Laughing death!”
is to be found the same significant contrast.
The further destinies of Siegfried are those of the Invictus: the spear of the gloomy, one-eyed Hagen strikes Siegfried’s vulnerable spot. The old sun, who has become the god of death, the one-eyed Wotan, smites his offspring, and once again ascends in eternal rejuvenation. The course of the invincible sun has supplied the mystery of human life with beautiful and imperishable symbols; it became a comforting fulfilment of all the yearning for immortality, of all desire of mortals for eternal life.
Man leaves the mother, the source of libido, and is driven by the eternal thirst to find her again, and to drink renewal from her; thus he completes his cycle, and returns again into the mother’s womb. Every obstacle which obstructs his life’s path, and threatens his ascent, wears the shadowy features of the “terrible mother,” who paralyzes his energy with the consuming poison of the stealthy, retrospective longing. In each conquest he wins again the smiling love and life-giving mother—images which belong to the intuitive depths of human feeling, the features of which have become mutilated and irrecognizable through the progressive development of the surface of the human mind. The stern necessity of adaptation works ceaselessly to obliterate the last traces of these primitive landmarks of the period of the origin of the human mind, and to replace them along lines which are to denote more and more clearly the nature of real objects.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SACRIFICE
After this long digression, let us return to Miss Miller’s vision. We can now answer the question as to the significance of Siegfried’s longing for Brunhilde. It is the striving of the libido away from the mother towards the mother. This paradoxical sentence may be translated as follows: as long as the libido is satisfied merely with phantasies, it moves in itself, in its own depths, in the mother.[[789]] When the longing of our author rises in order to escape the magic circle of the incestuous and, therefore, pernicious, object, and it does not succeed in finding reality, then the object is and remains irrevocably the mother. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings the deliverance from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish.
Whoever is acquainted with psychoanalysis knows how often neurotics cry out against their parents. To be sure, such complaints and reproaches are often justified on account of the common human imperfections, but still more often they are reproaches which should really be directed towards themselves. Reproach and hatred are always futile attempts to free one’s self apparently from the parents, but in reality from one’s own hindering longing for the parents. Our author proclaims through the mouth of her infantile hero Chiwantopel a series of insults against her own family. We can assume that she must renounce all these tendencies, because they contain an unrecognized wish. This hero, of many words, who performs few deeds and indulges in futile yearnings, is the libido which has not fulfilled its destiny, but which turns round and round in the kingdom of the mother, and, in spite of all its longing, accomplishes nothing. Only he can break this magic circle who possesses the courage of the will to live and the heroism to carry it through. Could this yearning hero-youth, Chiwantopel, but put an end to his existence, he would probably rise again in the form of a brave man seeking real life. This necessity imposes itself upon the dreamer as a wise counsel and hint of the unconscious in the following monologue of Chiwantopel. He cries sadly:
“In all the world, there is not a single one! I have sought among a hundred tribes. I have watched a hundred moons, since I began. Can it be that there is not a solitary being who will ever know my soul? Yes, by the sovereign God, yes! But ten thousand moons will wax and wane before that pure soul is born. And it is from another world that her parents will come to this one. She will have pale skin and pale locks. She will know sorrow before her mother bears her. Suffering will accompany her; she will seek also, and she will find, no one who understands her. Temptation will often assail her soul—but she will not yield. In her dreams, I will come to her, and she will understand. I have kept my body inviolate. I have come ten thousand moons before her epoch, and she will come ten thousand moons too late. But she will understand! There is only once in all the ten thousand moons that a soul like hers is born.”
Thereupon a green serpent darts from the bushes, glides towards him and stings him on the arm, then attacks the horse, which succumbs first. Then Chiwantopel says to his horse:
“‘Adieu, faithful brother! Enter into rest! I have loved you, and you have served me well. Adieu. Soon I will rejoin you!’ Then to the snake: ‘Thanks, little sister, you have put an end to my wanderings.’”