Chagall and the Goat

Iakov Levi

Chagall and the Goat

25/09/2007

Supplement B to The Demonization of Israel

As we have seen, the Primeval Father of western civilization was Dionysus - the Goat.

In the same way, the Primeval Father of the Judean clans, which later amalgamated into the kingdom of Judah, and eventually unfolded into the Jewish people, was Jahveh - the Goat.

The former was dethroned and precipitated into the Kingdom of Darkness as its Lord, the Evil Demon, which is represented as a big Goat. As Freud said: "gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them" [10].

The latter, on the contrary, was sublimated into more and more elevated highs, until he became the sole and omnipotent god.

In this antithetic dichotomy of resolution the roots of western anti -Semitism are to be found. Furthermore, the Jews stubbornly sticked to the sole rule of this paternal image, whilst the West celebrated the triumph of a solar filial instance as their god.

We should not be surprised: the hated Father of the West was represented like the beloved Father of the Jews. The two poles in the ambivalent position toward the Father found in the two peoples antithetic modes of expression. After all, we ought not to forget that antipathy and sympathy between human beings is dictated by divergence or similarity in Ego resolutions of the same instinctual needs. Instinctual needs are the same everywhere. The resolutions are different. The unfolding of these resolutions into an articulated pattern represents a culture. Henceforth, there are different cultures. And often they are not compatible with each other, to the point of perpetual hatred between peoples.

The task of art is to give expression to emotions. And by the way of reconnecting to the unconscious primal representations which lay at the roots of such emotions.

The hatred - and admiration at the same time - toward the Devil is well expressed in paintings and folk - tales. He is hated and admired because he represents unbridled lust. Our own lust, indeed, projected into our Primal Father.

In western art and folklore, the pole of love and affection toward the Father is repressed in Devil's representations. On the other hand, the love finds its expression in the representations of the Holy Trinity, obviously in the element representing the Father. As Christians pray: Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum....

The Jews have no Holy Trinity. They don't even have an Evil Demon worth of his reputation. The Gentiles surpassed them by large in fantasy and variations of expressive means on this matter.

However, in the last century the Jews yielded one great artist - Chagall - who was capable of expressing the affection toward their beastly Father. Affection which is always present - albeit in a condensed and hidden way - in the ambivalent attitude (love - hatred) toward the Father.

The Goat is omnipresent in Chagall's art. Like God, who is omnipresent, and superseding in the most important events of human life. Birth - Love and Matrimony - Labor - Pogroms - Exile - Death.

His real beastly nature is undeniable. His loving stare and the nostalgia of him are undeniable too.

Very differently from the western Goat, which is lustful and malevolent, this one is empathetic and loving. Almost playful, as a father caught in a joking mood.

God the Father as a suckling mother ...male and female he created them (Gen. 1:27)

And the omnipresent eye

He - She gives his milk. The Jews have no maternal deity - a suckling Mater (Isis suckling Horus - the Virgin suckling the Child) - like the others: Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Christians. At least they don't have one now. So God the Father became both: Father and Mother. As is written: "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15-16), "As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13) (Cf. The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother?).

And the omnipresent eye of God, which is the everlasting symbol of God's omnipotence, as is represented in Egyptian and Christian visual art. As Freud and Abraham have shown the eye is a penis symbol. In this case: the erection (=omnipotence) of God.

The Father - the Mother - the Son

Bless us Father

And what is the clock - case on the top of the last image?

They were terrified and wanted to hide themselves. One sprang under the table, the second into the bed, the third into the stove, the fourth into the kitchen, the fifth into the cupboard, the sixth under the washing-bowl, and the seventh into the clock-case. (The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids)

The seventh kid - the hero of the tale - the preferred and youngest son of the Mother, who like all the heroes of myths, tales and biblical stories is the one who delivers the group from the tyranny of a Father - image, hides in the clock - case. As the tale explicitly says, he is a goat too. Like the mother , the she - goat. In the tale the Father - image is displaced into the wolf - like in Peter and the Wolf and in The Three Little Pigs. As we have seen in The Demonization of Israel, in Jewish mythology the Father figure (God) is the Goat.

The presence of the cock and other birds is very meaningful too.

Firstly, birds are a very obvious phallic symbol. And as such they also remind the presence of the powerful paternal penis. Just like the bird of the Holy Ghost (Cf. Maestri and Disciples ).

