اسطوره تولد قهرمان بخش دوم A
3 The Interpretation of the Myths
Cursory review of these variegated hero myths reveals a series of uniformly common features, and building from these basic elements it seems appropriate to construct a standard legend, as it were. The individual traits of the several myths, and especially the apparent variations from the prototype, can be entirely elucidated only by myth interpretation. The standard legend itself may be formulated according to the following outline:
The hero is the child of very distinguished parents, and usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as sexual abstinence, prolonged infertility, or secret intercourse of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles. During or before the pregnancy, a prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, warns against his birth, usually threatening harm to the father.
Therefore the newborn child, usually at the instigation of the father or his representative, is doomed to be killed or exposed. As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (herders), and suckled by a female animal or a lowly woman.
After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents in a variety of ways. He takes revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged, on the other, achieving greatness and fame. 1
Because the normal relations of the hero toward his father and his mother regularly appear impaired in all these myths, as shown by the preceding outline, there is reason to assume that something in the nature of the hero must account for such a disturbance. Indeed, such motives are not difficult to find. It can be readily understood—and may be noted in the modern imitations of the heroic age—that for the hero, who much more than all others is exposed to resentment and defamation, his ancestry often becomes the source of anguish. The old saying Nemo propheta in patria (No one is a prophet in his own country) has no other meaning but that someone whose parents, siblings, and playmates are known to us will not easily be considered a prophet (Mark 6:4). There seems to be a certain necessity for the prophet to deny his parents; the well-known Meyerbeer opera Le Prophète is based on the avowal that the prophetic hero is permitted, in the interest of his mission, to abandon even his tenderly loving mother. A number of difficulties arise, however, as we proceed to a deeper inquiry into the motives obliging the hero to sever his family relations. Numerous investigators have previously emphasized that for an understanding of myth formation we must go back to its ultimate source— individual fantasy activity. 2 It has also been pointed out that this fantasy activity is found in active and uninhibited exuberance only in children (cf. Cox 1870, 9). Therefore, the fantasy life of the child should first be studied in order to come closer to understanding mythological and artistic fantasy activity—more complex, and modified by diverse influences. The investigation of the fantasy life of the child has hardly commenced, however, and is by no means sufficiently advanced to permit use of the findings to explain more complex psychic activities. Our imperfect knowledge of the psychic life of the child is due to the lack of a suitable instrument, and of a reliable pathway, for investigating this delicate and rather inaccessible domain. These childhood emotions can by no means be studied in the normal human adult. Indeed, in view of certain psychic disturbances, it may be said that the psychic normality of normal subjects consists precisely in their having overcome—or, more correctly, repressed —their childhood imagination and fantasy life. Here we lack a pathway. In children, on the other hand, empirical observation (which as a rule remains merely superficial) fails in the investigation of psychic processes because we are not yet able to trace all manifestations correctly to their motive forces. Here we lack an instrument. There is a certain class of persons, socalled psychoneurotics, shown by Freud to have remained children, in a sense, although they otherwise appear adult. These psychoneurotics may be said not to have given up their juvenile psychic life. On the contrary, in the course of maturation it has become strengthened and fixed, instead of modified. In psychoneurotics, the emotions of the child are preserved and intensified, thus becoming capable of pathological effects in which these otherwise unnoticed emotions appear broadened and magnified, as if under a microscope. In every sense, the fantasies of neurotics resemble exaggerated reproductions of childhood fantasies. This would seem to constitute a pathway. Unfortunately, though, in these cases access is much more difficult than with the child. Only one instrument makes this pathway accessible—the psychoanalytic method, developed through the work of Freud. Constant application of this method sharpens the observer’s view to such a degree that he can recognize the same motive forces, in their more nuanced manifestations, in the psychic life of those who do not later become neurotic.
For the following passages on the fantasy life of the child and of the neurotic I am indebted to Freud, who has kindly placed at my disposal his rich experience with the psychology of neurosis.
The freeing of the growing individual from parental authority is one of the most necessary, albeit painful developmental achievements. It is absolutely necessary for this detachment to take place, and it may be assumed that all individuals who have become normal adults have accomplished it to a certain extent. Indeed, social progress is essentially based on this opposition between the generations. On the other hand, there exists a class of neurotics whose condition indicates failure in this.
For the young child, the parents are, at first, the sole authority and the source of all belief.
To become like them, that is, the parent of the same sex, to grow up like the father or mother is the most intense and portentous wish of the child’s early years. With progressive intellectual development the child gradually gets to know the category to which his parents belong. The child meets other parents and compares them with his own, thus justifying doubt about the incomparability and uniqueness that he had attributed to them. Minor events in children’s lives make them dissatisfied, critical of their parents, and increasingly disposed to prefer other parents to their own. From the psychology of neurosis, we have learned that, among other factors, very intense emotions of sexual rivalry contribute to this result. The subject matter of such provocations evidently is the feeling of being slighted. Occasions arise only too frequently when the child is slighted or feels so in getting less than total parental love and resents having to share it with siblings. The feeling that one’s own affection is not wholly reciprocated finds a vent in the idea—often consciously remembered from early childhood—of being a stepchild or an adopted child. Many persons who have not become neurotics recall such occasions very often, when the hostile behavior of the parents was interpreted and reciprocated by them in this fashion, usually influenced by reading. Here, the influence of sex is already evident, insofar as the boy is far more inclined to harbor hostile impulses against his father than against his mother and shows a far greater inclination to free himself from the father than from the mother. The fantasy life of girls may be much less active in this respect. These consciously remembered childhood emotions supply the factor that permits us to understand myth.
What is seldom consciously remembered, but can almost invariably be demonstrated through psychoanalysis, is the next stage in this incipient alienation from the parents, which can be called the neurotic’s family romance. A core characteristic of neurosis and of the highly gifted is an exceptional fantasy life dominated by the theme of family relations, first appearing in children’s play just before puberty. An example of this fantasy activity is the ordinary daydream, 3 which persists long after puberty. Accurate observation of daydreams shows that they serve wish fulfillment, emending real life, and that they have two principal aims, one erotic, the other ambitious (usually covertly erotic). About this time the child’s fantasy is engaged with the task of getting rid of the parents, of whom he now has a low opinion and who are as a rule to be replaced by others, usually of higher social rank. For this purpose, the child makes use of opportune coincidences from his actual experience (in the country, meeting the lord of the manor or the proprietor of the estate; in the city, meeting nobility; [in the United States, some great statesman or millionaire]). 4 Such chance occurrences arouse the child’s envy, and this finds its expression in fantasies that replace the two parents by others of higher station. The technical elaboration of such fantasies, which are of course now conscious, depends on the child’s adroitness and the material at his disposal. It is likewise a factor whether these fantasies are elaborated with more or less effort to gain plausibility. This stage is reached at a time when children are still unaware of the sexual determinants of reproduction. When knowledge comes of the difference in the parts played by the father and mother in their sexual relations, the child realizes that pater semper incertus est, whereas the mother is certissima, and the family romance undergoes a peculiar curtailment. It is satisfied with exalting the father, while the descent from the mother is no longer questioned but accepted as an unalterable fact. This second (or sexual) stage of the family romance is supported by yet another motive, which did not exist in the first (or asexual) stage. Knowledge of sexual matters gives rise to the tendency to picture erotic situations and relationships, impelled by the desire to entice the mother, the subject of such great sexual curiosity, into secret infidelity and love affairs. In this way the primary or asexual fantasies are raised to the level of later understanding.
