moses and monotheism

MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
SIGMUND FREUD
 PDF version

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY KATHERINE JONES
PUBLISHED BY THE HOGARTH PRESS
AND THE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1939
First published 1939

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED
AT LETGHWORTH, HERTFORDSHIRE
 

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
PARTS I and II of this book were published in German in Imago in 1937; 
Part III has not previously appeared in print.
I am indebted to Mr. James Strachey and Mr.Wilfred Trotter for kindly reading through this translation and for making a number of valuable suggestions. I have also had the advantage of consulting the author on some doubtful points.
K.J:
 

CONTENTS
PART I
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN - - - - 11

PART II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 29

PART III
MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 89
PREFATORY NOTES 89

SECTION I:
1. The Historical Premisses 95
2. Latency Period and Tradition - 107
3. The Analogy 16
4. Application  129
5. Difficulties - - - - 148
SCTION II:
1. Summary - - - - - 163
2. The People of Israel - - 166
3. The Great Man - - - 169
4. The Progress in Spirituality - 176
5. Renunciation versus Gratification 182
6. The Truth in Religion - 193
7. The Return of the Repressed - 197
8. The Historical Truth - - - 201
9. The Historical Development - 207

GLOSSARY 217

INDEX - - - 219

Part I
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN

To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken light-heartedly especially by one belonging to that people. No consideration, however,will move rne to set aside truth in favour of supposed national interests. Moreover, the elucidation of the mere facts of the problem maybe expected to deepen our insight into the situation with which they are concerned.
The man Moses, the liberator of his people, who gave them their religion and their laws, belonged to an age so remote that the preliminary question arises whether he was an historical person or a legendary figure. If he lived, his time was the thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C.; we have no word of him but from the Holy Books and the written traditions of the Jews. Although the decision lacks final historical certainty, the great majority of historians have expressed the opinion that Moses did live and that the exodus from Egypt, led by him, did in fact take place.

It has been maintained with good reason that the later history of Israel could not be understood if this were not admitted. Science to-day has become much more cautious and deals much more leniently with tradition than it did in the early days of historical investigation.
What first attracts our interest in the person of Moses is his name, which is written Mosche in Hebrew. One may well ask: Where does it come from ? What does it mean ? As is well known, the story in Exodus, Chapter ii, already answers this question. There we learn that the Egyptian princess who saved the babe from the waters of the Nile gave him his name, adding the etymological explanation: because I drew him out of the water. But this explanation is obviously inadequate. "The biblical interpretation of the name 'He that was drawn out of the water' " -- thus an author of the 'Judisches Lexikon¹' "is folk etymology; the active Hebrew form itself of the name (Mosche can at best mean only "the drawer out") cannot be reconciled with this solution."  This argument can be supported by two further reflections : first, that it is nonsensical to credit an Egyptian princess with a knowledge of Hebrew etymology, and, secondly, that the water from which the child was drawn was most probably not the water of the Nile.

1. Judisches Lexikon, founded by Herlitz und Kirschner, Bd. IV, 1930, Jiidischer Verlag, .Berlin.

On the other hand the suggestion has long been made and by many different people that the name Moses derives from the Egyptian vocabulary.Instead of citing all the authors who have voiced this opinion I shall quote a passage from a recent work by Breasted¹,  an author whose History of Egypt is regarded as authoritative. "It is important to notice that his name, Moses, wasEgyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word 'mose' meaning "child" and is an abridgement  of a fuller form of such names as "Amen-mose".  meaning "Amon-a-child " or 'Ptah-mose' meaning 'Ptah-a -child' these forms themselves being likewise  abbreviations for the complete form "Amon-(has-give)-a child" or Ptah-(has -given) - a-child."  The abbreviation 'child' early became a convenient rapid form for the cumbrous full  name, and the name Mose, 'child', is not uncommon on the Egyptian monuments. The father of Moses without doubt prefixed to his son's name that of an Egyptian god like Amon or Ptah, and this divine name was gradually lost in current usage, till the boy was called 'Mose.' (The final s is an addition drawn from the Greek  translation of the Old Testament. It is riot in the Hebrew, which has 'mosheh').  I have given this passage literally and am by no means prepared to share the responsibility for its details. I ama little surprised, however, that Breasted in citing related names should have passed over the analogous the ophorous names in the list of Egyptian kings, such as Ah-mose, Thut-mose (Thothmes) and Ra-mose (Ramses).

1 The Dawn of Conscience, London, 1934, p. 350.

It might have been expected that one of the many authors who recognized Moses to be an Egyptian name would have drawn the conclusion, or at least considered the possibility, that the bearer of an Egyptian name was himself an Egyptian. In modern times we have no misgiving in drawing such conclusions, although to-day a person bears two names, not one, and although a change of name or assimilation of it in new conditions cannot be ruled out. So we are not at all surprised to find that the poet Chamisso was of French extraction, Napoleon Buonaparte on the other hand of Italian, and that Benjamin Disraeli was an Italian Jew as his name would lead us to expect. And such an inference from the name to the race should be more reliable and indeed conclusive in respect of early and primitive times. Nevertheless to the best of my knowledge no historian has drawn this conclusion in the case of Moses, not even one of those who, like Breasted, are ready to suppose that Moses "was cognizant of all the wisdom of the Egyptians."¹

What hindered them from doing so can only be guessed at. Perhaps the awe of Biblical tradition was insuperable. Perhaps it seemed monstrous to imagine that the man Moses could have been anything other than a Hebrew. In any event, what happened was that the recognition of the name being Egyptian was not a factor in judging the origin of the man Moses, and that nothing further was deduced from it. If the question of the nationality of this great man is considered important, then any new material for answering it must be welcome.

1 Loc. cit. 9 p. 334.

This is what my little essay attempts. It may claim a place in Imago¹  because the contribution it brings is an application of psycho-analysis.The considerations thus reached will impress only that minority of readers familiar with analytical reasoning and able to appreciate its conclusions.To them I hope it will appear of significance.
In 1909 Otto Rank, then still under my influence, published at my suggestion a book entitled: Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.² It deals with the fact "that almost all important civilized peoples have early on woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities in short their national heroes. Especially the history of their birth and of their early years is furnished with phantastic traits; the amazing similarity, nay, literal identity, of those tales, even if they refer to different, completely independent peoples, sometimes geographically far removed from one another, is well known and has struck many an investigator."

1 See Glossary.
2 Funftes Heft der Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Fr. Deuticke, Wien. It is far from my mind to depreciate the value of Rank's original contributions to this work._¹

Following Rank we reconstruct on the lines of Galton's technique - an "average myth" that makes prominent the essential features of all these tales, and we then get this formula.

• The hero is the son of parents of the highest station, most often the son of a king. 
• His conception is impeded by difficulties, such as abstinence or temporary sterility; or else his parents practice intercourse in secret because of prohibitions or other external obstacles. During his mothers pregnancy or earlier an oracle or a dream warns the father of the child's birth as containing grave danger for his safety.
• In consequence the father (or a person representing him) gives orders for the new-born babe to be killed or exposed to extreme danger; in most cases the babe is placed in a casket and delivered to the waves.
• The child is then saved by animals or poor people, such as shepherds, and suckled by a female animal or a woman of humble birth.
• When full grown he rediscovers his noble parents after many strange adventures, wreaks vengeance on his father and, recognized by his people, attains fame and greatness.

The most remote of the historical personages to whom this myth attaches is Sargon of Agade, the founder of Babylon about 2800 B.C. From the point of view of what interests us here it would perhaps be worth while to reproduce the account ascribed to himself:

"I am Sargon, the mighty king, King of Agade. My mother was a Vestal; my father I knew not; while my father's brother dwelt in the mountains. In my town Azupirani -- it lies on the banks of Euphrates -- my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a basket of sedge, closed the opening with pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, in the goodness of his heart lifted me out of the water. Akki, the drawer of water, as his own son he brought me up. Akki, the drawer of water, made me his gardener. When I was a gardener Istar fell in love with me. I became king and for fortyfive years I ruled as king."

The best known names in the series beginning with Sargon of Agade are Moses, Cyrus andRomulus. But besides these Rank has enumerated many other heroes belonging to myth or poetry to whom the same youthful story attaches either in its entirety or in well recognizable parts, such as(Edipus, Kama, Paris, Telephos, Perseus, Heracles, Gilgamesh, Amphion, Zethos and others.

The source and the tendency of such myths are familiar to us through Rank's work. I need only refer to his conclusions with a few short hints.A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him. The myth in question traces this struggle back to the very dawn of the hero's life, by having him born against his father's will and saved in spite of his father's evil intentions. The exposure in the basket is clearly a symbolical representation of birth; the basket is the womb, the stream the water at birth. In innumerable dreams the relation of the child to the parents is represented by drawing or saving from the water. When the imagination of a people attaches this myth to a famous personage it is to indicate that he is recognized as a hero, that his life has conformed to the typical plan. The inner source of the myth is the so-called "family  romance" of the child, in which the son reacts to the change in his inner relationship to his parents, especially that to his father. The child's first years are governed by grandiose over-estimation of his father; kings and queens in dreams and fairy tales always represent, accordingly, the parents. Later on, under the influence of rivalry and real disappointments, the release from the parents and a critical attitude towards the father sets in. The two families of the myth, the noble as well as the humble one, are therefore both images of his own family as they appear to the child in successive periods of his life.

It is not too much to say that these observations fully explain the similarity as well as the far spread occurrence of the myth of the birth of the hero. It is all the more interesting to find that the myth of Moses' birth and exposure stands apart; in one essential point it even contradicts the others.

We start with the two families between which the myth has cast the child's fate. We know that analytic interpretation makes them into one family, that the distinction is only a temporal one. In the typical form of the myth the first family, into which the child is born, is a noble and mostly a royal one; the second family, in which the child grows up, is a humble and degraded one, corresponding with the circumstances to which the interpretation refers. Only in the story of (Edipus is this difference obscured. The babe exposed by one kingly family is brought up by another royal pair. It can hardly be an accident that in this one example there is in the myth itself a glimmer of the original identity of the two families. The social contrast of the two families meant, as we know, to stress the heroic nature of a great man gives a second function to our myth, which becomes especially significant with historical personages. It can also be used to provide for our hero a patent of nobility to elevate him to a higher social rank. Thus Cyrusis for the Medes an alien conqueror; by way of the exposure myth he becomes the grandson of their king. A similar trait occurs in the myth of Romulus : if such a man ever lived he must have been an unknown adventurer, an upstart; the myth makes him a descendant of, and heir to, the royal house of Alba Longa. It is very different in the case of Moses. Here the first family usually so distinguished is modest enough.  He is the child of Jewish Leyites. But the second family the humble one in which as a rule heroes are brought up is replaced by the Royal house of Egypt; the princess brings him up as her own son. This divergence from the usual type has struck many research workers as strange. E. Meyer and others after him supposed the original form of the myth to have been different. Pharaoh had been warned by a prophetic dream¹ that his daughter's son would become a danger to him and his kingdom.This is why he has the child delivered to the waters of the Nile shortly after his birth. But the child is saved by Jewish people and brought up as their own. "National motives" in Rank's terminology² had transformed the myth into the form now known by us. However, further thought tells us that an original Moses myth of this kind, one not diverging from other birth myths, could not have existed. For the legend is either of Egyptian or of Jewish origin. The first supposition may be excluded. The Egyptians had no motive to glorify Moses; to them he was not a hero. So the legend should have originated among the Jewish people; that is to say, it was attached in the usual version to the person of their leader. But for that purpose it was entirely unfitted; what good is a legend to a people that makes their hero into an alien?

1 Also mentioned in Flavius Josephus's narration.
2 Loc. tit., p. 80, footnote.

The Moses myth as we know it to-day lags sadly behind its secret motives. If Moses is not of royal lineage our legend cannot make him into a hero; if he remains a Jew it has done nothing to raise his status. Only one small feature of the whole myth remains effective : the assurance that the babe survived in spite of strong outside forces to the contrary. This feature is repeated in the early history of Jesus, where King Herod assumes the role of Pharaoh. So we really have a right to assume that in a later and rather clumsy treatment of the legendary material the adapter saw fit to equip his hero Moses with certain features appertaining to the classical exposure myths characteristic of a hero, and yet unsuited to Moses by reason of the special circumstances.
With this unsatisfactory and even uncertain result our investigation would have to end, without having contributed anything to answering the" question whether Moses was Egyptian, were there not another and perhaps more successful way of approaching the exposure myth itself.

Let us return to the two families in the myth.As we know, on the level of analytic interpretation they are identical. On a mythical level theyare distinguished as the noble and the humble family. With an historical person to whom the myth has become attached there is, however, a third level, that of reality. One of the families is the real one, the one into which the great man was really born and in which he was brought up.The other is fictitious, invented by the myth in pursuance of its own motives. As a rule the real family corresponds with the humble one, the noble family with the fictitious one. In the case of Moses something seemed to be different. And here the new point of view may perhaps bring some illumination. It is that the first family, the one from which the babe is exposed to danger, is in all comparable cases the fictitious one; the second family, however, by which the hero is adopted and in which he grows up is his real one.If we have the courage to accept this statement as a general truth to which the Moses legend also is subject, then we suddenly see our way clear.Moses is an Egyptian probably of noble origin whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion! The exposure in the water was in its right place; to fit the new conclusion the intention had to be changed, not without violence. From a means of getting rid of the child it becomes a means of its salvation.

The divergence of the Moses legend from all others of its kind might be traced back to a special feature in the story of Moses' life. Whereas in all other cases the hero rises above his humble beginnings as his life progresses, the heroic life of the man Moses began by descending from his eminence to the level of the children of Israel.
This little investigation was undertaken in the hope of gaining from it a second, fresh argument for the suggestion that Moses was an Egyptian.We have seen that the first argument, that of his name, has not been considered decisive.¹  We have to be prepared for the new reasoning the analysis of the exposure myth not faring any better. The objection is likely to be that the circumstances of the origin and transformation of legends are too obscure to allow of such a conclusion as the preceding one, and that all efforts to extract the kernel of historical truth must be doomed to failure in face of the incoherence and contradictions clustering around the heroic person of Moses and the unmistakable signs of tendentious distortion and stratification accumulated through many centuries. I myself do not share this negative attitude, but I am not in a position to confute it.

1 .  Thus E. Meyer in Die Mosessagen und die Leviten, Berliner Sitzber. 1905: "The name Mose is probably the name Pinchas in the priest dynasty of Silo . . . without a doubt Egyptian. This does not prove however that these dynasties were of Egyptian origin, but it proves that they had relations with Egypt." (p. 651 .)  One may well ask what kind of relations one is to imagine.

If there was no more certainty than this to be attained why have I brought this enquiry to the notice of a wider public? I regret that even my justification has to restrict itself to hints. If, however, one is attracted by the two arguments outlined above, and tries to take seriously the conclusion that Moses was a distinguished Egyptian, then very interesting and far-reaching perspectives open out. With the help of certain assumptions the motives guiding Moses in his unusual undertaking can be made intelligible; in close connection with this the possible motivation of numerous characteristics and peculiarities of the legislation and religion he gave the Jewish people can be perceived. It stimulates ideas of some moment concerning the origin of monotheistic religion in general. But such important considerations cannot be based on psychological probabilities alone. Even if one were to accept it as  historical that Moses was Egyptian, we should want at least one other fixed point so as to protect the many emerging possibilities from the reproach of their being products of imagination and too far removed from reality. An objective proof of the period into which the life of Moses, and with it the exodus from Egypt, fall would perhaps have sufficed. But this has not been forthcoming, and therefore it will be better to suppress any inferences that might follow our view that Moses was an Egyptian.

PART II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN

Part II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN . . . 

In Part I of this book I have tried to strengthen by a new argument the suggestion that the man Moses, the liberator and law-giver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew, but an Egyptian. That his name derived from the Egyptian vocabulary had long been observed, though not duly appreciated. I added to this consideration the further one that the interpretation of the exposure myth attaching to moses necessitated the conclusion that he was an Egyptian whom a people needed to make into a Jew. At the end of my essay I said that important and far-reaching conclusions could be drawn from the suggestion that Moses was an Egyptian; but I was not prepared to uphold them publicly, since they were based only on psychological probabilities and lacked objective proof. The more significant the possibilities thus discerned the more cautious is one about exposing them to the critical attack of the outside world without any secure foundation like an iron monument with feet of clay. No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable. And, lastly, it is not attractive to be classed with the scholastics and talmudists who are satisfied to exercise their ingenuity unconcerned how far removed their conclusions maybe from the truth.
Notwithstanding these misgivings, which weigh as heavily to-day as they did then, out of the conflict of my motives the decision has emerged to follow up my first essay by this contribution.But once again it is only a part of the whole, and not the most important part.

I

If, then, Moses was an Egyptian, the first gain from this suggestion is a new riddle, one difficult to answer. When a people of a tribe¹  prepares for a great undertaking it is to be expected that one of them should make himself their leader or be chosen for this role. But what could have induced a distinguished Egyptian perhaps a prince, priest or high official to place himself at the head of a throng of culturally inferior immigrants, and to leave the country with them, is not easy to conjecture. The well-known contempt of the Egyptians for foreigners makes such a proceeding especially unlikely. Indeed, I am inclined to think this is why even those historians who recognized the name as Egyptian, and ascribed all the wisdom of Egypt to him, were not willing to entertain the obvious possibility that Moses was an Egyptian.

1 We have no inkling what numbers were concerned in the Exodus.

This first difficulty is followed by a second. We must not forget that Moses was not only the political leader of the Jews settled in Egypt, he was also their law-giver and educator and the man who forced them to adopt a new religion, which is still to-day called Mosaic after him.But can a single person create a new religion so easily?

And when someone wishes to influence the religion of another would not the most natural thing be to convert him to his own?
The Jewish people in Egypt were certainly not without some kind of religion, and if Moses, who gave them a new religion, was an Egyptian, then the surmise cannot be rejected that this other new religion was the Egyptian one.
This possibility encounters an obstacle: the sharp contrast between the Jewish religion attributed to Moses and the Egyptian one. The former is a grandiosely rigid monotheism.

There is only one God, unique, omnipotent, unapproachable. The sight of his countenance cannot be borne; one must not make an image of him, not even breathe his name. In the Egyptian religion, on the other hand, there is a bewildering mass of deities of differing importance and provenance. Some of them are personifications of great natural powers like heaven and earth, sun and moon. Then we find an abstraction such as Maat (Justice, Truth) or a grotesque creature like the dwarfish Bes. Most of them, however, are local gods from the time when the land was divided into numerous provinces. They have the shapes of animals as if they had not yet overcome their origin from the old totem animals. They are not clearly differentiated, barely distinguished by special functions attributed to some of them. The hymn sin praise of these gods tell the same thing about each of them, identify them with one another without any misgivings in a way that would confuse us hopelessly. Names of deities are combined with one another, so that one becomes degraded almost to an epithet of the other.  Thus in the best period of the "New Empire" the main god of the city of Thebes is called Amon-Rein which combination the first part signifies the ram-headed city-god, whereas Re is the name of the hawk-headed Sun-God of On. Magic and ceremonial, amulets and formulas, dominated the service of these gods, as they did the daily life of the Egyptians.
Some of these differences may easily derive from the contrast in principle between a strict monotheism and an unlimited polytheism. Others are obviously consequences of a difference in intellectual level; one religion is very near to the primitive, the other has soared to the heights of sublime abstraction. Perhaps it is these two characteristics that occasionally give one the impression that the contrast between the Mosaic and the Egyptian religion is one intended and purposely accentuated: for example, when the one religion severely condemns any kind of magic or sorcery which flourishes so abundantly in the other; or when the insatiable zest of the Egyptian for making images of his gods in clay, stone and metal, to which our museums owe so much, is contrasted with the way in which the making of the image of any living or visionary being is bluntly forbidden.
There is yet another difference between the two religions, which the explanations we have attempted do not touch. No other people of antiquity has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life; in accordance with this the death-god Osiris, the ruler of that other world, was the most popular and indisputable of all Egyptian gods.^The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in anyplace. And this is all the more remarkable since later experience has shown that the belief in a life beyond can very well be reconciled with a monotheistic religion.
We had hoped the suggestion that Moses was an Egyptian would prove enlightening and stimulating in many different respects. But our first deduction from this suggestion that the new religion he gave the Jews was his own, the Egyptian one has foundered on the difference, nay the striking contrast, between the two religions.
II
A strange fact in the history of the Egyptian religion, which was recognized and appraised relatively late, opens up another point of view.It is still possible that the religion Moses gave to his Jewish people was yet his own, an Egyptian religion though  not the Egyptian one.
In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, when Egypt became for the first time a world power, a young Pharaoh ascended the throne about1 375 B.C., who first called himself Amenhotep (IV) like his father, but later on changed his name and not only his name. This king undertook to force upon his subjects a new religion, one contrary to their ancient traditions and to all their familiar habits. It was a strict monotheism, the first attempt of its kind in the history of the world as far as we know and religious intolerance, which was foreign to antiquity before this and for long after, was inevitably born with the belief in one God. But Amenhotep's reign lasted only for seventeen years; very soon after his death in 1358 the new religion was swept away and the memory of the heretic king proscribed.From the ruins of his new capital which he had built and dedicated to his God, and from the inscriptions in the rock tombs belonging to it, we derive the little knowledge we possess of him.Everything we can learn about this remarkable, indeed unique, person is worthy of the greatest interest. ¹
Everything new must have its roots in what was before. The origin of Egyptian monotheism can be traced back a fair distance with some certainty.² In the School of the Priests in the Sun Temple at On (Heliopolis) tendencies had for some time been at work developing the idea of an universal God and stressing His ethical aspects. Maat, the Goddess of truth, order and justice, was a daughter of the Sun God Re. Already under Amenhotep III, the father and predecessor of the reformer, the worship of the Sun God was in the ascendant, probably in opposition to the worship of Amon of Thebes, who had become over prominent. An ancient name of the SunGod Aton or Atum was rediscovered, and in this Aton religion the young king found a movement he had no need to create, but one which he  could join.

1 Breasted called him "The first individual in human history."
2 The account I give here follows closely J. H. Breasted's History of Egypt, 1906, and The Dawn of Conscience, 1936, and the corresponding sections in the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II.

Political conditions in Egypt had about thattime begun to exert a lasting influence onEgyptian religion. Through the victorious swordof the great conqueror Thothmes III Egypt hadbecome a world power. Nubia in the south,Palestine, Syria and a part of Mesopotamia in the north had been added to the Empire. This imperialism was reflected in religion as Universality and Monotheism. Since Pharaoh's solicitude now extended beyond Egypt to Nubia and Syria,Deity itself had to give up its national limitation and the new God of the Egyptians had to become like Pharaoh the unique and unlimited sovereign of the world known to the Egyptians. Besides, it was natural that as the frontiers extendedEgypt should become accessible to foreign influences; some of the king's wives were Asiatic princesses,¹ and possibly even direct encouragement of monotheism had penetrated fromSyria.

1 Perhaps even Amenhotep's beloved spouse Nofertete.

Amenhotep never denied his accession to the Sun Cult of On. In the two hymns to Aton, which have been preserved to us through the inscriptions in the rock tombs and were probably composed by him, he praises the sun as the creator and preserver of all living beings in and outside Egypt with a fervour such as recurs many centuries after only in the psalms in honour of the Jewish god Jahve. But he did not stop at this astonishing anticipation of scientific knowledge concerning the effect of sunlight. There is no doubt that he went further: that he worshipped the sun not as a material object, but as a symbol of a Divine Being whose energy was manifested in his rays.¹
But we do scant justice to the king if we see in him only the adherent and protector of an Aton religion which had already existed before him.His activity was much more energetic. He added the something new that turned into monotheism the doctrine of an universal god : the quality of exclusiveness. In one of his hymns it is stated in so many words:

1 Breasted, History of Egypt, p. 360: "But however evident the Heliopolitan origin of the new state religion might be, it was not merely sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in the place of the old word for 'god' (nuter), and the god is clearly distinguished from the material sun." "It is evident that what the king was deifying was the force by which the Sun made itself felt on earth "(Dawn of Conscience, p. 279). Erman's opinion of a formula in honour of the god is similar : A. Erman (Die AEgyptische Religion, 1905). " There are . . . words which are meant to express in an abstract form the fact that not the star itself was worshipped, but the Being that manifested itself in it."

"Oh, Thou only God! There is no other God than Thou."¹ And we must not forget that to appraise the new doctrine it is not enough to know its positive content only; nearly as important is its negative side, the knowledge of what it repudiates. It would be a  mistake, too, to suppose that the new religion sprang to life ready and fully equipped like Athene out ofZeus5 forehead. Everything rather goes to show that during Amenhotep's reign it was strengthened so as to attain greater clarity, consistency, harshness and intolerance. Probably this development took place under the influence of the violent opposition among the priests of Amon that raised its head against the reforms of the king. In the sixth year of Amenhotep's reign this enmity had grown to such an extent that the king changed his name, of which the now proscribed name of the god Amon was a part. Instead of Amenhotephe called himself Ikhnaton.² But not only from his name did he eliminate that of the hated God, but also from all inscriptions and even where he found it in his father's name Amenhotep III. 
Soon after his change of name Ikhnaton left Thebes, which was under Amon's rule, and built a new capital lower down the river which he called Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton). 

1 Idem, History of Egypt, p. 374.
2 I follow Breasted's (American) spelling in this name (the accepted English spelling is Akhenaten). The king's new name means approximately the same as his former one : God is satisfied. Compare our Godfrey and the German Gotthold.

Its ruins are now called Tell-el-Amarna.¹
The persecution by the king was directed foremost against Amon, but not against him alone.Everywhere in the Empire the temples were closed, the services forbidden, and the ecclesiastical property seized. Indeed, the king's zeal went so far as to cause an inquiry to be made in to the inscriptions of old monuments in order to efface the word "God" whenever it was used in the plural.² It is not to be wondered at that these orders produced a reaction of fanatical vengeance among the suppressed priests and the discontented people, a reaction which was able to find a free outlet after the king's death. The Aton religion had not appealed to the people; it had probably been limited to a small circle round Ikhnaton's person. His end is wrapped in mystery. We learn of a few short-lived, shadowy successors of his own family. Already his son-inlaw Tutankhaton was forced to return to Thebes and to substitute Amon in his name for the god Aton. Then there followed a period of anarchy, until the general Haremhab succeeded in 1350in restoring order. The glorious Eighteenth Dynasty was extinguished; at the same time their conquests in Nubia and Asia were lost. In this sad interregnum Egypt's old religions had been reinstated. The Aton religion was at an end, Ikhnaton's capital lay destroyed and plundered, and his memory was scorned as that of a felon.

1 This is where in 1887 the correspondence of the Egyptian kings with their friends and vassals in Asia was found, a  correspondence which proved so important for our knowledge of history.
2 Idem, History ofEgypt, p. 363. 

It will serve a certain purpose if we now note several negative characteristics of the Aton religion. In the first place, all myth, magic and sorcery are excluded from it.¹
Then there is the way in which the Sun God is represented: no longer as in earlier times by a small pyramid and a falcon, but and this is almost rational by a round disc from which emanate rays terminating in human hands. In spite of all the love for art in the Amarna period, not one personal representation of the Sun God Aton has been found, and, we may say with confidence, ever will be found.²

1 Weigall (The Life and Times of Akhnaton, 1923, p. 121) says that Ikhnaton would not recognize a hell against the terrors of which one had to guard by innumerable magic spells. "Akhnaton flung all these formulas into the fire. Djins, bogies, spirits,  onsters, demigods and Osiris himself with all his court, were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes."
2 A. Weigall, I.e., p. 103, "Akhnaton did not permit any graven image to be made of the Aton. The true God, said the king, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life."

