Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts Part 3

In Sec. 12 we read, "So my previous trouble and toil fell upon me and I bethought myself that from strange causes [these strange causes are the dream censor who, ruling in the unconscious, effects the displacements that follow], it cannot concern me but another that is well known to me [in truth a well-known other]. Then I see our bridegroom with his bride in the previous attire going to that place ready and prepared for copulation and I was highly delighted with it. For I was in great anxiety lest the affair should concern me." The anxiety is quite comprehensible. It is just on account of its appearance that the displacement from the wanderer to the other person takes place. Further in Sec. 13: "Now after ... our bridegroom ... with his dearest bride ... came to the age of marriage [The aim with which the censor performs his duties and effects the dream displacement is, says Freud (Trdtg., p. 193), 'to prevent the development of anxiety or other form of painful affect'.] they both copulated ... and I wondered not a little that this maiden, that was supposed to be actually the _mother_ of the bridegroom, was still so young...." Now when the transfer has taken place, the thought of its being the mother is hazarded; whereas formerly a mere suggestion of a sister had been offered. Section 14 explicitly mentions incest and even arranges the punishment of the guilt. In this form the matter can, of course, be contemplated without troubling the conscience or being further represented pictorially.

The sister, alternating in the narrative with the mother, is only a preliminary to the latter. As we find that the dipus complex [Rather an attenuation, which occurs frequently, not merely in dream psychology, but also in modern mythology.] is revived in the parable, let us bring the latter into still closer relation with the fairy tales and myths to which we have compared it. The woman sought and battled for by the hero appears, in its deeper psychological meaning, always to be the mother. The significance of the incest motive has been discovered on the one hand by the psychoa.n.a.lysts (in particular Rank, who has worked over extensive material), on the other by the investigators of myths. That many modern mythologists lay most stress in this discovery upon the astral or meteorological content and do not draw the psychological conclusions is another matter that will be discussed later. But in pa.s.sing it may be noted that the correspondence in the discovered material (motives) is the more remarkable as it resulted from working in the direction of quite different purposes.

It is now time to examine the details of the parable in conformity with the main theme just stated and come to a definite interpretation.

Henceforward we may keep to a chronological order.

The threshold symbolism in the beginning of the parable has already been given, also the obstacles that are indicative of a psychic conflict. We might rest satisfied with that, yet a more complete interpretation is quite possible, in which particular images are shown to be overdetermined.

The way is narrow, overgrown with bushes, and leads to the Pratum felicitatis. That, according to a typical dream symbolism, is also a part of the female body. The obstacles in the way we recognize as a recoil from or impediment to incest; so it is evident that a definite female body, namely that of the mother, is meant. The penetration leads to the Pratum felicitatis, to blissful enjoyment. In fairy lore the sojourn in the forest generally signifies death or the life in the underworld. Wilhelm Muller, for example, writes, "As symbols of similar significance we have the transformation into swans or other birds, into flowers, the exposure in the forest, the life in the gla.s.s mountain, in a castle, in the woods.... All imply death and life in the underworld." The underworld is, when regarded mythologically, not only the land where the dead go, but also whence the living have come; thence for the individual, and in particular for our wanderer, the uterus of the mother. It is significant that the wanderer, as he strolls along, ponders over the fall of our first parents and laments it. The fall of the parents was a s.e.xual sin. That it was incest besides, will be considered later. The son who sees in his father his rival for his mother is sorry that the parents belong to each other. A s.e.xual offense (incest) caused the loss of paradise. The wanderer enters the paradise, the Pratum felicitatis. [Garden of Joy, Garden of Peace, Mountain of Joy, etc., are names of paradise. Now it is particularly noteworthy that the same words can signify the beloved.

(Grimm, D. Mythol., II, pp. 684 ff., Chap. XXV, 781 f.)] The path thither is not too rough for him (Sec. 2).

In Sec. 3 the wanderer enters his paradise (incest). He finds in the father an obstacle to his relation with the mother. The elders (splitting of the person of the father) will not admit him, forbid his entrance into the college. He himself, the youth is already among them. The younger man, whose name he knows without seeing his face, is himself. He puts himself in the place of his father. (The other young man with the black pointed beard may be an allusion to a quite definite person, intended for a small circle of readers of the parable, contemporaries of the author. Either the devil or death may be meant, yet I cannot substantiate this conjecture.)

