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integrating or adjusting). Other metaphors are less overt: he believes
that non-literate peoples consciously add new rites to their ceremonies
in an attempt to gain new effects (the primitive as stage manager), and
impose taboos with similarly conscious ends in mind ( the primitive as
legislator). Myths are invented "after the rites of the cult with the in–
tention of explaining them," and we may compare myth "with the ex–
periences of a young and unsophisticated child."
Bettelheim devotes a great deal of attention to J ewish religion in his
book, and here his Freudianism is rather more orthodox, since he re–
cognizes that such J ewish customs as infant circumcision obviously do
not fit his voluntaristic theories.
Symbolic Wounds
suggests somewhat
more familiarity with Roellenbleck on traces of Magna Mater cult in
the Old T estament and Zimmerman's theory of J ewish circumcision as
permanent erection (to name two of his more abstruse citations) than
it does with the Bible itself. Bettelheim speaks of "the original nature of
Jahwe as a fire god, who appeared to Moses in the burning thornbush,"
and he is orthodox Freudian in seeing fire as a phallic expression, and
Judaism as thus by extension a "phallic religion." All this seems un–
necessarily labored. There appear to be traces of many primitive wor–
ships in the Old Testament, among them the sacrificial blood of the
lamb and bread of life later to flower in the New, but the characteristic
god of the earliest
"J"
text is neither the priestly compilers' fire god
of the altars who savors the smell of burned kidney fat (Exodus 29:13),
nor the sky god of the "E" text who lives on mountain tops like Zeus
and sends down storms and victories. It is a very primitive phallic deity,
Buck Mulligan's "collector of prepuces," who makes male nakedness sa–
cred (Genesis 9: 23 ) and can show only his back parts to Moses (Exo–
dus 33: 23) ; who is appealed to by means of a genital oath (this has
become a commonplace reading of Genesis 24: 2 and 47: 29) and in
return confers fertility (Genesis 49: 25) ; whose symbol of power is the
rod that turns into a serpent (Exodus 4: 3) and whose altar is a phallic
herm on which oil is poured (Genesis 28: 18) or a cairn of stones on
which the sacred meal is eaten (Genesis 31: 46). Judaism is an ancient
religion containing such a variety of survivals that neither Bettelheim
nor Freud can reduce it to any primitive monotheism, and its customs
and taboos are magical, not practical, as Bettelheim recognizes when he
insists that modern medical circumcision is the ancient sacrifice to the
phallic deity "camouflaged as a hygienic or prophylactic manipulation."
"I ignore medical rationalizations," he says grandly at one point.
The problem is, ultimately, the matter of motivation. Bettelheim
