Chapter IV

of the first part of this book:

“He has set me up for his mark.

“His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare:—he poureth out my gall upon the ground.

“He breaketh me with breach upon breach: he runneth upon me like a giant.”—_Job_ xvi:12–13–14.

Now we understand this symbolism as an expression for the soul torment caused by the onslaught of the unconscious desires. The libido festers in his flesh, a cruel god has taken possession of him and pierced him with his painful libidian projectiles, with thoughts, which overwhelmingly pass through him. (As a dementia præcox patient once said to me during his recovery: “To-day a thought suddenly thrust itself through me.”) This same idea is found again in Nietzsche in Zarathustra:

_The Magician_

Stretched out, shivering Like one half dead whose feet are warmed, Shaken alas! by unknown fevers, Trembling from the icy pointed arrows of frost, Hunted by Thee, O Thought! Unutterable! Veiled! Horrible One! Thou huntsman behind the clouds! Struck to the ground by thee, Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark! —————— Thus do I lie Bending, writhing, tortured With all eternal tortures, Smitten By thee, crudest huntsman, Thou unfamiliar God.

Smite deeper! Smite once more: Pierce through and rend my heart! What meaneth this torturing With blunt-toothed arrows? Why gazeth thou again, Never weary of human pain, With malicious, God-lightning eyes, Thou wilt not kill, But torture, torture?

No long-drawn-out explanation is necessary to enable us to recognize in this comparison the old, universal idea of the martyred sacrifice of God, which we have met previously in the Mexican sacrifice of the cross and in the sacrifice of Odin.[609] This same conception faces us in the oft-repeated martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where, in the delicate-glowing flesh of the young god, all the pain of renunciation which has been felt by the artist has been portrayed. An artist always embodies in his artistic work a portion of the mysteries of his time. In a heightened degree the same is true of the principal Christian symbol, the crucified one pierced by the lance, the conception of the man of the Christian era tormented by his wishes, crucified and dying in Christ.

This is not torment which comes from without, which befalls mankind; but that he himself is the hunter, murderer, sacrificer and sacrificial knife is shown us in another of Nietzsche’s poems, wherein the apparent dualism is transformed into the soul conflict through the use of the same symbolism:

“Oh, Zarathustra, Most cruel Nimrod! Whilom hunter of God The snare of all virtue, An arrow of evil! Now Hunted by thyself Thine own prey Pierced through thyself, Now Alone with thee Twofold in thine own knowledge Mid a hundred mirrors False to thyself, Mid a hundred memories Uncertain Ailing with each wound Shivering with each frost Caught in thine own snares, Self knower! Self hangman!

“Why didst thou strangle thyself With the noose of thy wisdom? Why hast thou enticed thyself Into the Paradise of the old serpent? Why hast thou crept Into thyself, thyself?...”

The deadly arrows do not strike the hero from without, but it is he himself who, in disharmony with himself, hunts, fights and tortures himself. Within himself will has turned against will, libido against libido—therefore, the poet says, “Pierced through thyself,” that is to say, wounded by his own arrow. Because we have discerned that the arrow is a libido symbol, the idea of “penetrating or piercing through” consequently becomes clear to us. It is a phallic act of union with one’s self, a sort of self-fertilization (introversion); also a self-violation, a self-murder; therefore, Zarathustra may call himself his own hangman, like Odin, who sacrifices himself to Odin.

The wounding by one’s own arrow means, first of all, _the state of introversion_. What this signifies we already know—the libido sinks into its “own depths” (a well-known comparison of Nietzsche’s) and finds there below, in the shadows of the unconscious, the substitute for the upper world, which it has abandoned: _the world of memories_ (“’mid a hundred memories”), the strongest and most influential of which are the early infantile memory pictures. It is the world of the child, this paradise-like state of earliest childhood, from which we are separated by a hard law. In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of home and the endless hopes of all that is to be. As Heinrich in the “Sunken Bell,” by Gerhart Hauptmann, says, in speaking of his miraculous work:

“There is a song lost and forgotten, A song of home, a love song of childhood, Brought up from the depths of the fairy well, Known to all, but yet unheard.”

