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“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 Äses 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 (Gâyômard), the first man. Of his seed the earth took a third, but the moon two thirds. From his horns grew the fruits, from his nose, leeks, from his blood, grapes, from his tail, five and twenty kinds of grain. From his purified seed two new bulls were formed, from which all animals are descended.” Just as in the Iranian myth the original being, Gâyômard, considered as human, and the ancestor bull belong together, so we find in the northern myth a cow Audhumla associated with Ymir. Ymir is to be regarded as androgynous (man and woman), the primitive cow as only a doubling of his being. The Iranian primitive bull ancestor also occurs as cow. Compare white and red, male and female, in the body of the lion.

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In the Indian Asvamedha the parts of the sacrificed steed correspond to the elements of the visible creation. (Cf. Brhadaranyaka—Upanisad I, i.) A primitive vedic cosmogony makes the world arise from the parts of the body of a giant. (Rig-veda purusa-sukta.)

Just as from the dead primordial being the sacrificed bull, Mithra, sprouts life and vegetation, so in the dream of Omicron, a tree grows out of the belly of the dead bear. In mythology many trees grow out of graves, that in some way reincarnate the creative or life principle of the dead. It is an interesting fact that the world, or especially an improved new edition of the world, comes from the body of a dying being. Some one kills this being and so causes an improved creation. (According to Stucken, incidentally, all myths are creation myths.) This improvement is now identical, psychologically, with the above mentioned superior knowledge of the son (expressed in general terms, the present new generation as opposed to the ancestors). The son does away with the father (the children overpower the ancestors), and creates, as it were out of the wreckage, an improved world. So, beside the superior knowledge, a superior efficiency. The primordial beings are destroyed but not so the creative power (phallus, tree, the red and the white). It passes on to posterity (son) which uses it in turn.

Dismemberments in creation myths are not always multiple but sometimes dichotomous. Thus in the Babylonian cosmogony Marduk splits the monster [pg 073] Tiamat into two pieces, which henceforth become the upper and lower half of heaven. Winckler concludes that Tiamat is man-woman (primal pair). This brings us to the type of creation saga where the producer of the (improved) world separates the primal pair, his parents. The Chinese creation myth speaks of the archaic Chaos as an effervescing water, in which the two powers, Yang (heaven) and Yin (earth), the two primal ancestors, are mingled and united. Pwanku, an offshoot of these primal powers (son of the parents), separates them and thus they become manifest. In the Egyptian myth we read (in Maspero, Histoire des Peuples de l'Orient, Stucken, Astral Myth, p. 203): “The earth and the heaven were in the beginning a pair of lovers lost in the Now who held each other in close embrace, the god below the goddess. Now on the day of creation a new god [son type], Shou, came out of the eternal waters, glided between them and seizing Nouit [the goddess] with his hands, lifted her at arms' length above his head. While the starry bust of the goddess was lengthened out in space, the head to the west, the loins to the east, and became the sky, her feet and her hands [as the four pillars of heaven] fell here and there on our earth.” The young god or the son pushes his way between the parents, sunders their union, just as the dreamer Omicron would have liked to sunder the chain of the bear (the marriage bond of the parents). This case is quite as frequent a type in analytic psychology as in mythical cosmology. The child is actually [pg 074] an intruder, even if it does indirectly draw the bonds of marriage tighter. Fundamentally regarded, the child appears as the rival of the father, who is no longer the only beloved one of his wife. He must share the love with the new comer, to whom an even greater tenderness is shown. Regarded from the standpoint of the growing son, the intrusion represents the Œdipus motive (with the incest wish).

The most outspoken and also a commonly occurring form of the mythological separation of the primal pair is the castration of the father by the son. The motive is, according to all accounts, psychologically quite as comprehensible as the frequently substituted castration of the son by the father. The latter is psychologically the necessary correlate of the first form. The rivals, father and son, menace each other's sexual life. That the castration motive works out that way with father and son (son-in-law if the daughter takes the place of the mother) is expressed either in so many words in the myth or through corresponding displacement types.

A clear case is the emasculation of Uranus by his son Kronos, who thereby prevents the further cohabitation of the primal parents. [Archetype of the Titan motive in a narrow sense.] Important for us is the fact that castration in myths is represented sometimes as the tearing out of a limb or by complete dismemberment. (Stucken, Astral Myth, pp. 436, 443, 479, 638 ff.; Rank, Incest Motive, p. 311 ff.)

