Iakov Levi

 

 

 

The Demonization of Israel. The Psychoanalytic Meaning

 

 

 

With him was introduced the greatest and weirdest illness, from which human beings today have not recovered, the suffering of man from his humanness, from himself, a consequence of the forcible separation from his animal past, a leap and, so to speak, a fall into new situations and living conditions, a declaration of war against the old instincts, on which, up to that point, his power, joy, and ability to inspire fear had been based.

F.Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, 16

 

 

Published in Mentalities/Mentalitée  (Phillis Chesler Special) Volume 21:1, The Institute for the History of Mentalities, Outrigger Publisher, Hamilton, New Zealand 2007. ISSN 0111 - 8854

Commovent homines non res,
sed de rebus opiniones (Epictetus)
(people are moved not by the substance of things,
but by their interpretation)

25 Sept. 2007

 

Dealing with the demonization of Israel, we ought to focus on the substance of the personages involved, namely Israel (the Jews) and the Demon, the Great Lord of Darkness. Speaking of substance, we do not mean substance of a real presence, person or people. We take for granted that none of the readers of the present paper actually believes in the existence of the Devil. Therefore the Devil, not being a real presence, is a representation. In the following pages I shall try to prove that not only the Devil is a representation, but also that the Jews are such. Henceforth, it seems to me, that we must deal first with the substance of representations. Representations are external projections of internal needs, just as the projection on a cinema screen represents externally the contents programmed into the spool of film. Schopenhauer was the first to realize that we all live in a world of representations. We all are perceived by others, not according to what we are or we do, but according to what we represent in the eyes of the beholder. The need, that the Greeks called Ananke, generates the representations, that we can also call images, or imagines, the plural of Latin imago, a concept well known in psychoanalysis. An internal need created the Devil's image, and another - or maybe the same - created the Jew [1].

 

First to the Devil.

 

According to the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Devil is George Bush. On the 20^th of September 2006, he expressed his credo before the General Assembly with such a determination that we are induced into thinking that he really believes it. At the manifest level, it might well be a metaphor or a figure of speech. However, Chavez was behaving just as though he was sharing with the public not only an inner truth but a Revelation. What at the manifest level might seem as a comic gimmick, at the latent unconscious level is the representation of an imago, permeated by real emotional substance. 'The devil came here yesterday', -Chavez said, referring to G.W. Bush, who addressed the world body during its annual meeting on the previous Tuesday, "and it smells of sulfur still today." As we can see, to him the Devil was a very real presence.

But who is George Bush? He is the President of the United States of America, and he is considered the strongest man in the world. We can say that Hugo Chavez expressed his belief that the strongest being in the world is the Devil, quite the opposite view of the traditional fantasy which puts God into that role. In order to represent the Devil, one must be associated not only with evil, but also with extreme power: almost like that of God, in fact: like that of God. And even more: occasionally more than that of God, as we must infer from Chavez's colorful expression.

When the Islamic fundamentalists call America 'The Great Satan', the connotation is of extreme evil and extreme power at the same time. Could the United States of America be equaled to Satan if it were not perceived as extremely powerful? I don't think so. The implication is that America must be fought, but it would never be completely conquered. Just like Lust. The Islamic fundamentalists project into Americans and their permissive ways their own repressed lust.[2] So America becomes 'The Great Satan', to wit: The Great Erection.

Indeed, in Character and Anal Erotism (1908), Freud writes: 'the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life'[3]. However, in A Seven-teenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1922), Freud extensively explains that the Devil is a Father substitute:

 

It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father. But this is only so at first sight, for we know a good many things which lessen our surprise. To begin with, we know that God is a father substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde [...] We also know, from the secret life of individual which analysis uncovers, that his relation to his father was perhaps ambivalent from the outset, or, at any rate, soon became so [...] Concerning the Evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of God and yet is very close to him in his nature[4]

 

Freud continues pointing out how in religion the 'negative' aspects of the father image are projected into the Devil, whilst the 'positive' ones are projected into God. This is a very well known splitting mechanism.

Just as a reminder, as part of a series of extensively detailed rituals, during the hajj, Muslims perform collective circumambulations of the Kaaba and symbolic stoning of evil. We have a big stone, which is the god[5], and so the worshippers stone 'evil', which is an abstraction of the repressed pole in the ambivalent relationship toward God the Father. God is worshipped as a stone, and the "other" image of God the 'bad' god is stoned, as a liberating discharge of energy directed at the hated object.

