Freud - Complete Works (438 page)

   It would certainly be possible to
collect further evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be
understood as representing death. These indications would lead us
to conclude that the third one of the sisters between whom the
choice is made is a dead woman. But she may be something else as
well - namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death. Thanks to a
displacement that is far from infrequent, the qualities that a
deity imparts to men are ascribed to the deity himself. Such a
displacement will surprise us least of all in relation to the
Goddess of Death, since in modern versions and representations,
which these stories would thus be forestalling, Death itself is
nothing other than a dead man.

   If the third of the sisters is
the Goddess of Death, the sisters are known to us. They are the
Fates, the Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is
called Atropos, the inexorable.

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2610

II

   We will for the time being put
aside the task of inserting the interpretation that we have found
into our myth, and listen to what the mythologists have to teach us
about the role and origin of the Fates.¹

   The earliest Greek mythology (in
Homer) only knew a single , personifying inevitable fate. The
further development of this one Moera into a company of three (or
less often two) sister-goddesses probably came about on the basis
of other divine figures to which the Moerae were closely related -
the Graces and the Horae [the Seasons].

   The Horae were originally
goddesses of the waters of the sky, dispensing rain and dew, and of
the clouds from which rain falls; and, since the clouds were
conceived of as something that has been spun, it came about that
these goddesses were looked upon as spinners, an attribute that
then became attached to the Moerae. In the sun-favoured
Mediterranean lands it is the rain on which the fertility of the
soil depends, and thus the Horae became vegetation goddesses. The
beauty of flowers and the abundance of fruit was their doing, and
they were accredited with a wealth of agreeable and charming
traits. They became the divine representatives of the Seasons, and
it is possibly owing to this connection that there were three of
them, if the sacred nature of the number three is not a sufficient
explanation. For the peoples of antiquity at first distinguished
only three seasons: winter, spring and summer. Autumn was only
added in late Graeco-Roman times, after which the Horae were often
represented in art as four in number.

   The Horae retained their relation
to time. Later they presided over the times of day, as they did at
first over the times of the year; and at last their name came to be
merely a designation of the hours (
heure, ora
). The Norns of
German mythology are akin to the Horae and the Moerae and exhibit
this time signification in their names. It was inevitable, however,
that a deeper view should come to be taken of the essential nature
of these deities, and that their essence should be transposed on to
the regularity with which the seasons change. The Horae thus became
the guardians of natural law and of the divine Order which causes
the same thing to recur in Nature in an unalterable sequence.

  
¹
What follows is taken from Roscher’s
lexicon, under the relevant headings.

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2611

   This discovery of Nature reacted
on the conception of human life. The nature-myth changed into a
human myth: the weather-goddesses became goddesses of Fate. But
this aspect of the Horae found expression only in the Moerae, who
watch over the necessary ordering of human life as inexorably as do
the Horae over the regular order of nature. The ineluctable
severity of Law and its relation to death and dissolution, which
had been avoided in the charming figures of the Horae, were now
stamped upon the Moerae, as though men had only perceived the full
seriousness of natural law when they had to submit their own selves
to it.

   The names of the three spinners,
too, have been significantly explained by mythologists. Lachesis,
the name of the second, seems to denote ‘the accidental that
is included in the regularity of destiny’¹ - or, as we
should say, ‘experience’; just as Atropos stands for
‘the ineluctable’ - Death. Clotho would then be left to
mean the innate disposition with its fateful implications.

   But now it is time to return to
the theme which we are trying to interpret - the theme of the
choice between three sisters. We shall be deeply disappointed to
discover how unintelligible the situations under review become and
what contradictions of their apparent content result, if we apply
to them the interpretation that we have found. On our supposition
the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, Death itself. But
in the Judgement of Paris she is the Goddess of Love, in the tale
of Apuleius she is someone comparable to the goddess for her
beauty, in
The Merchant of Venice
she is the fairest and
wisest of women, in
King Lear
she is the one loyal daughter.
We may ask whether there can be a more complete contradiction.
Perhaps, improbable though it may seem, there is a still more
complete one lying close at hand. Indeed, there certainly is;
since, whenever our theme occurs, the choice between the women is
free, and yet it falls on death. For, after all, no one chooses
death, and it is only by a fatality that one falls a victim to
it.

  
¹
Roscher, quoting Preller, ed. Robert
(1894).

