SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
the Mara trod him to death in sleep.93 A synonym for the nightmare is the troll or "treader." The treading movement has been verified by the experience of Freud and myself with children, which shows that a secondary sexual meaning attaches to stamping or kicking, though the rhythm is obviously primary. Like the Mara, the "Stempe" treads.94 
	371 	The Indo-European root *mer) *mor) means 'to die.' From 
it also come Lat. mars) Gr. p,opos, 'fate,' and possibly MoLpa. the goddess of fate.95 The Noms who sit under the world-ash are well-known personifications of fate, like Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. With the Celts the conception of the Fates probably passed into that of the matres and matronae)96 who were considered divine by the Teutons. The divine significance of the mothers comes out in Julius Caesar, where he says, "The matrons should declare by lots and divinations whether it was expedient to join battle or not." 97 
	372 	In connection with the etymology of Mar and (night)mare) 
it should be added that F. mere has a strong phonetic resemblance to mare) although this, etymologically speaking, proves nothing. In Slavonic, mara means 'witch'; in Polish, mora means 'nightmare.' Mar or More in Swiss-German means 'sow' (it is also used as a swear-word). The Czech mura means both 'nightmare' and the Sphinx or hawk moth. This strange connection is eXplained by the fact that the butterfly is a symbol and allegory of the psyche. The Sphingidae are evening mothsthey come, like the nightmare, in darkness. Finally, it should be mentioned that the sacred olive-tree of Athene was called p,opLa, which is derived from p,opos, 'fate.' Halirrhothios wanted to cut down the tree, but killed himself with the axe in the attempt. 
93 Ibid., Ill, p. 1246. [From the Ynglinga Saga, 16.] 
94 Ibid.; also I, pp. 277-78: "Eat fast tonight I pray, that the Stempe tread you not." [The "Stempe," according to Grimm's citations, was an indeterminate nightmare figure that terrified children by trampling on them.-EDITORS.] 
95 Herrmann, NiJrdische Mythologie, p. 64, and Fick, W6rterbuch, I, p. 716. [In more recent philology, a kinship of mars and J.L6po~ is not assured. Not all the etymological conjectures in this passage are now considered warranted.-EDIToRS.] 96 Grimm, I, p. 417. 
97 The Gallic War, I, 50, trans. by Edwards, pp. 82-83, slightly modified. ("Ut matres familiae eorum sortibus et vaticinationibus declararent, utrum proelium committi ex usu esset, necne.") Cf. the man tic significance of the Delphic gorge, Mimir's fountain, etc. 
25° 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER' AND OF REBIRTH 
	373 	The phonetic connection between G. Mar, F. mere, and 
the various words for 'sea' (Lat. mare) G. Meer, F. mer) is certainly remarkable, though etymologically accidental. May it perhaps point back to the great primordial image of the mother, who was once our only world and later became the symbol of the whole world? Goethe says of the Mothers that they are "thronged round with images of all creation." 98 Even the Christians could not refrain from reuniting their Mother of God with the water: "Ave maris stella" are the opening words of a hymn to Mary. It is probably significant that the infantile word ma-ma (mother's breast) is found in all languages, and that the mothers of two religious heroes were called Mary and Maya. That the mother is in fact the child's "horse" is apparent in the primitive custom of carrying the child on the back or riding it on the hip. And Odin hung upon the maternal worldash, upon his "terrible horse." 
	374 	As we have seen, Isis, the mother of the gods, played an evil 
trick on the sun-god with the poisonous snake, and, according to Plutarch, she behaved equally treacherously towards her son Horus. Horus vanquished the wicked Set who had murdered his father Osiris, but Isis set him free again. Outraged, Horus lifted his hand against his mother and snatched the royal diadem from her head,99 in place of which Thoth gave her a cow's head (cf. pI. xxxb). Horus then vanquished Set for a second time. In the Greek legend, Typhon (Set) is a dragon. But even without this confirmation it is evident that Horus' fight is the typical fight of the sun-hero with the "whale dragon" who, as we know, is a symbol of the Terrible Mother, of the voracious maw, the jaws of death in which men are crunched and ground to pieces.lOo (Cf. pI. xxxvIIlb.) Whoever conquers this monster wins to eternal youth. But to this end, defying all danger, he must descend into the belly of the monster 101 ("journey to 
98 Cf. p. 206, above. 
99 Plutarch, De [side et OsiTide, 19, 6. [Cf. Babbitt trans., pp. 48-49.] 
100 Cf. the exotic myths in Frobenius, where the belly of the whale is clearly the land of death. 
101 One of the peculiarities of the Mara is that he can only get out through the hole by which he came in. [As Mephistopheles says (Wayne trans., p. 77): "All friends and phantoms must obey a law / To use the way they entered in before,"TRANs.] This motif evidently belongs to the rebirth myth. 
251 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
hell") and sojourn there for some time ("night sea Impnsonment": Frobenius). (Cf. diagram, p. 210; pI. xxnb.) 
	375 	The fight with the "nocturnal serpent" accordingly signifies 
conquest of the mother, who is suspected of an infamous crime, namely the betrayal of her son. Complete confirmation of all this is furnished by the fragments of the Babylonian Creation Epic discovered by George Smith, most of which come from the library of AssurbanipaI. The text dates from about the time of Hammurabi (2000 B.C.). From this account of the Creation we learn that Ea, the son of the watery deep and god of wisdom,102 has overthrown Apsu. Apsu is the progenitor of the great gods, so Ea has conquered the father. But Tiamat, the mother of the gods, plots revenge, and arrays herself for battle against them: 
Mother Hubur, who created everything, 
Procured invincible weapons, gave birth to giant snakes, Sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang, 
Filled their bodies with venom instead of blood, Roaring dragons she clothed with terror, 
Made them to swell with a terrible splendour, made them to prance, So that he who beholds them shall perish of terror. 
Their bodies shall rear up, and none shall turn them back. She set up lizards, dragons, and sphinxes, 
Hurricanes, mad dogs, scorpion-men, 
Lion-demons, fish-men, and centaurs, 
Bearing weapons that spare not, fearless in battle. Mighty are Tiamat's commands, irresistible are they. 
And when Tiamat had completed her handiwork, 
She prepared for battle against the gods, her descendants. To avenge Apsu, Tiamat did evil. 
When Ea now heard this thing, 
He was sore afraid, and he sat down sorrowfully. 
He went to the father, his creator, Ansar, 
To relate to him all that Tiamat plotted: 
Tiamat, our mother, is incensed against us, 
She has mustered a riotous throng, furiously raging,103 
102 For the abyss of wisdom, fount of wisdom, source of fantasies, see par. 640, below. 
103 Trans. of this and following passages based on Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte, I, pp. 4ff., and E. A. Speiser, in Pritcharcl, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 62-67. 
21)2 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	376 	Against the fearful hosts of Tiamat the gods finally put up 
Marduk, the god of spring, who represents the victorious sun. Marduk prepares himself for battle and forges his invincible weapons: 
He created the evil wind, lmhullu, the sou'wester, the hurricane, The fourfold wind, the sevenfold wind, the whirlwind, and the 
harmful wind, 
Then he let loose the winds he had brought forth, all seven of them: 
To stir up confusion in Tiamat's vitals, they followed behind him. Then the Lord raised up the cyclone, his mighty weapon; 
For his chariot he mounted the storm-wind, matchless and terrible. 
	377 	His chief weapons are the wind and a net with which he 
hopes to catch Tiamat. He approaches Tiamat and challenges her to single combat: 104 
Then Tiamat and Marduk, the wise one among the gods, joined 
Issue, 
Girding their loins for the fight, drawing near for battle. Then the Lord spread out his net and caught her; lmhullu, which followed behind, he let loose in her face, 
When Tiamat opened her mouth, as wide as she could, to consume 
him, 
He let lmhullu rush in and her lips could not close. With the raging winds he filled her belly, 
Her inward parts were seized and she opened wide her mouth. He smote her with the spear, he hewed her in pieces, 
He cut up her bowels and made mincemeat of her heart, Vanquished her and put an end to her life, 
Threw down her carcass and trampled upon it. 
	378 	After Marduk had slain Tiamat, he sat down and planned 
the creation of the world: 
Then the Lord paused to contemplate her dead body, That he might divide up the monster and do artful works. He split her like a flat fish into two parts,105 
One half he set up and with it he covered the sky. 
	379 	In this manner Marduk created the world from the mother. 
(Cf. fig. 41.) Evidently the killing of the mother-dragon here takes the form of a negative wind-fertilization. The world is 104 "Then the Lord approached, looking for the inside of Tiamat." 
105 Splitting of the IDother; cf. Kaineus, pars. 439f., 460, 480, 638, below. 
253 

created from the mother, i.e., with the libido that is withdrawn from her through the sacrifice, and through prevention of the regression that threatened to overcome the hero. We shall have to examine this significant formula more closely in the final chapter. As Gunkel106 has pointed out, the myth has interesting parallels in the literature of the Old Testament. Isaiah 51 : 9f. says: 106a 
Awake, awake, put on strength, 0 arm of the Lord; awake, as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not thou that didst cut Rahab in pieces, that didst pierce the dragon? 
Was it not thou that didst dry up the sea, the waters of the great deep; that didst make the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to pass over? 
The name Rahab is frequently used for Egypt in the Old 
Testament (in Isaiah 30: 7, Egypt is called "Rahab who sits still"), and also for dragon; it therefore meant something evil and hostile. Rahab appears here as the old dragon Tiamat, against whose evil power Marduk or Yahweh goes forth to battle. The term "the redeemed" refers to the children of Israel who were delivered from bondage; but it is also mythological, because the hero sets free those who had previously been devoured by the whale-dragon (Frobenius). 
	381 	Psalm 89: 10: 
Thou didst crush Rahab like a carcass. 
Job 26: 12£.: 
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
383 
By his power he stilled the sea, 
by his understanding he smote Rahab. By his wind the heavens were made fair, his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. 
Gunkel equates Rahab with chaos, i.e., Tiamat. The dragon Rahab also appears as Leviathan, the monster of the deep and personification of the sea. 
Psalm 74: 13ff.: 
Thou didst divide the sea by thy might; 
thou didst break the heads of the dragons on the waters. Thou didst crush the heads of Leviathan, 
thou didst give him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. 106 Schopfung und Chaos, p. 301I. 
106a [This and the next three passages are RSV.-TRANS.] 
254 
	385 	There is a further parallel in Isaiah 27: 1: 
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. 
	386 	We come upon a special motif in Job 41: If.: 
Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook? 
Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? 
Or bore his jaw through with a thorn? 
	387 	This motif has numerous parallels in the primitive myths 
collected by Frobenius, where the sea-monster was likewise fished for. 
	388 	We have seen that the incest prohibition prevents the son 
from symbolically reproducing himself through the mother. It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, bilt, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido. Now it is a fact amply confirmed by psychiatric experience that all parts of the psyche, inasmuch as they possess a certain autonomy, exhibit a personal character, like the split-off products of hysteria and schizophrenia, mediumistic "spirits," figures seen in dreams, etc. Every split-off portion of libido, every complex, has or is a (fragmentary) personality. At any rate, that is how it looks from the purely observational standpoint. But when we go into the matter more deeply, we find that they are really archetypal formations. There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as /jaLp,ovES, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination," as rationalism would have us believe. Consequently, man derives his human personal~ ity only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his 
255 
380 
382 
384 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes.107 Numerous mythological proofs could be advanced in support of this view. 
	389 	It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms him- 
self, and only through him does man take part in the transformation. Thus Khnum, "the maker, the potter, the builder," shapes his egg on the potter's wheel (pI. xub), for he is "immortal growth, his own generation and his own self-birth, the creator of the egg that came out of the primeval waters." The Egyptian Book of the Dead says: "I have risen like the mighty hawk 10S that comes forth from his egg," and: "I am the creator of Nun, who has taken up his abode in the underworld. My nest is not seen and my egg is not broken." Yet another passage speaks of "that great and glorious god in his egg, who created himself for that which came forth from him." 109 (Cf. fig. 36.) Therefore the god is also called Nagaga-uer, the "Great Cackler." (Book of the Dead 98 : 2: "I cackle like the goose, and whistle like the hawk.") 
	390 	The canalization of regressive libido into the god justifies 
the mythological statement that it is the god or the hero who commits incest. On the primitive level no further symbolization is required. This only becomes necessary when the mythological statement begins to bring the god into discredit, which obviously only happens at a higher level of morality. Thus Herodotus reports: 
I have already mentioned the festival of Isis at Busiris: it is here that everybody-tens of thousands of men and women-when the sacrifice is over, beat their breasts: in whose honour, however, I do not feel it is proper for me to say. 
At Papremis there is a special ceremony in addition to the ordinary rites and sacrifices as practised elsewhere. As the sun draws towards setting, only a few of the priests continue to employ themselves about the image of the god, while the majority, armed with wooden clubs, take their stand at the entrance of the temple; opposite these is another crowd of men, more than a thousand strong, also armed with clubs and consisting of men who have vows to perform. The image of the god, in a little wooden gold-plated shrine, is 
107 Represented in the human sphere by the quaternity composed of father, mother, godfather, godmother, the latter two corresponding to the divine pair. 
	108 I.e., the sun-god. 	109 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie, pp. 1611£. 
256 

