[211] This new emotional attitude must also have been responsible for the fact that the deed could not bring full satisfaction to any of the perpetrators. In a certain sense it had been in vain. For none of the sons could carry out his original wish of taking the place of the father. But failure is, as we know, much more favourable to moral reaction than success. [212] “Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the sacred law of blood are in primitive society the only crimes of which the community as such takes cognizance ...” _Religion of the Semites_, p. 419. [213] Compare _Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_, by C. G. Jung, in which some dissenting points of view are represented. [214] Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, Second Edition, 1907. [215] See above, p. 128. [216] “To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonization of a saint seems to a modern Catholic.” Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, I; _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, II, p. 177. [217] It is known that the overcoming of one generation of gods by another in mythology represents the historical process of the substitution of one religious system by another, either as the result of conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological development. In the latter case the myth approaches the “functional phenomena” in H. Silberer’s sense. That the god who kills the animal is a symbol of the libido, as asserted by C. G. Jung (_l.c._), presupposes a different conception of the libido from that hitherto held, and at any rate seems to me questionable. [218] _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 412-413. “The mourning is not a spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And a chief object of the mourners is _to disclaim responsibility for the god’s death_--a point which has already come before us in connexion with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ox-murder at Athens.’”