[810]. This form of question recalls the well-known Indian symbol of the world-bearing animal: an elephant standing upon a tortoise. The elephant has chiefly masculine-phallic significance and the tortoise, like every shell animal, chiefly feminine significance.
[811]. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Vol. II, p. 171.
[812]. The neurotic Don Juan is no evidence to the contrary. That which the “habitué” understands by love is merely an infirmity and far different from that which love means!
[813]. Spiegel: “Erân. Altertumskunde,” II, 667.
[814]. Freud: “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci,” p. 57: “The almighty, just God and benevolent nature appear to us as a great sublimation of father and mother, rather than revivals and reproductions of the early childish ideas of them. Religiousness leads biologically back to the long-continued helplessness and need of the offspring of man, who, when later he has recognized his real loneliness, and weakness against the great powers of life, feels his condition similar to that of childhood, and seeks to disavow this forlorn state by regressive renewal of the infantile protective powers.”
[815]. Nietzsche: “Fröhliche Wissenschaft,” Aphorism 157. “Mentiri—give heed!—he muses: immediately he will have a lie prepared. This is a stage of culture, upon which whole peoples have stood. One should ponder over what the Romans meant by mentiri!” Actually the Indo-Germanic root méntis, men, is the same for mentiri, memini and mens. See Walde: “Lat. Etym.,” sub. mendax, memini und mens.
[816]. See Freud: Jahrbuch, Vol. III, p. 60.
[817]. Bundehesh, XV, 27. The bull Sarsaok was sacrificed at the destruction of the world. But Sarsaok was the originator of the race of men: he had brought nine of the fifteen human races upon his back through the sea to the distant points of the compass. The primitive bull of Gayomart has, as we saw above, most undoubtedly female and maternal significance on account of his fertility.
[818]. If for Silberer the mythological symbolism is a process of cognition on the mythological stage (Jahrbuch, Vol. III, p. 664), then there exists, between this view and mine, only a difference of standpoint, which determines a different manner of expression.
[819]. This series of representations begins with the totem meal.