However, how did it come about that the father's imago is permeated by a connotation of unrestrained lust which is projected into the Devil? We are used to thinking of the father-image as an inhibiting psychic instance, which in later life translates into a Superego. Ethical values, instinctual inhibition and sublimation depend all on the inner father image. Whence -in our earliest infancy- did we pick up this unconscious conception that our father knows neither restraint nor morality?

Freud himself has answered the question dealing with the primal horde and the genesis of psychology :

 

The members of the group were subject to ties just as we see them to-day, but the father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others. Consistency leads us to assume that his ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To objects he gave away no more than was barely necessary.

He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the "superman" whom Nietzsche only expected from the future. Even to-day the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self confident and independent.[6]

It seems that Freud is indeed describing the Devil. No moral restraints, no self inhibitions, no love for anyone, only self -gratification. If God is endless love, the Devil is endless beastly lust. Hence the Devil is a projection of this side of the child fantasies directed at his own father. Fantasies which are phylogenetically inherited, but that receive ontogenetic reinforcement in families submitted to the despotism of a particularly tyrannical father.[7] The child's instinctual fantasies on the enormous size of his father's penis integrate into an image of paternal unlimited lust and potency. And not by accident, an enormous penis is fantasized in relation to the Devil's image, too, as folk-tales used to tell.

Now we know that in order to qualify for the title of demonic image, one must be associated to unlimited power and unlimited unrestrained lust. Thus, we can understand why America qualifies to be the Great Satan in the eyes of sexually repressed Islamic terrorists. What exactly Hugo Chavez had in his contorted mind on George Bush, we shall never know for sure. However, it fits that a third-rate leader of a third-world country is consumed by the envy peculiar to dwarfs aspiring to gianthood. And envy is always unconsciously associated with potency and sexual performance. Nietzsche would call it 'the resentment of the botched'.

Again, we can see that it is not the nature of the hated object which inspires the hatred, but what it represents in the eyes of the beholder. One can hardly imagine George Bush as a father- figure manifesting unrestrained potency and lust. However, to Hugo Chavez that does not matter. His envious fantasies relate to his impotence vis à vis the strength of America and its President. In his contorted mind, the Venezuelan President reconnects directly to his own childish fantasies relating to the primal Father.

It seems to me that most of anti-American sentiment in the world should to be associated with unconscious fantasies regarding the potency and virility of the strongest member of the horde. After all, what is the General Assembly if not a mock repetition of the primal horde? Here and there a democracy of primitive equality is - as it was in prehistoric times - mocked by the reality of the strongest member of the horde. All that remains is for Chavez to discharge his impotent frustration by name-calling. And what name fits better than El Diablo

The Devil's image gained preponderance in the West only with Christianity. When other gods were diminished and only one god attained prominence - in the imagery of the consub-stantiality of the Father with the Son, to whom the Father became implicitly subordinated - his antithesis or alter Ego - gained pre-eminence too. Beginning to speak of one God, western culture began speaking also of one Devil. It is significant that it is only when the West adopted the supremacy of the Son over the Father, and the Son became the One True God, only then did the Devil assume such pivotal importance. As long as western religion was focused on the eternal struggle between the gods, as well as between Heroes (Son - gods) and Olympian gods (Father - images), like in the myths of Prometheus, Heracles and other heroes who always represent the Son: then there was no need for a powerful Devil image. Only with the final supremacy of the Christ the Son did there suddenly emerge a powerful almighty Devil. This means that the Devil is not so needed as an alter to God the Father as it is as an alter to God the Son.

At this point, we can begin to understand why the Jews, who first adopted the idea of one God the Father never needed some almighty unconscious alternative. Satan only makes his appearance in late Hebrew texts ; he is a General Advocate, whose purpose seems to be to defame man before the Heavenly Throne.

If we return to what Freud said on the devil as representing a Father alter ego, we can also see that he is needed not as an alternative to a Father - god, but as an alternative to a Son - god. The Anti-Christ is an anti-son, reconnecting to the substance of the struggle between fathers and sons, which lies at the core of every religion.