The motive of revenge and retaliation, originally in the foreground, is evident here too. These neurotic children are mostly those who were punished by the parents to break them of bad sexual habits: through such fantasies, they now take revenge upon their parents. The younger children in a family are particularly inclined to deprive their predecessors of their advantage through stories of this kind (exactly as in historical intrigues). Frequently they do not hesitate in crediting the mother with as many love affairs as there are rivals. An interesting variation of this family romance restores the legitimacy of the fantasizing hero himself, while the other children are disposed of in this way as illegitimate. The family romance may be governed by a special interest besides, for through its variegated character and adaptability it meets every sort of requirement. In this way, for example, the young fantasizer dismisses the kinship of a sister who may have attracted him sexually. Those who turn aside with horror from this corrupt state in the child mind, or perhaps even contest the possibility of such things, should note that all these apparently hostile works of fiction are not intended in such a bad way after all, and that the original affection of the child for his parents remains intact under their thin disguise. The child’s faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent, for on investigating in detail the most common of these romantic fantasies—the substitution of both parents, or of the father alone, by more exalted personages—it will be found that these new and distinguished parents are invested throughout with qualities derived from real memories of the true lowly parents, so that the child does not actually remove the father but exalts him. The entire endeavor to replace the real father with one more distinguished is merely the expression of the child’s longing for the vanished happy time when to him the father seemed the strongest and noblest man, and the mother the dearest and loveliest woman. The child turns away from the father, as he now knows him, to the father in whom he believed in his earlier years, and his fantasies are in fact only the expression of regret that this happy time is over. Thus the overvaluation found in the earliest years of childhood comes into its own again in these fantasies. An interesting contribution to this subject comes from the study of dreams. Dream interpretation teaches that even in later years, in dreams about the emperor or the empress, these nobles stand for the father and the mother (see Freud 1900, 200). Thus the child’s overvaluation of the parents is alive and well in the dream of the normal adult.
As we proceed to fit the preceding perspectives into our scheme, we feel justified in analogizing the ego of the child with the hero of the myth, in view of the unanimous thrust of family romance and hero myth. We must keep in mind that the myth throughout reveals an endeavor to get rid of the parents and that the same wish arises in the fantasies of the child at the time when he is trying to establish his personal independence. The ego of the child behaves in this respect like the hero of the myth, and, indeed, the hero should always be interpreted merely as a collective ego, equipped with myriad excellent traits, just as the hero in works by a specific author usually represents the author himself or, better, one side of his character. 5 Summarizing the essentials of the hero myth, we find the descent from noble parents, the exposure in a river and in a box, and the raising by lowly parents. These are followed, as the story proceeds, by the hero’s return to his first parents, with or without punishment being meted out to them. It is clear that the two sets of parents in the myth correspond to the real and ideal sets of parents in the romantic fantasy. Closer inspection reveals the psychological identity of the humble and the noble sets of parents, precisely as in infantile and neurotic fantasies. In conformity with the overvaluation of the parents in early childhood, 6 the myth begins with the noble parents, exactly like the romantic fantasy, whereas in reality adults soon adapt themselves to actual conditions. Thus the fantasy of the family romance appears simply realized, in the myth, with a bold reversal of the actual conditions. The father’s hostility, and the exposure he perpetrates, underscore the motives causing the ego to indulge in the entire fiction. The fictitious romance is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected onto the father. The exposure in the myth, therefore, corresponds to the repudiation in the romantic fantasy. In the neurotic romance, the child simply gets rid of the father, whereas in the myth the father endeavors to get rid of the child. Rescue and revenge are the natural terminations, as demanded by the essence of fantasy. To establish the full value of this parallel, as just sketched in its general outlines, it must enable us to interpret certain constantly recurring details of the myth that seem to require a special explanation. This demand would seem to acquire special importance because no satisfactory explanation of these details is found in the writings of even the most enthusiastic astral mythologists or nature mythologists. Among these details are the regular occurrence of dreams (or oracles), the exposure in a box and in the water, the helpful animals, and other constant motifs that at first glance do not seem to permit a psychological derivation. Fortunately the psychoanalytic study of the dream and its symbolism, of phobias, and of certain ethnological and folklore facts permits the elucidation of these elements of the hero myth.
Intensive research into the dreams of normal people and the mentally ill establishes certain typical dream groups recurring with the same secret meaning for all dreamers. One of these groups constitutes so-called birth dreams (Freud 1900, 199); an understanding of these dreams allows us to discover the hidden meaning of the exposure myth as well. Scherner, who often intuitively grasps the essence of dreams, sees connections with birth in water dreams (1861, 200ff.):
In women’s dreams of danger from water it is evident that the dreamer, even if already middle-aged with grown children, still sees and attempts to rescue her endangered son or daughter as a small one. An unmarried woman dreamed that she had been given the task of rocking and caring for a little boy. Then she immediately noticed another child she knew beside the first child in the cradle. But as she observed the other child more closely, it became a beautiful canary. Later, she was to care for a third child, who, it was announced, had not yet been born, but whose arrival was anticipated. How revealing this dream is! With the trio of children, the procreative nature of the underlying stimulus is revealed. The aroused stimulus is reflected in the transformation of the second child into the lively bird. Also reflected in the transformation of child into bird is the likeness in size between the product (bird for child) and the closed uterus of the young woman. Finally, with the third child not yet born, but still held in the womb in the fantasy, the symbolism is objectively deflected directly to the organ in which it was aroused, and identifies the woman’s womb as having directly aroused the dream. —In both older and younger women, such dreams about children are extremely frequent; they constitute an apparently innocuous dream activity and indicate how significant it is.
Another dream discussed by Scherner (1861, 204) is even clearer.
An unmarried woman dreams that she is standing beside a large body of water. The current carries along several floating objects. Her attention is drawn most strongly toward a floating bundle (according to the dreamer), about as large as a child’s head and inflated like a small balloon. She wonders what might be in the bundle; it might contain treasures. But she fears that a small child might be hidden in the bundle, and this thought keeps her from observing it more closely. Finally, though, curiosity wins, and she finds a small pile of dry linens. Analysis: it is highly apparent how the fantasy of the dreamer retreats from the image of treasures in the bundle and, through the inserted suspicion that there could be a small child inside, identifies the bundle as a pregnant womb—the womb of the young woman herself.
Scherner treats the associations of the dreaming woman in an almost analytic matter, and our psychoanalytic interpretation confirms beyond a doubt the connections he suspected .
A similar dream was related to Abraham by a young, married woman at the beginning of pregnancy, who anticipated the delivery with some anxiety (1909, 22ff.):
I am alone in a rather long room. Suddenly I hear a noise from underground, but it does not surprise me because I immediately recall that from a certain place in the floor there is a channel leading directly to the water. I lift a trapdoor in the floor, and immediately a creature with brownish fur appears, looking almost like a seal. It casts off its fur, and turns out to be my brother. Exhausted and breathless, he begs me to give him shelter, for he ran away without permission and swam the entire way under water. I invite him to stretch out on a chaise longue in the room, and he falls asleep. A few moments later, renewed and much louder noises are heard at the door. My brother jumps up, crying in terror: “They want to take me away; they will think I’ve deserted!” He slips into his fur once again and attempts to escape through the channel but immediately returns, saying: “It’s no use: they’ve occupied the passage from the lake side!” At this moment, the door bursts open; several men rush in and grab my brother. I call out to them desperately: “He hasn’t done anything; I will plead his case!” Then I awoke.