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 41

Finally, there is a complete silence about the death god Osiris and the realm of the dead. Neither hymns nor inscriptions on graves know anything of what was perhaps nearest to the Egyptian's heart. The contrast with the popular religion cannot be expressed more vividly.¹
Ill
We venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.
We compared earlier the Jewish religion with the religion of the Egyptian people and noted how different they were from each other. Now we shall compare the Jewish with the Atonreligion and should expect to find that they were originally identical. We know that this is no easy task. Of the Aton religion we do not perhaps know enough, thanks to the revengeful spirit of the Amon priests. The Mosaic religion we know only in its final form as it was fixed by Jewish priests in the time after the Exile about 800 years later. If, in spite of this unpromising material, we should find some indications fitting in with our supposition then we may indeed value them highly.

1 Erman, /.., p. 90: "Of Osiris and his realm no more was to be heard." Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, p. 291: "Osiris is completely ignored. He is never mentioned in any record of Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna."

There would be a short way of proving our thesis that the Mosaic religion is nothing else but that of Aton, namely, by a confession of faith, a proclamation. But I am afraid I should be told that such a road is impracticable. The Jewish creed, as is well known, says: "Schema Jisroel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod." If the similarity of the name of the Egyptian Aton (or Atum) to the Hebrew word Adonai and the Syrian divine name Adonis is not a mere accident, but is the result of a primeval unity in language and meaning, then one could translate the Jewish formula: Hear, oh Israel, our god Aton (Adonai) is the only God. I am, alas, entirely unqualified to answer this question and have been able to find very little about it in the literature concerned, 1 but probably we had better not make things so simple. Moreover, we shall have to come back to the problems of the divine name.

1 Only a few passages in Weig all, I.e., pp. 12, 19: "The god Atum, who described Re as the setting sun, was perhaps of the same origin as Aton, generally venerated in Northern Syria. A foreign Queen, as well as her suite, might therefore have been attracted to Heliopolis rather than to Thebes."

The points of similarity as well as those of difference in the two religions are easily discerned ,but do not enlighten us much. Both are forms of a strict monotheism, and we shall be inclined to reduce to this basic character what is similar in both of them. 'Jewish monotheism is in some points even more uncompromising than the Egyptian, for example, when it forbids all visual representation of its God. The most essential difference apart from the name of their God is that the Jewish religion entirely relinquishes the worship of the sun, to which the Egyptian one still adhered. When comparing the Jewish with the Egyptian folk religion we received the impression that, besides the contrast in principle, there was in the difference between the two religions an element of purposive contradiction.This impression appears justified when in our comparison we replace the Jewish religion by that of Aton, which Ikhnaton as we know developed in deliberate antagonism to the popular religion. 
We were astonished and rightly so that the Jewish religion did not speak of anything beyond the grave, for such a doctrine is reconcilable with the strictest monotheism. This astonishment disappears if we go back from the Jewish religion to the Aton religion and surmise that this feature was taken over from the latter, since for Ikhnaton it was a necessity in fighting the popular religion where the death god Osiris played perhaps a greater part than any god of the upper regions.The agreement of the Jewish religion with that of Aton in this important point is the first strong argument in favour of our thesis. We shall see that it is not the only one.

44 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion; it is equally certain that he introduced the custom of circumcision. This has a decisive importance for our problem and it has hardly ever been weighed. The Biblical account, it is true, often contradicts it. On the one hand, it dates the custom back to the time of the patriarchs as a sign of the covenant concluded between God and Abraham. On the other hand, the text mentions in a specially obscure passage that God was wroth with Moses because he had neglected this holy usage and proposed to slay him as a punishment; Moses' wife, a Midianite, saved her husband from the wrath of God by speedily performing the operation. These are distortions, however,  which should not lead us astray; we shall explore their motives presently. The fact remains that the question concerning the origin of circumcision has only one answer: it comes from Egypt.Herodotus, "the Father of History," tells us that the custom of circumcision had long been practiced in Egypt, and his statement has been confirmed by the examination of mummies and even by drawings on the walls of graves. No other people of the Eastern Mediterranean has as far as we know followed this custom; we can assume with certainty that the Semites, Babylonians and Sumerians were not circumcised. Biblical history itself says as much of the inhabitants of Canaan; it is presupposed in the story of the adventure between Jacob's daughter and the Prince of Shechem.¹ 

The possibility that the Jews in Egypt adopted the usage of circumcision in any other way than in connection with the religion Moses gave them may be rejected as quite untenable. Now let us bear in mind that circumcision was practised in Egypt by the people as a general custom, and let us adopt for the moment the usual assumption that Moses was a Jew who wanted to free his compatriots from the service of an Egyptian overlord, and lead the mout of the country to develop an independent and self-confident existence a feat he  ctually achieved. What sense could there be in his forcing upon them at the same time a burdensome custom which, so to speak, made them intoEgyptians and was bound to keep awake their memory of Egypt, whereas his intention could only have had the opposite aim, namely, that his people should become strangers to the country of bondage and overcome the longing for the "fleshpots of Egypt"? 

1 When I use Biblical tradition here in such an autocratic and arbitrary way, draw on it for confirmation whenever it is convenient and dismiss its evidence without scruple when it contradicts my conclusions, I know full well that I am exposing myself to severe criticism concerning my method and that I weaken the force of my proofs. But this is the only way in which to treat material whose  trust worthiness as we know for certain was seriously damaged by the influence of distorting tendencies. 
Some justification will be forthcoming later, it is hoped, when we have unearthed those secret motives. Certainty is not to be gained in any case, and, moreover, we may say that all other authors have acted likewise.

46 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

No, the fact we started from and the suggestion we added to it are so incompatible with each other that we venture to draw the following conclusion: If Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion, but also the law of circumcision, he was no Jew but an Egyptian, and then the Mosaic religion was probably an Egyptian one, namely because of its contrast to the popular religion that of Aton with which the Jewish one shows agreement in some remarkable points.

As I remarked earlier, my hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian creates anew enigma. What he did easily understandable if he were a Jew becomes unintelligible in an Egyptian. But if we place Moses in Ikhnaton's period and associate him with that Pharaoh, then the enigma is resolved and a possible motive presents itself, answering all our questions. Let us assume that Moses was a noble and distinguished man: perhaps indeed a member of the royal house, as the myth has it. He must have been conscious of his great abilities, ambitious and energetic; perhaps he saw himself in a dim future as the leader of his people, the governor of the Empire.
In close contact with Pharaoh he was a convinced adherent of the new religion, whose basic principles he fully understood and had made his own. With the king's death and the subsequent reaction he saw all his hopes and prospects destroyed. If he was not to recant the convictions so dear to him then Egypt had no more to give him; he had lost his native country.In this hour of need he found an unusual solution.The dreamer Ikhnaton had estranged himself from his people, had let his world empire crumble.Moses5 active nature conceived the plan of founding a new empire, of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained. It was, as we perceive, an heroic attempt to struggle against his fate, to find compensation in two directions for the losses he had suffered through Ikhnaton's catastrophe. Perhaps he was at the time governor of that border province (Gosen) in which perhaps already in "the Hyksos period" certain Semitic tribes had settled. These he chose to be his new people.An historic decision.¹
He established relations with them, placed himself at their head and directed the Exodus" by strength of hand." In full contradistinction to the Biblical tradition we may suppose this Exodus to have passed off peacefully and without pursuit. The authority of Moses made it possible, and there was then no central power that could have prevented it.

1 If Moses were a high official we can understand his being fitted for the r61e of leader he assumed with the Jews. If he were a priest the thought of giving his people a new religion must have been near to his heart. In both cases he would have continued his former profession. A prince of royal lineage might easily have been both : governor and priest. In the report of Flavius Josephus (Antiqu. jud.), who accepts the exposure myth, but seems to know other traditions than the Biblical one, Moses appears as an Egyptian field -marshal in a victorious campaign in Ethiopia.

48 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

According to our construction the Exodus from Egypt would have taken place between 1358 and1350, that is to say, after the death of Ikhnato and before the restitution of the authority of the state by Haremhab.¹ The goal of the wandering could only be Canaan. After the supremacy of Egypt had collapsed, hordes of war-like Arameans had flooded the country, conquering and pillaging, and thus had shown where a capable people could seize new land. We know these warriors from the letters which were found in 1887 in the archives of the ruined city of Amarna. There they are called Habiru, and the name was passed on no one knows how to the Jewish invaders,Hebrews, who came later and could not have been referred to in the letters of Amarna. The tribes who were the most nearly related to the Jews now leaving Egypt also lived south of Palestine in Canaan. 

The motivation that we have surmised for the Exodus as a whole covers also the institution of circumcision. We know in what manner human beings both peoples and individuals react to this ancient custom, scarcely any longer understood. 

1 This would be about a century earlier than most historians assume, who place it in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Merneptah: or perhaps a little less, for official records seem to include the interregnum in Haremhab's reign.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 49

Those who do not practise it regard it as very odd and find it rather abhorrent; but those who have adopted circumcision are proud of the custom. They feel superior, ennobled, and look down with contempt at the others, who appear to them unclean. Even to-day the Turk hurls abuse at the Christian by calling him "an uncircumcised dog."
It is credible that Moses, who as an Egyptian was himself circumcised, shared this attitude. The Jews with whom he left his native country were to be a better substitute for the Egyptians he left behind. In no circumstances must they be inferior to them. He wished to make of them a "Holy People" so it is explicitly stated in the Biblical text and as a sign of their dedication he introduced the custom that made them at least the equals of the Egyptians. It would, further, be welcome to him if such a custom isolated them and prevented them from mingling with the other foreign peoples they would meet during their wanderings, just as the Egyptians had kept apart from all foreigners.¹

1 Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.C., gives in the account of his travels a characteristic of the Egyptians which shows an astounding similarity with well-known features of the later Jewish people. "They are in all respects much more pious than other peoples, they are also distinguished from them by many of their customs, such as circumcision, which for reasons of cleanliness they introduced before others; further, by their horror of swine, doubtless connected with the fact that Set wounded Horus when in the guise of a black hog; and, lastly, most of all by their reverence for cows, which they would never eat or sacrifice because they would thereby offend the cow-horned Isis. Therefore no Egyptian man or woman would ever kiss a Greek or use his knife, his spit or his cooking vessel, or eat of the meat of an(otherwise) clean ox that had been cut with a Greek knife. . . . In haughty narrowness they looked down on the other peoples who were unclean and not so near to the gods as they were." (After Erman, The Egyptian Religion, p. 181, etc.)
Naturally we do not forget here the parallels from the life of India. Whatever gave, by the way, the Jewish poet Heine in the nineteenth century the idea of complaining about his religion as "the plague trailing along from the valley of the Nile, the sickly beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians"?

50 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

Jewish tradition, however, behaved later on as if it were oppressed by the sequence of ideas we have just developed. To admit that circumcision was an Egyptian custom introduced by Moses would be almost to recognize that the religion handed down to them from Moses was also Egyptian. But the Jews had good reasons to deny this fact; therefore the truth about circumcision had also to be contradicted.

IV

At this point I expect to hear the reproach that I have built up my construction which places Moses the Egyptian in Ikhnaton's era, derives from the political state the country was in at that time his decision to protect the Jewish people, and recognizes as the Aton religion the religion he gave to his people or with which he burdened them, which had just been abolished in Egypt itself that I have built up this edifice of conjectures with too great a certainty for which no adequate grounds are to be found in the mater ial itself. I think this reproach would be unjustified.I have already stressed the element of doubt in the introduction, put a query in front of the brackets, so to speak, and can therefore save myself the trouble of repeating it at each point inside the brackets.
Some of my own critical observations may continue the discussion. The kernel of our thesis, the dependence of Jewish monotheism on the monotheistic episode in Egyptian history, has been guessed and hinted at by several workers.I need not cite them here, since none of them has been able to say by what means this influence was exerted. Even if, as I suggest, it is bound up with the individuality of Moses, we shall have to weigh other possibilities than the one here preferred. It is not to be supposed that the overthrow of the official Aton religion completely put an end to the monotheistic trend in Egypt.The School of Priests at On, from which it emanated, survived the catastrophe and might have drawn whole generations after Ikhnaton into the orbit of their religious thought. That Moses performed the deed is quite thinkable, therefore, even if he did not live in Ikhnaton's time and had not come under his personal influence, even if he were simply an adherent or merely a member of the school of On. 

52 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

This conjecture would postpone the date of the Exodus and bring it nearer to the time usually assumed, the thirteenth century; otherwise it has nothing to recommend it. We should have to relinquish the insight we had gained intoMoses5 motives and to dispense with the idea of the Exodus being facilitated by the anarchy prevailing in Egypt. The kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty following Ikhnaton ruled the country with a strong hand. All conditions, internal and external, favouring the Exodus coincide only
in the period immediately after the death of the heretic king.
The Jews possess a rich extra-biblical literature where the myths and superstitions are to be found which in the course of centuries were woven around the gigantic figure of their first leader and the founder of their religion and which have both hallowed and obscured that figure. Some fragments of sound tradition which had found no place in the Pentateuch may lie scattered in that material. One of these legends describes in an attractive fashion how the ambition of the man Moses had already displayed
itself in his childhood. When Pharaoh took him into his arms and playfully tossed him high, the little three-year old snatched the crown from Pharaoh's head and placed it on his own. The king was startled at this omen and took care to consult his sages.
1
1 The same anecdote, slightly altered, is to be found in Josephus.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 53Then, again, we are told of victorious battles he fought as an Egyptian captain in Ethiopia and,in the same connection, that he fled the country because he had reason to fear the envy of afaction at court or even the envy of Pharaoh himself. The Biblical story itself lends Moses certain features in which one is inclined to believe.It describes him as choleric, hot-tempered as when in his indignation he kills the brutal overseer who ill-treated a Jewish workman, or when in his resentment at the defection of his people he smashes the tables he has been given on Mount Sinai. Indeed, God himself punished him at long last for a deed of impatience we are not told what it was. Since such a trait does not lend itself to glorification it may very well be historical truth. Nor can we reject even the possibility that many character traits the Jews incorporated into their early conception of God when they made him jealous, stern and implacable, were taken au-fond from their memory of Moses, for in truth it was not an invisible god, but the man Moses,who had led them out of Egypt.
Another trait imputed to him deserves our special interest. Moses was said to have been "slow of speech" that is to say, he must have had a speech impediment or inhibition so that he had to call on Aaron (who is called his brother) for assistance in his supposed discussions with Pharaoh. This again may be historical truth and 

54 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
would serve as a welcome addition to the endeavour to make the picture of this great man live. It may, however, have another and more important significance. The report may, in as lightly distorted way, recall the fact that Moses spoke another language and was not able to communicate with his Semitic Neo-Egyptians without the help of an interpreter at least not at the beginning of their intercourse. Thus a fresh confirmation of the thesis: Moses was an Egyptian.
It looks now as if the train of thought has comet o an end, at least for the time being. From the surmise that Moses was an Egyptian, be it proven or not, nothing more can be deduced for the moment. No historian can regard the Biblical account of Moses and the Exodus as other than a pious myth, which transformed a remote tradition in the interest of its own tendencies. How the tradition ran originally we do not know.What the distorting tendencies were we should like to guess, but we are kept in the dark by our ignorance of the historical events. That our reconstruction leaves no room for so many spectacular features of the Biblical text the ten plagues, the passage through the Red Sea, the solemn law-giving on Mount Sinai will not lead us astray. But we cannot remain indifferent on finding ourselves in opposition to the sober historical researches of our time. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 55

These modern historians, well represented byE. Meyer/ follow the Biblical text in one decisive point. They concur that the Jewish tribes, who later on become the people
of Israel, at a certain time accepted a new religion. But this event did not take place in Egypt nor at the foot of amount in the Sinai peninsula, but in a place called Meribat-Qades, an oasis distinguished by its abundance of springs and wells in the country south of Palestine between the eastern end of the Sinai peninsula and the western end of Arabia.There they took over the worship of a god Jahve, probably from the Arabic tribe of Midianites who lived near-by. Presumably other neighbouring tribes were also followers of that god.
Jahve was certainly a volcano god. As we know,however, Egypt has no volcanoes and the mountains of the Sinai peninsula have never been volcanic; on the other hand, volcanoes which may have been active up to a late period are found along the western border of Arabia.One of these mountains must have been the Sinai-Horeb which was believed to be Jahve's abode. ² 
In spite of all the transformations theBiblical text has suffered, we are able to reconstruct according to E. Meyer the original character of the god: he is an uncanny,

1 E. Meyer: Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstdmmey 1906.
2 The Biblical text retains certain passages telling us that Jahve descended from Sinai to Meribat-Qades.

56 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day.¹
The mediator between the people and the god at this birth of a new religion was called Moses.He was the son-in-law of the Midianite priest Jethro and was tending his flocks when here ceived the divine summons. Jethro visited him in Qades to give him instructions.
E. Meyer says, it is true, that he never doubted there was a kernel of historical truth in the story of the bondage in Egypt and the catastrophe of the Egyptians,² but evidently he does not know where that recognized fact belongs and what to do with it. Only the custom of circumcision is he willing to derive from the Egyptians. He enriches our earlier discussion by two important suggestions. First, that Joshua asked the people to accept circumcision "to roll away the reproach of Egypt"; and, secondly, by the quotation from Herodotus that the Phoenicians (which probably means the Jews) and the Syrians in Palestine themselves admitted having learned the custom of circumcision from the Egyptians.³ But an Egyptian Moses does not appeal to him. "The Moses we know was the ancestor of the priests of Qades he stood therefore in relation to the cult, was a figure of the genealogical myth and not an historical person. So not one of those who has treated him as an historical person except those

1 L.c., pp. 38, 58.
2 L.c., p. 49.
3 L.c., p. 449.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 57

who accept tradition wholesale as historical truth has succeeded in filling this empty shape with any content, in describing him as a concrete personality; they have had nothing to tell us about what he achieved or about his mission in history.¹
On the other hand, Meyer never wearies of telling us about Moses' relation to Qades and Midian. "The figure of Moses so closely bound up with Midian and the holy places in the desert." ²

"This figure of Moses is inextricably associated with Qades (Massa and Meriba) ; the relationship with a Midianite priest by marriage completes the picture. The connection with the Exodus, on the other hand, and the story of his youth in its entirety, are absolutely secondary and are merely the consequence of Moses having to fit into a connected, continuous story."³ He also observes that all the characteristics contained in the story of Moses's youth were later omitted."
Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian and Pharaoh's grandson, but a shepherd to whom Jahve reveals himself. In the story of the tenplagues his former relationships are no longer mentioned, although they could have been used very effectively, and the order to kill the Israelite
first-born is entirely forgotten. In the Exodus and the perishing of the Egyptians Moses has no part at all; he is not even mentioned. The

1 L.c., p. 451.
2 L.c. p. 49.
3 L.c.
y p. 72.

58 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
characteristics of a hero, which the childhood story presupposes, are entirely absent in the later Moses; he is only the man of God, a performer of miracles, provided
with supernatural powers by Jahve."¹
We cannot escape the impression that this Moses of Qades and Midian, to whom tradition could even ascribe the erection of a brazen serpent as a healing god,
is quite a different person from the august Egyptian we had deduced, who disclosed to his people a religion in which all magic and sorcery were most strictly abhorred. Our Egyptian Moses differs perhaps no less from the Midian Moses than the universal god Aton differed from the demon Jahve on his divine mountain. And if we concede any measure of truth to the information furnished by modern historians, then we have to admit that the thread we wished to draw from the surmise that Moses was an Egyptian has broken off for the second time; this time, so it seems, without any hope of its being tied again.

1 L.c., p. 47.

V

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 59
A way unexpectedly presents itself, however,out of this difficulty too. The efforts to recognize in Moses a figure transcending the priest of Qades, and confirming the renown with which tradition had invested him, were continued after E. Meyer by Gressmann and others. In 1922E. Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance.¹
He found in the book of the prophet Hosea second half of the eighth century unmistakable traces of a tradition to the effect that the founder of their religion (Moses) met a violent end in a rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people. The religion he had instituted was at the same time abandoned. This tradition is not restricted to Hosea : it recurs in the writings of most of the later prophets; indeed, according to Sellin, it was the basis of all the later expectations of the Messiah. Towards the end of the Babylonian exile the hope arose among the Jewish people that the man they had so callously murdered would return from the realm of the dead and lead his contrite people and perhaps not only his people into the land of eternal bliss. Thepalp able connections with the destiny of the Founder of a later religion do not lie in our present course.
Naturally I am not in a position to decide whether Sellin has correctly interpreted the relevant passages in the prophets. 
If he is right,however, we may regard as historically credible the tradition he recognized: for such things are not readily invented

1 E. Sellin, Most und seine Bedeutung fuer die israelitisch-juediscfu Religionsgeschichte, 1922.

6O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

-- there is no tangible motive for doing so. And if they have really happened the wish to forget them is easily understood. We need not accept every detail of the tradition. Sellin thinks that Shittim in the land east of the Jordan is indicated as the scene of the violent deed. We shall see, however, that the choice of this locality does not accord with our argument. Let us adopt from Sellin the surmise that the Egyptian Moses was killed by the Jews and the religion he instituted abandoned. It allows us to spin our thread further without contradicting the trustworthy results of historical research. But we venture to be independent of the historians in other respects and to blaze our own trail. The Exodus from Egypt remains our starting-point.
It must have been a considerable number that left the country with Moses; a small crowd would not have been worth the while of that ambitious man, with his great schemes. The immigrants had probably been in the country long enough to develop into a numerous people. We shall certainly not go astray, however, if we suppose with the majority of research workers that only apart of those who later became the Jewish people had undergone the fate of bondage in Egypt. In other words, the tribe returning from Egypt combined later in the country between Egypt and Canaan with other related tribes that had been settled there for some time. This union, from which was born the people of Israel, expressed itself in the adoption of a new religion, common to all the tribes, the religion of Jahve; according to E. Meyer, this came about in Qades under the influence of the Midianites. Thereupon the people felt strong enough to undertake the invasion of Canaan. It does not fit in with this course of events that the catastrophe to Moses and his religion should have taken place in the land east of the Jordan it must have happened a longtime before the union.
It is certain that many very diverse elements contributed to the building up of the Jewish people, but the greatest difference among them must have depended on whether they had experienced the sojourn in Egypt and what followed it, or not. From this point of view wemay say that the nation was made up by the union of two constituents, and it accords with this fact that, after a short period of political unity,it broke asunder into two parts the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. History loves such restorations, in which later fusions are redissolved and former separations become once more apparent. The most impressive example a very well-known one was provided by the Reformation, when, after an interval of more than a thousand years, it brought to light again the frontier between the Germania that had been Roman and the part
that had always remained independent.

62 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

With the Jewish people we can not verify such a faithful reproduction of the former state of affairs. Our knowledge of those times is too uncertain to permit the assumption that the northern Kingdom had absorbed the original settlers, the southern those returning from Egypt;but the later dissolution, in this case also, could not have been unconnected with the earlier union. The former Egyptians were probably fewer than the others, but they proved to be on a higher level culturally. They exercised a more important influence on the later development  of the people because they brought with them a tradition the others lacked.

Perhaps they brought something else, something more tangible than a tradition. Among the greatest riddles of Jewish prehistoric times is that concerning the antecedents of the Levites. They are said to have been derived from one of the twelve tribes of Israel, the tribe of Levi, but no tradition has ever ventured to pronounce on where that tribe originally dwelt or what portion of the conquered country of Canaan had been allotted to it. They occupied the most important priestly positions, but yet they were distinguished from the priests. A Levite is not necessarily a priest; it is not the name of a caste. Our supposition about the person of Moses suggests an explanation.
It is not credible that a great gentleman like the Egyptian Moses approached to him without an escort. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 63a people strange
He must have brought his retinue with him, his nearest adherents, his scribes, his servants. These were the original Levites. Tradition maintains that Moses was a Levite. This seems a transparent distortion of the actual state of affairs: the Levites were Moses' people. This solution is supported by what I mentioned in my previous essay: that in later times we find Egyptian names only among the Levites.¹ We may suppose that a fair number of these Moses people escaped the fate that overtook him and his religion.They increased in the following generations and fused with the people among whom they lived,but they remained faithful to their master, honoured his memory and retained the tradition of his teaching. At the time of the union with the followers of Jahve they formed an influential minority, culturally superior to the rest.
I suggest and it is only a suggestion so far that between the downfall of Moses and the founding of a religion at Qades two generations were born and vanished, that perhaps even a century elapsed.

I do not see my way to determine whether the Neo-Egyptians as I should like to call those who returned from Egypt in distinction to the other Jews met with their blood relations after these had already accepted the Jahve religion or before that had happened.Perhaps the latter is more likely. It makes nodifference to the final result. What happened at Qades was a compromise, in which the part taken by the Moses tribe is unmistakable.

1 This assumption fits in well with what Yahuda says about the Egyptian influence on early Jewish writings. See A. S. Yahuda, Die Sprache des Pentateuch in ihren Beziehungen zum Aegyptischen, 1929.

64 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

Here we may call again on the custom of circumcision which a kind of "Leitfossil"  has repeatedly rendered us important services.
This custom also became the law in the Jahve religion, and since it is inextricably connected with Egypt its adoption must signify a concession to the people
of Moses. They or the Levites among them would not forgo this sign of their consecration. They wanted to save so much of their old religion, and for that price they were willing to recognize the new deity and all that the Midian priests had to say about him.Possibly they managed to obtain still other concessions. We have already mentioned that Jewish ritual ordains a certain economy in the use of the name of God. Instead of Jahve they had to say Adonai. It is tempting to fit this commandment into our argument, but that is merely a surmise.The prohibition upon uttering the name of God is, as is well known, a primaeval taboo. Why exactly it was renewed in the Jewish commandments is not quite clear; it is not out of the question that this happened under the influence of a new motive. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 65

There is no reason to suppose that the commandment was consistently followed;the word Jahve was freely used in the formationof personal theophorous names, i.e. in combinations such as Jochanan, Jehu, Joshua. Yet there is something peculiar about this name. It is well known that Biblical exegesis recognizes twosources of the Hexateuch. They are called J andE because the one uses the holy name of Jahve, the other that of Elohim; Elohim, it is true, not Adonai. But we may here quote the remark of one writer: the different names are a distinct sign of originally different gods¹
We admitted the adherence to the custom of circumcision as evidence that at the founding of the new religion at Qades a compromise had taken place. What it consisted in we learn from both J and E; the two accounts coincide and must therefore go back to a common source,either a written source or an oral tradition. The guiding purpose was to prove the greatness and power of the new god Jahve. Since the Moses people attached such great importance to their experience of the Exodus from Egypt, the deed of freeing them had to be ascribed to Jahve; it had to be adorned with features that proved the terrific grandeur of this volcano god, such as, for example, the pillar of smoke which changed to one of fire by night, or the storm that parted the waters so that the pursuers were drowned by the

1 Gressmann -- Mose und Seine ^eit^ 1913.

66 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
returning floods of water. The Exodus and the founding of the new religion were thus brought close together
in time, the long interval between them being denied. The bestowal of the Ten Commandments too was said to have taken place,not at Qades, but at the foot of the Holy Mountain amidst the signs of a volcanic eruption. This description, however, did a serious wrong to the memory of the man Moses; it was he, and not the volcano god, who had freed his people from Egypt. Some compensation was therefore due to him, and it was given by transposing Moses to Qades or to the mount Sinai-Horeb and putting him in the place of the Midianite priest. We shall consider later how this solution satisfied another,irresistibly urgent, tendency. By its means a balance, so to speak, was established : Jahve was allowed to extend his reach to Egypt from his mountain in Midia, while the existence andactivity of Moses were transferred to Qades and the country east of the Jordan. This is how he became one with the person who later established a religion, the son-in-law of the Midianite Jethro, the man to whom he lent his name Moses.We know nothing personal, however, about this other Moses he is entirely obscured by the first, the Egyptian Moses except possibly from clues provided by the contradictions to be found in the Bible in the characterization of Moses. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 67

He is often enough described as masterful, hot-tempered,  even violent, and yet it is also said of him that he was the most patient and sweet-tempered of all men. It is clear that the latter qualities would have been of no use to the Egyptian Moses who planned such great and difficult projects for his people. Perhaps they belonged to the other,the Midianite. I think we are justified in separating the two persons from each other and in assuming that the Egyptian Moses never was in Qades and had never heard the name of Jahve,whereas the Midianite Moses never set foot in Egypt and knew nothing of Aton. In order to make the two people into one, tradition or legend had to bring the Egyptian Moses to Midian; and we have seen that more than one explanation was given for it.