In the fourth section the examinations begin. First the examination in the narrower sense of the word. The paternal atmosphere of every examination has already been emphasized in the pa.s.sage from Freud quoted above. Every examination, every exercise is a.s.sociated with early impressions of parental commands and punishments. Later (in the treatment of the lion) the wanderer will turn out to be the questioner, whereas now the elders are the questioners. In the relation between parent and child questions play a part that is important from a psychological point of view.

Amazingly early the curiosity of the child turns toward s.e.xual matters.

His desire to know things is centered about the question as to where babies come from. The uncommunicativeness of the parents causes a temporary suppression of the great question, which does not, however, cease to arouse his intense desire for explanation. The dodging of the issue produces further a characteristic loss of trust on the part of the child, an ironic questioning, or a feeling that he knows better. The knowing better than the questioning father we see in the wanderer. The tables are turned. Instead of the child desiring (s.e.xual) explanation from the parents, the father must learn from the child (fulfillment of the wish to be himself the father, as above). The elders are acquainted only with figurative language ("Similitudines," "Figmenta," etc.); but the wanderer is well informed in practical life, in experience he is an adept. As a fact, parents in their indefiniteness about the question, Where do babies come from? give a figurative answer (however appropriate it may be as a figure of speech) in saying that the stork brings them, while the child expects clear information (from experience). On the propriety of the picturesque information that the stork brings the babies out of the water we may note incidentally the following observations of Kleinpaul. The fountain is the mother's womb, and the red-legged stork that brings the babies is none other than a humorous figure for the organ (phallus) with the long neck like a goose or a stork, that actually gets the little babies out of the mother's body. We understand also that the stork has bitten Mamma in the "leg."

We have become acquainted above with the fear of impotence as one significance of the anxiety about examinations. Psychos.e.xual obstructions cause impotence. The incest scruple is such an obstruction.

According to Laistner we can conceive the painful examination as a question torture-a typical experience of the hero in countless myths.

Laistner, starting from this central motive, traces the majority of myths back to the incubus dream. The solution of the tormenting riddle, the magic word that banishes the ghost, is the cry of awakening, by which the sleeper is freed from the oppressing dream, the incubus. The prototype of the tormenting riddle propounder is, according to Laistner, the Sphinx.

Sphinx, dragon, giants, man eaters, etc., are a.n.a.logous figures in myths.

They are what afflict the heroes, and what he has to battle with. The corresponding figure in our parable is the lion.

Although the wanderer has brilliantly stood the test, the elders (Sec. 5) do not admit him into their college (the motive of denial recurs later); but enter him for the battle with the lion. This is surely a personification of the same obstructions as the elders themselves. In them we have, so to speak, before us the dragon (to be subdued) in a plural form. a.n.a.logous multiplying of the dragon is found, for example, in Stucken [in the astral myth]. Typical dragon fighters are Jason, Joshua, Samson, Indra; and their dragon enemies are mult.i.tudes like the armed men from the sowing of the dragon's teeth by Jason, the Amorites for Joshua, the Philistines in the case of Samson, the Dasas in that of Indra. We know that for the wanderer the a.s.semblage of elders is to be conceived chiefly as the father, and the same is true now of the lion (king of animals, royal beast, also in hermetic sense) who has as lion been already appropriated to the father symbol. Kaiser, king, giants, etc., are wont in dreams to represent the father. Accordingly large animals, especially wild beasts or beasts of prey, are accustomed to appear in dreams with this significance.

Stekel [Spr. Tr.] contributes the following dream of the patient Omicron: "I was at home. My family had preserved a dead bear. His head was of wood and out of his belly grew a mighty tree, which looked very old. Around the animal's neck was a chain. I pulled at it, and afterwards was afraid that I had possibly choked him, in spite of the fact that he was long dead."

