1 86 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
consists in
deciding against the direct sense
perception in favour of the so-called higher
intellectual
processes, that is to say, in favour of
memories, reflection and deduction. An example
of this would be the decision that
paternity is
more important than maternity,
although the
former cannot be
proved by the senses as the
latter can. This is
why the child has to have the
father's name and inherit after him. Another
example would be: our God is the greatest and
mightiest, although He is invisible like the storm
and the soul. Rejecting a sexual or
aggressive
instinctual demand seems to be
something very
different from this. In
many examples of progress
in
spirituality for instance, in the triumph of
father
-right we cannot point to the authority
that
provides the measure for what is to be valued
the more
highly. In this case it cannot be the
father himself, since it is
only this progress that
raises him to the rank of an
authority. We are,
therefore, confronted with the phenomenon that
during the development of mankind the world of
the senses becomes
gradually mastered by spiritu-
ality, and that man feels proud and uplifted by
each such
step in progress. One does not know,
however, why this should be so. Still later it
happens that spirituality itself is overpowered by
the
altogether mysterious emotional phenomenon
of belief. This is the famous credo
quia absurdum,
and whoever has
compassed this regards it as
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 187
the
highest achievement. Perhaps what is com-
mon to all these psychological situations is some-
thing else. Perhaps man declares simply that
the
higher achievement is what is more difficult
to attain, and his
pride in it is only narcissism
heightened by his consciousness of having over-
come difficulty.
These considerations are certainly not very
fruitful, and one might think that they have
.nothing to do with our investigation into what
determined the character of the Jewish people.
This would be only to our advantage, but that
this train of
thought has all the same to do with
our
problem is shown by a fact that will occupy
us later more extensively. The religion that
began with the prohibition against making an
image of its God has developed in the course of
centuries more and more into a religion of
instinctual renunciation. Not that it demands
sexual abstinence; it is content with a consider-
able restriction of sexual freedom. God, however,
becomes completely withdrawn from sexuality
and raised to an ideal of ethical perfection.
Ethics, however, means restriction of instinctual
gratification. The Prophets did not tire of main-
taining that God demands nothing else from his
people but a just and virtuous life: that is to say,
abstention from the gratification of all impulses
that according to our present-day moral stand-
ards are to be condemned as vicious. And even
1 88 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the exhortation to believe in God seems to recede
in
comparison with the seriousness of these
ethical demands. Instinctual renunciation thus
appears to play a prominent part in religion,
although it had not been present in it from the
beginning.
Here is the
place to make a statement which
should obviate a
misunderstanding. Though it
may seem that instinctual renunciation, and the
ethics based on it, do not
belong to the essence of
religion, still they are genetically closely related
to
religion. Totemism, the first form of religion
of which we know, contains as an
indispensable
part of its system a number of laws and prohibi-
tions which
plainly mean nothing else but
instinctual renunciation. There is the
worship
of the Totem, which contains the
prohibition
against killing or harming it; exogamy, that is
to
say, the renunciation of the passionately
desired mothers and sisters of the horde; the
granting of equal rights for all members of the
brother horde, i.e. the restriction of the
impulse
to settle their
rivalry by brute force. In these
rules we have to discern the first
beginnings of a
moral and social order. It does not
escape our
notice that here two different motivations come
into
play. The first two prohibitions work in the
direction of what the murdered father would
have wished; they, so to
speak, perpetuate his
will. The third
law, the one giving equal rights
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1 89
to the brothers,
ignores the father's wishes. Its
sense lies in the need of
preserving permanently
the new order which was established after the
death of the father. Otherwise reversion to the
former state would have been inevitable. Here
social laws became
separated from others which
as we
might say originated directly from a
religious context.
In the abbreviated
development of the human
individual the most
important events of that
process are repeated. Here also it is the parents'
authority essentially that of the all-powerful
father who wields the
power of punishment
that demands instinctual renunciation on the
part of the child and determines what is allowed
and what is forbidden. What the child calls
"
good " or " naughty " becomes later, when
society and super-ego take the place of the
parents, " good,
33
in the sense of moral, or evil,
virtuous or vicious. But it is still the same thing :
instinctual renunciation through the presence of
the
authority which replaced and continued that
of the father.
Our insight into these problems becomes further
deepened when we investigate the strange con-
ception of sanctity. What is it really that appears
"
sacred "
compared with other things which we
respect highly and admit to be important and signi-
ficant ? On the one hand the connection between
the sacred and the religious is unmistakable;
1
9O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
it is so stressed as to be obvious.
Everything
connected with religion is sacred ; it is the
very core of sanctity. On the other hand our
judgement is disturbed by the numerous attempts
to
lay claim to the character of holiness by so
many other things, persons, institutions and
procedures that have little to do with religion.