If Christ is the Son, the sun and the light, as he is proclaimed by John in the Fourth Gospel, his antithesis is the Father, Lord of the darkness. Evil impulses are relegated to his kingdom because they are also associated with the darkness of unconscious instinctual life. The Devil is the product of the repression of the basic struggle between fathers and sons. This struggle in Christianity is apparently resolved through the reconciliation between the Christ and the Father, by his sitting in Heaven Dextera Patris (at the right of the Father). When the struggle and the aggressiveness between father and son are denied, they reappear in the form of struggle between God and Devil, and good and bad.

 

 

Tacitus and the Jews

 

As we have seen, the need for a powerful Devil image emerged strongly only with Christianity and the final victory of the Son on the Father. However, the image of the Son-God associated with purity and light has its prototypes in the heroes of the ancient world. First of all there is Apollo, the Son - god. He defied the Python, an extreme devilish menace to mankind, and he instituted the Pythic games, which are the natural continuation of the heroic deeds of the Son - gods of Greek mythology. At last, by the 5th century B.C.E. he was identified with Helios and his chariot of the Sun: Thus he is the prototype of the Messiah.

The cosmopolitan Hellenistic-Roman world was preparing the approaching final victory of the Son. His culture is the Apollonian world and its ecumenical message to be adopted and continued by the Catholic Church. Tribalism, sectarianism and superstition were associated with the Jews and their Father religion, while the progressivism and the ecumenism of Apollonian culture would be associated with the Son religion. Therefore, the young God is the Son, the Sun, and the Messiah. His alter is the vanquished Father, the repressed aggressive and sexual impulses, and their dwelling place: the darkness.

The Hellenistic-Roman world represented the light - a peculiarity of Apollo - the ecumenical Weltanshauung of civilization vis à vis the barbarian habitat of the denizens of the darkness, and culture and morality, vis à vis all the rest, which became the representation of evil and immorality. Not to be part of this culture, namely to refuse the Apollonian message of art, culture and the ecumenical Weltanshauung, meant to identify with a barbaric, tribal way of life, that which the Hellenistic Roman world was supposed to have conquered and suppressed.

 

Tacitus writes at the end of the first century C.E.. of the Jews:

 

Moyses, wishing to secure for the future his authority over the nation, gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practised by other men. Things sacred with us, with them have no sanctity, while they allow what with us is forbidden [...] (Hist. 5.4)

 

This worship, however introduced, is upheld by its antiquity; all their other customs, which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their strength to their very badness. The most degraded out of other races, scorning their national beliefs, brought to them their contributions and presents. This augmented the wealth of the Jews as also did the fact, that among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies. They sit apart at meals, they sleep apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women; among themselves nothing is unlawful (Hist. 5.5).

 

All the elements are mentioned:

 

1. The inversion of values between sacred and evil - what is sacred to mankind is evil to them and vice versa-.

 

2. Great strength and success which suck from evil (just like in Mefisto's story).

 

3. Great wealth - the famous ''Devil's stench''. As Freud reports: "Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is 'the faeces of Hell'[8].

 

And, above all,

 

4. "singularly prone to lust" ( proiectissima ad libidinem gens , alienarum concubitu abstinent;

inter se nihil inlicitum.)

 

 

 

Dionysus and Apollo

 

As Joshua Trachtenberg shows in many illustrations in his important book The Devil and the Jews,[9] during the Middle Ages the Devil was mainly represented as a goat, and the Jews were represented like him. During the Renaissance and afterwards the iconography Devil = goat was even more pronounced. For instance, there is a painting by Hans Baldung Grien, entitled Witches Sabbath (1510), today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in which we see naked witches, one of them riding a big goat flying in the air. An 18^th century painting by Goya, today in the Lazarus Galdiano Museum in Madrid, shows the same iconography: a group of witches holding babies to be sacrificed to the Devil, who is represented as a goat with enormous horns. Another painting by Goya,at the Prado Museum named 'The Great Goat' or 'The Sabbath Witches' retraces the same pattern. And it is no accident that satanic orgies are called 'Sabbaths' after the name of the sacred day in Jewish liturgy.

Dealing with the Devil's image, Freud writes:

 

Concerning the evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of god and yet is very close to him in his nature. His history has not been so well studied as that of god; not all religions have adopted the Evil Spirit, the opponent of God, and his prototype in the life of the individual has so far remained obscure. One thing, however, is certain: gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them[10].

