Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts - Herbert Silberer (great reads .TXT) 📗
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After the telling of the dream the mother asked the girl if she could imagine what the camel signified [pg 068] in the dream, and she immediately replied: “Papa, because he has to drag along and worry himself like a camel. You know, Mamma, when he wants to slobber you it is as if he said to you in camel talk, ‘Please play with me. I will marry you; I won't let you go away.’ The rocks on which you are were steep, the path was quite clear, but the railing was very dirty and there was a deep abyss, and a man slipped over the railing into the abyss. I don't know whether it was Uncle or Papa.”
Stekel remarks on this: “The neurotic child understands the whole conflict of the parents. The mother refused the father coitus. In this she will not ‘play’ with the camel. The camel wants to ‘marry’ her. It is quite puzzling how the child knows that Mamma has long entertained thoughts of separation.... Children evidently observe much more sharply and exactly than we have yet suspected. The conclusion of the dream is a quite transparent symbolism of coitus. But the dream thoughts go deeper yet. A man falls into an abyss. The father goes on little mountain expeditions. Does the child wish that the father may fall? The father treats the child badly and occasionally strikes her unjustly. At all events it is to be noted that the little puss says to her mother, ‘Mamma, isn't it true that when Papa dies you will marry Dr. Stekel?’ Another time she chattered, ‘You know, Mamma, Dr. N. is nicer than Papa; he would suit you much better.’ Also the antithesis of clean and [pg 069] dirty, that later plays such an important part in the psychic life of neurotics, is here indicated.”
Not only the camel but also the railing and the abyss are interesting in relation to Sec. 7 and 8 of the parable, where occurs the perilous wall with the railing. People fall down there. There is evidently here an intimate primitive symbolism (for the child also). But I will not anticipate.
It is not necessary to add anything to the bear dream. It is quite clear. Only one point must be noticed, that the subsequent concern about the dead is to be met in the parable, though not on the wanderer's part but on that of the elders who desire the reviving of the lion.
The wanderer describes the lion (Sec. 6) as “old, fierce and large.” (The growling bear of the dream.) The glance of his eye is the impressively reproachful look of the father.
The wanderer conquers the lion and “dissects” him. Red blood, white bones, come to view, male and female; the appearance of the two elements is, at any rate overdetermined in meaning as it signifies on the one hand the separation of a pair, father and mother, originally united as one body; and on the other hand the liberation of sexuality in the mind of the wanderer (winning of the mother or of the dragon-guarded maiden).
We ought not to explain the figures of the lion and the elders as “the father.” Such exalted figures are usually condensations or composite persons. [pg 070] The elders are not merely the father, but also the old, or the older ones = parents in general, in so far as they are severe and unapproachable. Apparently the mother also will prove unapproachable if the adult son desires her as a wife. [The male child, on the other hand, frequently has erotic experiences with the mother. The parents connive at these, because they do not understand the significance even of their own caresses. They generally do not know how to fix the limits between moderation and excess.] The wanderer has no luck with blandishments in the case of the lion. He begins indeed to fondle him (cf. Sec. 6), but the lion looks at him formidably with his bright, shining eyes. He is not obliging; the wanderer has to struggle with him. Offering violence to the mother often appears in myths. We shall have an example of this later. It is characteristic that the wanderer is amazed at his own audacity.
Dragon fighting, dismembering, incest, separation of parents, and still other motives have an intimate connection in mythology. I refer to the comparison of motives collected by Stucken from an imposing array of material. [I quote an excerpt from it at the end of this volume, Note A.] The motive of dismemberment has great significance for the subsequent working out of my theme, so I must for that reason delay a little longer at this point.
The parts resulting from the dismemberment have a sexual or procreative value. That is evident from the analysis of the parable, even without the support [pg 071] of mythological parallels. None the less let it be noticed that many cosmogonies assign the origin of the universe or at least the world or its life to the disintegrated parts of the body of a great animal or giant. In the younger Edda the dismemberment of the giant Ymir is recounted.
The Iranian myth has an ancestor bull, Abudad. “From his left side goes Goschorum, his soul, and rises to the starry heavens; from his right side came forth Kajomorts (Gâyômard), the first man. Of his seed the earth took a third, but the moon two thirds. From his horns grew the fruits, from his nose, leeks, from his blood, grapes, from his tail, five and twenty kinds of grain. From his purified seed two new bulls were formed, from which all animals are descended.” Just as in the Iranian myth the original being, Gâyômard, considered as human, and the ancestor bull belong together, so we find in the northern myth a cow Audhumla associated with Ymir. Ymir is to be regarded as androgynous (man and woman), the primitive cow as only a doubling of his being. The Iranian primitive bull ancestor also occurs as cow. Compare white and red, male and female, in the body of the lion.
[pg 072]In the Indian Asvamedha the parts of the sacrificed steed correspond to the elements of the visible creation. (Cf. Brhadaranyaka—Upanisad I, i.) A primitive vedic cosmogony makes the world arise from the parts of the body of a giant. (Rig-veda purusa-sukta.)
Just as from the dead primordial being the sacrificed bull, Mithra, sprouts life and vegetation, so in the dream of Omicron, a tree grows out of the belly of the dead bear. In mythology many trees grow out of graves, that in some way reincarnate the creative or life principle of the dead. It is an interesting fact that the world, or especially an improved new edition of the world, comes from the body of a dying being. Some one kills this being and so causes an improved creation. (According to Stucken, incidentally, all myths are creation myths.) This improvement is now identical, psychologically, with the above mentioned superior knowledge of the son (expressed in general terms, the present new generation as opposed to the ancestors). The son does away with the father (the children overpower the ancestors), and creates, as it were out of the wreckage, an improved world. So, beside the superior knowledge, a superior efficiency. The primordial beings are destroyed but not so the creative power (phallus, tree, the red and the white). It passes on to posterity (son) which uses it in turn.
Dismemberments in creation myths are not always multiple but sometimes dichotomous. Thus in the Babylonian cosmogony Marduk splits the monster [pg 073] Tiamat into two pieces, which henceforth become the upper and lower half of heaven. Winckler concludes that Tiamat is man-woman (primal pair). This brings us to the type of creation saga where the producer of the (improved) world separates the primal pair, his parents. The Chinese creation myth speaks of the archaic Chaos as an effervescing water, in which the two powers, Yang (heaven) and Yin (earth), the two primal ancestors, are mingled and united. Pwanku, an offshoot of these primal powers (son of the parents), separates them and thus they become manifest. In the Egyptian myth we read (in Maspero, Histoire des Peuples de l'Orient, Stucken, Astral Myth, p. 203): “The earth and the heaven were in the beginning a pair of lovers lost in the Now who held each other in close embrace, the god below the goddess. Now on the day of creation a new god [son type], Shou, came out of the eternal waters, glided between them and seizing Nouit [the goddess] with his hands, lifted her at arms' length above his head. While the starry bust of the goddess was lengthened out in space, the head to the west, the loins to the east, and became the sky, her feet and her hands [as the four pillars of heaven] fell here and there on our earth.” The young god or the son pushes his way between the parents, sunders their union, just as the dreamer Omicron would have liked to sunder the chain of the bear (the marriage bond of the parents). This case is quite as frequent a type in analytic psychology as in mythical cosmology. The child is actually [pg 074] an intruder, even if it does indirectly draw the bonds of marriage tighter. Fundamentally regarded, the child appears as the rival of the father, who is no longer the only beloved one of his wife. He must share the love with the new comer, to whom an even greater tenderness is shown. Regarded from the standpoint of the growing son, the intrusion represents the Œdipus motive (with the incest wish).
The most outspoken and also a commonly occurring form of the mythological separation of the primal pair is the castration of the father by the son. The motive is, according to all accounts, psychologically quite as comprehensible as the frequently substituted castration of the son by the father. The latter is psychologically the necessary correlate of the first form. The rivals, father and son, menace each other's sexual life. That the castration motive works out that way with father and son (son-in-law if the daughter takes the place of the mother) is expressed either in so many words in the myth or through corresponding displacement types.
A clear case is the emasculation of Uranus by his son Kronos, who thereby prevents the further cohabitation of the primal parents. [Archetype of the Titan motive in a narrow sense.] Important for us is the fact that castration in myths is represented sometimes as the tearing out of a limb or by complete dismemberment. (Stucken, Astral Myth, pp. 436, 443, 479, 638 ff.; Rank, Incest Motive, p. 311 ff.)
[pg 075]The Adam myth also contains the motive of the separated primal parents. In Genesis we do not, of course, see the myth in its pure form. It must first be rehabilitated. Stucken accomplishes this in regarding Adam and Eve (Hawwa) as the original world-parent pair, and Jahwe Elohim as the separating son god. By a comparison of Adam and Noah he incidentally arrives by analogical reasoning at an emasculation of Adam. In connection with the “motive of the sleeping primal father,” he observes later (Astral Myth, p. 224) that the emasculation (or the shameless deed, Ham with Noah) is executed while the primal father lies asleep. Thus, Kronos emasculates Uranus by night while he is sleeping with Gaia. Stucken now shows that the sleep motive is contained in
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