Freud - Complete Works (467 page)

   Thus psycho-analysis, in
contradiction to the more recent views of the totemic system but in
agreement with the earlier ones, requires us to assume that
totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a
simultaneous origin.

Totem And Taboo

2787

(6)

   A great number of powerful
motives restrain me from any attempt at picturing the further
development of religions from their origin in totemism to their
condition to-day. I will only follow two threads whose course I can
trace with especial clarity as they run through the pattern: the
theme of the totemic sacrifice and the relation of son to
father.¹

   Robertson Smith has shown us that
the ancient totem meal recurs in the original form of sacrifice.
The meaning of the act is the same: sanctification through
participation in a common meal. The sense of guilt, which can only
be allayed by the solidarity of all the participants, also
persists. What is new is the clan deity, in whose supposed presence
the sacrifice is performed, who participates in the meal as though
he were a clansman, and with whom those who consume the meal become
identified. How does the god come to be in a situation to which he
was originally a stranger?

   The answer might be that in the
meantime the concept of God had emerged - from some unknown source
- and had taken control of the whole of religious life; and that,
like everything else that was to survive, the totem meal had been
obliged to find a point of contact with the new system. The
psycho-analysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us
with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is
formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to
God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and
oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom
God is nothing other than an exalted father. As in the case of
totemism, psycho-analysis recommends us to have faith in the
believers who call God their father, just as the totem was called
the tribal ancestor. If psycho-analysis deserves any attention,
then - without prejudice to any other sources or meanings of the
concept of God, upon which psycho-analysis can throw no light - the
paternal element in that concept must be a most important one. But
in that case the father is represented twice over in the situation
of primitive sacrifice: once as God and once as the totemic animal
victim. And, even granting the restricted number of explanations
open to psycho-analysis, one must ask whether this is possible and
what sense it can have.

   We know that there are a
multiplicity of relations between the god and the sacred animal
(the totem or the sacrificial victim). (1) Each god usually has an
animal (and quite often several animals) sacred to him. (2) In the
case of certain specially sacred sacrifices - ‘mystic’
sacrifices - the victim was precisely the animal sacred to the god
(Smith, 1894). (3) The god was often worshipped in the shape of an
animal (or, to look at it in another way, animals were worshipped
as gods) long after the age of totemism. (4) In myths the god often
transforms himself into an animal, and frequently into the animal
that is sacred to him.

  
¹
Cf. the discussion by C. G. Jung (1912),
which is governed by views differing in certain respects from
mine.

Totem And Taboo

2788

   It therefore seems plausible to
suppose that the god himself was the totem animal, and that he
developed out of it at a later stage of religious feeling. But we
are relieved from the necessity for further discussion by the
consideration that the totem is nothing other than a surrogate of
the father. Thus, while the totem may be the
first
form of
father-surrogate, the god will be a later one, in which the father
has regained his human shape. A new creation such as this, derived
from what constitutes the root of every form of religion - a
longing for the father - might occur if in the process of time some
fundamental change had taken place in man’s relation to the
father, and perhaps, too, in his relation to animals.

   Signs of the occurrence of
changes of this kind may easily be seen, even if we leave on one
side the beginning of a mental estrangement from animals and the
disrupting of totemism owing to domestication. (See above,
p2777 f.
) There was one factor in the
state of affairs produced by the elimination of the father which
was bound in the course of time to cause an enormous increase in
the longing felt for him. Each single one of the brothers who had
banded together for the purpose of killing their father was
inspired by a wish to become like him and had given expression to
it by incorporating parts of their father’s surrogate in the
totem meal. But, in consequence of the pressure exercised upon each
participant by the fraternal clan as a whole, that wish could not
be fulfilled. For the future no one could or might ever again
attain the father’s supreme power, even though that was what
all of them had striven for. Thus after a long lapse of time their
bitterness against their father, which had driven them to their
deed, grew less, and their longing for him increased; and it became
possible for an ideal to emerge which embodied the unlimited power
of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as
their readiness to submit to him. As a result of decisive cultural
changes, the original democratic equality that had prevailed among
all the individual clansmen became untenable; and there developed
at the same time an inclination, based on veneration felt for
particular human individuals, to revive the ancient paternal ideal
by creating gods. The notion of a man becoming a god or of a god
dying strikes us to-day as shockingly presumptuous; but even in
classical antiquity there was nothing revolting in it.¹ The
elevation of the father who had once been murdered into a god from
whom the clan claimed descent was a far more serious attempt at
atonement than had been the ancient covenant with the totem.

  
¹
‘To us moderns, for whom the breach
which divides the human and the divine has deepened into an
impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was
otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were
akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and
the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to
them as the canonization of a saint seems to a modern
Catholic.’ (Frazer, 1911,
2
, 177 f.)

Totem And Taboo

2789

   I cannot suggest at what point in
this process of development a place is to be found for the great
mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have preceded the
father-gods. It seems certain, however, that the change in attitude
to the father was not restricted to the sphere of religion but that
it extended in a consistent manner to that other side of human life
which had been affected by the father’s removal - to social
organization. With the introduction of father-deities a fatherless
society gradually changed into one organized on a patriarchal
basis. The family was a restoration of the former primal horde and
it gave back to fathers a large portion of their former rights.
There were once more fathers, but the social achievements of the
fraternal clan had not been abandoned; and the gulf between the new
fathers of a family and the unrestricted primal father of the horde
was wide enough to guarantee the continuance of the religious
craving, the persistence of an unappeased longing for the
father.

