Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Herbert Silberer (great book club books txt) 📖

on the ground, on which they scatter grain, roll about in it again and again, then collect carefully all the grains, which have stuck on their bodies, and grind them on the mill stone which they turn in a contrary direction. When the corn is ground into meal, they bake a loaf of it, and give it to their husbands to eat, so that they become sick and die. When you have done this you will atone for it forty days on bread and water.”

Killing is the opposite of procreating, therefore the mill is here turned in reverse direction.

Etymologically it is here to be noted that the verb mahlen (grind), iterative form of môhen (mow), originally had a meaning of moving oneself forwards and backwards. Mulieren or mahlen (grind), molere, μυλλειν for coire (cf. Anthropophyteia, VIII, p. 14).

There are numerous stories where the mill appears as the place of love adventures. The “old woman's mill” also is familiar; old women go in and come out young. They are, as it were, ground over in the magic mill. The idea of recreation in the womb lies at the bottom of it, just as in the vulgar expression, “Lassen sie sich umvögeln.”

In a legend of the Transylvanian Gypsies, “there came again an old woman to the king and said: [pg 100] ‘Give me a piece of bread, for seven times already has the sun gone down without my having eaten anything!’ The King replied: ‘Good, but I will first have meal ground for you,’ and he called his servants and had the old woman sawn into pieces. Then the old woman's sawn up body changed into a good Urme (fairy) and she soared up into the air....” (H. V. Wlislocki, Märchen u. Sagen d. transylv. Zigeuner.)

A dream: “I came into a mill and into ever narrower apartments till finally I had no more space. I was terribly anxious and awoke in terror.” A birth phantasy or uterus phantasy.

Another dream (Stekel, Spr. d. Tr., p. 398 f.): “I came through a crack between two boards out of the ‘wheel room.’ The walls dripped with water. Right before me is a brook in which stands a rickety, black piano. I use it to cross over the brook, as I am running away. Behind me is a crowd of men. In front of them all is my uncle. He encourages them to pursue me and roars and yells. The men have mountain sticks, which they occasionally throw at me. The road goes through the verdure up and down hill. The path is strewn with coal cinders and therefore black. I had to struggle terribly to gain any ground. I had to push myself to move forwards. Often I seemed as though grown to the ground and the pursuers came ever nearer. Suddenly I am able to fly. I fly into a mill through the window. In it is a space with board walls; on the opposite wall is a large crank. [pg 101] I sit on the handle, hold on to it with my hands, and fly up. When the crank is up I press it down with my weight, and so set the mill in motion. While so engaged I am quite naked. I look like a cupid. I beg the miller to let me stay here, promising to move the mill in the manner indicated. He sent me away and I have to fly out of another window again. Outside there comes along the ‘Flying Post.’ I place myself in front near the driver. I was soon requested to pay, but I have only three heller with me. So the conductor says to me, ‘Well, if you can't pay, then you must put up with our sweaty feet.’ Now, as if by command, all the passengers in the coach drew off a shoe and each held a sweaty foot in front of my nose.”

This dream, too (beside other things), contains a womb phantasy, wheel room, mill, space with wet walls—the womb. The dreamer is followed by a crowd; just as our wanderer is met by a crowd; the elders. This dream, which will still further occupy our attention, I shall call the “Flying Post.”

Let us return to the parable. The mill of Section 11 is the womb. The wanderer strives for the most intimate union with his mother; his striving, to do better than his father culminates in his procreating himself, the son, again and better.

He will quite fill up his mother—be the father in full. Of course the phantasy does not progress without psychic obstructions. The anxious passage over the narrow plank manifests it.

We have here the familiar obstructions to movement [pg 102] and in a form indeed that recalls the dangerous path on the wall. The passage over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color = black. In the Flying Post dream a black road appears. The dreamer has conflicts like those of the wanderer.

The old miller who will give no information is the father. Of course he will not let him have his mother, and he gives him no information as to the mill work or the procreative activity. The wheels are, on the one hand, the organs that grind out the child (producing the child like meal), and on the other hand they are the ten commandments whose mundane administration is the duty of the father, by means of strict education and punishment. In passing over the plank, the wanderer places himself above the ten commandments and above the privileges of the father. The wanderer always extricates himself successfully from the difficulties. The anxiety is soon done away with, and the fulfillment phase supervenes. It is only a faint echo of the paternal commandments when the elders (immediately after the episode, Section 11) hold out before him the letter from the faculty. At bottom, in retaining [pg 103] their authority, they do indeed go against his own wishes (also a typical artifice of the dream technique).