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The Adam myth also contains the motive of the separated primal parents. In Genesis we do not, of course, see the myth in its pure form. It must first be rehabilitated. Stucken accomplishes this in regarding Adam and Eve (Hawwa) as the original world-parent pair, and Jahwe Elohim as the separating son god. By a comparison of Adam and Noah he incidentally arrives by analogical reasoning at an emasculation of Adam. In connection with the “motive of the sleeping primal father,” he observes later (Astral Myth, p. 224) that the emasculation (or the shameless deed, Ham with Noah) is executed while the primal father lies asleep. Thus, Kronos emasculates Uranus by night while he is sleeping with Gaia. Stucken now shows that the sleep motive is contained in the 2d chapter of Genesis. “And the Lord God 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 passion he follows and [pg 076] 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 breasts and her body falls in pieces. Fifteen gods 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 anus, navel, etc. The taking of the rib = birth process.] which ignores the sexual organs in woman and applies to both sexes, 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 analogy with other traditions, we may take this as the original one, it is clear that Adam has sexual 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 anus, etc., are among children [pg 077] common theories of birth. In myths analogous 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 gods 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, [pg 078] 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 friendship 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 substitutes an unconscious incest which Osiris committed with his second sister, Nephthys, the wife of Set, a union from which sprang Anubis (the dog-headed god). 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 [pg 079] 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 (testicles), 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. [pg 080] This motive is found as self-punishment for incest, at the close of the Œdipus 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 assistants, 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 [pg 081] 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, Nasshut 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 Nasshut a father image, in Lemminkainen a son image. In the tradition no relationship 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 [pg 082] 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., [pg 083] in the tale of Brother Lustig (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.

The gruesome meal in the story of the juniper tree reminds us of the Tantalus story and the meal of Thyestes. Demeter (or Thetes) ate a shoulder of the dismembered Pelops, who was set before the gods by his father Tantalus, and the shoulder, after he was brought to life again, was replaced by an ivory one. In a story from the northeastern Caucasus, a chamois similarly dismembered and brought to life, like Thor's goats, gets an artificial shoulder (of wood).

For the purpose of being brought to life again the parts of the dismembered animal are regularly put in a vessel or some container (kettle, box, cloth, skin). In the case of the kettle, which corresponds to the belly or uterus, they are generally cooked. Thus in the tale of the juniper tree, the magic rejuvenations of Medea, which—except in the version mentioning the magic potion—she practices on Jason and Æson, and also on goats (cf. Thor and his goats). I must quote still other pertinent observations of Rank (p. 313 ff). The motive of revivification, most intimately connected with dismemberment, appears not only in a secondary rôle [pg 084] to compensate for the killing, but represents as well simple coming to life, i.e., birth. Rank believes that coming to life again applies originally to a dissected snake (later other animals, chiefly birds), in which we easily recognize the symbolical compensation for the phallus of the Osiris story, excised and unfit for procreation, which can be brought to life again by means of the water of life. “The idea that man himself at procreation or at birth is assembled from separate parts, has found expression not only in the typical widespread sexual theories of children, but in countless stories (e.g., Balzac's Contes drolatiques) and mythical traditions. Of special interest to us is the antique expression communicated by Mannhardt (Germ. Myth., p. 305), which says of a pregnant woman that she has a belly full of bones,” which strikingly suggests the feature emphasized in all traditions that the bones of the dismembered person are thrown on a heap, or into a kettle (belly) or wrapped in a cloth. [Even the dead Jesus, who is to live again, is enveloped in a cloth. In several points he answers the requirements of the true rejuvenation myth. The point is also made that the limbs that are being put in the cloth must be intact, so that the resurrection may be properly attained (as in a bird story where the dead bird's bones must be carefully preserved). The incompleteness (stigmata) also appears after the resurrection.

John XIX, 33. “But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not [pg 085] his legs.”—40 f. “Then took they the body of Jesus and wound it in linen cloths with the spices. … Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid.”

We shall mention later the significance of garden and grave. It supports that of the cloths.]

Rank considers that the circumstance that the dismembered person or animal resurrected generally lacks a member, points without exception to castration.

What he has said about dismemberment we can now sum up with reference to the lion in the parable in the formulae: Separation of parents; the pushing aside of the father; castration of father; taking his place; liberation of the power of procreation; improvement. In its bearing on the incest wish, castration is indeed the best translation of the “anatomizing” of the lion. The dragon fighter has to release a woman. The idea that the mother is in need of being released, and that it is a good deed to free her from her oppressor, father, is according to the insight of psychoanalysis a typical element of those unconscious phantasies of mankind, which are stamped deeply with the greatest significance in the imaginative “family romance” of neurotics. To the typical dragon fight belongs, however (according to Stucken's correct formulation), the motive of denial. As a matter of fact the hero of our parable is denied the prize set before him—the admission into the college—for several of the [pg 086] elders insist on the condition that the wanderer must resuscitate the lion (Sec. 7). In myths where the dragon has to fight with a number of persons this difference generally occurs: that he produces dissension among his opponents. (Jason throws a stone among the men of the dragon's teeth, they fight about the stone and lay each other low.) Dissension occurs also among the old men. They turned (Sec. 7) “fiercely on each other” if only with words.