On the immediate cause of the dream, beyond the pregnancy, Abraham writes (1909, 23): “In the evening she had her physician explain to her various details concerning the development and physiology of the fetus. She had already become very well informed through books but still had some misconceptions. For example, she had not correctly understood the function of the birth water. She also conceived the fine fetal hair (lanugo) as thick, like that of a young animal.” From the analysis, Abraham emphasizes only the essential results of the incomplete interpretation, but these are entirely sufficient for our investigation (1909, 23):
The channel leading directly to the water symbolizes the birth canal. Water symbolizes the amniotic fluid. From this passage there emerges a hairy animal, like a seal. A seal is a hairy animal living in the water—like the fetus in the amniotic fluid. This creature—the expected child—appears immediately: a quick, easy delivery. It turns out to be the dreamer’s brother. Indeed, her brother is much younger than she. After their mother’s early death she had been obliged to care for him. Her relationship to him resembled motherhood in many ways. She still likes to call him the “little one.” … In the dream, preferential use is made of words that can be understood in various senses. … Thus the dreamer’s brother takes on the role of the child. Although he has been grown up for a long time … he represents the expected child. She is hoping for his visit. Thus she is expecting firstly the brother and secondly the child. This is the second analogy between brother and child. She hopes that her brother will leave his home. Thus, in the dream, he “deserts” from his home. He actually does live by the water; he often goes swimming there. (This is the third analogy with the fetus.) She, too, lives by the water, and the narrow room in her dream has a view of water. In a room in her home there is achaise longue, also used as a bed for overnight guests. There is a fourth analogy: that room will be the nursery, and the baby will sleep there. Upon his arrival, her brother is out of breath. Indeed, he has been swimming under water. After leaving the birth canal, the fetus too will have to gasp for air. The brother immediately falls asleep, as does a child soon after its birth. Now follows a scene in which the brother is in extreme anxiety—in a situation from which there is no escape. A similar situation faced by the dreamer is the delivery, of which she is already frightened. In the dream she transfers this anxiety to the fetus and to the brother, who represents it. She takes over his role, that of a lawyer, saying that she will plead his case.
We shall have occasion later to return to several elements from this dream analysis. These include the utilization of water as amniotic fluid; the utilization of the narrow channel as a symbol of the womb, suggested in myth by little chests, baskets, or ships; the conceptualization of the newborn child as an animal; the transformation into a human child through removal of the animal-like exterior; the replacement of the child by an adult; the peculiar sleep state of the “hero”; and finally his attempt to leave through the same unusual route. We now turn to another dream, related by a female patient and described by Jones (1910a, 296ff.):
She stood at the seashore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed into the crowded hall of a hotel. Her husband left her, and she “entered into a conversation with” a stranger.
The second half of the dream revealed itself in the analysis as representing a flight from her husband and the entering into intimate relations with a third person. … The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth phantasy. In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water. … The bobbing up and down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a revery in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household .
In a third example we have the dream of a young woman who fears, not without reason, that she may be pregnant; some time after the dream, which occurred in the context of this apprehension, it turned out that she was not pregnant after all.
1) In a house, lions were chasing and oppressing me because I had crushed their cubs to death in a sort of tourniquet. The pair of lions went after me, and I fled onto the roof. From there, I noticed that down below, on the water, a small boat was approaching. Instead of a bow it had a head; it seemed to be simultaneously a boat and an animal. In the boat a little cupid was sitting—a five- or six-year-old beautiful, blond boy. He was naked, with wings on his back, and at his side he carried a quiver of arrows. In one hand he held a satin ribbon that was wound around the head of the boat, and with which he steered the boat. In the other hand he held a sort of anchor (shaped like a shovel), with which he easily and playfully severed the heads, emerging from the water, of great horned beasts (resembling deer) which were swimming around and also wished to pursue me; no trace of the heads remained. I was glad he had saved me from these animals; I wanted to thank him, but couldn’t reach him. 2) Then I ran out again and suddenly noticed that a large wolf was chasing me. I anxiously fled into a restaurant, into a corner behind a table. I begged the wolf, which came rushing in after me, to spare my life. I breathed a sigh of relief when I noticed that he wished to spare me and had instead broken off the head of an old woman sitting beside me in order to eat it. (The wolf behaved entirely like a person and walked on his two hind legs.) It seems the wolf didn’t find the old woman tasty, for he next broke off the head of my other neighbor, an old man, and devoured it. 3) Then I found myself in a familiar apartment where a young man appeared with protestations of love; when I rejected him, he threw himself upon me in order to take me by force, but I pushed him out. Soon he appeared again with a revolver and a dagger, intending to kill me. I sent for police detectives to arrest him. Meanwhile a group of soldiers arrived; I thought they were coming to get him, but instead, as I observed from the upper passage, they were lowering someone into a dungeon. Then a detective came and arrested the intruder. I thought that he would probably also end up in such a dungeon, so I examined the cavern carefully. It was very deep and dark, and looked like a place I know in the karst formations. I thought: “He can bore a hole in the ground and escape, or he can bore through the cavern walls and get out even more easily.”
Based on the probable situation of the dreamer, we can rearrange this rather transparent, though somewhat disordered dream. Thus it really begins with part 3, the young man’s request for sex, which the dreamer rejects—acting more cautiously in the dream than she had in reality. Then follows the rape fantasy; just as with the mythological sons of virgins, the woman’s submitting to the man is justified through the idea that she was forced. And as if this is not enough, the father of her child is to be arrested and locked up in a dungeon—on the one hand because of his crime, and on the other hand, apparently, so that he will admit his paternity, already established by the dreamer. Indeed, the arrest and incarceration occur twice in the dream. While the second instance of lowering him down into the dungeon clearly constitutes the actual punishment of the father, the first instance is meant to suggest conception. Because the supposed father belonged to the military, it is understandable why, in the dream, soldiers lower a living thing down into the dungeon. It must then bore its way out of this deep, dark cave—just like the fetus that emerges through an opening in the floor in the dream reported by Abraham.
Now comes the connection to the beginning of part 1: the living things in the cave are also floating in the water and are suddenly revealed to include a beautiful little boy making his way through the water in a boat, as in the case reported by Abraham. This dream can be understand only as adream of birth, and it makes no secret of this significance: beside the man’s overpowering the woman, and the conception, the dream depicts the pregnancy (cave) and finally the birth (water). This interpretation is fully confirmed by the dreamer’s own explanation: when asked about the exemplary little blond Cupid, she naively confessed that she had always wished to have such a beautiful boy with curly blond locks as her own child. Birth is also suggested by the boy’s nakedness and by the dreamer’s interpretation of the anchor he holds in his hand, and which she sees as a symbol of “hope.” In her situation, though, this would be the hope that she will not have a child. Therefore the anchor completely eliminates the animals swimming in the water by cutting off their heads. This is augmented by the wolf that is breaking off people’s heads, and which she asks to spare her life—precisely what she refuses to do for her own child in the dream. 7 The fact that her anger is directed not only toward the supposed father of the illegitimate fetus but also against the fetus itself is shown in the opening scene of the dream, in which she crushes the lion cubs to death. Her aversion with respect to the man who has caused her supposed distress is expressed in the fact that she pictures him as a hungry predatory animal, as a big wolf “persecuting” her (with requests for sex) and “pursuing” her everywhere. The attack by the wolf in the restaurant has its complement in the rape by the young man at home (part 3), and the chain is closed by the discovery that the young man in the dream had in fact recently invited her to a restaurant. The dreamer does not notice that the little boy floating on the water in a boat is reminiscent of Lohengrin. This is a valuable proof that we are not dealing with a conscious memory or imitation but with the expression of a common, unconscious complex expressed in terms of the same universal symbols.