Secondly, a cock is indeed eaten at Yom Kippur eve, after a significant ritual, in which a cock for every male of the family is rotated above the head. Then thrown away and recovered. The cock has become the scapegoat for Israel's sins, and as such is sacrificed and eaten. Just like in ancient times a goat (scapegoat) fulfilled that role.
A cock is the symbol of the penis, and it is because of its excitement - sin that must be sacrificed - castrated.
Even in the Gospel a cock is associated with a connotation of guilt, as is written: " Jesus said to him, 'Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cocks crows, you will deny me three times'" (Matt. 26:34).

To Christians, a Son image took on himself peccata mundi (the world's sins). The Jews repressed the filial instance. So, a paternal image - goat or rooster - must condensate the roles of assassinated Father and scapegoat - sacrificial lamb - at the same time.

Theodor Reik, in his brilliant essay "The Shofar" [1] , in which he analyzes the psychoanalytic roots of the ritual horn in Judaism, writes:

The fear of a bull or goat in the phobias of children, where the anxiety is based on the thought of the horn by which the child fears to be tossed. May be compared with little Hans' fear of being bitten by a horse. The essential root of these infantile ideas is unconscious castration anxiety. It is fully in accordance with unconscious mental life that the instrument by which castration is carried out should be the father's penis (in the unconscious fantasies of children an operation on their own penis is also carried out by the paternal genital)

As we have seen the Goat, which in western culture represents lust and evil, to the Jews represents benevolence and salvation.

However - in Chagall's art - the lustful aspect of the goat is there too, behind the scenes.

Hans Baldung Grien: The Sabbath Witches Chagall: The Lady Rider

Chagall: Woman by Green and Red Hands Asherah of Ugarith (15^th century B.C.)

I don't think that Chagall was aware that he was painting Sabbath Witches.

Furthermore, the naked woman in The Lady Rider holds in her right hand a tuft of a plant or flowers. Just like the sacred prostitute of the ancient Semitic peoples: Asherah and her companions.

And the same goats too. For sure Chagall was not aware of the existence of this ancient ivory, that emerged from Ugarith (Syria) excavations.

In On Trees and on Birds (and on Flowers), I have shown that the fertility goddess Asherah, the sacred prostitute, was worshipped by the Hebrews as a sacred pole, namely a tree, which was synonymous of the goddess. As is narrated in Gideon's story, who had in his yard the image of Baal and the pole of Asherah (Judges 6: 25).

We can see in Chagall's Woman by Green and Red Hands and in the Ugarith ivory that the woman's hands seem to grow into a plant, as if she was a plant, and the goats feed from her very body. Like in Greek myth in which Daphne transforms herself into a tree.

Furthermore, Freud has shown in "Symbolism in Dreams" (1915-17) [2] that plants, flowers and bushes are the symbol of the female genital.

A woman is a tree, as is written: "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when longing is fulfilled, it is a tree of life". (Proverbs 13:12)

The Ashtarot (Asherot - sacred prostitutes) of Tel Beit Mirsim (Israel) ( From: W.F.Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, fig. 27)

The Sabbath Witches are indeed no other than the counterpart of the ancient Semitic sacred prostitutes. The latter were sacred, the former were evil, to the point to deserve to be led to the stake. As in the case of the Goat, Sacred and Evil, Demon and God are the same thing.
Now we can better understand why in Medieval Age women accused of witchcraft were also accused of copulating with the Devil.
Temple prostitution were very widespread in ancient Semitic East. The Hebrews too, before the First Exile, were addicted to this custom, as is explicitly told in the bible. Sacred prostitution was performed in the First Temple itself. Sacred prostitutes were - as the word itself tells - sacred, namely dedicated to the god. Qaddosh - sacred - literally means: 'dedicated to'. Qaddesh was the male prostitute and Qaddeshah was the female prostitute.
Therefore, the Qaddeshah symbolically copulated with god. What in the Semitic East was sacred, in the Christian west became evil. East and west had always been antagonist on this subject. The Greeks and the Romans despised temple prostitution as a barbaric custom. To them, virginity was fitter to the sacredness of temples. This concept was inherited by Christianity, in which the virginity of Athena, Artemis and the Vestals passed over to the Virgin Mary.
Now Dionysus - the former god, who as we have seen afore was associated with lasciviousness - became the Evil Demon, and as such was supposed to copulate with the Sabbath Witches, who inherited the role of Semitic sacred prostitutes.
On this associative chain anti - Semitism had an easy ride, too. Demons, witchcrafts, evil rites, and Jews have always been strictly associated.