The wanderer removes, as it were, an obstacle by the fight, tears down a wall or a restraint. This symbol occurs frequently in dreams; flying or jumping over walls has a similar meaning. The wanderer was carried as if in flight to the top of the wall. Then first returns the hesitation. The symbolism of the two paths, right and left, has already been mentioned. The man that precedes the wanderer (Sec. 7 and 8) may be quite properly taken as the father image; once, at any rate, because the wanderer finds himself on the journey to the mother (that is indeed the trend of the dream) and on this path the father is naturally the predecessor. The father is, however, the instructor, too, held up as an example and as a model for choosing the right path. The father follows the right path to the mother also; he is the lawful husband. The son can reach her only on the left path. This he takes, still for the purpose of making things better. Some one follows the wanderer on the other side (Sec. 8), whether man or woman is not known. The father [pg 087] image in front of the wanderer is his future for he will occupy his father's place. The Being behind him is surely the past, the careless childhood, that has not yet learned the difference between man and woman. It does not take the difficult right way, but quite intelligibly, the left. The wanderer himself turns back to his childish irresponsibility; he takes the left path. The many people that fall down may be a foil to illustrate the dangers of the path, for the purpose of deepening the impression of improvement. Phantasies of extraordinary abilities, special powers; contrasts to the anxiety of examinations; all these in the case of the wanderer mark the change from apprehension to fulfillment. We must not fail to recognize the element of desire for honor; it will be yet described. In view of myth motives reported by Stucken, the entire wall episode is to be conceived as a magic flight; the people that fall off are the pursuers.

At the beginning of the ninth section of the parabola, the wanderer breaks red and white roses from the rosebush and sticks them in his hat. Red-white we already know as sexuality. The breaking off of flowers, etc., in dreams generally signifies masturbation; common speech also knows this as “pulling off” or “jerking off.” In the symbolism of dreams and of myths the hat is usually the phallus. This fact alone would be hardly worth mentioning, but there are also other features that have a similar significance. The fear of impotence points to autoerotic components in the psychosexual constitution of [pg 088] the wanderer (of course not clearly recognized as such), which is shown as well in the anxiety about ridicule and disgrace that awaken ambition. This is clearest in the paragraphs 6, 10, 14, of the parable. That the masturbatory symbol precedes the subsequent garden episode, can be understood if we realize that the masturbation phantasy (which has an enormous psychic importance) animates or predetermines the immediately following incest.

The wall about the garden that makes the long detour necessary (Sec. 9) is as we know the resistance. Overcoming the resistance = going round the wall, removal of the wall. Of course, after the completion of the detour there is no wall. The wall, however, signifies also the inaccessibility or virginity of the woman. The wall surrounds a garden. The garden is, however (apart from the paradise symbolism derived from it), one of the oldest and most indubitable symbols for the female body.

“Maiden shall I go with you

In your rose garden,

There where the roses stand

The delicate and the tender;

And a tree nearby

That moves its leaves,

And a cool spring

That lies just under it.”

Without much change the same symbolism is found in stately form in the Melker Marienlied of the 12th century. (See Jung, Jb. ps. F., IV, S. 398 ff.)

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Sainted Mary

Closed gate

Opened by God's word—

Sealed fountain,

Barred garden,

Gate of Paradise.

Note also the garden, roses and fountains in the Song of Solomon.

The wanderer wishes to possess his mother as an unravished bride. Also a feature familiar to psychoanalysis. The generally accompanying antithesis is the phantasy that the mother is a loose woman = attainable, sexually alluring woman. Perhaps this idea will also be found in the parable.

The young people of both sexes, separated by a wall, do not come together because they are afraid of the distant detour to the door. This can, with a little courage, be translated: The auto-erotic satisfaction is easier.

[C G. Jung writes (Jb. ps. F., IV, p. 213 ff): “Masturbation is of inestimable importance psychologically. One is guarded from fate, since there is no sexual need of submitting to any one, life and its difficulties. With masturbation one has in his hands the great magic. He needs only to imagine and in addition to masturbate and he possesses all the pleasures of the world and is under no compulsion to conquer the world of his desire through hard work and struggle with reality. Aladdin rubs his lamp and the slaves come at his bidding; this story expresses the great psychologic gain in local sexual satisfaction [pg 090] through facile regression.” Jung applies to masturbation the motive of the dearly won prize and that of the stealing of fire. He even appears to derive in some way the use of fire from masturbation. In this at any rate I cannot follow him.]

On his detour the wanderer (who desires to reach the portal of woman) meets people who are alone in the rooms and carry on dirty work. Dirt and masturbation are wont to be closely associated psychically. The dirty work is “only appearance and individual fantasy,” and “has no foundation in Nature.” The wanderer knows that “such practices vanish like smoke.” He has done it himself before and now he will have nothing more to do with it. He aspires to a woman, that the work done alone leads to nothing is connected with the fact that the work of two is useful. But “dirty work” is also to be understood as sensual enjoyment without love.

In paragraph 10 we again meet the already mentioned symbolism of the walled garden. The wanderer is the only one that can secure admission to the maiden. After a fear of impotence (anxiety about disgrace) he goes resolutely to the door and opens it with his Diederich, which sticks into a narrow, hardly visible opening (deflowering). He “knows the situation of the place,” although he has never been there before. I mean that once, before he was himself, he was there in the body of his mother. What follows suggests a birth fantasy as these occur in dreams of being born. The wanderer now actually takes part in being born in reverse direction. [pg 091] I append several dreams about being born.

