There is also a “causative” element in it, for sun and fire as beneficent powers are objects of human love; for example, the sun-hero Mithra is called the “well-beloved.” In Nietzsche’s poem the comparison is also a causative one, but this time in a reversed sense. The comparison with the snake is unequivocally phallic, corresponding completely with the tendency in antiquity, which was to see in the symbol of the phallus the quintessence of life and fruitfulness. _The phallus is the source of life and libido, the great creator and worker of miracles_, and as such it received reverence everywhere. We have, therefore, three designating symbols of the libido: First, the _comparison by analogy_, as sun and fire. Second, the _comparisons based on causative relations_, as A: Object comparison. The libido is designated by its object, for example, the beneficent sun. B: _The subject comparison_, in which the libido is designated by its place of origin or by analogies of this, for example, by phallus or (analogous) snake. To these two fundamental forms of comparison still a third is added, in which the “tertium comparationis” is _the activity_; for example, the libido is dangerous when fecundating like the bull—through the power of its passion—like the lion, like the raging boar when in heat, like the ever-rutting ass, and so on. This activity comparison can belong equally well to the category of the analogous or to the category of the causative comparisons. _The possibilities of comparison mean just as many possibilities for symbolic expression_, and from this basis all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido images, may properly be reduced to a very simple root, that is, just to _libido and its fixed primitive qualities_. This psychologic reduction and simplification is in accordance with the historic efforts of civilization to unify and simplify, to syncretize, the endless number of the gods. We come across this desire as far back as the old Egyptians, where the unlimited polytheism as exemplified in the numerous demons of places finally necessitated simplification. All the various local gods, Amon of Thebes, Horus of Edfu, Horus of the East, Chnum of Elephantine, Atum of Heliopolis, and others,[143] became identified with the sun God Rê. In the hymns to the sun the composite being Amon-Rê-Harmachis-Atum was invoked as “the only god which truly lives.”[144] Amenhotep IV (XVIII dynasty) went the furthest in this direction. He replaced all former gods by the “living great disc of the sun,” the official title reading: “The sun ruling both horizons, triumphant in the horizon in his name; the glittering splendor which is in the sun’s disc.” “And, indeed,” Erman adds,[145] “the sun, as a God, should not be honored, but the sun itself as a planet which imparts through its rays[146] the infinite life which is in it to all living creatures.”