Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Sigmund Freud.

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).

https://archive.org/details/mosesandmonothei032233mbp/mode/2up

page 14
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.
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page 18
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.
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page 34 -35
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 about 1 375 B.C., who first called himself Amenhotep (IV) like his father, but later on changed his name [to Akhenaten] 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.
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page 39
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 into the inscriptions of old monuments in order to efface the word ” God ” whenever it was used in the plural.
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page 43 – 44
Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion; it is equally certain that he introduced the custom of circumcision.
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The fact remains that the question concerning the origin of circumcision has only one answer: it comes from Egypt. Herodotus, ” the Father of History, 55 tells us that the custom of circumcision had long been practised 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…
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page 62 – 63
It is not credible that a great gentleman like the Egyptian Moses approached a people strange to him without an escort. 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.
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page 74
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 Aegean 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.
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page 120 -121
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 either bodily 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.
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page 129
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 a sexual -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.
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page 134 – 135
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 a restitution of the patriarchal order. The new fathers, it is true, never succeeded to the omnipotence of the primaeval father. There were too many of them and they lived in larger communities than the original horde had been; they had to get on with one another and were restricted by 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.
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page 139
Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primaeval source. This he called original sin ; it was a crime against God that could be expiated only through death. Death had come into the world through original sin. 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 phantasy of expiation and that is why this phantasy could be welcomed in the form of a gospel of salvation (Evangel). A Son of God, innocent himself, had sacrificed himself and had thereby taken over 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 Greek mysteries had exerted their influence on the shaping of this phantasy of salvation. The essence of it seems to be Paul’s own contribution. He was a man with a gift for religion, in the truest sense of the phrase. Dark traces of the past lay in his soul, ready to break through into the regions of consciousness.

page 187
The religion that began with the prohibition against making an image of its God has developed in the course of centuries more and more into a religion of instinctual renunciation. Not that it demands sexual abstinence; it is content with a considerable restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes completely withdrawn from sexuality and raised to an ideal of ethical perfection. Ethics, however, means restriction of instinctual gratification.
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page 190 – 191
Let us proceed from the feature of prohibition which adheres so closely to religion. The sacred is obviously something that must not be touched. A sacred prohibition has a very strong affective note, but actually it has no rational motivation. For why should it be such a specially hideous crime 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 surely be told that all our feelings cry out against such a crime. Yet all this means is that the prohibition is taken to be self-evident, that we do not know how to explain it.

That such an explanation is illusory can easily be proved. What is reputed to offend our feelings used to be a general custom one might say a sacred tradition in the ruling families of the Ancient Egyptians and other peoples. It went without saying that each Pharaoh found his first and foremost wife in his sister, and the successors of the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did not hesitate to follow this example. So far we seem to discern that incest in this case between brother and sister was a prerogative forbidden to ordinary mortals and reserved for kings who represented the gods on earth. The world of the Greek and Germanic myths also took no exception to these incestuous relationships.
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page 192
When we hear that Moses “sanctified” his people by introducing the custom of circumcision we now understand the deep-lying meaning of this pretension. Circumcision is the symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primaeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the fulness of his power; and whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to the father’s will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice.
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