The article has been published in Mentalities/Mentalités, an interdisciplinary journal /un journal interdisciplinaire, volume/tome 19 – number/numero 1 - 2005, The Institute for the History of Mentalities, Outrigger Publishers, Hamilton, New Zealand 2005 [ ISSN 0111 - 8854 ].
English version of Di Maestri e di allievi, published in Scienza e psicoanalisi. Rivista multimediale di psicoanalisi e scienze applicate [Entered April 3, 2003].
Der menschenfeindliche Charakter des
urspr�nglichen Zeus noch im Prometheusmythus erkennbar.
(The hostility to man peculiar to
primeval Zeus
is evident in Prometheus’
myth)
(Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings, 7[10] )
We call Moses "Maestro" (Mosheh Rabbenu –
“Our Teacher”). But we call also Freud Maestro, a school’s teacher,
an orchestra conductor, a Rabbi, an artist, and even a great cook (a Chef).
Jesus was a Maestro, and so the Great Master of the Templars, a director
of Masonic lodges, and Hermes Tremegistus, the trice great, who owes his
name to the god Hermes, messenger and extension of Zeus. Being a winged
creature, Hermes is also his phallic symbol. He is the doer of the king
of the gods’ will, but he is also the Patron of thieves. The original theft
is no other than the stealing of women, as witnessed by Herodotus. The
Father of History begins his narrative with the abduction of Greek women
by the Phoenicians (Hist. 1:1), stating that the enmity between
the two peoples originated in that deed, implying that history and every
conflict between men was engendered in the abduction of women.
What could such different imagines - gods
and conductors, artists and cooks, teachers and preachers possibly have
in common?
Usually, a Maestro is the one who teaches us something
valuable. Why then do we call a Chef, an artist, and an orchestra conductor
Maestro?
In myths, a semi - god teaches men a cultural secret,
a trade, or a device necessary to their survival. Different tribes relate
to demigods the teaching of hunting, fishing, and agriculture, and they
become national heroes.
In the beginning, Prometheus was an intelligent Titan
who cheated Zeus. However, he subsequently became the creator and the savior
of mankind (Ovidius, Metam. 1:80-85). A marble relief from the Hellenistic
period, today on the ground floor of the Prado Museum in Madrid (see illustration below),
explicitly shows Prometheus creating man. He revealed to men the secret
of fire, stealing embers from the gods which he concealed in a hollow reed
that he donated to mankind (Hesiod, Works and Days 47; 50; Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound, 107). Always defiant of Zeus’ rage, Prometheus
taught men many arts and trades, including metallurgy. According to one
of Greek myths, he did not give to men only fire, but the woman (1).
Traces emerge that the creator of man had originally been a Son – God,
confirming Theodor Reik’s thesis in The Creation of the Woman (Chap. 2) that also
in Hebrew myth, Jahveh had originally been a Son – God.
Freud already had a similar intuition when he said:
“ The series of gods, then, would run chronologically: Mother Goddess –
Hero –Father God " (2) .
The Indian parallel of Prometheus, Indra, also steals
the soma transfiguring into a hawk; and in Indo-European myth, Agni retraces
the same pattern turning himself into a bird. In Greek myth, the bird makes
its appearance as the eagle devouring Prometheus’ liver, as punishment
for a similar theft, condensing, as happens in dreams, the one who steals
and the instrument of the punishment. A penis (the bird) has stolen,
and a penis consummates the inexorable Lex Talionis of the Father.
The condensation is triple – faced: Indeed, the eagle, the big penis, is
the symbol of Zeus. The bird, as Indra and Agni, is the thief, the Son
– God, and a bird executes Prometheus’ punishment. As we have seen, Hermes,
the winged messenger of Zeus, is also the Patron of thieves. The same elements
condense again.
Prometheus’ myth has been analyzed by Karl Abraham (3)
, who compared it to that of Moses: both heroes climb the mountain in order
to capture from the gods something pivotal to men, and in order to deliver the gift
to mankind. Prometheus captures fire (and woman), and Moses the Torah.
Both bring down to men the penis of the Father = the woman (4),
and both are consequently punished.
Abraham explains myths as the fulfillment of a collective
desire, which is very similar to the mechanism of dreams. The fire is the
representation of sexual desire. The female image, which in the Greek and
in the Indo –European myths is represented by the symbol of the wooden
disk perforated by the stick of the demigod (5)
, in Hebrew myth is represented by the symbol of the Torah.
After Abraham, Reik decoded the events on Sinai as an
acting out of the totemic meal (6) , in which
the two tablets of the Ten Commandments represent the Father – God, Jahveh,
and the Son – God Moses. However, as we have seen dealing with Greek and
Indo – European mythology, the Son – God, himself a phallic symbol similar
to the Father, capturing the latter’s potency and bringing it to man, also
performs an act of castration – an appropriation whose substance is stealing
the Woman from the Father, and Reik himself decoded the Torah as symbol
of the maternal body (see note 4).
We are clearly dealing with very condensed contents,
as in dreams.
Nietzsche has captured the real substance of Prometheus’
nature, as leader of the brotherhood of the primal horde:
Prometheus – one of the Titans who has devoured Dionysus [the Divine Goat, Zagreus, the hunter and totemic Father of the Greek tribes], and therefore he is suffering for the eternity as his creatures and, against Zeus, presents to us the advent of an universal religion [like the Christ]. Only through the devouring by the Titans, civilization is possible. The Titan’s race is perpetuated through robbery. Prometheus - at the same time the devourer of Dionysus and the father of Promethean men (Unpublished Writings, 7[83] ) (7).
Henceforth, the demigods, capturing from heaven what
belongs to the gods to deliver to men, are the delegates of the brotherhood
horde and the instrument of a libidinal satisfaction.