These endeavours are often
plainly tendentious.
Let us
proceed from the feature of prohibition
which adheres so closely to religion. The sacred
is
obviously something that must not be touched.
A sacred prohibition has a very strong affective
note, but actually it has no rational motivation.
For why should it be such a
specially hideous
crime to commit incest with a
daughter or sister,
so much more so than
any other sexual relations ?
When we ask for an explanation we shall surely
be told that all our
feelings cry out against such
a crime. Yet all this means is that the
prohibition
is taken to be
self-evident, that we do not know
how to explain it.
That such an
explanation is illusory can easily
be
proved. What is reputed to offend our feelings
used to be a
general custom one might say a
sacred tradition in the
ruling families of the
Ancient
Egyptians and other peoples. It went
without
saying that each Pharaoh found his first
and foremost wife in his sister, and the successors
of the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did not
hesitate to follow this
example. So far we seem
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
to discern that incest in this case between
brother and sister was a
prerogative forbidden
to
ordinary mortals and reserved for kings who
represented the gods on earth. The world of the
Greek and Germanic
myths also took no exception
to these incestuous
relationships. We may surmise
that the anxious concern for "
family " in our
higher nobility is a remnant of that old privilege,
and we observe that, as a
consequence of inbreed-
ing continued through many generations in the
highest social circles, the crowned heads of
Europe to-day consist in effect of one family.
To point to the incest of gods, kings and heroes
helps to dispose of another attempt at explanation,
namely, the one that would explain the horror of
incest
biologically and reduce it to an instinctive
knowledge of the harmfulness of inbreeding. It
is not even
certain, however, that there lies any
danger in inbreeding; let alone that primitive
races
recognized it and guarded against it. The
uncertainty in determining permitted and pro-
hibited
relationships is another argument against
presupposing a " natural feeling " as an original
motive for the horror of incest.
Our reconstruction of
pre-history forces another
explanation on us. The law of Exogamy, the
negative expression of which is the fear of incest,
was the will of the father and continued it after
his murder. Hence the
strength of its affectivity
and the
impossibility of a rational motivation:
1
92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
in short its sacredness. I should confidently
anticipate that an investigation of all other cases oi
sacred
prohibitions would lead to the same result
as that of the horror of incest, namely that what is
sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuated
will of the
primaeval father. This would also
elucidate the ambivalence of the word hitherto
inexplicable which expresses the conception of
sacredness. It is the ambivalence which governs
the relationship to the father. " Sacer " does not
only mean " sacred/
5 "
blessed/
5
but also some-
thing that we can only translate by " accursed/
5
"
worthy of disgust
55
(" auri sacra fames
55
).
The will of the father, however, was not only
something which one must not touch, which one
had to hold in high honour, but also something
which made one shudder because it necessitated
a
painful instinctual renunciation. When we hear
that Moses " sanctified " his people by introduc-
ing the custom of circumcision we now understand
the
deep-lying meaning of this pretension. Cir-
cumcision is the symbolical substitute of castra-
tion, a punishment which the primaeval father
dealt his sons long ago out of the fulness of his
power; and whosoever accepted this symbol
showed by so doing that he was ready to submit
to the father's will, although it was at the cost of
a
painful sacrifice.
To return to ethics : we may say in conclusion
that a
part of its precepts is explained rationally
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 193
by the necessity to mark off the rights of the
community to the individual, those of the
individual to the community, and those of
individuals to one another. What, however,
appears mysterious, grandiose and mystically
self-evident owes its character to its connection
with religion, its origin from the will of the
father.
6. The Truth in
Religion
How we who have little belief envy those who
are convinced of the existence of a Supreme
Power, for whom the world holds no problems
because He Himself has created all its institutions !
How comprehensive, exhaustive and final are the
doctrines of the believers compared with the
laboured, poor and patchy attempts at explana-
tion which are the best we can produce. The
Divine
Spirit, which in itself is the ideal of ethical
perfection, has planted within the soul of men the
knowledge of this ideal and at the same time the
urge to strive toward it. They feel immediately
what is high and noble and what low and mean.