However, as Mephistopheles says, “The danger is great.” These depths are enticing; they are the mother and—death. When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from the decision of the individual or from decreasing life force, then it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it has gushed forth, and turns back to that point of cleavage, the umbilicus, through which it once entered into this body. This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her comes the source of the libido. Therefore, when some great work is to be accomplished, before which weak man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido returns to that source—and this is the dangerous moment, in which the decision takes place between annihilation and new life. If the libido remains arrested in the wonder kingdom of the inner world,[610] then the man has become for the world above a phantom, then he is practically dead or desperately ill.[611] But if the libido succeeds in tearing itself loose and pushing up into the world above, then a miracle appears. This journey to the underworld has been a fountain of youth, and new fertility springs from his apparent death. This train of thought is very beautifully gathered into a Hindoo myth: Once upon a time, Vishnu sank into an ecstasy (introversion) and during this state of sleep bore Brahma, who, enthroned upon the lotus flower, arose from the navel of Vishnu, bringing with him the Vedas, which he diligently read. (Birth of creative thought from introversion.) But through Vishnu’s ecstasy a devouring flood came upon the world. (Devouring through introversion, symbolizing the danger of entering into the mother of death.) A demon taking advantage of the danger, stole the Vedas from Brahma and hid them in the depths. (Devouring of the libido.) Brahma roused Vishnu, and the latter, transforming himself into a fish, plunged into the flood, fought with the demon (battle with the dragon), conquered him and recaptured the Vedas. (Treasure obtained with difficulty.)

Self-concentration and the strength derived therefrom correspond to this primitive train of thought. It also explains numerous sacrificial and magic rites which we have already fully discussed. Thus the impregnable Troy falls because the besiegers creep into the belly of a wooden horse; for he alone is a hero who is reborn from the mother, like the sun. But the danger of this venture is shown by the history of Philoctetes, who was the only one in the Trojan expedition who knew the hidden sanctuary of Chryse, where the Argonauts had sacrificed already, and where the Greeks planned to sacrifice in order to assure a safe ending to their undertaking. Chryse was a nymph upon the island of Chryse; according to the account of the scholiasts in Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” this nymph loved Philoctetes, and cursed him because he spurned her love. This characteristic projection, which is also met with in the Gilgamesh epic, should be referred back, as suggested, to the repressed incest wish of the son, who is represented through the projection as if the mother had the evil wish, for the refusal of which the son was given over to death. In reality, however, the son becomes mortal by separating himself from the mother. His fear of death, therefore, corresponds to the repressed wish to turn back to the mother, and causes him to believe that the mother threatens or pursues him. The teleological significance of this _fear of persecution_ is evident; _it is to keep son and mother apart_.

The curse of Chryse is realized in so far that Philoctetes, according to one version, when approaching his altar, injured himself in his foot with one of his own deadly poisonous arrows, or, according to another version[612] (this is better and far more abundantly proven), _was bitten in his foot by a poisonous serpent_.[613] From then on he is ailing.[614]

This very typical wound, which also destroyed Rê, is described in the following manner in an Egyptian hymn:

“The ancient of the Gods moved his mouth, He cast his saliva upon the earth, And what he spat, fell upon the ground. With her hands Isis kneaded that and the soil Which was about it, together: From that she created a venerable worm, And made him like a spear. She did not twist him living around her face, But threw him coiled upon the path, Upon which the great God wandered at ease Through all his lands.

“The venerable God stepped forth radiantly, The gods who served Pharaoh accompanied him, And he proceeded as every day. Then the venerable worm stung him.... The divine God opened his mouth And the voice of his majesty echoed even to the sky. And the gods exclaimed: Behold! Thereupon he could not answer, His jaws chattered, All his limbs trembled And the poison gripped his flesh, As the Nile seizes upon the land.”

In this hymn Egypt has again preserved for us a primitive conception of the serpent’s sting. The aging of the autumn sun as an image of human senility is symbolically traced back to the mother through the poisoning by the serpent. The mother is reproached, because her malice causes the death of the sun-god. The serpent, the primitive symbol of fear,[615] illustrates the repressed tendency to turn back to the mother, because the only possibility of security from death is possessed by the mother, as the source of life.

