Such changes are easily divined even if we disregard the beginning of a
psychic estrangement from the animal as well as the disintegration of
totemism through animal domestication[215]. The situation created by the
removal of the father contained an element which in the course of time
must have brought about an extraordinary increase of longing for the
father. For the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had
each been animated by the wish to become like the father and had given
expression to this wish by incorporating parts of the substitute for him
in the totem feast. In consequence of the pressure which the bonds of
the brother clan exercised upon each member, this wish had to remain
unfulfilled. No one could or was allowed to attain the father’s
perfection of power, which was the thing they had all sought. Thus the
bitter feeling against the father which had incited to the deed could
subside in the course of time, while the longing for him grew, and an
ideal could arise having as a content the fullness of power and the
freedom from restriction of the conquered primal father, as well as the
willingness to subject themselves to him. The original democratic
equality of each member of the tribe could no longer be retained on
account of the interference of cultural changes; in consequence of which
there arose a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of
gods through the veneration of those individuals who had distinguished
themselves above the rest. That a man should become a god and that a god
should die, which to-day seems to us an outrageous presumption, was
still by no means offensive to the conceptions of classical
antiquity[216]. But the deification of the murdered father from whom the
tribe now derived its origin, was a much more serious attempt at
expiation than the former covenant with the totem.
In this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the place of the great
maternal deities who perhaps everywhere preceded the paternal deities.
But it seems certain that the change in the relation to the father was
not restricted to religion but logically extended to the other side of
human life influenced by the removal of the father, namely, the social
organization. With the institution of paternal deities the fatherless
society gradually changed into a patriarchal one. The family was a
reconstruction of the former primal horde and also restored a great part
of their former rights to the fathers. Now there were patriarchs again
but the social achievements of the brother clan had not been given up
and the actual difference between the new family patriarchs and the
unrestricted primal father was great enough to ensure the continuation
of the religious need, the preservation of the unsatisfied longing for
the father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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