Their emotional life is measured by the distance
from their ideal. It affords them high gratifica-
tion when they in perihelion, so to speak
come nearer to it; and they are punished by
severe distress when in aphelion they have
N
1
94 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
moved further away from it. All this is so simply
and unshakably established. We can
only regret
it if certain
experiences of life and observations of
nature have made it
impossible to accept the
hypothesis of such a Supreme Being. As if the
world had not
enough problems, we are con-
fronted with the task of
finding out how those who
have faith in a Divine
Being could have acquired
it, and whence this belief derives the enormous
power that enables it to overwhelm Reason and
Science. 1
Let us return to the more modest
problem that
has
occupied us so far. We set out to explain
whence comes the
peculiar character of the Jewish
people which in all probability is what has
enabled that
people to survive until to-day. We
found that the man Moses created their character
by giving to them a religion which heightened
their self-confidence to such a
degree that they
believed themselves to be
superior to all other
peoples. They survived by keeping aloof from
the others. Admixture of blood made little
difference, since what kept them together was
something ideal the possession they had in
common of certain intellectual and emotional
values. The Mosaic
religion had this effect
because
(i) it allowed the people to share in the
grandeur of its new conception of God, (2)
1
(An allusion to the passage in Faust " Verachte nur Vernunft
und Wissenschaft." Transl.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 195
because it maintained that the people had been
"
chosen " by this great God and was destined
to
enjoy the proofs of his special favour, and
(3) because it forced upon the people a pro-
gress in spirituality which, significant enough
in itself, further
opened the way to respect for
intellectual work and to further instinctual
renunciations.
This then is the conclusion we have attained,
but, although I do not wish to retract anything
I have said before, I cannot
help feeling that it is
somehow not altogether satisfactory. The cause
does not, so to
speak, accord with the result.
The fact we are trying to explain seems to be
incommensurate with everything we adduce by
way of explanation. Is it possible that all our
investigations have so far discovered not the
whole motivation, but only a superficial layer, and
that behind this lies hidden another very signifi-
cant
component ? Considering how extraordin-
arily complicated all causation in life and history
is we should have been
prepared for something
of that kind.
The path to this deeper motivation starts at a
certain
passage in the previous discussion. The
religion of Moses did not achieve its effects
immediately, but in a strangely indirect manner.
This does not mean that it did not itself produce
the effect. It took a long time, many centuries,
to do so; that
goes without saying where the
ig6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
development of a people's character is concerned.
Our modification, however, refers to a fact which
we have taken from the history of Jewish religion
or, if one prefers, introduced into it. We said
that the
Jewish people shook off the religion of
Moses after a certain time; whether
they did so
completely or whether they retained some of its
precepts we cannot tell. In accepting the sup-
position that during the long period of the fight
for Canaan, and the
struggles with the peoples
settled there, the
Jahve religion did not sub-
stantially differ from the worship of the other
Baalim, we stand on historical ground, in spite of
all the later tendentious
attempts to obscure this
shaming state of affairs. The religion of Moses,
however, had not perished. A sort of memory of
it had
survived, obscured and distorted, but
perhaps supported by individual members of the
Priest caste
through the ancient scripts. It was
this tradition of a
great past that continued to
exert its effect from the
background; it slowly
attained more and more
power over the minds of
the
people, and at last succeeded in changing the
god Jahve into the God of Moses and in bringing
again to life the abandoned religion Moses had
instituted centuries
ago.
In an earlier
chapter of this book we have dis-
cussed the
hypothesis that would seem to be
inevitable if we are to find
comprehensible such
an achievement on the
part of tradition.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
197
7. The Return of the Repressed
There are a number of similar
processes among
those which the
analytic investigation of mental
life has made known to us. Some of them are
termed
pathological; others are counted among
the varieties of the normal. This matters
little,
however, for the limits between the two are not
strictly defined and the mechanisms are to a
certain extent the same. It is much more
impor-
tant whether the
changes in question take place
in the
ego itself or whether they confront it as
alien; in the latter case they are called symptoms.
From the fullness of the material at
my disposal
I will choose cases that concern the formation of
character.
A young girl had developed into the most
decided contrast to her
mother; she had culti-
vated all the
qualities she missed in her mother
and avoided all those that reminded her of her
mother. We
may add that in former years she
had identified herself with her mother like
any
other female child and had now come to
oppose
this identification
energetically. When this girl
married, however, and became a wife and mother
in her
turn, we are surprised to find that she
became more and more like the mother towards
whom she felt so inimical, until at last the mother
198 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
identification she had overcome had once more
unmistakably won the day. The same thing
happens with boys, and even the great Goethe,
who in his Sturm und Drang period certainly did
not
respect his pedantic and stiff father very
highly, developed in old age traits that belonged
to his father's character. This result will stand
out more
strikingly where the contrast between
the two
persons is more pronounced. A young
man, whose fate was determined by his having
to
grow up with a good-for-nothing father,
developed at first in spite of the father into a
capable, trustworthy and honourable man. In
the
prime of life his character changed and from
now on he behaved as if he had taken this same
father as his
example. So as not to lose the
connection with our
topic we must keep in mind
that at the
beginning of such a process there
always exists an identification with the father
from
early childhood days. This gets repudiated,
even over
-compensated, and in the end again
comes to
light.
It has
long since become common knowledge
that the
experience of the first five years of child-
hood exert a decisive influence on our life, one
which later events