 

Accordingly, dealing with western culture, we must discover which god fell from supremacy into the Hell of the Demon's image. And in western mythology, the only god associated with the goat is Dionysus.

According to Orphic myth, which is the most archaic, the Titans captured Dionysus, the child, while he was playing, and tore him into shreds. They boiled the pieces in a cauldron. According to one version the dismembered pieces were buried and from the same soil the first vines were generated. Greek myths always present different versions of their stories, in order to give expression to all the possible Ego elaborations. Myths work like dreams. The engine is the need - the somatic impulse - and the representations are their Ego elaboration. Myth, like a dream, is the final outcome. However, there always are different possible outcomes. Therefore, there also are different versions of the same myth. The Orphic myth conceals the mnemonic traces of an archaic totemic meal, as the one described by Freud in Totem and Taboo.

Sir James Frazer, who studied the link between the customs of primitive peoples and myths of historical times, writes:

 

Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his names was 'Kid'.At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under the title of 'the one of the Black Goatskin' [like the devil painted by Goya] and a legend ran that on a certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he took the title. In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in autumn the plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden foliage of the fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a goat, which the husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of protecting their vines against blight. The image probably represented the vine-god himself. To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat[11]. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and devoured it raw, they must have believed that they were eating the body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw has been practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times. We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of Bacchus.   The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood.[12]

 

In other parts of Greece, Dionysus was worshipped in the rituals of death and resurrection as a bull. Frazer writes:

 

We find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god had been lured to his doom[13].

 

The beast was different but the substance of the rite is the same. A totemic beast is killed and eaten in a religious rite which retraces the tribal totemic meal. As Freud has shown, the totemic beast is always the father's representation. In Freud own words:

 

the father is represented twice over in the situation of primitive sacrifice: once as God and once as the totemic animal victim [...] We see, then, that in the scene of sacrifice before the god of the clan the father is in fact represented twice over - as the god and as the totemic victim. But in our attempts at understanding this situation we must beware of interpretations which seek to translate it in a two dimensional fashion as through it were an allegory, and which in so doing forget its historical stratification. [...] The doctrine of original sin was of Orphic origin. It formed a part of the mysteries, and spread from them to the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece. Mankind, it was said, were descended from the Titans, who had killed the young Dionysus - Zagreus and had torn him to pieces.[14] [...] In Greek tragedy the special subject matter of the performance was the suffering of the divine Goat, Dionysus, and the lamentation of the goats who were his followers and who identified themselves with him.[15]

 

In the same paragraph, Freud explains how the hero of Greek tragedy, Dionysus, condenses the image of the killed father, and that of the hero who kills him. Henceforth they are the same: the Divine Goat. Therefore, the primal father of the Greek tribes, before the development of a later articulated religion, was Dionysus, the Goat, who at the beginning was indeed represented as hairy and beastly, and only much later as a young hairless lad, in sympathy with the hairless Apollo of Hellenistic times. As we know Dionysus represented extreme wisdom, and also extreme lasciviousness. According to the two poles of the same fantasy directed at the father, as described afore.

However, Dionysus' wisdom is antithetic to the wisdom of Apollo. The former's is the wisdom of the one who could reconnect to the real substance of his instinctual nature, free from every inhibitory agency, which separates between himself and his true substance. Dionysus' wisdom is the biblical knowledge, namely the genital expression of the true nature of every mammal. As is written: "Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived" (Gen. 4:1), and again: "Cain knew his wife, and she conceived" (Gen. 4:17), and again: ""Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them" (Gen. 19:5). The Sodomites wanted to sodomize Lot's guests. Namely, also homosexual knowledge is genital in nature. And again: "Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man" (Gen. 19:7). Indeed, the god's mysteries were celebrated through orgies and Bacchanalia.

Apollo's wisdom is the secrets of the archaic puberty rites. The wisdom delivered from father to son. The secrets of inhibition and sublimation. The wisdom of the resolution of Oedipus' riddle, proposed by the Sphinx, in order to be initiated to Thebes and her queen. The secrets of the beastly substance of our own nature, vis à vis the secrets of social order and equilibrium.