The evil eye of the Devil (Goya)

The loving eye of God (Chagall)

Now, That is the Tale

Had Gadya

(which in Aramaic means "One Little Goat")

In the Diaspora, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Jews in the towns and villages raised goats so as to have an independent supply of milk. Chagall's pictures are filled with pictures of goats, as are Shalom Aleichem's stories. In popular Jewish folklore, the goat is a well-known motif which finds expression in jokes, folk songs and paintings. The Hasid Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk (early 19th cent.) told the following story:

" An old Jew once lost his snuffbox made of horn, on his way to the House of Study. He wailed: ן"Just as if the dreadful exile weren't enough, this must happen to me! Oh me, oh my, I've lost my snuffbox made of horn!' And then he came upon the sacred goat. The sacred goat was pacing the earth, and the tips of his black horns touched the stars. When he heard the old Jew lamenting, he leaned down to him, and said, ן"Cut a piece from my horns, whatever you need to make a new snuffbox.'

"The old Jew did this, made a new snuffbox, and filled it with tobacco. Then he went to the House of Study and offered everyone a pinch. They snuffed and snuffed, and everyone who snuffed it cried: "Oh, what wonderful tobacco! It must be because of the box. Oh, what a wonderful box! Wherever did you get it?' So the old man told them about the good sacred goat. And then one after the other they went out on the street and looked for the sacred goat.

"The sacred goat was pacing the earth and the tips of his black horns touched the stars. One after another the people went up to him and begged permission to cut off a bit of his horns. Time after time the sacred goat leaned down to grant the request. Box after box was made and filled with tobacco. The fame of the boxes spread far and wide. At every step he took, the sacred goat met someone who asked for a piece of his horns.

Now the sacred goat still paces the earth, but he has no horns."

From: Tales of the Hasidim, ed. Martin Buber. Translated by Olga Marx. Schocken Books, NY, 1991.

As we can see the Goat - which represents the Father - mercifully and benevolently gives his horns, which represent his penis, to the Jews. And piece after piece, as an extreme act of love. God the Father gives to his sons his penis - flesh and blood - as an act of love. The Jews enjoy the flavor of this act of benevolence. At the same time, taking off his horns piece by piece, in the same condensation they also castrate their Father as a talion for the act of castration perpetrated by fathers on their sons, generations after generation, in the form of circumcision. Fathers circumcise their sons, and in the tale the sons take their revenge. Sniffing is an act of appropriation as eating. Odor of the incense - so widely used in religious rites - is odor of the faeces, of the blood, of the flesh. And in the tale is benevolently given as an act of mercy.

In the same way Jesus, which came in the name of the Father, as his Vicar, but truly after having perpetrated the murderous deed in the name of the Brotherhood Horde, gives his blood and his flesh to his Brothers as an act of love and mercy.

Well, we smile because we all unconsciously know the truth: the Sons had killed their Father and lustfully eaten his penis and his flesh. It was not given. It was captured in an aggressive act of murder and cannibalism.

As the tale sums up, the end is known: "Now the sacred goat still paces the earth - but he has no horns." Namely, the Father has no penis because it was captured and eaten by the Brotherhood Horde of the sons. [For the equivalence between the horn and the penis, see T.Reik, (Supra) with the note below, and also note 1 in Supplement A El - The Bull]

Our Had Gadya - the little goat - is the equivalent of the little goat Dionysus, dismembered and eaten by the Titans, just like the horns of our Goat were dismembered by the Brothers - Jews of the tale. The myth is the same. The only difference is that in the Hassidic tale the aggressive connotation of the act was repressed and denied.

Just to remember what I have written in The Demonization of Israel:

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'. [Had Gadya] 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]

[...] 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]

It is not by accident that the Jews read the rigmarole of Had Gadya from the Haggadah of Pesah, at the end of the Seder, the Passover's ritual meal. Here too - like in Freud's quote: " 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." - the father is represented twice: He "bought" the Gadya for Trei Zuzei (two coins). Namely, he is represented as father proper, and as totemic animal.

We are dealing with a celebration of the totemic meal, in which the father's body is eaten, as in every ritual meal....Had Gadya..Ha.. Had Gadya....Had Gadya haaa a Had Gadya.

Now, some more very interesting points. As we shall see, in myth, religious representations, and tales - like in dreams - nothing is casual.

The old Jew 'lost his snuffbox made of horn'. A box, as Freud has shown in "Symbolism in Dreams" (1915 - 17)[3] and in The Three Caskets (1913), is the symbol of the woman . Namely, his snuffbox was a symbol of the mother. And symbols are not allegories. Symbols contains very concrete energetic (libidinal) contents. They are the real thing.