Finally, the fact that a single typical symbolic means of expression dominates the language of dreams—and of mythology—is shown by a fragment of another birth (abortion) dream related by the same young woman. She comes with her lover into a palace and is led by a man—presumably the executioner—into a large room. “There I noticed a well-like depression, several meters deep. It was walled in with stone. The executioner told me that the furs that came out of it would belong to me. I was very glad, and I got quite close to the edge of the well and looked down to see what would come out. I was very surprised to see a child’s body on a chain; I had expected to see a fur, as promised. Then I was toldthat all the children with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis were lowered down through this well. Below was a machine: the children were decapitated and their bodies were brought up through the well. Indeed, a child was led in, coughing, and spit at me. I was very irritated, turned my face aside and thought: “Now I will also get this disease.” This child was then lowered down through the well. The well was so narrow that only one child could slip through!” In a later portion of the dream the dreamer is lying with her lover in a marriage bed. There she awakes in the morning and notices that they are both bloody; in the dream, she explains to herself that this is due to menstruation. Thus the dream is based on the wish for menstruation (the wish not to be pregnant), or at least for marriage (marriage beds). Otherwise, she would have to kill the child that might be born (birth of a stillborn child): she would have to decapitate it (blood, executioner). Once again, the depression, shaped like a well, is clearly a symbol of the womb. Here we also observe the typical conceptualization of pregnancy as a contagious disease; indeed, a mother’s pregnancy is sometimes explained to children as an illness.
The very fact that the same typical symbols are employed leads to the firm conclusion that exposure of the newborn hero in the little chest in the water is a symbolic expression of birth. Children, of course, come from the water—not only in stork fables, which are by no means so illogical, but also in reality: they emerge from the birth water. The little chest, which is so well sealed and which protects the little hero, can easily be recognized as a symbol of the womb. Due to certain unconscious tendencies we shall take up later, in the exposure myth and sometimes in dreams as well (Freud 1900, 198, 238), pulling the chest from the water is depicted as plunging it into the water; 8 pulling the chest from the water symbolizes the birth process directly. Folk belief, fables, and folktales express directly and undisguised this mode of observation, represented symbolically in dreams and exposure myths. Valuable information is provided through an examination of the rich folklore tradition concerning this theme. According to Mannhardt (1858, 255), who also lists further references, “the nursemaid’s tale that infants are drawn from the well is distributed throughout Germany.” In Germany there are many “localized wells and ponds in which the unborn children live as fully formed beings” waiting to be pulled out (Reitzenstein 1909, 644; 1910). Thus Pröhle (1853, 196ff.) reports concerning the Harz region: “Children are told there that they were drawn from the pond at birth. Such children’s ponds are presumably found all over Germany. Folklore has it that the great ‘water woman’ has the children with her in the Festenburger Pond near Schulenburg. From there they swim down with the current, and are pulled out by the people in Schulenburg.” In Elbingerode, where the Wild Huntsman is said to hunt every seven years, the children are believed to come from the bottom of the lake (Mannhardt 1858, 95), and little children are supposed to have been seen at various spots in a small lake near Stolberg (Mannhardt 1858, 205). Woeste (1853, 90) reports: “Children’s lakes, children’s wells, and children’s trees are spoken of everywhere in the mountains of Germany. In Dielinghofen the little children come from the Burdyke, which means ‘farmer’s pond,’ but also ‘seed pond.’ In Limburg, the Milchbrunnen [milk well] was mentioned to me; others spoke of a cave, beneath the Oegerstein, that fills with water in the rainy season. In the western part of the Kolme region, though, it is usually said that the children come from a hollow tree.” Zingerle (1853, 345) also reports on folk beliefs in which children come from lakes, hollow trees, or tubs.
But also in faraway Singapore local folklore addresses the birth process in a similar symbolic language: recall Bab’s report (1906, 281) in which the wife of the raja Besurjak receives a child floating on a bubble of foam. The Lower Austrian folk belief from Trumau concerning the origin of children (cf. Wurth 1859, 140) corresponds most closely to the exposure myth: “Far out in the sea there stands a tree, and around this tree the little children grow. They are attached to the tree by strings; when the child is sufficiently grown, the string breaks and the child floats away. But lest it drown, it is in a box; in the box it floats through the sea to a stream. Now God causes a woman he wishes to have a child to become ill. The doctor is fetched. God has already revealed to him that the sick woman is to have a child. The doctor then goes down to the stream and waits until the box with the child comes floating down. He picks it up and brings it to the sick woman. This is the way everyone has children.” This folk belief, in which the newborn child is drawn from the water, is reminiscent of the legend of “Frau Hollen Teich” [Lady Hollow Pond] (Grimm and Grimm 1818, 1:7): “Newborn children form in her well, and she carries them out.”
In Ostfriesland the children are brought in from the moors. The parents drive to the moors in glass coaches, some of which tip over; then the mother breaks a leg and must lie in bed. The children are found under boulders and peat beds; twins, of course, are found under especially large ones. This is considered an indisputable truth, reinforced by the ambiguity of van de moer: “from the moor” or “from the mother.” Because moors are not found in all areas of Ostfriesland, on the islands children are said to come “from the dunes,” and in Emden they are drawn from the Nesserland children’s well. The parents sail there on their boat; the father walks around the well three times, and then a little diamond ship floats up, from which he takes the child. Nesserland was all that remained of the villages that sunk into the sea in the Dollart region, and whose ruins were sometimes visible at low tide until about 1600 (Die Gartenlaube, 1912, 6:136). “The children are fetched by the stork from the stone or the well, and are brought to their mothers” (Mannhardt 1858, 257). Near Weilburg on the Lahn River, in the forested hills across the valley, eerily surrounded by thick stands of spruce, are three houses arranged like a horseshoe; in these houses, the water feeding the wells collects. They are called well houses; young people know that inside children are floating in the water and that the stork brings them hence. “In Scheidingen, near Werl, the stork takes the children from the pond at Werler Voede. In Erfurt it takes them from the ‘kettle,’ a hollow by the moat, and in Halberstadt from the sluice” (Mannhardt 1858, 257). In and around Dietzenbach there is a song “addressed to the stork as the bringer of children” (Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde 1853, 1:475): “Stork, stork, stones, with the long legs, with the short knees! The Virgin Mary has found a child in the little well: who shall have it?” In Cologne it is said that the children are drawn from the well of Saint Kunibert’s Church: in the well, they sit around the Mother of God, who feeds and plays with them. In Jugenheim Mary and Saint John sit in the well of the Bergstrasse; Mary plays the fiddle for the children there and plays with them (Golther 1895). Landau (1899, 72) discusses many children’s rhymes and songs based on the “nursemaid’s belief” that children come from the water. 9
“But in folktales human birth is often represented as drawing the child up from a well or a lake” as well (Thimme 1909, 157). This task is normally assigned to the stork, as in the folktale “The Two Wanderers” (Grimm and Grimm 1885, no. 107), where the conscientious stork comforts the worried little tailor, who must provide the king with an heir, saying: “I have been bringing the little children to the city for a long time. I can certainly bring a prince from the well once too. Go home and do not worry.
