symbol of the gods of fertility, not simply their picture but the part, part of the whole, which represented concretely the fruitfulness, the phallus, was carried around in order to bring fertility to the fields, and still more, it was with the same object that young maidens were struck naked with a branch, a living branch, as a still more remote symbol, so that through this symbolic action the same object would be attained.
The cults themselves have also undergone a process of symbolization. Instead of human sacrifices, sacrifices of animals came gradually to be offered, then the animal was offered in some sort of imitation (formed of bread for example). The Chinese, for example, began to offer their divinities, instead of metal coins, papers representing them. The archives of ethnology are filled with examples, as the rational customs represent in great part remains of a strong symbolic cult.
Animals, of which a great number are and were sacred, belong to the symbols, which instead of a personified power of nature have become demons, god heads (the owls of Athens, the mountain serpents in the Erechtheion).
In the mythological tales and customs particular animals may assume a quite special symbolic significance, for example, a special sexual significance. At the feast of Dionysus, in which also fertility was sought, young male animals were offered up by preference. Zeus ravished Europa as a bull; Leda as a male swan. He impregnated Danae as a golden shower by the intervention of a symbolism which while not animal was clearly sexual.
Animals as representatives of sexual power are suitable as symbols insofar as that even in our speech and our general attitude the life-preserving principle is considered as the animal in man.
We are now arrived at a point where we can understand the symbolism of fairy tales, especially the sexual symbolism, so far as it springs from mythology and magic.
We must now approach it from the other side, the psychological and the psychopathological.
Freud explains in his "Traumdeutung" that the so-called dream-work is an effort towards condensation, in view of the representation of abstract things appropriate in a given scene, by the substitution of representable (concrete) things; that simi-