“I find myself on a very narrow stairway, leading down in turns; a winding stairway. I turn and push through laboriously. Finally I find a little door that leads me into the open, on a green meadow, where I rest in soft luxuriant bushes. The warm sunshine was very pleasant.”

F. S. dreams: “In the morning I went to work with my brother (as we went the same road) in the Customs House Street. Before the customs house I saw the head postillion standing. From it the way led to a street between two wooden walls; the way appeared very long and seemed to get narrower toward the end and indeed so close that I was afraid that we would not get through. I went out first, my brother behind me; I was glad when I got out of the passage and woke with a beating heart.” Addenda. “The way was very dark, more like a mine. We couldn't see, except in the distance the end, like a light in a mine shaft. I closed my eyes.” Stekel notes on the dreams of F. S.: “The dream is a typical birth dream. The head postillion is the father. The dreamer wants to reverse the birth relations of his brother who is ten years older than he. ‘I went out first, my brother after me.’ ”

Another beautiful example in Stekel: “Inter faeces et urinas nascimur.” [We are born between faeces and urine] says St. Augustine. Mr. F. Z. S. contributes an account of his birth which strongly reminds us of the sewer-theory.

“I went into the office and had to pass a long, [pg 092] narrow, uneven alley. The alley was like a long court between two houses and I had the indefinite feeling that there was no thoroughfare. Yet I hurried through. Suddenly a window over me opened and some one, I believe a female, spilled the wet contents of a vessel on me. My hat was quite wet and afterwards I looked at it closer and still noticed the traces of a dirty gray liquid. Nevertheless, I went on without stopping, and quickened my steps. At the end of the alley I had to go through the house that was connected by the alley with the other. Here I found an establishment (inn?) that I passed. In this establishment were people (porters, servants, etc.) engaged in moving heavy pieces of furniture, etc., as if these were being moved out or rearranged. I had to be careful and force my way through. Finally I came to the open on a street and looked for an electric. Then I saw on a path that went off at an angle, a man whom I took for an innkeeper who was occupied in measuring or fastening a hedge or a trellis. I did not know exactly what he was doing. He was counting or muttering and was so drunk that he staggered.”

Stekel: “In this dream are united birth and effects of the forbidden or unpermissible. The dreamer goes back over the path—evidently as an adult. The experiences represent an accusation against the mother. This accusation was not without reason. Mr. F. Z. S. had a joyless childhood. His mother was a heavy drinker. He witnessed her [pg 093] coitus with strangers. (Packing up = coitus.) The packers and porters are the strange men who visited his inn (his mother was also his nurse) in order to store heavy objects, etc. Finally he was obstructed in his birth, for a man is occupied in measuring. The father was a surveyor (the innkeeper). In the dream, furthermore, he was measuring a trellis-fence. Both trellis and hedge are typical dream symbols of obstacles to copulation.”

Comparing Sections 10 and 11 of the parable carefully with the contents of this dream, we find astonishing correspondences. Notice the details, e.g., the rosebushes, the sun, the rain, the hedge. On the “well builded house” of Section 10, I shall only remark that Scherner has noticed in this connection that the human body represents a building. “Well built house” signifies “beautiful body.”

If we remember that the wanderer reverses the way of birth, we shall not be surprised that he finds a smaller garden in the larger. That is probably the uterus. The wanderer attains the most intimate union with his ideal, the mother, in imagining himself in her body. This phantasy is continued still less ambiguously—but I do not wish to anticipate. Be it only said: He possesses his mother as a spouse and as a child; it is as if in the desire to do everything better than his father he desires to beget himself anew. We already know the mythological motives of new creation, that should follow the forcible separation of the parents and that we have not yet [pg 094] noticed in the parable. Shall the better world still be created, the dismembered paternal power be renewed, the lion again be brought to life?

The rectangular place in the garden suggests a grave. A wall in a dream means, among other things, a cemetery wall and the garden, a cemetery. And widely as these ideas may be contrasted with the lifegiving mother's womb, they yet belong psychologically in very close connection with her. And perhaps not only psychologically.

Stekel tells a dream of Mrs. Delta in which occurs “an open square space, a garden or court. In the corner stood a tree, that slowly sinks before our eyes as if it were sinking in water. As the tree and the court also made swinging motions, I cleverly remarked, ‘Thus we see how the change in the earth's surface takes place.’ ” The topmost psychic stratum of the dream reveals itself as an earthquake reminiscence. “Earth” leads to the idea of “Mother Earth.” The tree sinking into it, is the tree of life, the phallus. The rectangular space is the bedroom, the marriage bed. The swinging motions characterize the whole picture still better. The earthquake, however, contains, as is found in the analysis, death thoughts also. The rectangular space becomes a grave. Even the water of the dream deserves notice. “Babies come out of the water,” says an infantile theory of procreation. We learn later that the fœtus floats in amniotic liquor. This “water” lies naturally in “Mother Earth.” In contrast we have the water of the dead [pg 095] (river of the dead, islands of the dead, etc.). Both waters are analogous in the natural symbolism. It is the mythical abode of the people not yet, or no longer, to be found in the world.