In nine days, go to the royal palace: I will be there too.” At the appointed hour the stork comes flying through the window of the royal palace with a little boy in its beak, and places the beautiful child on the queen’s lap. The same belief is found among primitive peoples. It is reported that the tribes of Central Asia
believe that a plant spirit enters the woman; it lives in a great forest or in the depths of the water, just as in German folk belief. The Australian aborigines believed that children come from the forest, stones, or pools of water; among native peoples of Mexico we encounter a belief in a complete children’s kingdom in the sea. The Australian aborigines also believe in helpful birth animals effecting fertilization like our stork; these are snakes, snipes, and kangaroos. In India the ibis plays this role, in Japan it is the crane, and in Mexico it is the spoonbill heron. In the Middle East it was the dove, which was later considered sacred to the goddess of love, and still served a similar function in the conceptio immaculata of Mary and in the legend of Semiramis. According to Roth, the natives of Cape Grafton, Australia, believe that fully formed children are brought to the mother by a dove in a dream. (Reitzenstein 1909, 668)
For the Germanic peoples and various other European nationalities, of course, the stork has taken on this role. This accounts for the old German word for stork, adebär —literally “bringer of children.” The snake and the hare were also involved in earlier times; in Scandinavia the stork was replaced by the swan.
Everywhere, then, we find the same symbolic representation of the womb as a well, a kettle, a ditch, a dark cave, or a hollow tree. These are regularly considered “the home of unborn souls” (Mannhardt 1858, 255). The birth water is represented as a pond, a lake, or a spring (well), and the male entity that rescues the child from this primeval prison appears as a stork 10 or another animal, considered a soul animal. Thus the stork fable, sometimes erroneously thought to have been intentionally contrived for children, turns out to be a primeval relic of earlier folk belief, rooted in primitive popular imagination, 11 and the symbolic expression of these mysterious processes—an expression found also in the exposure myth and in dreams—seems to utilize a small number of typical forms with undeniable regularity.
If, despite the overwhelming evidence for this birth symbolism, doubts remain about its application to the hero myth, these should be fully dispelled by a further physiological fact. It seems that no detail of the birth process is left unaddressed, although the original significances may have faded during the gradual elaboration of the hero myth, given logically impeccable rationalizations or sentimental sublimations. In many hero myths, the rescue of the newborn is made possible only in that another child—a so-called stillborn child—is given the deceived persecutors in its place, as for example in the Cyrus legend. This substitute child is then usually dressed in the royal garb of the heroic child and buried with all honors. In other cases this second child plays a somewhat more active role, appearing as the twin brother of the hero and experiencing with him, in a shadowy manner, a portion of his destiny. The classic example of this type is the legend of the Dioscuri. According to Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.10.7) and Hyginus (Fabulae, no. 80), Leda, the mother of the Dioscuri, lay in one night with Zeus and her husband Tyndareos. Thus one of the twins, Pollux, is destined from the beginning for immortality, whereas the other, Castor, is mortal. The same opposition of the godly, immortal hero to his human, mortal (twin) brother, who leads a seemingly pale, shadowy existence at his side, is seen in the relationship of Hercules to Iphicles and in several other mythic forms; further elaboration has produced the folktales of brothers in which the youngest and weakest outshines the older ones.
But these Dioscuri, or godly twins, are found not only among IndoEuropean peoples (Greeks, Indians, Lithuanians), as Gruppe still maintains (1899, 274). Rather, they constitute one of the most widespread mythological genres. As Ehrenreich (1910, 31, 69, 239) has demonstrated, they belong to the regular corpus of mythical tales of primitive peoples. This typical motif—sometimes in conjunction with the struggle in the womb of the still unborn twins—combined with the motif of magical conception and birth, reoccurs throughout North and South America. In the more complex mythologies of North America and Polynesia, the pair of twins or brothers seems to have dissolved into several genealogically related groups. “A remarkable, and still unexplained trait often found in the Americas is that only one brother has godly qualities, whereas the other is thought to be purely human. His father is human and again impregnates the mother, already fertilized by a god. Accordingly, this second son is weaker, with human imperfections” (Ehrenreich 1910, 239). One trait in the legends of primitive peoples, which Ehrenreich notes without understanding its significance, explains this peculiar motif, which becomes meaningful only within our conception of the myth of the birth of the hero. “The motif also occurs in a variant in which the second brother arises from the discarded afterbirth of the first. This ‘boy from the afterbirth’ is one of the most frequent figures in legends of the Plains Indians” (Ehrenreich 1910, 239). When encountered in legends, this conception may seem peculiar, but through our interpretation it immediately ceases to be surprising. As so often occurs, what we otherwise must laboriously decipher from the symbolism of the unconscious is here offered to us clearly as a legend, albeit an uncomprehended one. 12 The superstitious beliefs associated with the afterbirth among nearly all primitive peoples, and the majority of advanced ones, show that the connection between the person and the afterbirth (and umbilical cord) is so intense that the fate of the individual’s entire life seems to depend on it: if these former parts of the ego are carefully preserved and handled, the ego itself will be successful; if they are injured or lost, the ego will likewise suffer and be annihilated. With typical conscientiousness, Frazer has collected and grouped the relevant legends, and from his data we summarize in the following eight paragraphs those characteristic for our topic (Frazer 1911a, 1:182ff.; 1913, 2:260ff.)
In the South Celebes, the umbilical cord and afterbirth are designated respectively as brother and sister of the child. They are placed in a pot of rice so that they will have something to eat (a justification that perhaps explains the ritual use of the rice pot elsewhere without them). When the (royal) child goes out for the first time, the rice pot with his two siblings accompanies him, decked out in official robes and sheltered by a parasol. When a prince (or princess) dies, the afterbirth is buried also. The Kei Islanders in southwestern New Guinea regard the umbilical cord as the brother or sister of the newborn, depending on whether it is a boy or a girl. A pot of ashes containing the cord is placed in the branches of a tree so that it can keep a watchful eye over the child’s fate. Sometimes the placenta is buried, hidden in the forest, or placed in a pit under the house, but this seems to relate more to the idea of eliminating harmful (demonic) influences than to that of a burial.
The Baganda (Africa) believe that every person is born with a double, which they identify with the afterbirth, regarding it as a second child. The umbilical cord also plays a role in naming the child and is itself called mulongo (twin). The umbilical cord or “twin” of the king is wrapped in children’s clothing, decorated with pearls, and treated like a person. It is placed in the care of the kimbugwe, the second most powerful official in the land, who has a house specifically for this purpose. Every month, at the appearance of the new moon, the kimbugwe brings the bundle containing the “twin” to the residence of the king in a stately procession with musical accompaniment. The king inspects the bundle and then returns it to him. Upon the death of the king, his “twin” is buried with him. The spirit of the king is thought to reside in both remains.
Among the Battas of Sumatra and many other ethnic groups of In donesia, the placenta is considered the younger brother or sister of the child and is buried beneath the house.
Sometimes the women of the interior of Java let the placenta float down the river at dusk, surrounded by fruits and flowers and illuminated by little candles, as food for the crocodiles—or, more precisely, for the people’s ancestors, whose spirits are considered to dwell in the crocodiles. Certain primitive islanders ceremoniously put the afterbirth out to sea: it is well covered, placed in a pot, and exposed in a boat. An opening is made in the pot so that it will sink.
Among the Maoris, before the ceremonial naming of the child, the umbilical cord is buried in a sacred place and a young sapling planted over it. If the sapling thrives, this is a good omen for the child’s life. Among the Fijians, the life of the child is also very intimately connected with that of the tree placed in the ground with the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord of a girl is cast into the sea by the mother (or sister) during the first fishing trip after the birth so that the girl will become a good fisherwoman. Among the Kooboos, a primitive tribe of Sumatra, the idea of the afterbirth and umbilical cord as a spirit double is very strong; they are considered brother and sister of the child, and because their bodies remain undeveloped, they are considered spiritually more advanced. They function as protective spirits for the child’s entire life, and the Kooboos always think of them, although they also consider them to be one, applying a collective term.
