SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
Lay under clustering grapes. And the boy Looked up to Father Helios, who knew him, And tasting the sweet berries, he chose 
The sacred vine for his nurse. 
And soon he is grown; the beasts 
Fear him, for he is other than they, 
A Man. He is not like you and not 
Like the father, for boldly the high 
Soul of the father in him is united 
With your joys and your sadness for always, o earth. Rather would he resemble 
Eternal nature, mother of gods, the terrible. 
Therefore, 0 earth, his presumption 
Drives him away from your breast, and your tender Gifts are in vain; ever and ever too high 
Does the proud heart beat! 
Leaving the sweet meadow of his shores Man must go out into flowerless waters, 
And though his orchards shine like the starry night With golden fruit, yet he digs 
Caves for himself in the mountains and grubs in the pit Far from the sacred ray of his father, 
Faithless also to the sun-god, who 
Loves not toilers and mocks at cares. 
Ah! the birds of the wood breathe freer, and though The breast of man more wildly and proudly heaves, His arrogance turns to fear, and the delicate 
Flowers of tranquillity bloom not for long.11 
	621 	This poem contains the first hint of discord between the 
poet and nature; he begins to feel estranged from reality. Note that the little child chooses the "vine for his nurse." This Dionysian allusion reminds us of Judah in Jacob's blessing (Genesis 49: 11): "binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine." 
	622 	There is a Gnostic gem showing a she-ass suckling her foal, 
surmounted by the sign of Cancer and the inscription "D.N.IHV.XPS.": Dominus noster Jesus Christus, to which is added, 11 Gedichte, p. 115. 
400 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
"Dei filius." 12 As Justin Martyr indignantly observes, the connections between the Christian legend and that of Dionysus are unmistakable (e.g., the miracle of the wine). In the Dionysus legend the ass plays an important part as the steed of Silenus. The ass pertains to the "second sun," Saturn, who was the star of Israel and is therefore to some extent identical with Yahweh. The mock crucifixion on the Palatine, with an ass's head (cf. pI. XLIII), is an allusion to the tale that an ass's head was worshipped in the temple at Jerusalem.13 The difference between Christians and Jews was at that time not very clear to an outsider. 
	623 	Holderlin is mainly concerned with the Dionysian nature 
of man: the vine is his nurse, and his ambition is to "resemble eternal Nature, mother of gods, the terrible." The "terrible Mother" is the mater saeva cupidinum, unbridled and unbroken Nature, represented by the most paradoxical god of the Greek pantheon, Dionysus, who significantly enough was also N ietzsche's god, although actually N ietzsche's original experience suggests rather the sinister huntsman, Wotan. Wagner was more explicit on this point. 
	624 	"Presumption" drives man away from the mother and from 
the earth, and estranges him from the "sacred ray of his father," until his defiance changes into fear. As a child of nature he falls into discord with her, precisely because he tries to resemble the "mother of gods." No reason guides him, only the Dionysian libido efjrenata: 
To Nature 
While about thy veil I lingered, playing, And, like any bud, upon thee hung,14 Still I felt thy heart in every straying 
Sound about my heart that shook and clung. 
While I groped with faith and painful yearning To your picture, glowing and unfurled, Still I found a place for all my burning 
Tears, and for my love I found a worldl 
12 Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, p. 369. 
13 [CL Tacitus, Historiae, V, Ill, 4, and ]osephus, Against APion, H, 4.-EDITORS.] 14 After our discussion of Holderlin's last poem, it will be clear that Nature is to be understood as the mother. (Cf. fig. 1.) Here the poet imagines the mother as a tree upon which the child hangs like a bud. (Cf. pI. XXXIX.) 
401 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
To the sun my heart before all others 
Turned as though he heard my every cry, And it called the stars its little brothers,15 
As it called the spring God's melody; 
And each breeze in groves or woodlands fruity Held thy spirit, and that same sweet joy Moved the well-springs of my heart with beautyThose were golden days without alloy. 
Where the spring is cool in every valley,16 
And the youngest bush and twig is green, And about the rocks the grasses rally, 
And the branches show the sky between, There I lay, imbibing every flower 
In a rapt, intoxicated glee, 
And, surrounded by a golden shower, 
From their heights the clouds sank down to me.l'l 
Often, as a weary, wandering river 
Longs to join the ocean's placid mirth, I have wept and lost myself forever 
In the fulness of thy love, 0 earth! 
15 In connection with his calling the stars his "brothers," I would remind the reader of what I said in Part I (par. 130) about the mystic identification with the stars: "I am a star wandering together with you," etc. Separation and differentiation from the mother, "individuation,:' produces that confrontation of subject and object which is the foundation of consciousness. Before this, man was one with the mother; that is to say, he was merged with the world as a whole. He did not yet know the sun was his brother; only after the separation did he begin to realize his affinity with the stars. This is a not uncommon occurrence in psychosis. For instance, in the case of a young labouring-man who developed schizophrenia, the first symptoms of his illness consisted in the feeling that he had a special relation to the sun and the stars. The stars became full of meaning for him, he thought they had something to do with him personally, and the sun gave him all sorts of strange ideas. One finds this apparently quite novel feeling for Nature very often in this disease. Another patient began to understand the language of the birds, who brought him messages from his sweetheart. (Cf. Siegfriedl) 
16 Springs, fountains, etc. are images of totality. 
17 This image expresses the state of divine or infantile beatitude, as in Holderlin's "Hyperion's Song of Fate" (trans. by Hamburger, p. 113): 
"You walk above in the light On soft floors, 0 blessed genii! Shining breezes of gods 
Touch you lightly." 
402 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
Then, with every other joyful being, 
Forth I rushed from Time's captivity, Like a pilgrim home from travel, fleeing 
To the arms of rapt Eternity. 
Blest be childhood's golden dreams, their power Hid from me life's dismal poverty; 
All the heart's good seeds ye brought to flower, Things I could not reach, ye gave to mel In thy beauty and thy light, 0 Nature, 
Of all effort and compulsion free,lS Fruitful love attained a kingly stature, 
Rich as harvests reaped in Arcady. 
That which brought me up is dead and riven, 
Dead the youthful world which was my shield, And this breast, which used to harbour heaven, 
Dead and dry as any stubble field. 
Though the songs of springtime sound as ever, Bringing friendly comfort to my smart, Yet the morning of my life is over 
And the spring has faded from my heart. 
Shadows are the things that once we cherished, Love itself must fade and cannot bide; Since the golden dreams of youth have perished Even friendly Nature's self has died. 
Heart, poor heart, those days could never show itHow far-off thy home, and where it lies; Now, alas, thou nevermore wilt know it 
If a dream of it does not suffice.19 
Palinode 
What gathers about me, Earth, in your dusky, friendly green? What do you waft me, airs, what do you bring me again? There is a rustling in all the tree-tops . , . 
IS This passage is specially significant: in childhood everything came as a gift, and he is unable to attain this state again, because it is won only through "effort and compulsion"-even love costs effort. In childhood the spring runs over in bubbling flllness, but in later life it needs a lot of hard work to keep it flowing at all, because the older we get the more it tends to flow back to its source. 
19 Gedichte, p. 57. [As trans. in the Hinkle (1916) edn., slightly modified.] 
403 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
Why do you wake my soul? why stir up The past in me, ye kindly ones? 
Spare me and let them rest, do not mock The ashes of my joy. Pass on, 
Ye fateless gods, let your youthfulness Flower upon those grown old. 
If you would deign to come down to mortals, Young girls will blossom for you, 
Young heroes, and sweeter than ever 
Morning will play round the cheeks of the happy, And ravishing sound 
The songs of those without care ... 
Ah, once the fountain of song 
So easily rushed from my bosom, when heavenly J ay still shone from my eyes ... 20 
	625 	The separation from youth has even taken away the golden 
glamour of Nature, and the future appears hopeless and empty. But what robs Nature of its glamour, and life of its joy, is the habit of looking back for something that used to be outside, instead of looking inside, into the depths of the depressive state. This looking back leads to regression and is the first step along that path. Regression is also an involuntary introversion in so far as the past is an object of memory and therefore a psychic content, an endopsychic factor. It is a relapse into the past caused by a depression in the present. Depression should therefore be regarded as an unconscious compensation whose content must be made conscious if it is to be fully effective. This can only be done by consciously regressing along with the depressive tendency and integrating the memories so activated into the conscious mind-which was what the depression was aiming at in the first place. 
Empedocles You seek life, and a godly fire 
Gushes and gleams for you out of the deeps of earth, As, with shuddering longing, you 
Hurl yourself down to the flames of Etna. 
So by a queen's wanton whim 
Pearls were dissolved in wine-heed her not I 20 Ibid., p. 156. 
4°4 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
What folly, 0 poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! 
Yet still you are holy to me, as the might of earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did not love hold me.21 
	626 	This poem reveals the poet's secret longing for the maternal 
depths and for the regenerating womb. (Cf. fig. 40.) He would 
Fig. 40. The womb of the World Mother 
Wooden bowl, Congo 
like to be melted like pearls in wine, to be sacrificed in the chalice, the "hater" of rebirth. He longs to imitate Empedocles, of whom Horace says: "Empedocles, eager to be thought a god immortal, coolly leapt into burning Aetna." 22 
	627 	He wants to go the way of the hero, the ideal figure that 
floats before him, and to share his fate. Yet love still holds him back in the light of day. The libido still has an object which makes life worth living. If this object were abandoned, then the 
21 Ibid., p. 142. [Cf. Leishman trans., p. 55.J 
22 Ars poetica, trans. by Fairclough, pp. 488-89. 
4°5 

SYNIBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
libido would sink down to the subterranean mother for rebirth: 
In Memoriam 
Daily I go a different path, sometimes 
Into the green wood, sometimes to bathe in the spring, Or to the rock where the roses bloom. 
From the top of the hill I look over the land, 
Yet nowhere, 0 lovely one, nowhere in the light do I find you, And in the breezes my words die away, 
The sacred words we once had ... 
Aye, you are far removed, holy countenance! And the melody of your life is kept from me, No longer overheard. And where are 
The magical songs that once 
Soothed my heart with the peace of the heavenly ones? How long it is, how long! the youth is 
Grown old, the earth itself, which then 
Smiled upon me, has grown different. 
Farewell! each day the soul departs, Turns back to you, and over you weeps The eye that with brighter shining 
Gaies across again, there where you tarry.23 
	628 	This distinctly suggests a renunciation, an envy of one's own 
youth, of that time of "effortlessness" which one would so gladly cling on to. But the final stanza portends disaster: a gazing towards the other land, the distant coast of sunrise or sunset. Love no longer holds the poet fast, the bonds with the world are broken, and loudly he calls for help to the mother: 
Achilles 
Lordly son of the gods! Because you had lost your beloved, You went to the rocky coast and cried aloud to the flood, 
Till the depths of the holy abyss heard you and echoed your grief In the stillness, where far from the clamour of ships, 
Deep under the waves, in a peaceful cave, the beautiful 
23 Gedichte, p. 157. 
406 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
Thetis dwells, your protectress, goddess and nymph of the sea. Mother she was to the youth, for the powerful goddess 
Had once, on the rocky shore of his island, lovingly 
Nursed the boy at her breast, had made him a hero 
With the might of her strengthening bath and the powerful song of 
the waves. 
And the mother, lamenting, heard the cry of her child, And rose like a cloud from the gloomy bed of the sea, Quieted with tender embraces the pains of her darling. 
And he listened while she, caressing him, promised to help him. Son of the gods! 0 were I like you, I could trustingly 
Pour out my secret grief to one of the Heavenly Ones. 
This I shall never see, but must bear the disgrace, as though I No more belonged to her who still thinks of me, even with tears. Beneficent gods, who disdain not men's prayers, then hear me! How raptly and fervently have I not loved you, holy light, 
Since I have lived, the earth and your fountains and woodlands, Father Aether-this heart has felt you about me too ardent and pure. 
•	soften, ye kind ones, my sorrows, that my soul be not silenced too 
early, 
That I may live and thank you, heavenly powers in the highest, With joyful song till the last, hurrying day, 
Thank you for gifts gone by, for the joys of lost youth, Then take me out of my loneliness up to yourselves.24 
	629 	These songs describe more vividly than one could hope to 
do in plain language the poet's steady withdrawal and increasing estrangement from life, his gradual submersion in the abyss of memory. After these nostalgic longings the apocalyptic vision of Patmos bursts upon us like a mysterious visitor from another world, a vision swirled round by mists from the abyss, by the gathering clouds of insanity bred by the mother. Mythological ideas again flash forth, symbolic intimations of death and the resurrection of life. 
	630 	I give here some significant fragments from "Patmos": 
Near is God 
And hard to apprehend. But where danger is, there Arises salvation also.25 
24 Ibid., p. 244. 
25 Ibid., pp. 335fI. [For passages up to par. 642, from "Patmos," cf. Hamburger trans., pp. 217ff.] 
407 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	631 	These words show that the libido has now sunk to a depth 
where "the danger is great" (Faust) "The Mothers"). There God is near, there man would find the maternal vessel of rebirth, the seeding-place where he could renew his life. For life goes on despite loss of youth; indeed it can be lived with the greatest intensity if looking back to what is already moribund does not hamper your step. Looking back would be perfectly all right if only it did not stop at externals, which cannot be brought back again in any case; instead, it ought to consider where the fascination of the past really springs from. The golden haze of childhood memories arises not so much from the objective facts as from the admixture of magical images which are more intuited than actually conscious. The parable of J onah who was swallowed by the whale reproduces the situation exactly. A person sinks into his childhood memories and vanishes from the existing world. He finds himself apparently in deepest darkness, but then has unexpected visions of a world beyond. The "mystery" he beholds represents the stock of primordial images which everybody brings with him as his human birthright, the sum total of inborn forms peculiar to the instincts. I have called this "potential" psyche the collective unconscious. If this layer is activated by the regressive libido, there is a possibility of life being renewed, and also of its being destroyed. Regression carried to its logical conclusion means a linking back with the world of natural instincts, which in its formal or ideal aspect is a kind of prima materia. If this prima materia can be assimilated by the conscious mind it will bring about a reactivation and reorganization of its contents. But if the conscious mind proves incapable of assimilating the new contents pouring in from the unconscious, then a dangerous situation arises in which they keep their original, chaotic, and archaic form and consequently disrupt the unity of consciousness. The resultant mental disturbance is therefore advisedly called schizophrenia, since it is a madness due to the splitting of the mind. 
	632 	In his poem, Holderlin describes the experience of entering 
into that wonderland of primordial images: 
In darkness dwell 
The eagles, and fearless across the abyss Go the sons of the Alps 
On lightly built bridges. 
408 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
	633 	"\Vith these words the dark fantastic poem sweeps on. The 
eagle, the sun-bird, dwells in darkness-the libido has hidden itself, but high overhead pass the dwellers in the mountains, probably the gods ("Ye wander above in the light"), symbols of the sun travelling across the sky like an eagle flying over the depths .. 
Therefore, since all round are upheaped The summits of time, 
And those that dwell nearest in love Must languish on uttermost mountains, Give us then innocent water, 
o pinions give us, to pass 
Over with constant minds and again return. 
	634 	The first image is a sombre one of mountains and time, 
probably called up by the sun wandering over the mountains; the next image, visualizing the simultaneous nearness and separation of the lovers, seems to hint at life in the underworld,26 where one is united with everything that was dear to one and yet cannot enjoy the happiness of reunion because it is all shadowy, unreal and devoid of life. There the descending soul drinks the "innocent" water, the drink of rejuvenation,27 that he may grow wings and soar up again into life, like the winged sun-disc (cf. pIs. VII, Ixa) which rises swan-like from the water. 
So I spoke, when swifter Than I had fancied, and far 
Whither I never had thought to come, A Genius bore me away 
26 Cf. the passage in Odysseus' journey to Hades, where he meets his mother: 
"As my mother spoke, there came to me out of the confusion in my heart the one desire, to embrace her spirit, dead though she was. Thrice, in my eagerness to clasp her to me, I started forward with my hands outstretched. Thrice, like a shadow or a dream, she slipped through my arms and left me harrowed by an even sharper pain." (Odyssey, XI, 204-8, trans. by Rieu, p. 181.) 
27 Spielrein's patient (p. 345), in connection with the significance of the communion, speaks of "water mingled with childishness," "spermatic water," "blood and wine." On p. 368 she says: "The souls fallen in the water are saved by God: they fall on deeper ground. Souls are saved by the sun-god." Cf. also the miraculous properties of the alchemical aqua permanens (Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 94 and 336£.). 
409 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
From my house. In the twilight 
The shadowy woods darkened as I went And the yearning brooks of my home; No more did I know these lands. 
	635 	After the dark and enigmatic prelude, which is like a premo- 
nition of what is to come, the poet begins the journey to the East, towards the sunrise, towards the mystery of eternity and rebirth, of which Nietzsche also dreams: 
o how should I not burn for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings-the ring of return! Never yet did I find the woman from whom I desired children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, 0 Eternity.28 
	636 	HOlderlin puts this same longing into a magnificent image, 
whose main features we know already: 
Yet soon in fresh radiance, Mysterious 
In the golden smoke, Swiftly sprung up 
With the tread of the sun, 
Asia bloomed out before me, 
Fragrant with a thousand peaks, and dazzled I sought one that I knew, for I was 
A stranger to the broad streets 
'Where the gold-flecked Pactolus 
Rushes down from Tmolus, 
And Taurus stands and Messogis, And full of flowers the garden, 
A quiet fire. But high in the light Blossoms the silver snow, 
And, witness to life everlasting, On attainless walls 
The immemorial ivy 29 grows, and upborne Upon living columns of cedars and laurels Are the solemn, 
The divinely built palaces. 
28 Thus SPake Zarathustra: "The Seven Seals," trans. by Common, p. 272, modified. 
29 The <f>np}Ja.ov nOavaula., the soma-drink, the haoma of the Persians, may have been made from Ej)hedra vulgaris. Spiegel, Eriinische Altertumskunde, I, p. 433. 
410 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
	637 	The vision is apocalyptic: the mother-city in the land of 
eternal youth, surrounded by the flowery verdure of imperishable spring.so (Cf. plo xXIIa.) The poet identifies himself here with John, who lived on Patmos and consorted with the "Son of the Highest" and saw him face to face: 
As at the mystery of the vine 
They sat together at the hour of the banquet, And quietly prescient in his great soul 
The Lord spake death and the last love ... 
Thereon he died. Of that 
There were much to be said. And the friends saw How he gazed forth victorious, 
The most joyful of all, at the last 
Therefore he sent them 
The Spirit, and the house 
Solemnly trembled, 
And the storm of God 
Rolled far-thundering over their visionary heads, Where brooding 
The heroes of death were assembled, As he now, in departure, 
Once more appeared before them. For now was put out 
The day of the sun, the kingly one, And himself, divinely suffering, Shattered the straight-rayed sceptre, For it shall come again 
At the proper time ... 
so Like the heavenly city in Hauptmann's Hannele (trans. by Meltzer, pp. 91-92): 
"The Realm of Righteousness is filled with light and joy, God's everlasting peace reigns there without alloy, 
Its mansions are marble, its roofs are of gold, 
Through its rivulets ripple wines ruddy and old. 
In its silver-white streets blow the lily and rose, 
In its steeples the chiming of joy-bells grows. 
The beautiful butterflies frolic and play 
On its ramparts, rich-robed in the mosses of May ..• The blessed below, in the regions of Light, 
Wander on, hand in hand, and rejoice in their flight. In the depths of the radiant, the ruby-red waves, 
Swan dives after swan, as its plumage it laves. 
So they wash themselves clean in the clear, deep red 
Of the blood that their Lord. their dear Saviour, had shed." 
411 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
	38 	The underlying images are the sacrificial death and resurrec- 
tion of Christ, conceived as the self-sacrifice of the sun, which voluntarily breaks its rayed sceptre in the certain hope of resurrection. Concerning the substance of the rayed sceptre the following may be noted: Spielrein's patient said that "God pierces the earth with his ray." For her the earth was a woman; she also regarded the sunbeam in mythological fashion as something solid: "Jesus Christ has shown me his love by tapping at the window with a sunbeam." I have come across the same idea of the solid substance of the sunbeam in other insane patients. Thor's hammer, which split the earth and penetrated deep into it, may be compared with Kaineus' foot. Inside the earth the hammer comports itself like the treasure, for in the fulness of time it comes to the surface again, i.e., is born again from the earth. At the place where Samson threw away the jawbone of the ass the Lord caused a fountain to gush forth.31 Springs also come from hoof-marks, footprints, horse's hooves. Magic wands and sceptres in general come into this category of meanings. Gr. (TK~7rTPOJl is related to UKii7ros, uK'Y/7raVWV, UK~7rWV = 'staff'; UK'Y/7rTOS = 'storm-wind'; Lat. scapus, 'shaft, stalk'; OHG. scatt) 'spear, lance.' 32 (Cf. pI. XLV.) SO once again we meet in this context the connections already known to us as libido-symbols. The breaking of the sceptre therefore signifies the sacrifice of power as previously exercised, i.e., of the libido which had been organized in a certain direction. 
	39 	That Holderlin's poem should pass from Asia to Patmos 
and thence to the Christian mystery may seem like a superficial association of ideas, but actually it is a highly significant train of thought: it is the entry into death and the land beyond, seen as the self-sacrifice of the hero for the attainment of immortality. At this time, when the sun has set and life seems extinguished, man awaits in secret expectancy the renewal of all life: 
And it was joy From now on 
To dwell in loving night and maintain Steadfast in simple eyes 
Abysses of wisdom. 
31 Judges 15: 17f. 
32 Prellwitz, Worterbuch der griechischen SPrache, s.v. o'K.q7rTW. 
412 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
	640 	Wisdom dwells in the depths, the wisdom of the mother; 
being one with her means being granted a vision of deeper things, of the primordial images and primitive forces which underlie all life and are its nourishing, sustaining, creative matrix. Holderlin, in his pathological ecstasy, senses the grandeur of the things seen, but unlike Faust he does not care to bring into the light of day all that he has found in the depths: 
And no evil it is if something Is lost and the living sound Fades from our speech, 
For heavenly labour is like to our own. The Highest would not have 
All at one time. 
So long as the pit bears iron And Etna fiery resin, 
So I have riches 
To fashion an image and see The Spirit 33 as ever it was. 
	641 	What the poet beholds in his Vulcan's pit is in truth the 
"Spirit" as ever it was, namely the totality of primary forms from which the archetypal images come. In this world of the collective unconscious spirit appears as an archetype which is endowed with supreme significance and is expressed through the figure of the divine hero, whose counterpart in the West is Christ. 
He wakens the dead, Who are not yet bound By the grossness of death 
And if the heavenly ones, 
As I believe, so love me .... 
Quiet is his 34 sign 
In the thunderous sky. And One stands beneath it His life long. For Christ lives yet. 
	64:/ 	But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from 
the Western Land (cf. pI. XIX), was robbed of his treasure by 
33 When writing this book I used an old edition of HOlderlin. Modern editions have "Christ" for "Geist." I have retained the old reading, because, on the internal evidence of the poem, I gathered that it meant Christ even before I saw 
	the modern reading. 	34 I.e., the Father's. 
413 

