Primal Father, Demiurge
Totem and Taboo (1913) is absolutely crowded with demons. For Freud, the principle spirit that animates the animism characteristic of the age of magic is the demonic spirit. “It was from corpses that the concept of evil spirits first arose.” The figure of the demon possesses a certain amount of reality as an emanation from the unconscious. Conjured by internal conflict, what had been feelings of unconscious hostility held towards the loved one becomes, after death, an entity, a wandering demon. Freud’s stated goal is to put the wandering spirits of animism back into the human mind (but of course they do not stay there). The path of the demon reveals the spatial dimension of the psyche as Freud conceived it: the shape of a projected world of spirit, of ideality; what you see is who you are. In the very famous last chapter of Totem and Taboo, concerning the murder of the primal father by the primal hoard, the demon, who had been, until now, something of a main character in this book, disappears altogether. Where did the demon go? Here is a fine example of Freud’s restraint: the reader is left on their own to decipher what amounts to the oldest and grandest of all heresies. It is a heresy that Freud could not state openly, but the implications are there for all to see. This latent heresy is that the murder of the primal father conjures the greatest demon of them all: the demiurge; that demonic entity known as Father God.
God