In these magical customs of primitives is expressed the significance of the afterbirth as a second being having mainly the character of a protective spirit, and exhibiting clear connections to the notion of the corporeal soul (cf. Rank 1914b). Moreover, similar superstitious ideas in Europe (Germany, England, Ruthenia, and Italy) 13 show further rationalizations of uncomprehended fertility rites in which a portion of the originally repressed meaning is nevertheless allowed to appear. Indeed, psychoanalytical elucidation 14 reveals that the customs of primitives, who according to their demonology must avert evil from the newborn child, must arise from the enmity of the parents toward the individual. These customs, then, seem to confirm the fantasized family romance of the hero. But in them we already find expressed the same compromise as in the family romance of the hero: the threatened child is saved through the introduction of a substitute victim. Indeed, rite and myth sometimes overlap extensively, as in customs dictating the exposure of the afterbirth in the water, resembling a voluntary sacrifice intended to spare the child itself from this fate. 15 But it is not only in the legends and customs of primitives that a portion of the birth symbolism underlying the hero myth is revealed with unambiguous clarity; it should be no surprise if in the highly developed cults of antiquity a portion of the primitive significance occasionally penetrates into consciousness. However, this involves sometimes one detail of the legend and sometimes another; the given detail is then emphasized with special clarity. For example, the little chest, familiar to us in its feminine significance from numerous dreams, was often utilized in Greek cults in a sense identical to that revealed by our interpretation in the exposure myth. In the ancient rite of hierogamy, the golden phallus-serpent, in whose honor virginity was sacrificed, was kept in a little chest, and in the Athenian and Eleusinian mysteries, the sacred phallus was enclosed in a little chest or basket and borne in a solemn procession as a mysterious treasure. 16 Similarly, in the mythic tales that concern us the little chest represents the protective womb. Gruppe (1906, 1171) has previously pointed out that in the legends of Tennes, Erichthonios, Perseus, Moses, Noah, and others, the chest containing the hero suggests the ritual for the birth of a god. 17 The same appears to hold for the legend of Bacchus; according to Pausanias (Periegesis Hellados [Description of Greece] 3.24) he was saved, through exposure in a chest in the Nile, from persecution by a king and was rescued by a princess when three months old—clearly reminiscent of the Moses legend. 18
In certain Native American legends (cf. Ehrenreich 1910, 81), the container from which the young hero emerges at his birth is conceived as literally filled with a dark mass of blood. In other cases, it is the length of time spent in the chest that is clearly reminiscent of the length of human gestation, as in the myth of Ares (Iliad 5.387ff.), who lay chained for thirteen months in a bronze barrel, equated by Böklen (1913, 15) with the chest, box, or ark. This is also true of the legend of Deukalion, the Greek Noah, who floats on the water for nine days and nights in a chest. Other legends seem directly to emphasize the physical process of birth by placing in the foreground the hero’s close connection with a sea monster that swallows him whole and then vomits him out again (the Jonah type). In a series of Greek legends, the hero swallowed and then vomited up develops first into a drowned hero carried dead to the shore; then into a hero brought to the shore, sleeping, across the quiet sea; and finally into the beautiful god-boy Arion, riding on a dolphin, for whom Melkart, sitting on a seahorse, may have given the first impetus (Schmidt 1907, 126). In other legends the name of the hero revealingly points to the sense of the birth symbolism. This is true of the legend of Kypselos as recounted by Herodotus (Historia 5.92ff.). In that version, by placing him in a flour box, Labda rescues her newborn child, of whom an oracle had predicted that he would bring forth a disaster, from persecution by his enemies: “[A]nd since he had escaped this danger, he was named for the chest, being called Kypselos, or cabinetmaker.” Leo has also argued that the name of the Anglo-Lombard Scéaf does not signify “sheaf of grain,” as the rationalistic etymology would have it, but is connected with High German Schaffing (barrel): “Although Scyld was called Scefing, it is likely that he had no father Scéaf or Schaf, but was the child carried ashore by the waves and called the son of the barrel” (1839, 24, note). In the same way, Cassel (1886, 43) emphasizes that “Scyld is a son of the ark, of the little ship, of the chest in which he lay as he came ashore. Old High German scef signifies ‘ship.’ The term is related to the word for ‘vessel, container’: Old High German skaf also signifies ‘ship,’ while skef signifies ‘vessel, container.’ Latin scapha ‘skiff’ is also related. The explanation invoking ‘sheaf of grain’ apparently arose at a later date. A new lineage also comes forth from Noah’s ark, lacking sail and rudder but protected through God’s providence. All humans, in their descent from them, are children of Noah and the ark. Scyld Scefing is also a child of his ship, as indicated by his name.” 19
A deeper generalization and clarification is expressed in the idea of birth in the water, which also represents the exposure myth par excellence—birth itself. The name of the Indian Aptya signifies “he who was born from the water” or, as the scholiast of the Rigveda puts it, “son of the waters” (Mannhardt 1858, 213). According to Leopold Schröder, the Vedic Purūravas says: “The woman of the water brought me what I desired: a noble boy was born from the water.” Agni is called a grandson of the waters (apām napāt ). Saxo’s version of the myth of the Nordic god Freyr retains the birth from the water (Mannhardt 1858, 214, 221). Based on a folk etymology, the name of the biblical Moses is also explained as “he who was drawn from the water” or “son of the water” (Josephus, Old Testament 2.6). The German folktale calls the sons of the maiden impregnated by a stream of water Wasserpeter and Wasserpaul (Grimm and Grimm 1885, 3: no. 60), or Wassersprung and Brunnenhold (fair one from the well) (Mannhardt 1858, 216ff.). 20 Similarly, the Anglo-Lombard Scéaf is thought of as being the son of the water and of the vessel in which he floats: these are his parents.
Immediate confirmation of this interpretation of the exposure—an interpretation taken from common human symbolism—is furnished by the material itself, in the dream of Cyrus’ grandfather (or still more convincingly, in the Ctesian version, of his mother) before his birth. In this dream, so much water flows from the lap of the expectant mother that it floods all of Asia, like an enormous ocean. 21 It is remarkable that in both cases the Chaldeans correctly interpreted these dreams of water as birth dreams. In all probability, these dreams themselves are constructed based on knowledge of a very ancient, universal symbolism, and on an obscure premonition of the relationships and connections verified through Freud’s teachings on dreams.