VI 

I am quite prepared to hear anew the reproach that I have put forward my reconstruction of the early history of the tribe of Israel with undue and unjustified certitude. I shall not feel this criticism to be too harsh, since it finds an echo in my own judgement. I know myself that this reconstruction has its weak places, but it also has its strong ones. On the whole the arguments in favour of continuing this work in the same direction prevail. The Biblical record before us contains valuable, nay invaluable, historical evidence.

68 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
It has, however, been distorted by tendentious influences and elaborated by the products of poetical invention. In our work we have already been able to divine one of these distorting tendencies. This discovery shall guide us on our way. It is a hint to uncover other similar distorting influences. If we find reasons for recognizing the distortions produced by them, then we shall be able to bring to light more of the true course of events.Let us begin by marking what critical research work on the Bible has to say about how the Hexateuch the five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua, for they alone are of interest to us here came to be written.¹ The oldest source is considered to be J, the Jahvistic, in the author of which the most modern research workers think they can recognize the priest Ebjatar, a contemporary of King David.² A little later, it is not known how much later, comes the so-called Elohistic, belonging to the northern kingdom.³
After the destruction of this kingdom, in 722 B.C., a Jewish priest combined portions of J and E and added his own contributions. His compilation is designated as JE. In the seventh century Deuteronomy, the fifth book, was added, it being alleged that the whole of it had been newly found

1 Encyclopedia Britannica, XI Edition, 1910, Art.: Bible.
2 See Auerbach, Wuste und Gelobtes Land, 1932.
3 Astruc in 1 753 was the first to distinguish between Jahvist andElohist.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 69

in the Temple. In the time after the destruction of the Temple, in 586 B.C., during the Exile and after the return, is placed the re-writing called the Priestly Code. The fifth century saw a definitive revision, and since then the work has not been materially altered.¹
The history of King David and his time is most probably the work of one of his contemporaries.It is real history, five hundred years before Herodotus, the "Father of History." One would begin to understand this achievement if one assumed, in terms of my hypothesis, Egyptian influence. ² The suggestion has even been made that early Israelites, the scribes of Moses, had a hand in the invention of the first alphabet.³ How far the accounts of former times are based on earlier sources or on oral tradition, and what

1 It is historically certain that the Jewish type was definitely fixed as a result of the reforms by Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century B.C., therefore after the Exile, during the reign of the friendly Persians. According to our reckoning approximately 900 years had then passed since the appearance of Moses. By these reforms the regulations aiming at the consecration of the chosen people were taken seriously: the separation from the other tribes were put into force by forbidding mixed marriages; the Pentateuch, the real compilation of the law, was codified in its definitive form; the re-writing known as the Priestly Code was finished. It seems certain, however, that the reform did not adopt any new tendencies, but simply took over and consolidated former suggestions. 
2 Gf. Yahuda, l.c.
3 If they were bound by the prohibition against making images
they had even a motive for forsaking the hieroglyphic picture writing when they adapted their written signs for the expression of a new language. 

70 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
interval elapsed between an event and its fixation by writing, we are naturally unable to know.The text, however, as we find it to-day tells us enough about its own history. Two distinct forces,diametrically opposed to each other, have left their traces on it. On the one hand, certain transformations got to work on it, falsifying the text in accord with secret tendencies, maiming and extending it until it was turned into its opposite. On the other hand, an indulgent piety reigned over it, anxious to keep everything as it
stood, indifferent to whether the details fitted together or nullified one another. Thus almost everywhere there can be found striking omissions,disturbing repetitions, palpable contradictions,signs of things the communication of which was never intended. The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces. One could wish to give the word "distortion" the double meaning to which it has a right, although it is no longer used in this sense. It should mean not only "to change the appearance of," but also "to wrench apart," "to put in another place." That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hiddenaway somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original connection. Only it is not always easy to recognize it. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
The distorting tendencies we want to detect must have influenced the traditions before they were written down. One of them, perhaps
the strongest of all, we have already discovered. We said that when the new god Jahve in Qades was instituted something had to be done to glorify
him. It is truer to say: He had to be established,made room for; traces of former religions had to be extinguished. This seems to have been done successfully with the religion of the settled tribes; no more was heard of it. With the returning tribes the task was not so easy; they were determined not to be deprived of the Exodus from Egypt, the man Moses and the custom of circumcision. It is true they had been in Egypt, but they had left it again, and from now on every trace of Egyptian influence was to be denied. Moses was disposed of by displacing him to Midian and Qades and making him into one person with the priest who founded the Jahve religion. Circumcision, the most compromising sign of the dependence on Egypt, had to be retained, but, in spite of all the existing evidence, every endeavour was made to divorce this custom from Egypt.The enigmatic passage in Exodus, written in an almost incomprehensible style, saying that God had been wroth with Moses for neglecting circumcision and that his Midianite wife saved his life by a speedy operation, can be interpreted only as a deliberate contradiction of the significant 

72 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
truth. We shall soon come across another invention for the purpose of invalidating a piece of inconvenient evidence.
It is hardly to be described as a new tendencyit is only the continuation of the same one when we find an endeavour completely to deny that Jahve was a new god, one alien to the Jews.For that purpose the myths of the patriarchs,Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are drawn upon. Jahve maintains that He had been the God of those patriarchs; it is true and He has to admit this Himself they did not worship Him under this name.¹
He does not add under what other name He used to be worshipped. Here the opportunity was taken to deal a decisive blow at the Egyptian origin of the custom of circumcision. Jahve was said to have already demanded it from Abraham, to have instituted it as sign of the bond between him and Abraham's descendants. This, however, was a particularly clumsy invention. If one wished to use a sign to distinguish someone from other people, one would choose something that the others did not possess certainly not something that millions could show. An Israelite, finding himself in Egypt, would have had to recognize all Egyptians as brothers, bound by the same bond,brothers in Jahve. 

1 The restrictions in the use of the new name do not become any more comprehensible through this, though much more suspect. 

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 73

The fact that circumcision was native to the Egyptians could not possibly have been unknown to the Israelites who created the text of the Bible. The passage from Joshua quoted by E. Meyer freely admits this; but nevertheless the fact had at all costs to be denied.We cannot expect religious myths to pay scrupulous attention to logical connections.Otherwise the feeling of the people might have taken exception -justifiably so to the behaviour of a deity who makes a covenant with his patriarchs containing mutual obligations, and then ignores his human partners for centuries until it suddenly occurs to him to reveal himself again to their descendants. Still more astonishing is
the conception of a god suddenly "choosing" a people, making it "his" people and himself its own god. I believe it is the only case in the history of human religions. In other cases the people and their god belong inseparably together;they are one from the beginning. Sometimes, it is true, we hear of a people adopting another god,but never of a god choosing a new people.Perhaps we approach an understanding of this unique happening when we reflect on the connection between Moses and the Jewish people.Moses had stooped to the Jews, had made them his people; they were his "chosen people"¹

1 Jahve was undoubtedly a volcano god. There was no reason for the inhabitants of Egypt to worship him. I am certainly not the first to be struck by the similarity of the  name Jahve to the root of the name of another god : Jupiter, Jovis. The composite name Jochanaan, made up in part from the Hebrew word Jahve and having a rather similar meaning to that of Godfrey or its Punic equivalent Hannibal, has become one of the most popular names of European Christendom in the forms of Johann, John, Jean, Juan. When the Italians reproduce it in the shape of Giovanni and then call one day of the week Giovedi they bring to light again a similarity which perhaps means nothing or possibly means very much. Far-reaching possibilities, though very insecure ones, open out here. In those dark centuries which historical research is only beginning to explore, the countries around the eastern basin of the Mediterranean were apparently the scene of frequent and violent volcanic eruptions which were bound to make the deepest impression on the inhabitants. Evans supposes that the final destruction of the palace of Minos at Knossos was also the result of an earthquake. In Crete, as probably everywhere in the ^Sgean world, the great Mother Goddess was then worshipped. The observation that she was unable to guard her house against the attack of a stronger power might have contributed to her having to cede her place to a male deity, whereupon the volcano god had the first right to replace her. Zeus still bears the name of "the Earth-shaker." There is hardly a doubt that in those obscure times mother deities were replaced by male gods (perhaps originally their sons). Specially impressive is the fate of Pallas Athene, who was no doubt the local form of the mother deity ; through the religious revolution she was reduced to a daughter, robbed of her own mother, and eternally debarred from motherhood by the taboo of virginity.

74 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

There was yet another purpose in bringing the patriarchs into the new Jahve religion. They had lived in Canaan; their memory was connected with certain localities in the country. Possibly they themselves had been Canaanite heroes or local divinities whom the immigrating Israelites had adopted for their early history. By evoking them one gave proof, so to speak, of having been born and bred in the country, and denied the odium that clings to the alien conqueror. It was a clever turn: the god Jahve gave them only what their ancestors had once possessed.
In the later contributions to the Biblical text the tendency to avoid mentioning Qades met with success. The site of the founding of the new religion definitely became the divine mountains Sinai-Horeb. The motive is not clearly visible; perhaps they did not want to be reminded of the influence of Midian. But all later distortions, especially those of the Priestly Code, serve another aim. There was no longer any need to alter in a particular direction descriptions of happenings of long ago; that had long been done. On the other hand, an endeavour was made to date back to an early time certain laws and institutions of the present, to base them as a rule on the Mosaic law and to derive from this their claim to holiness and binding force. However much the picture of past times in this way became falsified, the procedure does not lack a certain psychological justification. It reflected the fact that inthe course of many centuries about 800 years had elapsed between the Exodus and the fixationof the Biblical text by Ezra and Nehemiah the religion of Jahve had followed a retrograde development that had culminated in a fusion(perhaps to the point of actual identity) with the original religion of Moses.
And this is the essential outcome: the fateful content of the religious history of the Jews. 

76 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
VII
Among all the events of Jewish prehistory that poets, priests and historians of a later age undertook to portray
there was an outstanding one the suppression of which was called for by the most obvious and best of human motives. It was the murder of the great leader and liberator Moses,which Sellin divined from clues furnished by the Prophets. Sellin's presumption cannot be called fanciful; it is probable enough. Moses, trained in Ikhnaton's school, employed the same methods as the king; he gave commands and forced his religion on the people.¹  Perhaps Moses' doctrine was still more uncompromising than that of his Master; he had no need to retain any connection with the religion of the Sun God since the school of On would have no importance for his alien people. Moses met with the same fate as Ikhnaton,that fate which awaits all enlightened despots.The Jewish people of Moses was quite as unable to bear such a highly spiritualized religion, to find in what it offered satisfaction for their needs,as were the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty.In both cases the same thing happened: those who felt themselves kept
in tutelage, or who felt dispossessed, revolted and threw off the burden

1. In those times any other form of influence would scarcely have been possible.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 77

of a religion that had been forced on them. But while the tame Egyptians waited until fate had removed the sacred person of their Pharaoh, the savage Semites took their destiny into their own hands and did away with their tyrant.¹
Nor can we maintain that the Biblical text preserved to us does not prepare us for such an end to Moses. The account of the "Wandering in the Wilderness" which might stand for the time of Moses' rule describes a series of grave revolts against his authority which, by Jahve's command, were suppressed with savage chastisement. It is easy to imagine that one of those revolts came to another end than the text admits.The people's falling away from the new religion is also mentioned in the text, though as a mere episode. It is the story of the golden calf, whereby an adroit turn the breaking of the tables of the law which has to be understood symbolically (= "he has broken the law ")
is ascribed to Moses himself and imputed to his angry indignation.
There came a time when the people regretted the murder of Moses and tried to forget it. This was certainly so at the time of the coming

1 It is truly remarkable how seldom we hear during the millenia of Egyptian history of violent depositions or assassinations of a Pharaoh. A comparison with Assyrian history, for example, must increase this astonishment. The reason may, of course, be that with the Egyptians historical recording served exclusively official purposes.

78 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
together at Qades. If, however, the Exodus were brought nearer in time to the founding of their religion in the oasis, and one allowed Moses instead of the other founder to help in it, then not only were the claims of the Moses people satisfied, but the painful fact of his violent removal was also successfully denied. In reality it is most unlikely that Moses could have participated in the events at Qades, even if his life had not been shortened.
Here we must try to elucidate the sequence of these events. We have placed the Exodus from Egypt in the time after the extinction of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1350).
It might have happened then or a little later, for the Egyptian chroniclers included the subsequent years of anarchy in the reign of Haremhab, the king who brought it to an end and who reigned until 1315. The next aid in fixing the chronology and it is the only one is given by the stele of Merneptah( 1225-1215), which extols the victory over Isiraal (Israel) and the destruction of their seeds(sic). Unfortunately the value of this stele is doubtful; it is taken to be evidence that Israelite tribes were at that date already settled in Canaan.¹ 
E. Meyer rightly concludes from this stele that Merneptah could not have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as one had previously been wont to assume. The Exodus must belong to an earlier period.

1 E. Meyer, I.e., p. 222.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 79

The question who was Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus appears tome an idle one. There was no Pharaoh at that time, because the Exodus happened during the interregnum. But the Merneptah stele does not throw any light on the possible date of the fusion and the acceptance of the new religion in Qades. All we can say with certainty is that they took place some time between 1350 and 1215. Within this century we assume the Exodus to have been very near to the first date, the events in Qades not far from the second. The greater part of the period we would reserve for the interval between the two events. A fairly long time would be necessary for the passions of the returning tribes to cool down after the murder of Moses and for the influence of the Moses people, the Levites, to have become so strong as the compromise in Qades presupposes. Two generations, sixty years,might suffice, but only just. The date inferred from the stele of Merneptah falls too early, and as we know that in our hypothesis one assumption only rests on another we have to admit that this discussion shows a weak spot in the construction.Unfortunately everything connected with the settling of the Jewish people in Canaan is highly obscure and confused. We might, of course, use the expedient of supposing that the name in the Israel stele does not refer to the tribes whose fate we are trying to follow and who later on were united in the people of Israel. After all, the name of the Habiru (= Hebrews) from the Amarna time was also passed on to this people. 

Whenever it was that the different tribes were united into a nation by accepting the same religion it might very well have been an occurrence of no great importance for the history of the world. The new religion might have been swept away by the stream of events, Jahve would then have taken his place in the procession of erstwhile gods which Flaubert visualized, and ofhis people all the twelve tribes would have been "lost," not only the ten for whom the Anglo-Saxons have so long been searching. The god Jahve, to whom the Midianite Moses led a new people, was probably in no way a remarkable being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty, he had promised his adherents to give them "a land flowing with milk and honey" and he encouraged them to rid the country of its present inhabitants "with the edge of the sword." It is truly astonishing that inspite of all the revisions in the Biblical text so much was allowed to stand whereby we may recognize his original nature. It is not even sure that his religion was a true monotheism, that it denied the character of god to other divinities.
It probably sufficed that one's own god was more powerful than all strange gods. When the sequence of events took quite another course than such beginnings would lead us to expect there can be only one reason for it. To one part of the people the Egyptian Moses had given another and more spiritual conception of God, a single God who embraces the whole world, one as all loving as he was all-powerful, who averse to all ceremonial and magic set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice. For,incomplete as our information about the ethical side of the Aton religion may be, it is surely significant that Ikhnaton regularly described himself in his inscriptions
as "living in Maat"(truth, justice).¹ In the long run it did not matter that the people, probably after a very short time,renounced the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. The tradition itself remained and its influence reached though only slowly,in the course of centuries the aim that was denied to Moses himself. The god Jahve attained undeserved honour when, from Qades onward,Moses5 deed of liberation was put down to his account; but he had to pay dear for this usurpation. The shadow of the god whose place he had taken became stronger than himself; at the end of the historical development there arose beyond his Being that of the forgotten Mosaic God.None can doubt that it was only the idea of this other God that enabled the people of Israel to surmount all their hardships and to survive until our time. 

1 His hymns lay stress on not only the universality and oneness of God, but also His loving kindness for all creatures; they invite believers to enjoy nature and its beauties. Gp. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience.

82 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
It is no longer possible
to determine the part the Levites played
in the final victory of the Mosaic God over Jahve. When the compromise at Qades was effected they had raised their voice for Moses, their memory being still green of the master whose followers and countrymen they were. During the centuries since then the Levites had become one with the people or with the priesthood and it had become the main task of the priests to develop and supervise the ritual, besides caring for the holy texts and revising the min accordance with their purposes. But was not all this sacrifice and ceremonial at bottom only magic and black art, such as the old doctrine of Moses had unconditionally condemned ? There arose from the midst of the people an unending succession of men, not necessarily descended from Moses' people, but seized by the great and powerful tradition which had gradually grown in darkness, and it was these men, the prophets, who sedulously preached the old Mosaic doctrine:the Deity spurns sacrifice and ceremonial; He demands only belief and a life of truth and justice (Maat) . The efforts of the prophets met with enduring success; the doctrines with which they re-established the old belief became the permanent content of the Jewish religion. It is honour enough for the Jewish people that it has kept alive such a tradition and produced men who lent it their voice even if the stimulus had first
come from outside, from a great stranger. 

This description of events would leave me with a feeling of uncertainty were it not that I can refer to the judgement of other, expert, research workers who see the importance of Moses for the history of Jewish religion in the same light, although they do not recognize his Egyptian origin. Sellin says, for example:¹ "Therefore we have to picture the true religion of Moses, the belief he proclaimed in one, ethical god, as being from now on, as a matter of course, the possession of a small circle within the people. We cannot expect to find it from the start in the official cult, the priests' religion, in the general belief of the people. All we can expect is that here and there a spark
flies up from the spiritual fire he had kindled, that his ideas have not died out, but have quietly influenced beliefs and customs until, sooner or later, under the influence of special events, or through some personality particularly immersed in this belief, they broke forth again more strongly and gained dominance with the broad mass of the people. It is from this point of view that we have to regard the early religious history of the old Israelites. Were we to reconstruct the Mosaic religion after the pattern historical documents that describe the religion of the first five centuries in Canaan we should fall into the worst methodical error."
laid down in the

1. Sellin, I.e., p. 52.

84 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
Volz¹ expresses himself still more explicitly. He says: "that the heaven-soaring work of Moses was at first hardly understood and feebly carried out, until during the course of centuries it penetrated more and more into the spirit of the people and at last found kindred souls in the great prophets who continued the work of the lonely Founder."
With this I have come to an end, my sole purpose having been to fit the figure of an Egyptian Moses into the framework of Jewish history. I may now express my conclusion in the shortest formula: To the well-known duality of that history two peoples who fuse together to form one nation, two kingdoms into which this nation divides, two names for the Deity in the source of the Bible we add two new ones : the founding of two new religions, the first one ousted by the second and yet reappearing victorious,two founders of religions, who are both called by the same name Moses and whose personalities we have to separate from each other. And all these dualities are necessary consequences of the first: one section of the people passed through what may properly be termed a traumatic experience which the other was spared. There still remains much to discuss, to explain and to assert.

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 85 

Only then would the interest in our purely historical study be fully warranted. In what exactly consists the intrinsic nature of at radition, and in what resides its peculiar power,how impossible it is to deny the personal influence of individual great men on the history of the world, what profanation of the grandiose multiformity of human life we commit if we recognize as sole motives those springing from material needs, from what sources certain ideas, especially religious ones, derive the power with which they subjugate individuals and peoples to study all this on the particular case of Jewish history would be an alluring task. Such a continuation of my essay would link up with conclusions laid down twenty-five years ago in Totem and Taboo. But I hardly trust my powers any further.

1 Paul Volz: Mose, 1907, p. 64.

PART III

MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION

PREFATORY NOTES

I. Written before March 1938 (Vienna)

WITH the audacity of one who has little or nothing to lose I propose to break a well-founded resolution for the second time and to follow up my two essays on Moses (Imago, Bd. XXIII, Heft i and 3) with the final part, till now withheld. When I finished the last essay I said I knew full well that my powers would not suffice for the task. I was,of course, referring to the weakening of the creative faculties which accompanies old age,¹ but there was also another obstacle. We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism. In Soviet Russia the attempt has been 

1 I do not share the opinion of my gifted contemporary Bernard Shaw that men would achieve anything worth while only if they could attain the age of 300 years. With the mere lengthening of the period of life nothing would be gained unless much in the conditions of life were radically changed as well.

92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

made to better the life of a hundred million people till now held in suppression. The authorities were bold enough to deprive them of the anodyne of religion and wise enough to grant them a rea¬ sonable measure of sexual freedom. But in doing so they subjected them to the most cruel coercion and robbed them of every possibility of freedom of thought. With similar brutality the Italian people are being educated to order and a sense of duty. It was a real weight off the heart to find, in the case of the German people, that retrogression into all but prehistoric barbarism can come to pass independently of any progressive idea. Be that as it may, events have taken such a course that to-day the conservative democracies have become the guardians of cultural progress and that, strangely enough, just the institution of the Catholic Church has put up a sturdy resistance against the danger to culture. The Catholic Church, which so far has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought and has resolutely opposed any idea of this world being governed by advance towards the recognition of truth!

We are living here in a Catholic country under the protection of that Church, uncertain how long the protection will last. So long as it does last I naturally hesitate to do anything that is bound to awaken the hostility of that Church. It is not cowardice, but caution; the new enemy ¹ — and we 

1 [i.e., German National Socialism. Transl.]

HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 91

shall guard against doing anything that would serve his interests is more dangerous than the old one, with whom we have learned to live in peace.Psycho-analytic research is in any case the subject of suspicious attention from Catholicism. I do not maintain that this suspicion is unmerited. If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains its grandiose powers in the same way as we should a neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country the greatest resentment of the powers that be. It is not that I have anything new to say, nothing that I have not clearly expressed a quarter of a century ago. All that, however, has been forgotten, and it would undoubtedly have some effect were I to repeat it now and to illustrate it by an example typical of the way in which religions are founded. It would probably lead to ourbeing forbidden to work in Psycho -Analysis. Such violent methods of suppression are by no means alien to the Catholic Church; she feels it rather as an intrusion into her privileges when other people resort to the same means. Psycho-Analysis, however, which has travelled everywhere during the course of my long life, has not yet found a more serviceable home than in the city where it was born and grew. 
I do not only think so, I know that this external danger will deter me from publishing the last 

92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

part of my treatise on Moses. I have tried to remove this obstacle by telling myself that my fear is based on an over-estimation of my personal importance, and that the authorities would probably be quite indifferent to what I should have to say about Moses and the origin of monotheistic religions. Yet I do not feel sure that my judgement is correct. It seems to me more likely that malice and an appetite for sensation would make up for the importance I may lack in the eyes of the world. So I shall not publish this essay. But that need not hinder me from writing it. The more so since it was written once before, two years ago, and thus only needs re-writing and adding on to the two previous essays. Thus it may lie hid until the time comes when it may safely venture into the light of day,or until someone else who reaches the same opinions and conclusions can be told: "In darker days there lived a man who thought as you did."

II. June 1938 (London) 
The exceptionally great difficulties which have weighed on me during the composition of this essay dealing with Moses inner misgivings as well as external hindrances are the reason why this third and final part comes to have two different prefaces which contradict, indeed even cancel,  each other. For in the short interval between writing the two prefaces the outer conditions of the author have radically changed. Formerly I lived under the protection of the Catholic Church and feared that by publishing
the essay I should lose that protection and that the practitioners and students of psycho-analysis in Austria would be forbidden their work. Then, suddenly,the German invasion broke in on us and Catholicism proved to be, as the Bible has it, "but a broken reed". In the certainty of persecution now not only because of my work, but also because of my "race" I left with many friends the city which from early childhood, through78 years, had been a home to me.
I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England. Here I live now, a welcome guest, relieved from that oppression and happy that I may again speak and write I almost said "think" -- as I want or have to. I dare now to make public the last part of my essay.
There are no more external hindrances or at least none that need alarm one. In the few weeks of my stay I have received a large number of greetings, from friends who told me how glad they were to see me here, and from people unknown to me, barely interested in my work, who simply expressed their satisfaction that I had found freedom and security here. Besides all this there came, with a frequency bewildering to a foreigner, letters of another kind, expressing concern for the weal of my soul, and anxious to point me the way to Christ and to enlighten me about the future of Israel. The good people who wrote thus could not have known much about me.I expect, however, that when this new work of mine becomes known among my new compatriots I shall lose with my correspondents and a number of the others something of the sympathy they now extend to me.
The inner difficulties were not to be changed by the different political system and the new domicile. Now as then I am uneasy when confronted with my own work; I miss the consciousness of unity and intimacy that should exist between the author and his work. This does not mean that I lack conviction in the correctness of my conclusions. That conviction I acquired a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my book on Totem and Taboo (in 1912), and it has only become stronger since. From then on I have never doubted "that religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of long forgotten important happenings in the primaeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect
on mankind from the historical truth they contain.My uncertainty begins only at the point when I ask myself the question whether I have succeeded in proving this for the example of Jewish Monotheism chosen here. To my critical faculties this treatise, proceeding from a study of the man Moses, seems like a dancer balancing on one toe.
If I had not been able to find support in the analytic interpretation of the exposure myth and pass thence to Sellin's suggestion concerning Moses' end, the whole treatise would have to remain unwritten. However, let me proceed.
I begin by abstracting the results of my second the purely historical essay on Moses. I shall not examine them critically here, since they form the premisses of the psychological discussions which are based on them and which continually revert to them.

SECTION I

1. The Historical Premisses

The historical background of the events which have aroused our interest is as follows. Through the conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt had become a world Empire. The new Imperialism was reflected in the development of certain religious ideas, if not in those of the whole people, yet in those of the governing and intellectually active upper stratum. Under the influence of the priests of the Sun God at On(Heliopolis), possibly strengthened by suggestions from Asia, there arose the idea of a universal God Aton no longer restricted to one people and one country. With the young Amenhotep IV (who later changed his name to Ikhnaton) a Pharaoh succeeded to the throne who knew no higher interest than in developing the idea of such a God.He raised the Aton religion to the official religion and thereby the universal God became the Only God; all that was said of the other gods became deceit and guile. With a superb implacability he resisted all the temptations of magical thought and discarded the illusion, dear particularly to the Egyptians, of a life after death. With an astonishing premonition of later scientific knowledge he recognised in the energy of the sun's radiation the source of all life on earth and worshipped the sun as the symbol of his God's power. He gloried in his joy in the Creation and in his life in Maat (truth and justice)
. It is the first case in the history of mankind, and perhaps the purest, of a monotheistic religion.
A deeper knowledge of the historical and psychological conditions of its origin would be of inestimable value. Care was taken, however,that not much information concerning the Aton religion should come down to us. Already under the reign of Ikhnaton's weak successors every thing he had created broke down. The priesthood he had suppressed vented their fury on his memory. The Aton religion was abolished; the capital of the heretic Pharaoh demolished and pillaged. In 13506.0. the Eighteenth Dynasty was extinguished; after an interval of anarchy the general Haremhab, who reigned until 1315, restored order. Ikhnaton's reforms seemed to bebut an episode, doomed to be forgotten.
This is what has been established historically and at this point our work of hypothesis begins.Among the intimates of Ikhnaton was a man who was perhaps called Thothrnes, as so many others were at that time;¹ the name does not matter,but its second part must have been -mose. He held high rank, and was a convinced adherent of the Aton religion, but in contradistinction to the brooding King he was forceful and passionate.For this man the death of Ikhnaton and the abolishing of his religion meant the end of all his hopes. Only proscribed or recanting could he remain in Egypt.
If he were governor of a border province he might well have come into touch with a certain Semitic tribe which had immigrated several generations ago. In his disappointment and loneliness he turned to those strangers and sought in them for a compensation of what he had lost. He chose them for his people and tried to realize his own ideals through them. 

