Freud - Complete Works (790 page)

   The first decisive step towards a
change in this sort of ‘social’ organization seems to
have been that the expelled brothers, living in a community, united
to overpower their father and, as was the custom in those days,
devoured him raw. There is no need to balk at this cannibalism; it
continued far into later times. The essential point, however, is
that we attribute the same emotional attitudes to these primitive
men that we are able to establish by analytic investigation in the
primitives of the present day - in our children. We suppose, that
is, that they not only hated and feared their father but also
honoured him as a model, and that each of them wished to take his
place in reality. We can, if so, understand the cannibalistic act
as an attempt to ensure identification with him by incorporating a
piece of him.

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   It must be supposed that after
the parricide a considerable time elapsed during which the brothers
disputed with one another for their father’s heritage, which
each of them wanted for himself alone. A realization of the dangers
and uselessness of these struggles, a recollection of the act of
liberation which they had accomplished together, and the emotional
ties with one another which had arisen during the period of their
expulsion, led at last to an agreement among them, a sort of social
contract. The first form of a social organization came about with a
renunciation of instinct
, a recognition of mutual
obligations
, the introduction of definite
institutions
, pronounced inviolable (holy) - that is to say,
the beginnings of morality and justice. Each individual renounced
his ideal of acquiring his father’s position for himself and
of possessing his mother and sisters. Thus the
taboo on
incest
and the injunction to
exogamy
came about. A fair
amount of the absolute power liberated by the removal of the father
passed over to the women; there came a period of
matriarchy
.
Recollection of their father persisted at this period of the
‘fraternal alliance’. A powerful animal - at first,
perhaps, always one that was feared as well - was chosen as a
substitute for the father. A choice of this kind may seem strange,
but the gulf which men established later between themselves and
animals did not exist for primitive peoples; nor does it exist for
our children, whose animal phobias we have been able to understand
as fear of their father. In relation to the totem animal the
original dichotomy in the emotional relation to the father
(ambivalence) was wholly retained. On the one hand the totem was
regarded as the clan’s blood ancestor and protective spirit,
who must be worshipped and protected, and on the other hand a
festival was appointed at which the same fate was prepared for him
that the primal father had met with. He was killed and devoured by
all the tribesmen in common. (The totem meal, according to
Robertson Smith.) This great festival was in fact a triumphant
celebration of the combined sons’ victory over their
father.

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   What is the place of religion in
this connection? I think we are completely justified in regarding
totemism, with its worship of a father-substitute, with its
ambivalence as shown by the totem meal, with its institution of
memorial festivals and of prohibitions whose infringement was
punished by death - we are justified, I say, in regarding totemism
as the first form in which religion was manifested in human history
and in confirming the fact of its having been linked from the first
with social regulations and moral obligations. Here we can only
give the most summary survey of the further developments of
religion. They no doubt proceeded in parallel with the cultural
advances of the human race and with the changes in the structure of
human communities.

   The first step away from totemism
was the humanizing of the being who was worshipped. In place of the
animals, human gods appear, whose derivation from the totem is not
concealed. The god is still represented either in the form of an
animal or at least with an animal’s face, or the totem
becomes the god’s favourite companion, inseparable from him,
or legend tells us that the god slew this precise animal, which was
after all only a preliminary stage of himself. At a point in this
evolution which is not easily determined great mother-goddesses
appeared, probably even before the male gods, and afterwards
persisted for a long time beside them. In the meantime a great
social revolution had occurred. Matriarchy was succeeded by the
re-establishment of a patriarchal order. The new fathers, it is
true, never achieved the omnipotence of the primal father; there
were many of them, who lived together in associations larger than
the horde had been. They were obliged to be on good terms with one
another, and remained under the limitation of social ordinances. It
is likely that the mother-goddesses originated at the time of the
curtailment of the matriarchy, as a compensation for the slight
upon the mothers. The male deities appear first as sons beside the
great mothers and only later clearly assume the features of
father-figures. These male gods of polytheism reflect the
conditions during the patriarchal age. They are numerous, mutually
restrictive, and are occasionally subordinated to a superior high
god. The next step, however, leads us to the theme with which we
are here concerned - to the return of a single father-god of
unlimited dominion.

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   It must be admitted that this
historical survey has gaps in it and is uncertain at some points.
But anyone who is inclined to pronounce our construction of
primaeval history purely imaginary would be gravely
under-estimating the wealth and evidential value of the material
contained in it. Large portions of the past, which have been linked
together here into a whole, are historically attested: totemism and
the male confederacies, for instance. Other portions have survived
in excellent replicas. Thus authorities have often been struck by
the faithful way in which the sense and content of the old totem
meal is repeated in the rite of the Christian Communion, in which
the believer incorporates the blood and flesh of his god in
symbolic form. Numerous relics of the forgotten primaeval age have
survived in popular legends and fairy tales, and the analytic study
of the mental life of children has provided an unexpected wealth of
material for filling the gaps in our knowledge of the earliest
times. As contributions to our understanding of the son’s
relation to the father which is of such great importance, I need
only bring forward animal phobias, the fear, which strikes us as so
strange, of being eaten by the father, and the enormous intensity
of the dread of being castrated. There is nothing wholly fabricated
in our construction, nothing which could not be supported on solid
foundations.