And the following interpretation of it derived through a.n.a.lysis: "The bear is a growler, i.e., his father, who has told him many a lie about the genesis of babies. He reviles him for it. He was a blockhead, he had a wooden head. The mighty tree is the phallus. The chain is marriage. He was a henpecked husband, a tamed bear. Mother held him by the chain. This chain (the bond ? of marriage) Omicron desired to sunder. (Incest thoughts.) When the father died Omicron held his hand over his father's mouth to find out whether he was still breathing. Then he was pursued by compulsive ideas, that he had killed his father. In dreams the same reproaches appear. We realize how powerful his murder impulses were. His reproaches are justified. For he had countless death wishes that were centered about that most precious life."

A girl not yet six years old told her mother the following dream:

"We went together, there we saw a camel on a rock, and you climbed up the cliff. The camel wanted to keep s...o...b..ring you, but you wouldn't let him, and said, 'I'd like to do it, but if you are like this, I won't do it.' "

After the telling of the dream the mother asked the girl if she could imagine what the camel signified 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 s...o...b..r 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 ant.i.thesis of clean and 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 antic.i.p.ate.

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 s.e.xuality 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. 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.e.xual or procreative value. That is evident from the a.n.a.lysis of the parable, even without the support of mythological parallels. None the less let it be noticed that many cosmogonies a.s.sign 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.

"From Ymir's flesh was the earth created, From his sweat the sea, From his skeleton the mountains, the trees from his hair, From his skull the heavens, From his eyebrows kindly ases made Mitgard, the son of man.

But from his brain were created all the ill-tempered clouds."

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 (Gayomard), 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, Gayomard, considered as human, and the ancestor bull belong together, so we find in the northern myth a cow Audhumla a.s.sociated 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.

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 pa.s.ses 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 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. Pw.a.n.ku, 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 G.o.d below the G.o.ddess. Now on the day of creation a new G.o.d [son type], Shou, came out of the eternal waters, glided between them and seizing Nouit [the G.o.ddess] with his hands, lifted her at arms' length above his head. While the starry bust of the G.o.ddess was lengthened out in s.p.a.ce, 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 G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lytic psychology as in mythical cosmology. The child is actually 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 dipus 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 subst.i.tuted 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 s.e.xual 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 Ura.n.u.s by his son Kronos, who thereby prevents the further cohabitation of the primal parents. [Archetype of the t.i.tan 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.)

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 G.o.d. By a comparison of Adam and Noah he incidentally arrives by a.n.a.logical 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 Ura.n.u.s by night while he is sleeping with Gaia. Stucken now shows that the sleep motive is contained in the 2d chapter of Genesis. "And the Lord G.o.d caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof." (II, 21.) According to Stucken the rib stands euphemistically for the organ of generation, which is cut off from Adam while he sleeps.

Rank works out another kind of rearrangement. He takes the creation of Eve from Adam as an inversion. He refers to the ever recurring world-parent myths of savage peoples, in which the son begets upon the mother a new generation. He cites after Frobenius a story from Joruba, Africa, where the son and daughter of the world parents marry and have a son, who falls in love with his mother. As she refuses to yield to his pa.s.sion he follows and overpowers her. She immediately jumps up and runs away crying. The son follows her to soothe her, and when he catches her she falls sprawling on the earth, her body begins to swell, two streams of water spring from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her body falls in pieces. Fifteen G.o.ds spring from her disrupted body. [Motive of the mutilation of the maternal body. The dismembered lion also naturally contains this motive. From the mutilated body come male and female (red and white) children.] Rank supposes that the biblical account of the world parents serves as a mask for incest (and naturally at the same time the symbolic accomplishment of the incest). He continues, "It is needed only that the infantile birth theory [Birth from a.n.u.s, navel, etc. The taking of the rib = birth process.] which ignores the s.e.xual organs in woman and applies to both s.e.xes, be raised in the child's thought to the next higher grade of knowledge, which ascribes to the woman alone the ability to bring children into the world by the opening of her body. In opposition to the biblical account we have the truly natural process, according to which Adam came out of the opened body of Eve. If by a.n.a.logy with other traditions, we may take this as the original one, it is clear that Adam has s.e.xual intercourse with his mother, and that the disguising of this shocking incest furnished the motive for the displacement of the saga and for the symbolic representation of its contents." The birth from the side of the body, from the navel, from the a.n.u.s, etc., are among children common theories of birth. In myths a.n.a.logous to the biblical apple episode the man almost always offers the apple to the woman. The biblical account is probably an inversion. The apple is an apple of love and an impregnation symbol.