1 This, for example, was also the name of the sculptor whose
workroom was discovered in Tell-el-Amarna.

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After he had left Egypt with them accompanied by his immediate followers he hallowed them by the custom of circumcision, gave them laws and introduced them to the Aton religion which the Egyptians had just discarded. Perhaps the rules the man Moses imposed on his Jews were even harder than those of his master and teacher Ikhnaton; perhaps he also relinquished the connection with the Sun God of On, to whom the latter had still adhered.
For the Exodus from Egypt we must fix the time of the interregnum after 1350. The subsequent periods of time, until possession was taken of the land of Canaan, are especially obscure. Out of the darkness which the Biblical Text has here left or rather created the historical research of our days can distinguish two facts. The first, discovered by E. Sellin, is that the Jews, who even according to the Bible were stubborn and unruly towards their law-giver and leader, rebelled at last, killed him and threw off the imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians had done before them. The second fact, proved by E. Meyer, is that these Jews on their return from Egypt united with tribes nearly related to them, in the country bordering on Palestine, the Sinai peninsula and Arabia, and that there, in a fertile spot called Qades, they accepted under the influence of the Arabian Midianites a new religion, the worship of the volcano God Jahve.

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Soon after this they were ready to conquer Canaan.
The relationship in time of these two events to each other and to the Exodus is very uncertain. The next historical allusion is given in a stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned until 1215, which numbers "Israel" among the vanquished in his conquests in Syria and Palestine. If we take the date of this stele as a terminus ad quern there remains for the whole course of events, starting from the Exodus, about a century after 1350 until before 1215. It is possible, however, that the name Israel does not yet
refer to the tribes whose fate we are here following and that in reality we have a longer period at our disposal. The settling of the later Jewish people in Canaan was certainly not a swiftly achieved conquest; it was rather a series of successive struggles and must have stretched over a longish period. If we discard the restriction imposed by the Merneptah stele we may more readily assume thirty years, a generation, as the time of Moses¹ and two generations at least, probably more,until the union in Qades took place;² the interval between Qades and the setting out for Canaan need not have been long. Jewish tradition had as I have shown in my last essay good reason toshorten the interval between the Exodus and the foundation of a religion in Qades; our argument would incline us to favour the contrary.

1 This would accord with the forty years' wandering in the desert of which the Bible tells us.
2 Thus about 1350-40 to 1320-10 for Moses, 1260 or perhaps rather later for Qades, the Merneptah stele before 1215.

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Till now we have been concerned with the external aspects of the story, with an attempt to fill in the gaps of our historical knowledge in part a repetition of my second essay. Our interest follows the fate of Moses and his doctrines, to which the revolt of the Jews only apparently put an end. From the Jahvist account written down about 1000 B.C., though doubtless founded on earlier material we have learned that the union of the tribes and foundation of a religion in Qades represented a compromise, the two parts of which are still easily distinguishable. One partner was concerned only in denying the recency and foreignness of the God Jahve and in heightening his claim to the people's devotion.The other partner would not renounce memories, so dear to him, of the liberation from Egypt and the magnificent figure of his leader Moses; and, indeed, he succeeded in finding a place for the fact as well as for the man in the new representation of Jewish early history, in retaining at least the outer sign of the Moses religion, namely circumcision, and in insisting on certain restrictions in the use of the new divine name. I have said that the people who insisted on those demands were the descendants of the Moses followers, the Levites, separated by a few generations only from the actual contemporaries and compatriots of Moses and attached to his memory by a tradition still green. The poetically elaborated accounts attributed to the Jahvist and to his later competitor the Elohist, are like gravestones, under which the truth about those early matters the nature of the Mosaic religion and the violent removal of the great man truths withdrawn from the knowledge of later generations, should, so to speak, be laid to eternal rest. And if we have divined aright the course of events, there is nothing mysterious about them; it might very well, however, have been the definite end of the Moses episode in the history of the Jewish people.The remarkable thing about it is that this was not so, that the most important effects of that experience should appear much later and should in the course of many centuries gradually force their way to expression.
It is not likely that Jahve was very different in character from thegods of the neighbouring peoples and tribes; hew restled with the other gods, it is true, just as the tribes fought among themselves, yet we may assume that a Jahve worshipper of that time would never have dreamt of doubting the existence of the gods of Canaan, Moab, Amalek and so on, any more than he would the existence of the people who believed in them. The monotheistic idea, which had blazed up in Ikhnaton's time, was again obscured and was to remain in darkness for a long time to come. On the islandElephantine, close to the first Nile cataract, discoveries have yielded the astonishing information that a Jewish military colony, settled there centuries ago, worshipped in their temples besidest heir chief god Jahu two female deities, one of whom was called Anat-Jahu. Those Jews, it is true, had been separated from the mother country and had not gone through the same religious development; the Persian government (in the fifth century B.C.) communicated to them the new ceremonial regulations of Jerusalem.¹ Returning to earlier times we may surely say that Jahve was quite unlike the Mosaic God. Aton had been a pacifist, like his deputy on earth or rather his model the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who looked on with folded arms as the Empire his ancestors had won fell to pieces. For a people that was preparing to conquer new lands by violence Jahve was certainly better suited. Moreover, what was worthy of honour in the Mosaic God was beyond the comprehension of a primitive people.
I have already mentioned and in this I am supported by the opinion of other workers that the central fact of the development of Jewish religion was this: in the course of time Jahve lost his own character and became more and more

1 Auerbach: Wtiste und Gelobtes Land. Bd. II, 1936.

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like the old God of Moses, Aton. Differences remained, it is true, and at first sight they would seem important; yet they are easy to explain. Aton had begun his reign
in Egypt in a happy period of security, and even when the Empire began to shake in its foundations his followers had been able to turn away from worldly matters and to continue praising and enjoying his creations. To the Jewish people fate dealt a series of severe trials and painful experiences, sotheir God became hard, relentless and, as it were, wrapped in gloom. He retained the character ofan universal God who reigned over all lands and peoples; ''the fact, however, that his worship had passed from the Egyptians to the Jews found its expression in the added doctrine that the Jews were his chosen people, whose special obligations would in the end find their special reward. Itmight not have been easy for that people to reconcile their belief in their being preferred toall others by an all-powerful God with the dire experiences of their sad fate. But they did notlet doubts assail them, they increased their own feelings of guilt to silence their mistrust and perhaps in the end they referred to "God's unfathomable will," as religious people do to this day. If there was wonder that he allowed ever new tyrants to come who subjected and illtreated his people the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians yet
his power was recognized in that all those wicked enemies got defeated in their turn and their empires destroyed.
In three important points the later Jewish God became identical with the old Mosaic God. The first and decisive point is that he was really recognized as the only God, beside whom another god was unthinkable. Ikhnaton's monotheism was taken seriously by an entire people; indeed, this people clung to it to such an extent that it became the principal content of their intellectual life and displaced all other interests. The people and the priesthood, now the dominating part of it, were unanimous on that point; but the priests, in confining their activities to elaborating the ceremonial for his worship, found themselves in opposition to strong tendencies within the people which endeavoured to revive two other doctrines of Moses about his God. The prophets' voices untiringly proclaimed that God disdained ceremonial and sacrifice and asked nothing but a belief in Him and a life in truth and justice. When they praised the simplicity and holiness of their life in the desert they surely stood under the influence of Mosaic ideals.
It is time now to raise the question whether there is any need at all to invoke Moses' influence on the final shape of the Jewish idea of their God, whether it is not enough to assume a spontaneous development to a higher spirituality during a cultural life extending over many centuries.

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On this possible explanation, which would put an end to all our guessing, I would make two comments. First that it does not explain any thing. The same conditions did not lead to monotheism with the Greek people, who were surely most gifted, but to a breaking up of polytheistic religion and to the beginning of philosophical thought. In Egypt monotheism had grown as far as we understand its growth as an ancillary effect of imperialism; God was the reflection of a Pharaoh autocratically governing a great world empire. With the Jews the political conditions were most unfavourable for a development away from the idea of an exclusive national God towards that of an universal ruler of the world. Whence then did this tiny and impotent nation derive the audacity to pass themselves off for the favourite child of the Sovereign Lord?
The question of the origin of monotheism among the Jews would thus remain unanswered or else one would have to be content with the current answer that it was the expression of their particular religious genius. We know that genius is incomprehensible and unaccountable and it should therefore not be called upon as an explanation until every other solution has failed.¹
Furthermore, there is the fact that Jewish records and history themselves show us the way

1 The same consideration holds good for the remarkable case of William Shakespeare of Stratford.

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by stating emphatically and this time without contradicting themselves that the idea of anOnly God was given to the people by Moses.If there is an objection to the trustworthiness of this statement, it is that the priests in their rewriting of the Biblical Text as we have it, ascribe much too much to Moses. Institutions, as wellas ritualistic rules, undoubtedly belonging to later times, are declared to be Mosaic laws, with the clear intention of enhancing their authority.This is certainly a reason for suspicion, yet hardly enough for us to use. For the deeper motive of such an exaggeration is clear as daylight. The priests, in the accounts they present, desired to establish a continuity between their own times and the Mosaic period. They attempted to deny just that which we have recognized to be the most striking feature of Jewish religious history,
namely, that there was a gap between theMosaic law-giving and the later Jewish religion a gap filled in at first by the worship of Jahve and only later slowly covered over. Their presentation denies this sequence of events with all the means in its power, although its historical correctness is beyond all doubt, since throughout the peculiar treatment the Biblical Text has undergone there remain more than enough statements in proof of it. The priests' version had an aim similar to that of the tendency which made the new god Jahve the God of the Patriarchs. If we take into consideration this motive of the PriestlyCode it is hard not to believe that it was reallyMoses who gave his Jews the monotheistic idea.We should find it the easier to give assent to this since we are able to say from where the idea came to Moses something which the Jewish priesthood had certainly forgotten.
Here, someone might ask, what do we gain by deriving Jewish monotheism from the Egyptians?
The problem has thus only been put back a step; we know no more about the genesis of the monotheistic idea. The answer is that it is not aquestion of gain, but of research. And perhaps we shall learn something by elucidating the real process.

2. Latency Period and Tradition

I thus believe that the idea of an Only God, as well as the emphasis laid on ethical demands inthe name of that God and the rejection of all magic ceremonial, were indeed Mosaic doctrines, which at first found no hearing but came into their own after a long space of time and finally prevailed. How is such a delayed effect to be explained and where do we meet with similar phenomena?
Our next reflection tells us that they are often met with in very different spheres and that they probably come about in various ways which are more or less easy
to understand. Let us take foran example the fate of any new scientific theory, for instance, the Darwinian doctrine of evolution.At first it meets with hostile rejection and is
violently debated for decades; it takes only one generation, however, before it is recognized asa great step towards truth. Darwin himself was accorded the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey. Such a case provides no enigma. The new truth had awakened affective resistances.These could be sustained by arguments that opposed the evidence in support of the unpleasant doctrine. The contest of opinions lasted a certain time. From the very beginning there were both adherents and opponents, but the number aswell as the importance of the former steadily increased until at last they gained the upper hand. During the whole time of the conflict no one forgot what was the matter at issue. We are hardly surprised to find that the whole process took a considerable time; probably we do not adequately appreciate the fact that we have hereto do with a manifestation of mass psychology.There is no difficulty in finding a full analogy to it in the mental life of an individual. In such a case a person would hear of something new which, on the ground of certain evidence, he is asked to accept as true; yet it contradicts many of his wishes and offends some of his highly treasured convictions. He will then hesitate, look for arguments to cast doubt on the new material, and so will struggle for a while until at last he admits it himself: "all this is true after all, although I find it hard to accept and it is painful to have to believe in it." All we learn from this process is that it needs time for the intellectual work of the Ego to overcome objections
that are invested by strong feelings. This case, however, is not very similar to the one we are trying to elucidate.
The next example we turn to seems to have still less in common with our problem. It may happen that someone gets away from, apparently unharmed, the spot where he has suffered as hocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which one can ascribe only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a "traumatic neurosis." This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the "incubation period," a transparent allusion to the pathologyof infectious disease. As an afterthought we observe that in spite of the fundamental difference in the two cases, the problem of the traumatic neurosis and that of Jewish Monotheismthere is a correspondence in one point. 

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It is the feature which one might term latency. There are the best grounds for thinking that in the history of the Jewish religion there is a long period after the breaking away from the Mosesreligion during which no trace is to be found of the monotheistic idea, the condemnation of ceremonial and the emphasis on the ethical side.
Thus we are prepared for the possibility that the solution of our problem is to be sought in as pecial psychological situation.
I have more than once traced the events in Qades when the two components of the laterJewish people combined in the acceptance of anew religion. With those who had been inEgypt the memory of the Exodus and of the figure of Moses was still so strong and vivid that it insisted on being incorporated into any account of their early history. There might have been among them grandsons of persons who them selves had known Moses, and some of them still felt themselves to be Egyptians and bore Egyptian names. They had good reasons, however, for "repressing" the memory of the fate that had befallen their leader and law-giver. For the other component of the tribe the leading motive was to glorify the new God and deny his foreign - ness. Both parties were equally concerned to deny that there had been an earlier religion and especially what it contained. This is how the first compromise came about, which probably

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was soon codified in writing; the people fromEgypt had brought with them the art of writing and the fondness for writing history. A longtime was to elapse, however, before historians came to develop an ideal of objective truth. At first they shaped their accounts according to their needs and tendencies of the moment, with an easy conscience, as if they had not yet understood what falsification signified. In consequence, a difference began to develop between the written version and the oral report,
i.e. the tradition, of the same subject-matter. What has been deleted or altered in the written version might quite well have been preserved uninjured in the tradition. Tradition was the complement and at the same time the contradiction of the written history.
It was less subject to distorting influences perhaps in part entirely free of them and therefore might be more truthful than the account set down in writing.
Its trustworthiness, however, was impaired by being vaguer and more fluid than the written text, being exposed to many changes and distortions as it was passed on from one generation to the other by word of mouth.Such a tradition may have different outcomes.The most likely event would be for it to be vanquished by the written version, ousted by it, until it grows more and more shadowy and at last is forgotten. Another fate might be that the tradition itself ends by becoming a written version.

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There are other possibilities which will be mentioned later.
The phenomenon of the latency period in the history of the Jewish religion may find its explanation in this : the facts which the so-called official written history purposely tried to suppress were in reality never lost. The knowledge of them survived in traditions which were kept a live among the people. According to E. Sellin, there even existed a tradition concerning the end ofMoses which contradicted outright the official account and came far nearer to the truth. The same thing, we may suppose, happened with other beliefs that had apparently found an end at the same time as Moses, doctrines of theMosaic religion that had been unacceptable to the majority of Moses' contemporaries.
Here we meet with a remarkable fact. It is that these traditions instead of growing weaker as time went on grew more and more powerful  in the course of centuries, found their way into the later codifications of the official accounts, and at last proved themselves strong enough decisively to influence the thought and activity of the people. What the conditions were that made such a development possible seems, however, far from evident.
This fact is indeed strange, so much so that we feel justified in examining it afresh. Within it our problem lies. The Jewish people had abandoned the Aton religion which Moses had given them and had turned to the worship of another god who differed little from the Baalim of the neighbouring tribes. All the efforts oflater distorting influences failed to hide this humiliating fact. Yet the religion of Moses did not disappear without leaving any trace; a kind of memory of it had survived, a tradition perhaps obscured and distorted. It was this tradition of a great past that continued to. work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people and at last
succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into the Mosaic God and in waking to a new life thereligion Moses had instituted centuries ago and which had later been forsaken. That a dormant tradition should exert such a powerful influence on the spiritual life of a people is not a familiar conception. There we find ourselves in a domain of mass psychology where we do not feel at home.We must look around for analogies, for facts of a similar nature even if in other disciplines. We shall find them, I am sure. 
When the time was ripening for a return of the religion of Moses, the Greek people possessed an exceptionally rich treasure of legends and myths of heroes. It is believed that the ninth or eighth century B.C. saw the creation of the Homeric epics which derived their material from this complex of myths. With our psychological

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knowledge of to-day we could long beforeSchliemann and Evans have put the question:whence did the Greeks obtain all this material of myths and legends which Homer and the greatAttic dramatists transformed into immortal works of art? The answer would have had to be : this people probably passed in its early history through a period of outward splendour and highly developed culture which ended in catastrophe as, indeed, history tells and of which a faint tradition lived on in these legends. Archaeological research of our days has confirmed this suggestion, which if made earlier would surely have been considered too bold. It has discovered the evidence of the grandiose Minoan-Mycenaean culture which had probably already come to an end on the Greek mainland by 1250 B.C. The Greek historians of a later period hardly ever refer to it. There is the remark that there was a time when the Cretans ruled the sea, a mention of the name of King Minos and his palace, and of the labyrinth; but that is all. Nothing remained of that great time but the traditions seized upon by the great writers. Other peoples also possess such folk-epics, for example, the Indians, Finns and Germans. It is for the literary historian to investigate whether the same conditions as with the Greeks applied there as well. I think that such an investigation would yield a positive result. The conditions we have specified for the origin of folk-epics are as follows : there exists a period of early history that immediately afterwards is regarded as eventful, significant, grandiose and perhaps always heroic; yet it happened so long ago and  belonged to times so remote that later generations receive intelligence of it only as an obscure and incomplete tradition. Surprise has been expressed that the epic as a literary form should have disappeared in later times. The explanation may be that the conditions for the production of epics no longer exist. The old material has been used up and so far as later events are concerned history has taken the place of tradition. The bravest heroic deeds of our days are no longer able to inspire an epic; Alexander the Great himself had grounds for his complaint that he would have no Homer to celebrate his life.
Remote times have a great attraction sometimes mysteriously so for the imagination. As often as mankind is dissatisfied with its present and that happens often enough it harks back to the past and hopes at last to win belief in the never-forgotten dream of a Golden Age.¹ Probably man still stands under the magic spell of his childhood, which a not unbiassed memory presents to him as a time of unalloyed bliss.

1 Such a situation forms the basis of Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." He assumes the part of a minstrel who, sadly disappointed with the violent contests of the political parties of his time, contrasts them with the unity and patriotism of their forbears.

Il6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

Incomplete and dim memories of the*past, which we call tradition, are a great incentive to the artist, for he is free to fill in the gaps in the memories according to the behests of his imagination and to form after his own purpose the image of the time he has undertaken to reproduce.One might almost say that the more shadowy tradition has become the more meet is it for the poet's use. The value tradition has for poetry, therefore, need not surprise us, and the analogy we have found of the dependence of epic poetry on precise conditions will make us more inclined to accept the strange suggestion that with theJews it was the tradition of Moses which turned the Jahve worship
in the direction of the oldMosaic religion. The two cases, however, are very different in other respects. In the one the result is poetry, in the other a religion, and we have assumed that the latter under the stimulus of a tradition was reproduced with a faithfulness for which, of course, the epic cannot provide a parallel. Enough remains, therefore, of our problem to encourage a search for better analogies.

3. The Analogy

The only really satisfactory analogy to the remarkable process which we have recognized in the history of Jewish religion is to be found in a domain apparently remote from our problem. It is, however, very complete, approximating to identity. Here again we find the phenomenon of latency, the appearance of inexplicable manifestations which call for an explanation, and the strict condition of an early, and subsequently forgotten, experience. Here too we find the characteristic of compulsiveness, which overpowering logical thinking strongly engages the psychical life; it is a trait which was not concerned in the genesis of the epic. 
This analogy is met with in psychopathology, in the genesis of human neurosis : that is to say, in a discipline belonging to individual psychology, where as religious phenomena must of course be regarded as a part of mass psychology. We shall see that this analogy is not so startling as it appears at first sight; indeed, it is rather in the nature of an axiom.
The impressions we experienced at an early age and forgot later, to which I have ascribed such great importance for the aetiology of the neuroses, are called traumata. It may remain an open question whether the aetiology of the neuroses should in general be regarded as a traumatic one.The obvious objection is that a trauma is not always evident in the early history of the neurotic individual. Often we must be content to say that there is nothing else but an unusual reaction to experiences and demands that apply to all individuals; many people deal with them in another way which we may term normal. Where we can find no other explanation than an hereditary and constitutional disposition we are naturally tempted to say that the neurosis was not suddenly acquired but slowly developed. 
In this connection, however, two points standout. The first is that the genesis of the neurosis always goes back to very early impressions in childhood.¹  The second is this: it is correct to say that there are cases which we single out as "traumatic" ones because the effects unmistakably go back to one or more strong impressions of this early period. They failed to be disposed of normally, so that one feels inclined to say: if this or that had not happened, there would have been no neurosis. It would be sufficient for our  purposes even if we had to limit the analogy in question to these traumatic cases. Yet the gap between the two groups does not seem unbridgeable. It is quite possible
to combine both aetiological conditions in one conception; all depends on what is defined as traumatic. If we may assume that an experience acquires its traumatic character only in consequence of a quantitative element that is to say, that if the experience evokes unusual pathological reactions the fault

1 That is why it is nonsensical to maintain that psycho-analysis is practised if these early periods of life are excluded from one's investigation; yet this claim has been made in many quarters.

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lies in its having made too many demands on the personality then we can formulate the conclusion that with one constitution something produces a trauma whereas with another it does not. We then have the conception of a sliding scale, a so-called complemental series, where two factors converge to complete the aetiology; a minus in one factor is compensated by a plus in the other. Generally the two factors work together and only at either end of the series can we speak of a simple motivation. In consequence of this reasoning we can leave out of account the difference between traumatic and non-traumatic aetiology as being unimportant for our analogy.
Despite some risk of repetition, it maybe useful to group together the facts relating to the important analogy in question. They are as follows. Our researches have shown that what we call the phenomena or symptoms of a neurosisare the consequences of certain experiences and impressions which, for this very reason, we recognize to be aetiological traumata. We wish to as certain, even if only in a rough schematic way, the characteristics common to these experiences and to neurotic symptoms.
Let us first consider the former. All these traumata belong to early childhood, the period up to about five years. Impressions during the time when the child begins to speak are found to be especially interesting. The period between two and four years is the most important. How soon after birth this sensitiveness to traumata begins we are not able to state with any degree of certainty. 
The experiences in question are as a rule entirely forgotten and remain inaccessible to memory. They belong to the period of infantile amnesia which is often interrupted by isolated fragmentary  memories, the so-called "screen- memories." 
They concern impressions of a sexual and aggressive nature and also early injuries to the self (injuries to narcissism). We should add that children at that early age do not yet distinguish between sexual and purely aggressive actions so clearly as they do later on; (the "sadistic" misunderstanding of the sexual act belongs to this context). It is of course very striking that the sexual factor should predominate and theory must take this into account.
These three points early happenings within the first five years of life, the forgetting, and the characteristic of sexuality and aggressivity belong closely together. The traumata are eitherbodily experiences or perceptions, especially those heard or seen; that is to say, they are either experiences or impressions. What connects the three points is established theoretically, by analytic work; this alone can yield a knowledge of the forgotten experiences, or to put
it more concretely, though more incorrectly is able to bring those forgotten experiences back to memory.The theory says that, contrary to popular opinion, human sexual life or what later corresponds with it shows an early blossoming which comes to an end at about the age of five.
Then follows the so-called latency period
lasting up to puberty during which there is no further sexual development; on the contrary much that had been achieved undergoes a retrogression. The theory is confirmed by anatomical study of the growth of the internal genitalia, it suggests that man is derived from a species of animal that was sexually mature at five years, and arouses the suspicion that the postponement ,and the beginning twice over, of sexual life has much to do with the transition to humanity.Man seems to be the only animal with a latency period and delayed sexuality. Investigations of primates, which so far as I know have not been made, would furnish an invaluable test for this theory. It must be significant psychologically that the period of infantile amnesia coincides with this early blossoming of sexuality. Perhaps this state of affairs is a necessary condition for the existence of neurosis, which seems to be a human privilege, and which in this light appears to bea survival from primaeval times like certain parts of our body.
What features are common to all neurotic symptoms?

