Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult ArtsSilberer, Herbert
Religion
Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts
Silberer, Herbert
Alchemy; Society of Rosicrucians; Symbolism (Psychology)
The sexual propensity forbidden by the censor is incest. That it can be
mentioned in the parable in spite of the censor is accounted for by the
exceedingly clever and unsuspected bringing about of the suggestion.
Dreams are very adroit in this respect, and the same cleverness
(apparently unconscious on the part of the author) is found in the
parable, which is in every way analogous to the dream. Incest can be
explicitly mentioned, because it is attributed to persons that have
apparently nothing to do with the wanderer. That the king in the crystal
prison is none other than the wanderer himself, we indeed know, thanks to
our critical analysis. The dreamer of the dream does not know it. For him
the king is a different person, who is alone responsible for his actions;
although in spite of the clear disguise, some feeling of responsibility
still overshadows the wanderer, a peculiar feeling that has struck us
before, and now is explained.
Later we shall see that from the beginning of the parable, incest symbols
are in evidence. Darkly hinted at first they are later somewhat more
transparent, and in the very moment when they remove the last veil and
attain a significance intolerable for the censor, exactly at that
psychologic moment the forbidden action is transferred to the other,
apparently strange, person.
A similar process, of course, is the change of situation in the strawberry
dream at the exact moment when the affair begins to seem unpleasant to the
dreamer. This becoming unpleasant can be beautifully followed out in the
parable. The critical transition is found exactly in one of those places
where the representation appears most confused. It is in this way that the
weakest points of the dream surface are usually constituted. Those are the
places where the outer covering is threadbare and exposes a nakedness to
the view of the analyzer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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