Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/545

 order to pacify the anger of the "terrible mother" the most beautiful woman was sacrificed as symbol of man's libido. Less vivid examples are the sacrifice of the first-*born and various valuable domestic animals. A second ideal case is the self-castration in the service of the mother (Dea Syria, etc.), a less obvious form of which is circumcision. By that at least only a portion is sacrificed.[48] With these sacrifices, the object of which in ideal cases is to symbolize the libido drawing away from the mother, life is symbolically renounced in order to regain it. By the sacrifice man ransoms himself from the fear of death and reconciles the destroying mother. In those later religions, where the hero, who in olden times overcomes all evil and death through his labors, has become the divine chief figure, he becomes the priestly sacrificer and the regenerator of life. But as the hero is an imaginary figure and his sacrifice is a transcendental mystery, the significance of which far exceeds the value of an ordinary sacrificial gift, this deepening of the sacrificial symbolism regressively resumes the idea of the human sacrifice. This is partly due to the preponderance of phantastic additions, which always take their subject-matter from greater depths, and partly due to the higher religious occupation of the libido, which demanded a more complete and equivalent expression. Thus the relation between Mithra and his bull is very close. It is the hero himself in the Christian mysteries who sacrifices himself voluntarily. The hero, as we have sufficiently shown, is the infantile personality longing for the mother, who as Mithra sacrifices the wish (the libido), and as Christ