In connection with the stereotypical occurrence of the warning vision in the hero myth, this deep dream meaning seems to indicate that we are dealing here with very ancient dream material 22 whose essence, precisely for that reason, is so accessible to our scientific knowledge of dreams. Further confirmation of this interpretation, which renders the dream of water equivalent to exposure, is found in the fact that precisely in the Cyrus legend, which contains the dream of water, the theme of exposure in the water is lacking, so that the myth simply portrays the birth dream as real. In the interpretation of the tendentious hero myth, we must not be disturbed by the incongruity in the order of the individual elements of the symbolized birth versus the real birth process. This chronological rearrangement or even reversal has been explained by Freud as due to the general manner in which recollections are elaborated into fantasies; the same material reappears in fantasies, but in an entirely new arrangement, and no attention whatsoever is paid to the natural sequence of acts. 23 Besides this chronological reversal, the reversal of the contents requires special explanation. The first reason for the representation of the birth by its opposite—the life-threatening exposure in the water—is the accentuation of the parents’ hostility toward the future hero. 24 The creative influence of this tendency to represent the parents as the first and most powerful opponents of the hero will be appreciated when it is kept in mind that the entire family romance in general owes its origin to the feeling of being neglected and thus to the assumed hostility of the parents. In the myth, this hostility goes so far that the parents do not wish to let the child be born, which is precisely the reason for the hero’s complaint; moreover, the myth plainly reveals the desire to go forward with birth even against the will of the parents. The life-threatening danger hidden behind birth, in representing birth through exposure, actually exists in the birth process itself. In overcoming all these obstacles the idea is also expressed that the future hero has actually overcome the greatest difficulties by being born, for he has victoriously thwarted all attempts to prevent this. 25 There is also room for another interpretation in which the youthful hero, foreseeing his destiny to taste more than his share of life’s bitterness, pessimistically deplores the fact that he has been given life—as if this were an inimical act. He accuses the parents, as it were, for having exposed him to the struggle of life, for having allowed him to be born. 26 The refusal to let the son be born, associated especially with the father, is frequently concealed by the opposite motif, the wish for a child (as with Oedipus, Perseus, and others), while the hostile attitude toward the future successor to throne and kingdom is projected to the outside, to an oracular verdict, thereby revealed as the substitute of the ominous dream or, better, as the equivalent of its interpretation.
From another point of view, however, the family romance shows that the fantasies of the child, although apparently estranging the parents, actually say nothing about them except that they are the real parents. The exposure myth, translated with the assistance of symbolism, likewise contains nothing but the assurance: “This is my mother, who has borne me at the command of the father.” Due to the tendency of the myth, and the resulting transference of the hostile attitude from the child to the parents, this assurance of the real parentage is expressed as the repudiation of such parentage.
On closer inspection, we notice first that the hostile attitude of the hero toward his parents concerns especially the father. Usually, as in the myths of Oedipus, Paris, and others, the royal father receives a prophecy of some disaster threatening him through the expected son; then it is the father who causes the exposure of the boy, and who persecutes and threatens him in all sorts of ways after his unexpected rescue, but finally succumbs to his son, according to the prophecy. In order to understand this trait, which may at first appear somewhat startling, there is no need to explore the heavens for some process into which it might be laboriously fitted. If we look with open eyes and unprejudiced minds at the relations between parents and children, or among siblings, as they really are, 27 a certain tension is frequently, indeed regularly revealed between father and son—as is a still more distinct competition between brothers. Although this tension may not be obvious and permanent, it is lurking in the sphere of the unconscious, with periodic eruptions. Erotic factors are especially apt to be involved, and as a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the son’s dislike for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother. The Oedipus myth shows plainly, but with coarser dimensions, the accuracy of this interpretation, for the patricide is here followed by incest with the mother. This erotic relation with the mother, which predominates in other mythological cycles, is relegated to the background in the myths of the birth of the hero, 28 while the opposition against the father is accentuated with extra vehemence. The fact that it is specifically the mother and her relationship to the hero that are handled, as the German saying goes, in such a stepmotherly way— but literally invoking a stepmother—may not seem fully in accord with our interpretation of the exposure as birth. Yet another, rather persistent motif reveals that the discord is illusory. With remarkable regularity the physical mother is represented by a helpful animal that cares for the exposed child, often nursing it. 29 Beyond the emphasis on the purely physical relationship with the mother, to the child’s conception of which we shall return, in this motif a portion of primitives’ totemistic beliefs concerning their descent also survives. The deep human significance of these beliefs has likewise been revealed to us through Freud’s research. Totemism is thought to be the first stage in human social organization. Its main characteristics are that the totem group members honor the totem as their common ancestor and avoid and feel revulsion toward sexual relations within the group. Given the first of the two characteristics, the totem—generally an animal—protects its descendants and is protected by them. In the hero myth, this beneficial cultural role is directly embodied by the mother animal.
The parallels between this totem worship and several of Freud’s observations of children and neurotics (1913a) are shown in the characteristic worship of a particular animal species as the group ancestor, resulting from an unconscious identification of this animal with the father; primitives express this very directly, regarding themselves as descendants of the totem in a more than metaphorical sense. This would easily explain the worship of the totem but not the specifics of the sacrificial rites held in its honor. Here Freud steps in, adding to the one mystery the further one concerning the source of the incest prohibition, which requires totem group members to practice exogamy. He develops the thinking of Darwin and Atkinson, who, on analogy with the social structures of higher apes, saw the “primeval horde,” consisting of several females and one old and strong male, as the oldest form of human society. This male tolerates no competitors, killing or expelling his sons when they reach sexual maturity. While Darwin and Atkinson failed to find the path from this “primeval horde” to the first stage of true social organization, Freud reconstructs it based on the actual sense of totemism, revealed only through the psychoanalytical method. Atkinson already suspected that the expelled sons banded together and that, strengthened by mutual cooperation, they killed the father. This would correspond to the union of the tribe with the victim of the totem sacrifice. But now, because each male desired the females for himself, while none was strong enough to exclude the other males, dissatisfaction and discord arose. In order to maintain the united group, without which the individuals could not survive, all the males had to renounce sexual relations with the females of the group voluntarily. The important role played by “men’s societies” within all primitive groups supports this interpretation. Totem exogamy is based on this renunciation, as is the later worship of the powerful, essentially awed father, whose murder, producing no advantages, was regretted by the sons. All these events—presented here, of course, as a summary of developments over many thousands of years—have left traces in totemistic and other customs; with relevance for the history of culture, they are echoed in myths and in folktales. Viewed from this perspective, the family romance of the hero seems in a certain sense to reflect the originally real persecution of the son by the father, which is fantasized back from a later, remembered time into the time of birth and even before birth. This occurs precisely when the son feels he owes nothing—not even his life—to his father, now perceived as inimical. Now occurs the saving act of the mother, who perhaps at some prehistoric time actually had to protect the newborn child from the cruel father. This is still quite naively recounted in the Greek myth of Zeus: fearing the childdevouring Kronos, his mother bears him in a cave on Mount Ida and hides him there, where he is fed by the goat Amalthea. Thus the mother returns in the hero myth as a protective, nourishing totem animal, while the old, pretotemistic, primeval father, with all his primitive characteristics, lives on in the sire.
Thus this portion of the exposure myth, while symbolically signifying birth, also represents an openly inimical act by the cruel primeval father, who through the oracle actually pronounces the wish that the son had never come into the world.
In the further content of the hero myth one easily notes that this inimical primeval act by the father is repeated several times. This first occurs when the son, who has spent his childhood abroad, reaches adolescence. At this time the mythical son leaves his second home “to seek adventure.” Simultaneously and remarkably, the father again adopts protective measures to safeguard his life and power. We can understand the actual significance of this mythical trait by adducing for comparison the ethnological complement, the puberty rites of primitives, psychoanalytically elucidated by Reik (1915). There too, the adolescent youths, albeit through the far more impressive means of ritual, are shown the still-unbroken power of their fathers. The inimical acts the older generation permits itself to perpetrate against them in this solemn context are intended as an admonition not to carry out their secret wishes, derived from the parent complex; simultaneously, these acts are proofs of their masculine energy, for it is only this masculine energy that makes the youths worthy to advance into the older generation—to be accepted into the circle of their fathers. In myth, the form in which the father’s enmity first reoccurs is a “task,” well suited to a higher level of culture, and worthy of a “hero.” The task always involves very special feats, which no one else seems capable of carrying out; all others have perished in the attempt. Yet contrary to the expectations of the assigner of the task, and despite all obstacles, the hero is successful. This process, repeated ad libitum, results in the actual “heroic deeds,” which, viewed from a sophisticated point of view, relate as follows to exposure and the “tasks” associated with it. Exposure, in its symbolic significance, represents birth in the difficult circumstances characteristic among primitives. Birth thus appears as the first magnificent feat (task), during which many perish, but which the hero survives, despite all difficulties. 30 Thus the very fact of being a son is heroic.
