Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/497

 *victus: the spear of the gloomy, one-eyed Hagen strikes Siegfried's vulnerable spot. The old sun, who has become the god of death, the one-eyed Wotan, smites his offspring, and once again ascends in eternal rejuvenation. The course of the invincible sun has supplied the mystery of human life with beautiful and imperishable symbols; it became a comforting fulfilment of all the yearning for immortality, of all desire of mortals for eternal life.

Man leaves the mother, the source of libido, and is driven by the eternal thirst to find her again, and to drink renewal from her; thus he completes his cycle, and returns again into the mother's womb. Every obstacle which obstructs his life's path, and threatens his ascent, wears the shadowy features of the "terrible mother," who paralyzes his energy with the consuming poison of the stealthy, retrospective longing. In each conquest he wins again the smiling love and life-giving mother—images which belong to the intuitive depths of human feeling, the features of which have become mutilated and irrecognizable through the progressive development of the surface of the human mind. The stern necessity of adaptation works ceaselessly to obliterate the last traces of these primitive landmarks of the period of the origin of the human mind, and to replace them along lines which are to denote more and more clearly the nature of real objects.