543 
544 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
the demon-serpent, so Holderlin's poem dies away in a painful lament, which tells us that his descent to the shadows will be followed by no resurrection in this world: 
... shamefully 
A mighty force wrenches the heart from us, For the heavenly each demand sacrifice. 
This recognition, that one must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood, before the "heavenly ones" wrench the sacrifice from us (and with it the entire man), came too late 
to the poet. 
I therefore take it as a wise counsel which the unconscious 
gives our author, to let her hero die, for he was really not much more than the personification of a regressive and infantile reverie, having neither the will nor the power to make good his aversion from this world by fishing up another from the primeval ocean of the unconscious, which would truly have been an heroic act. Such a sacrifice can only be accomplished through whole-hearted dedication to life. All the libido that was tied up in family bonds must be withdrawn from the narrower circle into the larger one, because the psychic health of the adult individual, who in childhood was a mere particle revolving in a rotary system, demands that he should himself become the centre of a new system. That such a step includes the solution, or at least some consideration, of the sexual problem is obvious enough, for unless this is done the unemployed libido will inevitably remain fixed in the unconscious endogamous relationship to the parents and will seriously hamper the individual's freedom. We must remember that Christ's teaching means ruthlessly separating a man from his family, and we saw in the Nicodemus dialogue how he took especial pains to give regression a symbolic meaning. Both tendencies serve the same goal, namely that of freeing man from his family fixations, from his weakness and uncontrolled in'fantile feelings. For if he allows his libido to get stuck in a childish milieu, and does not free it for higher purposes, he falls under the spell of unconscious compulsion. Wherever he may be, the unconscious will then recreate the infantile milieu by projecting his complexes, thus reproducing 
414 

645 
646 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
all over again, and in defiance of his vital interests, the same dependence and lack of freedom which formerly characterized his relations with his parents. His destiny no longer lies in his own hands: his Tvxcu KaL Mo,pa, (fortunes and fates) fall from the stars. The Stoics called this condition Heimarmene, compulsion by the stars, to which every "unredeemed" soul is subject. When the libido thus remains fixed in its most primitive form it keeps men on a correspondingly low level where they have no control over themselves and are at the mercy of their affects. That was the psychological situation of late antiquity, and the saviour and physician of that time was he who sought to free humanity from bondage to Heimarmene.311 
Miss Miller's vision seems at first sight to treat the problem of sacrifice as a purely individual problem, but if we examine the way it is worked out we shall see that it is something that must be a problem for humanity in general. For the symbols employed-the snake that kills the horse, and the hero who sacrifices himself of his own free will-are mythological figures born of the unconscious. 
To the extent that the world and everything in it is a product of thought, the sacrifice of the libido that strives back to the past necessarily results in the creation of the world. For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it, arises the picture of the world as we know it today. This simple thought is what constitutes the meaning of the cosmic sacrifice, a good example being the slaying of Tiamat (fig. 41), the Babylonian mother-dragon, from whose body heaven and earth were made.86 But perhaps the fullest expres- 
85 This was the real purpose of all the mystery religions. They created symbols of death and rebirth (cf. pI. LXla). As Frazer points out in The Golden Bough (Part Ill: "The Dying God," pp. 214ft',), even primitive peoples have in their initiation mysteries the same symbolism of dying and being born again as Apuleius records in connection with the initiation of Lucius into the Isis, mysteries (The Golden Ass, XI, 23, trans. by Graves, p. 286): "I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine's threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements," The rites of initiation "approximate to a voluntary death" from which Lucius was "born again" (p. 284). (Cf. pI. VI.) 86 From the sacrifice of the dragon in alchemy comes the microcosm of the philosopher's stone (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 404). 
415 

	
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 

sion of this idea is to be found in Indian philosophy of the oldest date, in the Vedic hymns. The Rig-Veda asks: 

What was the wood, what was the tree, From which heaven and earth were hewn? Let the sages inquire within their minds.37 

:~ 

Fig. 41. Marduk fighting Tiamat Assyrian cylinder seal 

	)47 	Vishvakarman, the All-Creator, who made the world from 
the unknown tree, did so as follows: 

Sacrificing as a wise sacrificer, 
Our Father entered into all these beings; Striving for blessings through prayer, 
Hiding his origin, he went into the lower world. Yet what and who has served him 
As a resting-place and a support? 
	548 	The Rig-Veda proceeds to answer these questions: Purusha 
(Man, Anthropos) was the primal being who 

Encompassed the earth on all sides And ruled over the ten-finger place (the highest point of heaven).38 
	649 	Purusha is evidently a sort of Platonic world-soul who sur- 
rounds the earth from outside: 

Being born he over topped the world Before, behind, and in all places. 

37 Rig-Veda, X, 81, 4. This passage, and those in pars. 647 and 649, trans. from Deussen, Geschichte, pp. 136 and 156. 
S8 Rig-Veda, X, 90. This passage, and those in pars. 650, 651, 656, trans. by W. Norman 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 

	650 	As the all-encompassing world-soul Purusha has a maternal 

character, for he represents the original "dawn state" of the psyche: he is the encompasser and the encompassed, mother and unborn child, an undifferentiated, unconscious state of primal being. As such a condition must be terminated, and as it is at the same time an object of regressive longing, it must be sacrificed in order that discriminated entities-i.e., conscious contents-may come into being: 

Him, Purusha, born at the beginning, they besprinkled on the straw; the gods sacrificed with him, and the saints and the sages. 
	651 	The passage is very remarkable. If one attempted to put this 

mythologem on the Procrustean bed of logic sore violence would be done to it. How on earth ordinary "sages" come to be sacrificing the primal being side by side with the gods is an utterly fantastic conception, quite apart from the fact that in the beginning (i.e., before the sacrifice) nothing existed except the primal being! But if this primal being means the great mystery of the original psychic state, then everything becomes clear: 

From that sacrifice when it was fully offered the speckled (clotted) butter was collected; it constituted the birds and the wild and domestic animals. 

From that sacrifice when it was fully offered the hymns were born, and the chants; the metres were born from it, and from it the prose formula was born .... 

The moon was born from his mind; from his eye was born the sun; from his mouth Indra and Agni; from his breath Vayu was born. 

From his navel grew the atmosphere; from his head the sky; from his feet the earth; from his ear the directions. Thus the worlds are made. 