As water will appear again at important points in the parable, I will dwell a little longer on that topic.

Little children come out of Holla's fountain, there are in German districts a number of Holla wells or Holla springs (Holla brunn?) with appropriate legends. Women, we are told, who step into those springs become prolific. Mullenhof tells of an old stone fountain in Flensburg, which is called the Grönnerkeel. Its clear, copious water falls out of four cocks into a wide basin and supplies a great part of the city. The Flensburgers hold this fountain in great honor, for in this city it is not the stork which brings babies, but they are fished out of this fountain. While fishing the women catch cold and therefore have to stay in bed. Bechstein (Fränk. Sagensch.) mentions a Little Linden Spring on a road in Schweinfurt near Königshofen. The nurses dip the babies out of it with silver pails, and it flows not with water but with milk. If the little ones come to this baby fountain they look through the holes of the millstone (specially mentioned on account of what follows) at its still water, that mirrors their features, and think they have seen a little brother or sister that looks just like them. (Nork. Myth d. Volkss., p. 501.)

From the lower Austrian peasantry Rank takes the following (Wurth. Zf. d. Mythol., IV, 140): [pg 096] “Far, far off in the sea there stands a tree near which the babies grow. They hang by a string on the tree and when the baby is ripe the string breaks and the baby floats off. But in order that it should not drown, it is in a box and in this it floats away to the sea until it comes into a brook. Now our Lord God makes ill a woman for whom he intended the baby. So a doctor is summoned. Our Lord God has already suggested to him that the sick woman will have a baby. So he goes out to the brook and watches for a long time until finally the box with the baby comes floating in, and he takes it up and brings it to the sick woman. And this is the way all people get their babies.”

I call attention briefly also to the legend of the fountain of youth, to the mythical and naturalistic ideas of water as the first element and source of all life, and to the drink of the gods (soma, etc.) Compare also the fountain in the verses previously quoted.

The bridal pair in the parable (Sec. 11) walk through the garden and the bride says they intend in their chamber to “enjoy the pleasures of love.” They have picked many fragrant roses. Bear in mind the picking of strawberries in Mr. T.'s dream. The garden becomes a bridal chamber. The rain mentioned somewhat earlier, is a fructifying rain; it is the water of life that drops down upon Mother Earth. It is identical with the sinking trees of Mrs. Delta's dream, with the power of creation developed by the wanderer, with the mythical drink of the gods, [pg 097] ambrosia, soma. We shall now see the wanderer ascend or descend to the source of this water of life. To gain the water of life it is generally in myths necessary to go down into the underworld (Ishtar's Hell Journey), into the belly of a monster or the like. Remember, too, that the wanderer puts himself back in his mother's womb. There is indeed the origin of his life. The process is still more significantly worked out in the parable.

The wanderer (Section 11, after the garden episode) comes to the mill. The water of the mill stream also plays a significant part in the sequel. The reader will surely have already recognized what kind of a mill, what kind of water is meant. I will rest satisfied with the mere mention of several facts from folklore and dream-life.

Nork (Myth. d. Volkss., p. 301 f.) writes that Fenja is of the female sex in the myth (Horwendil) which we must infer from her occupation, for in antiquity when only hand mills were as yet in use, women exclusively did this work. In symbolic language, however, the mill signifies the female organ (μυλλός from which comes mulier) and as the man is the miller, the satirist Petronius uses molere mulierem = (grind a woman) for coitus, and Theocritus (Idyll, IV, 48) uses μύλλω (I grind) in the same sense. Samson, robbed of his strength by the harlot, has to grind in the mill (Judges XVI, 21) on which the Talmud (Sota fol. 10) comments as follows: By the grinding is always meant the sin of fornication (Beischlaf). Therefore all the mills [pg 098] in Rome stand still at the festival of the chaste Vesta. Like Apollo, Zeus, too, was a miller (μυλεύς, Lykophron, 435), but hardly a miller by profession, but only in so far as he presides over the creative lifegiving principle of the propagation of creatures. It is now demonstrated that every man is a miller and every woman a mill, from which alone it may be conceived that every marriage is a milling (jede Vermählung eine Vermehlung), etc. Milling (vermehlung) is connected with the Roman confarreatio (a form of marriage); at engagements the Romans used to mingle two piles of meal. In the same author (p. 303 and p. 530): Fengo is therefore the personification of grinding, the mill (Grotti) is his wife Gerutha, the mother of Amleth or Hamlet. Grotti means both woman and mill. Greeth is only a paraphrase of woman. He continues, “Duke Otto, Ludwig of Bavaria's youngest son, wasted his substance with a beautiful miller's daughter named Margaret, and lived in Castle Wolfstein. … This mill is still called the Gretel mill and Prince Otto the Finner” (Grimm, D. S., No. 496). Finner means, like Fengo, the miller [Fenja—old Norman? = the milleress], for the marriage is a milling [Vermählung ist eine Vermehlung], the child is the ground grain, the meal.

