Note C (280). According to Jung it is a characteristic of the totality of the sun myth which relates that the “fundamental basis of the ‘incestuous’ desire is not equivalent to cohabitation, but to the peculiar idea of becoming a child again, to return to the parents’ protection, to get back into the mother again in order to be born again by the mother. On the way to this goal stands incest, however, i.e., necessity in some way to get back into the uterus again. One of the simplest ways was to fructify the mother and procreate oneself again. Here the prohibition against incest steps in, so now the sun myths and rebirth myths teem with all possible proposals as to how one could encompass incest. A very significant way of encompassing it is to change the mother into another being or rejuvenate her, in order to make her vanish after the resulting birth [respective propagation], i.e., to cause her to change herself back. It is not incestuous cohabitation that is sought, but rebirth, to which one might attain quickest by cohabitation. This, however, is not the only way, although perhaps the original one.” (Jung, Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 266 ff.) In another place it is said: The separation of the son from the mother signifies the separation of man from the pairing consciousness of animals, from the lack of individual consciousness characteristic of infantile archaic thought. “First by the force of the incest prohibition could a self-conscious individual be produced, who had before been, thoughtlessly one with the genus, and only so first could the idea of the individual and conclusive death be rendered possible. So came, as it were, death into the world through Adam’s sin. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reason; fear of death holds him there. It appears that there is no concept and no word strong enough to express the meaning of this conflict. Whole religions are built to give value to the magnitude of this conflict. This struggle for expression, enduring thousands of years, cannot have the source of its power in the condition which is quite too narrowly conceived by the common idea of incest; much more apparently must we conceive the law that expresses itself first and last as a prohibition against incest as a compulsion toward domestication, and describe the religious system as an institution that most of all takes up the cultural aims of the not immediately serviceable impulsive powers of the animal nature, organizes them and gradually makes them capable of sublimated employment.” (Jb. ps. F., IV, pp. 314 ff.)