	652 	It is evident that by this is meant not a physical, but a psy- 

chological cosmogony. The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. What drives him towards this discovery is conceived by Freud as the "incest barrier." The incest prohibition blocks the infantile longing for the mother and forces the libido along the path of life's biological aim. The libido, driven back from the mother by the incest prohibition, seeks a sexual object in 
417 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
place of the forbidden mother. Here the terms "incest prohibition," "mother," etc. are used metaphorically, and it is in this sense that we have to interpret Freud's paradoxical dictum: "To begin with we knew none but sexual objects." 39 This statement is not much more than a sexual allegory, as when one speaks of male and female electrical connections, screws, etc. All it does is to read the partial truths of the adult into infantile conditions which are totally different. Freud's view is incorrect if we take it literally, for it would be truer to say that at a still earlier stage we knew nothing but nourishing breasts. The fact that the infant finds pleasure in sucking does not prove that it is a sexual pleasure, for pleasure can have many different sources. Presumably the caterpillar finds quite as much pleasure in eating, even though caterpillars possess no sexual function whatever and the food instinct is something quite different from the sex instinct, quite unconcerned about what a later sexual stage may make of these earlier activities. Kissing, for instance, derives far more from the act of nutrition than from sexuality. Moreover the so-called "incest barrier" is an exceedingly doubtful hypothesis (admirable as it is for describing certain neurotic conditions), because it is a product of culture which nobody invented and which grew up naturally on the basis of complex biological necessities connected with the development of "marriage classes." The main purpose of these is not to prevent incest but to meet the social danger of endogamy by instituting the "cross-cousin marriage." The typical marriage with the daughter of the maternal uncle is actually implemented by the same libido which could equally well possess the mother or the sister. So it is not a question of avoiding incest, for which incidentally there are plenty of opportunities in the frequent fits of promiscuity to which primitives are prone, but of the social necessity of spreading the family organization throughout the whole tribe.40 
	653 	Therefore it cannot have been the incest-taboo that forced 
mankind out of the original psychic state of non-differentiation. On the contrary, it was the evolutionary instinct peculiar to man, which distinguishes him so radically from all other ani- 
39 "The Dynamics of the Transference:' p. 319. 
40 Cf. my "Psychology of the Transference:' pars. 433ff. and Layard, "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype:' pp. 254ff. 
418 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
mals and forced upon him countless taboos, among them the incest-taboo. Against this "other urge" the animal in us fights with all his instinctive conservatism and misoneism-hatred of novelty-which are the two outstanding features of the primitive and feebly conscious individual. Our mania for progress represents the inevitable morbid compensation. 
	654 	Freud's incest theory describes certain fantasies that ac- 
company the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother's body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pI. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a far/on de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a "Jonah-and-the-Whale" complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere 
419 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the "mysteries" ("representations collectives") in the whale's belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life. 
	55 	What actually happens in these incest and womb fantasies 
is that the libido immerses itself in the unconscious, thereby provoking infantile reactions, affects, opinions and attitudes from the personal sphere, but at the same time activating collective images (archetypes) which have a compensatory and curative meaning such as has always pertained to the myth. Freud makes his theory of neurosis-so admirably suited to the nature of neurotics-much too dependent on the neurotic ideas from which precisely the patients suffer. This leads to the pretence (which suits the neurotic down to the ground) that the causa efficiens of his neurosis lies in the remote past. In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic's thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis. 
	56 	After this digression, let us turn back to our Vedic hymn. 
Rig-Veda X, go closes with a significant verse which is also of the greatest importance as regards the Christian mystery: 
With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice; these were the first ordinances. These powers (arising from the sacrifice) reach the sky where are the saints and the gods.41 
	57 	Sacrifice brings with it a plenitude of power that is equal to 
the power of the gods. Even as the world is created by sacrifice, by renouncing the personal tie to childhood, so, according to the teaching of the U panishads, will,be created the new state of man, which can be described as immortal. This new state beyond the human one is again attained through a sacrifice, the horse-sacrifice, which has cosmic sig"nificance. What the sacrificed horse means we learn from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: 
Om! 
1. Verily, dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun his eye, the wind his breath, universal fire his open mouth. The year is the 41 Trans. by W. Norman Brown. 
420 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
body of the sacrificial horse, the sky his back, the atmosphere his belly, the earth the underpart of his belly, the quarters his flanks, the intermediate quarters his ribs, the seasons his limbs, the months and half-months 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. When he shows his teeth, that is lightning. When he shakes himself, then it thunders. When he urinates, then it rains. His voice is speech. 
2. Verily, day was created for the horse as the sacrificial dish which stands before him; its place is the world-ocean towards the east. Night was created for the sacrificial horse as the sacrificial dish which stands behind him; its place is the world-ocean towards the west. 
Verily, these two surround the horse on both sides as the two sacrificial vessels. 
As a steed he carried the gods, as a charger the Gandharvas, as a racer the demons, as a horse men. The ocean is his kinsman, the sea his cradle.42 
	658 	As Deussen remarks, the horse-sacrifice signifies a renun- 
ciation of the world. When the horse is sacrificed the world is sacrificed and destroyed-a train of thought that also suggested itself to Schopenhauer. The horse stands between two sacrificial vessels, passing from one to the other, just as the sun passes from morning to evening. (Cf. fig. 3.) Since the horse is man's steed and works for him, and energy is even measured in terms of "horse power," the horse signifies a quantum of energy that stands at man's disposal. It therefore represents the libido which has passed into the world. We saw earlier on that the "motherlibido" must be sacrificed in order to create the world; here the world is destroyed by renewed sacrifice of the same libido, which once belonged to the mother and then passed into the world. The horse, therefore, may reasonably be substituted as a symbol for this libido because, as we saw, it has numerous connections with the mother.43 The sacrifice of the horse can only produce another phase of introversion similar to that which 42 Trans. by Hume, The Thirteen PrinciPal Upanishads, pp. 73-74, modified. 
43 The Bundahish (XV, 37) says that the bull Sarsaok will be sacrificed at the end of the world. Sarsaok helped to distribute the human race: he carried nine of the fifteen races on his back through the sea to the most distant parts of the earth. The primordial bull of Gayomart has, as we saw earlier, a maternal significance on account of his fertility. 
421 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
prevailed before the creation of the world. The position of the horse between the two vessels, which represent the birth-gIving and the devouring mother, hints at the idea of life enclosed in the ovum; consequently the vessels are destined to "surround" the horse. That this is in fact so can be seen from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3, 3 ("Where the offerers of the horse sacrifice go"): 
"What has become of the Parikshitas? I ask you, Yajfiavalkya, what has become of the Parikshitas?" 
Yajfiavalkya said: H ... Doubtless they have gone whither the offerers of the horse sacrifice go." 
HAnd where, pray, do the offerers of the horse sacrifice go?" 
"This inhabited world is as broad as thirty-two days' journeys of the sun-god's chariot. The earth, which is twice as broad, surrounds it on all sides. The ocean, which is twice as broad, surrounds the earth on all sides. There 44 is a gap as broad as the edge of a razor or the wing of a mosquito. Indra, taking the form of a falcon, delivered the Parikshitas to the wind, and the wind took them and bore them to the place where the offerers of the horse sacrifice were ... 
"Therefore the wind is the most individual thing (vyashti) and the most universal (samashti). He who knows this wards off repeated death." 45 
	9 	As the text says, the offerers of the horse-sacrifice go to that 
narrowest of gaps between the shells of the world-egg, the point where they are at once united and divided. Indra, who in the form of a falcon has stolen the soma (the treasure hard to attain), is the psychopomp who delivers the souls to the wind, to the generating pneuma, the individual and universal prana (life-breath),46 to save them from "repeated death." This line of thought summarizes the meaning of innumerable myths and is at the same time an excellent example of how far Indian philosophy is, in a certain sense, nothing more than refined and sublimated mythology.47 In the Miller drama the first to die is the 
44 Deussen says (Sechzig UPanishads, IH, p. 434): "'There,' on the horizon where the sky and the sea meet, between the two shells of the world egg. is a narrow crack through which one can get out onto 'the back of the sky,' where ... union with Brahman takes place." 
	45 Trans. by Hume, p. Ill, modified. 	46 Symbol of Brahman (Deussen). 
47 If mythological symbolism is for Silberer ("Ober die SymbolbiIdung," HI, pp. 6641£.) a cognitional process on the mythological level, 'then there is complete agreement between his view and mine. 
422 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
horse, the animal brother of the hero (corresponding to the early death of the half-bestial Enkidu, friend and brother of Gilgamesh). His sacrificial death brings to mind the whole category of animal-sacrifices in mythology. The animal-sacrifice, where it has lost its original meaning as an offered gift and has taken on a higher religious significance, has an inner relationship to the hero or god. The animal represents the god himself; thus the bull represents Dionysus Zagreus and Mithras, the 
Fig. 42. The sacred tree of Attis Relief from an altar to Cybele 
lamb Christ, etc.48 The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido. This is expressed most clearly in the cult legend of Attis. Attis was the son-lover of Agdistis-Cybele, the mother of the gods. Driven mad by his mother's insane love for him, he castrated himself under a pine-tree. The pine-tree played an important part in his cult (fig. 42); every year a pine-tree was decked with garlands, an effigy of Attis was hung upon it and then it was cut down. Cybele then took the pine-tree into her cave and lamented over it. The tree obviously signifies the son-according to one version Attis was actually changed into a pine-tree-whom the mother takes back into her "cave," i.e., the maternal womb. At the 
48 The following interesting Sumerian-Assyrian fragment (Gressmann, Altori. entalische Texte, I, p. 101) comes from the library of Assurbanipal: "To the wise man he said: A Iamb is a substitute for a man. He gives the Iamb for his life, he gives the head of a Iamb for the head of a man." 
423 

'0 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
same time, the tree also has a maternal significance, since the hanging of the son or his effigy on the tree represents the union of mother and son. Common speech employs the same image: a person is said to "hang on his mother." Again, the felling of the pine-tree parallels the castration and is a direct reminder of it. In that case the tree would have more of a phallic meaning. But since the tree is primarily significant of the mother, its felling has the significance of a mother-sacrifice. These intricate overlappings of meaning can only be disentangled if we reduce them to a common denominator. This denominator is the libido: the son personifies the longing for the mother which exists in the psyche of every individual who finds himself in a similar situation. The mother personifies the (incestuous) love for the son. The tree personifies the mother on the one hand and the phallus of the son on the other. The phallus in its turn stands for the son's libido. The felling of the pine, i.e., castration, denotes the sacrifice of this libido, which seeks something that is as incongruous as it is impossible. The myth therefore depicts, through the arrangement and nature of the protagonists, the typical fate of a libido regression that is played out mainly in the unconscious. At the same time the dramatis personae appear in consciousness as in a dream, but in essence they are only envisagings of the currents and tendencies of the libido. The actuating principle of all the figures is the libido, which by its own unity binds its products so closely together that certain attributes or activities may easily pass from one figure to the next-a fact which presents no difficulties to intuitive understanding, but vastly complicates the task of logical exposition. 
The impulse to sacrifice proceeds in the above instance from the mater saeva cuPidinum) who drives the son to madness and self-mutilation. As a primal being the mother represents the unconscious; hence the myths tell us that the impulse to sacrifice comes from the unconscious. This is to be understood in the sense that regression is inimical to life and disrupts the instinctual foundations of the personality, and is consequently followed by a compensatory reaction taking the form of violent suppression and elimination of the incompatible tendency. It is a natural, unconscious process, a collision between instinctive tendencies, which the conscious ego experiences in most cases 
424 

