A Tale of Two Cities. The Unfolding of the Sense of Guilt in Judaism and in the West
 

By

Iakov Levi

 2007-03-21

Published in Mentalities/ Mentalités - an interdisciplinary journal-  volume 20:2, 2006, The Institute for the History of Mentalities, Outrigger Publisher, Hamilton (New Zealand) 2006.  ISSN 0111 - 8854

In another article[1] I have interpreted Zeus’ phallic symbol (the bird), which daily comes to devour Prometheus’ liver, as the mnemonic traces of the Primal Father who castrated his own sons. The little child too feels threatened by his father’s enormous penis, as retaliation for the primal fantasy of castrating his father[2].

 In Christian myth, the bird, which daily comes to devour Prometheus' liver, is represented by the bird of the Holy Spirit. In many paintings, we still can see the dove, symbol of the Holy Ghost, standing on the top of the cross. The bird only transfigured from threatening and malevolent into "dovish" and benevolent. The original meaning has been repressed, but the bird is still there[3].

Christianity is an evolution and transformation of Greek - Roman culture. Christian myths express the existential change which took place in Greek - Roman culture after the crisis undergone by the ancient world. As part of the context of the metamorphosis, the aggressive contents of the relationship between fathers and sons, still vivid and tangible in Greek myths, were transformed into a "love affair" between the Father and the Sons, sterilized from the aggressive connotation peculiar to the ambivalence mode of the Oedipus complex' conundrum. The cruel and threatening Zeus became a merciful Father who even “gives” spontaneously his own beloved son, to be sacrificed for the sake of the all sons of mankind. Like fathers who abuse their son “for his own good”. The Father’s cruelty is re-elaborated as mercifulness. It is a psychic device the purpose of which is to maintain in the repression the sense of guilt associated with the primal fantasy. The reason why children abuse is destructive for their mental health is not because of temporary physical pain, which can be easily overcome, but because the child makes an interpretation of his parents’ abuse as evidence of the sinfulness of his own primal fantasies. The abuse enacts a reactivation of the fantasy, and in this way prevents the sense of guilt, which would be there in its nuclear form anyway, from being successfully and healthily repressed or sublimated.

 With the fall of the ancient world, the mounting sense of guilt transformed heroes into martyrs, and the defiance of the sons into the acceptance of the faithful.

 Something similar had happened in the Hebrew world. The ancient sagas telling of heroic deeds and acts of defiance, in the post-Exile manipulation of the ancient texts became stories of divine salvation enacted by pious acceptance of God’s will. Hebraism transformed into Judaism.

 However, the traces remained. As Freud stated, to manipulate a text is like to conceal a crime. It can be done, but traces always are to be found.

 The odd longevity of Patriarchs, never satisfactorily explained by biblical commentators, discloses the true nature of the original stories. They were gods and demigods, and therefore immortal, like the protagonists of other peoples’ mythology. When the monotheist editor manipulated the ancient stories into a version acceptable to the new monotheistic Weltanschauung he degraded the gods into Patriarchs. From immortal they became mortal, but their previous immortality emerges in their extraordinary longevity. How can be defined a man living eight or nine hundred years if not “immortal”?

 In the 6^th chapter of the Book of Genesis we read: “It happened, when men began to multiply on the surface of the ground, and daughters were born to them,  that God's sons saw that men's daughters were beautiful, and they took for themselves wives of all that they chose” (6:1-2). Greek mythology is rich with stories of gods falling in love with mortal women and goddesses with mortals. And immediately following: “The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God's sons came to men's daughters. They bore children to them: the same were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”. Here are the Giants (the Titans), the demigods and the heroes.

 Like Zeus, Jahveh at the beginning was not the merciful  father that he became later. As the angry Zeus daily castrates Prometheus bound to the rock, so the Hebrew god befalls on Moses, who is the equivalent of Prometheus, the vicar of the brotherhood horde[4]:

It happened on the way at a lodging place, that Yahweh met him and wanted to kill him.  Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said, "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me."  So he let him alone. Then she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood," because of the circumcision. (Ex. 4:25-6).

This verse contains the traces of an archaic puberty rite, in which, as in the puberty rites of savages, circumcision is a substitution for being killed by the elders of the tribe. As in the biblical verse, circumcision defiles death, both because it represents a castration – death substitute, and because it symbolises the acceptance of the will and the yoke of the Father. Jahveh threatened to do to Moses exactly what Zeus had done to Prometheus: eating his liver = eating his penis = killing - castrating him.