Impregnation by food is also an infantile procreation theory. For Rank, therefore, it is Adam who is guilty of separating the primal parents [Jahwe and Hawwa] and of incest with the mother. The contrast between the two preceding conceptions of the Adam myth should not be carried beyond limits. That they can stand side by side is the more conceivable because Genesis itself is welded together from heterogeneous parts and different elaborations of the primal pair motive. Displacements, inversions, and therefore apparent contradictions must naturally lie in such a material.

Moreover, the interpretation depends not so much on the narrative of the discovered motives as on the motives themselves. [On the interpretation of the mythological motives cf. Lessmann, Aufg. u. Ziele, p. 12.]

Let us return now to the motive of dismemberment. One of the best known examples of dismemberment in mythology is that of Osiris. Osiris and Isis, the brother and sister, already violently in love with each other in their mother's womb, as the myth recounts, copulated with the result that Arueris was born of the unborn. So the two G.o.ds came into the world as already married brother and sister. Osiris traversed the earth, bestowing benefits on mankind. But he had a bad brother, full of jealousy and envy, Typhon (Set), who would gladly have taken advantage of the absence of his brother to place himself on his throne. Isis, who ruled during the absence of Osiris, acted so vigorously and resolutely that all his evil designs were frustrated. Finally Osiris returned and Typhon, with a number of confederates (the number varies) and with the Ethiopian queen Aso, formed a conspiracy against the life of Osiris, and in feigned friends.h.i.+p arranged a banquet. He had, however, caused a splendid coffin to be made, and as they sat gayly at the feast, Typhon had it brought in, and offered to give it to the person whose body would fit it. He had secretly taken the measure of Osiris and had prepared the coffin accordingly. All tried it in turn. None fitted. Finally Osiris lay in it. Then Typhon and his confederates rushed up, closed it and threw it into the river, which carried it to the sea. (Creuzer, L., p. 259 ff.) For the killing of his brother Set, which happened according to the original version on account of desire for power, later tradition subst.i.tutes an unconscious incest which Osiris committed with his second sister, Nephthys, the wife of Set, a union from which sprang Anubis (the dog-headed G.o.d). Set and Nephthys are, according to H. Schneider, apparently no originally married brother and sister like Osiris and Isis, but may have been introduced by way of duplication, in order to account for the war between Osiris and his brother. With the help of Anubis, Isis finds the coffin, brings it back to Egypt, opens it in seclusion and gives way to her tender feelings and sorrow for him. Thereupon she hides the coffin with the body in a thicket in the forest in a lonely place. A hunt which the wild hunter Typhon arranges, discovers the coffin. Typhon cuts the body into fourteen pieces.

Isis soon discovers the loss and searches in a papyrus canoe for the dismembered body of Osiris, traveling through all the seven mouths of the Nile, till she finally has found thirteen pieces. Only one is lacking, the phallus, which had been carried out to sea and swallowed by a fish. She put the pieces together and replaced the missing male member by another made of sycamore wood and set up the phallus for a memento (as a sanctuary). With the help of her son Horus, who, according to later traditions, was begotten by Osiris after his death, Isis avenged the murder of her spouse and brother. Between Horus and Set, who originally were brothers themselves, there arises a bitter war, in which each tore from the other certain parts of the body as strength-giving amulets. Set knocked an eye out of his opponent and swallowed it, but lost at the same time his own genitals (t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es), which in the original version were probably swallowed by Horus. Finally Set was overcome and compelled to give up Horus' eye, with the help of which Horus again revivified Osiris so that he could enter the kingdom of the dead as a ruler.