We have seen how in archaic times Dionysus was identified not only with the goat but also with the bull. We should not be surprised. Interestingly, in Hebrew myth, too, there is a duality in relation to the totemic beast. The traces of the duality and of the antagonism between both totemic beasts, possibly originally belonging to different clans, emerges in the story of the Golden Calf and God's wrath. The Golden Calf, like a bull, was the deity of Israel, while the Ram (Jahveh) was the deity of Judah (Cf. Supplement A El - The Bull) . Eventually Jahveh-the-Goat triumphed over El-the-bull-calf. The traces of the struggle entered the text in the Exodus story in the battle between the faithful to God and the worshippers of the golden calf (On El as the deity of Israel and Jahveh as the deity of Jehuda, see El, god of Israel--Yahweh, god of Judah and " El Defines Israel").

Something similar happened to the Greeks, and oddly enough we are dealing with the same duality: a bull and a goat. Eventually, the Greeks conserved both versions of the story, while the Jews, under pressure of the late monotheistic resolution, repressed the previous existence of two totemic beast, and only Jahveh-the-Goat survived. And to this day Jews still use the ram's horn (shofar) in their most sacred day, Yom Kippur.

With the development of the primitive totemic rites into the first forms of an articulated religion, the beast took the form of a god. However, Dionysus was too associated to the primitive rites, and remained a god associated with impulsiveness, orgies and free discharge of energies, as in the Bacchanalia (Dyonisia), in which the Tyasi practiced Homophagia, another trace of the totemic and cannibalistic substance of the original rite. In order to give expression to the needs of a more majestic and inhibiting Father, another divinity was created, one apt to sit on the throne on the Olympus: Zeus.

The image of the Father was split in two: Dionysus was associated with lasciviousness, and Zeus with law and order. To be sure, Dionysus came first, and Zeus is his derivative. In order to conceal the real substance of the events - we are dealing with psychic events - the myth concocted a version in which Dionysus was the son of Zeus, once by Persephone, in another version by Semele, and in another born straight from Zeus' thigh. This is an inversion, a psychic mechanism much adopted in dreams .

However, the traces that in the beginning Zeus and Dionysus were one remain in Orphic myth in which Dionysus is mentioned as Chtonios (related to the underground), like Zeus, and Zeus was called Zagreus (the great hunter[16]), which was an epithet of Dionysus. Moreover they were often represented with the same face.[17]

Henceforth, Dionysus was a second Zeus - we should say the first Zeus - and Zeus was father of Apollo, who became the Son-God par antonomasia. The image of Apollo unfolds slowly. The archaic Apollo threatens and menaces by death the Achaeans under Troy's walls, like the adults of the tribe who in the puberty rites of savages threaten to kill the young novices in the bush. He is always associated with the youngsters. First he is presented as a god who initiates the lads. Thereafter he condenses with them and becomes their protector; this is exactly what occurs at the conclusion of puberty rites. The adults, who kidnapped the lads and threatened them by death, condense with them in an outcome of mutual identification. The god's second name is Phoebus, which means 'who brightens' or 'pure'. Apollo has a dual character, uniting the characteristics of 'destroyer' and 'saviour', 'destroyer' and 'victim', or 'purifier' and 'purifying sacrifice'. And purification is the ultimate goal of puberty rites, namely, purification from incestuous and aggressive drives. Henceforth he became the god of education, culture, dreams, art, and divination. By the 5^th century B.C.E. he was identified with Helios, the sun.

In short, a solar deity who became the personification of sublimation in contrast to the archaic Dionysus, who in the representation of his symbol - the Goat - became the personification of darkness and lasciviousness: in other words, the opposite of sublimation. We can see how education and sublimation became associated not with a parental image but with that of the Son. It is the leader of the brotherhood horde who delivers the goods of self inhibition and civil order. On the contrary, the image of the primal father is that of unrestrained impulses, as fits to the Devil.

In Hellenistic times, when Greek culture (and thereafter the Roman culture) became ecumenical, Apollo was also the personification of western culture with its essential features of civilization and ecumenism. Civilization in this way became synonymous with the Apollonian, whilst Dionysius became the synonym of the tribal, sectarian, and barbaric.

When western culture unfolded into Christianity, the archaic father of prehistoric Greek tribes became the Devil, exactly as Freud hinted when speaking of the devil as a fallen deity. In contrast, Apollo - the lad and protector of lads - became his antithesis: the Christ who embodied his features. To Zeus was reserved the role of the Father in the Holy Trinity, and we can see him in paintings where he is confined to a secondary role behind the crucified Son on top of the cross. However, it is obvious that this image of the Father is a later overlay, a mechanism of defence and denial against the emergence of the archaic and therefore more authentic image.

