Notes.
Note A (80). I put here not merely those comparisons of motives which are alike at the beginning, but also those that are important for our further consideration. My rendering of them is partly abridged. Signs of similarity are, as Stucken explains, not employed to express an absolute congruence, but predominantly in the sense of “belongs with” or “or is the alternate of.” Stucken's comparison I, A, goes: Moses in the ark = spark of fire in the ark = Pandora's books = Eve's apple; I, B: Moses in the ark = the exposed = the fatherless = the persecuted = the deluge hero [the one floating in the ark]. II, A: Eve's apple = Moses in the ark = Onan's seed = fire = soma = draught of knowledge, etc. III, B: Tearing open of the womb = decapitation or dismemberment = exposure = separation of the first parents. IV, B: The dismembered [man or woman] = the rejuvenated = the reborn [m. or w.]. VI, A: Potiphar motive = separation of first parents = Onan motive. VII, A: The wicked stepmother = Potiphar's wife = man eater. VII, B: Flight from the “man eater” = flight from Potiphar's wife = flight from the wicked stepmother = separation of the first parents = magic flight. IX, A: The first parents = magic flight. IX, A: The killed ram = Thor's ram = Thyestes' meal = soma. XIII, A: The exposed = the persecuted = the dismembered child = the slain ram—the helpful animal. XIX: The Uriah letter = the changed letter = word violence [curse = blessing]. XX: Scapegoat = ark. XXVIII: Wrestling match = rape of women = rape of soma = opening of the chest [opening of [pg 418] the hole] = rape of the garments [of the bathing swan ladies]. XXIX: Castration = tearing asunder [consuming] of the mother's body = the final conflagration = the deluge. XXXIII, A: Dragonfight = wrestling match = winning of the offered king's daughter = rape of the women = rape of fire = deluge. XL, A: Incest motive = Potiphar motive. XL, B: Incest = violation of a [moral] prohibition. XL, C: Seducer [male or female] to incest = “man-eater.” XLIV, A: The father who rejects the daughter = “man eater.” XLIV, B: Separation of the first parents = refusal of the daughter [refusal of the “king's daughter” promised to the dragon fighter] = substitution. XLV, A: Sodomy = substitution = rape = parthenogenesis = marriage of mortal with the immortal = seduction = adultery = incest = love = embraces of the first parents = wrestling match. Otherwise is marriage of mortal with the immortal = incest = separation of the first parents. (SAM Book 5.)
Note B (128). That the ideas of gold and offal lie very near each other is shown in numerous forms and variations in myth, fairy tale and popular superstition. I mention above all the figure of the ducat or gold-dropper which has probably been attenuated from a superstition to a joke, and around it are gathered such expressions as “he has gold like muck,” “he must have a gold dropper at his house”; then the description of bloody hemorrhoids as golden veins; the fabulous animals that produce as excrement gold and precious things. Here belong also the golden ass [K. H. M., No. 36], which at the word “Bricklebrit” begins “to spew gold from before and behind,” or [Pentam., No. 1], at the command, “arre cacaure,” gives forth gold, pearls and diamonds as a priceless diarrhea. [Arre is a word of encouragement like our get-up; cacuare is derived naturally from cacare, kacken = to cack, perhaps with an echo of aurum, [pg 419] oro, gold.] It occurs frequently in sagas that animal dung, e.g., horse manure, is changed into gold as, inversely, gold sent by evil spirits is easily turned [again] into dung. Gold is, in the ancient Babylonian way of thinking, which passes over into many myths, muck of hell or the under world. If a man buried a treasure so that no one should find it, he does well to plant a cactus on the covered [treasure] as a guardian of the gold, according to an old magical custom. An attenuation of the comparison dung = gold seems to be coal = gold. In Stucken we find the comparison excrement = Rheingold = sperm [S. A. M., p. 262] and connected with it [pp. 266 ff.] a mass of material mythologically connected with it. I mention the similar parallels derived from dream analysis (Stekel, Spr. d. Tr., passim), further in particular the psychologically interesting contributions of Freud on “Anal character” (Kl. Schr., pp. 132 ff.) like Rank's contribution. (Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 55 ff.)
