Kushnacht Zurich, 15 November 1909
Pater, peccavil-it is indeed a scandal to have kept you waiting 25 days for an answer.
From the last paragraph of your letter it is clear why the intervals need to be shorter: you seem to be very isolated in-Vienna.
Eitingon's company cannot be counted among the highest joys.
His vapid intellectualism has something exasperating about it.
If I appear to be such a sterile and lazy correspondent it is because I am positively wallowing in people and social life here.
I spend much of my time with young Honegger-he is so intelligent and subtle-minded.
Hardly a day goes by without an exchange of ideas.
Thus I fill up my gaps and do not sense the passing of 25 days.
Well, it is scandalous and shall not happen again. I will arrange matters with Forel at once, and for you too.
Bleuler,I hear, has already joined.
He is chewing the cud of countless resistances.
His main grudge against us is that he is incapable of doing any \}IA.
He also seems to think that we back up Stekel in every particular.
(I am very glad that we are in agreement on St. A dictionary of dream symbols!
Good Lord, that's all we needed! Too bad he's usually right.}
Now to better things-mythology.
For me there is no longer any
doubt what the oldest and most natural myths are trying to say.
They speak quite "naturally" of the nuclear complex of neurosis.
A particularly fine example is to be found in Herodotus: at Paprernis, during the festival in honour of the mother of Ares (Typhon), there was a great mock-battle between two opposing crowds armed with wooden clubs.
Many wounded.
This was a repetition of a legendary event: Ares, brought up abroad, returns home to his mother in order to sleep with her."
Her attendants, not recognizing him, refuse him admission.
He goes into the town, fetches help, overpowers the attendants and sleeps with his mother.
These flagellation scenes are repeated in the Isis cult, in the cult of Cybele, where there is also self-castration, of Atargatis (in Hierapolis), and of Hecate: whipping of youths in Sparta.
The dying and resurgent god (Orphic mysteries, Thammuz, Osiris [Dionysus]," Adonis, etc.) is everywhere phallic.
At the Dionysus festival in Egypt the women pulled the phallus up and down on a string: "the dying and resurgent god."
I am painfully aware of my utter dilettantism and continually fear I am dishing you out banalities.
Otherwise I might be able to say more of these things.
It was a great comfort to me to learn that the Greeks themselves had long since ceased to understand their own myths and interpreted the life out of them just as our philologists do.
One of ,the most lamentable seems to me to be Jeremias- (this time lucus a lucendo) , who reduces everything to astronomy when the opposite is staring you in the face.
Now I am laboriously ploughing through the components of the Artemis myth; it has been fearfully distorted by syncretism.
Although the philologists moan about it, Greek syncretism, by creating a hopeless mishmash of theogony and theology, can nevertheless do us a service: it permits reductions and the recognition of similarities, as in dream analysis.
If A is put in place of C, then one may conjecture a connection from C to A.
One of the greatest difficulties is the dating of myths, so important for the genesis of the cults.
It also seems to me extremely difficult to estimate what was folkloristic and widely disseminated and what merely a poetic variant, doubtless very interesting to the philologist but quite unimportant to the ethnologist.
I was most interested in your news about Oedipus.
Of the dactyls I know nothing, but have heard of St. Cosmas" that people kiss his great toe and offer up wax phalli ex voto.
Can you give me sources for the Oedipus myth and the Dactyls?
A counterpart of the nun-like Vestal Virgins would be the self-castrated priests of Cybele.
What is the origin of the New Testament saying: "There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake"?"
Wasn't self-castration practically unheard of among the Jews?
But in neighbouring Edessa" self-castration of the Atargatis priests was the rule.
In that same place, incidentally, there were 180 ft. high "spires" or minarets in phallic form.
Why is the phallus usually represented as winged? (Joke: "The mere thought lifts it.")
Do you know those early mediaeval lead medallions in Paris, on one side the Christian cross, on the other a penis or vulva?
And the penis-cross of Sant'Agata de'Goti? (Inaccurate illustration in Inman.)
There seem to be indications of early mediaeval phallus worship.
I have recommended Frl. Dr. L. von Karpinska to Dr. Jekels. Frl. Cincburg'" couldn't be traced.
With many kind regards,
Yours,
JUNG ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 262-264
Dear Professor Freud, 27March 1912
Many thanks for the second edition of Cradiva.
I quite agree with your proposal.
I shall notify the local groups accordingly, i.e., I presume that I have to consult them.
Perhaps we can hold the Congress next spring.
Bleuler has demanded the return of one of the manuscripts already with ,Deuticke,' a very fine Dem. praec. analysis, for fear of public opinion in Zurich.
He could have done this long ago, so it is just another low trick.
Of course it was a paper produced at the Clinic, which I have now wasted a lot of time correcting.
Please excuse the "meagreness" of this "letter."
You will be hearing more from me very soon.
Best regards,
Most sincerely yours,
JUNG ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 497-498
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