122 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

Here we may note two importan tpoints. The effects of the trauma are twofold, positive and negative. The former are endeavours to revive the trauma, to remember the forgotten experience, or, better still, to make it real -- to live once more through a repetition of it; if it was an early affective relationship it is revived in an analogous connection with another person.These endeavours are summed up in the terms" fixation to the trauma" and "repetition - compulsion." The effects can be incorporated into the so-called normal Ego and in the form of constant tendencies lend to it immutable character traits, although or rather because their real cause, their historical origin, has been forgotten. Thus a man who has spent his childhood in an excessive and since forgotten "mother- fixation" may all his life seek for a woman on whom he can be dependent, who will feed and keep him. A girl who was seduced in early childhood may orient her later sexual life towards provoking such assaults over and over again. It will thus be seen that to understand the problem sof neurosis enables us to penetrate into the secrets of character formation in general.
The negative reactions pursue the opposite aim; here nothing is to be remembered or repeated of the forgotten traumata. They may be grouped together as defensive reactions. They express themselves in avoiding issues, a tendency  which may culminate in an inhibition or phobia.These negative reactions also contribute considerably to the formation of character. Actually they represent fixations on the trauma no less than do the positive reactions, but they follow the opposite tendency. The symptoms of the neurosis proper constitute a compromise to which both the positive and negative effects of the trauma contribute; sometimes one component, sometimes the other, predominates.These opposite reactions create conflicts which the subject cannot as a rule resolve.
The second point is this. All these phenomena, the symptoms as well as the restrictions of personality and the lasting changes in character,display the characteristic of compulsiveness; that is to say, they possess great psychical intensity,they show a far-reaching independence of psychical processes that are adapted to the demands of the real world and obey the laws of logicalthinking. They are not influenced by outerreality or not normally so ; they take no notice of real things, or the mental equivalents of these, sothat they can easily come into active oppositionto either. They are as a state within the state, an inaccessible party, useless for the commonweal; yet they can succeed in overcoming the other, the so-called normal, component and in forcing it into their service. If this happens then the sovereignty of an inner psychical reality has been established over the reality of the outer world; the way to insanity is open. Even if it does not come to this, the practical importance of the conflict is immeasurable. The inhibitions, or even inability to deal with life, of people dominated by neurosis are a very important factor in human society. The neurosis may be regarded as a direct expression of a "fixation" to an early period of their past.
And how about latency, a question especially interesting in regard to our analogy ? A trauma in childhood can be immediately followed by a neurosis during childhood; this constitutes an effort of defence accompanied by the formation of symptoms. The neurosis may last a long time and cause striking disturbances, or it may remain latent and be overlooked. As a rule, defence obtains the upper hand in such a neurosis; in any event changes of the personality remain like scars. A childhood neurosis seldom continues without an interval into the neurosis of the adult.Much more often it is succeeded by a time of undisturbed development, a process made possible or facilitated by the physiological latency. Only later does the change appear with which the neurosis becomes definitely manifest as a delayed effect of the trauma. This happens either at puberty or somewhat later. In the first case it comes about because the instincts strengthened by physical maturity can again take up the battle in which at first they were defeated. In the second case the neurosis becomes manifest later because the reactions and changes of the personality brought about by the defence mechanisms prove to be an obstacle for the solving of new problems of life, so that grave conflicts arise between the demands of the outer world and those of the Ego, which strives to preserve
the organization it had painfully developed in its defensive struggle. The phenomenon of a latency in the neurosis between the first reactions to the trauma and the  later appearance of the illness must be recognized as typical. The illness may also be regarded as an attempt at cure, an endeavour to reconcile the divided Ego divided by the trauma with the rest and to unite it into a strong whole that will be fit to cope with the outer world. Yet such an effort is rarely successful unless analytic help is sought, and even then not always. Often it ends in entirely destroying and breaking up the Ego or in the Ego being overpowered by the portion that was early split off, and has since been dominated, by the trauma. To convince the reader of the truth of our statements the exhaustive communication of several neurotic life histories would be necessary.The difficulty of the subject, however, would lead to great discursiveness and entirely destroy the character of this essay.
It would become a treatise on the neuroses and even then would 

126 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

enforce conviction only on that minority of people who have devoted their life's work to the study and practice of psycho-analysis. Since I am speaking here to a larger audience I can only ask the reader to lend a tentative credence to the abbreviated exposition which he has just read;I, on my part, agree that he need accept the deductions which I propose to lay before him only if the theories on which they are based turnout to be correct.
Nevertheless I can try to relate one case which will show clearly many of the peculiarities of neurosis that I have mentioned above.One case cannot, of course, display every thing; so we shall not be disappointed if its content seems far away from the analogy we are seeking.
A little boy who, as so often happens in the families of the petite bourgeoisie, shared his parents' bedroom had ample, and even regular, opportunity for observing sexual intercourse at an age before he was able to talk. He saw much and heard still more. In his later neurosis, which broke out immediately after the time of his first seminal emission, disturbed sleep was the earliest and most trying symptom. He became extraordinarily sensitive to nocturnal noises and, if once awakened, could not get to sleep again.This disturbance was a true compromise symptom: on the one hand the expression of his defence against his nocturnal observations, on the other hand the endeavour to re-establish the wakefulness which had enabled him to listen to those experiences. 
Stirred early to aggressive virility by these observations the boy began to excite his penis by touch and to make sexual advances towards his mother, putting himself thus in his father's place through identification with him. This went on until at last his mother forbade him to touch his penis and threatened to tell his father, who would take the offending organ away. This threat of castration had a very strong traumatic effect on the boy. He relinquished his sexual activity and his character underwent a change. 
Instead of identifying himself with his father he began to be afraid of him, adopted a passive attitude towards him and by means of occasional disobedience provoked his father to punish him physically.This corporal punishment had sexual significance for him and in that way he could identify himself with the ill-treated mother. He began to cling more and more closely to his mother as if he could not bear to be without her love, even for a moment, since this constituted a protection against the danger of castration from his father.
The latency period was spent in this modification of the (Edipus complex; it remained free from obvious disturbances. He became a model child and was successful in school.
So far we have pursued the immediate effect of the trauma and confirmed the existence of a latency period.
The appearance of puberty brought with it the manifest neurosis and disclosed its second main symptom, sexual impotency. He had lost all sensitiveness in his penis, never tried to touch it and never dared to approach a woman sexually.His sexual activities remained restricted to psychical onanism with sadistic -masochistic phantasies in which it was easy to recognize the consequence of those early observations of parental coitus. The thrust of increased virility that puberty brought with it turned to ferocious hatred of his father and opposition to him. This extreme negative relation to his father, which went as far as injuring his own interests, was the reason for his failure in life and his conflicts with the outer world. He could not allow himself to be successful in his profession, because his father had forced him to adopt it. He made no friends and was always on bad terms with his superiors.Burdened with these symptoms and incapacities he found at last a wife after his father's death.Then the core of his character appeared, traits
which made him very difficult to live with. He developed an absolutely egotistical, despotic and brutal personality; it was obviously necessary to him to bully and oppress other people. He was the exact copy of his father, after the image of him he had formed in his memory; that is to say, he revived the father-identification which as a child he had  adopted for sexual motives. In this part of the neurosis we recognize the return of the repressed, which together with the immediate effects of the trauma and the phenomenon of latency we have described as among the essential symptoms of a neurosis.

4. Application

Early trauma -- Defence -- Latency -- Outbreak of the Neurosis Partial return of the repressed material: this was the formula we drew up for the development
of a neurosis. Now I will invite the reader to take a step forward and assume that in the history of the human species something happened similar to the events in the life of the individual. That is to say, mankind as a whole also passed through conflicts of asexual -aggressive nature, which left permanent traces but which were for the most part warded off and forgotten; later, after a long period of latency, they came to life again and created phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms.
I have, I believe, divined these processes and wish to show that their consequences, which bear a strong resemblance to neurotic symptoms, are the phenomena of religion. Since it can no longer be doubted after the discovery of evolution that mankind had a pre-history, and since this history is unknown (that is to say, forgotten),such a conclusion has almost the significance of an axiom. If we should learn that the effective and forgotten traumata relate, here as well as there, to life in the human family, we should greet this information as a highly welcome and unforeseen gift which could not have been anticipated from the foregoing discussion.
I have already upheld this thesis a quarter of a century ago, in my book Totem and Taboo (1912),and need only repeat what I said there. The argument started from some remarks by CharlesDarwin and embraced a suggestion of Atkinson's.It says that in primaeval times men lived in small hordes, each under the domination of a strong male. When this was is not known; no point of contact with geological data has been established.It is likely that mankind was not very far advanced in the art of speech. An essential part of the argument is that all primaeval men, including, therefore, all our ancestors, underwent the fate I shall now describe.
The story is told in a very condensed way, as if what in reality took centuries to achieve, and during that long time was repeated innumerably, had only happened once. The strong male was the master and father of the whole horde: unlimited in his power, which he used brutally. All females were his property, the wives and daughters in his own horde as well as perhaps also those robbed from other hordes. The fate of the sons was a hard one; if they excited the father's jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out. They were forced to live in small communities and to provide themselves with wives by robbing them from others. Then one or the other son might succeed in attaining a situation similar to that of the father in the original horde.One favoured position came about in a natural way: it was that of the youngest son who, protected by his mother's love, could profit byhis father's advancing years and replace him after his death. An echo of the expulsion of the eldest son, as well as of the favoured position of the youngest, seems to linger in many myths and fairy tales.
The next decisive step towards changing this first kind of "social" organization lies in the following suggestion. The brothers who had been driven out and lived together in a community clubbed together, overcame the father and according to the custom of those times all partook of his body.
This cannibalism need not shock us; it survived into far later times.The essential point is, however, that we attribute to those primaeval people
the same feelings and emotions that we have elucidated in the primitives of our own times, our children, by psychoanalytic research. That is to say: they not merely

132 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

hated and feared their father, but also honoured him as an example to follow; in fact each son wanted to place himself in his father's position.The cannibalistic act thus becomes comprehensible as an attempt to assure one's identification with the father by incorporating a part of him.
It is a reasonable surmise that after the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarrelled among themselves for the succession, which each of them wanted to obtain for himself alone. They came to see that these fights were as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won understanding as well as the memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile led at last to a union among them, a sort of social contract.Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization accompanied by a renunciation sf instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual obligations; institutions declared sacred, which could not be broken in short the beginnings of morality and law. Each renounced the ideal of gaining for himself the position of father, of possessing his mother or sister. With this the taboo of incest and the law of exogamy came into being.  A good part of the power which had become vacant through the father's death passed to the women; the time of the matriarchate followed. The memory of the father lived on during this time of the "brother horde." A strong animal, which perhaps at first was also dreaded, was found as a substitute. Such a choice may seem very strange to us, but the gulf which man created later between himself and the animals did not exist for primitive man. Nor does it with our children, whose animal phobias we have been able to explain as dread of the father.
The relationship to the totem animal retained the original ambivalency of feeling towards the father. The totem was, on the one hand, the corporeal ancestor and protecting spirit of the clan; he was to be revered and protected. On the other hand, a festival was instituted on which day the same fate was meted out to him as the primaeval father had encountered. He was killed and eaten by all the brothers together. (TheTotem feast, according to Robertson Smith.)This great day was in reality a feast of triumph to celebrate the victory of the united sons over the father.
Where, in this connection, does religion come in? Totemism, with its worship of a father substitute, the ambivalency towards the father which is evidenced by the totem feast, the institution of remembrance festivals and of laws the breaking of which is punished by death this totemism, I conclude, may be regarded as the earliest appearance of religion in the history of mankind, and it illustrates the close connection existing 

134 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM 

from the very beginning of time between social institutions and moral obligations. The further development of religion can be treated here only in a very summary fashion. Without a doubt it proceeded parallel to the cultural development of mankind and the changes in the structure of human social institutions.
The next step forward from totemism is the humanizing of the worshipped being. Human gods, whose origin from the totem is not veiled,
take the place previously filled by animals.Either the god is still represented as an animal or at least he bears the countenance of an animal; the totem may become the inseparable companion of the god, or, again, the myth makes the god vanquish just that animal which was nothing but his predecessor. At one period it is hard to say when great mother-deities appeared, probably before the male gods, and they were worshipped beside the latter for a long time to come.During that time a great social revolution had taken place. Matriarchy was followed by are stitution of the patriarchal order. The new fathers, it is true, never succeeded to the omnipotence of the primaeval father. There were toomany of them and they lived in larger communities than the original horde had been; theyhad to get on with one another  and were restrictedby social institutions. Probably the mother deities were developed when the matriarchy was being limited, in order to compensate the dethroned mothers. The male gods appear at first as sons by the side of the great mothers; only later do they clearly assume the features of the father. These male gods of polytheism mirror the conditions of patriarchal times. They are numerous, they have to share their authority, and occasionally they obey a higher god. The nextstep, however, leads us to the topic that interests us here : the return of the one and only fatherdeity whose power is unlimited. 
I must admit that this historical survey leaves many a gap and in many points needs further confirmation. Yet whoever declares our reconstruction of primaeval history to be fantastic greatly underestimates the richness and the force of the evidence that has gone to make up this reconstruction. Large portions of the past, which are here woven into a whole, are historically proven or even show their traces to this day, such as matriarchal right, totemism and male communities. Others have survived in remarkable replicas. Thus more than one author has beenstruck by the close resemblance between the rite of Christian Communion where the believersymbolically incorporates the blood and flesh ofhis God and the Totem feast, whose innermeaning it reproduces. Numerous survivals of our forgotten early history are preserved
in the legends and fairy tales of the peoples, and 

136 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

analytic study of the mental life of the child has yielded an unexpectedly rich return by filling upgaps in our knowledge of primaeval times. Asacontribution towards an understanding of thehighly important relation between father andson I need only quote the animal phobias, thefear of being eaten by the father (which seems sostrange to the grown mind), and the enormousintensity of the castration complex. There is nothing in our reconstruction that is invented, nothing that is not based on good grounds.
Let us suppose that the presentation here given of primaeval history is on the whole credible.Then two elements can be recognized in religious rites and doctrines: on the one hand, fixations on the old family history and survivals of this; on the other hand, reproductions of the past and a return long after of what had been forgotten.It is the latter element that has until now been overlooked and therefore not understood. It
will therefore be illustrated here by at least one impressive example.
It is specially worthy of note that every memory returning from the forgotten past does so with great force, produces an incomparably strong influence on the mass of mankind and puts forward an irresistible claim to be believed, against which all logical objections remain powerless very much like the credo quia absurdum. This strange characteristic can only be understood by comparison with the delusions in a psychotic case. It has long been recognized that delusions contain a piece of forgotten truth, which had at its return to put up with being distorted and misunderstood, and that the compulsive conviction appertaining to the delusion emanates from this core of truth and spreads to the errors that enshroud it. Such a kernel of truth which we might call historical truth must also be conceded to the doctrines of the various religions. They are, it is true, imbued with the character of psychotic symptoms, but as mass phenomena they have escaped the curse of isolation.
No other part of religious history has become so abundantly clear as the establishment of monotheism among the Jewish people and its continuation into Christianity if we omit the development from the animal totem to the human god with his regular (animal) companion, a  development which can be traced without a gap and readily understood. (Each of the four Christian evangelists, by the way, still has his favourite animal.) If we admit for the moment that the rule of Pharaoh's empire was the external reason for the appearance of the monotheistic idea, we see that this idea uprooted from its soil and transplanted to another people after a long latency period takes hold of this people, is treasured by them as their most precious possession and for its part keeps this people alive by bestowing on them the pride of being the chosen people.It is the religion of the primaeval father and the hope of reward, distinction and finally world sovereignty,  is bound up with it. The last-named wish -phantasy relinquished long ago by theJewish people still survives among their enemies in their belief in the conspiracy of the "Elders of Zion." We shall consider in a later chapter how the special peculiarities of a monotheistic religion borrowed from Egypt must have worked on the Jewish people, how it formed their character for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism and encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations. The people, happy in their conviction of possessing truth, overcome by the consciousness of being the chosen, came to value highly all intellectual and ethical achievements. I shall also show howtheir sad fate, and the disappointments reality hadin store for them, was able to strengthen all thesetendencies. At present, however, we shall followtheir historical development in another direction.The restoration to the primaeval father of his historical rights marked a great progress, butthis could not be the end. The other parts ofthe prehistoric tragedy also clamoured for recognition. How this process was set into motion it is not easy to say.
It seems that a growing feeling of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people and perhaps the whole of civilization of that timeas a precursor of the return of the repressed material. This went on until a member of theJewish people, in the guise of a political -religiousagitator, founded a doctrine which together withanother one, the Christian religion separatedfrom the Jewish one. Paul, a Roman Jew fromTarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primaeval source.This he called original sin; it was a crime againstGod that could be expiated only through death.Death had come into the world through originals in. In reality this crime, deserving of death, had been the murder of the Father who later was deified. The murderous deed itself, however, was not remembered; in its place stood the phantasyof expiation and that is why this phantasy couldbe welcomed in the form of a gospel of salvation(Evangel). A Son of God, innocent himself,had sacrificed himself and had thereby takenover the guilt of the world. It had to be a Son,for the sin had been murder of the Father.Probably traditions from Oriental and Greekmysteries had exerted their influence on theshaping of this phantasy of salvation. Theessence of it seems to be Paul's own contribution.He was a man with a gift for religion, in the truestsense of the phrase. Dark traces of the past layin his soul, ready to break through into the regions of consciousness.

I4O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

That the Redeemer sacrificed himself as an innocent man was an obviously tendentiousdistortion, difficult to reconcile with logicalthinking. How could a man who was innocenta ssume the guilt of the murderer by allowing himself to be killed'? In historical reality there was no such contradiction. The "redeemer" could be no one else but he who was most guilty, the leader of the brother horde who had overpowered' the Father. Whether there had beensuch a chief rebel and leader must in myopinion remain uncertain. It is quite possible, but we must also consider that each memberofthe brother horde certainly had the wish to dothe deed by himself and thus to create for himselfa unique position
as a substitute for the identification with the father which he had to give up when he was submerged in the community. If there was no such leader, then Christ was the heir of an unfulfilled wish-phantasy; if there was such a leader, then Christ was his successor and his reincarnation. It is unimportant,  however, whether we have here a phantasy or the return of a forgotten reality; in any case, here lies the origin of the conception of the hero he who rebels against the father and kills him in some guise or other.¹ Here we also find the real source

1 Ernest Jones calls my attention to the probability that the God Mithra, who slays the Bull, represented this leader, the one who simply gloried in his deed. It is well known how long the worship of Mithra disputed the final victory with Christianity.

HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 141

of the "tragic guilt" of the hero in drama a guilt hard to demonstrate otherwise. We can scarcely doubt that in Greek tragedy the hero and the chorus represent this same rebel hero and the brother horde, and it cannot be without significance that in the Middle Ages the theatre began a fresh with the story of the Passion. 
I have already mentioned that the Christian ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the believer incorporates the flesh and blood of the Redeemer, repeats the content of the old Totem feast; it does so, it is true, only in its tender and adoring sense, not in its aggressive sense. The ambivalency dominating the father-son relationship, however, shows clearly in the final result of the religious innovation. Meant to propitiate the father deity, it ends by his being dethroned and set aside. The Mosaic religion had been aFather religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, justas in those dark times every son had longed to do.Paul, by developing the Jewish religion further, became its destroyer. His success was certainly mainly due to the fact that through the idea of salvation he laid the ghost of the feeling of guilt.
It was also due to his giving up the idea of the chosen people and its visible sign circumcision. That is how the new religion could become all-embracing, universal. Although this step might have been determined by Paul's revenge fulness on account of the opposition which his innovation found among the Jews, nevertheless one characteristic of the old Aton religion (universality) was reinstated; a restriction had been abolished which it had acquired while passing on to a new carrier, the Jewish people.
In certain respects the new religion was a cultural regression as compared with the olderJewish religion; this happens regularly when a new mass of people of a lower cultural level effects an invasion or is admitted into an older culture. Christian religion did not keep to thelofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewishreligion had soared. The former was no longerstrictly monotheistic, took over from the surrounding peoples numerous symbolical rites, reestablished the great Mother Goddess and foundroom for many deities of polytheism in an easily recognizable disguise though in subordinatepositions. Above all it was not inaccessible as the Aton religion and the subsequent Mosaic religion had been to the penetration of superstitions, magical and mystical elements which proved a great hindrance to the spiritual development of two following
millenia.
The triumph of Christianity was a renewed victory of the Amon priests over the God of Ikhnaton after an interval of a millenium and a

HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 143

half and over a larger region. And yet
Christianity marked a progress
in the history of religion
:
that is to say, in regard
to the return of therepressed. From now on Jewish religion was, soto speak, a fossil.
It would be worth while to understand whythe monotheistic idea should make such a deepimpression on just the Jewish people, and whythey adhered to it so tenaciously.
I believethis question can be answered. The great deedand misdeed of primaeval times, the murder of theFather, was brought home to the Jews, for fatedecreed that they should repeat
it on the personof Moses, an eminent father substitute. It wasa case of acting
instead of remembering, something which often happens during analytic workwith neurotics. They responded
to the doctrineof Moses which should have been a stimulus totheir memory by denying their act, did notprogress beyond the recognition of the greatFather and barred the passage
to the point wherelater on Paul started his continuation of primaevalhistory. It can scarcely be chance that the violentdeath of another great man should become thestarting point
for the creation of a new religionby Paul. This was a man whom a small numberof adherents in Judea believed to be the Son ofGod and the promised Messiah, and who later
on took over some of the childhood history thathad been attached to Moses. In reality, however,
144 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
we have hardly more definite knowledge of himthan we have of Moses. We do not know if hewas really the great man whom the Gospelsdepict or whether it was not rather the fact andthe circumstances of his death that were thedecisive factor in his achieving importance. Paul,who became his apostle, did not himself knowhim.
The murder of Moses by his people whichSellin recognized
in the traces of tradition andwhich, strangely enough, the young Goethe
1 hadassumed without any evidence has thus becomean indispensable part of our reasoning, an important link between the forgotten deed of primaevaltimes and its subsequent reappearance in theform of Monotheistic religions,
2 It is an attractivesuggestion that the guilt attached to the murderof Moses may have been the stimulus for the wishphantasy of the Messiah, who was to return andgive to his people salvation and the promisedsovereignty over the world. If Moses was this
first Messiah, Christ became his substitute andsuccessor. Then Paul could with a certain rightsay to the peoples:
"
See, the Messiah has trulycome. He was indeed murdered before youreyes." Then also there is some historical truthin the rebirth of Christ, for he was the resurrected1 Israel in der Wuste, Bd. VII of the Weimar Edition, S. 170.
2 Compare in this connection the well-known exposition
in
Frazer's The Golden Bough, Part III,
"
The Dying God," 1911.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 145Moses and the returned primaeval Father of theprimitive horde as well only transfigured andas a Son in the place of his Father.
The poor Jewish people, who with its usualstiff-necked obduracy continued to deny themurder of their
"
father/
5 has dearly expiatedthis in the course of centuries. Over and overagain they heard the reproach: you killed ourGod. And this reproach
is true, if rightlyinterpreted. It says, in reference to the history ofreligion: you won't admit that you murderedGod (the archetype
of God, the primaeval Fatherand his reincarnations). Something should beadded, namely:
"
It is true, we did the samething, but we admitted it, and since then we havebeen purified."
Not all accusations with which antisemitismpursues the descendants of the Jewish people
arebased on such good foundations. There must, ofcourse, be more than one reason for a phenomenonof such intensity and lasting strength as thepopular hatred ofJews. A whole series of reasonscan be divined: some of them, which need nointerpretation,
arise from obvious considerations;others lie deeper and spring from secret sources,which one would regard as the specific motives.In the first group the most fallacious is thereproach of their being foreigners, since in manyplaces nowadays under the sway of antisemitismthe Jews were the oldest constituents of theK
146 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
population or arrived even before the present
inhabitants. This is so, for example, in the townof Cologne, where Jews came with the Romans,before it was colonized by Germanic tribes. Othergrounds for antisemitism are stronger,
as forexample, the circumstance that Jews mostly live
as a minority among other peoples,
since thefeeling of solidarity of the masses in order to becomplete has need of an animosity against anoutside minority and the numerical weakness ofthe minority
invites suppression. Two otherpeculiarities that the Jews possess, however, arequite unpardonable. The first is that in manyrespects they are different from their
"
hosts."Not fundamentally so, since they are not a foreignAsiatic race as their enemies maintain butmostly consist of the remnants of Mediterraneanpeoples and inherit their culture. Yet they aredifferent although sometimes it is hard to definein what respects especially from the Nordicpeoples, and racial intolerance finds strongerexpression strange
to say
in regard to smalldifferences than to fundamental ones. The secondpeculiarity has an even more pronounced effect.
It is that they defy oppression, that even the mostcruel persecutions have not succeeded in exterminating them. On the contrary, they show acapacity for holding
their own in practical
life
and, where they
are admitted, they make valuablecontributions to the surrounding civilization.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 147The deeper
motives of antisemitism have theirroots in times long past; they come from theunconscious and I am quite prepared to hearthat what I am going to say will at first appearincredible. I venture to assert that the jealousywhich the Jews evoked in the other peoples bymaintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God the Father has not yet beenovercome by those others, just
as if the latter hadgiven credence to the assumption. Furthermore,among the customs through which the Jewsmarked off their aloof position, that of circumcision made a disagreeable, uncanny impressionon others. The explanation probably
is that it
reminds them of the dreaded castration idea andof things in their primaeval past which they wouldfain forget. Then there is lastly the most recentmotive of the series. We must not forget that all
the peoples who now excel in the practice of antisemitism became Christians only
in relativelyrecent times, sometimes forced to it by bloodycompulsion. One might say, they all are
"
badlychristened "; under the thin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were,barbarically polytheistic. They have not yetovercome their grudge against the new religionwhich was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianitycame to them. The facts that the Gospels
tell astory which is enacted among Jews, and in truth
148 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
treats only of Jews, has facilitated such a projection. The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatredfor Christianity, and it is not surprising that in theGerman National-Socialist revolution this closeconnection of the two monotheistic religions
finds
such clear expression
in the hostile treatment ofboth.
5. Difficulties
Perhaps the preceding chapter has succeededin establishing the analogy between neuroticprocesses and religious events and thereby
inpointing to the unexpected origin of the latter.
In this translation from individual into masspsychology two difficulties emerge, different innature and importance, which we must nowexamine. The first is that we have treated here ofonly one case in the rich phenomenology
of thereligions and have not thrown any light on theothers. The author regretfully has to admit thathe cannot give more than one sample,
that he hasnot the expert knowledge necessary
to completethe investigation. This limited knowledge willallow him perhaps to add that the founding of theMohammedan religion seems to him to be anabbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, inimitation of which it made its appearance. Thereis reason to believe that the Prophet originallyintended to accept
the Jewish religion
in full for
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 149himself and his people. The regaining of the onegreat primaeval Father produced in the Arabs anextraordinary advance in self-confidence whichled them to great worldly successes, but which
it is true exhausted itself in these. Allah provedhimself to be much more grateful
to his chosenpeople than Jahve had in his time. The innerdevelopment of the new religion, however, sooncame to a standstill, perhaps
because it lackedthe profundity which in the Jewish religionresulted from the murder of its founder. Theapparently rationalistic religions of the East arein essence ancestor cults; therefore they stopshort at an early stage of the reconstruction ofthe past. If it is correct that in the primitivepeoples of our time we find as the sole content:>f their religion the worship
of a highest Being,then we can interpret
this only
as a withering
inthe development of religion, and from here drawa parallel with the innumerable cases ofrudimentary neuroses which we find in clinical psychology.Why here as well as there no further developmenttook place we do not understand. We must holdthe individual gifts of these peoples responsibleor it, the direction their activities take and theirgeneral social condition. Besides it is a good^ule in analytic work to be satisfied with explain
- ng what exists and not to try
to explain what haslot happened.
The second difficulty in this translation into
150 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
mass psychology
is much more significant, becauseit presents a new problem of a cardinal nature.The question
arises in what form is the activetradition in the life of the peoples
still extant.There is no such question with individuals, for
here the matter is settled by the existence ofmemory traces of the past
in the unconscious.Let us go back to our historical example. Thecompromise in Qades, we said, was based on thecontinued existence of a powerful traditionliving on in the people who had returned fromEgypt. There is no problem here. We suggestedthat such a tradition was maintained by consciousmemory of oral communications which had beenpassed on from forbears of only two or threegenerations ago. The latter had been participantsand eye-witnesses of the events in question. Canwe believe the same, however, for the latercenturies, namely, that the tradition was alwaysbased on a knowledge, communicated in a normalway, which had been transmitted from forbearto descendant ? Who the persons were thatstored such knowledge and passed it on frommouth to mouth we no longer know, as we didin the earlier case. According to Sellin, thetradition of the murder of Moses was alwayspresent among the Priests, until at last it was set
down in writing which alone made it possiblefor Sellin to divine it. Yet it could not have beenknown to many; it was not general knowledge.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 151And is this form of transmission enough to explainits effect ? Can we credit such a knowledge onthe part of a few with the power to seize theimagination of the masses so lastingly when theylearn of it ? It rather looks as if there were asomething also in the ignorant mass of the peopleakin to this knowledge on the part of the few,which comes forward to meet it as soon as it is
uttered.
It becomes harder still to arrive at a conclusionwhen we turn to the analogous case in primaevaltimes. In the course of thousands of centuriesit certainly became forgotten
that there wasaprimaeval father possessing the qualities we mentioned, and what fate he met. Nor can we assumean oral tradition as we did with Moses. In whatsense, therefore, can there be any question of atradition ? In what form could it have existed ?
To help readers who are unwilling
or unprepared to plunge into complicated psychological matters I shall place
the result of thefollowing investigation
at the very beginning.
I
hold that the concordance between the individualand the mass is in this point almost complete.The masses, too, retain an impression of the pastin unconscious memory traces.
The case of the individual seems to be clearenough. The memory trace of early events hehas retained, but he has retained it in a specialpsychological
condition. One can say that the
152 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
individual always knew of them, in the sense thatwe know repressed
material. We have formedcertain conceptions and they can easily beproved by analysis of how something getsforgotten and of how after a time it can cometolight again. The forgotten material is not extinguished, only
"
repressed
"
;
its traces areextant in the memory in their original freshness,but they are isolated by
"
counter-cathexes."They cannot establish contact with the otherintellectual processes; they are unconscious,inaccessible to consciousness. It may happenthat certain parts of the repressed material haveescaped this process, have remained accessibleto memory and occasionally reappear in consciousness, but even then they
are isolated, aforeign body without any connection with therest of the mind. This may happen, but it neednot happen. Repression may also be complete,and this is the case we propose
to examine.
This repressed material retains its impetus to
penetrate into consciousness. It reaches its aimwhen three conditions are present. (
i
) Whenthestrength of counter-cathexis is diminished by anillness which acts on the Ego itself, or through
adifferent distribution of cathexis in the Ego ashappens regularly during sleep. (2) When thoseinstincts attached to the repressed material becomestrengthened. The processes during puberty provide the best example for this. (3) Whenever
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 153recent events produce impressions
or experiences which are so much like the repressedmaterial that they have the power to awaken it.
Thus the recent material gets strengthened by thelatent energy of the repressed, and the repressedmaterial produces
its effect behind the recentmaterial and with its help.
In none of the three cases does the materialthat had been repressed succeed in reachingconsciousness unimpeded or without change. It
must always undergo distortions which bear witnessto the not entirely overcome resistance derivedfrom the counter-cathexis, or else to the modifying influence of a recent experience
or to both.
As a distinguishing sign and landmark we haveused the difference between a psychic processbeing conscious or unconscious. The repressedmaterial is unconscious. It would be a cheeringsimplification if this sentence could be reversed,i.e. if the difference of the qualities
"
conscious
"and
"
unconscious
"
were identical with thedifference: belonging to the Ego or repressed.The fact that our mental life harboured suchisolated and unconscious material would be newand important enough.
In reality things aremore complex. It is true that all repressedmaterial is unconscious, but not true that everything belonging
to the Ego is conscious. Webecome aware that being conscious is anephemeral quality which adheres to a psychical
154 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
process only temporarily. This is why for ourpurposes we must replace "conscious" by "capableof being conscious," and we call this quality
"
preconscious." We then say more correctly
: the Egois essentially preconscious (virtually conscious) ,
but parts of the Ego are unconscious.
This last statement teaches us that the qualitiesto which we have attended so far do not suffice
to show us the way in the darkness of mental life.
We must introduce another distinction, one nolonger qualitative, but topographical, andwhich lends it a special value genetic
at the sametime. Now we distinguish from our mental life
which we see to be an apparatus consisting ofseveral hierarchies, districts or provinces oneregion, which we term the
"
real Ego," fromanother which we call the
"
Id." The Id is theolder; the Ego has developed
out of it through theinfluence of the outer world as the bark developsaround a tree. Our primary instincts start in theId; all processes
in the Id are unconscious. TheEgo corresponds,
as we have mentioned, with therealm of the preconscious; parts of it normallyremain unconscious. The psychical processes
inthe
"
Id
"
obey quite
different laws; their courseand the influence they
exert on one another aredifferent from those that reign
in the Ego. It is
the discovery of these differences that has guidedus to our new understanding and lends confirmation to it.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 155The repressed material must be regarded asbelonging to the Id and obeys its mechanisms;it differs from it only
in respect of its genesis.
This differentiation takes place during the earlyperiod, while the Ego is developing
out of the Id.Then the Ego takes possession of part of the Idand raises it on to the preconscious level; otherparts are thus not affected and remain in the Idas the
"
unconscious
"
proper. In the further development of the Ego, however, certain psychicalimpressions and processes
in it get shut out bydefensive mechanisms; they
are deprived
of theirpreconscious character, so that they are degradedagain to become integral parts of the Id. This,therefore, is the
"
repressed material
"
in the Id.As regards the passage between the two mentalprovinces we assume, on the one hand, thatunconscious processes
in the Id can be raised toa preconscious
level and incorporated
into theEgo, and, on the other hand, that preconsciousmaterial in the Ego can travel the opposite wayand be shifted back into the Id. That later onanother district, the
"
Super-ego,"
is delimitedin the Ego, does not concern us in this context.
All this may seem far from simple, but if onehas become familiar with the unaccustomedtopographical conception
of the mental apparatusthen there are no particular
difficulties. I willadd here that the topography of the psyche
I
have here developed has in general nothing to do
156 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
with cerebral anatomy; there is only one pointwhere it impinges on it. The unsatisfactoriness of
this conception which I perceive
as clearly
asanyone has its roots in our complete ignoranceof the dynamic nature of mental processes. Werealise that what distinguishes a conscious ideafrom a preconscious one, and this from an unconscious one, cannot be anything else but amodification, or perhaps
also another distribution,of psychic energy. We speak
of cathexes andhypercathexes, but beyond this we lack all
knowledge and even a beginning
for a usefulworking hypothesis. Of the phenomenon ofconsciousness we are at least able to say that it
cleaves originally
to perception.
All perceptionswhich come about through painful, tactile,
auditory or visual stimuli are the more likely tobe conscious. Thought processes, and what maybe analogous to them in the Id, are unconsciousper se, and obtain their entry
into consciousnessby their connection, via the function of speech,with memory traces of perceptions through touchand ear. In the animal, which lacks speech,
theserelationships must be simpler.
The impressions of the early traumata, fromwhich we started, are either not translated intothe preconscious
or they are soon re -directedinto the Id through repression. Their memoryresidues are then unconscious and operate fromthe Id. We can believe we can follow their
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 157further fate distinctly
as long
as they
deal withpersonal experiences. A new complication arises,
however, when we become aware that thereprobably exists in the mental life of the individualnot only what he has experienced himself, butalso what he brought with him at birth, fragmentsof phylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage. Thenthe question arises : in what does this inheritanceconsist, what does it contain, and what evidenceof it is there ?
The first and most certain answer is that it
consists in certain dispositions, such as all livingbeings possess: that is to say, in the ability andtendency to follow a certain direction of development, and to react in a particular way to certainexcitations, impressions and stimuli. Sinceexperience shows that individuals differ in this
respect, our archaic inheritance includes thesedifferences; they represent what is recognizedas the constitutional element in the individual.Since all human beings go through the sameexperiences, at least in their earliest years, theyalso react to them in the same way, and this is whythe doubt arose whether these reactions with all
their individual differences should not be reckonedas part of that archaic heritage. This doubt mustbe rejected; the fact of this similarity does notenrich our knowledge of the archaic heritage.
Meanwhile analytic research has yielded
severalresults which give us food for thought.
First of
158 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
all there is the universality of speech symbolism.Symbolic substitution of one object throughanother the same applies
to actions ourchildren are conversant with, and it seems quitenatural to them. We cannot trace the wayinwhich they learned it and must admit that inmany cases to learn it would be impossible.
It
is original knowledge, which the adult later onforgets. He employs,
it is true, the same symbolism in his dreams, but he does not understandthem unless the analyst interprets them for himand even then he is loath to believe the translation.
When he has used one of the common phrases ofspeech in which this symbolism
is crystallized, hehas to admit that its true meaning had quiteescaped him. Symbolism even ignores the difference in languages; investigation would probablyshow that it is ubiquitous,
the same with all
peoples. Here there seems to be an assured caseof archaic inheritance from the time whenspeech was developing, although one mightattempt another explanation: one might saythat these are thought-connections between ideaswhich were formed during the historical development of speech and which have to be repeatedevery time the individual passes through such adevelopment. This then would be a case ofinheriting a thought-disposition
as elsewhere oneinherits an instinctual disposition; so it againwould contribute nothing new to our problem.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 159Analytic research, however, has also broughtto light other things, which exceed in significance
anything we have so far discussed. In studyingreactions to early traumata we often find to oursurprise that they do not keep strictly to what theindividual himself has experienced, but deviatefrom this in a way that would accord much betterwith their being
reactions to genetic events andin general can be explained only through theinfluence of such. The behaviour of a neuroticchild to his parents when under the influence ofan (Edipus and castration complex
is very
richin such reactions which seem unreasonable in theindividual and can only be understood phylogenetically, in relation to the experiences ofearlier generations.
It would be amply worthwhile to collect and publish
the material on whichmy remarks are based. In fact it seems to meconvincing enough to allow me to venturefurther and assert that the archaic heritage ofmankind includes not only dispositions, butalso ideational contents, memory-traces
of theexperiences of former generations. In this waythe extent as well as the significance of thearchaic heritage would be enhanced in a remarkable degree.
On second thoughts
I must admit that I haveargued as if there were no question
that there exists
an inheritance of memory-traces
of what ourforefathers experienced, quite independently
of
l6o MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
direct communication and of the influence ofeducation by example. When I speak
of an oldtradition still alive in a people, of the formationof a national character, it is such an inheritedtradition and not one carried on by word ofmouth that I have in mind. Or at least I didnot distinguish between the two, and was notquite clear about what a bold step
I took byneglecting this difference. This state of affairs is
made more difficult,
it is true, by the presentattitude of biological science which rejects theidea of acquired qualities being transmitted todescendants. I admit, in all modesty, that inspite of this I cannot picture biological development proceeding without taking
this factor intoaccount. The two cases, it is true, are not quitesimilar; with the former it is a question
ofacquired qualities that are hard to conceive,with the latter memory-traces of external expressions, something almost concrete. Probably,however, we cannot an fond imagine one withoutthe other. If we accept
the continued existenceof such memory-traces
in our archaic inheritancethen we have bridged
the gap between individualand mass psychology, and can treat peoples
aswe do the individual neurotic. Though we mayadmit that for the memory-traces in our archaicinheritance we have so far no stronger proofthan those remnants of memory evoked byanalytic work, which call for a derivation from
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION l6lphylogenesis, yet
this proof seems to me convincing enough to postulate such a state of affairs. Ifthings are different then we are unable to advanceone step further on our way, either in psychoanalysis or in mass psychology.
It is bold, butinevitable.
In making this postulate we also do somethingelse. We diminish the over-wide gap humanarrogance in former times created between manand beast. If the so-called instincts of animals
which from the very beginning
allow them tobehave in their new conditions of living
as if theywere old and long-established ones if this
instinctual life of animals permits of any explanation at all, it can only be this: that they carryover into their new existence the experience oftheir kind, that is to say, that they have preservedin their minds memories of what their ancestorsexperienced. In the human animal things shouldnot be fundamentally different. His own archaicheritage though different in extent and character corresponds
to the instincts of animals.
After these considerations I have no qualms insaying that men have always known in this
particular way that once upon a time they hada primaeval father and killed him.
Two further questions must here be answered.First under what conditions does such a memoryenter into the archaic inheritance and, secondly,in what circumstances can it become active, that
1 62 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
is to say, penetrate from its unconscious state inthe Id into consciousness though in an alteredand distorted form ? The answer to the first
question is easy
to formulate: it happens whenthe experience
is important enough or is repeatedoften enough or in both cases. With the fathermurder both conditions are fulfilled. To thesecond question
I would remark: there maybea number of influences which need not all beknown; a spontaneous course is also possible
inanalogy with what happens
in some neuroses.The awakening, however, of the memory-tracethrough a recent real repetition of the event is
certainly of decisive importance. The murder ofMoses was such a repetition, and later on thesupposed judicial murder of Christ, so that theseevents move into the foreground as causativeagents. It seems as if the genesis of monotheismwould not have been possible without theseevents. We are reminded of the words of thepoet:
"
All that is to live in endless song
Must in life-time first be drown'd."
l
I will conclude with a remark which furnishesa psychological argument. A tradition based onlyon oral communication could not produce the1 Schiller: The Gods of Greece (English translation by E. A.
Bowring).
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 163obsessive character which appertains
to religiousphenomena. It would be listened to, weighedand perhaps rejected, just
like any other newsfrom outside
;
it would never achieve the privilegeof being freed from the coercion of logical thinking. It must first have suffered the fate ofrepression, the state of being unconscious, beforeit could produce
such mighty effects on its
return, and force the masses under its spell, suchas we have observed with astonishment andhitherto without understanding in religioustradition. And this is a consideration which tilts
the balance in favour of the belief that thingsreally happened as I have tried to describe themor at least very much in that way.
SECTION II
i. Summary
The following part of this essay cannot be sentforth into the world without lengthy explanationsand apologies. For it is no other than a faithful,
often literal, repetition of the first part save thatsome of the critical investigations have beencondensed and that there are additions referringto the problem
of how and why the character of
164 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the Jewish people developed
in the form it did.I know that this way of presenting my subject
is
as ineffectual as it is inartistic. I myself disapprove of it wholeheartedly. Why have I notavoided it ? The answer to this question
is easyfor me to find, but rather hard to admit. I havenot been able to efface the traces of the unusualway in which this book came to be written.
In truth it has been written twice over. Thefirst time was a few years ago in Vienna, whereI did not believe in the possibility of publishingit. I decided to put it away, but it haunted melike an unlaid ghost, and I compromised bypublishing two parts of the book independentlyin the periodical Imago. They were the psychoanalytical starting points of the whole book:"
Moses an Egyptian
"
and the historical essaybuilt on it
"
If Moses was an Egyptian.
"
Therest, which might give offence and was dangerous namely, the application of my theory to thegenesis of monotheism and my interpretation
ofreligion I kept back, as I thought,
for ever.Then in March 1938 came the unexpectedGerman invasion. It forced me to leave my home,but it also freed me of the fear lest my publishingthe book might cause psycho-analysis
to be forbidden in a country where its practice was still
allowed. No sooner had I arrived in Englandthan I found the temptation of making my withheld knowledge accessible to the world irresistible,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 165and so I started to rewrite the third part of myessay, to follow the two already published. Thisnaturally necessitated a regrouping of thematerial, if only
in part. In this secondary reediting, however, I did not succeed in fitting thewhole material in. On the other hand, I couldnot make up my mind to relinquish the twoformer contributions altogether, and this is howthe compromise came about of adding unaltereda whole piece of the first version to the second, adevice which has the disadvantage of extensiverepetition.
I might, it is true, find comfort in the reflectionthat the matter I treated of was so new andsignificant quite apart from whether my presentation of it was correct or not that it must countas only a minor misfortune if people
are madetoread about it twice over. There are things thatshould be said more than once and cannot berepeated often enough. It should, however, beleft to the reader's free will whether he wishes tolinger with a subject or return to it. A conclusionshould not be emphasized by the sly device ofdishing up the same subject twice in the samebook. By doing so one proves
oneself a clumsywriter and has to bear the blame for it. However,the creative power of an author does not, alas,
always follow his good will. A work grows
as it
will and sometimes confronts its author as anindependent, even an alien, creation.
1 66 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
2. The People of
Israel
If we are quite
clear in our minds that a procedure like the present one to take from thetraditional material what seems useful and to
reject what is unsuitable, and then to put
theindividual pieces together according
to theirpsychological probability does not afford anysecurity for finding the truth, then one is quiteright to ask why such an attempt was undertaken. In answer to this I must cite the result.
If we substantially reduce the severe demandsusually made on an historical and psychologicalinvestigation then it might be possible
to clearup problems
that have always seemed worthyof attention and which, in consequence
ofrecent events, force themselves again on ourobservation. We know that of all the peopleswho lived in antiquity
in the basin of the Mediterranean the Jewish people
is perhaps
the onlyone that still exists in name and probably
alsoin nature. With an unexampled power
ofresistance it has defied misfortune and ill-treatment, developed special character traits and,incidentally, earned the hearty
dislike of all
other peoples. Whence comes this resistance of theJew, and how his character is connected with his
fate, are things one would like to understandbetter.
We may start from one character trait of the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 167Jews which governs their relationship
to otherpeople. There is no doubt that they have a verygood opinion
of themselves, think themselvesnobler, on a higher level, superior
to the othersfrom whom they
are also separated by manyoftheir customs.1 With this they
are animated bya special trust in life, such as is bestowed by thesecret possession of a precious gift ;
it is a kind ofoptimism. Religious people would call it trust inGod.
We know the reason of this attitude of theirs
and what their precious
treasure is. They reallybelieve themselves to be God's chosen people;they hold themselves to be specially near to Him,and this is what makes them proud and confident.According to trustworthy accounts they behavedin Hellenistic times as they do to-day. TheJewish character, therefore, even then was whatit is now, and the Greeks, among whom andalongside whom they lived, reacted to the Jewishqualities in the same way as their
"
hosts
"
doto-day. They reacted, so one might think, as if
they too believed in the preference which theIsraelites claimed for themselves. When one is
the declared favourite of the dreaded father oneneed not be surprised that the other brothers andsisters are jealous. What this jealousy can lead to1 The insult frequently hurled at them in ancient times that they
were lepers (cf. Manetho) must be read as a projection:
"
Theykeep apart from us as if we were lepers."
1 68 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
is exquisitely shown in the Jewish legend
ofJoseph and his brethren. The subsequent
courseof world history seemed to justify
this Jewisharrogance, for when later on God consented tosend mankind a Messiah and Redeemer He againchose Him from among the Jewish people. Theother peoples would then have had reason tosay:
"
Indeed, they were right; they
are God'schosen people.
"
Instead of which it happenedthat the salvation through Jesus Christ broughton the Jews nothing but a stronger hatred, whilethe Jews themselves derived no advantage fromthis second proof
of being favoured, because theydid not recognize
the Redeemer.
On the strength of our previous remarks wemay say that it was the man Moses who stampedthe Jewish people with this trait, one whichbecame so significant
to them for all time. Heenhanced their self-confidence by assuring themthat they were the chosen people
of God; hedeclared them to be holy, and laid on them theduty to keep apart from others. Not that theother peoples on their part lacked self-confidence.
Then, just as now, each nation thought itself
superior to all the others. The self-confidence ofthe Jews, however, became through Mosesanchored in religion ;
it became a part of their
religious belief. By the particularly
close relationship to their God they acquired
a part of Hisgrandeur. And since we know that behind the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 169God who chose the Jews and delivered them fromEgypt stood the man Moses who achieved thatdeed, ostensibly
at God's command, we ventureto say this: it was one man, the man Moses,who created the Jews. To him this people owesits tenacity in supporting life; to him, however,also much of the hostility which it has met andis
meeting still.
3. The Great Man
How is it possible that one single man candevelop such extraordinary effectiveness, that hecan create out of indifferent individuals andfamilies one people, can stamp this people withits definite character and determine its fate formillenia to come ? Is not such an assumption
aretrogression to the manner of thinking
thatproduced creation myths and hero worship, totimes in which historical writing exhausted itself
in narrating the dates and life histories of certain individuals sovereigns or conquerors
? Theinclination of modern times tends rather to traceback the events of human history
to more hidden,general and impersonal factors the forcibleinfluence of economic circumstances, changes
infood supply, progress
in the use of materials andtools, migrations caused by increase in populationand change ofclimate. In these factors individualsplay no other part than that of exponents
or
170 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
representatives of mass tendencies which mustcome to expression and which found thatexpression as it were by chance in such persons.These are quite legitimate points of view, butthey remind us of a significant discrepancybetween the nature of our thinking apparatusand the organization of the world which we aretrying to apprehend. Our imperative need forcause and effect is satisfied when each processhas one demonstrable cause. In reality, outsideus this is hardly so; each event seems to be overdetermined and turns out to be the effect ofseveral converging causes. Intimidated by thecountless complications of events research takesthe part of one chain of events against another,stipulates contrasts that do not exist and whichare created merely through tearing apart morecomprehensive
relations.
1
If, therefore, the investigation of one particularcase demonstrates the outstanding influence of asingle human personality, our conscience neednot reproach us that through accepting this
conclusion we have dealt a blow at the doctrineof the significance of those general impersonal1 1 would guard myself, however, against a possible misunderstanding. I do not mean to say that the world is so complicated
that every assertion must hit the truth somewhere. No, our
thinking has preserved the liberty of inventing dependencies andconnections that have no equivalent
in reality.
It obviously prizes
this gift very highly, since it makes such ample use of it inside as
well as outside of science.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 171factors. In point of fact there is without doubtroom for both. In the genesis of monotheism wecannot, it is true, point
to any other externalfactor than those we have already mentioned,namely, that this development has to do with theestablishing of closer connections among different nations and the existence of a great empire.We will keep, therefore, a place
for
"
the greatman
"
in the chain, or rather in the network, ofdetermining causes. It may not be quite useless,
however, to ask under what condition we bestowthis title of honour. We may be surprised
to findthat it is not so easy
to answer this question. Afirst formulation, which would define as great ahuman being specially endowed with qualitieswe value highly,
is obviously
in all respectsunsuitable. Beauty, for instance, and muscularstrength much as they may be envied do notestablish a claim to
"
greatness.
55 There shouldperhaps be mental qualities present, psychicaland intellectual distinction. In the latter respectwe have misgivings: a man who has an outstanding knowledge in one particular
field wouldnot be called a great man without any furtherreason. We should certainly not apply
the termto a master of chess or to a virtuoso on a musicalinstrument, and not necessarily
to a distinguishedartist or a man of science. In such a case weshould be content to say: he is a great writer,painter, mathematician or physicist, a pioneer
in
172 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
this field or that, but we should pause beforepronouncing him a great man. When we declare,for instance, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci andBeethoven, to be great men, then something else
must move us to do so beyond the admiration oftheir grandiose
creations. If it were not for justsuch examples one might very well conceive theidea that the title
"
a great man
"
is reserved bypreference for men of action that is to say,conquerors, generals and rulers and was intended as a recognition of the greatness of theirachievements and the strength of the influencethat emanated from them. However, this too is
unsatisfying, and is fully contradicted by ourcondemnation of so many worthless people
ofwhom one cannot deny that they exercised agreat influence on their own and later times. Norcan success be chosen as a distinguishing
featureof greatness if one thinks of the vast numberofgreat men who, instead of being successful,
perished after being dogged by misfortune.
We should, therefore, tentatively, incline to theconclusion that it is hardly worth while to searchfor an unequivocal definition of the concept:a great man. It seems to be a rather loosely usedterm, one bestowed without due considerationand given to the supernormal development ofcertain human qualities: in doing so we keepclose to the original
literal sense of the word"
greatness.
55 We may also remember that it is
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 173not so much the nature of the great man thatarouses our interest as the question of what arethe qualities by virtue of which he influences his
contemporaries.
I propose
to shorten this investigation, however, since it threatens to lead us farfrom our goal.
Let us agree, therefore, that the great maninfluences his contemporaries
in two ways:through his personality and through the idea forwhich he stands. This idea may lay stress on anold group of wishes in the masses, or point to anew aim for their wishes, or again
lure the massesby other means. Sometimes and this is surelythe more primitive
effect the personality aloneexerts its influence and the idea plays a decidedlysubordinate part. Why the great man shouldrise to significance
at all we have no doubtwhatever. We know that the great majority ofpeople have a strong need for authority which it
can admire, to which it can submit, and whichdominates and sometimes even ill-treats it. Wehave learned from the psychology
ofthe individualwhence comes this need of the masses. It is thelonging for the father that lives in each of us fromhis childhood days,
for the same father whomthehero of legend boasts of having overcome. Andnow it begins to dawn on us that all the featureswith which we furnish the great man are traits
of the father, that in this similarity
lies the essencewhich so far has eluded us- of the great man.
174 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
The decisiveness of thought, the strength of will,
the forcefulness of his deeds, belong to the pictureof the father; above all other things, however,the self-reliance and independence
of the greatman: his divine conviction of doing
the rightthing, which may pass
into ruthlessness. He mustbe admired, he may be trusted, but one cannothelp being also afraid of him. We should have takena cue from the word itself; who else but the fathershould have been in childhood the great man?
Without doubt it must have been a tremendousfather imago that stooped
in the person
of Mosesto tell the poor Jewish labourers that they werehis dear children. And the conception
of aunique, eternal, omnipotent God could not havebeen less overwhelming for them; He whothought them worthy to make a bond with Him,promised to take care of them if only theyremained faithful to His worship. Probably theydid not find it easy
to separate
the image of theman Moses from that of his God, and theirinstinct was right
in this, since Moses might verywell have incorporated into the character of hisGod some of his own traits, such as his irascibilityand implacability. And when they
killed this
great man they only repeated an evil deed whichin primaeval times had been a law directed againstthe divine king, and which as we knowderives from a still older prototype.
1
1 Frazer. Loc. cit., p. 192.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 175When, on the one hand, the figure of the greatman has grown into a divine one, it is time toremember, on the other hand, that the fatheralso was once a child. The great religious ideafor which the man Moses stood was, as we havestated, not his own; he had taken it over fromhis King Ikhnaton. And the latter whosegreatness as a founder of religion
is proved without a doubt followed perhaps intimations whichthrough his mother or by other ways had reachedhim from the near or the far East.
We cannot trace the network any further. Ifthe present argument, however, is correct so far,
the idea of monotheism must have returned inthe fashion of a boomerang into the country ofits origin. It appears
fruitless to attempt
toascertain what merit attaches to an individual ina new idea. Obviously many have taken part
inits development and made contributions to it.
On the other hand, it would be wrong to breakoff the chain of causation with Moses and toneglect what his successors, the Jewish prophets,achieved. Monotheism had not taken root inEgypt. The same failure might have happenedin Israel after the people had thrown off theinconvenient and pretentious religion imposedon them. From the mass of the Jewish people,however, there arose again and again men wholent new colour to the fading tradition, renewedthe admonishments and demands of Moses and
176 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
did not rest until the lost cause was once moreregained. In the constant endeavour of centuries,and last but not least through two great reforms
the one before, the other after the Babylonianexile there took place
the change of the popularGod Jahve into the God whose worship Moseshad forced upon the Jews. And it is the proof
ofa special psychical
fitness in the mass which hadbecome the Jewish people
that it could bringforth so many persons who were ready to takeupon themselves the burden of the Mosaicreligion for the reward of believing that theirpeople was a chosen one and perhaps
for otherbenefits of a similar order.
4. The Progress
in Spirituality
To achieve lasting psychical
effects in a people
it
is obviously not sufficient to assure them that theywere specially chosen by God. This assurancemust be proved
if they
are to attach belief to it
and draw their conclusions from that belief. Inthe religion of Moses the exodus served as sucha proof; God, or Moses in his name, did not tire
of citing this proof
of favour. The feast of thePassover was established to keep
this event inmind, or rather an old feast was endowed withthis memory. Yet it was only a memory. Theexodus itself belonged to a dim past. At thetime the signs of God's favour were meagre
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 177enough; the fate of the people
of Israel wouldrather indicate his disfavour. Primitive peoplesused to depose or even punish their gods if theydid not fulfil their duty of granting them victory,fortune and comfort. Kings have often beentreated similarly
to gods
in every age ;
the ancientidentity of king and god, i.e. their commonorigin, thus becomes manifest. Modern peoplesalso are in the habit of thus getting
rid of theirkings if the splendour of their reign is dulled bydefeats accompanied by the loss of land andmoney. Why the people of Israel, however,adhered to their God all the more devotedly theworse they were treated by Him that is aquestion which we must leave open for themoment.
It may stimulate us to enquire whether thereligion of Moses had given the people nothingelse but an increase in self-confidence through
theconsciousness of being
"
chosen." The nextelement is indeed easily found. Their religionalso gave to the Jews a much more grandioseidea of their God or to express
it more soberly
the idea of a more august God. Whoever believedin this God took part
in his greatness,
so to speak,might feel uplifted
himself. This may not bequite obvious to unbelievers, but it may beillustrated by the simile of the high confidence aBriton would feel in a foreign land, made unsafeby revolt, a confidence in which a subject of someM
178 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
small continental state would be entirely lacking.The Briton counts on his Government to send awarship if a hair of his head is touched and alsoon the rebels knowing very well that this is so,
while the small state does not even own a warship.The pride in the greatness of the British Empirehas therefore one of its roots in the consciousnessof the greater security and protection
that aBritish subject enjoys. The same may be true ofthe idea of the great God and since one wouldhardly presume
to assist God in his conduct ofthe world pride
in the greatness of God goestogether with that of being
"
chosen.
55
Among the precepts of Mosaic religion
is onethat has more significance than is at first obvious.It is the prohibition against making an image ofGod, which means the compulsion to worship aninvisible God. I surmise that in this point Moseshad surpassed
the Aton religion in strictness.
Perhaps he meant to be consistent; his God wasto have neither a name nor a countenance. Theprohibition was perhaps
a fresh precautionagainst magic malpractices.
If this prohibitionwas accepted, however, it was bound to exercisea profound influence. For it signified subordinating sense perception
to an abstract idea;it was a triumph
of spirituality over the senses;more precisely an instinctual renunciation1
1
[I use this phrase (Triebverzicht)
as an abbreviation for
"
renouncing the satisfaction of an urge derived from an instinct ".
Trans.]
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 179accompanied by its psychologically necessaryconsequences.
To make more credible what at first glancedoes not appear convincing we must call to mindother processes of similar character in the development of human culture. The earliest among themand perhaps
the most important we candiscern only in dim outline in the obscurity ofprimaeval times. Its surprising
effects makeit
necessary to conclude that it happened.
In ourchildren, in adult neurotics as well as in primitivepeople, we find the mental phenomenon whichwe have called the belief in the
"
omnipotence ofthoughts." We judge it to be an over-estimationof the influence which our mental faculties theintellectual ones in this case can exert on theouter world by changing it. All magic, thepredecessor of science, is basically founded onthese premisses. All magic ofwords belongs here,as does the conviction of the power connectedwith the knowledge and the pronouncing of aname. We surmise that
"
omnipotence ofthoughts
"
was the expression of the pride mankind took in the development of language, whichhad brought in its train such an extraordinaryincrease in the intellectual faculties. Thereopened then the new realm of spirituality whereconceptions, memories, and deductions becameof decisive importance,
in contrast to the lowerpsychical activity which concerned itself with the
l8o MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
immediate perceptions of the sense organs.
Itwas certainly one of the most important stages onthe way to becoming human.