V. SYM:aoLS OF THE MOTHER AND of REBIRTH 
conveyed to another sacred building on the day before the ceremony. The few priests who are left to attend to it put it, together with the shrine which contains it, in a four-wheeled cart, which they drag along towards the temple. The others, waiting at the temple gate, try to prevent it from coming in, while the votaries take the god's side and set upon them with their clubs. The assault is resisted, and a vigorous tussle ensues in which heads are broken and not a few actually die of the wounds they receive. That, at least, is what I believe, though the Egyptians told me that nobody is ever killed. The origin of this festival is explained locally by the story that the mother of Ares 110 once lived in the temple; Ares himself was brought up elsewhere, but when he grew to manhood he wished to get to know 111 his mother and for that purpose came to the temple where she was. Ber attendants, however, not knowing him by sight, refused him admission, and succeeded in keeping him out until he fetched help from another town and forced his way in by violence. This, they say; is why the battle with clubs is part of the ceremony at the festival of Ares,112 
	391 	A Pyramid Text, describing the dead Pharaoh's fight for 
supremacy in heaven, says: 
The sky weeps, the stars shake, the keepers of the gods tremble and their servants flee, when they behold the King rising up as a spirit, as a god who lives on his fathers and possesses his mothers,113 
	392 	It is clear that the votaries fight and even kill each other 
for their share in the mystery of divine incest.114 In this way they participate in the action of the god.115 The death of Baldur, by being wounded with the branch of mistletoe, is analogous to the death of Osiris and seems to require a similar 
110 Ares probably means the Egyptian god Set. 
111 [In the German text used by the author this word (lTvp.p.€i~ti,) is translated as 'to have intercourse with.'- TRANS.] 
112 Herodotus, Book 11, 61ff., trans. by de Selincourt, pp. 126-27. 113 Cited in Dieterich; Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 100. 
114 The Polynesian myth of Maui says that the hero robbed his mother of her girdle. The theft of the veil in the myth of the swan-maiden means the same thing. In a myth of the Yoruba, of Nigeria, the hero simply ravishes his mother (Frobenius, Zeitalter). 
115 The above-mentioned myth of Halirrhothios (par. 372), who killed himself in the attempt to cut down the sacred tree of Athens, the moria, expresses the same psychology, as also does the castration of the priests who serve the Great Mother. The ascetic tendency in Christianity (e.g., Orlgen's self-castration) is a similar phenomenon. 
~57 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
explanation. The legend says that all creatures had pledged themselves not to harm Baldur; only the mistletoe was forgotten, because she was supposed to be too young. Yet it was the twig of mistletoe that killed Baldur. The mistletoe is a parasite. The female fire-stick, the fire-mother, was obtained from the wood of a parasitic or creeping plant for the Indian fire-boring ceremony.116 In Germanic legend the Mara, after its nightly jaunt, is said to rest on the "marentakken," which Grimm suggests is another name for mistletoe.117 Mistletoe was also a sovereign remedy against barrenness,118 In Gaul, it was only after offering sacrifice that the Druid was allowed, amid solemn ceremonies, to climb the sacred oak and cut the ritual branch of mistletoe. That which grows on the tree is the child (pI. XXXIX), or oneself in renewed and rejuvenated form; and that is precisely what one cannot have, because the incest prohibition forbids it. We are told that the mistletoe which killed Baldur was "too young"; hence this clinging parasite could be interpreted as the "child of the tree." But as the tree signifies the origin in the sense of the mother, it represents the source of life, of that magical life-force whose yearly renewal was celebrated in primitive times by the homage paid to a'divine son, a puer aeternus. The graceful Baldur is such a figure. This type is granted only a fleeting existence, because he is never anythingbut an anticipation of something desired and hoped for. This is so literally true that a certain type of "mother's son" actually exhibits all the characteristics of the flower-like, youthful god, and even dies an early death.119 The reason is that he only lives on and through the mother and can strike no roots in the world, so that he finds himself in a state of permanent incest. He is, as it were, only a dream of the mother, an ideal which she soon takes back into herself, as we can see from the Near Eastern "son-gods" like Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, and Christ. The mistletoe, like Baldur, represents the "child of the mother," the 
	116 Kuhn, Mythol. Studien, I. 	117 Ill, p. 1246. [Cf. par. 370, above.] 
118 Hence, in England, the custom of hanging mistletoe at Christmas. For mistletoe as the wand of life, see Aigremont, Volkserotik und Pfianzenwelt, 11, P·36. 
119 There is a beautiful description of the puer aeternus in an exquisite little book by the airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince. My impression that the author had a personal mother-complex was amply confirmed from firsthand information. 
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V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
longed-for, revivified life-force that flows from her. But, separated from its host, the mistletoe dies. Therefore, when the Druid cuts it, he kills it and by this act symbolically repeats the fatal self-castration of Attis and the wounding of Adonis by the boar's tusk. This is the dream of the mother in matriarchal times, when there was as yet no father to stand by the side of the son. 
	393 	But why should the mistletoe kill Baldur, since it is, in a 
sense, his sister or brother? The lovely apparition of the puer aeternus is, alas, a form of illusion. In reality he is a parasite on the mother, a creature of her imagination, who only lives when rooted in the maternal body. In actual psychic experience the mother corresponds to the collective unconscious, and the son to consciousness, which fancies itself free but must ever again succumb to the power of sleep and deadening unconsciousness. The mistletoe, however, corresponds to the shadow brother, of whom E. T. A. Hoffmann gives such an excellent description in his Devil's Elixir} and whom the psychotherapist regularly meets as a personification of the personal unconscious.12o Just as, at evening, the shadows lengthen and finally engulf everything, so the mistletoe betokens Baldur's end. Being an equivalent of Baldur himself, it is fetched down from the tree like the "treasure hard to attain" (see the following chapters). The shadow becomes fatal when there is too little vitality or too little consciousness in the hero for him to complete his heroic task. 
	394 	The "son of the mother," as a mere mortal, dies young, but 
as a god he can do that which is forbidden and superhuman: he commits the magical incest and thus obtains immortality. In the myths the hero does not die; instead, he has to overcome the dragon of death. 
	395 	As the reader will long since have guessed, the dragon repre- 
sents the negative mother-imago and thus expresses resistance to incest, or the fear of it. Dragon and snake are symbolic representations of the fear of the consequences of breaking the taboo and regressing to incest. It is therefore understandable that we should come over and over again upon the motif of the tree and the snake. Snakes and dragons are especially significant as guardians or defenders of the treasure. The black horse Apaosha 120 See "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," Ch. I. 
259 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
also has this meaning in the old Persian Song of Tishtriya, where he blocks up the sources of the rain-lake. The white horse, Tishtriya, makes two futile attempts to vanquish Apaosha; at the third attempt he succeeds with the help of Ahura-Mazda.121 Whereupon the sluices of heaven are opened and the fertilizing rain pours down upon the earth.122 In this symbolism we can see very clearly how libido fights against libido, instinct against instinct, how the unconscious is in conflict with itself, and how mythological man perceived the unconscious in all the adversities and contrarieties of external nature without ever suspecting that he was gazing at the paradoxical backgTound of his own consciousness. 
	396 	The tree entwined by the snake may therefore be taken as 
the symbol of the mother who is protected against incest by fear. This symbol is frequently found on Mithraic monuments. The rock with a snake coiled round it has a similar meaning, for Mithras (and also Men) was born from a rock. The threatening of new-born infants by snakes (Mithras, Apollo, Heracles) is explained by the legend of Lilith and the Lamia. Python, the dragon of Leto, and Poine, who devastated the land of Crotopos, were sent by the father of the new-born. This fact points to the father as being the cause of the fear, which as we know prompted Freud to his famous aetiological myth of the primal horde with the jealous old patriarch at the top. The immediate model for this is obviously the jealous Yahweh, struggling to protect his wife Israel from whoredoms with strange gods. The father represents the world of moral commandments and prohibitions, although, for lack of information about conditions in prehistoric times, it remains an open question how far the first moral laws arose from dire necessity rather than from the family preoccu- 
121 A variation of the same motif can be found in a legend from Lower Saxony: 
There was once a young ash-tree that grew unnoticed in a wood. Each New Year's Eve a white knight riding upon a white horse comes to cut down the young shoot. At the same time a black knight arrives and engages him in combat. After a lengthy battle the white knight overcomes the black knight and cuts down the tree. But one day the white knight will be unsuccessful, then the ash will grow, and when it is big enough for a horse to be tethered under it, a mighty king will come and a tremendous battle will begin: i.e., end of the world. (Grimm, III, p. 960.) 
122 J. E. Lehmann, in Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehl'buch del' Religionsgeschichte, n, p. 185. 
260 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
pations of the tribal father. At all events it would be easier to keep one's eye on a boxful of spiders than on the females of a primal horde. The father is the representative of the spirit, whose function it is to oppose pure instinctuality. That is his archetypal role, which falls to him regardless of his personal qualities; hence he is very often an object of neurotic fears for the son. Accordingly, the monster to be overcome by the son frequently appears as a giant who guards the treasure. An excellent example of this is the giant Humbaba in the Gilgamesh Epic, who guards the garden of Ishtar,123 Gilgamesh conquers the giant and wins Ishtar, whereupon Ishtar immediately makes sexual advances to her deliverer.124 These facts should be sufficient to explain the role played by Horus in Plutarch, and especially the violent treatment of Isis. By overpowering the mother the hero becomes equal to the sun: he renews himself. He wins the strength of the invincible sun, the power of eternal rejuvenation. We can now understand the series of pictures illustrating the Mithraic legend on the Heddernheim Relief (pI. XL). First we see the birth of Mithras from the top of the tree; the next picture shows him carrying the conquered bull (cf. pI. xLIxa). Here the bull has the same significance as the monster and may be compared with the bull that was conquered by Gilgamesh. He represents the father who-paradoxically-enforces the incest prohibition as a giant and dangerous animal. The paradox lies in the fact that, like the mother who gives life and then takes it away again as the "terrible" or "devouring" mother, the father apparently lives a life of unbridled instinct and yet is the living embodiment of the law that thwarts instinct. There is, however, a subtle though important distinction to be made here: the father commits no incest, whereas the son has tendencies in that direction. The paternal law is directed against incest with all the violence and fury of uninhibited instinct. Freud overlooks the fact that the spirit too is dynamic, as indeed it must be if the psyche is not to lose its self-regulating equilibrium. But as the "father," the representative of moral law, is not only an objective fact, but a subjective psychic factor in the son himself, the killing of the bull clearly denotes an overcoming of animal instinct, and at the same time 
123 Other examples in Frobenius, passim. 
124 Cf. Jensen, Gilgamesch-Epos, etc. 
261 

