The answer might be that the idea of god had meanwhile appeared,--no one
knows whence--and had dominated the whole religious life, and that the
totem feast, like everything else that wished to survive, had been
forced to fit itself into the new system. However, psychoanalytic
investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god
is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal
relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical,
fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but
an exalted father. Here also, as in the case of totemism, psychoanalysis
advises us to believe the faithful, who call god father just as they
called the totem their ancestor. If psychoanalysis deserves any
consideration at all, then the share of the father in the idea of a god
must be very important, quite aside from all the other origins and
meanings of god upon which psychoanalysis can throw no light. But then
the father would be represented twice in primitive sacrifice, first as
god, and secondly as the totem-animalsacrifice, and we must ask, with
all due regard for the limited number of solutions which psychoanalysis
offers, whether this is possible and what the meaning of it may be.
We know that there are a number of relations of the god to the holy
animal (the totem and the sacrificial animal): 1. Usually one animal is
sacred to every god, sometimes even several animals. 2. In certain,
especially holy, sacrifices, the so-called ‘mystical’ sacrifices, the
very animal which had been sanctified through the god was sacrificed to
him[214]. 3. The god was often revered in the form of an animal, or from
another point of view, animals enjoyed a godlike reverence long after
the period of totemism. 4. In myths the god is frequently transformed
into an animal, often into the animal that is sacred to him. From this
the assumption was obvious that the god himself was the animal, and that
he had evolved from the totem animal at a later stage of religious
feeling. But the reflection that the totem itself is nothing but a
substitute for the father relieves us of all further discussion. Thus
the totem may have been the first form of the father substitute and the
god a later one in which the father regained his human form. Such a new
creation from the root of all religious evolution, namely, the longing
for the father, might become possible if in the course of time an
essential change had taken place in the relation to the father and
perhaps also to the animal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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