“Thou, who standest before me, stretch out to me thy hands, it is I, I am become one of thee. Daily am I together with my Father Atum.”
The identification with God necessarily has as a result the enhancing of the meaning and power of the individual.[[127]] That seems, first of all, to have been really its purpose: a strengthening of the individual against his all too great weakness and insecurity in real life. This great megalomania thus has a genuinely pitiable background. The strengthening of the consciousness of power is, however, only an external result of the “becoming-one with God.” Of much more significance are the deeper-lying disturbances in the realm of feeling. Whoever introverts libido—that is to say, whoever takes it away from a real object without putting in its place a real compensation—is overtaken by the inevitable results of introversion. The libido, which is turned inward into the subject, awakens again from among the sleeping remembrances one which contains the path upon which earlier the libido once had come to the real object. At the very first and in foremost position it was father and mother who were the objects of the childish love. They are unequalled and imperishable. Not many difficulties are needed in an adult’s life to cause those memories to reawaken and to become effectual. In religion the regressive reanimation of the father-and-mother imago is organized into a system. The benefits of religion are the benefits of parental hands; its protection and its peace are the results of parental care upon the child; its mystic feelings are the unconscious memories of the tender emotions of the first childhood, just as the hymn expresses it:
“I am in my country, I come into my city. Daily am I together with my father Atum.”[[128]]
The visible father of the world is, however, the sun, the heavenly fire; therefore, Father, God, Sun, Fire are mythologically synonymous. The well-known fact that in the sun’s strength the great generative power of nature is honored shows plainly, very plainly, to any one to whom as yet it may not be clear that in the Deity man honors his own libido, and naturally in the form of the image or symbol of the present object of transference. This symbol faces us in an especially marked manner in the third Logos of the Dieterich papyrus. After the second prayer[[129]] stars come from the disc of the sun to the mystic, “five-pointed, in quantities, filling the whole air. If the sun’s disc has expanded, you will see an immeasurable circle, and fiery gates which are shut off.” The mystic utters the following prayer:
Ἐπακουσόν μου, ἀκουσόν μου—ὁ συνδήσας πνεύματι τὰ πύρινα κλεῖθρα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, δισώματος πυρίπολε, φωτὸς κτίστα—πυρίπνοε, πυρίθυμε, πνευματόφως, πυριχαρῆ, καλλίφως, φωτοκράτωρ, πυρισώματε, φωτοδότα, πυρισπόρε, πυρικλόνε, φωτόβιε, πυριδῖνα, φωτοκινῆτα, κεραυνοκλόνε, φωτὸς κλέος, αὐξησίφως, ἐνπυρισχησίφως, ἀστροδάμα.[[130]]
The invocation is, as one sees, almost inexhaustible in light and fire attributes, and can be likened in its extravagance only to the synonymous attributes of love of the mystic of the Middle Ages. Among the innumerable texts which might be used as an illustration of this, I select a passage from the writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg (1212–1277):
“O Lord, love me excessively and love me often and long; the oftener you love me, so much the purer do I become; the more excessively you love me, the more beautiful I become; the longer you love me, the more holy will I become here upon earth.”
God answered: “That I love you often, that I have from my nature, for I myself am love. That I love you excessively, that I have from my desire, for I too desire that men love me excessively. That I love you long, that I have from my everlastingness, for I am without end.”[[131]]
The religious regression makes use indeed of the parent image without, however, consciously making it an object of transference, for the incest horror[[132]] forbids that. It remains rather as a synonym, for example, of the father or of God, or of the more or less personified symbol of the sun and fire.[[133]] Sun and fire—that is to say, the fructifying strength and heat—are attributes of the libido. In Mysticism the inwardly perceived, divine vision is often merely sun or light, and is very little, or not at all, personified. In the Mithraic liturgy there is found, for example, a significant quotation:
Ἡ δὲ πορεία τῶν ὁρωμένων θεῶν διὰ τοῦ δίσκου, πατρός μου, θεοῦ φανήσεται.[[134]]