The dismemberment, with final loss of the phallus, will be clearly recognized as a castration. The tearing out of the eye is similarly to be regarded as emasculation. This motive is found as self-punishment for incest, at the close of the dipus drama. On the dismemberment of Osiris as a castration, Rank writes (Inz. Mot., p. 311): "The characteristic phallus consecration of Isis shows us that her sorrow predominantly concerns the loss of the phallus, (and it also is expressed in the fact that according to a later version, she is none the less in a mysterious manner impregnated by her emasculated spouse), so on the other hand the conduct of the cruel brother shows us that in the dismemberment he was particularly interested in the phallus, since that indeed was the only thing not to be found, and had evidently been hidden with special precautionary measures. Indeed both motivations appear closely united in a version cited by Jeremias (Babylonisches in N. T., p. 721), according to which Anubis, the son of the adulterous union of Osiris with his sister Nephthys, found the phallus of Osiris, dismembered by Typhon with 27 a.s.sistants, which Isis had hidden in the coffin. Only in this manner could the phallus from which the new age originated, escape from Typhon. If this version clearly shows that Isis originally had preserved in the casket the actual phallus of her husband and brother which had been made incorruptible and not merely a wooden one, then on the other hand the probability increases that the story originally concerns emasculation alone because of the various weakening and motivating attempts that meet us in the motive of the dismemberment."

In the form of the Osiris saga the dismemberment appears, however, not merely as emasculation. More clearly recognizable is also the separation of the primal parents, the dying out of the primal being resulting in a release of the primal procreative power for a fresh world creation. It is a very interesting point that in one of the versions a mighty tree grows out of the corpse of Osiris. Later on we become acquainted for the first time with the potent motive of the restoration of the dismembered one, the revivification of the dead.

For example, in the Finnish epic, Kalevala, Na.s.shut throws the Lemminkainen into the waters of the river of the dead. Lemminkainen was dismembered, but his mother fished out the pieces, one of which was missing, put them together and brought them to life in her womb. According to Stucken's explanation we recognize in Na.s.shut a father image, in Lemminkainen a son image. In the tradition no relations.h.i.+p between them is mentioned. That is, however, a "Differentiation and attenuation of traits, which is common in every myth-maker." (S. A. M., p. 107.)

In the Edda it is recounted "that Thor fared forth with his chariot and his goats and with him the Ase, called Loki. They came at evening to a peasant and found shelter with him. At night Thor took his goats and slew them; thereupon they were skinned and put into a kettle. And when they were boiled Thor sat down with his fellow travelers to supper. Thor invited the peasant and his wife and two children to eat with him. The peasant's son was called Thialfi and the daughter Roskwa. Then Thor laid the goats' skins near the hearth and said that the peasant and his family should throw the bones onto the skins. Thialfi, the peasant's son, had the thigh bone of one goat and cut it in two with his knife to get the marrow.

Thor stayed there that night, and in the morning he got up before dawn, dressed, took the hammer, Miolner, and lifted it to consecrate the goats'

skins. Thereupon the goats stood up; but one of them was lame in the hind leg. He noticed it and said that the peasant or some of his household must have been careless with the goats' bones, for he saw that a thigh bone was broken." We are especially to note here that the hammer is a phallic symbol.

In fairy tales the dismemberments and revivifications occur frequently.

For example, in the tale of the Juniper Tree [Machandelboom] (Grimm, K. H.

M., No. 47), a young man is beheaded, dismembered, cooked and served up to his father to be eaten. The father finds the dish exceptionally good. On asking for his son he is answered that the youth has gone to visit relatives. The father throws all the bones under the table. They are collected by the sister, wrapped in a bit of cloth and laid under the juniper tree. The soul of the boy soared in the air as a bird and was afterward translated into a living youth. The Grimm brothers introduce as a parallel: "The collection of the bones occurs in the myths of Osiris and Orpheus, and in the legend of Adelbert; the revivification in many others, e.g., in the tale of Brother l.u.s.tig (K. H. M., No. 81), of Fichter's Vogel (No. 46), in the old Danish song of the Maribo-Spring, in the German saga of the drowned child, etc." Moreover, W. Mannhardt (Germ. Mythen., pp.

57-75) has collected numerous sagas and fairy tales of this kind, in which occur the revivifications of dismembered cattle, fish, goats, rams, birds, and men.