Freud - Complete Works (468 page)

Totem And Taboo

2792

   Let us assume it to be a fact,
then, that in the course of the later development of religions the
two driving factors, the son’s sense of guilt and the
son’s rebelliousness, never became extinct. Whatever attempt
was made at solving the religious problem, whatever kind of
reconciliation was effected between these two opposing mental
forces, sooner or later broke down, under the combined influence,
no doubt, of historical events, cultural changes and internal
psychical modifications.

   The son’s efforts to put
himself in the place of the father-god became ever more obvious.
The introduction of agriculture increased the son’s
importance in the patriarchal family. He ventured upon new
demonstrations of his incestuous libido, which found symbolic
satisfaction in his cultivation of Mother Earth. Divine figures
such as Attis, Adonis and Tammuz emerged, spirits of vegetation and
at the same time youthful divinities enjoying the favours of mother
goddesses and committing incest with their mother in defiance of
their father. But the sense of guilt, which was not allayed by
these creations, found expression in myths which granted only short
lives to these youthful favourites of the mother-goddesses and
decreed their punishment by emasculation or by the wrath of the
father in the form of an animal. Adonis was killed by a wild boar,
the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, beloved of Cybele, perished
by castration.¹ The mourning for these gods and the rejoicings
over their resurrection passed over into the ritual of another
son-deity who was destined to lasting success.

  
¹
Fear of castration plays an extremely large
part, in the case of the youthful neurotics whom we come across, as
an interference in their relations with their father. The
illuminating instance reported by Ferenczi (1913
a
) has shown
us how a little boy took as his totem the beast that had pecked at
his little penis. When our children come to hear of ritual
circumcision, they equate it with castration. The parallel in
social psychology to this reaction by children has not yet been
worked out, so far as I am aware. In primaeval times and in
primitive races, where circumcision is so frequent, it is performed
at the age of initiation into manhood and it is at that age that
its significance is to be found; it was only as a secondary
development that it was shifted back to the early years of life. It
is of very great interest to find that among primitive peoples
circumcision is combined with cutting the hair and knocking out
teeth or is replaced by them, and that our children, who cannot
possibly have any knowledge of this, in fact treat these two
operations, in the anxiety with which they react to them, as
equivalents of castration.

Totem And Taboo

2793

   When Christianity first
penetrated into the ancient world it met with competition from the
religion of Mithras and for a time it was doubtful which of the two
deities would gain the victory. In spite of the halo of light
surrounding his form, the youthful Persian god remains obscure to
us. We may perhaps infer from the sculptures of Mithras slaying a
bull that he represented a son who was alone in sacrificing his
father and thus redeemed his brothers from their burden of
complicity in the deed. There was an alternative method of allaying
their guilt and this was first adopted by Christ. He sacrificed his
own life and so redeemed the company of brothers from original
sin.

   The doctrine of original sin was
of Orphic origin. It formed a part of the mysteries, and spread
from them to the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece. (Reinach,
1905-12,
2
, 75 ff.) Mankind, it was said, were descended
from the Titans, who had lulled the young Dionysus-Zagreus and had
torn him to pieces. The burden of this crime weighed on them. A
fragment of Anaximander relates how the unity of the world was
broken by a primaeval sin,¹ and that whatever issued from it
must bear the punishment. The tumultuous mobbing, the killing and
the tearing in pieces by the Titans reminds us clearly enough of
the totemic sacrifice described by St. Nilus - as, for the matter
of that, do many other ancient myths, including, for instance, that
of the death of Orpheus himself. Nevertheless, there is a
disturbing difference in the fact of the murder having been
committed on a
youthful
god.

  
¹
‘
Une sorte de péché
proethnique
’ (Reinach, 1905-12,
2
, 76).

Totem And Taboo

2794

   There can be no doubt that in the
Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If,
however, Christ redeemed mankind from the burden of original sin by
the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the
sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in
human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by
the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to
blood-guilt.¹ And if this sacrifice of a life brought about
atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only
have been the murder of the father.

   In the Christian doctrine,
therefore, men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manner
the guilty primaeval deed, since they found the fullest atonement
for it in the sacrifice of this one son. Atonement with the father
was all the more complete since the sacrifice was accompanied by a
total renunciation of the women on whose account the rebellion
against the father was started. But at that point the inexorable
psychological law of ambivalence stepped in. The very deed in which
the son offered the greatest possible atonement to the father
brought him at the same time to the attainment of his wishes
against
the father. He himself became God, beside, or, more
correctly, in place of, the father. A son-religion displaced the
father-religion. As a sign of this substitution the ancient totem
meal was revived in the form of communion, in which the company of
brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the son - no longer the
father - obtained sanctity thereby and identified themselves with
him. Thus we can trace through the ages the identity of the totem
meal with animal sacrifice, with theanthropic human sacrifice and
with the Christian Eucharist, and we can recognize in all these
rituals the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed
down but of which they must none the less feel so proud. The
Christian communion, however, is essentially a fresh elimination of
the father, a repetition of the guilty deed. We can see the full
justice of Frazer’s pronouncement that ‘the Christian
communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless
far older than Christianity’.²

  
¹
We find that impulses to suicide in a
neurotic turn out regularly to be self-punishments for wishes for
someone else’s death.