At this point we can see the stages according to which western culture evolved, from the tribal totemic rites, into the first religion with the mnemonic traces of Dionysus the Goat, as the primal father, and eventually with the supremacy of a Son-God: Apollo, the Christ.

Civilization owes its successful unfolding to the victory of the Son on the Father, yet not without a tepid concession to the latter's role too, in the condensation of the Holy Trinity image. It seems that the outstanding success of Christianity is due to its capacity for condensation and synthesis between the psychic needs acting in the field. The fertility cults, which with different names represented the main religion of the civilized cosmopolitan world, and in which a young god - lover of the goddess - died and was resurrected by his lover (cp. the Orphic myth of Dionysus-Demetra, similar also to Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis) in a psychic regression were condensed with the archaic puberty rites, in which the novice is born anew from the generation of the fathers (and not from the mother), and identifies with them.

In this condensation, in which the Christ ascends to Heaven, identifies with the Father sitting at his right hand, the growing sense of guilt finds its resolution, as it had been in the archaic puberty rites of western prehistory. Christ dies like Dionysus (Adonis, Attis et.), retracing his Pagan Passion, but then he resurrects in the shape of Apollo, and in Him the solar cosmopolitan western civilization finds its identification.

 

 

The Jews

 

Jewish culture unfolded in a different way. It seems that prior to the First Exile, the Hebrews' cultural development too was unfolding according to a similar trend. The biblical story of Isaac's aborted sacrifice represents a mnemonic trace of archaic puberty rites.[18] The scene of Moses ascending the mountain in order to receive the Law - a symbol of the Mother and paternal penis (Cf. Maestri and Disciples ) and the orgy awaiting for him at the feet of the mountain, conceals mnemonic traces of a totemic rite. Furthermore, it seems that the image of Moses contains the same features of the heroes of archaic Greece. Prior to this mission, he performs heroic deeds, e.g., killing the Egyptian and saving Jethro's daughters. Moses is associated with re-birth, of which the water is a symbol. And re-birth is strictly associated to puberty rites and initiation - gods. First he is drawn from the waters, and again he draws the entire people from the waters of the Red sea, in a collective puberty rite of re-birth.

Hero and demigod, as in the mythology of other peoples, in the post-exilic re-elaboration of the ancient Hebrew sagas, due to the new monotheistic Weltanschauung, Moses was transformed into prophet and mortal. At the beginning he was a demigod, as is written: 'And he [Hizkiahu] broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had burned incense to it; it was called Nehushtan' (2 Kings 18:4). In other words, Moses was worshipped in Judah as a god of medicine and healing, the like of Aesculapius - himself not by accident son of Apollo - whose symbol was the serpent, too. Furthermore, the young god Tammuz, who periodically died and resurrected (in the context of Semitic fertility cults) was worshipped in the Temple of Jerusalem, which was the central site of those cults in Judah, as it is written: 'Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord; and behold, there sat women weeping Tammuz' (Ezekiel 8:14). These rites were the rule and not the exception, as the later monotheistic editor is very eager to present.

The Hebrews, too, were part of the trend peculiar to the peoples of antiquity towards a victory of a Son-God over the archaic totemic beast. In the religion of the southern clans, which later formed the kingdom of Judah, the totemic beast - the goat - equivalent to Dionysus, was Jahveh. That is the reason why Jahveh and his prophets were always so angry at the people who were psychically developing in the direction of dethroning the primal Father - as had happened to Dionysus - in favour of heroes and Son deities.

 

Then the exile came.

 

Psychically, the exile was a catastrophe to an extent even more far reaching than the material consequences of the loss of land and sovereignty. The trauma of this loss triggered a collective psychosexual regression[19]. The Judahites regressed from the cult of the Mother at the heterosexual level (= genital) - as it was performed in the Semitic fertility cults (Cf. Jeremiah Chap. 44) to the exclusive religion of the Father. In the process heroship was aborted, and consequently the young heroes of Hebrew mythology, like Moses, Joshua and others, were transformed from rebels like Prometheus and other Greek and Semitic heroes and demigods into the humble servants of an omnipotent God. The rebelliousness of the sons towards the fathers, which is a necessary element for progress and civilization, was repressed beyond recognition. Now only submission was in the card.

