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)
A clear case is the emasculation of Uranus by his son Kronos, who thereby
prevents the further cohabitation of the primal parents. [Archetype of the
Titan motive in a narrow sense.] Important for us is the fact that
castration in myths is represented sometimes as the tearing out of a limb
or by complete dismemberment. (Stucken, Astral Myth, pp. 436, 443, 479,
638 ff.; Rank, Incest Motive, p. 311 ff.)
The Adam myth also contains the motive of the separated primal parents. In
Genesis we do not, of course, see the myth in its pure form. It must first
be rehabilitated. Stucken accomplishes this in regarding Adam and Eve
(Hawwa) as the original world-parent pair, and Jahwe Elohim as the
separating son god. By a comparison of Adam and Noah he incidentally
arrives by analogical reasoning at an emasculation of Adam. In connection
with the “motive of the sleeping primal father,” he observes later (Astral
Myth, p. 224) that the emasculation (or the shameless deed, Ham with Noah)
is executed while the primal father lies asleep. Thus, Kronos emasculates
Uranus by night while he is sleeping with Gaia. Stucken now shows that the
sleep motive is contained in the 2d chapter of Genesis. “And the Lord God
caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of
his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.” (II, 21.) According to
Stucken the rib stands euphemistically for the organ of generation, which
is cut off from Adam while he sleeps.
Rank works out another kind of rearrangement. He takes the creation of Eve
from Adam as an inversion. He refers to the ever recurring world-parent
myths of savage peoples, in which the son begets upon the mother a new
generation. He cites after Frobenius a story from Joruba, Africa, where
the son and daughter of the world parents marry and have a son, who falls
in love with his mother. As she refuses to yield to his passion he follows
and overpowers her. She immediately jumps up and runs away crying. The son
follows her to soothe her, and when he catches her she falls sprawling on
the earth, her body begins to swell, two streams of water spring from her
breasts and her body falls in pieces. Fifteen gods spring from her
disrupted body. [Motive of the mutilation of the maternal body. The
dismembered lion also naturally contains this motive. From the mutilated
body come male and female (red and white) children.] Rank supposes that
the biblical account of the world parents serves as a mask for incest (and
naturally at the same time the symbolic accomplishment of the incest). He
continues, “It is needed only that the infantile birth theory [Birth from
anus, navel, etc. The taking of the rib = birth process.] which ignores
the sexual organs in woman and applies to both sexes, be raised in the
child’s thought to the next higher grade of knowledge, which ascribes to
the woman alone the ability to bring children into the world by the
opening of her body. In opposition to the biblical account we have the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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