661 
662 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
passively because it is not normally aware of these libido movements and does not consciously participate in them. 
Ovid, by the way, says of the pine-tree that it is "pleasing to the mother of the gods, because Cybelean Attis here put off his human form and stiffened into a tree-trunk." 49 
Transformation into the pine-tree amounts to burial in the mother, just as Os iris was overgrown by the cedar. (Cf. fig. 23.) On the Coblenz bas-relief,50 Attis is shown growing out of a tree. This is interpreted by Mannhardt as the indwelling vegetation numen, but it is probably simply a tree-birth, as with Mithras. (Cf. the Heddernheim Relief, pI. XL.) As Firmicus Maternus notes, tree and effigy played an important part in the Isis and Osiris cult and also in that of Kore-Persephone.51 Dionysus bore the name of Dendrites, and in Boeotia he was supposed to have been called fVO€VOPOS, 'he in the tree.' 52 In the legend of Pentheus, which is bound up with the Dionysus myth, there is a striking counterpart to the death of Attis and the subsequent lamentation: Pentheus,53 curious to see the orgies of the Maenads, climbed up into a pine-tree but was spotted by his mother; the Maenads cut down the tree, and Pentheus, taken for a wild animal, was torn to pieces by them in their frenzy, 54 his own mother being the first to hurl herself upon him.55 In this legend the phallic meaning of the tree (felling = castration), its maternal nature (the tree "bears" Pentheus), and its identity with the son (felling = slaying of Pentheus), are all present; at the same time we have here the counterpart and complement of the Pieta, namely the Terrible Mother. The feast of Attis was celebrated first as a lamentation and then as a festival of joy in the spring. (Good Friday and Easter.) The 
	49 	"Grata deum matri, siquidem Cybeleius Attys 
Exuit hac hominem, truncoque induruit illo." 
Metamorphoses, X, 104. (C£. Miller trans., n, pp. 70-71.] 50 Roscher, Lexikon, s.y. "Attis," I, 722, 10. 
51 Firmicus Maternus, De errore protanarum religionum, XXVII, p. 69: "Per annos singulos arbor pinea caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum iuvenis subligatur" (Each year a pine-tree is felled, and an effigy of a youth is tied to the middle of the tree). 
52 Preller, Griechische Mythologie, I, p. 555. Cited in Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, p. 407. 
53 Another hero with a serpent nature; his father was Echion, the adder. 54 The typical sacrificial death in the Dionysus cult. 
55 Roscher, Lexikon, s.y. "Dionysus," I, 1054, 56fl'. 
425 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMA nON: TWO 
priests of the Attis-Cybele cult were eunuchs, and were called Galloi.56 The archigallos was called Atys.57 Instead of the annual castration the priests merely scratched their arms till they bled. (Arm as substitute for phallus; twisting out the arms.58) There is a similar instinct-sacrificing symbolism in the Mithraic religion, where the essential portions of the mystery consisted in the catching and subduing of the bull. A parallel figure to Mithras is the Original Man, Gayomart. He was created together with his ox, and the two lived in a state of bliss for six thousand years. But when the world entered the aeon of Libra (the seventh zodiacal sign), the evil principle broke loose. In astrology, Libra is known as the "Positive House" of Venus, so the evil principle came under the dominion of the goddess of love, who personifies the erotic aspect of the mother. Since this aspect, as we have seen, is psychologically extremely dangerous, the classical catastrophe threatened to overtake the son. As a result of this constellation, Gayomart and his ox died only thirty years later. (The trials of Zarathustra also lasted for thirty years.) Fifty-five species of grain and twelve kinds of healing plants came from the dead ox. His seed entered into the moon for purification, but the seed of Gayomart entered into the sun. This seems to suggest that the bull has a hidden feminine significance. Gosh or Drvashpa was the bull's soul and it was worshipped as a female divinity. At first she was so faint-hearted that she refused to become the goddess of cattle until, as a consolation, the coming of Zarathustra was announced to her. This has its parallel in the Purana where the earth received the promise of Krishna's coming.59 Like Ardvisura, the goddess of love, Gosh rides in a chariot. So the bull-anima appears to be decidedly feminine. In astrology Taurus, too, is a House of Venus. The myth of Gayomart repeats in modified form the primitive "closed circle" of a self-reproducing masculine and feminine divinity. 
56 For the festal processions they wore women's clothes. 
57 In Bithynia, Attis was called 1!',bl'a$ (papa, pope) and Cybele, Mii. The Cybele cults of the Near and Middle East worshipped at the fish, and fish-eating was taboo for the priests of the mother-goddess. It is also worth knowing that the son of Atargatis, who is identical with Astarte, Cybele, etc., was called 'lx8vs. Roscher, 
	s.v. "Ichthys." 	58 Cf. Frobenius, Zeitalter, passim. 
59 Spiegel, Eriinische Altertumskunde, 11, p. 76. 
426 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
	663 	Like the sacrificial bull, fire-whose sacrifice we have already 
discussed in Chapter Ill-has a feminine nature in Chinese philosophy, according to one of the commentators 60 on the Chuang-tzu (350 B.C.): "The hearth spirit is called Chi. He is dressed in bright red, resembling fire, and in appearance is like a lovely, attractive maiden." The Book of Rites says: "Wood is burnt in the flames for the Au spirit. This sacrifice to Au is a sacrifice to the old women who are dead." These hearth and fire spirits are the souls of departed cooks and are therefore referred to as "old women." The god of kitchens grew out of this preBuddhistic tradition and later, as a man, became the ruler of the family and the link between it and heaven. In this way the original female fire-spirit became a sort of Logos and mediator. 
	664 	From the seed of the bull sprang the first progenitors of 
cattle, as well as 272 kinds of useful animals.61 According to the Mainyo-i-Khard,62 Gayomart destroyed Dev Azur, the demon of evil desires. Azhi, another evil demon, remained the longest on earth despite the activities of Zarathustra, but was finally destroyed at the Resurrection (like Satan in the Apocalypse). Another version says that Angramainyu and the serpent were left until the last so as to be destroyed by Ahura-Mazda himself.63 Kern suggests that Zarathustra r.lay mean "Golden Star" and may be identical with Mithras.64 The name Mithras is related to Modern Persian mihr} meaning 'love' and 'sun.' 
	665 	In the case of Zagreus, we saw that the bull is identical with 
the god and that the bull-sacrifice is a divine sacrifice. But the animal is, as it were, only a part of the hero; he sacrifices only his animal attribute, and thus symbolically gives up his instinctuality. His inner participation in the sacrificial act 65 is perfectly expressed in the anguished and ecstatic countenance of the bull-slaying Mithras. He slays it willingly and unwillingly 
60 Nagel, "Der chinesische Ki\chengott (Tsau.kyun)," pp. 23ff. 
61 Spiegel, I, p. 510. 
62 Spiegel, Grammatik der Parsisprache, pp. 135, 166. [Cf. West trans., Mainyo-iKhard, XXVII, 15 (p. 157).] 
63 Spiegel, Altertumskunde, 11, p. 164. [Cf. West trans., VIII, 15 (p. 14.2).] 64 Ibid., I, p. 708. 
65 Porphyry (De antro nymPharum, 24, in Taylor trans., p. I go) says: "For Mithras, as well as the bull, is the demiurge and lord of generation." (Cited in Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, p. 72.) 
427 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
at once,66 hence the rather pathetic expression on certain monuments, which is not unlike the somewhat mawkish face of Christ in Guido Reni's Crucifixion. Benndorf says of Mithras: 
The features, which ... especially in the upper portion have an absolutely ideal character, wear an extremely sickly expression.67 
	;66 	Cumont likewise stresses the facial expression of the Tauro- 
ctonos: 
The face, which can be seen in the best reproductions, is that of a young man of almost feminine beauty; a mass of curly hair rising up from the forehead surrounds it as with an aureole; the head is slightly tilted backwards, so that his glance is directed towards the heavens, and the contraction of the brows and lips gives a strange expression of sorrow to the face.68 
	67 	The head from Ostia (cf. frontispiece), supposed by Cumont 
to be that of Mithras Tauroctonos,69 certainly wears an expression which we know all too well from our patients as one of sentimental resignation. It is a fact worth noting that the spiritual transformation that took place in the first centuries of Christianity was accompanied by an extraordinary release of feeling, which expressed itself not only in the lofty form of charity and love of God, but in sentimentality and infantilism. The lamb allegories of early Christian art fall in this category. 
	;8 	Since sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are 
never very far apart, they must be somehow typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split-mindedness of the sacrificer: he wants to, and yet doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. Nevertheless, it is only his animal nature that Mithras sacrifices, his instinctuality,70 always in close analogy to the course of the sun. 
66 The death of the bull, too, is voluntary and involuntary. As Mithras stabs the bull a scorpion nips it in the testicles (cf. pI. XL). (Autumn equinox of the Taurus aeon.) 
67 Benndorf and Schone, Bildwerke des Lateranischen Museums, No. 547. 
68 Textes, I, p. 182. In another passage (p. 183) Cumont speaks of the "sorrowful and almost morbid grace of the hero's features." 
69 [It has also been identified as Attis.-ED1TORS.] 
70 The libido nature of the sacrificed is indubitable. In Persia it was a ram that induced the firs' man to commit the first sin (cohabitation); it is also the first 
428 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
	669 	We have learned in the course of this investigation that the 
libido which builds up religious structures regresses in the last analysis to the mother, and thus represents the real bond through which we are connected with our origins. When the Church Fathers derive the word religio from religare (to reconnect, link back), they could at least have appealed to this psychological fact in support of their view.n As we have seen, this regressive libido conceals itself in countless symbols of the most heterogeneous nature, some masculine and some feminine -differences of sex are at bottom secondary and not nearly so important psychologically as would appear at first sight. The essence and motive force of the sacrificial drama consist in an unconscious transformation of energy, of which the ego becomes aware in much the same way as sailors are made aware of a volcanic upheaval under the sea. Of course, when we consider the beauty and sublimity of the whole conception of sacrifice and its solemn ritual, it must be admitted that a psychological formulation has a shockingly sobering effect. The dramatic concreteness of the sacrificial act is reduced to a barren abstraction, and the flourishing life of the figures is flattened into twodimensionality. Scientific understanding is bound, unfortunately, to have regrettable effects-on one side; on the other side abstraction makes for a deepened understanding of the phenomena in question. Thus we come to realize that the figures in the mythical drama possess qualities that are interchangeable, because they do not have the same "existential" meaning as the concrete figures of the physical world. The latter suffer tragedy, perhaps, in the real sense, whereas the others 
animal they sacrifice (Spiegel, I, p. 511). The ram is therefore equivalent to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which, according to the Manichaean view, was Christ. Melito of Sardis (2nd cent.) taught that Christ the Lamb was comparable to the ram caught in the thicket that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son, and that the thicket represented the Cross. (Fr. V, cited in Robertson, p. 412.) 
71 The original derivation from religere (to go through again, think over, recollect) is the more probable. (Cicero, De inventione, 2, 53, and De natura deorum, 1, 42.) Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones, 4, 28; in .Fletcher trans., I, p. 282, modified) derives it from religare: "Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus" (We are bound and tied to God by this link of piety). Similarly St. Jerome and St. Augustine. See Walde, Lateinisches W6rterbuch, p. 233, "diligo." The crucial contrast is between religo and neglego. 
429 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
merely enact it against the subjective backcloth of introspective consciousness. The boldest speculations of the human mind concerning the nature of the phenomenal world, namely that the wheeling stars and the whole course of human history are but the phantasmagoria of a divine dream, become, when applied to the inner drama, a scientific probability. The essential thing in the mythical drama is not the concreteness of the figures, nor is it important what sort of an animal is sacrificed or what sort of god it represents; what alone is important is that an act of sacrifice takes place, that a process of transformation is going on in the unconscious whose dynamism, whose contents and whose subject are themselves unknown but become visible indirectly to the conscious mind by stimulating the imaginative material at its disposal, clothing themselves in it like the dancers who clothe themselves in the skins of animals or the priests in the skins of their human victims. 
	'70 	The great advantage of scientific abstraction is that it gives 
us a key to the mysterious processes enacted behind the scenes, where, leaving the colourful world of the theatre behind us, we enter into the ultimate reality of psychic dynamism and psychic meaningfulness. This knowledge strips the unconscious processes of all epiphenomenality and allows them to appear as what our whole experience tells us that they are-autonomous quantities. Consequently, every attempt to derive the unconscious from the conscious sphere is so much empty talk, a sterile, intellectual parlour-game. One suspects this wherever writers cheerfully talk of the "subconscious," without apparently realizing what an arrogant prejudice they are presuming to express. How do they know, forsooth, that the unconscious is "lower" and not "higher" than the conscious? The only certain thing about this terminology is that consciousness deems itself higher -higher than the gods themselves. One day, let us hope, its "god-almightiness will make it quiver and quake"! 
	71 	The annual sacrifice of a maiden to the dragon is perhaps 
the ideal sacrifice on a mythological level. In order to mollify the wrath of the Terrible Mother the most beautiful girl was sacrificed as a symbol of man's concupiscence. Milder forms were the sacrifice of the first-born and of various domestic animals. The alternative ideal is self-castration, of which a milder form is circumcision. Here at least only a modicum is sacrificed, 
430 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
which amounts to replacing the sacrifice by a symbolical act.72 By sacrificing these valued objects of desire and possession, the instinctive desire, or libido, is given up in order that it may be regained in new form. Through sacrifice man ransoms himself from the fear of death and is reconciled to the demands of Hades. In the late cults the hero, who in olden times conquered evil and death through his labours, has become the divine protagonist, the priestly self-sacrificer and renewer of life. Since he is now a divine figure and his sacrifice is a transcendental mystery whose meaning far exceeds the value of an ordinary sacrificial gift, this deepening of the sacrificial symbolism is a reversion to the old idea of human sacrifice, because a stronger and more total expression is needed to portray the idea of sel/sacrifice. The relation of Mithras to his bull comes very close to this idea. In Christianity it is the hero himself who dies of his own free will. On the Mithraic monuments we often come across a strange symbol: a krater 73 (mixing-bowl) with a snake coiled round it, and a lion facing the snake like an antagonist.74 (PI. Lxmb.) It looks as if they were fighting for the krater. The krater symbolizes the maternal vessel of rebirth, the snake fear and resistance, and the lion raging desire.75 The snake almost always assists at the bull-sacrifice by gliding towards the blood flowing from the wound. It seems to follow from this that the bull's life-its blood-is offered to the snake, that it is a sacrificial offering to the powers of the underworld, like the blood drunk by the shades in the nekyia of Odysseus. vVe have already pointed out the reciprocal relationship between bull and snake, and we saw that the bull symbolizes the living hero, whereas the snake symbolizes the dead, buried, chthonic hero. But as the hero, when dead, is back in the mother, the snake also 
72 Cf. Zipporah's words to her son after she had circumcised him (Exodus 4: 25): 
"Surely a bloody husband art thou to me." [A V; RSV has "bridegroom of blood." - TRANS.] Joshua 5: 2ff. says that Joshua reintroduced circumcision for the benefit of the children born in the wilderness. "In this way he replaced the child sacrifices, which it had been customary to offer to Yahweh in early days, by the offering of the foreskin of the male" (Drews, The Christ Myth, p. 83). 
73 We learn from Porphyry (De antr. nymPh.) that "instead of a fountain a mixing-bowl [KpaT~p] is placed near Mithras." (Cited in Cumont, Textes, I, p. 101.) This is of some importance in interpreting the krater. Cf. also the krater of Zosimos (Berthelot, Alchimistes grecs, Ill, p. 235). 
	74 Cumont, I, p. 100. 	75 As the zodiacal sign for the sun's greatest heat. 
43] 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
stands for the devouring mother. The combination of the bull's blood and the snake therefore looks like a union of opposites, and the lion and snake fighting for the krater may mean the same thing. This is probably the cause of the miraculous fertility that results from the sacrifice of the bull. Even on the primitive level, among the Australian blackfellows, we meet with the idea that the life-force wears out, turns "bad" or gets lost, and must therefore be renewed at regular intervals. Whenever such an abaissement occurs the rites of renewal must be performed. There is an infinite number of these rites, but even on a much higher level they retain their original meaning. Thus the Mithraic killing of the bull is a sacrifice to the Terrible Mother, to the unconscious, which spontaneously attracts energy from the conscious mind because it has strayed too far from its roots, forgetting the power of the gods, without whom all life withers or ends catastrophically in a welter of perversity. In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious. This makes possible a union of opposites resulting in a release of energy. At the same time the act of sacrifice is a fertilization of the mother: the chthonic serpent-demon drinks the blood, i.e., the soul, of the hero. In this way life becomes immortal, for, like the sun, the hero regenerates himself by his self-sacrifice and re-entry into the mother. After all this we should have no difficulty in recognizing the son's sacrifice to the mother in the Christian mystery. Just as Attis unmans himself for the sake of his mother, and his effigy was hung on the pine-tree in memory of this deed, so Christ hangs 70 on the tree of life, on the wood of martyrdom, the 'EKli'r17 and mother (cf. pI. XXXVI), and ransoms creation from death. By entering again into the womb of the mother, 
76 The end of Prometheus is a similar sacrificial death: he was chained to the rocks. In another version his chains were drawn through a pillar. He suffered as a punishment the fate that Christ took upon himself willingly. The fate of Prometheus is therefore reminiscent of the misfortune that befell Theseus and Peirithous, who grew fast to the rocks, the chthonic mother. According to Athenaeus, Jupiter, on setting Prometheus free again, commanded him to wear a willow crown and an iron ring, thus symbolizing his captivity and bondage. Robertson (p. 397) compares the crown of Prometheus to Christ's crown of thorns. The devout wear crowns in honour of Prometheus, in order to represent his bondage. In this connection, therefore, the crown has the same meaning as the betrothal ring: the worshippers are '''TOXO' TaU O,ou, 'captives of the god: 
432 

