“I lay on the seashore, the shining waters glittering in my dreamy eyes; at a great distance fluttered the soft breeze; throbbing, shimmering, stirring, lulling to sleep comes the wave beat to the shore—or to the ear? I know not. Distance and nearness become blurred into one; without and within glide into each other. Nearer and nearer, dearer and more homelike sounds the beating of the waves; now, like a thundering pulse in my head it strikes, and now it beats over my soul, devours it, embraces it, while it itself at the same time floats out like the blue waste of waters. Yes, without and within are one. Glistening and foaming, flowing and fanning and roaring, the entire symphony of the stimuli experienced sounds in one tone, all thought becomes one thought, which becomes one with feeling; the world exhales in the soul and the soul dissolves in the world. Our small life is encircled by a great sleep—the sleep of our cradle, the sleep of our grave, the sleep of our home, from which we go forth in the morning, to which we again return in the evening; our life but the short journey, the interval between the emergence from the original oneness and the sinking back into it! Blue shimmers the infinite sea, wherein dreams the jelly fish of the primitive life, toward which without ceasing our thoughts hark back dimly through eons of existence. For every happening entails a change and a guarantee of the unity of life. At that moment when they are no longer blended together, in that instant man lifts his head, blind and dripping, from the depths of the stream of experience, from the oneness with the experience; at that moment of parting when the unity of life in startled surprise detaches the Change and holds it away from itself as something alien, at this moment of alienation the aspects of the experience have been substantialized into subject and object, and in that moment consciousness is born.”
Joël paints here, in unmistakable symbolism, the confluence of subject and object as the reunion of mother and child. The symbols agree with those of mythology, even in their details. The encircling and devouring motive is distinctly suggested. The sea, devouring the sun and giving birth to it anew, is already an old acquaintance. The moment of the rise of consciousness, the separation of subject and object is a birth; truly philosophical thought hangs with lame wings upon the few great primitive pictures of human speech, above the simple, all-surpassing greatness of which no thought can rise. The idea of the jelly fish is not “accidental.” Once when I was explaining to a patient the maternal significance of water at this contact with the mother complex, she experienced a very unpleasant feeling. “It makes me squirm,” she said, “as if I touched a jelly fish.” Here, too, the same idea! The blessed state of sleep before birth and after death is, as Joël observed, something like old shadowy memories of that unsuspecting, thoughtless state of early childhood, where as yet no opposition disturbed the peaceful flow of dawning life, to which the inner longing always draws us back again and again, and from which the active life must free itself anew with struggle and death, so that it may not be doomed to destruction. Long before Joël, an Indian chieftain had said the same thing in similar words to one of the restless wise men:
“Ah, my brother, you will never learn to know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing: this is next to sleep; this is the most delightful thing there is. Thus we were before birth, thus we shall be after death.”[[646]]
We shall see in Hiawatha’s later fate how important his early impressions are in his choice of a wife. Hiawatha’s first deed was to kill a roebuck with his arrow:
“Dead he lay there in the forest,
By the ford across the river.”
This is typical of Hiawatha’s deeds. Whatever he kills, for the most part, lies next to or in the water, sometimes half in the water and half on the land.[[647]] It seems that this must well be so. The later adventures will teach us why this must be so. The buck was no ordinary animal, but a magic one; that is to say, one with an additional unconscious significance. Hiawatha made for himself gloves and moccasins from its hide; the gloves imparted such strength to his arms that he could crumble rocks to dust, and the moccasins had the virtue of the seven-league boots. By enwrapping himself in the buck’s skin he really became a giant. This motive, together with the death of the animal at the ford,[[648]] in the water, reveals the fact that the parents are concerned, whose gigantic proportions as compared with the child are of great significance in the unconscious. The “toys of giants” is a wish inversion of the infantile phantasy. The dream of an eleven-year-old girl expresses this:
“I am as high as a church steeple; then a policeman comes. I tell him, ‘If you say anything, I will cut off your head.’”
The “policeman,” as the analysis brought out, referred to the father, whose gigantic size was over-compensated by the church steeple. In Mexican human sacrifices, the gods were represented by criminals, who were slaughtered, and flayed, and the Corybantes then clothed themselves in the bloody skins, in order to illustrate the resurrection of the gods.[[649]] (The snake’s casting of his skin as a symbol of rejuvenation.)
Hiawatha has, therefore, conquered his parents, primarily the mother, although in the form of a male animal (compare the bear of Mudjekeewis); and from that comes his giant’s strength. He has taken on the parent’s skin and now has himself become a great man. Now he started forth to his first great battle to fight with the father Mudjekeewis, in order to avenge his dead mother Wenonah. Naturally, under this figure of speech hides the thought that he slays the father, in order to take possession of the mother. Compare the battle of Gilgamesh with the giant Chumbaba and the ensuing conquest of Ishtar. The father, in the psychologic sense, merely represents the personification of the incest prohibition; that is to say, resistance, which defends the mother. Instead of the father, it may be a fearful animal (the great bear, the snake, the dragon, etc.) which must be fought and overcome. The hero is a hero because he sees in every difficulty of life resistance to the forbidden treasure, and fights that resistance with the complete yearning which strives towards the treasure, attainable with difficulty, or unattainable, the yearning which paralyzes and kills the ordinary man.