 The Greeks – Romans could express in their mythology the aggressiveness of the relationship father – sons, and so could the ancient Hebrews. Then the Hebrews became Jews, The Greek – Romans became Christians, and the aggressiveness was repressed and denied. The latter declared that they had changed religion, and so doing they also could preserve the old mythology. Taking distance from their original myths, they preserved them. The Jews, on the other hand, pretended to have remained the same, and in so doing they had to make an adaptation of the old stories to the new reality. To manipulate the texts, it seems to me  too a high price to pay, but that was the way they chose to go.

 In both cases, cherchez the sense of guilt, which induced the two peoples to deny the basic aggressiveness in the Father – Son relationship.

 Since Jewish monotheism is a by product of the first Exile, it is not too difficult to try to decode what happened. The loss of the Land (symbol of the mother), the loss of Freedom and Liberty, two obvious feminine symbols[5], the loss of the Temple (Habait – the house, another maternal symbol),  in which - prior to the exile - were indeed performed the cults of the Mother – goddesses – Astarte and Asherah, and not the cult of Jahveh, the Father – god (henceforth the continuous wrath of the prophets), induced the Hebrews into abandoning the cults of the Mother in favor of a retrenchment into the cult of the Father. It is equivalent to what happens to a child who is abandoned by his mother. He retrenches more into the father. He is abused by maternal abandonment, and the sense of guilt for his instinctual needs – aggression toward the father and incest – are activated again by the emotional deprivation. Furthermore, the destruction and disappearance of the brother kingdom of Israel, the exile and the threat of  total annihilation reactivated the need of paternal protection to exacerbation. Need which, according to Freud, is the most impellent of  the child’s needs. At this point, the instinctual aggressive drive toward the father could not be sustained anymore, neither the anxiety of paternal retaliation. Both were repressed, and the dreadful Jahveh who had threatened his children “with pestilence, or with the sword” (Ex.5:3) became a merciful Father.

 We can say that the reactivation of the sense of guilt associated with the primal fantasy of parricide - castration was due to the trauma of maternal abandonment equivalent to a similar situation of child abuse. A psychic trauma is not just a stressful event but an event which induces into a psychosexual regression. We can say that birth is not a trauma at all, as it is sometimes erroneously defined, but just a stressful event. If there is later another event which induces into a regression to the fetal level, only then we can speak of trauma.

 A psychic trauma is an event which induces the libido to fixate at a lower level than the one previously reached, namely a failure of the libido to progress in its natural path.

 The Exile was a trauma because induced a psychosexual regression from the cult of the mother (at the genital level) to a passive homosexual position versus the father. Israel renounced the Mother, and gradually became “the bride of God”.

 In the West, the situation seems to have been quite the opposite. Not a failure (a trauma) induced them into a regression, but too much of a good thing: success.

 In order to understand how it happens that human beings cannot sustain success even more than they cannot sustain failure, we must remember what Freud has written in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936):

But why should such disbelief arise in something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high degree of pleasure? Truly paradoxical behaviour! But I recollect that on a previous occasion I dealt with the similar case of people who, as I put it, are 'wrecked by success' [...] In another set of cases, just as in those who are wrecked by success, we find a sense of guilt or inferiority, which can be translated: 'I am not worthy of such happiness, I don't deserve it.' But these two motives are essentially the same, for one is only a projection of the other. For, as has long been known, the fate which we expect to treat us so badly is a materialisation of our conscience, of the severe super-ego within us, itself a residue of the punitive agency of our childhood [...] We could not believe that we were to be given the joy of seeing Athens.

 Success is unconsciously perceived as defiance of our father and an aggressive act against him. As such, as in the case of failure, it reactivates the sense of guilt associated with the primal fantasy.

 That explains why many civilizations collapsed at the apex of their success. The malaise produced by their own success induced them into retrenching and into a self – destructive behaviour. Babylonian, Egyptians, Persians, Romans only apparently were defeated by external enemies. In reality, the external factor had to exercise only a slight pressure in order to induce the collapse, which was in the cards because of self unwillingness to sustain success.

 Paradoxically, we can say that Judaism did not follow the way of other peoples into oblivion and lasted so long against all the odds of history because of its chronic failure. The lack of success spared him the compulsory drive to collapse at the apex as happened to other peoples, because that  apex, namely the full realization of its own potential, was never fulfilled. It is possible that now that the Jews re - entered history, and quite in a successful way, their own demise is in the cards too, as has happened to anyone else before.

 Links:

Maestri and Disciples
A Comment on an Article by Caroline Glick: "Column One: Where Israel Went Astray"
Jews Hugging and Kissing Ahmadinejad: Oedipus With Side - Locks, Beards and Long Coats
From the Invasion of Lebanon to the Charges of Rape
The Cease - Fire and the Hasty Retreat of Israel