Another process of later time confronts us in amuch more tangible form. Under the influenceof external conditions which we need not followup here and which in part
are also not sufficientlyknown it happened that the matriarchal structure of society was replaced by a patriarchalone. This naturally brought with it a revolutionin the existing
state of the law. An echo of thisrevolution can still be heard, I think, in theOresteia of ^Eschylos. This turning from themother to the father, however, signifies above all
a victory of spirituality over the senses, that is tosay a step forward in culture, since maternity is
proved by the senses whereas paternity
is asurmise based on a deduction and a premiss. Thisdeclaration in favour of the thought process, thereby raising it above sense perception, was provedto be a step charged with serious consequences.
Some time between the two cases I havementioned another event took place which showsa closer relationship
to the ones we have investigated in the history of religion. Man found thathe was faced with the acceptance of
"
spiritual
"forces, that is to say such forces as cannot beapprehended by the senses, particularly not bysight, and yet having undoubted, even extremelystrong, effects. If we may trust to language, it
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION l8lwas the movement of the air that provided theimage of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its
name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus,
Hebrew: ruach=smoke). The idea of the soulwas thus born as the spiritual principle
in theindividual. Observation found the breath of airagain in the human breath which ceases withdeath
;
even to-day we talk of a dying manbreathing his last. Now the realm of spirits hadopened for man, and he was ready to endoweverything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself. The whole world becameanimated, and science, coming so much later, hadenough to do in disestablishing the former state ofaffairs and has not yet
finished this task.
Through the Mosaic prohibition God was raisedto a higher level of spirituality; the door wasopened to further changes in the idea of Godofwhich we shall speak
later. At present another ofits effects will occupy
us. All such progress
inspirituality results in increasing self-confidence,in making people proud so that they feel superiorto those who have remained in the bondage of thesenses. We know that Moses had given the Jewsthe proud feeling of being God's chosen people;by de-materialising God a new, valuable contribution was made to the secret treasure of thepeople. The Jews preserved
their inclinationtowards spiritual
interests. The political misfortune of the nation taught them to appreciate
1 82 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the only possession they had retained, theirwritten records, at its true value. Immediatelyafter the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalemby Titus, Rabbi Jochanaan ben Sakkai asked forpermission to open at Jabne the first school forthe study of the Torah. From now on it was theHoly Book, and the study of it, that kept
thescattered people together.
So much is generally known and accepted.
I
only wished to add that this whole development, so characteristic of the Jews, had beeninitiated by Moses' prohibition against worshipping God in a visible form.
The preference which through two thousandyears the Jews have given to spiritual endeavourhas, of course, had its effect; it has helped tobuild a dyke against brutality and the inclinationto violence which are usually found whereathletic development becomes the ideal of thepeople. The harmonious development ofspiritualand bodily activity as achieved by the Greekswas denied to the Jews. In this conflict theirdecision was at least made in favour of whatis
culturally the more important.
5. Renunciation versus Gratification
1
It is not at all obvious why progress
in spirituality and subordination of the senses should raise1
(See footnote on p. 178.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 183the self-confidence of a person
as well as of anation. This seems to presuppose
a definitestandard of value and another person
or institution who uses it. For an explanation we turn toan analogous case in the psychology of theindividual which we have learned to understand.When the Id makes an instinctual demandofan erotic or aggressive nature on a human being,the most simple and natural response
for the Ego,which governs
the apparatus
for thinking andmuscle innervation, is to satisfy
this by an action.This satisfaction of the instinct is felt as pleasureby the Ego, just
as not satisfying
this instinctwould undoubtedly become a source of discomfort. Now it may happen
that the Ego eschewssatisfaction of the instinct because of externalobstacles, namely, when it realizes that the actionin question would bring
in its course seriousdanger to the Ego. Such a refraining from satisfaction, an
"
instinctual renunciation
"
because ofexternal obstacles as we say, in obedience tothe reality-principle
is never pleasurable. Theinstinctual renunciation would bring about alasting painful tension if we did not succeed indiminishing the strength of the instinctual urgeitself through
a displacement
of energy. Thisinstinctual renunciation may also be forced onus, however, by other motives, which we rightlycall inner ones. In the course of individualdevelopment a part of the inhibiting
forces in the
184 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
outer world becomes internalized; a standardis created in the Ego which opposes
the otherfaculties by observation, criticism and prohibition.We call this new standard the super-ego. From nowon the Ego,
before undertaking to satisfy theinstincts, has to consider not only the dangers ol
the outer world, but also the objections of thesuper-ego, and has therefore more occasion for
refraining from satisfying the instinct. While,however, instinctual renunciation for externalreasons is only painful, renunciation for internalreasons, in obedience to the demands of the superego, has another economic effect. It bringsbesides the inevitable pain a gain in pleasure
tothe Ego as it were, a substitutive satisfaction.The Ego feels uplifted;
it is proud ofthe renunciation as of a valuable achievement. We think wecan follow the mechanism of this gain
in pleasure.The super-ego
is the successor and representativeof the parents (and educators), who superintendedthe actions of the individual in his first years
oflife; it perpetuates
their functions almost withouta change. It keeps
the Ego in lasting dependenceand exercises a steady pressure. The Egois
concerned, just
as it was in childhood, to retainthe love of its master, and it feels his appreciationas a relief and satisfaction, his reproaches
aspricks of conscience. When the Ego has madethe sacrifice to the super-ego of renouncing aninstinctual satisfaction, it expects
to be rewarded
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 185by being loved all the more. The consciousnessof deserving this love is felt as pride. At a timewhen the authority was not yet internalized as
super-ego the relation between the threatened loss
of love and the instinctual demand would havebeen the same. A feeling of security and satisfaction results if out of love to one's parents oneachieves an instinctual renunciation. This goodfeeling could acquire
the peculiar
narcissistic
character of pride only
after the authority
itself
had become a part of the Ego.
How does this explanation of gaining satisfaction through instinctual renunciation help
us inunderstanding the processes we wish to study,namely, the increase of self-confidence thataccompanies progress
in spirituality
? Apparentlythey help very little, for the circumstances hereare very different. There is no instinctualrenunciation, and there is no second person
orhigher standard for whose benefit the sacrifice is
made. The second statement will soon appeardoubtful. One might say: the great man is theauthority for whose sake the effort is made, andsince the great man achieves this because he is afather substitute we need not be surprised
if heis allotted the role ofsuper -ego
in mass psychology.This would, therefore, hold good for the manMoses in his relationship
to the Jewish people.In other points, however, there would seem to beno proper analogy. The progress
in spirituality
1 86 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
consists in deciding against the direct senseperception in favour of the so-called higherintellectual processes, that is to say, in favour ofmemories, reflection and deduction. An exampleof this would be the decision that paternity
is
more important than maternity, although
theformer cannot be proved by the senses as thelatter can. This is why the child has to have thefather's name and inherit after him. Anotherexample would be: our God is the greatest andmightiest, although He is invisible like the stormand the soul. Rejecting a sexual or aggressiveinstinctual demand seems to be something verydifferent from this. In many examples
of progressin spirituality
for instance, in the triumph offather -right we cannot point
to the authoritythat provides the measure for what is to be valuedthe more highly. In this case it cannot be thefather himself, since it is only
this progress
thatraises him to the rank of an authority. Weare,
therefore, confronted with the phenomenon thatduring the development of mankind the world ofthe senses becomes gradually mastered by spirituality, and that man feels proud and uplifted byeach such step
in progress. One does not know,however, why this should be so. Still later it
happens that spirituality
itself is overpowered bythe altogether mysterious emotional phenomenonof belief. This is the famous credo quia absurdum,and whoever has compassed this regards
it as
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 187the highest achievement. Perhaps what is common to all these psychological
situations is something else. Perhaps man declares simply
thatthe higher achievement is what is more difficult
to attain, and his pride
in it is only narcissismheightened by his consciousness of having overcome difficulty.
These considerations are certainly not veryfruitful, and one might think that they have.nothing to do with our investigation
into whatdetermined the character of the Jewish people.This would be only
to our advantage, but thatthis train of thought
has all the same to do withour problem is shown by a fact that will occupyus later more extensively. The religion thatbegan with the prohibition against making animage of its God has developed
in the course ofcenturies more and more into a religion ofinstinctual renunciation. Not that it demandssexual abstinence; it is content with a considerable restriction of sexual freedom. God, however,becomes completely withdrawn from sexualityand raised to an ideal of ethical perfection.Ethics, however, means restriction of instinctualgratification. The Prophets
did not tire of maintaining that God demands nothing
else from hispeople but a just and virtuous life: that is to say,abstention from the gratification of all impulsesthat according
to our present-day moral standards are to be condemned as vicious. And even
1 88 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the exhortation to believe in God seems to recedein comparison
with the seriousness of theseethical demands. Instinctual renunciation thusappears to play
a prominent part
in religion,although it had not been present
in it from thebeginning.
Here is the place
to make a statement whichshould obviate a misunderstanding. Thoughit
may seem that instinctual renunciation, and theethics based on it, do not belong to the essence ofreligion, still they are genetically closely relatedto religion. Totemism, the first form of religionof which we know, contains as an indispensablepart of its system a number of laws and prohibitions which plainly mean nothing else butinstinctual renunciation. There is the worshipof the Totem, which contains the prohibitionagainst killing or harming it; exogamy, that is
to say, the renunciation of the passionatelydesired mothers and sisters of the horde; thegranting of equal rights
for all members of thebrother horde, i.e. the restriction of the impulseto settle their rivalry by brute force. In theserules we have to discern the first beginnings ofamoral and social order. It does not escape ournotice that here two different motivations comeinto play. The first two prohibitions work in thedirection of what the murdered father wouldhave wished; they,
so to speak, perpetuate
hiswill. The third law, the one giving equal rights
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1 89to the brothers, ignores the father's wishes. Its
sense lies in the need of preserving permanentlythe new order which was established after thedeath of the father. Otherwise reversion to theformer state would have been inevitable. Heresocial laws became separated from others which
as we might say originated directly from areligious context.
In the abbreviated development
of the humanindividual the most important
events of thatprocess are repeated. Here also it is the parents'authority essentially that of the all-powerfulfather who wields the power
of punishment
that demands instinctual renunciation on thepart of the child and determines what is allowedand what is forbidden. What the child calls
"
good
"
or
"
naughty
"
becomes later, whensociety and super-ego
take the place of theparents,
"
good,
33 in the sense of moral, or evil,
virtuous or vicious. But it is still the same thing
:
instinctual renunciation through the presence ofthe authority which replaced and continued thatof the father.
Our insight into these problems becomes furtherdeepened when we investigate the strange conception of sanctity. What is it really that appears"
sacred
"
compared with other things which werespect highly and admit to be important and significant ? On the one hand the connection betweenthe sacred and the religious
is unmistakable;
1 9O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
it is so stressed as to be obvious. Everythingconnected with religion
is sacred
;
it is thevery core of sanctity. On the other hand ourjudgement is disturbed by the numerous attemptsto lay claim to the character of holiness by somany other things, persons,
institutions andprocedures that have little to do with religion.These endeavours are often plainly tendentious.Let us proceed from the feature of prohibitionwhich adheres so closely
to religion. The sacredis obviously something that must not be touched.A sacred prohibition has a very strong
affectivenote, but actually it has no rational motivation.For why should it be such a specially hideouscrime to commit incest with a daughter
or sister,
so much more so than any other sexual relations ?
When we ask for an explanation we shall surelybe told that all our feelings cry out against sucha crime. Yet all this means is that the prohibitionis taken to be self-evident, that we do not knowhow to explain
it.
That such an explanation is illusory can easilybe proved. What is reputed to offend our feelingsused to be a general custom one might say asacred tradition in the ruling
families of theAncient Egyptians and other peoples.
It wentwithout saying that each Pharaoh found his first
and foremost wife in his sister, and the successorsof the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did nothesitate to follow this example. So far we seem
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
to discern that incest in this case betweenbrother and sister was a prerogative forbiddento ordinary mortals and reserved for kings whorepresented the gods on earth. The world of theGreek and Germanic myths also took no exceptionto these incestuous relationships. We may surmisethat the anxious concern for
"
family
"
in ourhigher nobility
is a remnant of that old privilege,
and we observe that, as a consequence of inbreeding continued through many generations
in thehighest social circles, the crowned heads ofEurope to-day consist in effect of one family.
To point to the incest of gods, kings and heroeshelps to dispose of another attempt at explanation,namely, the one that would explain
the horror ofincest biologically and reduce it to an instinctiveknowledge of the harmfulness of inbreeding.
It
is not even certain, however, that there lies anydanger in inbreeding; let alone that primitiveraces recognized it and guarded against
it. Theuncertainty in determining permitted and prohibited relationships
is another argument againstpresupposing a
"
natural feeling
"
as an originalmotive for the horror of incest.
Our reconstruction of pre-history
forces anotherexplanation on us. The law of Exogamy, thenegative expression of which is the fear of incest,
was the will of the father and continued it after
his murder. Hence the strength of its affectivity
and the impossibility of a rational motivation:
1 92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
in short its sacredness. I should confidentlyanticipate that an investigation ofall other cases oi
sacred prohibitions would lead to the same result
as that of the horror of incest, namely that whatis
sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuatedwill of the primaeval
father. This would alsoelucidate the ambivalence of the word hithertoinexplicable which expresses the conception
of
sacredness. It is the ambivalence which governsthe relationship
to the father.
"
Sacer
"
does notonly mean
"
sacred/
5
"
blessed/
5 but also something that we can only translate by
"
accursed/5
"
worthy of disgust
55
(" auri sacra fames
55
).
The will of the father, however, was not onlysomething which one must not touch, which onehad to hold in high honour, but also somethingwhich made one shudder because it necessitateda painful instinctual renunciation. When we hearthat Moses
"
sanctified
"
his people by introducing the custom ofcircumcision we now understandthe deep-lying meaning of this pretension. Circumcision is the symbolical
substitute of castration, a punishment which the primaeval
fatherdealt his sons long ago out of the fulness of his
power; and whosoever accepted
this symbolshowed by so doing
that he was ready to submitto the father's will, although
it was at the cost ofa painful sacrifice.
To return to ethics : we may say
in conclusionthat a part of its precepts
is explained rationally
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 193by the necessity
to mark off the rights of thecommunity to the individual, those of theindividual to the community, and those ofindividuals to one another. What, however,appears mysterious, grandiose and mysticallyself-evident owes its character to its connectionwith religion,
its origin from the will of thefather.
6. The Truth in Religion
How we who have little belief envy those whoare convinced of the existence of a SupremePower, for whom the world holds no problemsbecause He Himself has created all its institutions !
How comprehensive,
exhaustive and final are thedoctrines of the believers compared with thelaboured, poor and patchy attempts
at explanation which are the best we can produce. TheDivine Spirit, which in itself is the ideal of ethical
perfection, has planted
within the soul of men theknowledge of this ideal and at the same time theurge to strive toward it. They feel immediatelywhat is high and noble and what low and mean.Their emotional life is measured by the distancefrom their ideal. It affords them high gratification when they
in perihelion,
so to speak
come nearer to it; and they
are punished bysevere distress when in aphelion they haveN
1 94 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
moved further away from it. All this is so simplyand unshakably established. We can only regretit if certain experiences of life and observations ofnature have made it impossible
to accept
thehypothesis of such a Supreme Being. As if theworld had not enough problems, we are confronted with the task of finding out how those whohave faith in a Divine Being could have acquiredit, and whence this belief derives the enormouspower that enables it to overwhelm Reason andScience.1
Let us return to the more modest problem
thathas occupied us so far. We set out to explainwhence comes the peculiar character of the Jewishpeople which in all probability
is what hasenabled that people
to survive until to-day. Wefound that the man Moses created their characterby giving to them a religion which heightenedtheir self-confidence to such a degree that theybelieved themselves to be superior
to all otherpeoples. They survived by keeping
aloof fromthe others. Admixture of blood made little
difference, since what kept them together wassomething ideal the possession they had incommon of certain intellectual and emotionalvalues. The Mosaic religion had this effect
because (i) it allowed the people
to share in thegrandeur of its new conception
of God, (2)
1 (An allusion to the passage in Faust
"
Verachte nur Vernunft
und Wissenschaft." Transl.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 195because it maintained that the people had been"
chosen
"
by this great God and was destinedto enjoy the proofs of his special favour, and(3) because it forced upon the people a progress in spirituality which, significant enoughin itself, further opened
the way to respect
forintellectual work and to further instinctualrenunciations.
This then is the conclusion we have attained,but, although
I do not wish to retract anythingI have said before, I cannot help feeling that it is
somehow not altogether satisfactory. The causedoes not, so to speak, accord with the result.
The fact we are trying
to explain seems to beincommensurate with everything we adduce byway of explanation.
Is it possible that all ourinvestigations have so far discovered not thewhole motivation, but only
a superficial layer, andthat behind this lies hidden another very significant component
? Considering how extraordinarily complicated
all causation in life and historyis we should have been prepared
for somethingof that kind.
The path to this deeper
motivation starts at acertain passage
in the previous
discussion. Thereligion of Moses did not achieve its effects
immediately, but in a strangely
indirect manner.This does not mean that it did not itself producethe effect. It took a long time, many centuries,to do so; that goes without saying where the
ig6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
development of a people's character is concerned.Our modification, however, refers to a fact whichwe have taken from the history ofJewish religionor, if one prefers, introduced into it. We saidthat the Jewish people shook off the religion ofMoses after a certain time; whether they
did socompletely or whether they retained some of its
precepts we cannot tell. In accepting
the supposition that during the long period of the fight
for Canaan, and the struggles with the peoplessettled there, the Jahve religion did not substantially differ from the worship
of the otherBaalim, we stand on historical ground, in spite ofall the later tendentious attempts
to obscure this
shaming state of affairs. The religion of Moses,however, had not perished. A sort of memoryofit had survived, obscured and distorted, butperhaps supported by individual members of thePriest caste through the ancient scripts.
It wasthis tradition of a great past
that continued toexert its effect from the background; it slowlyattained more and more power over the minds ofthe people, and at last succeeded in changing thegod Jahve into the God of Moses and in bringingagain to life the abandoned religion Moses hadinstituted centuries ago.
In an earlier chapter of this book we have discussed the hypothesis
that would seem to beinevitable if we are to find comprehensible suchan achievement on the part of tradition.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1977. The Return of the Repressed
There are a number of similar processes amongthose which the analytic investigation of mentallife has made known to us. Some of them aretermed pathological;
others are counted amongthe varieties of the normal. This matters little,
however, for the limits between the two are notstrictly defined and the mechanisms are to acertain extent the same. It is much more important whether the changes in question take placein the ego itself or whether they confront it asalien; in the latter case they are called symptoms.From the fullness of the material at my disposalI will choose cases that concern the formation ofcharacter.
A young girl had developed
into the mostdecided contrast to her mother; she had cultivated all the qualities she missed in her motherand avoided all those that reminded her of hermother. We may add that in former years shehad identified herself with her mother like anyother female child and had now come to opposethis identification energetically. When this girl
married, however, and became a wife and motherin her turn, we are surprised
to find that shebecame more and more like the mother towardswhom she felt so inimical, until at last the mother
198 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
identification she had overcome had once moreunmistakably won the day. The same thinghappens with boys, and even the great Goethe,who in his Sturm und Drang period certainly didnot respect his pedantic and stiff father veryhighly, developed
in old age traits that belongedto his father's character. This result will standout more strikingly where the contrast betweenthe two persons
is more pronounced. A youngman, whose fate was determined by his havingto grow up with a good-for-nothing father,developed at first in spite of the father into acapable, trustworthy and honourable man. Inthe prime of life his character changed and fromnow on he behaved as if he had taken this samefather as his example. So as not to lose theconnection with our topic we must keep
in mindthat at the beginning of such a process therealways exists an identification with the fatherfrom early childhood days. This gets repudiated,even over-compensated, and in the end againcomes to light.
It has long since become common knowledgethat the experience of the first five years of childhood exert a decisive influence on our life, onewhich later events oppose
in vain. Much couldbe said about how these early experiences
resist
all efforts of more mature years
to modify them,but this would not be relevant. It may not be sowell known, however, that the strongest obsessive
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 199influence derives from those experiences whichthe child undergoes at a time when we havereason to believe his psychical apparatus to beincompletely fitted for accepting them. The factitself cannot be doubted, but it seems so strangethat we might try
to make it easier to understandby a simile; the process may be compared to aphotograph, which can be developed and madeinto a picture after a short or long interval. HereI may point out, however, that an imaginativewriter, with the boldness permitted
to suchwriters, made this disconcerting discovery beforeme. E. T. A. Hoffmann used to explain
thewealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quicklychanging pictures and impressions he had receivedduring a journey in a post-chaise, lasting
forseveral weeks, while he was still a babe at hismother's breast. What a child has experiencedand not understood by the time he has reachedthe age of two he may never again remember,except in his dreams. Only through psychoanalytic treatment will he become aware of thoseevents. At any time in later years, however, theymay break into his life with obsessive impulsiveness, direct his actions, force him to like or dislikepeople and often decide the choice of his loveobject by a preference
that so often cannot berationally defended. The two points
that touchon our problem are unmistakable. They are,
2OO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
first, the remoteness of time,
1 which is consideredhere as the really decisive factor, as, for instance,in the special
state of memory that in thesechildhood experiences we class as
"
unconscious/5
In this feature we expect
to find an analogy withthe state of mind that we ascribe to tradition whenit is active in the mental emotional life of a people.It was not easy,
it is true, to introduce the conception of the unconscious into mass psychology.Contributions to the phenomena we are lookingfor are regularly made by the mechanisms thatlead to a neurosis. Here also the decisive experiences in early childhood exert a lasting influence,yet in this case the stress falls not on the time, buton the process opposing
that event, the reactionagainst it. Schematically expressed
it is so. Asa consequence of a certain experience
there arisesan instinctual demand which claims satisfaction.The Ego forgoes
this satisfaction, either because it
is paralysed by the excessiveness of the demandor because it recognizes
in it a danger. The first
of these reasons is the original one
;
both end inthe avoidance of a dangerous situation. The Egoguards against
this danger by repression. The1 Here also a poet may speak for us. To explain his attachmenthe imagines
Ach du warst in abgelebten Zeiten
Meine Schwester oder meine Frau.
Goethe, Vol. IV of the Weimar Edition, p. 97.
(For in previous lives we both have passed through
You, Love, were my sister or my wife.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 201excitation becomes inhibited in one way or other;the incitement, with the observations and perceptions belonging to it, is forgotten. This, however,does not bring the process
to an end; either theinstinct has kept
its strength, or it will regain
it
or it is reawakened by a new situation. It renew*its claim and since the way to normal satisfaction is barred by what we may call the scar tissue
of repression
it gains
at some weak point
ne\\access to a so-called substitutive satisfactionwhich now appears
as a symptom, without the
acquiescence and also without the comprehensiorof the ego. All phenomena ofsymptom-formatiorcan be fairly described as
"
the return of therepressed." The distinctive character of themhowever, lies in the extensive distortion thereturning elements have undergone, comparecwith their original form. Perhaps
the objectionwill be raised here that in this last group
of fact*
we have deviated too much from the similaritywith tradition. We shall feel no regret, however,if this has led us nearer to the problems
oi
instinctual renunciation.
8. The Historical Truth
We have made all these psychological digressionsto make it more credible that the religion
oJ
Moses exercised influence on the Jewish peopleOnly when it had become a tradition. Wehave
2O2 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
scarcely achieved more than a probability. Yetlet us assume we have succeeded in proving this
conclusively; the impression would still remainthat we had satisfied only
the qualitative
factorof our task, not the quantitative
as well. Toall
matters concerning
the creation of a religion
and certainly to that of the Jewish one pertainssomething majestic, which has not so far beencovered by our explanations. Some other elementshould have part
in it: one that has few analogiesand nothing quite
like it, something unique andcommensurate with that which has grown out ofit, something like religion
itself.
Let us see if we can approach
our subject fromthe reverse side. We understand that primitiveman needs a God as creator of the world, as headof his tribe, and as one who takes care of him.This God takes his place behind the dead fathersof whom tradition still has something to relate.
Man in later times of our time, for instance
behaves similarly. He also remains infantile andneeds protection, even when he is fully grown;he feels he cannot relinquish the support
of his
God. So much is indisputable, but it is not soeasily to be understood why there must be onlyone God, why just the progress from Henotheismto Monotheism acquires such an overwhelmingsignificance. It is true, as we have mentionedbefore, that the believer participates
in thegreatness of his God and the more powerful
the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 203Jod the surer the protection he can bestow. Thepower of a God, however, need not presupposehis being an only God: many peoples onlyglorified their chief god the more if he ruled overa multitude of inferior gods; he was not the less
great because there were other gods than He.It also meant sacrificing some of the intimaterelationship if the God became universal andcared equally for all lands and peoples. One had,so to speak, to share one's God with strangers andhad to compensate
oneself for that by believingthat one was favoured by him. The point couldbe made that the conception
of an Only Godsignifies a step forward in spirituality;
this point,however, cannot be estimated so very highly.
The true believer knows of a way adequately tofill in this obvious gap in motivation. He saysthat the idea of an Only God has had this overwhelming effect on mankind because it is part ofeternal truth, which, hidden for so long, has atlast come to light and has swept
all before it.
We have to admit that at last we have an elementof an order commensurate to the greatness ofthe subject as well as to that of the success of its
influence.
I also should like to accept
this solution.
However, I have my misgivings. The religiousargument is based on an optimistic and idealistic
premiss. The human intellect has not shownitself elsewhere to be endowed with a very good
2O4 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
scent for truth, nor has the human mind displayed any special readiness to accept truth. Onthe contrary, it is the general experience
that thehuman intellect errs very easily without oursuspecting it at all, and that nothing
is morereadily believed than what regardless of thetruth meets our wishes and illusions half-way.That is why our agreement needs modifying.I too should credit the believer's solution withcontaining the truth; it is not, however, thematerial truth, but an historical truth. I wouldclaim the right
to correct a certain distortionwhich this truth underwent on its re -emergence.That is to say : I do not believe that one supremegreat God
"
exists
"
to-day, but I believe that inprimaeval times there was one person who mustneeds appear gigantic and who, raised to thestatus of a deity, returned to the memory of men.Our supposition was that the religion of Moseswas discarded and partly forgotten and that lateron it forced itself on to the notice of the peopleas a tradition. I make the assumption
that this
process was the repetition of an earlier one.When Moses gave to his people
the conceptionof an Only God it was not an altogether newidea, for it meant the re -animation of primaevalexperience in the human family that had longago faded from the conscious memory of mankind.The experience was such an important one, however, and had produced,
or at least prepared,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 205such far-reaching changes
in the life of man, that,I cannot help thinking,
it must have left somepermanent trace in the human soul somethingcomparable to a tradition.
The psycho-analyses of individuals have taughtus that their earliest impressions, received at atime when they were hardly able to talk, manifestthemselves later in an obsessive fashion, althoughthose impressions themselves are not consciouslyremembered. We feel that the same must holdgood for the earliest experiences of mankind.One result of this is the emergence of the conception of one great God. It must be recognizedas a memory, a distorted one, it is true, but nevertheless a memory. It has an obsessive quality;it simply must be believed. As far as its distortiongoes it may be called a delusion; in so far as it
brings to light something from the past
it mustbe called truth. The psychiatric delusion alsocontains a particle of truth; the patient's conviction issues from this and extends to the wholedelusional fabrication surrounding it.
The following pages
contain a scarcely
alteredrepetition of what I said in the first section. In1912 I tried in my book Totem and Taboo toreconstruct the ancient situation from which all
these effects issued. In that book I made use ofcertain theoretical reflections of Charles Darwin,Atkinson, and especially Robertson Smith, andcombined them with findings and suggestions
2O6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
from psycho-analytic practice. From DarwinI
borrowed the hypothesis
that men originallylived in small hordes
;
each of the hordes stoodunder the rule of an older male, who governedby brute force, appropriated
all the females andbelaboured or killed all the young males, including his own sons. From Atkinson I received thesuggestion that this patriarchal system came to anend through a rebellion of the sons, who unitedagainst the father, overpowered him and togetherconsumed his body. Following Robertson Smith'stotem theory
I suggested
that this horde, previously ruled by the father, was followed byatotemistic brother clan. In order to be able tolive in peace
with one another the victoriousbrothers renounced the women for whose sakethey had killed the father, and agreed
to practiseexogamy. The power
of the father was brokenand the families regulated by matriarchy. Theambivalence of the sons towards the fatherremained in force during
the whole furtherdevelopment.
Instead of the father a certainanimal was declared the totem; it stood for theirancestor and protecting spirit, and no one wasallowed to hurt or kill it. Once a year, however,the whole clan assembled for a feast at which theotherwise revered totem was torn to pieces andeaten. No one was permitted
to abstain from this
feast; it was the solemn repetition of the fathermurder, in which social order, moral laws and
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 2O7religion had had their beginnings. The correspondence of the totem feast (according
toRobertson Smith's description) with the ChristianCommunion has struck many authors beforeme.
I still adhere to this sequence of thought.
I
have often been vehemently reproached
for notchanging my opinions
in later editions of mybook, since more recent ethnologists have withoutexception discarded Robertson Smith's theoriesand have in part replaced them by others whichdiffer extensively.
I would reply
that thesealleged advances in science are well known to me.Yet I have riot been convinced either of theircorrectness or of Robertson Smith's errors. Contradiction is not always refutation; a new theorydoes not necessarily denote progress. Above all,
however, I am not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst. It was my good right
to select fromethnological data what would serve me for myanalytic work. The writings of the highly giftedRobertson Smith provided me with valuablepoints of contact with the psychological materialof analysis and suggestions
for the use of it. I
cannot say the same of the work of his opponents.9. The Historical Development
I cannot reproduce
here the contents of Totemand Taboo, but I must try
to account for the long
2O8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
interval that took place between the eventswhich we suggested happened in primaeval timesand the victory of monotheism in historical times.After the combination ofbrother clan, matriarchy,exogamy and totemism had been establishedthere began a development which maybedescribed as a slow
"
return of the repressed.
55
The term
"
repressed
55
is here used not in its
technical sense. Here I mean something past,vanished and overcome in the life of a people,which I venture to treat as equivalent
to repressedmaterial in the mental life of the individual. Inwhat psychological form the past
existed duringits period of darkness we cannot as yet
tell. It is
not easy to translate the concepts
of individualpsychology into mass psychology, and I do notthink that much is to be gained by introducingthe concept of a
"
collective
"
unconscious thecontent of the unconscious is collective anyhow,a general possession of mankind. So in the meantime the use of analogies must help
us out. Theprocesses we study here in the life of a people
arevery similar to those we know from psycho- pathology, but still they
are not quite the same.We must conclude that the mental residue of thoseprimaeval times has become a heritage which,with each new generation, needs only to beawakened, not to be re-acquired. We may thinkhere of the example of speech symbolism, whichcertainly seems to be inborn. It originates
in the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 2OQtime of speech development, and it is familiar toall children without their having been speciallyinstructed. It is the same in all peoples
in spiteof the differences in language. What we may still
lack in certainty we may acquire from otherresults of psycho-analytic investigations. Welearn that our children in a number of significantrelationships do not react as their own experienceswould lead us to expect, but instinctively,
likeanimals; this is explicable only by phylogeneticinheritance.
The return of the repressed proceeds slowly;it certainly does not occur spontaneously, butunder the influence of all the changes in theconditions of life that abound throughout
thehistory of civilization. I can give here neither asurvey of the conditions on which it depends
norany more than a scanty enumeration of the stagesin which the return proceeds. The father becameagain the head of the family, but he was nolonger omnipotent as the father of the primaevalhorde had been. In clearly recognizable
transitional stages the totem animal was ousted by thegod. The god,
in human form, still carried atfirst the head of an animal
;
later on he was wontto assume the guise of the same animal. Still
later the animal became sacred to him and hisfavourite companion or else he was reputed
tohave slain the animal, when he added its nameto his own. Between the totem animal and the
2IO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
god the hero made his appearance;
this wasoften an early stage of deification. The idea of aHighest Being seems to have appeared early;
atfirst it was shadowy and devoid of any connectionwith the daily interests of mankind. As the tribes
and peoples were knit together
into larger
unitiesthe gods also became organized into families andhierarchies. Often one of them was elevated tobe the overlord of gods and men. The next step,
to worship only one God, was taken hesitatingly,and at long last the decision was made toconcede all power to one God only and not tosuffer any other gods
beside him. Only then wasthe grandeur of the primaeval
father restored;the emotions belonging to him could now berepeated.
The first effect of the reunion with what menhad long missed and yearned for was overwhelming and exactly
as the tradition of the law-givingon Mount Sinai depicts
it. There was admiration,awe and gratitude that the people had foundfavour in His eyes: the religion of Moses knows ofonly these positive feelings towards the Father- God. The conviction that His power wasirresistible, the subjection
to His will, could nothave been more absolute with the helpless,
intimidated son of the father of the horde thanthey were here; indeed, they become fully comprehensible only by the transformation into theprimitive and infantile milieu. Infantile feelings
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 211are far more intense and inexhaustibly deep
thanare those of adults; only religious ecstasy canbring back that intensity. Thus a transport ofdevotion to God is the first response
to the returnof the Great Father.
The direction of this Father religion was thusfixed for all time, but its development was notthereby finished. Ambivalency belongs
to theessence of the father-son relationship ;
it had tohappen that in the course of time the hostility
should be stirred which in ancient times hadspurred the sons to slay
their admired anddreaded father. In the religion of Moses itself
there was no room for direct expression of themurderous father-hate. Only a powerful
reactionto it could make its appearance:
the consciousness of guilt because of that hostility, the badconscience because one had sinned against Godand continued so to sin. This feeling of guiltiness,
which the Prophets incessantly kept
alive andwhich soon became an integral part of thereligious system itself, had another, superficial,
motivation which cleverly veiled the true originof the feeling. The people met with hard times;the hopes based on the favour of God were slow inbeing fulfilled;
it became not easy
to adhere tothe illusion, cherished above all else, that theywere God's chosen people.
If they wished to keephappiness, then the consciousness of guilt becausethey themselves were such sinners offered a
212 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
welcome excuse for God's severity. They deservednothing better than to be punished by Him,because they did not observe the laws; the needfor satisfying this feeling of guilt, which comingfrom a much deeper
source was insatiable, madethem render their religious precepts ever and evermore strict, more exacting, but also more petty.In a new transport of moral asceticism the Jewsimposed on themselves constantly increasinginstinctual renunciation, and thereby reached
at least in doctrine and precepts
ethical heightsthat had remained inaccessible to the otherpeoples of antiquity. Many Jews regard theseaspirations as the second main characteristic, andthe second great achievement, of their religion.
Our investigation
is intended to show how it is
connected with the first one, the conception
ofthe one and only God. The origin, however, ofthis ethics in feelings of guilt, due to the repressedhostility to God, cannot be gainsaid.
It bears thecharacteristic of being never concluded and neverable to be concluded with which we are familiarin the reaction-formations of the obsessionalneurosis.
The further development transcends Judaism.Other elements re-emerging from the dramaenacted around the person
of the primaevalfather were in no way to be reconciled with theMosaic religion. The consciousness of guilt inthat epoch was no longer
restricted to the Jews;
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 213it had seized all Mediterranean peoples
as avague discomfort, a premonition
of misfortunethe reason for which no one knew. Modernhistory speaks of the ageing of antique culture.I would surmise that it has apprehended onlysome of the casual and adjuvant causes for themood of dejection then prevailing among thepeoples. The lightening of that oppressionproceeded from the Jews. Although food for theidea had been provided by many suggestivehints from various quarters,
it was, nevertheless,in the mind of a Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who as aRoman citizen was called Paul, that the perception dawned: "it is because we killed God theFather that we are so unhappy.'
5
It is quite
clearto us now why he could grasp
this truth in noother form but in the delusional guise of the gladtidings:
"
we have been delivered from all guiltsince one of us laid down his life to expiate ourguilt.
55 In this formulation the murder of Godwas, of course, not mentioned, but a crime thathad to be expiated by a sacrificial death couldonly have been murder. Further, the connectionbetween the delusion and the historical truth wasestablished by the assurance that the sacrificial
victim was the Son of God. The strength whichthis new faith derived from its source in historicaltruth enabled it to overcome all obstacles; in theplace of the enrapturing feeling of being thechosen ones there came now release through
214 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
salvation.^The
fact of the father-murder, however, had on its return to the memory of mankindto overcome greater
obstacles than the one whichconstituted the essence of monotheism; it had toundergo a more extensive distortion. The unmentionable crime was replaced by the tenet ofthe somewhat shadowy conception
of original sin.
Original sin and salvation through sacrificial
death became the basis of the new religionfounded by Paul. The question whether therewas a leader and instigator
to the murder amongthe horde of brothers who rebelled against theprimaeval father, or whether that figure wascreated later by poets who identified themselveswith the hero and was then incorporated
intotradition, must remain unanswered. After theChristian doctrine had burst the confines ofJudaism, it absorbed constituents from manyother sources, renounced many features of puremonotheism and adopted
in many particularsthe ritual of the other Mediterranean peoples.It was as if Egypt had come to wreak her vengeance on the heirs of Ikhnaton. The way in whichthe new religion came to terms with the ancientambivalency in the father-son relationship
is
noteworthy. Its main doctrine, to be sure, wasthe reconciliation with God the Father, theexpiation of the crime committed against Him;
but the other side of the relationship manifested
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 215itself in the Son who had taken the guilt on hisshoulders becoming God himself beside theFather and in truth in place of the Father.Originally a Father religion, Christianity becamea Son religion. The fate of having to displace theFather it could not escape.
Only a part of the Jewish people accepted
thenew doctrine. Those who refused to do so arestill called Jews. Through this decision they arestill more sharply separated from the rest of theworld than they were before. They had to sufferthe reproach from the new religious communitywhich besides Jews included Egyptians, Greeks,Syrians, Romans and lastly also Teutons thatthey had murdered God. In its full form this
reproach would run:
"
they will not admit thatthey killed God, whereas we do and are cleansedfrom the guilt ofit.
55 Then it is easy to understandwhat truth lies behind this reproach. WhytheJews were unable to participate
in the progresswhich this confession to the murder of Godbetokened (in spite of all its distortion) mightwell be the subject of a special investigation.Through this they have, so to speak, shouldereda tragic guilt. They have been made to sufferseverely for it.
Our research has perhaps thrown some lighton the question how the Jewish people acquiredthe qualities that characterize it. The problemhow they could survive until to-day
as an entity
2l6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
has not proved so easy
to solve. One cannot,however, reasonably demand or expect exhaustiveanswers of such enigmas.
All that I can offer is asimple contribution, and one which should beappraised with due regard to the critical limitations I have already mentioned.
GLOSSARY
^Etiology causation, particularly of disease.
Affect pertaining
to the feeling bases of emotion.
Ambivalence the co-existence of opposed feelings, particularly love and hate.
Amnesia failure of memory.
Cathexis the process whereby ideas and mental attitudes
are invested with a
"
charge
"
of emotion.
Imago a German periodical devoted to the non-medicalapplication of psycho-analysis.
Instinctual pertaining to instinct.
Masochism the obtaining of sexual pleasure
in conjunction
with suffering.
Obsessional Neurosis a neurosis characterized by the
alternation of obsessive (compulsive)
ideas and doubts.
Onanism auto-erotic activity, the commonest examplebeing masturbation.
Phylo-genetic pertaining
to racial development.
Reaction-formation development of a character trait that
keeps in check and conceals another one, usually of
the exactly opposite
kind.
Regression reversion to an earlier kind of mental life.
Repetition-compulsion the tendency to repeat, whichFreud considers the most fundamental characteristic ofthe mind.
Repression the keeping
of unacceptable
ideas fromconsciousness, i.e. in the
"
unconscious."
Sadism the obtaining
of sexual pleasure through the
infliction of suffering.
Super-ego the self-criticizing part
of the mind out of
which the conscience develops.
Trayma injury, bodily
or mental.
217