The same writer (Sitt. u. Gebr., p. 162): “In concept the seed corn has the same value as the spermatozoon. The man is the miller, the woman the mill.”

In Dulaure-Krauss-Rieskel (Zeugung i. Glaub [pg 099] usw. d. Völk., p. 100 ff.) I find the following charm from the writings of Burkhard, Bishop of Worms: “Have you not done what some women are accustomed to do? They strip themselves of clothes, they anoint their naked bodies with honey, spread a cloth on the ground, on which they scatter grain, roll about in it again and again, then collect carefully all the grains, which have stuck on their bodies, and grind them on the mill stone which they turn in a contrary direction. When the corn is ground into meal, they bake a loaf of it, and give it to their husbands to eat, so that they become sick and die. When you have done this you will atone for it forty days on bread and water.”

Killing is the opposite of procreating, therefore the mill is here turned in reverse direction.

Etymologically it is here to be noted that the verb mahlen (grind), iterative form of môhen (mow), originally had a meaning of moving oneself forwards and backwards. Mulieren or mahlen (grind), molere, μυλλειν for coire (cf. Anthropophyteia, VIII, p. 14).

There are numerous stories where the mill appears as the place of love adventures. The “old woman's mill” also is familiar; old women go in and come out young. They are, as it were, ground over in the magic mill. The idea of recreation in the womb lies at the bottom of it, just as in the vulgar expression, “Lassen sie sich umvögeln.”

In a legend of the Transylvanian Gypsies, “there came again an old woman to the king and said: [pg 100] ‘Give me a piece of bread, for seven times already has the sun gone down without my having eaten anything!’ The King replied: ‘Good, but I will first have meal ground for you,’ and he called his servants and had the old woman sawn into pieces. Then the old woman's sawn up body changed into a good Urme (fairy) and she soared up into the air. …” (H. V. Wlislocki, Märchen u. Sagen d. transylv. Zigeuner.)

A dream: “I came into a mill and into ever narrower apartments till finally I had no more space. I was terribly anxious and awoke in terror.” A birth phantasy or uterus phantasy.

Another dream (Stekel, Spr. d. Tr., p. 398 f.): “I came through a crack between two boards out of the ‘wheel room.’ The walls dripped with water. Right before me is a brook in which stands a rickety, black piano. I use it to cross over the brook, as I am running away. Behind me is a crowd of men. In front of them all is my uncle. He encourages them to pursue me and roars and yells. The men have mountain sticks, which they occasionally throw at me. The road goes through the verdure up and down hill. The path is strewn with coal cinders and therefore black. I had to struggle terribly to gain any ground. I had to push myself to move forwards. Often I seemed as though grown to the ground and the pursuers came ever nearer. Suddenly I am able to fly. I fly into a mill through the window. In it is a space with board walls; on the opposite wall is a large crank. [pg 101] I sit on the handle, hold on to it with my hands, and fly up. When the crank is up I press it down with my weight, and so set the mill in motion. While so engaged I am quite naked. I look like a cupid. I beg the miller to let me stay here, promising to move the mill in the manner indicated. He sent me away and I have to fly out of another window again. Outside there comes along the ‘Flying Post.’ I place myself in front near the driver. I was soon requested to pay, but I have only three heller with me. So the conductor says to me, ‘Well, if you can't pay, then you must put up with our sweaty feet.’ Now, as if by command, all the passengers in the coach drew off a shoe and each held a sweaty foot in front of my nose.”

This dream, too (beside other things), contains a womb phantasy, wheel room, mill, space with wet walls—the womb. The dreamer is followed by a crowd; just as our wanderer is met by a crowd; the elders. This dream, which will still further occupy our attention, I shall call the “Flying Post.”

Let us return to the parable. The mill of Section 11 is the womb. The wanderer strives for the most intimate union with his mother; his striving, to do better than his father culminates in his procreating himself, the son, again and better.

He will quite fill up his mother—be the father in full. Of course the phantasy does not progress without psychic obstructions. The anxious passage over the narrow plank manifests it.

We have here the familiar obstructions to movement [pg 102] and in a form indeed that recalls the dangerous path on the wall. The passage over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color = black. In the Flying Post dream a black road appears. The dreamer has conflicts like those of the wanderer.

The old miller who will give no information is the father. Of course he will not let him have his mother, and he gives him no information as to the mill work or the procreative activity. The wheels are, on the one hand, the organs that grind out the child (producing the child like meal), and on the other hand they are the ten commandments whose mundane administration is the duty of the father, by means of strict education and punishment. In passing over the plank, the wanderer places himself above the ten commandments and above the privileges of the father. The wanderer always extricates himself successfully from the difficulties. The anxiety is soon done away with, and the fulfillment phase supervenes. It is only a faint echo of the paternal commandments when the elders (immediately after the episode, Section 11) hold out before him the letter from the faculty. At bottom, in retaining [pg 103] their authority, they do indeed go against his own wishes (also a typical artifice of the dream technique).

