It is also conceivable that the obtrusive occurrence of incest, castration of the father, etc., should make the mythologists ponder. It was bias on the part of many of them to be unwilling to see the psychological value of these things. I must therefore acknowledge the justice of Rank’s view when he (Inz-Mot., p. 278) says in reference to the Œdipus myth (rightly, in all probability, interpreted by Goldziher as a sun myth): “Yet it is indubitable that these ideas of incest with the mother and the murder of the father are derived from human life, and that the myth in this human disguise could never be brought down from heaven without a corresponding psychic idea, which may really have been an unconscious one even at the time of the formation of the myth, just as it is with the mythologists of today.” And in another passage (pp. 318 ff.): “While these investigators (astral and moon mythologists) would consider incest and castration operative in an equal or even greater degree than we do, as the chief motives in the formation of myths in the celestial examples only, we are forced by psychoanalytical considerations to find in them universal primitive human purposes which later, as a result of the need of psychological justification, have been projected into the heavens from which our myth interpreters wish in turn to derive them. [Whether such a need of justification has had a share in the formation of myths appears to me doubtful or at any rate not demonstrable. At all events in so strongly emphasizing these unnecessary assumptions and conceiving the projection upon heaven of the mundane psychological primal motives as an act of release, we hide the more important cause for concerning ourselves with heaven, namely the already mentioned vital importance of the things that are accomplished there. Now the fact that the primal motives cooperate in the symbolical realization of these things, implies no defense directed against them. A better defense would be to repress them in symbolism than, as really happens, to utilize them in it.] These interpreters, for example, have believed that they recognized in the motive of dismemberment (castration) a symbolic suggestion of the gradual waning of the moon, while the reverse is for us undoubted, namely, that the offensive castration has found a later symbolization in the moon phases. Yet it argues either against all logic and psychology, or for our conception of the sexualization of the universe, that man should have symbolized so harmless a phenomenon as the changes of the moon, by so offensive a one as the dismemberment or castration of the nearest relative. So the nature mythologists also, and Siecke in particular, have thought that primitive man has ‘immediately regarded’ the (to him) incomprehensible waning of the moon as a dismemberment, while this is psychologically quite unthinkable unless this image, which is taken from earthly life, should have likewise