397 
398 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
a secret and furtive overcoming of the power of the law, and hence a criminal usurpation of justice. Since the better is always the enemy of the good, every drastic innovation is an infringement of what is traditionally right, and may sometimes even be a crime punishable by death. As we know, this dilemma played an important part in the psychology of early Christianity, at the time when it came into conflict with Jewish law. In the eyes of the Jews, Christ was undoubtedly a law-breaker. Not unjustly is he called Adam Secundus; for just as the first Adam became conscious through sin, through eating of the tree of knowledge, so the second Adam broke through to the necessary relation with a fundamentally different God.125 
The third picture shows Mithras reaching for the nimbus on the head of Sol. This act recalls the Christian idea that those who have conquered win the crown of eternal life. 
In the fourth picture Sol kneels before Mithras. (Cf. pI. xXlva.) These last two pictures show that Mithras has arrogated to himself the strength of the sun and become its lord. He has conquered his animal nature (the bull). Animals represent instinct, and also the prohibition of instinct, so that man becomes human through conquering his animal instinctuality. Mithras has thus sacrificed his animal nature-a solution already anticipated in the Gilgamesh Epic by the hero's renunciation of the terrible Ishtar. In the Mithraic sacrifice the conquest of instinctuality no longer takes the archaic form of overpowering the mother, but of renouncing one's own instinctive desires. The primitive idea of reproducing oneself by entering into the mother's body has become so remote that the hero, instead of committing incest, is now sufficiently far advanced in the domestic virtues to seek immortality through the sacrifice of the incest tendency. This significant change finds its true fulfilment only in the symbol of the crucified God. In atonement for Adam's sin a bloody human sacrifice is hung upon the tree of 125 This transformation of the God-image was clearly felt and expressed even in the Middle Ages (see Psychology and Alchemy, par. 522f.). The transformation had already begun in the Book of Job: Yahweh allows himself to be fooled by Satan, deals faithlessly with Job, misjudges the situation, and then has to admit his error. But although Job is obliged to bow to brute force he carries of[ the moral victory. In this conflict there lies a budding consciousness of the Johannine Christ: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." [Cf. also Jung, "Answer to ]ob."-EDlTORS.] 
262 

399 
400 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
life.126 (Cf. pI. XXXVI.) Although the tree of life has a mother significance, it is no longer the mother, but a symbolical equivalent to which the hero offers up his life. One can hardly imagine a symbol which expresses more drastically the subjugation of instinct. Even the manner of death reveals the symbolic content of this act: the hero suspends himself in the branches of the maternal tree by allowing his arms to be nailed to the cross. We can say that he unites himself with the mother in death and at the same time negates the act of union, paying for his guilt with deadly torment. This act of supreme courage and supreme renunciation is a crushing defeat for man's animal nature, and it is also an earnest of supreme salvation, because such a deed alone seems adequate to expiate Adam's sin of unbridled instinctuality. The sacrifice is the very reverse of regression-it is a successful canalization of libido into the symbolic equivalent of the mother, and hence a spiritualization of it. 
As I have already pointed out, the hanging of the victim on a tree was a religious rite, of which numerous examples can be found in the Germanic sphere of culture,127 It is also characteristic that the victims were pierced with a spear. Thus, in the Hovamol Edda, Odin says: 
I ween that I hung / on the windy tree, Hung there for nights full nine; 
With the spear I was wounded, / and offered I was To Odin, myself to myself.128 
The hanging of the victims on crosses was a religious custom in Middle America. Miiller 129 mentions the Fejervary Manuscript (a Mexican hieroglyphic codex), which has, for a tailpiece, a cross with a gory divinity hanging in the centre. Equally significant is the Palenque Cross (pI. XLW).130 At the top is a bird, on either side two human figures facing the cross, one of them holding out a child for either sacrifice or baptism. The ancient Aztecs are said to have invoked the favour of Cinteotl, "the 
126 Christ dies on the same tree against which Adam sinned. Zockler, The Cross of Christ, p. 225. 
127 The skins of animals were hung on the sacrificial trees and afterwards spears 
	were thrown at them. 	128 Trans. by Bellows, The Poetic Edda, p. 60. 
129 J. G. Muller, Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 498. [The codex, in the Liverpool Public Museum, is pre-Aztec, c. 11th-14th cents.-EDITORS.] 
130 Step hens, Travel in Central America, Il, p. 346. 
263 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
daughter of heaven and goddess of the grain," by nailing a youth or maiden to the cross every spring and shooting the victim with arrows,131 The name of the cross signifies "Tree of our life or flesh." 132 An effigy from the island of Philae represents Osirisin the form of a crucified god, mourned by Isis and N ephthys, his sister wives.l33 
	4°1 	The meaning of the cross is certainly not restricted to the 
tree of life, as has already been shown. Miiller takes it as an emblem of rain and fertility. m We should also mention that it is a powerful charm for averting evil (e.g., making the sign of the cross). 
	4°2 	In view of the fact that the cross resembles the human figure 
with arms outspread, it is worth noting that in early Christian art Christ is not nailed to the cross, but is shown standing before it with open arms.135 Maurice interprets this as follows: 
It is a fact not less remarkable than well attested, that the Druids in their groves were accustomed to select the most stately and beautiful tree as an emblem of the deity they adored; and, having cut off the side branches, they affixed two of the largest of them to the highest part of the trunk, in such manner that those branches, extended on each side like the arms of a man, together with the body, presented to the spectator the appearance of a huge cross [cf. fig. 26J; and on the bark, in various places, was actually inscribed the letter "tau." 136 
	403 	The "tree of knowledge" of the Jains, of India, also has a 
human form; it is represented as an enormously thick trunk shaped like a human head, from the top of which grow two 131 Zockler, p. 25. 
132 Bancroft, The Native Races ot the Pacific States ot North America, 11, p. 506. Cited in Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, p. 408. 
133 Rossellini, Monumenti dell' Egitto, Ill, PI. 23, cited in Robertson, p. 411. 
134 Zockler, pp. 6ff. In an Egyptian picture of the birth of a king, in Luxor, the bird· headed Thoth, the Logos and messenger of the gods, is shown announcing to the young queen Mautmes that she will give birth to a son. In the next scene Kneph and Hathor hold the crux ansata to her mouth, thus fertilizing her in a spiritual or symbolic manner. (Cf. fig. 27.) (Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology, pp. 18f., cited in Robertson, p. 328.) 
135 Robertson, p. 409, mentions that in Mexico the sacrificial priest clothed himself in the skin of a newly killed woman and then stood before the war·god with arms stretched out like a cross. 
136 Maurice, Indian Antiquities, VI, p. 68. By "tau" he means the primitive Egyptian form of the cross: T. 
264 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
long branches hanging down on either side, with a short, vertical branch sticking straight up, crowned with a bud-like knob.137 Robertson tells us that in the Assyrian system God was represented in the form of a cross, the vertical standing for the 