Note C (280). According to Jung it is a characteristic of the totality of the sun myth which relates that the “fundamental basis of the ‘incestuous’ desire is not equivalent to cohabitation, but to the peculiar idea of becoming a child again, to return to the parents' protection, to get back into the mother again in order to be born again by the mother. On the way to this goal stands incest, however, i.e., necessity in some way to get back into the uterus again. One of the simplest ways was to fructify the mother and procreate oneself again. Here the prohibition against incest steps in, so now the sun myths and rebirth myths teem with all possible proposals as to how one could encompass incest. A very significant way of encompassing it is to change the mother into another being or rejuvenate her, in order to make her vanish after the resulting birth [respective propagation], i.e., to cause her to change herself back. It is not incestuous cohabitation that is sought, but rebirth, to [pg 420] which one might attain quickest by cohabitation. This, however, is not the only way, although perhaps the original one.” (Jung, Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 266 ff.) In another place it is said: The separation of the son from the mother signifies the separation of man from the pairing consciousness of animals, from the lack of individual consciousness characteristic of infantile archaic thought. “First by the force of the incest prohibition could a self-conscious individual be produced, who had before been, thoughtlessly one with the genus, and only so first could the idea of the individual and conclusive death be rendered possible. So came, as it were, death into the world through Adam's sin. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reason; fear of death holds him there. It appears that there is no concept and no word strong enough to express the meaning of this conflict. Whole religions are built to give value to the magnitude of this conflict. This struggle for expression, enduring thousands of years, cannot have the source of its power in the condition which is quite too narrowly conceived by the common idea of incest; much more apparently must we conceive the law that expresses itself first and last as a prohibition against incest as a compulsion toward domestication, and describe the religious system as an institution that most of all takes up the cultural aims of the not immediately serviceable impulsive powers of the animal nature, organizes them and gradually makes them capable of sublimated employment.” (Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 314 ff.)
Note D (274). Jung divides the libido into two currents lengthwise, one directed forward, the other backward: “As the normal libido is like a constant stream, which pours its waters into the world of reality, so the resistance, dynamically regarded, is not like a rock raised in the river bed, which is flowed over and around by the stream, [pg 421] but like a back current flowing towards the source instead of towards the mouth. A part of the soul probably wants the external object, another part, however, prefers to return to the subjective world, whither the airy and easily built palaces of the phantasy beckon. We could assume this duality of human will, for which Bleuler from his psychiatric standpoint has coined the word ambitendency, as something everywhere and always existing, and recall that even the most primitive of all motor impulses are already contradictory as where, e.g., in the act of extension, the flexor muscles are innervated.” (Jb. ps. F., IV, p. 218.)
Note E (279). Of the wonderful abilities that pass current as fruits of the yoga practice, the eight grand powers [Maha-siddhi] are generally mentioned: 1. To make oneself small or invisible [animan], 2, 3. to acquire the uttermost lightness or heaviness [laghiman, gariman], 4. to increase to the size of a monster and to reach everything even the most distant, as e.g., to the moon with the tips of the fingers [mahiman or prapti], 5. unobstructed fulfillment of all wishes, e.g., the wish to sink into the earth as into water and to emerge again [prakamya], 6. perfect control over the body and the internal organs [isitva], 7. the ability to change the course of nature [vasitva], and 8. by mere act of will to place oneself anywhere [yatra kamavasayitva]. Besides these eight marvelous powers many others might be named, which are partly included in the above; such an exaltation of sensitiveness that the most remote and imperceptible images, the happenings in other worlds on planets and stars, as also the goings on in one's own interior and in other men's are perceived by the senses; the knowledge of the past and the future, of previous existences and of the hour of death; understanding the language of animals, the ability to summon the dead, etc. These miraculous powers, however, suffer [pg 422] from the disadvantages of being transitory, like everything else won by man through his merit—with the exception of salvation. (Garbe, Samkhya and Yoga, p. 46.)
Note F (305). Jung (Jb., Ill, p. 171) refers to Maeterlinck's “inconscient supérieur” (in “La Sagesse et la Destinée”) as a prospective potentiality of subliminal combinations. He comments on it as follows: “I shall not be spared the reproach of mysticism. Perhaps the matter should none the less be pondered: doubtless the unconscious contains the psychological combinations that do not reach the liminal value of consciousness. Analysis resolves these combinations into their historical determinants for that is one of the essential tasks of analysis, i.e., to render powerless by disconnecting them, the obsessions of the complexes that are concurrent with the purposeful conduct of life. History is ignorant of two kinds of things: what is hidden in the past and what is hidden in the future. Both are probably to be attained with a certain measure of probability, the former as a postulate, the latter as a historical prognosis. In so far as to-morrow is contained in to-day, and all the warp of the future already laid, a deepened knowledge of the present could make possible a more or less wide-reaching and sure prognosis of the future. If we transfer this reasoning, as Kant has already done, to the psychologic, the following things must result; just as memory traces, which have demonstrably become subliminal, are still accessible to the unconscious, so also are certain very fine subliminal combinations showing a forward tendency, which are of the greatest possible significance for future occurrences in so far as the latter are conditioned by our psychology. But just as the science of history troubles itself little about the future combinations which are rather the object of politics, just so little are the psychological combinations the object of the analysis, but would be rather the object of an infinitely [pg 423] refined psychological synthesis, which should know how to follow the natural currents of the libido. We cannot do this, but probably the unconscious can, for the process takes place there, and it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of this work, at least in dreams, come to light, whence came the prophetic interpretation of dreams long claimed by superstition. The aversion of the exact [sciences] of to-day against that sort of thought-process which is hardly to be called phantastic is only an overcompensation of the thousands of years old but all too great inclination of man to believe in soothsaying.”