672 
673 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
he pays in death 77 for the sin which the Protanthropos Adam committed in life, and by that deed he regenerates on a spiritual level the life which was corrupted by original sin. St. Augustine, as we have already remarked, actually interprets Christ's death as a hieros gamos with the mother, similar to the feast of Adonis, where Venus and Adonis were laid upon the bridal couch: 
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 [matrona] for ever.78 
Matrona in the language of St. Augustine means the Church, the bride of the Lamb. The feeling-tone of the classical hieros gamos has here changed into its opposite: torment instead of lust, and the martyr's stake instead of the mother and mistress. What was once felt as pleasurable-i.e., the union of the masculine consciousness with the feminine unconscious-is now felt as painful; the symbol of the hieros gamos is no longer experienced concretely on the bodily level, but on a higher, psychic one as the union of God with his congregation (the corpus mysticum). To put it in modern psychological language, this projection of the hieros gamos signifies the conjunction of conscious and unconscious, the transcendent function characteristic of the individuation process. Integration of the uncon. scious invariably has a healing effect.79 
Comparison between the Mithraic and the Christian sacri. fice should show just where the superiority of the Christian symbol lies: it lies in the frank admission that not only has 
77 The spear wound given by Longinus takes the place of the dagger thrust in the Mithraic bull-sacrifice. Aeschylus says that the "jagged tooth of the brazen wedge" was driven through the breast of the enchained Prometheus (Prometheus, trans. by Smyth, I, pp. 220-21). Odin and Huitzilopochtli were pierced by the spear, Adonis was killed by the boar's tusk. 
78 Sermo Suppositus 120,8. [Cf. par. 411, above.] 
79 The same idea is found in Nordic mythology: through hanging on the tree of life Odin obtained knowledge of the runes and of the inspiriting drink that gave him immortality. People are inclined to trace this mythologem back to Christian influence. But what about Huitzilopochtli? 
433 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
man's animal instinctuality (symbolized by the bull) to be sacrificed, but the entire natural man, who is more than can be expressed by his theriomorphic symbol. Whereas the latter represents animal instinctuality and utter subjection to the law of the species, the natural man means something more than that, something specifically human, namely the ability to deviate from the law, or what in theological language is known as the capacity for "sin." It is only because this variability in his nature has continually kept other ways open that spiritual development has been possible for Homo sapiens at all. The disadvantage, however, is that the absolute and apparently reliable guidance furnished by the instincts is displaced by an abnormal learning capacity which we also find in the anthropoid apes. Instead of instinctive certainty there is uncertainty and consequently the need for a discerning, evaluating, selecting, discriminating consciousness. If the latter succeeds in compensating the instinctive certainty, it will increasingly substitute reliable rules and modes of behaviour for instinctive action and intuition. There then arises the opposite danger of consciousness being separated from its instinctual foundations and of setting up the conscious will in the place of natural impulse. 
i Through the sacrifice of the natural man an attempt is made to reach this goal, for only then will the dominating ideal of consciousness be in a position to assert itself completely and mould human nature as it wishes. The loftiness of this ideal is incontestable and should indeed not be contested. Yet it is precisely on this lofty height that one is beset by a doubt whether human nature is capable of being moulded in this way, and whether our dominating idea is such that it can shape the natural material without damaging it. Only experience will show. Meanwhile, the attempt must be made to climb these heights, for without such an undertaking it could never be proved that this bold and violent experiment in self-transformation is possible at all. Nor could we ever estimate or understand the powers that favour the attempt or make it utterly impossible. Only then shall we be in a position to see whether the selfsacrifice of the natural man, as the Christian understands it, is a final solution or a view capable of further modification. Whereas the Mithraic sacrifice was still symbolized by the archaic slaughter of an animal and aimed only at domesticating and disciplin- 
434 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
ing the instinctual man,80 the Christian idea of sacrifice is symbolized by the death of a human being and demands a surrender of the whole man-not merely a taming of his animal instincts, but a total renunciation of them and a disciplining of his specifically human, spiritual functions for the sake of a spiritual goal beyond this world. This ideal is a hard schooling which cannot help alienating man from his own nature and, to a large degree, from nature in general. The attempt, as history has shown, was entirely possible and led in the course of a few centuries to a development of consciousness which would have been quite out of the question but for this training. Developments of this kind are not arbitrary inventions or mere intellectual fantasies; they have their own inner logic and necessity. The barrage of materialistic criticism that has been directed against the physical impossibility of dogma ever since the age of enlightenment is completely beside the point. Dogma must be a physical impossibility, for it has nothing whatever to say about the physical world but is a symbol of "transcendental" or unconscious processes which, so far as psychology can understand them at all, seem to be bound up with the unavoidable development of consciousness. Belief in dogma is an equally unavoidable stop-gap which must sooner or later be replaced by adequate understanding and knowledge if our civilization is to continue. 
	675 	In Miss Miller's fantasy, too, there is an inner necessity 
that compels it to go on from the horse-sacrifice to the sacrifice of the hero. Whereas the former symbolizes the renunciation of biological drives, the latter has the deeper and ethically more valuable meaning of a human self-sacrifice, a renunciation of egohood. In her case, of course, this is true only in a metaphorical sense, since it is not the author of the story but its hero, Chiwantopel, who offers himself and is voluntarily sacrificed. The morally significant act is delegated to the hero, while Miss Miller only looks on admiringly and applaudingly, without, it seems, realizing that her animus-figure is constrained to do what she herself so signally fails to do. The advance from the animal sacrifice to the human sacrifice is therefore only an idea, and when Miss Miller plays the part of a pious spectator 80 Mithraism was the religion of the Roman legionaries and admitted only men as initiates. 
435 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
of this imaginary sacrificial act, her participation is without ethical significance. As is usual in such cases, she is totally unconscious of what it means when the hero, the vehicle of the vitally important magical action, perishes. When that happens, the projection falls away and the threatening sacrificial act recoils upon the subject herself, that is, upon the personal ego of the dreamer. In what form the drama will then run to an end it is impossible to predict. Nor, in the case of Miss Miller, owing to the lack of material and my ignorance of her personality, did I foresee, or venture to assume, that it would be a psychosis which would form the companion piece to Chiwantopel's sacrifice. It was, in fact, a KaTOX~ -a total surrender, not to the positive possibilities of life, but to the nocturnal world of the unconscious, a debacle similar to the one that overtook her hero. 
Chiwantopel is killed by a snake. We have already found abundant evidence for the snake as an instrument of sacrifice (the legend of St. Sylvester, the virginity test, wounding of Ra and Philoctetes, lance and arrow symbolism). It is the knife that kills, but also the phallus as symbol of the regenerative power of the grain, which, buried in the earth like a corpse, is at the same time the inseminator of the earth. (PI. LXnIa.) The snake symbolizes the numen of the transformative act as well as the transformative substance itself, as is particularly clear in alchemy. As the chthonic dweller in the cave she lives in the womb of mother earth, like the Kundalini serpent who lies coiled in the abdominal cavity, at the base of the spine. Alchemy has the legend of Gabricus and Beya, the royal brother-sister pair. During the hieros gamos) Gabricus gets right inside the body of his sister and disappears completely; he is buried in her womb, where, dissolved into atoms, he changes into the soulsnake, the serpens mercurialis.81 (Cf. fig. 6.) Such fantasies are not uncommon among patients. Thus one patient of mine had the fantasy that she was a snake which wound itself round her mother and finally crawled right into her. 
The snake that killed the hero is green. So was the snake of another patient,82 who said: "Then a little green snake came into my mouth, it had the loveliest, most delicate feeling, as if 
81 Cf. Psychology and A lchemy, par. 436: "Visio Arislei." 
82 "The Psychology of Dementia Praecox" (1936 edn., p. 127). 
436 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
it had human understanding and wanted to tell me something. It was just as if it wanted to kiss me." Spielrein's patient said of her snake: "It is God's animal, it has such wonderful colours: green, blue, and white. The rattlesnake is green; it is very dangerous .... The snake can have a human mind, it can have divine judgment; it is a friend of children. It would save the children who are needed to preserve human life." 83 The significance of the snake as an instrument of regeneration is unmistakable. (Cf. fig. 37.) 
	678 	As the horse is the brother, so the snake is the sister of 
Chiwantopel ("my little sister"). Rider and horse form a centaur-like unit,84 like man and his shadow, i.e., the higher and lower man, ego-consciousness and shadow, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In the same way the feminine belongs to man as his own unconscious femininity, which I have called the anima. She is often found in patients in the form of a snake. Green, the life-colour, suits her very well; it is also the colour of the Creator Spiritus. I have defined the anima as the archetype of life itself.85 Here, because of the snake symbolism, she must also be thought of as having the attribute of "spirit." This apparent contradiction is due to the fact that the anima personifies the total unconscious so long as she is not differentiated as a figure from the other archetypes. With further differentiations the figure of the (wise) old man becomes detached from the anima and appears as an archetype of the "spirit." He stands to her in the relationship of a "spiritual" father, like Wotan to Brlinhilde or Bythos to Sophia. Classic examples are to be found in the novels of Rider Haggard. 
	679 	When Chiwantopel calls the snake his "little sister," this is 
not without significance for Miss Miller, because the hero is in fact her brother-beloved, her "ghostly lover," the animus. She herself is his life-snake which brings death to him. When the hero and his horse die, the green snake remains, and the snake is nothing other than the unconscious psyche of the author herself who now, as we have seen, will suffer the same fate as Chiwantopel, that is, she will be overpowered by her unconscious. 
	680 	The conflict between horse and snake or bull and snake 
88 Spielrein, p. 366. 
84 For case material, cf. Gerhard Adler, Studies, Ch. V, "Consciousness and Cure." 85 See my "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." 
437 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
represents a conflict within the libido itself, a striving forwards and backwards at one and the same time.86 It is as if the libido were not only a ceaseless forward movement, an unending will for life, evolution, creation, such as Schopenhauer envisaged in his cosmic Will, where death is a mishap or fatality coming from outside; like the sun, the libido also wills its own descent, its own involution. During the first half of life it strives for growth; during the second half, softly at first and then ever more perceptibly, it points towards an altered goal. And just as in youth the urge for limitless expansion often lies hidden under veiling layers of resistance to life, so that "other urge" often hides behind an obstinate and purposeless cleaving to life in its old form. This apparent contradiction in the nature of the libido is illustrated by a statue of Priapus in the archaeological museum at Verona: Priapus, with a sidelong smile, points with his finger to a snake biting his phallus (pI. LXIb). 
	11 	A similar motif can be found in a Rubens' Last Judg- 
ment (pI. LXIV), where, in the foreground, a man is being castrated by a serpent. This motif illustrates the meaning of the end of the world.87 The fantasy of world conflagration, of the cataclysmic end of the world in general, is the projected primordial image of the great transformation, the enantiodromia of life into death, which Rubens represents as emasculation by the serpent. The image of the consuming change that dissolves the phenomenal world of individual psychic existence originates in the unconscious and appears before the conscious mind in dreams and shadowy premonitions. And the more unwilling the latter is to heed this intimation, the more frightening become the symbols by which it makes itself known. The snake plays an important role in dreams as a fear-symbol. Because of 
86 Bleuler ca1led this "ambivalence" or "ambitendency," and Stekel "the bipolarity of all psychic phenomena" (Die Sprache des Traumes, pp. 535f.). 
87 The role played by the serpent in mythology is analogous to the end of the world. It is said in the Voluspa that the deluge would begin when the Midgard . Serpent rises up for universal destruction. The name of the Serpent is ]ormlln- 
gandr, which means literally 'monstrous dragon' [Paul, Grundriss der germanischen Philologie-EDlToRs]. The world-destroying Fenris-Wolf likewise has connections with the sea. Fen is found in Fensalir (Meersale), the dwelling-place of Frigga; originally it meant 'sea' (Frobenius, Zeitalter, p. 179). In the story of Red Riding Hood, the serpent or fish is replaced by a wolf, because he is the typical destroyer. 
438 