The actual task assigned in adolescence, and whose destructive intention reveals it as a substitute for exposure, is a test of manhood, which, like the exposure motif, has a double (ambivalent) meaning: it exposes the youth to destruction but, should he pass the test (ordeal), makes him the equal of his father.
Thus the exposure motif, which like all myth and folktale motifs involves ambivalent feelings, seems to afford the generations mutual protection from each other—as it were, a sort of mutual life insurance—for through the exposure, though it occurs in the interest of the father, the son is ultimately rescued from the father, his persecutor. Indeed, the son now becomes the enemy so feared, with justification, by the father. Thus it can be no surprise that the heroic tasks, which originally constituted a multiplication of the father’s primeval impulses for the elimination of the son, are ultimately revealed as aborted acts of vengeance by the son against the “evil” father (patricide). This is obscured by the fact that they occur at the command of the father himself. Similarly, the correlative primeval wish for possession of the mother is gladly denied through its obscuring opposite, the Potiphar motif, which, just in reverse, feigns the seduction of the steadfast hero by a lascivious surrogate of the mother.
The son carries out his rebellious acts and satisfies the patricidal impulse while abroad, against surrogates or, more often, animal monsters (totem sacrifices). So, by accomplishing tasks assigned by his father in hopes of his destruction, he becomes a socially valuable reformer, a conqueror of man-eating monsters and those devastating the countryside, an inventor, a founder of cities, and a bearer of culture, as shown especially by the culturally advanced Greeks in their heroes Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Oedipus, Bellerophon, and others. At the command of evil tyrants, they all slay animal monsters, which in their totemistic significance are quite easily understood as father surrogates, because given the import of the first heroic deed—victory over the father through rescue from exposure—the myth places it at the very beginning of the narrative. With this presentation of the heroic deeds in the form of victory over the father the myth reveals its origin and meaning.
Because the hero, by accomplishing tasks assigned him by his father in hopes of his destruction (heroic deeds), ultimately attains the father’s position (gaining a wife for himself), his achievements prove to be a substitute for patricide, thus yielding the formula that the heroic lies precisely in overcoming the father, the instigator of the exposure and the tasks. It is not that the hero had a miraculous birth and youth. Rather, it is the tale of his birth and youth that makes him a hero. Historically this situation can be formulated as follows: at one time coming into the world as the son of a strict and jealous father and opposing oneself to his lust for power was a heroic act. As mythological motifs, exposure and being sent forth to accomplish heroic tasks, which corresponds to exposure at a later stage, are already significantly dampened forms of the original expulsion of the sons by the paterfamilias to protect himself from the violent acts of his growing offspring, yearning for power. 31
The history of culture and tradition leaves no doubt that the cruel acts within the family described in myths and folktales were once real. “The head of the family was fully entitled to determine the life or death of a helpless family member as he saw fit. Such a legal situation can still be observed today among certain primitive peoples” (Nejmark 1918, 1). “The father had to decide whether the newborn child should be raised or exposed, and later, too, the child’s life lay in his hands. … Thus the custom of exposing the child does not disappear until the transition from a strictly patriarchal family constitution … which among primitives is still the predominant family form” (Nejmark 1918, 6). “Primitives at a higher level of cultural development demonstrate certain examples of such a weakening of the father’s tyranny. It is usually the case that the first limitation on paternal power is the elimination of his right to determine the life or death of his growing son. … Further, his right to kill his children is limited exclusively to newborns, and finally even his right to kill or expose newborns is denied him” (Nejmark 1918, 8). In the history of Roman law and of the Roman state, the process of limiting paternal power can be pursued especially clearly, and in a manner interesting for the history of culture, “for the Roman state arose following the model of the Roman family, so that the Roman king had over his subjects essentially the same rights held by the paterfamilias over the personae in potestate ” (Nejmark 1918, 15). Thus revolution against every form of tyranny ultimately felt to be oppressive is in the end a revolt against paternal power. 32 The fact that the child’s rebellion against the father is apparently provoked in the birth myths by the hostile behavior of the father is due to a tendentious presentation of the relation, known as projection, brought about by very specific characteristics of the myth-forming psychic activity. Given their resemblance to clear processes in the mechanism of certain psychic disturbances, the projection mechanism—which also had its part in the reversal (“thrusting in”) of the birth act—and certain other characteristics of myth formation (to be discussed later) necessitate the uniform characterization of the myth as a paranoid structure. Intimately connected with the paranoid character is the property of separating, through fantasy, what is fused. This process, as illustrated by the two sets of parents, provides the foundation for myth formation and, together with the projection mechanism, supplies the key to understanding an entire series of otherwise inexplicable configurations of the myth. In characteristic hero myths, the process, beginning with projection in the service of justification, continues with the separation mechanism to express its gradual progress differently.
In the original psychological setting, father is identical with king, the tyrannical persecutor. The first step in the attenuation of this relation is manifested in those myths in which the separation of the tyrannical persecutor from the real father is attempted but not fully accomplished. For the tyrannical father is still related to the hero, usually as his grandfather, as in the Cyrus legend and its parallels, and in the majority of hero myths in general. In separating the role of father from that of king, this type of myth signifies the first return step of the descent fantasy toward the actual conditions, and accordingly the hero’s father appears in this type mostly as a lowly man (in the legends of Cyrus, Gilgamesh, and others). The hero thus strives toward a certain kinship with his parents, which finds its expression in the fact that, besides the hero, his father and mother also represent victims of the tyrant. The hero thus acquires a more intimate connection especially with the mother—he is often exposed with her (Perseus, Telephos, Feridun)—and, due to various motives, she is nearer to him anyway, while the renouncement of his hatred against the father here attains the expression of its strongest reaction formation, 33 as in the Hamlet legend, where the hero does not persecute his father (or grandfather) but avenges the persecuted father. This shows a deeper relation of the Hamlet legend with the Persian story of Kaikhosrav, where the hero likewise appears as the avenger of his murdered father (cf. Feridun, Kullervo, and others).
But the grandfather himself, who in certain legends is replaced by other relatives (uncle, in the Hamlet legend), also has a deeper meaning. The Oedipus complex is here combined with the second correlative complex, that of erotic relationships between father and daughter. 34 The father who refuses to give his daughter to any of her suitors, or who associates certain difficult conditions with the winning of the daughter, does this because he really begrudges her to all others and wishes to have her himself. He locks her up in some inaccessible spot to safeguard her virginity (Perseus, Gilgamesh, Telephos, Romulus), and when his command is disobeyed, he pursues the daughter and her offspring with insatiable hatred. However, the unconscious sexual motives of his hostile attitude, later avenged by his grandson, make it evident that again the hero kills in him just the man who is trying to rob him of the love of his mother—namely, the father. 35 Another attempted reversal from the original type is seen when the return of the family romance to the lowly father, brought about through the separation of the father’s role from that of the king, is again nullified through the lowly father’s secondary elevation to the rank of a god, as with Perseus and the other sons of virgin mothers (Karna, Ion, Romulus, Jesus). The secondary character of this godly paternity is especially evident in those myths where the virgin who has been impregnated by divine
