The occurrence of the same symbolic representation among the aborigines is illustrated by the following examples: Stucken relates the New Zealand tale of the Polynesian Fire (and Seed) Robber, Mani-tiki-tiki, who is exposed directly after his birth, his mother throwing him into the sea, wrapped in an apron (chest, box). A similar story is reported by Frobenius (loc. cit., p. 379) from Betsimisaraka, where the child is exposed on the water, and is found and raised by a rich childless woman, but finally resolves to discover his actual parents. According to a report of Bab (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1906, p. 281) the wife of the Raja Besurjay was presented with a child floating on a bubble of water-foam (from Singapore).
[83] The before-mentioned work of Abraham, “Dreams and Myths,” pp. 22, 23, English translation, Monograph Series, No. 15, contains the analysis of a very similar although more complicated birth dream, corresponding to the actual conditions; the dreamer, a young pregnant woman, who was awaiting her delivery, not without fear, dreamed of the birth of her son, and the water appeared directly as the amniotic fluid.
[84] This phantasy of an enormous water is extremely suggestive of the large and widespread group of the Flood Myths, which actually seem to be no more than the universal expression of the exposure myth. The hero is here represented by humanity at large. The wrathful father is the god; the destruction as well as the rescue of humanity likewise follow one another in immediate succession. In this parallelization, it is of interest to note that the ark, or pitched house, in which Noah floats upon the water is designated in the Old Testament by the same word (tebah) as the receptacle in which the infant Moses is exposed (Jeremias, loc. cit., p. 250). For the motive of the great flood, compare Jeremias, p. 226, and Lessmann, at the close of his treatise on the Kyros saga in Europe, where the flood is described as a possible digression of the exposure in the water. A transition instance is illustrated by the flood saga told by Bader, in his Badensian folk legends. When the Sunken Valley was inundated once upon a time by a cloudburst, a little boy was seen floating upon the waters in a cradle, who was miraculously saved by a cat (Gustav Friedrichs, loc. cit., p. 265).
The author has endeavored to explain the psychological relations between the exposure-myth, the flood legend, and the devouring myth, in his article on the “Overlying Symbols in Dream Awakening, and Their Recurrence in Mythical Ideation” (“Die Symbolschichtung in Wecktraum und ihre Wiederkehr im mythischen Denken” Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, V, 1912).
[85] Compare the same reversal of the meanings in Winckler’s interpretation of the etymology of the name of Moses (p. 13).
[86] The same conditions remain in the formation of dreams and in the transformation of hysterical phantasies into seizures (compare “Traumdeutung,” p. 238, and the annotation in the same place), also, Freud, “Allgemeines über den hysterischen Anfall” (“General Remarks on Hysterical Seizures”) in Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 2 Series, p. 146 et seq.
[87] According to a pointed remark of Jung’s, this reversal in its further mythical sublimation permits the approximation of the hero’s life to the solar cycle (“Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,” II Part, Jahrb. f. Psychoanalyse, V, 1912, p. 253).
[88] The second item of the schedule here enters into consideration: the voluntary continence or prolonged separation of the parents, which naturally induces the miraculous conception and virgin birth of the mother. The abortion phantasies, which are especially distinct in the Zoroaster legend, also belong under this heading.
[89] The comparison of birth with a shipwreck, by the Roman poet Lucretius, seems to be in perfect harmony with this symbolism: “Behold the infant: Like a shipwrecked sailor, cast ashore by the fury of the billows, the poor child lies naked on the ground, bereft of all means for existence, after Nature has dragged him in pain from the mother’s womb. With plaintive wailing he filleth the place of his birth, and he is right, for many evils await him in life” (Lucretius, “De Nature Rerum,” V, 222-227). Similarly, the first version of Schiller’s “Robbers,” in speaking of Nature, says: “She endowed us with the spirit of invention, when she exposed us naked and helpless on the shore of the great Ocean, the World. Let him swim who may, and let the clumsy perish!”
[90] Compare the representation of this relation and its psychic consequences, in Freud’s Significance of Dreams.