INDEX
Aaron: 53.
Abraham: 44, 72.
Adonai: 42, 64, 65.
Adonis: 42.
JEgyptische Religion, Die: 37.
^Eschylos: 180.
^Etiology of the neuroses: 117,
118, 119.
After-life: 33.
Agade: 17.
Akhetaton (see also Ikhnaton) : 39,
40.
Akki: 17.
Alexander the Great: 115.
Allah: 149.
Alphabet, first: 69.
Amalek: 101.
Ambivalency : 211,214.
Amenhotep III: 36, 38.
Amenhotep IV (see also Ikhnaton) :
34, 35, 37, 38, 96-
Amon: 13, 36, 38, 39, 41, 142.
Amon-Re: 32.
Amphion: 17.
Ancestor cults: 149.
Anti-semitism: 145, 146, 147.
Aramcans: 48.
Archaic heritage: 157, 158,
161.
Astruc, Jean: 68.
Athene: 38, 74.
Atkinson: 130, 205, 206.
Aton (or Atum) : 36, 37, 42, 46,
58, 67, 96, 102, 103.
Aton religion: 39, 40, 41, 43, 50,
51, 81, 96, 97, 98, 113, 142, 178,
Auerbach: 68, 102.
Azupirani: 17.
Baalim: 1 13, 196.
Babylon: 17.
Beethoven: 172.
Bes: 32.
Birth: 18, 19.
Breasted,). H.: 13, 14, 35, 37, 38,
41,
81.
Brother clan: 206.
Buonaparte, Napoleon: 14.
Cambridge Ancient History: 35.
Canaan: 44, 48, 61, 62, 74, 78,
79, ?4, 985 99,
ioi
, 196.
Cannibalism: 131, 132.
Castration: 131, 147, 192.
threat of: 127.
complex: 136, 159.
Cathexis: 156.
Cerebral-anatomy: 156.
Chamisso, Adelbert von: 14.
Chosen people
: 211.
Christ: 21, 94, 140, 141,
162.
Christian Communion: 135,141.
Evangelists : 137.
Religion: 142.
Circumcision: 44, 45, 46, 48, 49,
50, 56, 64, 65, 71, 72, 98, 100,
141, 147, 192. "
Collective
"
unconscious : 208.
Cologne: 146.
Compromise : no.
Compulsiveness
: 123.
Counter-cathexis : 152, 153.
Credo quia absurdum: 186.
Crete: 74.
Cyrus: 17, 20.
Darwin, Charles: 108, 130, 205,
206.
Darwinian doctrine: 109.
David, King: 68,69.
Da Vinci, Leonardo: 172.
3*9
22O INDEX
Dawn of Conscience, The: 13, 14,
35, 37, 4'> 81.
Delusions: 137.
Deuteronomy: 68.
Development of the neuroses : 1 29.
Disraeli, Benjamin: 14.
Distortion : 113,214.
E: 65.
Ebjatar: 68.
Ego: 109, 122, 125, 154, 155, 200.
Egyptian monotheism: 35, 107.
religion: 31, 32, 33, 34,
36,41,43,46.
Egyptian Religion, The: 50.
"Elders of Zion": 138.
Elohim: 65.
Elohist: 68, 101.
Encyclopedia Britannica, The: 68.
Erman, A.: 37, 50.
Ethiopia: 47, 53.
Euphrates: 17.
Evans, A. J.: 74, 114.
Evolution: 108.
Exile: 41, 69.
Exodus: 30, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57, 60,
65, 66, 71, 78, 98, 99,
100, 110, 176.
Book of: 12, 71, 79.
Exogamy: 132, 188, 191, 206,
208.
Exposure myth: 21, 22, 23.
Ezra: 69, 74.
Falcon: 40.
Falsification : 1 1 1 . Family romance : 1 8.
Father-hate: 211.
-murder: 131, 162, 206,
214.
-religion: 141.
-son-relationship
: 211,214.
substitute: 143.
Feelings of guilt: 138,143,212.
Finns: 114.
Fixation: 122, 123, 124, 125, 136.
Flaubert: 80.
Frazer, Sir James: 144.
Galton, A.: 16.
Genesis of the neuroses : 1 1 8.
German National Socialism: 90,
148.
German people: 90,114.
Gilgamesh: 17.
Godfrey: 74.
Gods of Greece, The: 162.
Goethe: 144, 172, 198, 200.
Golden Age, the: 115.
Golden Bough, The : 1 44.
Golden calf, the: 77.
Gosen: 47.
Gospel of salvation: 139.
Greek people : 1 05,
1 1 3,
1 1 4.
Gressmann, Hugo: 59, 65.
Hannibal: 74.
Haremhab: 39, 48, 78, 97.
Hebrews : 48, 80.
Heine: 50.
Heliopolis: 35, 37, 42, 96.
Henotheism: 202.
Heracles: 17.
Heretic King: 35, 97.
Hero: 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23,
24, 58, 140, 141, 214.
Herod, King: 21.
Herodotus: 44, 49, 56, 69.
Hexateuch: 65, 68.
History of Egypt, The: 13, 35, 38,
39-
Hoffmann, E. T. A.: 199.
Holy People: 49.
Homer: 114, 115.
Horror of swine: 49.
Horus: 49.
Hosea: 59.
Hyksos period: 47.
Id: 154, 155, 156, 162.
Identification: 127, 129, 140.
Ikhnaton: 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46,
47> 4**, 50, 5
J
> 5*> 76, 81, 96> 97,
98, 101, 104, 142, 175, 214.
Imago: 15, 89, 164.
Imperialism: 36, 95, 105.
Inbreeding: 191.
Incest: 132.
fear of: 191.
taboo of: 190.
India: 50.
Infantile amnesia: 120, 121.
Instinctual renunciation : 178, 183,
185, 187, 189, 192,
2OI, 212.
satisfaction: 184.
INDEX 221Isaac: 72.
Isis: 49.
Israel in der Wttste: 144.
Israeliten und ihre NachbarMmme,
Die: 55, 56, 57, 58.
Istar: 17.
Italian people: go.
J: 65,68.
Jabne: 182.
Jacob: 44, 72.
Jahu: 102.
Jahve: 37, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64,
65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77>
80, 81, 82, 98, 100, 102, 103,
104, 105, 106, 113, 116, 149,
176, 196.
Jahvist: 68, 100, 101.
JE: 68.
Jehu: 65.
Jerusalem: 102.
Jethro: 56, 66.
Jewish character: 167,194.
god: 37.
history: 84, 85, 100, 105,
1 06.
monotheism: 42, 51, 95,
107, 109.
people: 20, 21, 24, 29, 31,
49> 5, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73,
76, 79, 83, 99, 101, 102,
103, no, 112, 137, 138,
i39> i43> J 45>
1 66, 1 68,
175, 176, 185, 187, 194,
196, 201, 215.
religion: 31,33,41,485465
82, 83, 106, 1 10, 112,
116, 139, 141, 142, 143,
148, 149, 196, 202.
tradition: 50, 99.
Jochanaan: 65, 74.
Jochanaan ben Sakkai, Rabbi:
182.
Jordan: 60, 61, 66.
Joseph : 1 68.
Josephus, Flavius: 20, 47, 52.
Joshua: 56, 65.
Judisches Lexikon : 12.
Jupiter: 73.
Justice: 81, 82, 104.
Kama: 17.
Knossos: 74.
Latency: no, 112, 117, 121, 124,
125, 127, 128, 129, 137.
Lays of Ancient Rome : 115.
Levites: 20, 62, 63, 64, 79, 84, 101.
Life and Times of Akhnaton, The: 40,
42.
Maat: 32, 35, 81, 82, 96.
Macaulay: 115.
Magic: 81, 179.
Massa: 57.
Matriarchy: 132, 134, 135, 206,
208.
Medes: 20.
Meriba: 57.
Meribat-Qades : 55.
Merneptah stele: 48, 78, 79, 99.
Mesopotamia: 36.
Messiah: 59, 143, 144, 168.
Meyer, E. : 20, 23, 55, 56, 57, 59,
61, 73, 78, 98-
Middle Ages: 141.
Midia: 66.
Midian: 57, 58, 64, 67, 71, 75.
Minoan-Mycenaean culture : 114.
Minos: 74.
Minos, King: 114.
Moab : i o i . Mohammedan religion: 148.
Monotheism: 24, 31, 34, 35, 36,
37, 42, 51, 80, 92, 95, 96, 101,
104, 105, 107, 109, no, 137,
138, 142, 143, 144, 148, 175,
202, 214.
Mosaic doctrine : 82, 107, 143.
God: 81, 82, 102, 104,
113-
ideals : 1 04.
law: 75, 106.
prohibition : 1 8 1 . religion: 31, 33, 41, 42,
46, 83, 101, 112, 116,
141, 142, 178, 194, 212.
Mose: 84.
Moses; his name: 12, 14, 23, 31,
97-
his birth: 19-23.
circumcision : 44.
and the Exodus: 47.
and the Jews: 47, 49, 73,
97,
1 68, 169,
and Pharaoh: 46, 50, 52,
53, 76, 97-
222 INDEX
Moses; and God: 53, 177, 210.
and Midian: 56, 57.
murder of: 59, 60, 77, 79,
98, 143, '5, 162.
and Levites: 62, 63.
and breaking of the tables :
77-
character of: 97.
Mosessagen und die Leviten, Die: 23.
Mose und seine Bedeutung fuer
die
israelitsch - juedische Religionsgeschichte: 59.
Mose und seine zeit: 65.
Mother-deities: 134, 142.
Mother-fixation : 122.
Mount Sinai: 53, 54, 66, 210.
Myth: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 29, 46, 52, 54, 56, 72, 73,
95, 113, 114, 131, 134.
Mythus von der Geburt des Helden,
Der: 15, 20.
Narcissism: 120.
Nehemiah: 69, 75.
Neo-Egyptians: 54, 63.
Nile: 12, 20, 50, 102.
Nofertete: 36.
Northern Syria: 42.
Nubia: 36, 40.
(Edipus: 17, 19.
complex: 127, 159.
Omnipotence of thoughts : 1 79.
Omnipotent God : 1 74.
On: 32, 35> 37> 5
1 * 76, 96> 98- Onanism: 128.
Oresteia, The: 180.
Original Sin: 139.
Osiris: 33, 40, 41, 43.
Palestine: 36, 48, 55, 56, 98, 99.
Paris : 1 7.
Passion, the: 141.
Paul of Tarsus: 139, 141, 143,
144, 214.
Pentateuch: 52, 69.
Perseus: 17.
Persians: 69, 102.
Pharaoh: 20, 21, 34, 36, 46, 52,
53> 57, 77. 79> 9^, 97> 99>
I
103, 105, 137, 190.
Phoenicians: 56.
Phylogenetic origin: 157.
Pinchas: 23.
Poetry: 15, 17, 116.
Polytheism: 33, 105, 135, 142,
147.
Preconscious : 152, 154, 155.
Priestly Code : 69, 75, 107.
Primaeval Father horde : 1 34,
1 38,
145, 148, 151, 161, 192, 209, 210.
Progress
in spirituality: 138.
Prophets, the: 59, 76, 84, 104,
211.
Ptah: 13.
Ptolemies : 1 90.
Punic: 74.
Qades: 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64,
65, 66, 67, 71, 75, 78, 79, 81, 98,
99, 100, no, 150.
Ra-mose (Ramses) : 14.
Rank, Otto: 15, 16, 17, 18, 20.
Re: 3L>, 35,42.
Red Sea: 54.
Redeemer: 140, 141,
168.
Repetition-compulsion: 122.
Repressed Material: 129, 151,
*52, 153, 155-
Romans: 61, 146.
Romulus: 17, 20.
Sacred: 192.
Sargon of Agade : 17.
Schiller: 162.
Schliemann, Heinrich: 114.
School of the Priests : 35, 5
1 . Screen-memories: 120.
Sellin, E. : 59, 60, 76, 83, 95, 98,
112, 144.
Set: 49.
Shakespeare, William: 105.
Shaw, George Bernard: 89.
Shechem, Prince of: 45.
Shittim: 60.
Silo: 23.
Sinai: 55, 98.
Sinai-Horeb: 55, 66, 75.
Smith, Robertson: 133, 205, 206,
207.
Son religion: 141.
Soviet Russia: 89.
Sprache des Pentateuch in ihren
Beziehungen zum Aegyptischen
: 6*-
69.
Sublimation: 138.
INDEX 223Substitutive satisfaction : 1 84, 20 1 . Sumerians: 44.
Sun God: 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 96,
^98. Sun Temple: 35.
Super-Ego: 155, 184, 185, 189.
Symbolism: 158.
Symptom formation: 201.
Syria: 36, 42, 99.
Taboo: 64, 74, 132.
of incest: 190.
Talmudists: 30.
Telephos: 17.
Tell-el-Amarna: 39, 97.
Temple: 69.
Ten Commandments: 66.
Theatre, the: 141.
Thebes: 32, 36, 38, 39, 42.
Thothmes: 97.
Ill: 36-
Titus: 182.
Topography of the psyche: 155.
Torah: 182.
Totem and Taboo: 85, 94, 130, 205,
207.
Totem animal: 133, 209.
Totemism: 32, 133, 134, 135, 141,
1 88, 206, 207, 208, 209.
Tradition: 12, 62, 67, 71, 82, 83,
85, in, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,
150, 151, 160, 201, 214.
Tragic guilt: 140, 141, 215.
Traumata: 84, 109, 117, 119, 120,
122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128,
129, 130, 159.
Turk: 49.
Tutankhaton: 39.
Twelve tribes: 80.
Unconscious: 153, 154, 155, 200.
memory traces : 151.
Universal god: 37, 96, 103.
Universalism: 36, 142.
Vestal: 17.
Volcano god: 55, 65, 66, 73, 74,
89.
Volz, Paul: 84.
Weigall, A. : 40, 42.
Westminster Abbey: 108.
Wish-phantasy: 138, 140, 144.
Womb: 18.
Worship of the Sun: 43.
Wuste und Gelobtes Land: 68, 102.
Yahuda, A. S.: 63, 69.
Zethos: 17.
Zeus: 38, 74