I have already discussed the letter episode sufficiently (as also Sections 12 and 13), so I need say no more about the incest wish there expressed.

The bridal pair were put (Section 14) into their crystal prison. We have been looking for the reassembling of the dismembered; it takes place before our eyes, the white and red parts, bones and blood, are indeed bridegroom and bride. The prison is the skin or the receptacle in which, as in myths, the revivification takes place. Not in the sense of the revivification of the annihilated father, but a recreation (improvement) that the son accomplishes, although the creative force as such remains the same. The son “marries and mills” (vermählt und vermehlt) with his mother, for the crystal container is again the same as the mill; the uterus. Even the amniotic fluid and the nutritive liquid for the fœtus are present, and the wanderer remakes himself into a splendid king. He can really do it better than his father. The dream carries the wish fulfillment to the uttermost limits.

Let us examine the process somewhat more in detail. The wanderer, by virtue of a dissociation, has a twofold existence, once as a youth in the inside of the glass sphere, and once outside in his former guise. Outside and inside he is united with his mother as husband and as developing child. He there embraces his “sister” (image of his mother [pg 104] renewed with him as it were) as Osiris does his sister Isis. And in addition to this the infantile sexual components of exhibitionism find satisfaction, for whose gratification the covering of the procreation mystery is made of glass. The sexual influence of the wanderer on the kettle (uterus) is symbolically indicated by the fire task allotted to him. The fire is one of the most frequent love symbols in dreams. Language also is wont to speak of the fire of love, of the consuming flames of passion, of ardent desires, etc. Customs, in particular marriage customs, show a similar symbolism. That the wanderer is charged with a duty, and explicitly commanded to do what he is willing to do without orders, is again the already mentioned cunning device of the dream technique to bring together the incompatible. It seems almost humorous when the prison is locked with the seal of the right honorable faculty; I recall to you the expression “sealing” (petschieren); the sealing is an applying of the father's penis. In the place of father we find, of course, the officiating wanderer. The sealing means, however, the shutting up of the seed of life that is placed in the mother. It is also said that the pair, after the confinement in the prison, can be given no more nourishment; and that the food with which they are provided comes exclusively from the water of the mill. That refers to the intrauterine nourishment, to which nothing, of course, can be supplied but the water of the mill so familiar to us.

The precious vessel that the wanderer guards is [pg 105] surrounded by strong walls; it is inaccessible to the others; he alone may approach with his fire. It is winter. That is not merely a rationalizing (pretext of commonplace argument) of the firing, but a token of death entering into the uterus. The amorous pair in the prison dissolve and perish, even rot (Section 15). I must mention incidentally, for the understanding of this version, that at the time of the writing of the parable the process of impregnation was associated with the idea of the “decaying” or “rotting” of the semen. The womb is compared to the earth in which the kernel of grain “decays.”

The decaying which precedes the arising of the new being is connected with a great inundation. Mythically, a deluge is actually accustomed to introduce a (improved) creation. A proper myth can hardly dispense with the idea of a primal flood. I would, in passing, note that the present phase of the parable corresponds mythologically to the motive of being swallowed, the later release from the prison is the spitting forth (from the jaws of the monster), the return from the underworld. The dismemberment motive of the cosmogonies is usually associated with a deluge motive. In the description of the flood in the parable there are, moreover, included some traits of the biblical narrative, e.g., the forty days and the rainbow. This, be it remarked in passing, had appeared before; it is a sign of a covenant. It binds heaven and earth, man and woman. The flood originates in the falling of tears; it arises also from the body of the woman; it [pg 106] refers to the well known highly significant water. Stekel has arranged for dreams the so-called symbolic parallels, according to which all secretions and excretions may symbolically represent each other. On the presupposition that marks of similarity are not conceived in a strict sense, the following comparisons may be drawn: Mucus = blood = pus = urine = stools = semen = milk = sweat = tears = spirit = air = [breath = flatus] = speech = money = poison. That in this comparison both souls and tears appear is particularly interesting; the living or procreating principle appears as soul in the form of clouds. These are formed from water, the Water of Life. The dew that comes from it impregnates the earth.

As we have now reached the excreta, I should like to remind the reader of the foul and stinking bodies that in the parable lie in liquid (Section 15) on which falls a warmer rain. The parable psychoanalytically regarded, is the result of a regression leading us into infantile thinking and feeling; we have seen it clearly enough in the comparison with the myths. And here it is to be noticed how great an interest children take in the process of defecation. I should not have considered this worthy of notice, did not the hermetic symbolism, as we shall see later, actually use in parallel cases the expressions “fimus,” “urina puerorum,” etc., in quite an unmistakable manner. In any case