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 simple occurrence. Even yet a deep animosity seems to live in man because a brutal law has separated him from the instinctive yielding to his desires and from the great beauty of the harmony of the animal nature. This separation manifested itself, among other things, in the incest prohibition and its correlates (laws of marriage, etc.); therefore pain and anger relate to the mother, as if she were responsible for the domestication of the sons of men. In order not to become conscious of his incest wish (his backward harking to the animal nature), the son throws all the burden of the guilt on the mother, from which arises the idea of the "terrible mother."[46] The mother becomes for him a spectre of anxiety, a nightmare.[47]

After the completed "night journey to the sea," the chest of Osiris was cast ashore by Byblos, and lay in the branches of an Erica, which grew around the coffin and became a splendid tree. The king of the land had the tree placed as a column under his roof.[48] During this period of Osiris's absence (the winter solstice) the lament customary during thousands of years for the dead god and his return occurs, and its [Greek: eu(/resis] is a feast of joy. A passage from the mournful quest of Isis is especially noteworthy:

"She flutters like a swallow lamenting around the column, which encloses the god sleeping in death."

(This same motive returns in the Kyffhaüser saga.)

Later on Typhon dismembers the corpse and scatters the pieces. We come upon the motive of dismember-