The Jews like to think that monotheism is a progress vis à vis polytheism. However, it seems to me that this postulate has yet to be proven. Freud, for example, stated that monotheism represents progress in civilization because any regression to the rule of the Primal Father (Freud doesn't call it a regression, but a return from the Mother to the Father) represents a strengthening of the inhibiting instance - the Super Ego - which is the paternal presence inside the psychic apparatus (endopsychic).[20]

 

But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality - that is an advance in civilization, since maternity is proven by the evidence of the senses while paternity is an hypothesis, based on an inference of premises[21]

 

It is a "victory" over sensuality. No doubt. But self-inhibition and civilization are by no means concomitant. For a repressive attitude is also antithetic to progress and civilization. No democracy could have developed out of Judaism in which the Law is transcendent and not agreed upon between the members of the group. No Apollonian arts can emerge either under the constraint of the command not to make images.

If during the succeeding centuries there was indeed an "advance in intellectuality" in the Jewish people - and this is Freud's expression - at least from a statistical point of view, then, it seems to me that it was not because of monotheism per se but because of the exile, the segregation and the persecutions, as well as other concomitant factors that distilled the best out of those Jews who survived. Today, Muslims are even more monotheistic than Jews, and yet it does not seem to me that they enjoy any particular "advance in intellectuality". In fact, they have no democracy, no visual arts, no theatre, and almost no music. Even sports are not encouraged in fundamentalist Islamic groups. Only iconoclastic rage to the point of destroying other peoples cultural achievements, like the Buddha at Banyan in Afghanistan. In brief, a repressive culture is no premise for intellectual achievements.

Furthermore, inhibiting the sight's sense might strengthen an inclination to psychosexual regression. As opposed to other mammals, who are attracted by each other through the sense of smell - the sight's sense plays no role in animal sexuality - humans, erect and detached from the ground, tended to favour the migration of the libido from smell to sight. Humans achieve sexual excitement mainly through the eye, and through the eroticization of the eye they reach a sublimated enjoyment of art and all the other achievements of civilization. Henceforth, no civilization would be possible under the constraint of the sight-inhibition. The migration of the libido from the olfactory smell to the eye was its precondition. All ancient civilizations unfolded under the primacy of the eye.

The Jews came and demanded such an inhibition as part of their new monotheistic Weltanschauung. The Gentiles interpreted it as a demand for psychosexual regression from the eye to nose, from beauty to ugliness: from humanity to beastliness, from Apollo to the archaic Dio-nysus, from the Son to the Father et. Thus the anti-Semites always have an easy ride on this unconscious chain of associations. For them, it strengthens the paradigm Jew = The Beast = The Devil.

Now we can better understand the connotation of disgust attached to anti-Semitic representations, from Tacitus' description to the caricatures of the Nazi era.

 

 

From Hellenism to Nazism

 

When western culture and the Jews encountered - by the time of Alexander the Great's invasion of the East - both cultures were already organized into antithetical modes. After a brief honeymoon, which lasted almost one hundred years, the unbridgeable differences surfaced. Hellenistic civilization was focused around the rule of the Son and his solar civilization. Alexander himself may be considered a prototype of the Christ: A young god who unites the world in one ecumenical civilization. The Greeks had successfully repressed their tribal past and the totemic and puberty rites that were part of it. In addition, they invested an enormous amount of energy into repressing the substance of their primal totemic father: Dionysus the Goat. Furthermore, the god himself had by then acquired the appearance of the young hairless Apollo as a device of defence against a possible resurgence from the repression of its true nature.

In contrast, the Jews denied their earlier polytheistic experience and had regressed, albeit in a sublimated way, to the rites of their tribal past.[22] They denied the existence or even the need of a Son-God, who would deliver them from the tyranny of their Primal Father. The totemic beast - the Goat - assumed the form of an omnipotent heavenly God, who nevertheless kept all the features of the original tribal god: cruelty, jealousy, and intolerance for other deities.

We ought not to forget that by and large the polytheistic ancient world was tolerant and syncretistic. Religious intolerance is a specific monotheistic invention. Even today we can easily compare the western secular - multicultural - attitude, which is essentially tolerant of different ways of life - at least at the manifest level - with the intolerant fundamentalist ways of Islam as it is currently acted out in the third world.