Accordingly, only the mother can cure him, sick unto death, and, therefore, the hymn goes on to depict how the gods were assembled to take counsel:

“And Isis came with her wisdom: Her mouth is full of the breath of life, Her words banish sorrow, And her speech animates those who no longer breathe. She said: ‘What is that; what is that, divine father? Behold, a worm has brought you sorrow——’

“‘Tell me thy name, divine father, Because the man remains alive, who is called by his name.’”

Whereupon Rê replied:

“‘I am he, who created heaven and earth, and piled up the hills, And created all beings thereon. I am he, who made the water and caused the great flood, Who produced the bull of his mother, Who is the procreator,’ etc.

“The poison did not depart, it went further, The great God was not cured. Then said Isis to Rê: ‘Thine is not the name thou hast told me. Tell me true that the poison may leave thee, For he whose name is spoken will live.’”

Finally Rê decides to speak his true name. He is approximately healed (imperfect composition of Osiris); but he has lost his power, and finally he retreats to the heavenly cow.

The poisonous worm is, if one may speak in this way, a “negative” phallus, a deadly, not an animating, form of libido; therefore, a wish for death, instead of a wish for life. The “true name” is soul and magic power; hence a symbol of libido. What Isis demands is the retransference of the libido to the mother goddess. This request is fulfilled literally, for the aged god turns back to the divine cow, the symbol of the mother.[616] This symbolism is clear from our previous explanations. The onward urging, living libido which rules the consciousness of the son, demands separation from the mother. The longing of the child for the mother is a hindrance on the path to this, taking the form of a psychologic resistance, which is expressed empirically in the neurosis by all manners of fears, that is to say, the fear of life. The more a person withdraws from adaptation to reality, and falls into slothful inactivity, the greater becomes his anxiety (cum grano salis), which everywhere besets him at each point as a hindrance upon his path. The fear springs from the mother, that is to say, from the longing to go back to the mother, which is opposed to the adaptation to reality. This is the way in which the mother has become apparently the malicious pursuer. Naturally, it is not the actual mother, although the actual mother, with the abnormal tenderness with which she sometimes pursues her child, even into adult years, may gravely injure it through a willful prolonging of the infantile state in the child. It is rather the mother-imago, which becomes the Lamia. The mother-imago, however, possesses its power solely and exclusively from the son’s tendency not only to look and to work forwards, but also to glance backwards to the pampering sweetness of childhood, to that glorious state of irresponsibility and security with which the protecting mother-care once surrounded him.[617]

The retrospective longing acts like a paralyzing poison upon the energy and enterprise; so that it may well be compared to a poisonous serpent which lies across our path. Apparently, it is a hostile demon which robs us of energy, but, in reality, it is the individual unconscious, the retrogressive tendency of which begins to overcome the conscious forward striving. The cause of this can be, for example, the natural aging which weakens the energy, or it may be great external difficulties, which cause man to break down and become a child again, or it may be, and this is probably the most frequent cause, the woman who enslaves the man, so that he can no longer free himself, and becomes a child again.[618] It may be of significance also that Isis, as sister-wife of the sun-god, creates the poisonous animal from the spittle of the god, which is perhaps a substitute for sperma, and, therefore, is a symbol of libido. She creates the animal from the libido of the god; that means she receives his power, making him weak and dependent, so that by this means she assumes the dominating rôle of the mother. (Mother transference to the wife.) This part is preserved in the legend of Samson, in the rôle of Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair, the sun’s rays, thus robbing him of his strength.[619] Any weakening of the adult man strengthens the wishes of the unconscious; therefore, the decrease of strength appears directly as the backward striving towards the mother.