I have already discussed the letter episode sufficiently (as also Sections 12 and 13), so I need say no more about the incest wish there expressed.

The bridal pair were put (Section 14) into their crystal prison. We have been looking for the reassembling of the dismembered; it takes place before our eyes, the white and red parts, bones and blood, are indeed bridegroom and bride. The prison is the skin or the receptacle in which, as in myths, the revivification takes place. Not in the sense of the revivification of the annihilated father, but a recreation (improvement) that the son accomplishes, although the creative force as such remains the same. The son “marries and mills” (vermählt und vermehlt) with his mother, for the crystal container is again the same as the mill; the uterus. Even the amniotic fluid and the nutritive liquid for the fœtus are present, and the wanderer remakes himself into a splendid king. He can really do it better than his father. The dream carries the wish fulfillment to the uttermost limits.

Let us examine the process somewhat more in detail. The wanderer, by virtue of a dissociation, has a twofold existence, once as a youth in the inside of the glass sphere, and once outside in his former guise. Outside and inside he is united with his mother as husband and as developing child. He there embraces his “sister” (image of his mother [pg 104] renewed with him as it were) as Osiris does his sister Isis. And in addition to this the infantile sexual components of exhibitionism find satisfaction, for whose gratification the covering of the procreation mystery is made of glass. The sexual influence of the wanderer on the kettle (uterus) is symbolically indicated by the fire task allotted to him. The fire is one of the most frequent love symbols in dreams. Language also is wont to speak of the fire of love, of the consuming flames of passion, of ardent desires, etc. Customs, in particular marriage customs, show a similar symbolism. That the wanderer is charged with a duty, and explicitly commanded to do what he is willing to do without orders, is again the already mentioned cunning device of the dream technique to bring together the incompatible. It seems almost humorous when the prison is locked with the seal of the right honorable faculty; I recall to you the expression “sealing” (petschieren); the sealing is an applying of the father's penis. In the place of father we find, of course, the officiating wanderer. The sealing means, however, the shutting up of the seed of life that is placed in the mother. It is also said that the pair, after the confinement in the prison, can be given no more nourishment; and that the food with which they are provided comes exclusively from the water of the mill. That refers to the intrauterine nourishment, to which nothing, of course, can be supplied but the water of the mill so familiar to us.

The precious vessel that the wanderer guards is [pg 105] surrounded by strong walls; it is inaccessible to the others; he alone may approach with his fire. It is winter. That is not merely a rationalizing (pretext of commonplace argument) of the firing, but a token of death entering into the uterus. The amorous pair in the prison dissolve and perish, even rot (Section 15). I must mention incidentally, for the understanding of this version, that at the time of the writing of the parable the process of impregnation was associated with the idea of the “decaying” or “rotting” of the semen. The womb is compared to the earth in which the kernel of grain “decays.”

The decaying which precedes the arising of the new being is connected with a great inundation. Mythically, a deluge is actually accustomed to introduce a (improved) creation. A proper myth can hardly dispense with the idea of a primal flood. I would, in passing, note that the present phase of the parable corresponds mythologically to the motive of being swallowed, the later release from the prison is the spitting forth (from the jaws of the monster), the return from the underworld. The dismemberment motive of the cosmogonies is usually associated with a deluge motive. In the description of the flood in the parable there are, moreover, included some traits of the biblical narrative, e.g., the forty days and the rainbow. This, be it remarked in passing, had appeared before; it is a sign of a covenant. It binds heaven and earth, man and woman. The flood originates in the falling of tears; it arises also from the body of the woman; it [pg 106] refers to the well known highly significant water. Stekel has arranged for dreams the so-called symbolic parallels, according to which all secretions and excretions may symbolically represent each other. On the presupposition that marks of similarity are not conceived in a strict sense, the following comparisons may be drawn: Mucus = blood = pus = urine = stools = semen = milk = sweat = tears = spirit = air = [breath = flatus] = speech = money = poison. That in this comparison both souls and tears appear is particularly interesting; the living or procreating principle appears as soul in the form of clouds. These are formed from water, the Water of Life. The dew that comes from it impregnates the earth.

As we have now reached the excreta, I should like to remind the reader of the foul and stinking bodies that in the parable lie in liquid (Section 15) on which falls a warmer rain. The parable psychoanalytically regarded, is the result of a regression leading us into infantile thinking and feeling; we have seen it clearly enough in the comparison with the myths. And here it is to be noticed how great an interest children take in the process of defecation. I should not have considered this worthy of notice, did not the hermetic symbolism, as we shall see later, actually use in parallel cases the expressions “fimus,” “urina puerorum,” etc., in quite an unmistakable manner. In any case it is worth remembering that out of dung and urine, things that decompose malodorously and repulsively, fresh life arises. This [pg 107] agrees with the infantile theory of procreation, that babies are brought forth as the residue of assimilation; we are to observe, however, still other interrelations that will be encountered later. A series of mythological parallels may be cited. I shall rest satisfied with referring to the droll story, “Der Dumme Hans.” Stupid Jack loads manure (fæces, sewage) into a cart and goes with it to a manor; there he tells them he comes from the Moorish land (from the country of the blacks) and carries in his barrel the Water of Life. When any one opens the barrel without permission, Stupid Jack represented himself as having turned the water of life into sewage. He repeated the little trick with his dead grandmother whom he sewed up in black cloths and gave out as a wonderfully beautiful princess who was lying in a hundred years' sleep. Again, as he expected, the covering was raised by an unbidden hand and John lamented, that, on account of the interference, instead of the princess, whom he wanted to take to the King, a disgusting corpse had been magically substituted. He succeeded in being recompensed with a good deal of money. [Jos. Haltrich, Deut. Volksmed. d. Siebenbürg, II, p. 224.]