VIII. THE SACRIFICE 
its poisonousness, its appearance is often an early symptom of physical disease. As a rule, however, it expresses an abnormally active or "constellated" unconscious and the physiological symptoms-mainly abdominal-associated therewith. Interpretation in any given case depends as always on individual circumstances and must be modified accordingly. In youth it denotes fear of life; in age, fear of death. In the case of Miss Miller the fatal significance of the green snake is obvious enough in the light of subsequent events. But it is not so easy to say what was the real cause of the unconscious gaining the upper hand. The necessary biographical material is lacking. I can only say that I have very often noticed in such cases a singularly narrow consciousness, an apprehensive stiffness of attitude, and a spiritual and emotional horizon bounded by childish naIvete or pedantic prejudice. To judge from the little we know of Miss Miller, it seems to be more a case of emotional naIvete: she underestimated the possibilities in her and leapt too lightly into dangerously deep waters where some knowledge of the shadow would have been in place. Such people should be given as much psychological knowledge as possible. Even if it doesn't protect them from the outbreak of psychosis, it nevertheless makes the prognosis look more hopeful, as I have often observed. In border-line cases such as this a real psychological understanding is often a matter of life and death. 
	682 	As at the beginning of our investigation the name of the 
hero obliged us to speak of the symbolism of Popocatapetl as the "creative" part of the body, so now at the end of the Miller drama we again have an opportunity to see how the volcano assists at the death of the hero and, by means of an earthquake, causes him to disappear into the bowels of the earth. Just as the volcano gave birth and name to the hero, so at the end it swallows him back again.88 We learn from his last words that the longed-for beloved who alone understands him is called 
88 Cf. Holderlin's longing in his poem "Empedocles," also Zarathustra's journey to Hades through the mouth of a volcano. I have shown elsewhere ("On the Psychology of Occult Phenomena," pars. 140ff.; "Cryptomnesia," 18I1f.) that this passage in Nietzsche is a cryptomnesia. Death is a re-entry into the mother. Hence the Egyptian king Men-kau-Re (Mykerinos) had his daughter buried in a gilded wooden cow, as a guarantee of rebirth. The cow was placed in a gorgeous apartment and offerings were made to it. In an adjoining apartment were the images of the king's concubines. Herodotus, n, 129, in Selincourt trans., p. 153. 
439 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMA nON: TWO 

"Ja-ni-wa-ma." In this name we find those sweet lispings already known to us from the babyhood of Hiawatha: wawa, wama, mama. The only one who really understands us is the mother. For ver-, in vcrstehen, 'to understand' (OHG.firstdn), may be derived from a primitive Germanic prefix tri-, which is identical with '/rEpL, 'round,' 'about.' The OHG. anttrist6n, 'to interpret,' is considered to be identical with firstdn. Hence the fundamental meaning of verstehen would be to 'stand round about something.' 89 Comprehendere and KuruuvAAu/J.{3avHv both express an image similar to the German ertassen, 'to grasp, comprehend.' The factor common to all these terms is the idea of surrounding, embracing. And there is no doubt at all that nothing in the world ever embraces us so completely as the mother. When the neurotic complains that the world does not understand him, he is telling us in a word that he wants his mother. Paul Verlaine has given beautiful expression to this thought in his poem "Mon Reve familier": 
le fais souvent ce reve et range et penetrant 
D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui m'aime, Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout a fait la meme 
Ni tout a fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend. 
Car elle me comprend, et mon cceur, transparent Pour elle seule, helas! cesse d'etre un probleme Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front bleme, Elle seule les sait rafraichir, en pleurant. 
Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse?- le l'ignore. 
Son nom? le me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore Comme ceux des aimes que la Vie exila. 
Son regard est pareil au regard des statues, 
Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a L'inflexion des voix cheres qui se sont tues.90 
89 Kluge, Worterbuch. 

