Totem and Taboo Part 16

I must ascribe the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval, and the crowding of the material in the above exposition to a restraint which the nature of the subject demands. It would be just as meaningless to strive for exactness in this material as it would be unfair to demand certainty here.

[211] This new emotional att.i.tude must also have been responsible for the fact that the deed could not bring full satisfaction to any of the perpetrators. In a certain sense it had been in vain. For none of the sons could carry out his original wish of taking the place of the father. But failure is, as we know, much more favourable to moral reaction than success.

[212] "Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the sacred law of blood are in primitive society the only crimes of which the community as such takes cognizance ..." _Religion of the Semites_, p.

419.

[213] Compare _Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_, by C. G.

Jung, in which some dissenting points of view are represented.

[214] Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, Second Edition, 1907.

[215] See above, p. 128.

[216] "To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and divine has deepened into an impa.s.sable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking G.o.ds and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonization of a saint seems to a modern Catholic." Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, I; _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, II, p. 177.

[217] It is known that the overcoming of one generation of G.o.ds by another in mythology represents the historical process of the subst.i.tution of one religious system by another, either as the result of conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological development.

In the latter case the myth approaches the "functional phenomena" in H.

Silberer's sense. That the G.o.d who kills the animal is a symbol of the libido, as a.s.serted by C. G. Jung (_l.c._), presupposes a different conception of the libido from that hitherto held, and at any rate seems to me questionable.

[218] _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 412-413. "The mourning is not a spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And a chief object of the mourners is _to disclaim responsibility for the G.o.d's death_--a point which has already come before us in connexion with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the 'ox-murder at Athens.'"

[219] The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big role in disturbing the relations to the father in the case of our youthful neurotics. In Ferenczi's excellent study we have seen how the boy recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little p.e.n.i.s. When children learn about ritual circ.u.mcision they identify it with castration. To my knowledge the parallel in the psychology of races to this att.i.tude of our children has not yet been drawn. The circ.u.mcision which was so frequent in primordial times among primitive races belongs to the period of initiation in which its meaning is to be found; it has only secondarily been relegated to an earlier time of life. It is very interesting that among primitive men circ.u.mcision is combined with or replaced by the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth, and that our children, who cannot know anything about this, really treat these two operations as equivalents to castration when they display their fear of them.

[220] Reinach, _Cultes, Mythes, et Religions_, II, p. 75.

[221] "Une sorte de peche proethnique," _l.c._, p. 76.

[222] The suicidal impulses of our neurotics regularly prove to be self-punishments for death wishes directed against others.

[223] _Eating the G.o.d_, p. 51.... n.o.body familiar with the literature on this subject will a.s.sume that the tracing back of the Christian communion to the totem feast is an idea of the author of this book.

[224] Ariel in _The Tempest_:

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange....

[225] La Mort d'Orphee, _Cultes, Mythes, et Religions_, Vol. II, p. 100.

[226] That is to say, the parent complex.

[227] I am used to being misunderstood and therefore do not think it superfluous to state clearly that in giving these deductions I am by no means oblivious of the complex nature of the phenomena which give rise to them; the only claim made is that a new factor has been added to the already known or still unrecognized origins of religion, morality, and society, which was furnished through psychoa.n.a.lytic experience. The synthesis of the whole explanation must be left to another. But it is in the nature of this new contribution that it could play none other than the central role in such a synthesis, although it will be necessary to overcome great affective resistances before such importance will be conceded to it.

[228] Compare Chapter II.

[229] See Chapter III.