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2612

   However, contradictions of a
certain kind - replacements by the precise opposite - offer no
serious difficulty to the work of analytic interpretation. We shall
not appeal here to the fact that contraries are so often
represented by one and the same element in the modes of expression
used by the unconscious, as for instance in dreams. But we shall
remember that there are motive forces in mental life which bring
about replacement by the opposite in the form of what is known as
reaction-formation; and it is precisely in the revelation of such
hidden forces as these that we look for the reward of this enquiry.
The Moerae were created as a result of a discovery that warned man
that he too is a part of nature and therefore subject to the
immutable law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle
against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness
that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position. Man, as we
know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the
wishes that reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled
against the recognition of the truth embodied in the myth of the
Moerae, and constructed instead the myth derived from it, in which
the Goddess of Death was replaced by the Goddess of Love and by
what was equivalent to her in human shape. The third of the sisters
was no longer Death; she was the fairest, best, most desirable and
most lovable of women. Nor was this substitution in any way
technically difficult: it was prepared for by an ancient
ambivalence, it was carried out along a primaeval line of
connection which could not long have been forgotten. The Goddess of
Love herself, who now took the place of the Goddess of Death, had
once been identical with her. Even the Greek Aphrodite had not
wholly relinquished her connection with the underworld, although
she had long surrendered he: chthonic role to other divine figures,
to Persephone, or to the tri-form Artemis-Hecate. The great
Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples, however, all seem to have
been both creators and destroyers - both goddesses of life and
fertility and goddesses of death. Thus the replacement by a wishful
opposite in our theme harks back to a primaeval identity.

   The same consideration answers
the question how the feature of a choice came into the myth of the
three sisters. Here again there has been a wishful reversal. Choice
stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man
overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater
triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where
in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen
is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of
women.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2613

   On closer inspection we observe,
to be sure, that the original myth is not so thoroughly distorted
that traces of it do not show through and betray its presence. The
free choice between the three sisters is, properly speaking, no
free choice, for it must necessarily fall on the third if every
kind of evil is not to come about, as it does in
King Lear
.
The fairest and best of women, who has taken the place of the
Death-goddess, has kept certain characteristics that border on the
uncanny, so that from there we have been able to guess at what lies
beneath.¹

   So far we have been following out
the myth and its transformation, and it is to be hoped that we have
correctly indicated the hidden causes of the transformation. We may
now turn our interest to the way in which the dramatist has made
use of the theme. We get an impression that a reduction of the
theme to the original myth is being carried out in his work, so
that we once more have a sense of the moving significance which had
been weakened by the distortion. It is by means of this reduction
of the distortion, this partial return to the original, that the
dramatist achieves his more profound effect upon us.

   To avoid misunderstandings, I
should like to say that it is not my purpose to deny that King
Lear’s dramatic story is intended to inculcate two wise
lessons: that one should not give up one’s possessions and
rights during one’s lifetime, and that one must guard against
accepting flattery at its face value. These and similar warnings
are undoubtedly brought out by the play; but it seems to me quite
impossible to explain the overpowering effect of
King Lear
from the impression that such a train of thought would produce, or
to suppose that the dramatist’s personal motives did not go
beyond the intention of teaching these lessons. It is suggested,
too, that his purpose was to present the tragedy of ingratitude,
the sting of which he may well have felt in his own heart, and that
the effect of the play rests on the purely formal element of its
artistic presentation; but this cannot, so it seems to me, take the
place of the understanding brought to us by the explanation we have
reached of the theme of the choice between the three sisters.

  
¹
The Psyche of Apuleius’s story has
kept many traits that remind us of her relation with death. Her
wedding is celebrated like a funeral, she has to descend into the
underworld, and afterwards she sinks into a death-like sleep (Otto
Rank). - On the significance of Psyche as goddess of the spring and
as ‘Bride of Death’, cf. Zinzow (1881). - In another of
Grimm’s Tales (‘The Goose-girl at the Fountain’,
No. 179) there is, as in ‘Cinderella’, an alternation
between the beautiful and the ugly aspect of the third sister, in
which one may no doubt see an indication of her double nature -
before and after the substitution. This third daughter is
repudiated by her father, after a test which is almost the same as
the one in
King Lear
. Like her sisters, she has to declare
how fond she is of their father, but can find no expression for her
love but a comparison with salt. (Kindly communicated by Dr. Hanns
Sachs.)

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2614

   Lear is an old man. It is for
this reason, as we have already said, that the three sisters appear
as his daughters. The relationship of a father to his children,
which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic situations, is
not turned to further account in the play. But Lear is not only an
old man: he is a dying man. In this way the extraordinary premiss
of the division of his inheritance loses all its strangeness. But
the doomed man is not willing to renounce the love of women; he
insists on hearing how much he is loved. Let us now recall the
moving final scene, one of the culminating points of tragedy in
modern drama. Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the
stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes
intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like
the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from
the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth,
bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with
the necessity of dying.

   The dramatist brings us nearer to
the ancient theme by representing the man who makes the choice
between the three sisters as aged and dying. The regressive
revision which he has thus applied to the myth, distorted as it was
by wishful transformation, allows us enough glimpses of its
original meaning to enable us perhaps to reach as well a
superficial allegorical interpretation of the three female figures
in the theme. We might argue that what is represented here are the
three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman - the woman
who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys
him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the
mother in the course of a man’s life - the mother herself,
the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the
Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an
old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his
mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death,
will take him into her arms.