“And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water.”
When Hiawatha, in his earliest childhood dreaming, felt the sounds of water and wind press upon his ears, he recognized in these sounds of nature the speech of his mother. The murmuring pine trees on the shore of the great sea, said “Minnewawa.” And above the murmuring of the winds and the splashing of the water he found his earliest childhood dreams once again in a woman, “Minnehaha,” the laughing water. And the hero, before all others, finds in woman the mother, in order to become a child again, and, finally, to solve the riddle of immortality.
The fact that Minnehaha’s father is a skilful arrow-maker betrays him as the father of the hero (and the woman he had with him as the mother). The father of the hero is very often a skilful carpenter, or other artisan. According to an Arabian legend, Tare,[[651]] Abraham’s father, was a skilful master workman, who could carve arrows from any wood; that is to say, in the Arabian form of speech, he was a procreator of splendid sons.[[652]] Moreover, he was a maker of images of gods. Tvashtar, Agni’s father, is the maker of the world, a smith and carpenter, the discoverer of fire-boring. Joseph, the father of Jesus, was also a carpenter; likewise Kinyras, Adonis’s father, who is said to have invented the hammer, the lever, roofing and mining. Hephaestus, the father of Hermes, is an artistic master workman and sculptor. In fairy tales, the father of the hero is very modestly the traditional wood-cutter. These conceptions were also alive in the cult of Osiris. There the divine image was carved out of a tree trunk and then placed within the hollow of the tree. (Frazer: “Golden Bough,” Part IV.) In Rigveda, the world was also hewn out of a tree by the world-sculptor. The idea that the hero is his own procreator[[653]] leads to the fact that he is invested with paternal attributes, and reversedly the heroic attributes are given to the father. In Mânî there exists a beautiful union of the motives. He accomplishes his great labors as a religious founder, hides himself for years in a cave, he dies, is skinned, stuffed and hung up (hero). Besides he is an artist, and has a crippled foot. A similar union of motives is found in Wieland, the smith.
Hiawatha kept silent about what he saw at the old arrow-maker’s on his return to Nokomis, and he did nothing further to win Minnehaha. But now something happened, which, if it were not in an Indian epic, would rather be sought in the history of a neurosis. Hiawatha introverted his libido; that is to say, he fell into an extreme resistance against the “real sexual demand” (Freud); he built a hut for himself in the wood, in order to fast there and to experience dreams and visions. For the first three days he wandered, as once in his earliest youth, through a forest and looked at all the animals and plants:
“‘Master of life!’ he cried, desponding,
‘Must our lives depend on these things?’”
The question whether our lives must depend upon “these things” is very strange. It sounds as if life were derived from these things; that is to say, from nature in general. Nature seems suddenly to have assumed a very strange significance. This phenomenon can be explained only through the fact that a great amount of libido was stored up and now is given to nature. As is well known, men of even dull and prosy minds, in the springtime of love, suddenly become aware of nature, and even make poems about it. But we know that libido, prevented from an actual way of transference, always reverts to an earlier way of transference. Minnehaha, the laughing water, is so clearly an allusion to the mother that the secret yearning of the hero for the mother is powerfully touched. Therefore, without having undertaken anything, he goes home to Nokomis; but there again he is driven away, because Minnehaha already stands in his path.
He turns, therefore, even further away, into that early youthful period, the tones of which recall Minnehaha most forcibly to his thoughts, where he learnt to hear the mother-sounds in the sounds of nature. In this very strange revival of the impressions of nature we recognize a regression to those earliest and strongest nature impressions which stand next to the subsequently extinguished, even stronger, impressions which the child received from the mother. The glamour of this feeling for her is transferred to other objects of the childish environment (father’s house, playthings, etc.), from which later those magic blissful feelings proceed, which seem to be peculiar to the earliest childish memories. When, therefore, Hiawatha hides himself in the lap of nature, it is really the mother’s womb, and it is to be expected that he will emerge again new-born in some form.