Note B (128). That the ideas of gold and offal lie very near each other is shown in numerous forms and variations in myth, fairy tale and popular superstition. I mention above all the figure of the ducat or gold-dropper which has probably been attenuated from a superstition to a joke, and around it are gathered such expressions as “he has gold like muck,” “he must have a gold dropper at his house”; then the description of bloody hemorrhoids as golden veins; the fabulous animals that produce as excrement gold and precious things. Here belong also the golden ass [K. H. M., No. 36], which at the word “Bricklebrit” begins “to spew gold from before and behind,” or [Pentam., No. 1], at the command, “arre cacaure,” gives forth gold, pearls and diamonds as a priceless diarrhea. [Arre is a word of encouragement like our get-up; cacuare is derived naturally from cacare, kacken = to cack, perhaps with an echo of aurum, oro, gold.] It occurs frequently in sagas that animal dung, e.g., horse manure, is changed into gold as, inversely, gold sent by evil spirits is easily turned [again] into dung. Gold is, in the ancient Babylonian way of thinking, which passes over into many myths, muck of hell or the under world. If a man buried a treasure so that no one should find it, he does well to plant a cactus on the covered [treasure] as a guardian of the gold, according to an old magical custom. An attenuation of the comparison dung = gold seems to be coal = gold. In Stucken we find the comparison excrement = Rheingold = sperm [S. A. M., p. 262] and connected with it [pp. 266 ff.] a mass of material mythologically connected with it. I mention the similar parallels derived from dream analysis (Stekel, Spr. d. Tr., passim), further in particular the psychologically interesting contributions of Freud on “Anal character” (Kl. Schr., pp. 132 ff.) like Rank’s contribution. (Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 55 ff.)