Fig. 26. The human cross 
From Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, Cologne, I533 
human figure, and the horizontal for a conventionalized pair of wings.138 Archaic Greek idols, such as were found in large quantities in Aegina, have a similar character: an immoderately long head, wing-shaped arms slightly raised, and in front distinct breasts.139 
	137 Zockler, p. 12. 	138 Robertson, p. 133. 
139 I am indebted for this information to Professor E. Fiechter, formerly of the Technical Institute, Stuttgart. 
265 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	404 	I must leave it an open question whether the symbol of the 
cross bears any relation to the two ceremonial fire-sticks used in fire-making, as has been claimed. But it seems very likely that the idea of "union" still lingers on in the cross, for underlying all fertility magic is the thought of renewal, which in turn is intimately connected with the cross. The idea of union expressed in the cross symbol is found in Plato's Timaeus) where the demiurge joins the parts of the world-soul together by means of two sutures, which form a X (chi). According to Plato, the world-soul contains the world in itself like a body, an image which cannot fail to remind us of the mother: 
And in the centre he set a soul and caused it to extend throughout the whole and further wrapped its body round with soul on the outside; and so he established one world alone, round and revolving in a circle, solitary but by reason of its excellence able to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but sufficient to itself. On all these accounts the world which he brought into being was a blessed god,140 
	405 	This utter inactivity and desirelessness, symbolized by the 
idea of self-containment, amounts to divine bliss. Man in this state is contained as if in his own vessel, like an Indian god in the lotus or in the embrace of his Shakti. In accordance with this mythological and philosophical conception, the enviable Diogenes lived in a tub in order to give symbolical expression to the blissfulness and godlikeness of his freedom from desire. On the relation between the world-soul and the world-body Plato says: 
Now this soul, though it comes later in the account we are now attempting, was not made by the god younger than the body; for when he joined them together, he would not have suffered the elder to be ruled by the younger. There is in us too much of the casual and random, which shows itself in our speech; but the god made soul prior to body and more venerable in birth and excellence, to be the body's mistress and governor.141 
	406 	From other indications it appears that the image of the 
"soul" somehow coincides with the mother-imago.142 The next 140 Timaeus, 34 B. This and the following passages trans. by Cornford, pp. 58f. 141 Timaeus, 34 B - C. 
142 See Psychological Types, "soul" and "soul image," Defs. 48 and 49. The anima is the archetype of the feminine and plays a very important role in a 
266 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
stage in the development of the world-soul takes place in a mysterious and rather controversial fashion.143 When the operation was complete, the following was done: 
This whole fabric, then, he split lengthwise into two halves; and making the two cross one another at their centres in the form of the letter X, he bent each round into a circle and joined it up .... 
When the whole fabric of the soul had been finished to its maker's mind, he next began to fashion within the soul all that is bodily and brought the two together, fitting them centre to centre.144 
	407 	A peculiar use is made of the cross symbol by the Muyscas 
Indians, of Peru; two ropes are stretched crosswise over the surface of the water (pool or stream), and fruits, oil, and precious stones are thrown in as a sacrifice at the point of intersection.145 Here the divinity is evidently the water, not the cross, which only signifies the place of sacrifice. The symbolism is somewhat obscure. Water, and particularly deep water, usually has a maternal significance, roughly corresponding to "womb." The point of intersection of the two ropes is the point of union where the "crossing" takes place. (Note the double meaning of this word! According to all the analogies, the aim of fertility magic is to bring about the increase of the things marked for sacrifice.) 
	408 	The cross in the form of the crux ansata frequently appears 
in the hand of the Egyptian Turn or Atum, the supreme god or hegemon of the Ennead. Its meaning is "life," which is to say that the god gives life. (Fig. 27.) It is important to know something about the attributes of this life-giving god. Turn of OnHeliopolis bears the name "the father of his mother," and his attendant goddess, Jusas or Nebit-Hotpet, is called sometimes the mother, sometimes the daughter, and sometimes the wife of the god. The first day in autumn is known in the Heliopolitan inscriptions as the "feast-day of the goddess Jusasit," as the arrival of the "sister who makes ready to unite herself with her father." It is the day on which "the goddess Mehnit completes 
man's unconscious. See "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," Ch. n. I have discussed the world-soul of Plato's Timaeus in "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," pars. 186££. (Swiss edn., pp. 344££.). 
	143 See my remarks ibid. 	144 Timaeus, 36 B - E. 	145 Zockler, p. 24. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
her work, 50 that the god Osiris may enter the left eye." 146 It is also called "the day for filling the sacred eye with what it needs." In the autumn equinox the heayenly cow with the moon-eye, Isis, receives the seed that begets Horus (the moon being the guardian of the seed).147 The "eye" evidently stands 
Fig. 27. The life-giving crux ansata Egypt 
for the female genitals, as is clear from the myth of Indra, who, as a punishment for his wantonness, was smitten with yonis all over his body, but was so far pardoned by the gods that the shameful yonis were changed into eyes. The little image reflected in the eye, the "pupilla," is a "child." The great god becomes a child again: he enters into the mother's womb for selfrenewaI.148 (Cf. pI. XLII.) An Egyptian hymn says: 
Thy mother, the sky, 
StretLhes forth her arms to thee. 
146 The "left eye" is the moon. See below, par. 487: the moon as the gatheringplace of souls (cf. fig. 31). 
141 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, pp. 281,ff. 
148 Cf. the retreat of Ra on the heavenly cow (par. 351). In one of the Hindu rites of purification the penitent has to crawl through an artificial cow in order to be reborn. 
268 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	409 	The hymn continues: 
Thou shinest, 0 father of the gods, upon the back of thy mother, daily thy mother taketh thee in her arms. When thou lightest up the habitation of the night, thou art one with thy mother, the sky.149 
	410 	Turn of Pithum-Heroopolis not only carries the crux ansata 
as a symbol, but even has this emblem as the commonest of his titles, ankh or ankhi, which means 'life' or the 'Living One.' He was chiefly worshipped as the Agathodaimon serpent (cf. fig. 37), of whom it was said: "The sacred Agathodaimon serpent goes forth from the city of Nezi." The snake, because it casts its skin, is a symbol of renewal, like the scarab beetle, a sunsymbol, which was believed to be of masculine sex only and to beget itself. "Khnum" (another name for Turn, but always the sun-god is meant) comes from the verb num, 'to combine or unite.' 150 Khnum appears as the potter and maker of his own egg (cf. pI. XLIb). 
	411 	It is clear from all this that the cross is a many-faceted sym- 
bol, and its chief meaning is that of the "tree of life" and the "mother." Its symbolization in human form is therefore quite understandable. The various forms of the crux ansata have the meaning of "life" and "fruitfulness," and also of "union," which can be interpreted as the hieros gamos of the god with his mother for the purpose of conquering death and renewing life.l51 This mythologem, it is plain, has passed into Christianity. For instance, St. Augustine says: 
Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world. He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman for ever.152 
149 Cited in Schultze, Psychologie der Naturv6lker, p. 338. 150 Brugsch, pp. 2goff. 
151 This formula is not surprising, since it is the primitive man in us whose animal forces appear in religion. From this point of view what Dieterich says in his Mithrasliturgie (p. 108) is especially significant: "The old thoughts coming from below gain a new strength in the history of religion. The revolution from below creates new life in the old indestructible forms," 
152 Sermo Suppositus 120. 8. ("Procedit Christus quasi sponsus de thalamo suo, praesagio nuptiarum exiit ad campum saeculi; pervenit usque ad crucis torum et 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	412 	The analogy is indeed so plain that it hardly requires 
further comment. It is, therefore, a very touching and, for all its naivete, an extraordinarily profound piece of symbolism when Mary, in an Old English lament of the Virgin,153 accuses the cross of being a false tree, which unjustly and insensately destroyed "the pure fruit of her body, her gentle birdling," with a poisonous draught, the draught of death, which was meant only for the guilty descendants of the sinner Adam. Her son was not to blame for their guilt. Mary laments: 
Tre unkynde, thou schalt be kud, mi sane step-moder I the calIe: 
cros thou holdest him so heih on heigth, mi fruites feet I mai not kis; 
cros I fynde thou art my fa, 
thou berest my brid, beten blo. 
	413 	Whereupon the Holy Cross answers: 
Ladi to the I owe honour, thi brihte palmes nou I bere; 
thi fruit me florischeth in blod colour that Blosme Blamed up in thi bour. ac not for the aI-one, 
but for to winne all this world. 
	414 	Concerning the relation of the two mothers to one another, 
the Cross says: 
thou art i-crouned hevene quene, thorw the burthe that thou beere. I am a Relyk that shineth shene, men wolde wite wher that I were, at the parlement wol I bene, 
on domes-day prestly a-pere; 
at the parlement shul puiten up pleynyng, hou Maydenes fruit on me gan sterve.154 
ibi firmavit ascendendo coniugium; ubi cum sentiret anhelantem in SUSp1f1lS creaturam commercio pietatis se pro coniuge dedit ad poenam; et copulavit sibi perpetuo iure matronam.") The "woman" is the Church. (Cf. pI. xxxa.) 
153 "Dispute between Mary and the Cross," in Morris, Legends of the Holy Rood, pp. 134-35· 
154 [In modern English: "Tree unkind thou shalt be known, my son's stepmother I call thee: Cross, thou holdest him so high in height, my fruit's feet I may not kiss; Cross, I find thou art my foe, thou bearest my bird, beaten 
270 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 
	415 	Thus the Mother of Death joins the Mother of Life in la- 
menting the dying god, and, as an outward token of their union, Mary kisses the cross and is reconciled.155 In ancient Egypt this union of opposite tendencies was naively preserved in the Isis mother-imago. The separation of the son from the mother signifies man's leave taking from animal unconsciousness. It was only the power of the "incest prohibition" 156 that created the self-conscious individual, who before had been mindlessly one with the tribe; and it was only then that the idea of the final death of the individual became possible. Thus through Adam's sin, which lay precisely in his becoming conscious, death came into the world. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reasons for not doing so: ultimately, it is the fear of death that holds him there. It seems as if no idea and no word were powerful enough to express the meaning of this conflict. Certainly the struggle for expression which has continued through the centuries cannot be motivated by what is narrowly and crudely conceived as "incest." We ought rather to conceive the law that expresses itself first and last in the "incest prohibition" as the impulse to domestication, and regard the religious systems as institutions which take up the instinctual forces of man's animal nature, organize them, and gradually make them available for higher cultural purposes. 
	416 	We will now return to Miss Miller's visions. Those that now 
follow do not require detailed discussion. First comes the image of a "bay of purple water." The symbolism of the sea links up 
blue ... / Lady, to thee I owe honour, thy bright palms now I bear; thy fruit Bourisheth for me in blood colour ... ; that blossom bloomed up in thy bower. And not for thee alone, but to win all this world. / Thou art crowned Heaven's queen, through the burden that thou barest. I am a Relic that shineth bright; men desire to know where I am. At the parliament [of the judgment day] shall I be, on doomsday appear suddenly; at the parliament I shall put up complaint, how a Maiden's fruit on me began to die."] 
155 In Greece the stake on which criminals were executed or punished was known as the "hecate." 
156 The incest-taboo is part of a complicated whole, Le., the marriage class system, the most elementary form of which is the cross-cousin marriage. This is a compromise between the endogamous and exogamous tendencies. See my "Psychology of the Transference," pars. 4331£. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
with what has gone before, and we could also refer back to the reminiscences of the bay of Naples in Part 1. In the sequence of the whole we certainly ought not to overlook the significance of the bay, so it might be as well to cast a glance at the etymology of this conception. Generally speaking, bay denotes anything that stands open. F. bayer means 'to keep the mouth open, to gape: Another word for the same thing is gulf (Lat. sinus), which, in F. golfe) is closely connected with goufjre) 'abyss' (cf. also Eng. gap). Gulf is related to Kb}..?r05,157 'bosom, lap, womb'; also 'fold of a garment,' or 'pocket: (In Swiss-German, Buese is 'pocket of a coat or skirt:) KbA'lr05 can also mean a deep hollow between two waves, or a valley between two high mountains. These significations point clearly to the underlying primitive ideas. They render intelligible Goethe's choice of words in the passage where Faust wishes to follow the sun with winged desire in order to drink its "streams of quenchless light": 
Then mountains could not check my godlike flight, With wild ravine or savage rocky ways; 
But 10, the sea, with warm and tranquil bays, Would hold its beauty to my wondering sight.158 
	417 	Faust's desire, like that of every hero, is a yearning for the 
mystery of rebirth, for immortality; therefore his way leads out to sea and down into the maw of death, that frighteningly narrow "passage" which signals the new day: 
I hear a call towards the open main, 
My tide of soul is ebbing more and more; Lies at my feet the shining, glassy plain, 
A new day beckons to another shore. 
As if on wings, a chariot of fire 
Sweeps near me. I am ready to be free. Piercing the ether, new-born, I aspire To rise to spheres of pure activity. 
Now let me dare to open wide the gate 
Past which man's steps have ever flinching trod, The hour is come, as master of my fate, 
To prove in man the stature of a god, 
157 Diez, Wiirterbuch der romanischen Sprachen, p. 168. 158 Trans. by Wayne, p. 66. 
272 

V. SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH Nor shrink before the cavern black and fell, Imagination's torment evermore, 
But strive towards that passage) at whose door -A narrow mouth-burn all the flames of hell. This step I take in cheerful resolution, 
Though I should plunge to death and dissolution.1119 
	418 	So it seems like a confirmation of this when in the very next 
vision Miss Miller sees "a perpendicular cliff." (Cf. goufjre.) This whole series of visions ends, so the author tells us, with a confusion of sounds, somewhat resembling "wa-ma, wa-ma." This strikes a very primitive, abysmal note. Since we learn nothing from Miss Miller about the subjective roots of this echo from the past, there is only one conjecture open to us: that it might, in the context as a whole, be considered a slight distortion of the well-known cry "Ma-ma." 
159 Trans. based on Wayne, p. 54. 
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VI 
THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
	419 	There now comes a short pause in the production of the 
visions; then the activity of the unconscious is energetically resumed. 
	420 	A wood appears, with trees and bushes. After our discussion 
in the preceding chapter, we need only say that the meaning of the forest coincides essentially with that of the tabooed tree. The sacred tree is generally found in a wood or in a paradiselike garden. Sometimes the forbidden grove takes the place of the tabooed tree and is invested with all the attributes of the latter. The forest, like the tree, has a maternal significance. In the vision which now follows, the forest forms the setting for the dramatic representation of Chiwantopel's end. I will first give the beginning of the drama, i.e., the first attempt at sacrifice, as it appears in the original text. The reader will find the continuation, the monologue and sacrificial scene, at the beginning of the next chapter. 
The figure of Chi-wan-to-pel comes up from the south, on horseback, wrapped in a blanket of bright colours, red, blue, and white. An Indian, dressed in buckskin, beaded and ornamented with feathers, creeps forward stealthily, making ready to shoot an arrow at Chiwan-to-pel, who bares his breast to him in an attitude of defiance; and the Indian, fascinated by this sight, slinks away and disappears into the forest. 
	421 	Chiwantopel appears on horseback. This fact seems to be of 
some importance because, as the next act of the drama will show, the horse does not play a neutral role, but suffers the same death as the hero, who even calls him his "faithful brother." This points to a curious similarity between horse and rider. There seems to be an intimate connection between the 
274 

VI. THE BAlTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
two which leads them to the same fate. We have already seen that the libido directed towards the mother actually symbolizes her as a horse.1 The mother-imago is a libido-symbol and so is the horse; at some points the meaning of the two symbols overlaps. But the factor common to both is the libido. In the present context, therefore, the hero and his horse seem to symbolize the 

Fig. 28. \\Iotan riding the eight-legged horse Sleipnir Tombstone, Gotland, Sweden, c. A.D. IOOO 
idea of man and the subordinate sphere of animal instinct. Parallel representations would be Agni on the ram (pI. xIIIb), Wotan on Sleipnir (fig. 28), Ahura-Mazda on Angramainyu,2 
1 The goddess of the underworld, Hecate, is sometimes represented with a horse's head. Demeter and Philyra, wishing to escape the attentions of Kronos or Poseidon, change themselves into mares. Witches can easily change into horses, hence the nail-marks of the horseshoe may be seen on their hands. The devil rides on the witch's horse (fig. 29), and priests' housekeepers are changed after death into horses. (Negelein, "Das Pferd im Seelenglauben und Totenkult," XI, pp. 4061£.) 
2 In the same way the legendary king Talimurath rides on Ahriman, the devil. 
275 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMAnON: TWO 
Christ on the ass,3 Mithras on the bull, accompanied by his symbolic animals, the lion and the snake (pI. XL), Men on the human-footed horse, Frey on the boar with golden bristles, and so on. The steeds of mythology are always invested with great significance and very often appear anthropomorphized. Thus Men's horse has human forelegs, Balaam's ass human speech, and the bull upon whose back Mithras springs to deliver the death blow (taurokathapsis: 4 cf. pI. XL) is a life-giving deity. 

