called the Schreckross (terrible horse) in German. Cannegieter says of nightmares: "Even today the peasants drive away these female spirits (mother-goddesses, moirae) by throwing the bone of a horse's head upon the roof, and you can often see such bones on peasant houses hereabouts. But at night they are be· lieved to ride at the time of the first sleep and to tire out the horses for long journeys." 92 At first sight, there seems to be an etymological connection between nightmare and mare (female horse)-G. Mar and Miihre. The Indo-European root for 'mare' is *mark; cf. OIr. marc. Mare is akin to OHG. meriha (fern. of marah) 'stallion'), OE. myre (fern. of mearh) 'stallion'), ON. merr. The supposed source of nightmare is OE. and ON. mara) 'ogress, incubus, demon,' and, by extension, 'nightmare.' F. cauchemar comes from Lat. calcare) 'to tread,' in the reiterative sense of "treading" the grape; it is also used of the cock that "treads" the hen. This movement is equally typical of the nightmare; hence it was said of King Vanlandi: "Mara trail hann," 
	89 Cf. Jones, On the Nightmare. 	90 Das Riitsel der Sphinx. 
91 Freud, "Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy," and my "Psychic Conflicts in a Child," 92 EPistola de ara ad Noviomagum reperta, p. 25. ("Abigunt eas nymphas (matres deas, moiras) hodie rustici osse capitis equini tectis injecto, cujusmodi ossa per has terras in rusticorum viIIis crebra est animadvertere. Nocte autem ad concubia equitare creduntur et equos fatigare ad longinqua itinera.") Cited from Grimm, Ill, p. 1246. 
249