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 peeped out from her arm. She wanted to seize it, but it escaped her." A patient with a very strong introversion (catatonic state) complained to me that a snake was stuck in her throat.[110] This symbolism is also used by Nietzsche in the "vision" of the shepherd and the snake:[111]

"And verily, what I saw was like nothing I ever saw before. I saw a young shepherd, writhing, choking, twitching with a convulsed face, from whose mouth hung a black, heavy serpent.

"Did I ever see so much disgust and pallid fear upon a countenance?[112] Might he have been sleeping, and the snake crept into his mouth—there it bit him fast?

"My hand tore at the serpent and tore—in vain!—I failed to tear the serpent out of his mouth. Then there cried out of me: 'Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!' I exclaimed; all my horror, my hate, my disgust, my compassion, all the good and bad cried out from me in one voice.

"Ye intrepid ones around me! solve for me the riddle which I saw, make clear to me the vision of the lonesomest one.

"For it was a vision and a prophecy; what did then I behold in parable? And who is it who is still to come?

"Who is the shepherd into whose mouth crept the snake? Who is the man into whose throat all the heaviness and the blackest would creep?[113]

"But the shepherd bit, as my cry had told him; he bit with a huge bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—and sprang up.

"No longer shepherd, no longer man, a transfigured being, an illuminated being, who laughed! Never yet on earth did a man laugh as he laughed!

"O my brethren, I heard a laugh which was no human laughter—and now a thirst consumeth me, a longing that is never allayed.

"My longing for this laugh eats into me. Oh, how can I suffer still to live! And how now can I bear to die!"[114]