Fig. 29. The Devil riding off with a witch From OlausMagnus, Historia, Rome, I555 
The mock crucifixion on the Palatine shows the Crucified with an ass's head (pI. XLIII), which may perhaps be a reference to the old legend that the image of an ass was worshipped in the temple at Jerusalem.5 In the form of Drosselbart ('horse's beard') Wotan is half man, half horse. An old German riddle puts this unity of horse and rider 6 very nicely: "Who are the two that go to the Thing? Together they have three eyes,7 ten 
3 The she-ass and her foal might derive from astrology, since the zodiacal sign Cancer, which rules at the summer solstice, was known in antiquity as the ass and its young. Cf. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, p. 368. 
4 The image is probably taken from the Roman circus .. The Spanish matador still has an heroic significance. Cf. Suetonius, Opera, trans. by RoUe, n, pp. 40--43: 
"They drive wild bulls all over the arena, leaping upon them when they are tired out and throwing them to the ground by the horns." 
5 This legend is part of the astrological aspect of the Jewish god (Saturn), which I would rather not discuss here. 
6 Cf. the exhaustive account of this theme in Max Jiihns, Ross und Reiter. 7 Wotan is one-eyed. Cf. Schwartz, lndogermanischer Volksglaube, pp. 164ff. 
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VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
feet and one tail,S and thus they travel over the land." Legend attributes properties to the horse which psychologically belong to the unconscious of man: there are clairvoyant and clairaudient horses, path-finding horses who show the way when the wanderer is lost, horses with man tic powers. In the Iliad (xix), the horse prophesies evil. They hear the words the corpse utters on its way to the grave-words which no human can hear. Caesar was told by his human-footed horse (probably derived from an identification of Caesar with the Phrygian Men) that he would conquer the world. An ass prophesied to Augustus the victory of Actium. Horses also see ghosts. All these things are typical manifestations of the unconscious. We can therefore see why the horse, as a symbol of the animal component in man, has numerous connections with the devil. The devil has a horse's hoof and sometimes a horse's form. At critical moments he shows the proverbial cloven hoof, just as, during the abduction of Hadding, Sleipnir suddenly looked out from behind Wotan's mantle.9 The devil, like the nightmare, rides the sleeper; hence it is said that those who have nightmares are ridden by the devil. In Persian lore the devil is the steed of God. He represents the sexual instinct; consequently at the Witches' Sabbath he appears in the form of a goat or horse. The sexual nature of the devil is imparted to the horse as well, so that this symbol is found in contexts where the sexual interpretation is the only one that fits. Loki propagates in the form of a horse, and so does the devil, as an ancient god of fire. Lightning, too, is represented theriomorphically as a horse.1o An uneducated hysterical patient once told me that as a child she was terrified of thunderstorms, because after each flash of lightning she saw a huge black horse rearing up to the sky. Indian legend tells of the black thunder-horse of Yama, the god of death, who dwells in the south, the mythical place of storms.u In German folklore the devil is a god of lightning who hurls the horse's hoof-lightning -on the roof tops. In accordance with the primitive idea that thunder fertilizes the earth, lightning and horses' hoofs both have a phallic meaning. An uneducated woman patient who had been violently forced by her husband to have coitus with him often dreamt that a wild horse leapt over her and kicked 
S Odin gives this riddle to King Heidhrekr (Hervarar Saga). Schwartz, p. 183. 
	9 Negelein, p. 412. 	10 Ibid., p. 419. 	11 Schwartz, p. 88. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
her in the abdomen with his hind foot. Plutarch records the following words of a prayer from the Dionysian orgies: 
Come, Dionysus, into thy temple at Elis, come with the Graces into thy holy temple, come with the bull's foot thundering, worthy bull, worthy bull! 12 
Pegasus struck the fountain of Hippocrene from the earth with his hoof. A Corinthian statue of Bellerophon, which was also a fountain, was made so that the water flowed from the hoof of the horse. Baldur's horse struck forth a spring with his kick. The horse's foot is therefore the dispenser of fruitful moisture.13 A tale from lower Austria, recorded by ]ahns,14 says that a gigantic man on a white horse can sometimes be seen riding over the mountains, a sure sign of rain. In German legend, Mother Holle, the goddess of childbirth, comes on horseback. Pregnant women nearing confinement would often give oats to a white horse from their aprons and ask him for a speedy delivery. Originally it was the custom for the horse to nuzzle the woman's genitals. The horse, like the ass, has the significance of a priapic animal,15 Hoof-marks were once worshipped as dispensers of blessings and fertility; they also established the right of possession and were of importance in determining boundaries, like the Priapic statues of Latin antiquity. It was a horse who, like the Dactyls, discovered the mineral wealth of the Harz Mountains with his hoof. The horse-shoe, an equivalent for the horse's foot,16 brings luck and has an apotropaic meaning. In the Netherlands, a hoof is hung up in the stable to ward off sorcery. The analogous effect of the phallus is well known; hence the phalli on gates. The shank in particular is supposed to keep off lightning, on the principle that like cures like. 
	41111 	On account of their speed, horses signify wind, and here 
again the tertium comparationis is the libido-symbol. German legend knows the wind as the wild huntsman in lustful pursuit of the maiden. Wotan gallops along in a storm after the wind-bride (Frigg) fleeing before him.17 Storm-centres often get 12 Preller, Griechische Mythologie, I, p. 432. [From Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, 
	36.] 	13 For further examples see Aigremont, Fuss- und Schuhsymbolik. 
H Ross und :Reiter, p. 7.7. 
15 Aigremont, p. 17. [Cf. the erotic role of the horse in Robinson Jeffers' poem "Roan Stallion."-EDITORS.] 
	16 Negelein, XII, p. 386f. 	17 Schwartz, p. 113, 
278 

VI. THE BATILE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER their names from horses, e.g., the Schimmelberge ('white horse hills') on Liineburg heath. The centaurs are, among other things, wind-gods.18 
	4113 	Horses also signify fire and light, like the fiery horses of 
Helios. Hector's horses were called Xanthos (yellow, glaring), Podargos (swift-footed), Lampos (shining), and Aithon (burning). Siegfried leaps over the wall of fire on the thunder-horse Grani, who was sired by Sleipnir and was the only one capable of taking the fiery hedge.19 There is a distinct fire symbolism in the mystic quadriga mentioned by Dio Chrysostom: 20 the highest god always drives his chariot round in a circle. The chariot is drawn by four horses, and the outside horse moves very quickly. He has a shining coat, bearing on it the signs of the zodiac and the constellations.21 The second horse goes more slowly and is illuminated on one side only. The third horse is slower still, and the fourth horse runs round himself. Once, however, the outside horse set the mane of the second horse on fire with his fiery breath, and the third horse drenched the fourth with streams of sweat. Then the horses dissolve and merge with the substance of the strongest and most fiery, which now becomes the charioteer. The horses represent the four elements. The catastrophe signifies world conflagration and the deluge, after which the division of God into Many ceases, and the divine One is restored.22 There can be no doubt that the quadriga is meant as an astronomical symbol of Time. We saw in Part I that the Stoic conception of fate is a fire-symbol, so it is a logical continuation of this idea when the closely related conception of time exhibits the same libido symbolism. 
18 Evidence for the centaurs as wind-gods may be found in Meyer, Indoger- 
	manische My then, II, pp .. 447ff. 	19 Schwartz, p. 141. 
20 Opera, XXXVI, 6. Cited in Cumont, Mysteries ot Mithra, p. 25. 
21 This is a special motif which must have something typical about it. A schizophrenic patient ("The I'sychology of Dementia Praecox"; 1936 edn., p. 1!11) declared that her horses had "half moons" under their coats "like little curls." The I Ching is supposed to have been brought to China by a horse that had the magic signs (the "river map") on his coat. The skin of the Egyptian skygoddess, the heavenly cow, is dotted with stars. (Cf. fig. 25.) The Mithraic Aion bears the signs of the zodiac on his skin (cf. pI. XLIV). 
22 This is the result of a world catastrophe. In mythology, too, the blossoming and withering of the tree of life denotes the turning point, the beginning of a new age. 
279 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	i24 	The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: 
Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun his eye, the wind his breath, the universal fire his open mouth. The year is the body of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back, the air his belly, the earth the underpart of his belly. The poles are his flanks, the intermediate poles his ribs, the seasons his limbs, the months and halfmonths his joints, days and nights his feet, the stars his bones, the clouds his flesh. Sand is the food in his stomach, rivers are his entrails. His liver and lungs are the mountains; plants and trees, his hair. The rising sun is his forepart, the setting sun his hind part .... The ocean is his kinsman, the sea his cradle.23 
	l25 	Here the horse is undoubtedly conceived as a time-symbol, 
besides being the whole world. In the Mithraic religion we meet with a strange god, Aion (pI. XLIV), also called Chronos or deus leontocePhalus because he is conventionally represented as a lion-headed human figure. He stands in a rigid attitude, wrapped in the coils of a serpent whose head juts forward over the head of the lion. In each hand he holds a key, on his breast is a thunderbolt, on his back are the four wings of the wind, and on his body are the signs of the zodiac. His attributes are a cock and implements. In the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter, which was based on classical models, Aion is shown as a naked man bearing in his hand a snake.24 As the name indicates, he is a time-symbol, and is composed entirely of libido-images. The lion, the zodiacal sign for the torrid heat of summer,25 is the symbol of concuPiscentia efJrenata) 'frenzied desire.' ("My soul roars with the voice of a hungry lion," says Mechthild of Magdeburg.) In the Mithraic mysteries the snake is often shown as the antagonist of the lion, in accordance with the myth of the sun's fight with the dragon. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Turn is addressed as a tom-cat, because in that form he fought the Apophis-serpent. To be "entwined" or embraced is the same as to be "devoured," which as we saw means entering into the mother's womb. Time is thus defined by the rising and setting sun, by the death and renewal of libido, the dawning and ex- 
23 Br. Up., I, i, trans. by Hume, p. 73, modified. 
24 Cumont, Textes, I, p. 76. 
25 Therefore the lion was killed by Samson, who afterwards harvested honey from the carcass. Summer's end is autumn's plenty. The legend of Samson is a parallel of the Mithraic sacrifice. Ct. Steinthal, "Die Sage von Simson," pp. 129ff. 
280 

VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER tinction of consciousness. The attribute of the cock again points to time, and the implements to creation through time (Bergson's "durc:~e cn~atrice"). Oromazdes (Ahura-Mazda) and Ahriman came into being through Zrwan akarana) 'infinitely long duration.' So time, this empty and purely formal concept, is expressed in the mysteries through transformations of the creative force, libido, just as time in physics is identical with the flow of the energic process. Macrobius remarks: "By the lion's head the present time is indicated ... because its condition is strong and fervent." 26 Philo Judaeus evidently knows better: 
Time is regarded as a god by evil men who wish to hide the Essential Being .... Vicious men think that Time is the cause of the world, but the wise and good think it is God.27 
	426 	In Firdausi, time is often the symbol of fate.28 The Indian 
text quoted above goes even further: its horse symbol contains the whole world, his kinsman and cradle is the sea, the mother, who is the equivalent of the world-soul. Just as Aion represents the libido in the "embrace" or state of death and rebirth, so here the cradle of the horse is the sea, i.e., the libido is in the "mother," dying and rising again in the unconscious. 
	427 	We have already seen that the horse is connected through 
Yggdrasill with the symbolism of the tree. The horse too is a "tree of death"; for instance in the Middle Ages the bier was called "St. Michael's Horse," and the modern Persian word for coffin means 'wooden horse.' 29 The horse also plays the part of a psychopomp who leads the way to the other world-the souls of the dead are fetched by horsewomen, the Valkyries. Modern Greek songs speak of Charon as riding on a horse. 
	428 	Finally, the symbol appears in yet another form: sometimes 
the devil rides on a three-legged horse. The goddess of death, 
26 Saturnaliorum Libri VII, I, 20, IS, in Opera, 11, p. 189. ("Leonis capite monstratur praesens tempus-quia conditio ejus ... valida fervensque est.") 
27 In Genesim, I, 100, in Opera omnia, VI, p. 338. Cited in Cumont, Textes, I, p.82. 
28 Spiegel, Eriinische Altertumskunde, 11, p. 193. In the treatise IIEpl <f>UUEWS, which is ascribed to Zoroaster, Ananke, the goddess of fate, is symbolized by air. (Cumont, p. 87.) 
29 Spielrein's patient (p. 394) speaks of horses who eat human beings and even exhumed corpses. 
281 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
Hel, rides on a three-legged horse in time of pestilence.3o In the Bundahish 31 there is a monstrous three-legged ass who stands in the heavenly rain-lake Vouru-Kasha; his urine purifies its waters, and at his cry all useful animals become pregnant and all harmful animals drop their young. The contrasting symbolism of He! is fused into one image in the ass of Vouru-Kasha. The libido is fructifying as well as destructive. 
	429 	In the Miller drama an Indian approaches the hero, prepar- 
ing to shoot an arrow at him. But Chiwantopel, with a proud gesture, exposes his breast to the enemy. This image reminded the author of the scene between Cassius and Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.32 A misunderstanding has arisen between the two friends, Brutus accusing Cassius of withholding the money for the legions. Cassius breaks out in a peevish tirade: 
Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come, Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, 
For Cassius is aweary of the world: 
Hated by one he loves: braved by his brother; Check'd like a bondman; all his faults observ'd, Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote, To cast into my teeth. 01 I could weep 
My spirit from mine eyes! There is my dagger, And here my naked breast; within, a heart Dearer than Plutus' mine, richer than gold: 
If that thou be'st a Roman, take it forth; 
I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart. Strike, as thou didst at Caesar; for, I know, 
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lov'dst him better Than ever thou lov'dst Cassius. 
	430 	Our material would not be complete if we did not mention 
that this speech of Cassius has several analogies with the agonized delirium of Cyrano, except that Cassius is far more theatrical. There is something childish and hysterical in his 
30 Negelein, p. 416. Cf. my remarks on the three-legged horse in "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales" (1954/55 edn., p. 28). 
	31 [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 535.-EDITORS.] 	32 Act IV, scene 1II. 
282 
.1 
v!. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
manner. Brutus has no intention of killing him; instead, he pours cold water on him in the following dialogue: 
Sheathe your dagger: 
Be angry when you will, it shall have scope; Do what you will, dishonour shall be humour. o Cassiusl you are yoked with a lamb 
That carries anger as the flint bears fire, 
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark, And straight is cold again. 
	CASSlUS: 	Hath Cassius liv'd 
To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus, When grief and blood ill-temper'd vexeth him? 
BRUTUS: When I spoke that, I was ill-temper'd too. 
CASSlUS: Do you confess so much? Give me your hand. 
BRUTUS: And my heart" too. 
CASSlUS: 
o Brutusl 
BRUTUS: 
What's the matter? 
CASSlUS: Have you not love enough to bear with me, When that rash humour which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful? 
	BRUTUS: 	Yes, Cassius; and from henceforth 
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus, He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so. 
41\1 
Cassius's irritability is eXplained by the fact that he identifies with his mother and therefore behaves exactly like a woman, as his speech demonstrates to perfection.33 His womanish yearning for love and his despairing self-abasement under the proud masculine will of Brutus fully justify the latter's remark that Cassius is "yoked with a lamb," in other words, has something feckless in his character, which is inherited from his mother. This can be taken as proof of an infantile disposition, which is 88 A clear case of identity with the anima. The first carrier of the anima-image is the mother. 
283 

432 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
as always characterized by a predominance of the parental imago, in this case that of the mother. An individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from his childish environment and his adaptation to his parents, with the result that he has a false reaction to the world: on the one hand he acts towards his parents like a child, always demanding love and immediate emotional rewards, while on the other hand he is so identified with his parents through his close ties with them that he behaves like his father or his mother. He is incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him. Therefore Brutus correctly surmises that "the mother chides" in Cassius, not he himself. The psychologically valuable fact to be elicited here is that Cassius is infantile and identified with the mother. His hysterical behaviour is due to the circumstance that he is still, in part, a "lamb," an innocent and harmless child. So far as his emotional life is concerned, he has not yet caught up with himself, as is often the case with people who are apparently so masterful towards life and their fellows, but who have remained infantile in regard to the demands of feeling. 
Since the figures in the Miller drama are children of the author's imagination, they naturally depict those traits of character which belong to the author herself.34 The hero Chiwantopel represents her ideal, who is here projected as a masculine figure; for Miss Miller is still youthful enough to see her ideal in a man. She has evidently received no salutary disappointments in this respect, but is still enjoying her illusions. She does not yet know that her ideal figure ought really to be feminine, because such a figure might touch her too closely. So long as the ideal is portrayed in the person of a man, it does not commit her to anything; it merely stimulates her fantastic demands. Were the ideal of her own sex, she might one day make the discovery that she does not quite come up to it. That would be uncomfortable, but salutary. Cyrano's gesture 35 is all very fine and impressive, but that of Cassius verges on the theatrical. Both heroes set about dying in the grand manner, and Cyrano actually succeeds in doing so. This yearning for death anticipates the inevitable end of the illusion that the other person is 
84 Because her fantasy is not a creation she consciously willed and formed, ",ut 
	an involuntary product. 	35 See par. 48, above. 
284 

433 
434 

VI. THE BAITLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
the ideal. Miss Miller's ideal figure is evidently about to change his psychic localization-he might even take up his abode in the author herself. That would mark a very critical point in her career. For when such a vitally important figure as the ideal is about to change, it is as though that figure had to die. It then creates in the individual all sorts of unaccountable and apparently unfounded presentiments of death-a romantic worldweariness. These tendencies have already found expression in the "Song of the Moth," but now they become more sharply defined. Her infantile world wants to come to an end and be replaced by the adult phase. The wish of young girls to die is often only an indirect expression of this, but it remains a pose even if they really do die, for even death can be dramatized. Such an outcome merely makes the pose more effective. That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death. As an infantile person Miss Miller cannot realize what her task is in life; she cannot set herself any goal or standard for which she feels responsible. Therefore she is not yet prepared to accept the problem of love either, for this demands full consciousness and responsibility, circumspection and foresight. It is a decision in favour of life, at whose end death stands. Love and death have not a little to do with one another. 
The proud gesture with which the hero offers himself to death may very easily be a manoeuvre for courting the sympathy of the other person, and it therefore invites the cool analysis which Brutus proceeds to give. The behaviour of Chiwantopel is equally suspicious, for the Cassius scene which serves as its model indiscreetly discloses the fact that the whole affair is merely infantile. When a gesture turns out to be too theatrical it gives ground for the suspicion that it is not genuine, that somewhere a contrary will is at work which intends something quite different. 
In the ensuing drama the libido assumes a menacing activity that contrasts very strongly with the inactive nature of the preceding symbols, and a conflict develops in which one party threatens the other with murder. The hero, the ideal image of the dreamer, is ready to die; he has no fear of death. To judge from the infantile character of this hero, it is indeed high time for him to quit the stage. Death is to come for him in the form 
281'; 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
of an arrow-shot. In view of the fact that many heroes are themselves mighty archers, or else are killed by arrows, it may not be superfluous to inquire what death by an arrow means. (Cf. pI. XLV.) 
	435 	We read in the biography of Anna Catherina Emmerich, the 
hysterical German nun (1774-1824) who received the stigmata, the following account of her heart-trouble: 
When only in her novitiate, she received as a Christmas gift from Christ a very painful heart-trouble, which lasted for the whole period of her ordained life. But God showed her inwardly its purpose: it was to atone for the decay of the spirit of the Order, and especially for the sins of her fellow sisters. But what made this trouble most painful to her was the gift which she had possessed from youth, of seeing with her mind's eye the inner nature of man as he really was. She felt the heart-trouble physically, as if her heart were continually pierced by arrows.36 These arrows-and for her this was a far worse spiritual torment-she recognized as the thoughts, schemings, secret gossipings, misunderstandings, and uncharitable slanders with which her fellow sisters, wholly without reason and conscience, plotted against her and her God-fearing way of life.37 
	436 	It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and long- 
suffering nature will not readily endure such a high degree of differentiation and defends itself in its own way. The constant companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can live. ""Ve know that these temptations can pass off unconsciously, so that only their equivalents reach consciousness in the form of symptoms. We know, too, that Herz traditionally rhymes with Schmerz.38 It is a well-known fact that hysterics substitute a physical pain for a psychic pain which is not felt because repressed. Catherina Emmerich's biographer has understood this more or less correctly, but her own interpretation of the pain is based, as usual, on a projection: it is always the others who secretly say all sorts of wicked things about her, and this is the cause of her pains. The facts of the matter are rather different: the renunciation of all life's joys, this fading before the flower, is always painful, and especially painful are the un- 
36 The heart of the mother of God is pierced by a sword, "that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed," Luke 2 : 35. 
37 Wegener, Leben der Dienerin Gottes Anna Catherina Emmerich, p. 63· 38 [German 'heart' and 'pain.'-EDIToRS.] 
286 

VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
fulfilled desires and the attempts of nature to break through the barrier of repression, without which no such differentiation would be possible. The gossip and sarcastic gibes of the sisters very naturally pick on these painful things, so that it must seem to the saint as if her difficulties came from there. She could hardly know that gossip is very apt to take over the role of the unconscious, and, like a skilled adversary, always aims at the chinks in our armour of which we know nothing. 
	437 	The same idea is expressed in the following passage from the 
discourses of the Buddha: 
But if those sensual pleasures fail the person who desires and wishes for them, he will suffer, pierced by the arrow of pain.39 
	438 	The wounding and painful shafts do not come from outside, 
through gossip, which only pricks us on the surface, but from the ambush of our own unconscious. It is our own repressed desires that stick like arrows in our flesh.40 On another occasion this became true for our nun, and in the most literal sense. It is a well·known fact that scenes of mystic union with the Saviour are strongly tinged with erotic libido,41 Stigmatization amounts to an incubation with the Saviour, a slight modification of the ancient conception of the unio mystica as cohabitation with the god. The nun gives the following account of her stigmatization: 
I had a contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, and I besought him to let me feel his sorrows with him, and prayed five paternosters in adoration of the five sacred wounds. Lying on my bed with arms outstretched, I entered into a great sweetness and into an endless thirst for the torments of Jesus. Then I saw a radiance descending towards me; it came slanting down from above. It was a crucified body, alive and transparent, the arms extended, but without the Cross. The wounds shone more brightly than the body; they were 
89 Sutta-NiPata, trans. by Fausbiill, p. 146. 
40 Theocritus (27, 29), calls the pangs of birth the "darts of EiIeithyia," as though the pain came from outside. [Cf. Edmonds trans., p. 337.] The same corn· parison is used for desire in Ecclesiasticus 19: 2: "As an arrow that sticketh in the flesh of the thigh, so is a word in a fool's belly." That is to say, it gives him no peace until it is out. 
41 This fact, however, does not prove that the experience of the unio mystica is exclusively erotic in origin. The upsurge of eroticism only proves that the canalization of libido has not been entirely successful, with the result that clear traces of the original form remain behind unassimilated. 
287 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
five circles of glory emanating from the glory of the whole. I was enraptured, and my heart was moved with great pain and yet with great sweetness, from my longing to share the torments of my Saviour. And at the sight of the wounds my longing for the sufferings of the Redeemer increased more and more, as if streaming out of my breast, through my hands, side, and feet towards his holy wounds. Then from the hands, then from the side, then from the feet of the figure triple beams of shining red light shot forth into my hands, my side, and my feet, ending in an arrow.42 
	439 	The beams are triple, terminating in an arrow-head}3 Like 
Cupid, the sun has his quiver full of destroying or fertilizing arrows.44 The arrow has a masculine significance; hence the Oriental custom of describing brave sons as the arrows or javelins of their father. "To make sharp arrows" is an Arabic expression for begetting valiant sons. To announce the birth of a son the Chinese used to hang a bow and arrow in front of the house. Accordingly the Psalms declare (127: 4, RV): "As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of youth." Thanks to this meaning of the arrow, we can see why the Scythian king Ariantes, wishing to prepare a census, demanded an arrow-head from each man.45 A similar significance attaches to the lance: men are descended from the lance; the ash is the mother of lances; therefore the men of the Bronze Age are derived from her. Kaineus 46 commanded that his lance was to be worshipped. Pindar says of this Kaineus that, in the legend, "he descended into the depths, splitting the earth with a straight foot." 47 Originally he is supposed to have been a maiden 
42 Wegener, 77ff. 
43 Apuleius (The Golden Ass, Il, 31, in Graves trans., p. 59) makes drastic use of the bow-and-arrow symbolism: "Since the first of Cupid's sharp arrows lodged in my heart this morning, I have been standing to arms all day, and now my bow is strung so tight that I'm afraid something will snap if the Advance isn't sounded pretty soon." 
44 And like the plague-bringing Apollo. In OHG., 'arrow' is strala. 45 Herodotus, IV, 81. [Cf. Selincourt trans., p. 269.] 
46 Cf. Roscher, Lexikon, Ill, 894ff., s.v. "Kaineus." 
47 Pindar, fr. 166f. Spielrein's patient (p. 371) also had this idea of splitting the earth: "Iron is used for boring into the earth-With iron you can make menThe earth is split, burst open, man is divided-Man is cut up and put together again-In order to put a stop to being buried alive, Jesus told his disciples to bore into the earth." The motif of "splitting" is of world-wide significance. The Persian hero Tishtriya, taking the form of a white horse, split open the rain-lake 
288 

VI. THE BAITLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER named Kainis, who, as a reward for her submissiveness, was changed by Poseidon into an invulnerable man. Ovid, describing the battle of the Lapithae with the invulnerable Kaineus, says that in the end they covered him completely with trees, because that was the only way they could get at him. He continues: 
His end is doubtful. Some say that his body was thrust down by the weight of the trees to the Tartarean pit, but the son of Ampycus denied this. For from the midst of the pile he saw a bird with golden wings fly up into the limpid air.48 
	440 	Roscher49 takes this bird to be the golden plover (Charadrius 
pZuviaZis), which gets its name from the fact that it lives in a xap6.8pa, 'crack in the earth.' His song heralds the rain. 
	441 	Once again we recognize the typical elements of a libido 
myth: original bisexuality, immortality (invulnerability) through entry into the mother (splitting the mother with the foot), resurrection as a soul-bird, and production of fertility (rain). When a hero of this type causes his lance to be worshipped, he probably does so because he thinks it a valid equivalent of himself. 
	442 	From this standpoint the passage in Job, which we quoted 
in Part I, appears in a new light: 
He hath set me up for his mark. 
His archers compass me round about, 
He cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; He poureth out my gall upon the ground. 
He breaketh me with breach upon breach, 
He runneth upon me like a giant.50 
	443 	Here Job is voicing the torment of soul caused by the on- 
slaught of unconscious desires; the libido festers in his flesh, a cruel God has overpowered him and pierced him through with barbed thoughts that agonize his whole being .. 
and so made the earth fruitful. He is also called Tir, 'arrow.' He is sometimes represented as feminine, with bow and arrow. (Cumont, Textes, I, p. 136.) Mithras shoots water from the rock with his arrow in order to stop the drought. On Mithraic monuments the knife, otherwise used as the sacrificial instrument for killing the bull, is sometimes round stuck in the earth. (Ibid., pp. 115, 116, 165.) 48 Metamorphoses, trans. by Miller, Il, pp. 216-17, modified. 
.9 In a review of Meyer's Indogermanische My then, in GOttingische Gelehrte 
	Anzeigen, I (1884), p. 155. 	50 Job 16: 12ff. 
289 

	

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 

	444 	The same image occurs in Nietzsche: 

Stretched out, shivering, 
Like one half dead whose feet are warmed, Shaken by unknown fevers, 

Shuddering from the icy pointed arrows of frost, Hunted by thee, 0 thought, 
Unutterable! veiled! horrible onel 
Thou huntsman behind the clouds. 
Struck to the ground by thee, 
Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark: 
Thus do I lie, 

Twisting, writhing, tortured With eternal tortures, Smitten 
By thee, cruel huntsman, Thou unknown-God! 

Smite deeper! 
Smite once more! Pierce, rend my heart! 
What meaneth this torturing With blunt-toothed arrows? Why gazest thou again, 
Never weary of human agony, 
With sardonic gods'-eyes, flashing lightning? Why wilt thou not kill, 
Only torture, torture? III 
	445 	No long-drawn explanations are needed to see in this com- 

parison the martyred and sacrificed god whom we have already met in the Aztec crucifixions and in the sacrifice of Odin.1I2 We meet the same image in depictions of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where the glowing, girlishly tender flesh of the young saint betrays all the pain of renunciation which the sensibility of the artist projected into it. An artist cannot prevent his work from being coloured by the psychology of his time. This is true in even higher degree of the Christian symbol, the Crucified pierced by the lance. It is a true symbol of the man of the Christian era, tormented by his desires and crucified in Christ. 

III Thus SPake Zarathustra. (Werke, VI, pp. 367f.) [Cf. trans. by Common, p. 293·] 112 Spielrein's patient said that she too had been shot by God three times-"then came a resurrection of the spirit." 

2QO 

	::-k:~ __ ¥~n&"tfi.t'- 	~'~VNJ'Ji".M""'~ 
; 11\"'~'~ ,...'w.ul/ll",,-, ,.l""'~fil~h4t- .. .,.,: 