They give to men the craved woman, or reveal a secret,
a knowledge, which, as Wisdom, is also the symbol of the maternal body
(8).
A Maestro, like Moses or Freud, the school’s teachers,
and the ones who deliver to us knowledge, are the donors of a sublimated
erotic gratification. The gratified libido is genital, as is written: “Now
Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Gen.
4:1); “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and
bore Enoch” (Gen. 4:17). In the case of Chefs, the
libidinal gratification is oral, not quite sublimated, but nevertheless
libidinal, as every satisfaction. Eating is unconsciously associated to
the maternal body, too. It is not a casual thing that most of the Maestri,
those specialists in cooking delicasies, are male.We also call a great
artist Maestro. Let us check what Freud has said of art:
Art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization (9).
In Civilization and its Discontents (1930),
speaking of the artist, Freud says:
Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido, which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance (10).
Henceforth, an artist is a Maestro because he helps
us to come up against frustration from the external world through a sublimated
libidinal satisfaction, and in delivering a relief from the suffering caused
by the repression of instincts, and the subsequent energetic accumulation.
Libido satisfaction is always a discharge of accumulated energies. On the other hand, sufferance is their accumulation.
Reik, in “The Shofar” (see note 6), has shown how music began
in the imitation of the voice of the primal father, after he was slain by the brotherhood
horde.
As also Nietzsche has shown, (11)
, music engenders in the primal and most archaic layers of human soul,
which he defined as “Dionysian”. Freud called the same psychic province
“Id”.
Before the formation of the “Ego”, which is the psychic
agency necessary to the mediation of Id - drives (Freudian trieb)
into art, there was music, a crude expression of the orgiastic joy and
suffering concomitant to parricide. When the first music erupted, there
was still no Ego, or it was only in its first stages of formation. For
sure, there was also not yet a Super – Ego, which would inhibit the erotic
discharge of energies. Music was still only an orgiastic expression of
the Id. With the gradual formation of an inhibiting Super – Ego, it was
channeled into singing, and at last into melodies, as we know them today.
Oddly, it seems that Freud was quite adverse to music.
Was his Super – Ego too severe?
Some time ago, I had the occasion to watch to an interview
on Israeli television with Daniel Birenbaum, the director of Berlin Philharmonic.
Once in a while, he comes home, and we know that “A
prophet is not without honor except in his own country and his own house"
(Matt. 13:57). The interviewer pressed a provocative question upon
him ironically, as we Israelis usually do with prodigal sons returning
home: “How do you feel when everyone, here and in the world, even
while carrying your errands in the market, call you Maestro?”
Birenbaum responded to the ironic glance of the interviewer
with his own defiant smile and, settling into his chair, responded: “Even
the greatest Maestro of orchestra, when he raises his batton (an
obvious phallic symbol) to open the first bar, hesitates for a moment.
He knows that everything depends on the musicians. The conductor is powerless,
if he is not followed by the orchestra". And so saying, he raised his right
hand into the air, as if he were standing in front of an imagined host
of disciples, and then he lowered it abruptly.
Therefore, the Maestro depends on his disciples, as the
leader of the brotherhood of the primal horde had to look backwards, to
see whether he was followed. His own orgiastic scream of pain and victory
had to be echoed by his brothers. He was first among peers, but a nobody
if left alone. The Maestro is the hero of the primal tragedy, and
he needs the Chorus of the Goats, dancing and limping around him, echoing
and telling his gesta.
Henceforth, Freud’s nearly obsessive preoccupation was
that others would not understand him, and that he would die before his
work was universally recognized. As Jones writes, Freud constantly pressed
Strachey into finishing his translating work. The Maestro needed
an audience to fulfill his mission.
In the same way, Moses, triumphantly descending from
the sacred mountain and holding in his hands the paternal penis – Torah
captured from the slain Father, had found his brothers enhancing him with
orgiastic dances.
Moses descends the mountain, and “There
is a noise of war in the camp” (Ex. 32:17). That had been
the primal scene, to which, in thousands of years of repression, condensed
mnemonic traces of other events.
“And the people sat down to eat
and drink, and rose up to play (Waiaqumu Lezacheq)” (Ex.
32:6).
Rashi, in his commentary to this verse, says: “They committed
incest, and shed blood, because the word Zachoq has both meanings”.
Those are the mnemonic traces of the totemic meal and
orgy, while Moses triumphantly raises the Tablets of the Law - paternal
penis and female body. The act, symbolically repeated every Saturday, Monday
and Thursday in synagogues, when the Scrolls of the Torah are publicly
raised and displayed before the congregation, condenses the orgiastic triumph
on the Father, the capturing of his penis, and then delivering the
craved for female object to the congregation.
The overlay of the Post - Exilic Editor pasted into the
text creates a divergence of intentions between Moses, the Maestro,
and his disciples, when the former was elaborated into an imago
of Vicar of God the Father. As Abraham and Reik have shown, Moses was originally
a Son – God. The same thing happened to Jesus. In the final elaboration of the version collectively agreed upon, the "Son of Man"
became the Vicar of God the Father.
Thus, the Maestri bring down from the mountain the fire
– knowledge – female body – Zeus’ penis (Prometheus - Moses – Freud), they
direct the orchestra of the brotherhood’s orgy (Daniel Birenbaum), and
they (the cooks) prepare tasteful dishes – woman – Father’s penis.
Last but not least, it is no casual thing that we call
a group of musicians “a musical band”. We are indeed dealing with a band
of brothers, a horde led by a Maestro, a conductor, primus inter pares,
first among peers.
Prometheus and the inanimate body of Man
A sarcophagus dating IV century A.D. From Pozzuoli near Naples
(Archaeological Museum of Naples)
