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 MYSTICISM AND OCCULTISM 229

the maternal element in the God-head, the unio mystica, the andro- gynous Adam, Christ, the language of nature, etc.). Kielholz's study, while it brings in pathological processes as parallels, does not omit to point out the positive features in the mysticism of Boehme and their significance for ecclesiastical and cultural history.

Margarete Peter, bom in 1794, whose mystical frenzy had such disastrous consequences, is made the subject of a psychological analysis by Theodor Schroeder (16). From the analytic exami- nation of the Virgin Birth myth by A. J. Storfer (22) and by Ernest Jones (7) we obtain numerous clues to the mysticism attaching to the Christian Madonna-cult. Both articles, and specially that by Ernest Jones, must be regarded as indispensable bases of any future investigation of this subject. Reik goes still further back in certain passages of his article on the Schofar, as he relies on the interpretations of the lithurgy in the Kabbala. The same writer sees in the puberty rites and the entrance into the novitiate so clearly allied to the former the germ as it were of the mysteries of the ancient religions with which he draws out the comparison. In opposition to Silberer (21) he lays especial weight on the instinctive bases of these phenomena conditioned as they are by repressed tendencies.

We have found no occasion up to this point to expect revelations from the researches of spiritism, occultism and theosophy, which would cast another light on the psychic forces and laws indicated by psycho-analysis, or could force us to any modification of psycho-analytical assumptions. Various attempts, whether under- taken by spiritists, or by certain psychologists whose point of view is not far removed from the psycho-analytic, to supplement the theory of the operation of the deeper psychic forces by one of supernatural powers, have not stood the test of reality. The view put forward by Stekel and Petersen (11), as well as by other authors, of a telepathic function of dreams, of the existence of premonitions, etc., could not be shared by psycho-analysis, both because all objective proof is lacking, and because psycho-analysis itself finds in the effects, reactions and substitutions of repressed tendencies an adequate explanation for unusual phenomena of this kind. The most important advance in this direction, since Freud put forward in his ' Psychopathology of Everyday Life ' the conception of a meta-psychology as a scientific postulate, is the theory of