“A sick man now Sick of a serpent’s poison,[620] A captive now Whom the hardest destiny befell In thine own pit; Bowed down as thou workest Encaved within thyself, Burrowing into thyself, Helpless, Stiff, A corpse. Overwhelmed with a hundred burdens, Overburdened by thyself. A wise man, A self-knower, The wise Zarathustra; Thou soughtest the heaviest burden And foundest thou thyself....” The symbolism of this speech is of the greatest richness. He is buried in the depths of _self, as if in the earth_; really a dead man who has turned back to mother earth;[621] a Kaineus “piled with a hundred burdens” and pressed down to death; the one who groaning bears the heavy burden of his own libido, of that libido which draws him back to the mother. Who does not think of the Taurophoria of Mithra, who took his bull (according to the Egyptian hymn, “the bull of his mother”), that is, his love for his mother, the heaviest burden upon his back, and with that entered upon the painful course of the so-called Transitus![622] This path of passion led to the cave, in which the bull was sacrificed. Christ, too, had to bear the cross,[623] the symbol of his love for the mother, and he carried it to the place of sacrifice where the lamb was slain in the form of the God, the infantile man, a “self-executioner,” and then to burial in the subterranean sepulchre.[624] That which in Nietzsche appears as a poetical figure of speech is really a primitive myth. It is as if the poet still possessed a dim idea or capacity to feel and reactivate those imperishable phantoms of long-past worlds of thought in the words of our present-day speech and in the images which crowd themselves into his phantasy. Hauptmann also says: “Poetic rendering is that which allows the echo of the primitive word to resound through the form.”[625]