There is still to be considered one more source of the reanimation of the mother-imago. We have already met it in the discussion of the mother

## scene in “Faust,” that is to say, _the willed introversion of a creative

mind_, which, retreating before its own problem and inwardly collecting its forces, dips at least for a moment into the source of life, in order there to wrest a little more strength from the mother for the completion of its work. It is a mother-child play with one’s self, in which lies much weak selfadmiration and self-adulation (“Among a hundred mirrors”—Nietzsche); _a Narcissus state_, a strange spectacle, perhaps, for profane eyes. The separation from the mother-imago, the birth out of one’s self, reconciles all conflicts through the sufferings. This is probably meant by Nietzsche’s verse:

“Why hast thou enticed thyself Into the Paradise of the old serpent? Why hast thou crept Into thyself, thyself?...

“A sick man now Sick of a serpent’s poison,[620] A captive now Whom the hardest destiny befell In thine own pit; Bowed down as thou workest Encaved within thyself, Burrowing into thyself, Helpless, Stiff, A corpse. Overwhelmed with a hundred burdens, Overburdened by thyself. A wise man, A self-knower, The wise Zarathustra; Thou soughtest the heaviest burden And foundest thou thyself....”

The symbolism of this speech is of the greatest richness. He is buried in the depths of _self, as if in the earth_; really a dead man who has turned back to mother earth;[621] a Kaineus “piled with a hundred burdens” and pressed down to death; the one who groaning bears the heavy burden of his own libido, of that libido which draws him back to the mother. Who does not think of the Taurophoria of Mithra, who took his bull (according to the Egyptian hymn, “the bull of his mother”), that is, his love for his mother, the heaviest burden upon his back, and with that entered upon the painful course of the so-called Transitus![622] This path of passion led to the cave, in which the bull was sacrificed. Christ, too, had to bear the cross,[623] the symbol of his love for the mother, and he carried it to the place of sacrifice where the lamb was slain in the form of the God, the infantile man, a “self-executioner,” and then to burial in the subterranean sepulchre.[624]

That which in Nietzsche appears as a poetical figure of speech is really a primitive myth. It is as if the poet still possessed a dim idea or capacity to feel and reactivate those imperishable phantoms of long-past worlds of thought in the words of our present-day speech and in the images which crowd themselves into his phantasy. Hauptmann also says: “Poetic rendering is that which allows the echo of the primitive word to resound through the form.”[625]

The sacrifice, with its mysterious and manifold meaning, which is rather hinted at than expressed, passes unrecognized in the unconscious of our author. The arrow is not shot, the hero Chiwantopel is not yet fatally poisoned and ready for death through self-sacrifice. We now can say, according to the preceding material, this sacrifice means renouncing the mother, that is to say, _renunciation of all bonds and limitations which the soul has taken with it from the period of childhood into the adult life_. From various hints of Miss Miller’s it appears that at the time of these phantasies she was still living in the circle of the family, evidently at an age which was in urgent need of independence. That is to say, man does not live very long in the infantile environment or in the bosom of his family without real danger to his mental health. Life calls him forth to independence, and he who gives no heed to this hard call because of childish indolence and fear is threatened by a neurosis, and once the neurosis has broken out it becomes more and more a valid reason to escape the battle with life and to remain for all time in the morally poisoned infantile atmosphere.

The phantasy of the arrow-wound belongs in this struggle for personal independence. The thought of this resolution has not yet penetrated the dreamer. On the contrary, she rather repudiates it. After all the preceding, it is evident that the symbolism of the arrow-wound through direct translation must be taken as a coitus symbol. The “Occide moriturus” attains by this means the sexual significance belonging to it. Chiwantopel naturally represents the dreamer. But nothing is attained and nothing is understood through one’s reduction to the coarse sexual, because it is a commonplace that the unconscious shelters coitus wishes, the discovery of which signifies nothing further. _The coitus wish under this aspect is really a symbol for the individual demonstration of the libido separated from the parents, of the conquest of an independent life._ This step towards a new life means, at the same time, the death of the past life.[626] Therefore, Chiwantopel is the infantile hero[627] (the son, the child, the lamb, the fish) who is still enchained by the fetters of childhood and who has to die as a symbol of the incestuous libido, and with that sever the retrogressive bond. For the entire libido is demanded for the battle of life, and there can be no remaining behind. The dreamer cannot yet come to this decision, which will tear aside all the sentimental connections with father and mother, and yet it must be made in order to follow the call of the individual destiny.

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