Inasmuch as the wanderer of our parable finds himself not outside but inside of the receptacle, he is as if in a bath. I note incidentally that writings analogous to the parable expressly mention a bath in a similar place, as the parable also does (Sec. 15). In dreams the image of bathing frequently appears to occur as a womb or birth phantasy.

[pg 108]

At the end of the 14th section, as the inmates of the prison die, his certain ruin stands before the wanderer's eyes—again a faint echo of his relation to the bridegroom.

We have already for a long time thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the thought that in the crystal prison the revivification of the dismembered comes to pass. Whoever has the slightest doubt of it, can find it most beautifully shown in the beginning of Section 15. The author of the parable even mentions Medea and Æson. I need add nothing more concerning the talents of the Colchian sorceress in the art of dissection and rejuvenation.

In Section 18, “the sun shines very bright, and the day becomes warmer than before and the dog days are at hand.” Soon after (Sec. 19) the king is released from prison. It was before the winter (Sec. 14), but after that season, when the sun “shines very warm” (Sec. 11), consequently well advanced into autumn. Let us choose for the purpose a middle point between the departing summer and the approaching winter, about the end of October, and bear in mind that the dog-days come in August, so that at the end of July they are in waiting, then we find for the time spent in the receptacle nine months—the time of human gestation.

The newborn (Sec. 20) is naturally—thirsty. What shall he be fed with if not with the water from the mill? And the water makes him grow and thrive.

Two royal personages stand before us in splendor [pg 109] and magnificence. The wanderer has created for himself new parents (the father-king is, of course, also himself) corresponding to the family romance of neurotics, a phantasy romance, that like a ghost stalks even in the mental life of healthy persons. It is a wish phantasy that culminates in its most outspoken form in the conviction that one really springs from royal or distinguished stock and has merely been found by the actual parents who do not fit. They conceal his true origin. The day will come, however, when he will be restored to the noble station which belongs to him by right. Here belong in brief, those unrestrained wish phantasies which, no matter in what concrete form, diversify the naïvely outlined content. They arise from dissatisfaction with surroundings and afford the most agreeable contrasts to straitened circumstances or poverty. In the parable especially, the King (in his father character) is attractively portrayed.

At first the “lofty appearance” (Sec. 19) of the severe father amazes the wanderer, then it turns out, however, that the king (ideal father) is friendly, gracious and meek, and we are assured that “nothing graces exalted persons as much as these virtues.” And then he leads the wanderer into his kingdom and allows him to enjoy all the merely earthly treasures. There takes place, so to speak, a universal gratification of all wishes.

Mythologically we should expect that the hero thrown up from the underworld, should have brought with him the drink of knowledge. This is [pg 110] actually the case, as he has indeed gained the thing whose constitution is metaphorically worked out in the whole story, that is, the philosopher's stone. The wanderer is a true soma robber.

Let us hark back to the next to last section. Here, near the end of the dream, the King becomes sleepy. The real sleeper already feels the approaching awakening and would like to sleep longer (to phantasy). But he pretends that the king is sleepy, thus throwing the burden from his own shoulders. And to this experience is soon attached a symbol of waking: the wanderer, the dreamer of the parable, is taken to another land, indeed into a bright land. He wakes from his dreams with a pious echo of his wish fulfillment on his lips … “to which end help us, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Amen.” It is quite prosaic to conclude this melodious finale by means of the formula “threshold symbolism.”

To sum up in a few words what the parable contains from the psychoanalytic point of view, and to do this without becoming too general in suggesting as its results the universal fulfillment of all wishes, I should put it thus: the wanderer in his phantasy removes and improves the father, wins the mother, procreates himself with her, enjoys her love even in the womb and satisfies besides his infantile curiosity while observing procreative process from the outside. He becomes King and attains power and magnificence, even superhuman abilities.

Possibly one may be surprised at so much absurdity. One should reflect, however, that those [pg 111] unconscious titanic powers of imagination that, from the innermost recesses of the soul set in motion the blindly creating dream phantasy, can only wish and do nothing but wish. They do not bother about whether the wishes are sensible or absurd. Critical power does not belong to them. This is the task of logical thinking as we consciously exercise it, inasmuch as we observe the wishes rising from the darkness and compare and weigh them according to teleological standards. The unconsciously impelling affective life, however, desires blindly, and troubles itself about nothing else.