   If our account of primaeval
history is accepted as on the whole worthy of belief, two sorts of
elements will be recognized in religious doctrines and rituals: on
the one hand fixations to the ancient history of the family and
survivals of it, and on the other hand revivals of the past and
returns, after long intervals, of what has been forgotten. It is
this last portion which, hitherto overlooked and therefore not
understood, is to be demonstrated here in at least one impressive
instance.

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   It is worth specially stressing
the fact that each portion which returns from oblivion asserts
itself with peculiar force, exercises an incomparably powerful
influence on people in the mass, and raises an irresistible claim
to truth against which logical objections remain powerless: a kind
of ‘
credo quia absurdum
’. This remarkable
feature can only be understood on the pattern of the delusions of
psychotics. We have long understood that a portion of forgotten
truth lies hidden in delusional ideas, that when this returns it
has to put up with distortions and misunderstandings, and that the
compulsive conviction which attaches to the delusion arises from
this core of truth and spreads out on to the errors that wrap it
round. We must grant an ingredient such as this of what may be
called
historical
truth to the dogmas of religion as well,
which, it is true, bear the character of psychotic symptoms but
which, as group phenomena, escape the curse of isolation.

   No other portion of the history
of religion has become so clear to us as the introduction of
monotheism into Judaism and its continuation in Christianity - if
we leave on one side the development which we can trace no less
uninterruptedly, from the animal totem to the human god with his
regular companions. (Each of the four Christian evangelists still
has his own favourite animal.) If we provisionally accept the
world-empire of the Pharaohs as the determining cause of the
emergence of the monotheist idea, we see that that idea, released
from its native soil and transferred to another people was, after a
long period of latency, taken hold of by them, preserved by them as
a precious possession and, in turn, itself kept them alive by
giving them pride in being a chosen people: it was the religion of
their primal father to which were attached their hope of reward, of
distinction and finally of world-dominion. This last wishful
phantasy, long abandoned by the Jewish people, still survives among
that people’s enemies in a belief in a conspiracy by the
‘Elders of Zion’. We reserve for discussion in later
pages how the special peculiarities of the monotheist religion
borrowed from Egypt affected the Jewish people and how it was bound
to leave a permanent imprint on their character through its
rejection of magic and mysticism, its invitation to advances in
intellectuality and its encouragement of sublimations; how the
people, enraptured by the possession of the truth, overwhelmed by
the consciousness of being chosen, came to have a high opinion of
what is intellectual and to lay stress on what is moral; and how
their melancholy destinies and their disappointments in reality
served only to intensify all these trends. For the moment we will
follow their development in another direction.

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   The re-establishment of the
primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward but
it could not be the end. The other portions of the prehistoric
tragedy insisted on being recognized. It is not easy to discern
what set this process in motion. It appears as though a growing
sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people, or perhaps of
the whole civilized world of the time, as a precursor to the return
of the repressed material. Till at last one of these Jewish people
found, in justifying a politico-religious agitator, the occasion
for detaching a new - the Christian - religion from Judaism. Paul,
a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced
it back correctly to its original source. He called this the
‘original sin’; it was a crime against God and could
only be atoned for by death. With the original sin death came into
the world. In fact this crime deserving death had been the murder
of the primal father who was later deified. But the murder was not
remembered: instead of it there was a phantasy of its atonement,
and for that reason this phantasy could be hailed as a message of
redemption (
evangelium
). A son of God had allowed himself to
be killed without guilt and had thus taken on himself the guilt of
all men. It had to be a son, since it had been the murder of a
father. It is probable that traditions from oriental and Greek
mysteries had had an influence on the phantasy of redemption. What
was essential in it seems to have been Paul’s own
contribution. In the most proper sense he was a man of an innately
religious disposition: the dark traces of the past lurked in his
mind, ready to break through into its more conscious regions.

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   That the redeemer had sacrificed
himself without guilt was evidently a tendentious distortion, which
offered difficulties to logical understanding. For how could
someone guiltless of the act of murder take on himself the guilt of
the murderers by allowing himself to be killed? In the historical
reality there was no such contradiction. The ‘redeemer’
could be none other than the most guilty person, the ringleader of
the company of brothers who had overpowered their father. We must
in my judgement leave it undecided whether there was such a chief
rebel and ringleader. That is possible; but we must also bear in
mind that each one of the company of brothers certainly had a wish
to commit the deed by himself alone and so to create an exceptional
position for himself and to find a substitute for his
identification with the father which was having to be given up and
which was becoming merged in the community. If there was no such
ringleader, then Christ was the heir to a wishful phantasy which
remained unfulfilled; if there was one, then he was his successor
and his reincarnation. But no matter whether what we have here is a
phantasy or the return of a forgotten reality, in any case the
origin of the concept of a hero is to be found at this point - the
hero who always rebels against his father and kills him in some
shape or other.¹ Here too is the true basis for the
‘tragic guilt’ of the hero of drama, which is otherwise
hard to explain. It can scarcely be doubted that the hero and
chorus in Greek drama represent the same rebellious hero and
company of brothers; and it is not without significance that in the
Middle Ages what the theatre started with afresh was the
representation of the story of the Passion.