Iakov Levi


THE ISRAELITES AND THE QUAILS



August 22, 2004


And a wind went out from the Lord, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp...and the people stood up all that day, and all that night, and all the next day, and they gathered the quails...And while the meat was yet between their teeth, before it was chewed, the wrath of the Lord was inflamed against the people...(Numb.,11:31-33).


It seems the famous "Memory of Childhood" of Leonardo da Vinci, interpreted by Freud.
The "memory", which essentially is a daylight dream, had been as follows:

It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips (1).
And Freud explains:
A tail, 'coda', is one of the most familiar symbols and substitutive expressions for the male organ, in Italian no less than in other languages; the situation in the fantasy, of a vulture opening the child's mouth and beating about inside it vigorously with its tail, corresponds to the idea of an act of fellatio, a sexual act  in which the penis is put into the mouth of the person involved...Further investigation informs us that this situation, which morality condemns with such severity, may be traced to an origin of the most innocent kind. It only repeats in a different form a situation in which we all felt comfortable -when we were still in our suckling days (essendo io in culla) and took our mother's (or wet nurse's) nipple into our mouth and sucked at it. The organic impression of this experience - the first source of pleasure in our life - doubtless remains indelibly printed on us; and when at a later date the child becomes familiar with the cow's udder whose function is that of a nipple, but whose shape and position under the belly it resembles a penis, the preliminary stage has been reached which will later enable him to form the repellent sexual fantasy.
Now we understand why Leonardo assigned the memory of his supposed experience with the vulture to his suckling period. What the fantasy conceals is merely a reminiscence of sucking - or being suckled - at his mother breast...
We interpret the fantasy as one of being suckled by his mother, and we find his mother replaced by - a vulture. Where does this vulture come from and how does it happen to be found in its present place?...In the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the mother is represented by a picture of a vulture. The Egyptians also worshiped a Mother Goddess, who was represented as having a vulture's head, or else several heads, of which at least one was a vulture's. This Goddess's name was pronounced Mut. Can the similarity to the sound of our word Mutter [mother] be merely a coincidence? There is, then, some real connection between vulture and mother...It would be interesting to inquire how it could be that the ancient egyptians came to choose the vulture as a symbol of motherhood...We learn from these [ancient] sources that the vulture was regarded as a symbol of motherhood because only female vultures were believed to exist; there were, it was thought, no males of the species...
How then were vultures supposed to be impregnated if all of them were females? This is a point fully explained in a passage of Horapollo. At a certain time these birds pause in mid - flight, open their vagina and are impregnated by the wind (2)
.
An Orphic myth on the world's creation tells us that at the beginning there was the Night, an obvious symbol of the maternal womb (3). She was represented as a bird with black wings.
Having been impregnated by the Wind, The Night laid a silver egg into the womb of darkness and Eros jumped from it, called Protogonos, the first of all the gods (4).
Now we have found again the wind which emerged at the beginning of our Biblical quotation: And a wind went out from the Lord.
As in the Egyptian and Orphic myth, the wind represents the male element, the impregnating one, and the bird, which in Biblical myth became Quails, represents the female element which is impregnated.
The Biblical story tells us of a collective fantasy of the Israelites, equivalent to that of Leonardo.



Rome - Palazzo Falconieri

A Bird (= the penis) with breasts

From the Great Mother to Fellatio

Maat, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth is represented as a winged woman. Therefore, she is woman and bird (the symbol of the penis) in the same condensation, as the breasted hawk carved on the front of Palazzo Falconieri. The same is Isis, The Great Mother:

                     

