Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/457

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  • ness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent.

It is all that is retrogressive, and as the model of our first world is our mother, all retrogressive tendencies are towards the mother, and, therefore, are disguised under the incest image.

In both these ideas the poet has represented in mythologic symbols the libido arising from the mother and the libido striving backward towards the mother.

There is a description in the fifteenth song how Chibiabos, Hiawatha's best friend, the amiable player and singer, the embodiment of the joy of life, was enticed by the evil spirits into ambush, fell through the ice and was drowned. Hiawatha mourns for him so long that he succeeds, with the aid of the magician, in calling him back again. But the revivified friend is only a spirit, and he becomes master of the land of spirits. (Osiris, lord of the underworld; the two Dioscuri.) Battles again follow, and then comes the loss of a second friend, Kwasind, the embodiment of physical strength.

In the twentieth song occur famine and the death of Minnehaha, foretold by two taciturn guests from the land of death; and in the twenty-second song Hiawatha prepares for a final journey to the west land:

"I am going, O Nokomis,
On a long and distant journey,
To the portals of the Sunset,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind Keewaydin.

"One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,