Then he cried with grief and spoke his prayer:
“‘Sovereign God, take me soon! I have tried to know thee, and to keep thy law! O, do not suffer my body to fall into corruption and decay, and to furnish the vultures with food!’ A smoking crater is perceived at a distance, the rumbling of an earthquake is heard, followed by a trembling of the ground.”
Chiwantopel cries in the delirium of suffering, while the earth covers his body:
“I have kept my body inviolate. Ah! She understands. Ja-ni-wa-ma, Ja-ni-wa-ma, thou who comprehendeth me.”
Chiwantopel’s prophecy is a repetition of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” where the poet could not escape sentimentality, and at the close of the career of the hero, Hiawatha, he brings in the Savior of the white people, in the guise of the arriving illustrious representatives of the Christian religion and morals. (One thinks of the work of redemption of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru!) With this prophecy of Chiwantopel, the personality of the author is again placed in the closest relation to the hero, and, indeed, as the real object of Chiwantopel’s longing. Most certainly the hero would have married her, had she lived at his time; but, unfortunately, she comes too late. The connection proves our previous assertion that the libido moves round in a circle. The author loves herself; that is to say, she, as the hero, is sought by one who comes too late. This motive of coming too late is characteristic of the infantile love: the father and the mother cannot be overtaken. The separation of the two personalities by ten thousand moons is a wish fulfilment; with that the incest relation is annulled in an effectual manner. This white heroine will seek without being understood. (She is not understood, because she cannot understand herself rightly.) And she will not find. But in dreams, at least, they will find each other, “and she will understand.” The next sentence of the text reads:
“I have kept my body inviolate.”
This proud sentence, which naturally only a woman can express, because man is not accustomed to boast in that direction, again confirms the fact that all enterprises have remained but dreams, that the body has remained “inviolate.” When the hero visits the heroine in a dream, it is clear what is meant. This assertion of the hero’s, that he has remained inviolate, refers back to the unsuccessful attempt upon his life in the previous chapter (huntsman with the arrow), and clearly explains to us what was really meant by this assault; that is to say, the refusal of the coitus phantasy. Here the wish of the unconscious obtrudes itself again, after the hero had repressed it the first time, and thereupon he painfully and hysterically utters this monologue. “Temptation will often assail her soul—but it will not yield.” This very bold assertion reduces—noblesse oblige—the unconscious to an enormous infantile megalomania, which is always the case when the libido is compelled, through similar circumstances, to regressions. “Only once in all the ten thousand moons is a soul born like mine!” Here the unconscious ego expands to an enormous degree, evidently in order to cover with its boastfulness a large part of the neglected duty of life. But punishment follows at its heels. Whoever prides himself too much on having sustained no wound in the battle of life lays himself open to the suspicion that his fighting has been with words only, whilst actually he has remained far away from the firing-line. This spirit is just the reverse of the pride of those savage women, who point with satisfaction to the countless scars which were given them by their men in the sexual fight for supremacy. In accordance with this, and in logical continuation of the same, all that follows is expressed in figurative speech. The orgiastic “Occide moriturus” in its admixture with the reckless laughter of the Dionysian frenzy confronts us here in sorry disguise with a sentimental stage trickery worthy of our posthumous edition of “Christian morals.” In place of the positive phallus, the negative appears, and leads the hero’s horse (his libido animalis), not to satisfaction, but into eternal peace—also the fate of the hero. This end means that the mother, represented as the jaws of death, devours the libido of the daughter. Therefore, instead of life and procreative growth, only phantastic self-oblivion results. This weak and inglorious end has no elevating or illuminating meaning so long as we consider it merely as the solution of an individual erotic conflict. The fact that the symbols under which the solution takes place have actually a significant aspect, reveals to us that behind the individual mask, behind the veil of “individuation,” a primitive idea stands, the severe and serious features of which take from us the courage to consider the sexual meaning of the Miller symbolism as all-sufficient.
It is not to be forgotten that the sexual phantasies of the neurotic and the exquisite sexual language of dreams are regressive phenomena. The sexuality of the unconscious is not what it seems to be; it is merely a symbol; it is a thought bright as day, clear as sunlight, a decision, a step forward to every goal of life—but expressed in the unreal sexual language of the unconscious, and in the thought form of an earlier stage; a resurrection, so to speak, of earlier modes of adaptation. When, therefore, the unconscious pushes into the foreground the coitus wish, negatively expressed, it means somewhat as follows: under similar circumstances primitive man acted in such and such a manner. The mode of adaptation which to-day is unconscious for us is carried on by the savage Negro of the present day, whose undertakings beyond those of nutrition appertain to sexuality, characterized by violence and cruelty. Therefore, in view of the archaic mode of expression of the Miller phantasy, we are justified in assuming the correctness of our interpretation for the lowest and nearest plane only. A deeper stratum of meaning underlies the earlier assertion that the figure of Chiwantopel has the character of Cassius, who has a lamb as a companion. Therefore, Chiwantopel is the portion of the dreamer’s libido bound up with the mother (and, therefore, masculine); hence he is her infantile personality, the childishness of character, which as yet is unable to understand that one must leave father and mother, when the time is come, in order to serve the destiny of the entire personality. This is outlined in Nietzsche’s words:
“Free dost thou call thyself? Thy dominant thought would I hear and not that thou hast thrown off a yoke. Art thou one who had the right to throw off a yoke? There are many who throw away their last value when they throw away their servitude.”
Therefore, when Chiwantopel dies, it means that herein is a fulfilment of a wish, that this infantile hero, who cannot leave the mother’s care, may die. And if with that the bond between mother and daughter is severed, a great step forward is gained both for inner and outer freedom. But man wishes to remain a child too long; he would fain stop the turning of the wheel, which, rolling, bears along with it the years; man wishes to keep his childhood and eternal youth, rather than to die and suffer corruption in the grave. (“O, do not suffer my body to fall into decay and corruption.”) Nothing brings the relentless flight of time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our consciousness than an inactive and empty life. Idle dreaming is the mother of the fear of death, the sentimental deploring of what has been and the vain turning back of the clock. Although man can forget in the long- (perhaps too long) guarded feelings of youth, in the dreamy state of stubbornly held remembrances, that the wheel rolls onward, nevertheless mercilessly does the gray hair, the relaxation of the skin and the wrinkles in the face tell us, that whether or not we expose the body to the destroying powers of the whole struggle of life, the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies, which, alas! we so dearly love. Nor does it help if we cry out with the melancholy hero Chiwantopel, “I have kept my body inviolate”; flight from life does not free us from the law of age and death. The neurotic who seeks to get rid of the necessities of life wins nothing and lays upon himself the frightful burden of a premature age and death, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life. If the libido is not permitted to follow the progressive life, which is willing to accept all dangers and all losses, then it follows the other road, sinking into its own depths, working down into the old foreboding regarding the immortality of all life, to the longing for rebirth.