Now, amusing to relate, Mama hurried to his help. It is a peculiar fact that the woodpecker was also the “Mama” of Romulus and Remus, who put nourishment into the mouths of the twins with his beak.[690] (Compare with that the rôle of the vulture in Leonardo’s dream. The vulture is sacred to Mars, like the woodpecker.) With the maternal significance of the woodpecker, the ancient Italian folk-superstition agrees: that from the tree upon which this bird nested any nail which has been driven in will soon drop out again.[691] The woodpecker owes its special significance to the circumstance that he _hammers holes into trees_. (“To drive nails in,” as above!) It is, therefore, understandable that he was made much of in the Roman legend as an old king of the country, a possessor or ruler of the holy tree, the primitive image of the Paterfamilias. An old fable relates how Circe, the spouse of King Picus, transformed him into the Picus Martius, the woodpecker. The sorceress is the “new-creating mother,” who has “magic influence” upon the sun-husband. She kills him, transforms him into the soul-bird, the unfulfilled wish. Picus was also understood as the wood demon and incubus, as well as the soothsayer, all of which fully indicate the mother libido.[692] Picus was often placed on a par with Picumnus by the ancients. Picumnus is the inseparable companion of Pilumnus, and both are actually called _infantium dii_, “the gods of little children.” Especially it was said of Pilumnus that he defended new-born children against the destroying attacks of the wood demon, Silvanus. (Good and bad mother, the motive of the two mothers.) The benevolent bird, a wish thought of deliverance which arises from introversion,[693] advises the hero to shoot the magician under the hair, which is the only vulnerable spot. This spot is the “phallic” point,[694] if one may venture to say so; it is at _the top of the head_, at the _place where the mystic birth from the head takes place_, which even to-day appears in children’s sexual theories. Into that Hiawatha shoots (one may say, very naturally) three arrows[695] (the well-known phallic symbol), and thus kills Megissogwon. Thereupon he steals the magic wampum armor, which renders him invulnerable (means of immortality). He significantly leaves the dead lying in the water—because the magician is the fearful mother: “On the shore he left the body, Half on land and half in water, In the sand his feet were buried, And his face was in the water.” Thus the situation is the same as with the fish king, because the monster is the personification of the water of death, which in its turn represents the devouring mother. This great deed of Hiawatha’s, where he has vanquished the mother as the death-bringing demon,[696] is followed by his marriage with Minnehaha.