The Mother is unconsciously perceived as a phallic creature, as the child is convinced that the woman has a penis like his own. Through Fellatio, the adult reconnects to the childish psychosexual need of sucking the mother's nipple.
How does the process of fixation on the maternal breast occur? Is that a fixation due to deprivation (or overstimulation) at the oral stage, as many psychologists erroneously think, or is it rather the result of a process of regression, after the normal libidinal flowing had been inhibited by a trauma at the genital stage?
The misunderstanding has its source in the confusion between the event and its interpretation by the child. For psychic life, the real event (Freudian material truth) does not dictate the outcome, but the interpretation a posteriori of an excitement due to an erotic drive is the clue to human emotional life.
If the erotic fixation on the maternal breast were the outcome of a frustration while still at the oral stage, the penis would not be an instrument of erotic satisfaction, as it occurs in the fellatio. The erotic discharge of energy would happen sucking the female breast, as it had been to a baby in the oral stage. In normal adult sexuality, the sucking of the female breast might be only a foreplay, and not the climax of the sexual act.
However, if erotic satisfaction occurs through Fellatio, it means that the genital stage (Oedipal) had been previously reached, and only a regression from that stage induced the subject into re-directing the economic (quantitative) distribution of the libido. Otherwise, it would not be comprehensible why the penis, which in the oral stage has no part in erotic satisfaction, participates in the sexual act.
The Oedipal child is stimulated by the attraction towards the mother into directing his genital energies towards her fantasized penis, because that is the way he makes an interpretation of the female genital, at that stage of psychosexual development. It is a matter of penis versus penis.
In our unconscious, we never completely get rid of that early interpretation. Isis, the Great Mother, is a bird. Namely, she possesses an enormous penis. Towards that penis is directed the genital libido of the child.
Now, a psychical trauma, inhibiting the normal flowing of the libido, induces the child into contracting his genital energies and into a psychosexual regression. The libido is re-distributed into the previous stages.
At this point, the fantasized maternal penis is no more desired at the genital level, namely through the concentration of libido energies into the drive to penetrate the female, but at the previous levels: anal sadistic, oral sadistic, and intrauterine.
If, in the process of regression, the child settles at the anal stage, as an adult, he will reach erotic satisfaction controlling, beating and humiliating women. Some urinate or defecate on the object of their lust. Clitoridectomy is an act of anal sadistic satisfaction, directed at the fantasized penis of the woman, namely, cutting the female penis which has deluded the early childish lust.
If the regression is all the way back to the oral stage, the fantasized maternal penis is sucked, as the maternal breast had been sucked in the oral stage. The maternal penis trasfigures again into the breast, and not the other way around, as erroneusly perceived. In the fellatio, the penis is sucked as if it were a breast. The identification is with the sucker, and with the female - penis - breast that at the early Oedipal stage had deluded, as it occurs through the condensation of dreams and neurotic symptoms.
Karl Abraham has shown how, in our unconscious, penis and breasts are psychically equivalent, and that the identification with the breast (the mother) is due to an emotional deprivation not while at the oral stage, but later (5). The case reported by Abraham deals with a child who identified with the breast while his mother was nursing his younger brothers: "His identification with his mother was his reaction to the preference shown to his younger brothers" (op.cit).
The Oedipal child, having been psychically injured in his search for the female penis, in the process of regression, looks at its equivalence in the female breast. The injury does not consist in the realization of the missing female penis per se, but by an emotional deprivation concomitant to the wondering on the female missing member. It is the perceived rejection by his mother which induces him into a regression, and not the mere ascertainment of the female genital. In more extreme cases, he gives up his heterosexual drive, and he regresses into pre - Oedipal homosexuality, as occurred to Leonardo. What Freud failed to emphasize is the regressive aspect of Leonardo's fantasy. Leonardo had been deprived of maternal love while at the Oedipal - genital stage. That was the trauma that induced him into regressing to homosexuality and to fellatio fantasies.

In Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism, I have shown that many Biblical stories associated with the Exodus represent oral sadistic and intrauterine fantasies. However, the story of the Exodus was narrated for the first time after the trauma of the destruction of Israel and at the eve of Judah' exile. An historical trauma translated into a psychosexual regression.
The Fellatio's fantasy expressed by the story of the Israelites and the quails is not a remembered event, but one fantasized as a result of a psychosexual regression.
The Hebrews did not know anything about quails and other miracles, before the traumatic events which befell on them at the eve of the First Exile.


Links:
Exile and Monotheism (Part I)
Killing God. From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
Freud and Reik. Was Moses an Egyptian?
Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism

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NOTES


1) Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood" (1910), in The Standard Edition of the complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Translated from the German under the general Editorship of James Strachey, The Hogart Press, London 1957, vol. 11, p.82.

2) Ibidem, pp.85 - 89.

3) Karl Abraham, "Restrictions and Transformations of Scoptophilia in Psycho - Neurotics; with Remarks on Analoggous Phenomena in Folk - Psychology" (1913), in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D., with an Introductory Memoir by Ernest Jones, The Hogarth Press, London 1927, pp.201 - 6.

4) Karoly Kerenyi, Gli Dei della Grecia, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1962, pp. 26-7)

5) K. Abraham, "An Infantile Sexual Theory not Hitherto Noted" (1925), in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, edited by Ernest Jones, translated by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Hogart Press, London 1927, pp. 335 -6.


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