90 Poemes saturniens (1866). 
44° 

IX 
EPILOGUE 
	683 	So end the Miller fantasies. Their melancholy outcome is 
due largely to the fact that they break off at the critical moment when the threat of invasion by the unconscious is plainly apparent. It is hardly to be supposed that Miss Miller, who evidently had not the faintest clue as to the real meaning of her visions-which even Theodore Flournoy, despite his fine feeling for values, could do nothing to explain-would be able to meet the next phase of the process, namely the assimilation of the hero to her conscious personality, with the right attitude. In order to do so she would have had to recognize what fate demanded of her, and what was the meaning of the bizarre images that had broken in upon her consciousness. That there was already some degree of dissociation is obvious, since the unconscious went ahead independently and kept on churning out images which she had not consciously produced herself and which she felt as strange and portentous. To the objective observer it is perfectly clear that the fantasies were products of a psychic energy not under the control of the conscious mind. They were longings, impulses, and symbolic happenings which it was quite unable to cope with either positively or negatively. The instinctual impulse that was trying to rouse the dreamer from the sleep of childhood was opposed by a personal pride that was distinctly out of place, and also, one must suppose, by a correspondingly narrow moral horizon, so that there was nothing to help her understand the spiritual content of the symbols. Our civilization has long since forgotten how to think symbolically, and even the theologian has no further use for the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers. The cure of souls in Protestantism is in an even more parlous condition. Who ever would go to the trouble, nowadays, of patching together the basic ideas of Christianity from a "welter of pathological fan- 
441 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: TWO 
tasies"? For patients in this situation it is a positive life-saver when the doctor takes such products seriously and gives the patient access to the meanings they suggest. In this way he makes it possible for the patient to assimilate at least part of the unconscious and to repair the menacing dissociation by just that amount. At the same time the assimilation guards against the dangerous isolation which everyone feels when confronted by an incomprehensible and irrational aspect of his personality. Isolation leads to panic, and that is only too often the beginning of a psychosis. The wider the gap between conscious and unconscious, the nearer creeps the fatal splitting of the personality, which in neurotically disposed individuals leads to neurosis, and, in those with a psychotic constitution, to schizophrenia and fragmentation of personality. The aim of psychotherapy is therefore to narrow down and eventually abolish the dissociation by integrating the tendencies of the unconscious into the conscious mind. Normally these promptings are realized unconsciously or, as we say, "instinctively," and though their spiritual content remains unnoticed, it nevertheless insinuates itself into the conscious spiritual life of the patient, mostly in disguised form, without his being aware of it. All this passes off smoothly and without difficulty provided that his consciousness contains certain ideas of a symbolic nature-"for those who have the symbol the passage is easy," say the alchemists. If, on the other hand, there is already a tendency to dissociation, perhaps dating back to youth, then every advance of the unconscious only increases the gap between it and consciousness. As a rule outside help is needed to bridge the gap. Had I treated Miss Miller I would have had to tell her some of the things of which I have written in this book, in order to build up her conscious mind to the point where it could have understood the contents of the collective unconscious. Without the help of these "representations collectives," which have psychotherapeutic value even for primitives, it is not possible to understand the archetypal associations of the products of the unconscious. It is in no sense sufficient to try to do so with nothing but a personalistically oriented psychology. Anyone who wants to treat serious dissociations must know something of the anatomy and evolutionary history of the mind he is setting out to cure. The physician 'who treats physical diseases is required to have some knowledge of anatomy, physi- 
442 

IX. EPILOGUE 
ology, embryology, and comparative evolution. Neurotic dissociations can, up to a point, be remedied with the help of purely personalis tic psychology, but not the problem of transference, which crops up in the majority of cases and always hides collective contents. 
	684 	The Miller case is a classic example of the unconscious 
manifestations which precede a serious psychic disorder. Their presence does not by any means prove that a disorder of this kind is bound to occur. That, as I have already said, depends among other things on whether the conscious attitude towards them is positive or negative. The Miller case suited my book very well because I had nothing to do with it personally and could thus refute the oft-repeated charge that I had "influenced" the patient. Had the case come up for treatment at the very first sign of spontaneous fantasy creations, the later episode of Chiwantopel, for instance, might have taken a very different turn, and the end, so we will hope, would have been less calamitous. 
	685 	With these remarks we come to the end of our programme. 
We set ourselves the task of examining an individual fantasy system in relation to its sources, and in the course of our inquiry have stumbled upon problems of such enormous proportions that our attempts to understand their full scope and complexity cannot of necessity amount to much more than a superficial survey. I do not take kindly to the argument that because certain working hypotheses may not possess eternal validity or may possibly be erroneous, they must be withheld from the public. Certainly I have done my best to guard against error, which can be particularly pernicious on such treacherous ground, by keeping myself fully conscious of the dangers that beset an investigation of this kind. We doctors are not so happily plated as research workers in other fields. We cannot choose our assignment or mark off the territory to be investigated, for the sick man who comes to us for treatment confronts us with unforeseeable problems and expects us to fulfil a therapeutic task for which we cannot but feel inadequate. The strongest incentive to unceasing research has always come to me from my practice, and it consisted in the simple question which no man can ignore: "How can you treat something that you do not under- 
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stand?" Dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusions are expressive of a situation. If I do not understand the dreams, neither do I understand the situation of the patient, and of what use is my treatment then? It was never my intention to justify my theories by my patients; it seemed to me far more important to understand their situation in all its aspects, which naturally include the compensatory activity of the unconscious. Such was the case with Miss Miller. I have tried to understand her situation to the best of my ability and have set down the results of my efforts as an example of the nature and extent of the problems about which any doctor who wants to practise psychotherapy should have scientific knowledge. He needs a science of the psyche, not a theory about it. I do not regard the pursuit of science as a bickering about who is right, but as an endeavour to augment and deepen human knowledge. The present work is addressed to those who think and feel about science in the same way. 

Fig. 43. Antique cameo 
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THE MILLER FANTASIES 

[Translated from "Quelques Faits d'imagination creatrice subconsciente," in Archives de psychologie (Geneva), V (1906), 36-5l. The article contains an introduction of five pages signed by Theodore Flournoy, which is not translated here. In it, Flournoy speaks of the Miller material as a "traduction"; it is therefore evident that Miss Miller wrote her memoir in English and it was translated (by Flournoy?) into French. Flournoy describes her as "a young American who studied for a semester at our [Geneva] university and who today pursues a distinguished career as a journalist and lecturer in the United States." The original of the Miller memoir has never come to light, and accordingly a double translation has been necessary both in the present edition and in the Hinkle translation of 1916 (where, however, the full Miller text was not given, as here). Professor Jung based his study on the French version, and therefore certain words and phrases that he considered of special point are here given in French, in brackets. Likewise, indication is given of words and passages that the Flournoy publication left in English. 
-EDITORS.] 

SOME INSTANCES OF SUBCONSCIOUS CREATIVE IMAGINATION 
by Miss Frank Miller of New York 
I. PHENOMENA OF TRANSITORY SUGGESTION OR OF INSTANTANEOUS AUTOSUGGESTION 
What I mean by this, in default of a better term, is a curious phenomenon that I have observed in myself and that occurs in different forms. It consists in this, that at certain moments and for a few seconds only, the impressions or feelings of another person are so strongly suggested to me that they seem to be mine, although, as soon as the suggestion is over, I am perfectly sure that this was not the case. Here are some examples: 
1. I am passionately fond of caviar, the odour and taste of which are, on the contrary, very repellent to certain members of my family. But if one of them, just as I am about to eat it, begins to express her disgust, this disgust is at once suggested to me so clearly that, for a few moments, I feel complete repugnance for the smell and the taste of caviar. It takes, however, only a minute's effort for me to dispel this impression and to find the caviar as delectable as ever. 
2. Here, on the other hand, is an example of the transmission 
. of a pleasing impression. There are certain perfumes and essences that affect me disagreeably because they smell too strong, so much so as to give me nausea and make me almost ill. Yet if a lady begins to smell her eau-de-Cologne, recommending it to me for its strength and exquisite perfume, her pleasure for an instant becomes mine-probably not for more than three to five seconds-after which it disappears and gives place to my usual aversion to strong odours. It is much easier for me, it seems, to 
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dismiss the agreeable suggestion and return to my real feeling of distaste than to do the reverse. 
3. When I am following a story with great interest, either reading or listening, I often have the illusion, which may last up to a minute, of really taking part in the action, instead of merely reading or hearing it. This is especially marked at fine theatrical productions (for example, performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, or Irving). The illusion becomes so complete in certain very moving scenes that in Cyrano) for instance, when Christian is killed and Sarah Bernhardt throws herself upon him to stanch the bleeding of his wound, I have felt a real, piercing pain in my own breast, just where Christian is supposed to have received the blow. This kind of suggestion may last a minute, or a second. 
4. Such momentary suggestions sometimes take on very curious aspects, in which the part played by imagination is accentuated. For example, I have enjoyed my sea voyages enormously, and I retain a particularly vivid memory of crossing the Atlantic. Now, someone lately showed me a beautiful photograph of a steamship in mid ocean; and instantly-the illusion was of an arresting power and beauty-I felt the throb of the engines, the heave of the waves, the roll of the ship. It can hardly have lasted for more than a second, but during that barely appreciable instant it was as though I were once more at sea. The same phenomenon recurred, though less clearly, on seeing the same photograph again some days later. 
5. Here is an example proceeding evidently from creative fantasy. One day when I was taking a bath and was preparing to use the shower, I was in the act of winding a towel round my head to protect my hair from the water. The towel, of a thick material, had taken a conical shape, and I was standing in front of a mirror to pin it firmly in place. This conical form was, no doubt, a striking reminder of the pointed head-dress of the ancient Egyptians; be that as it may, it seemed to me, for one moment and with an almost breath-taking clarity, that I was on a pedestal, a veritable Egyptian statue with all its details; stiff-limbed, one foot forward, holding insignia in my hand, etc. This indeed was superb, and it was with regret that I felt the impression fading away like a rainbow; like a rainbow, too, it returned again faintly before it disappeared altogether. 
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6. Yet another phenomenon. An artist of some reputation very much wished to illustrate some of my publications. But in this matter I have my own ideas and am difficult to please. However, I succeeded in making him draw landscapes, such as those of Lake Geneva, where he had never been, and he used to pretend that I could make him depict things that he had never seen and give him the sense of a surrounding atmosphere that he had never felt; in short, that I was using him as he himself used his pencil; that is, simply as an instrument. 
I do not attach much importance to the various things I have just described-they are so fugitive and nebulousl-and I think that all persons with a nervous temperament and imagination, who react with a lively sympathy towards external impressions, experience analogous phenomena. They do not seem to me to be of much consequence in themselves, unless they can help us to understand other things, less elementary. I believe that this sympathic or sympathizing (sympathetic 1) temperament, in people whose health is quite normal, plays a large part in the creation or the possibility of such "suggested" images and impressions. Now, may it not be that, under certain favourable conditions, something quite new, different from anything that one knows, may come over the mental horizon, something as dazzling and splendid as a rainbow and yet as natural in its origin and cause? For, surely, these queer little experiences (I mean the last of those above) differ as much from the ordinary, everyday course of life as a rainbow differs from blue sky. 
The aim of the few preceding observations is to serve as an introduction to two or three further, more important ones which, in their turn, seem to me of a nature that throws some light on the even more complex and mystifying phenomena experienced by other persons, who are carried away by them be. cause they are unable-or unwilling-to analyse the abnormal. subliminal, or subconscious working of their minds. 
1 [In English in Flournoy's publication.] 
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