Now, the old Jew complains: ""Just as if the dreadful exile weren't enough, this must happen to me! Oh me, oh my, I've lost my snuffbox made of horn!'".

The equivalence between the loss of the box and the loss of the Promised Land (the exile) is amazing. The Promised Land is the Mother. Henceforth the close association between the snuffbox and the exile. Both deals with the same thing: the loss of the Mother.

Another thing, which is the same. The snuffbox, namely the Mother, was made of horn, namely, of the father's penis. As I have shown in The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother? :

In one of the versions on the birth of Aphrodite, the female - goddess par excellence, associated to sexuality like her Eastern counterparts Inanna - Ishtar - Astarte, and Asherah, we are told that the goddess was born from the castrated penis of Ouranus, thrown into the sea by his son Cronos.
The biblical story of Eve being born from Adam'rib conceals - albeit in a more distorted way - the same unconscious concept of the woman as a man's penis. As Theodor Reik has shown, Adam's rib - from which Eve was born - is a displacement of the man's penis (The Creation of the Woman, Braziller, New York 1960, pp. 107-110).

So, we can clearly see how the snuffbox, which is the Mother, is made of the Goat's horn, which is the Father's penis.

Debt

The Debt

Nietzsche perceived the existence of a compelling sense of debt between the generations and their ancestors:

The civil - law relationship between the debtor and his creditor, discussed above, has been interpreted in an, historically speaking, exceedingly remarkable and dubious manner into a relationship in which to us modern men it seems perhaps least to belong: namely into the relationship between the present generation and its ancestors.

Within the original tribal community - we are speaking of primeval times - the living generation always recognized a juridical duty toward earlier generations, and especially toward the earliest, which founded the tribe [...] The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists , and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments - (Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, 19)

Now, with the help of the Greek myth and the Hassidic tale, we are better positioned to understand the genealogy of the sense of guilt and of debt of the sons toward their parents. The source of the sense of debt is rooted in the aggressive drive to capture and to eat the father's penis. In the Hassidic tale the sacred goat gives it benevolently to the sons. As we have seen it is only a mechanism of defence in order to hide the repressed aggressive drive. Nevertheless, as we are told: "Now the sacred goat still paces the earth - but he has no horns." He has no horns, and we are in debt.

The Gospel tells of a similar debt, which must be paid:

When they had come to Capernaum those who collected the didrachmas came to Peter, and said, "Doesn't your teacher pay the didrachma?" He said, "Yes." When he came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, "What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth receive toll or tribute? From their sons, or from strangers?" Peter said to him, "From strangers." Jesus said to him, "Therefore the sons are exempt. But, lest we cause them to stumble, go to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the first fish that comes up. When you have opened its mouth, you will find a stater. Take that, and give it to them for me and you." (Matthew, 17:24-7)

Interestingly: "Jesus said to him, " Therefore the sons are exempt. But, lest we cause them to stumble" The sons are exempt, are they? Nietzsche thinks otherwise. Jesus absolves them from the debt, namely from the guilt. However, he pays the debt. No one pays a debt that he does not own.

As I have shown in Pinocchio. The Puberty Rite of a Puppet, Jesus represents the delegate of the Brotherhood Horde of the Sons, primus inter pares. As such he is required to pay the ancestral debt in the name of his brothers. Peter is the one who will be in charge of the gate of Heaven. Namely he is the keeper of the key of Redemption. He will accept the novices, who successfully passed their puberty rite, into the acceptance of Heaven. As delegate of Jesus, he is sent to take the coin from the mouth of the fish. And the fish is the Christ himself. His name in Greek is IHTHIOUS (acronym of Iesus Christus Theou Uous Soter - Jesus Christ God's Son Redeemer), which means "fish".

In The Demonization of Israel, I have drawn an equivalence between the Christ and Apollo, the Son - god protector and representative of the lads. And Apollo's symbol was a fish too (a dolphin). Namely, the fish, which is a penis, is the symbol of the Son. On Eastern, Christians eat fishes made of chocolate, and on Friday they eat fish instead of meat. The manifest meaning is to abstain from eating meat as an expression of mourning. However, at the same time, it is custom to eat fish, as if fish had a less lustful substance, and therefore was fitter to express mourning. The latent meaning is another: Meat is the flesh of the Father whilst fish is the flesh of the Son. Namely, they abstain from repeating the original murderous and cannibalistic deed, and they eat - namely identify with - the flesh of the Son. In this way Jesus pays the ancestral debt out of his own flesh. And on the behalf of all the Sons, whom he represents.