   We see, then, that in the scene
of sacrifice before the god of the clan the father
is
in
fact represented twice over - as the god and as the totemic animal
victim. But in our attempts at understanding this situation we must
beware of interpretations which seek to translate it in a
two-dimensional fashion as though it were an allegory, and which in
so doing forget its historical stratification. The two-fold
presence of the father corresponds to the two chronologically
successive meanings of the scene. The ambivalent attitude towards
the father has found a plastic expression in it, and so, too, has
the victory of the son’s affectionate emotions over his
hostile ones. The scene of the father’s vanquishment, of his
greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his
supreme triumph. The importance which is everywhere, without
exception, ascribed to sacrifice lies in the fact that it offers
satisfaction to the father for the outrage inflicted on him in the
same act in which that deed is commemorated.

Totem And Taboo

2790

   As time went on, the animal lost
its sacred character and the sacrifice lost its connection with the
totem feast; it became a simple offering to the deity, an act of
renunciation in favour of the god. God Himself had become so far
exalted above mankind that He could only be approached through an
intermediary the priest. At the same time divine kings made their
appearance in the social structure and introduced the patriarchal
system into the state. It must be confessed that the revenge taken
by the deposed and restored father was a harsh one: the dominance
of authority was at its climax. The subjugated sons made use of the
new situation in order to unburden themselves still further of
their sense of guilt. They were no longer in any way responsible
for the sacrifice as it now was. It was God Himself who demanded it
and regulated it. This is the phase in which we find myths showing
the god himself killing the animal which is sacred to him and which
is in fact himself. Here we have the most extreme denial of the
great crime which was the beginning of society and of the sense of
guilt. But there is a second meaning to this last picture of
sacrifice which is unmistakable. It expresses satisfaction at the
earlier father-surrogate having been abandoned in favour of the
superior concept of God. At this point the psycho-analytic
interpretation of the scene coincides approximately with the
allegorical, surface translation of it, which represents the god as
overcoming the animal side of his own nature.¹

  
¹
It is generally agreed that when, in
mythologies, one generation of gods is overcome by another, what is
denoted is the historical replacement of one religious system by a
new one, whether as a result of foreign conquest or of
psychological development. In the latter case myth approximates to
what Silberer has described as ‘functional phenomena’.
The view maintained by Jung (1912) that the god who kills the
animal is a libidinal symbol implies a concept of libido other than
that which has hitherto been employed and seems to me questionable
from every point of view.

Totem And Taboo

2791

   Nevertheless it would be a
mistake to suppose that the hostile impulses inherent in the
father-complex were completely silenced during this period of
revived paternal authority. On the contrary, the first phases of
the dominance of the two new father surrogates - gods and kings -
show the most energetic signs of the ambivalence that remains a
characteristic of religion.

   In his great work,
The Golden
Bough
, Frazer puts forward the view that the earliest kings of
the Latin tribes were foreigners who played the part of a god and
were solemnly executed at a particular festival. The annual
sacrifice (or, as a variant, self-sacrifice) of a god seems to have
been an essential element in the Semitic religions. The ceremonials
of human sacrifice, performed in the most different parts of the
inhabited globe, leave very little doubt that the victims met their
end as representatives of the deity; and these sacrificial rites
can be traced into late times, with an inanimate effigy or puppet
taking the place of the living human being. The theanthropic
sacrifice of the god, into which it is unfortunately impossible for
me to enter here as fully as into animal sacrifice, throws a
searching retrospective light upon the meaning of the older forms
of sacrifice. It confesses, with a frankness that could hardly be
excelled, to the fact that the object of the act of sacrifice has
always been the same - namely what is now worshipped as God, that
is to say, the father. The problem of the relation between animal
and human sacrifice thus admits of a simple solution. The original
animal sacrifice was already a substitute for a human sacrifice -
for the ceremonial killing of the father; so that, when the
father-surrogate once more resumed its human shape, the animal
sacrifice too could be changed back into a human sacrifice.

   The memory of the first great act
of sacrifice thus proved indestructible, in spite of every effort
to forget it; and at the very point at which men sought to be at
the farthest distance from the motives that led to it, its
undistorted reproduction emerged in the form of the sacrifice of
the god. I need not enlarge here upon the developments of religious
thought which, in the shape of rationalizations, made this
recurrence possible. Robertson Smith, who had no thought of our
derivation of sacrifice from the great event in human prehistory,
states that the ceremonies at the festivals in which the ancient
Semites celebrated the death of a deity ‘were currently
interpreted as the commemoration of a mythical tragedy’.
‘The mourning’, he declares, ‘is not a
spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but
obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And a chief
object of the mourners is to disclaim responsibility for the
god’s death - a point which his already come before us in
connection with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the
"ox-murder at Athens".’ (Ibid., 412.) It seems most
probable that these ‘current interpretations’ were
correct and that the feelings of the celebrants were fully
explained by the underlying situation.