As I have argued before, with the advent of Christianity, the archaic God the Father -Dionysus the Goat was relegated to the underworld in the shape of the Devil. The Jews, on their part, had meanwhile elevated their archaic Father-Jahveh the Goat to the highest place as their sole ruler. Henceforth, every contact with the Jews put at risk the western mechanism of defence against a regression into mental contents which were perceived as successfully repressed. "The voice of the jungle" - a psychosexual regression - menaced to trap the West and its achievements in their pre-historical past. The Devil of the former was easily identified by the Greco-Roman Christians with the sublime God of the latter. It was not just a matter of semantics. All the values personified by the Jews were antithetical to the values personified by western civilization, and vice versa. Tacitus' words cited earlier in this essay are enlightening on this matter.

At this point it is easy to understand why a demonization of the Jews by western culture was unavoidable. The Jews, with their rites, their faith, and their defiance of the cult of the Son unconsciously remind the Christians of the image of their assassinated father.

Now we can also understand why the Jews are perceived not only as omnipotent and intriguing for the world domination, but also why they are always experienced as threatening. The reason is that an aggressive impulse, even if it is apparently successfully repressed, never ceases to be active in the underground of the mind. The projection of an aggressive impulse translates into paranoid fantasies of persecutions. The Beast, i.e., the assassinated father, is always unconsciously perceived as plotting revenge. For this reason, the triumphant horde of brothers can never sleep peacefully. The Jew, represented in anti-Semitic caricatures as a Goat, is conspiring against that peaceful sleep.

Who are the "Elders of Zion" and their mysteriously secret protocols if not the mature adults of the tribe, who threaten the lives of the young innocent lads? Which image could be more paternal than that of a group of elders? And with such a goatish look! And what about that monstrous huge nose in the middle of the face of the Jew in anti-Semitic cartoons? Psychoanalysis has shown that the nose is a displacement of the penis. Henceforth, a huge paternal penis - fantasized by little boys - threatens to castrate the horde of brothers. And no mockery is able to disguise the deep fear and angst that lies curled up at the roots of that representation. Mockery is a defence mechanism against that anxiety. The more the cultural resolution demanded an absolute victory of the Son on the Father, the more the need to repress the image of the paternal agency, the more the outburst of anti-Semitism is prone to be violent and hysterical.

From the Judeophobia of the Semitic dwellers of the Hellenistic Orient to Tacitus' disgust for the barbarian anti-Apollonian Jews and on to the Catholic Church, it was all an escalando. In medieval Europe there were, naturally, ups and downs, according to the psychic needs of the moment. But the Catholic Church, once having established the dogma of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and apparently attributing a similar role to the Father, was prone to blunt the most extreme expressions of anti-Semitism [sic!]. Until the Reformation came, and then the new churches went a step further in denying the Father in favour of the Son. They denied the need and the existence of a Holy Father (the Pope). They stopped calling their own priests "father" (padre), and opted for a "reverend" or "pastor". This new priestly figure no longer a father above all, but one of them, i.e., a member of the brotherhood horde - primus intra pares, first among peers. Certain Protestant sects made a mockery of the Catholic Holy Trinity, calling it the "Catholic Cerberus"[23]. At this point a further twist in the demonizing of the Jews was on the cards.

The savage outbursts of anti-Semitism by Martin Luther are well known. As Luther grew older, he became increasingly obsessed with the notion that the Devil threatened him constantly. His association of Jews with the Devil heightened his anti-Jewish attitudes. Several months after publishing On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther wrote another attack on Jews entitled Schem Hamephoras, in which he explicitly equated Jews with the Devil[24].

Luther sowed the seeds for Nazism, which took the ultimate step, and in which the paternal instance was utterly denied. Hitler, Erik Erikson has shown,[25] was himself a filial image, and he declared himself the only hero-deity-leader of the horde. The Fuhrer did not have to share the throne with a paternal agency, as in the Holy Trinity. The result was an orgy of instinctual drives with no inhibition. In order to feel free, the Nazis had first to exterminate the paternal presence personified by the Jews.

 

 

NOTES

Abbreviations: SE = The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in 24 volumes, Vintage - the Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London 1953.