a. Expulsion of the demons Anonymous engraving, I7th century 

b. Sun-god Shamanistic Eskimo idol, Alaska 

VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE l'vIOTHER 
	446 	That the torment which afflicts mankind does not come from 
outside, but that man is his own huntsman, his own sacrificer, his own sacrificial knife, is clear from another poem of Nietzsche's, where the dualism is resolved into a psychic conflict through the same symbolism: 
o Zarathustra, 
Most cruel Nimrodl Erstwhile hunter of God, Snare of all virtue, Arrow of evil! 
And now 
Self-hunted, 
Thine own quarry, Thyself pierced through 
Now 
Alone with thyself, 
Split in thine own knowledge, Amidst a hundred mirrors 
To thine own self false, Amidst a hundred memories Uncertain, 
Languishing with each wound, Shivering with each frost, Strangled in thine own snares, Self-knower! 
Self-hangman! 
Why didst thou hang thyself With the noose of thy wisdom? Why hast thou enticed thyself Into the old serpent's Paradise? Why hast thou stolen 
Into thyself, thyself? 53 
	447 	The deadly arrows do not strike the hero from without; 
it is himself who hunts, fights, and tortures himself. In him, instinct wars with instinct; therefore the poet says, "Thyself pierced through," which means that he is wounded by his own arrow. As we know that the arrow is a libido-symbol, the mean- 
53 "Between Birds of Prey." (Werke, VIII, p. 414.) [Cf. trans. in Ecce Homo and Poetry by Ludovici, Cohn, et al., p. 179.] 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
ing of this "piercing" is clear: it is the act of union with oneself, a sort of self-fertilization, and also a self-violation, a self-murder, so that Zarathustra can justly call himself his own hangman (like Odin, who sacrifices himself to Odin). One should not of course take this psychologem in too voluntaristic a sense: nobody deliberately inflicts sllch tortures on himself, they just happen to him. If a man reckons the unconscious as part of his personality, then one must admit that he is in fact raging against himself. But, in so far as the symbolism thrown up by his suffering is archetypal and collective, it can be taken as a sign that he is no longer suffering from himself, but rather from the spirit of the age. He is suffering from an objective, impersonal cause, from his collective unconscious which he has in common with all men. 
	448 	Being wounded by one's own arrow signifies, therefore, a 
state of introversion. What this means we already know: the libido sinks "into its own depths" (a favourite image of N ietzsche's), and discovers in the darkness a substitute for the upper world it has abandoned-the world of memories ("Amidst a hundred memories"), the strongest and most influential of which are the earliest ones. It is the world of the child, the paradisal state of early infancy, from which we are driven out by the relentless law of time. In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of home and the hopes of all that is to be. As Heinrich says of his miraculous work in Gerhart Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell: 
It sings a song, long lost and long forgotten, A song of home, a childlike song of love, Born in the waters of some fairy well, 
Known to all mortals, and yet heard of none.54 
	449 	Yet "the danger is great," 55 as Mephistopheles says, for these 
depths fascinate. When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed, and returns to the point of cleavage, the navel, where it first entered the body. This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her the current of life reached us. Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man 
	54 Trans. by Meltzner, p. 75. 	55 Faust, Part II, "The Mothers." 
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VI. THE BAITLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to tht fountainhead-and that is the dangerous moment when tht issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libidc gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world,56 then for tht upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill. But if the libido manages to teal itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness. This idea is illustrated in an Indian myth: 
Vishnu sank into a profound trance, and in his slumber brought forth Brahma, who, enthroned on a lotus, rose out of Vishnu's navel, bringing with him the Vedas (pI. XLVIa) , which he diligently read. (Birth of creative thought from introversion.) But through Vishnu's ecstatic absentmindedness a mighty flood came upon the world. (Devouring and destruction of the world through introversion.) Taking advantage of the general confusion, a demon stole the Vedas and hid them in the depths. Brahma then roused Vishnu, who, changing himself into a fish (pI. XLVII), plunged into the flood, fought the demon, conquered him, and recaptured the Vedas. 
	450 	This is a primitive way of describing the libido's entry into 
the interior world of the psyche, the unconscious. There, through its introversion and regression, contents are constellated which till now were latent. These are the primordial images, the archetypes, which have been so enriched with individual memories through the introversion of libido as to become perceptible to the conscious mind, in much the same way as the crystalline structure latent in the saturated solution takes visible shape from the aggregation of molecules. Since these introversions and regressions only occur at moments when a new orientation and a new adaptation are necessary, the constellated archetype is always the primordial image of the need of the 
56 This is mythologicalIy represented in the legend of Theseus and Peirithous. who wanted to abduct Persephone from the underworld. They entered a chasm in the grove of Colonus and descended into the bowels of the earth. When they got down below they wished to rest a little, but found they had grown fast to the rocks and could not rise. In other words, they remained stuck in the mother and were lost to the upper world. Later Theseus was rescued by Heracles, who appeared in the role of the death-conquering hero. The Theseus myth is therefore a representation of the individuation process. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
moment. Although the changing situations of life must appear infinitely various to our way of thinking, their possible number never exceeds certain natural limits; they fall into more or less typical patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. The archetypal structure of the unconscious corresponds to the average run of events. The changes that may befall a man are not infinitely variable; they are variations of certain typical occurrences which are limited in number. When therefore a distressing situation arises, the corresponding archetype will be constellated in the unconscious. Since this archetype is numinous, i.e., possesses a specific energy, it will attract to itself the contents of consciousness-conscious ideas that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realization. Its passing over into consciousness is felt as an illumination, a revelation, or a "saving idea." Repeated experience of this process has had the general result that, whenever a critical situation arises, the mechanism of introversion is made to function artificially by means of ritual actions which bring about a spiritual preparation, e.g., magical ceremonies, sacrifices, invocations, prayers, and suchlike. The aim of these ritual actions is to direct the libido towards the unconscious and compel it to introvert. If the libido connects with the unconscious, it is as though it were connecting with the mother, and this raises the incest-taboo. But as the unconscious is infinitely greater than the mother and is only symbolized by her, the fear of incest must be conquered if one is to gain possession of those "saving" contentsthe treasure hard to attain. Since the son is not conscious of his incest tendency, it is projected upon the mother or her symbol. But the symbol of the mother is not the mother herself, so in reality there is not the slightest possibility of incest, and the taboo can therefore be ruled out as a reason for resistance. In so far as the mother represents the unconscious, the incest tendency, particularly when it appears as the amorous desire of the mother (e.g., Ishtar and Gilgamesh) or of the anima (e.g., Chryse and Philoctetes), is really only the desire of the unconscious to be taken notice of. The rejection of the unconscious usually has unfortunate results; its instinctive forces, if persistently disregarded, rise up in opposition: Chryse changes into a venomous serpent. The more negative the attitude of. the conscious towards the unconscious, the more dangerous does 
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VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
the latter become.57 Chryse's curse was fulfilled so completely that Philoctetes, on approaching her altar, wounded himself in the foot with his own poison-tipped arrow, or, according to other versions 58 which are in fact better attested, was bitten in the foot by a poisonous snake, 59 and fell into a decline.60 
	~1 	This very typical injury also destroyed Ra, and is described 
as follows in an Egyptian hymn: 
The mouth of the god twitched with age, So that he dropped his spittle on the earth, And what he spat fell on the ground. 
Isis then kneaded it with her hands Together with the earth which was there; She fashioned from it a noble worm 
And made it like a spear. 
57 When the Greeks set out on their expedition to Troy, they wished, like the Argonauts and Heracles before them, to offer sacrifice on the altar of Chryse, a nymph who lived on an island of the same name, in order to secure a happy end to their voyage. Philoctetes was the only one among them' who knew the way to her hidden shrine. But there the disaster befell him which is described above. Sophocles treats of this episode in his Philoctetes. We learn from a scholiast that Chryse offered the hero her love, but, on being scorned, cursed him. Philoctetes, like his forerunner Heracles, is the prototype of the wounded and ailing king, a motif that is continued in the legend of the Grail and in alchemical symbolism (cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 49Iff. lInd fig. 149). 
58 Roscher, Lexikoll, 2318, 15ff., s.v. "Philoctetes." 
50 When the Russian stIll-hero Oleg approached the skull of the slain horse, a snake darted out and bit him in the foot, so that he fell sick and died. And when Indra, in the form of Shyena the falcon, stole the soma drink, Krishanu the herdsman wounded him in the foot with an arrow. De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, 1I, pp. 181-82. 
60 Like the Grail king who guards the chalice, symbol of the mother. The myth of Philoctetes comes from the wider context of the Heracles cycle. Heracles had two mothers, the helpful AIcmene and the vengeful Hera, from whose breast he drank the milk of immortality. Heracles conquered Hera's serpents while yet in the cradle; that is, he freed himself from the grip of the unconscious. But from time to time Hera sent him fits of madness, in one of which he killed his own children. This is indirect proof that she was a lamia. According to one tradition. Heracles perpetrated this deed after refusing to perform the labours for his taskmaster Eurystheus. As a consequence of his hanging back, the libido that was ready for the work regressed to the unconscious mother-imago. and this resulted in madness. In this state he identified with the lamia and killed his own children. The Delphic oracle told him that he was named Heracles because he owed his immortal fame to Hera, who through her persecutions drove him to his great deeds. It is evident that the great deed really means overcoming the mother and thus winning immortality. His characteristic weapon, the club, he cut from the 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
She did not wind it living about her face, But threw it in a coil upon the path 
Upon which the great god was wont to walk At pleasure through his two countries. 
The noble god stepped forth in his splendour, The gods who served Pharaoh accompanied him, And he walked as he did each day. 
Then the noble worm stung him ... 
The divine god opened his mouth, 
And the voice of his majesty rang through the heavens. And the gods cried: Behold! Behold! 
He could not answer them, 
His jawbones chattered, 
All his limbs trembled, 
And the poison invaded his flesh As the Nile invades his territory.61 
	452 	In this hymn Egypt has preserved for us a primitive version of 
the snake-sting motif. The aging of the autumn sun as a symbol of human senility is traced back to poisoning by a serpent. The mother is blamed for causing the death of the sun-god with her mischievous arts. The serpent symbolizes the mysterious numen of the "mother" (and of other daimonia) who kills, but who is at the same time man's only security against death, as she is the source of life.62 Accordingly, only the mother can cure him who is sick unto death, and the hymn goes on to describe how the gods were called together to take counsel: 
Then came Isis with her wisdom, 
Whose mouth is full of the breath of life, Whose decree banishes pain, 
And whose word gives life to those who no longer breathe. 
maternal olive-tree. Like the sun, he possessed the arrows of Apollo. He conquered the Nemean lion in its cave, whose meaning is the "grave in the mother's womb" (see the end of this chapter). Then follows the fight with the Hydra (cf. also fig. 17) and his other deeds, which were all wished on him by Hera. All of them symbolize the fight with the unconscious. At the end of his career, however, he became the slave of Omphale (o,.."'aM~ = 'navel') as the oracle prophesied; that is, he had to submit after all to the unconscious. 
61 This and the following passages trans. from Erman, pp. 265-67, modified. 
62 How concretely this mythologem is taken on the primitive level can be seen from the description in Gatti, South of the Sahara (pp. 226ff.), of a medicinewoman in Natal who had a twenty-foot boa constrictor as her familiar. 
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VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER 
She said: What is it, what is it, divine Father? Behold, a worm hath done thee this wrong. 
Tell me thy name, divine Father, 
For he whose name is spoken shall live. 
	453 	Ra answers: 
I am he who created heaven and earth, and piled up the mountains, And made all living things. 
I am he who made the water and caused the great flood, Who made the Bull of his Mother, 
Who is the Begetter. 
The poison did not depart, it went further, The great god was not healed. 
Then said Isis to Ra: 
That is not thy name which thou tellest me. Tell me thy name, that the poison may depart, For he whose name is spoken shall live. 
	454 	Finally Ra decides to utter his true name. He was only par- 
tially cured, just as Osiris was only incompletely reconstituted, and in addition he lost his power and finally had to retire on the back of the heavenly cow. 
	455 	The poisonous worm is a deadly instead of an animating 
form of libido. The "true name" is Ra's soul and magic power (his libido). What Isis demands is the transference of libido to the mother. This request is fulfilled to the letter, for the aging god returns to the heavenly cow, the symbol of the mother. 
	456 	The meaning of this symbolism becomes clear in the light of 
what we said earlier: the forward-striving libido which rules the conscious mind of the son demands separation from the mother, but his childish longing for her prevents this by setting up a psychic resistance that manifests itself in all kinds of neurotic fears-that is to say, in a general fear of life. The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally "into the mother." The reasons for this are generally projected outside oneself: the fault lies with external circumstances, or else the parents are made responsible. And indeed, it remains 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 

to be found out how much the mother is to blame for not letting the son go. The son will naturally try to explain everything by the wrong attitude of the mother, but he would do better to refrain from all such futile attempts to excuse his own ineptitude by laying the blame on his parents. 
	457 	This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, but a very 
real panic, which seems disproportionate only because its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: the young, growing part of the personality, if prevented from living or kept in check, generates fear and changes into fear. The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle, she then becomes the vengeful pursuer. Naturally it is not the real mother, although she too may seriously injure her child by the morbid tenderness with which she pursues it into adult life, thus prolonging the infantile attitude beyond the proper time. It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 (Cf. pIs. xxxvma, XLVIII.) The motherimago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; it makes him forget his dependence on the unconscious. The case of Gilgamesh is instructive in this respect: he was so successful that the gods, the representatives of the unconscious, saw themselves compelled to deliberate how they could best bring about his downfall. Their efforts were unavailing at first, but when the hero had won the herb of immortality (cf. pI. XIX) and was almost at his goal, a serpent stole the elixir of life from him while he slept. 
	458 	The demands of the unconscious act at first like a paralysing 
poison on a man's energy and resourcefulness, so that it may well be compared to the bite of a poisonous snake. (Cf. fig. 30.) 

63 The myth of Hippolytus has similar ingredients: His step-mother Phaedra faUs in love with him, he repulses her, she accuses him of violation before her husband, who calls upon Poseidon to punish Hippolytus. Whereupon a monster comes out of the sea; Hippolytus' horses take fright and drag him to death. But he is restored to life by Aesculapius, and the gods convey him to the grove of the wise nymph Egeria, the counsellor of Numa Pompilius. 
2g8 

VI. THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER Apparently it is a hostile demon who robs him of energy, but in actual fact it is his own unconscious whose alien tendencies are beginning to check the forward striving of the 

Fig. 30. QuetzaIcoatl devouring a man 

From the Codex Borbonicus, Aztt'c r6th century 

conscious mind. The cause of this process is often extremely obscure, the more so as it is complicated by all kinds of external factors and subsidiary causes, such as difficulties in work, disappointments, failures, reduced efficiency due to age, depressing family problems, and so on and so forth. According to the myths 
299