  
²
Frazer (1912,
2
, 51). No one
familiar with the literature of the subject will imagine that the
derivation of Christian communion from the totem meal is an idea
originating from the author of the present essay.

Totem And Taboo

2795

(7)

   An event such as the elimination
of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably
have left ineradicable traces in the history of humanity; and the
less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been
the substitutes to which it gave rise.¹ I shall resist the
temptation of pointing out these traces in mythology, where they
are not hard to find, and shall turn in another direction and take
up a suggestion made by Salomon Reinach in a most instructive essay
on the death of Orpheus.²

   In the history of Greek art we
come upon a situation which shows striking resemblances to the
scene of the totem meal as identified by Robertson Smith, and not
less profound differences from it. I have in mind the situation of
the most ancient Greek tragedy. A company of individuals, named and
dressed alike, surrounded a single figure, all hanging upon his
words and deeds: they were the Chorus and the impersonator of the
Hero. He was originally the only actor. Later, a second and third
actor were added, to play as counterpart to the Hero and as
characters split off from him; but the character of the Hero
himself and his relation to the Chorus remained unaltered. The Hero
of tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a
tragedy. He had to bear the burden of what was known as
‘tragic guilt’; the basis of that guilt is not always
easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no
guilt at all. As a rule it lay in rebellion against some divine or
human authority; and the Chorus accompanied the Hero with feelings
of sympathy, sought to hold him back, to warn him and to sober him,
and mourned over him when he had met with what was felt as the
merited punishment for his rash undertaking.

   But why had the Hero of tragedy
to suffer? and what was the meaning of his ‘tragic
guilt’? I will cut the discussion short and give a quick
reply. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero
of the great primaeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a
tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had
to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. The
scene upon the stage was derived from the historical scene through
a process of systematic distortion - one might even say, as the
product of a refined hypocrisy. In the remote reality it had
actually been the members of the Chorus who caused the Hero’s
suffering; now, however, they exhausted themselves with sympathy
and regret and it was the Hero himself who was responsible for his
own sufferings. The crime which was thrown on to his shoulders,
presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority, was
precisely the crime for which the members of the Chorus, the
company of brothers, were responsible. Thus the tragic Hero became,
though it might be against his will, the redeemer of the Chorus

   In Greek tragedy the special
subject-matter of the performance was the sufferings of the divine
goat, Dionysus, and the lamentation of the goats who were his
followers and who identified themselves with him. That being so, it
is easy to understand how drama, which had become extinct, was
kindled into fresh life in the Middle Ages around the Passion of
Christ.

  
¹
In Ariel’s words from
The
Tempest
:

                               
Full fathom five thy father lies;

                               
   Of his bones are coral made;

                               
Those are pearls that were his eyes:

                               
   Nothing of him that doth fade,

                               
But doth suffer a sea-change

                               
Into something rich and strange.

  
²
‘La mort
d’Orphée’, contained in the volume which I have
so often quoted (1905-12,
2
, 100 ff.).

Totem And Taboo

2796

   At the conclusion, then, of this
exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should like to insist that its
outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and
art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement
with the psycho-analytic finding that the same complex constitutes
the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes.
It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of
social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one
single concrete point - man’s relation to his father. It is
even possible that yet another psychological problem belongs in
this same connection. I have often had occasion to point out that
emotional ambivalence in the proper sense of the term - that is,
the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object
- lies at the root of many important cultural institutions. We know
nothing of the origin of this ambivalence. One possible assumption
is that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But
it seems to me quite worth considering another possibility, namely
that originally it formed no part of our emotional life but was
acquired by the human race in connection with their
father-complex,¹ precisely where the psycho-analytic
examination of modern individuals still finds it revealed at its
strongest.²

   Before I bring my remarks to a
close, however, I must find room to point out that, though my
arguments have led to a high degree of convergence upon a single
comprehensive nexus of ideas, this fact cannot blind us to the
uncertainties of my premises or the difficulties involved in my
conclusions. I will only mention two of the latter which may have
forced themselves on the notice of a number of my readers.

   No one can have failed to
observe, in the first place, that I have taken as the basis of my
whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental
processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual. In
particular, I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action
has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained
operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that
action. I have supposed that an emotional process, such as might
have developed in generations of sons who were ill-treated by their
father, has extended to new generations which were exempt from such
treatment for the very reason that their father had been
eliminated. It must be admitted that these are grave difficulties;
and any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a kind
would seem to be preferable.