The hermetics often urge retirement, prayer and meditation, as prerequisites for the work; it is treated of still more in the hieroglyphic pictures themselves. The picture of death is already familiar to us from the hermetic writings, but in the technical language there are still other expressions for introversion, e.g., the shutting up in the receptacle, the solution in the mercury of the sages, the return of the substance to its radical condition (by means of the "radical" or root dampness). Similar features in our parable are the wandering in the dense forest, the stay in the lion’s den, the going through the dark passage into the garden, the being shut up in the prison or, in the language of alchemy, the receptacle. Introversion is continually connected with regression. Regression, as may be recalled from the 2d section of Part I, is a harking back to more primitive psychic activities, from thinking to gazing, from doing to hallucinating; a striving back towards childhood and the pleasures of childhood. Introversion accordingly is accompanied by a desire for symbolic form of expression (the mystical education is carried on in symbols), and causes the infantile imagos to revive—chiefly the mother image. It was pre-eminently father and mother who appeared as objects of childish love, as well as of defiance. They are unique and imperishable, and in the life of adults there is no difficulty in reawakening and making active those memories and those imagos. We easily comprehend the fact that the symbolic aim of the previously mentioned katabasis always has a maternal character; earth, hole, sea, belly of fish, etc., that all are symbols for mother and womb. Regression revives the Œdipus complex with its thoughts of incest, etc. Regression leads back to all these relics now done away with in life and repressed. It actually leads into a sort of underworld, into the world of titanic wishes, as I have called them. How far this was the case in the alchemistic parable, I have fully shown in the psychoanalytic treatment of it. Here I need merely to refer to the maternal nature of the symbols cited: receptacle, mercury of the sages (“mother of metals”) and radical moisture, also called “milk” and the like. Fairy tales have frequently a very pretty functional symbolism for the way in which introversion leads to the mother imago. Thus the simpleton in the fairy tale of the feathers comes through the gate of introversion exactly into the family circle, to the mother that cares for him. There his love finds its satisfaction. There he even gets a daughter, replica of the mother imago, for a wife. In the parable the wandering in the forest (introversion) is followed by the battle (suggestive of incest) with the lion (father or mother in their awe inspiring form); the inclusion in the receptacle (introversion) by the accomplishment of the incest.