Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/431

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the hammer, the lever, roofing and mining. Hephæstus, the father of Hermes, is an artistic master workman and sculptor. In fairy tales, the father of the hero is very modestly the traditional wood-cutter. These conceptions were also alive in the cult of Osiris. There the divine image was carved out of a tree trunk and then placed within the hollow of the tree. (Frazer: "Golden Bough," Part IV.) In Rigveda, the world was also hewn out of a tree by the world-sculptor. The idea that the hero is his own procreator[26] leads to the fact that he is invested with paternal attributes, and reversedly the heroic attributes are given to the father. In Mânî there exists a beautiful union of the motives. He accomplishes his great labors as a religious founder, hides himself for years in a cave, he dies, is skinned, stuffed and hung up (hero). Besides he is an artist, and has a crippled foot. A similar union of motives is found in Wieland, the smith.

Hiawatha kept silent about what he saw at the old arrow-maker's on his return to Nokomis, and he did nothing further to win Minnehaha. But now something happened, which, if it were not in an Indian epic, would rather be sought in the history of a neurosis. Hiawatha introverted his libido; that is to say, he fell into an extreme resistance against the "real sexual demand" (Freud); he built a hut for himself in the wood, in order to fast there and to experience dreams and visions. For the first three days he wandered, as once in his earliest youth, through a forest and looked at all the animals and plants: