Eating the God: Myth of the Primal Father
How is it that the eucharist holds such psychoactive power even to this day?
Freud explored this question, psychoanalytically, in his great work of speculative anthropology Totem and Taboo (1913). Curiously enough, in this work’s last sentence (spoiler alert) Freud revised the famous opening of the Gospel of John, “…in the beginning was the word…” into its opposite: “in the beginning was the Deed.” The deed in question was no good deed, but rather, in the words of AC/DC, “dirty deeds, done dirt cheap:” this dirty deed was the murder of the primal father by his exiled sons, the primal hoard.
Deployoying equal parts Darwin and Lord Frazer, Freud concocts his myth, imagining that primaeval humans lived in small groups that were ruled, as with gorillas or chimpanzees, by an alpha male, the titular primal father, who collected as many wives as he was able to maintain and who jealously chased away all threats to his rule. No satisfaction was denied the primal father who, like God in the Book of Job, or the president of the United States, did whatever he wanted to—because, well, because He’s the Primal Father. Soon however his many sons living in exile, no longer able to tolerate the degree of tyrannical indulgence, banded together and killed the father and, in what can only shock the modern reader, tore him apart and devoured him. Thereafter the sons were consumed with guilt and sought to atone for their crime with various rituals and prohibitions; the totem ritual, together with the incest taboo, was instituted: thus civilization began, gods became God, and neurosis became our common lot.
Lacan called this myth “the only myth the modern age was capable of,” and, linking it with the legend of Pan’s death, likewise described the primal father as an “all powerful, half-animal,” almost as if he were describing Pan who, as everyone knows, has horns and the bottom half of a goat. Did the primal horde eat Pan?
Well, they ate something. Theophagy, the ancient practice of eating the god, was done far in advance of Christ’s demand that his followers drink his blood and eat his flesh—a demand that I still find to be rather grotesque whenever I hear it, but one that is made with routine and automatic consistency in most churches every Sunday morning. Christians are not usually described as cannibals and yet if the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is real then aren’t they? At the very least most Christians remain patently unaware of the larger, older and much weirder tradition that they happen to be stuck inside of and acting-out, in pantomime, every week.
This is essentially the scandalous thesis of Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), a book from which Freud took a great deal when formulating his primal myth, citing him at least 95 times in Totem and Taboo. The armchair anthropologist Lord James Frazer, who “never even saw a savage,” lays out a story common to humanity: primitive society in the age of magic, revered a vegetative god, who once a year was sacrificed, as scapegoat, and eaten. As it turns out eating the god was something of a meme in that era leading up to the Last Supper, and Christ’s cannibalistic request was one that had been made regularly, far afield from early Christianity, and not only by Dionysius, that other rather goaty, Christ-like god (note1).
For some reason The Golden Bough became a runaway best seller to the point where it seemed that everyone involved in literary modernism had read it: Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, etc. I think that probably what was so exciting to the public upon the release of the Golden Bough was not only the dislodging of the eucharist from Christian revelation into immanent history, but also the transposition of the primitive “savagery,” by which victims were killed and eaten in sacred rights in the dim past, onto the now mundane ritual that believers performed every Sunday morning without thinking. Suddenly the barbaric past was a great deal closer to home.
Freud follows the anthropology of his era and links this practice of eating god to primitive totemism, in which the totem animal is deified and made sacred, and which, on special occasions, is ritualistically sacrificed and eaten, just as goats were for the Dionysian festivals. Freud does not describe the primal father as half-animal, as Lacan does, but rather the totem animal is the father. He makes this deduction from his own analyses of children’s animal phobias, such as little Hans and his fear of horses. Freud does Frazer one deeper by adding the myth of the primal father as datum and precedent to all of this ritualistic killing (note 2). The dirty deed that begat these sacred rituals is regarded by Freud as a kind of original sin common to all humankind.
Here then is where time collapses in on itself, as it does so often in psychoanalysis, and the mythical crimes of remote primaeval antiquity phase shift into our own immediate unconscious desires. Under “the inexorable psychological law of ambivalence,” (note 3) as Freud names it, do we not hate and love our father at the same time? Have we not, at one point or another, wished for our father’s death? Or was glad when he did die?
This collapse of history into the present moment is particular to Freud’s rather peculiar view of historical movement; for Freud, history proceeds crab-wise, in a kind of parallel process, first as historical fact and then as psychical reality; that is, what happened in deed in the primeval dawn, happens again, right now, in fantasy life; or, in particular, the fantasy life of children; for, as you may have noticed, children can often loudly wish for their parent’s deaths.
In my view, the parallel process of historical deed and psychical reality moves along the path of an emanation. Not so different in kind than the rays that emanate from the Ein-Sof void-god of the kabbalistic cosmos, our psychic life is made dynamic by rays emanating from both the violent deeds of an ultimately unimaginable historical past, and the equally remote early years of childhood. The evidence of these emanations may be found anywhere from the genetic record, to language, to symptoms, gender-norms, mythologies, religious beliefs and of course archaic rituals.
What makes a psychotropism like the eucharist so psychotropic would be precisely the ambient force of these occult emanations…
“Of Course it’s a good idea!” Father God, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975
Notes:
Note 1: Dionysius, the god of the vine, had asked, long before Christ, that his followers eat and drink his body and blood in the form of a sacrificed goat and sacred wine. The recent psychedelic historicists (in my view following Nietzsche) give a turn of the screw to this discourse by arguing that this wine was fortified wine, that is, wine that had been mixed with any number of hellacious psychoactive botanicals. This was wine that could famously kill you after two glasses (what Nietzsche had already named the witch’s brew: that intoxicating blend of ecstasy and cruelty common to the Dionysian cult—remember the Maenads?). Form this view one can well imagine then that the language of this era, such as enthusiasmos, telestic madness, or even “being filled with the holy spirit,” is but the drug-addled psycho-babble of folks who were stoned out of their gourds.
Note 2: from Totem and Taboo: “Thus we can trace through the ages the identity of the totem meal with animal sacrifice, with theanthropic human sacrifice and with the Christian Eucharist, and we can recognize in all these rituals the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed down but of which they must none the less feel so proud. The Christian communion, however, is essentially a fresh elimination of the father, a repetition of the guilty deed. We can see the full justice of Frazer's pronouncement that ‘the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity.”
Note 3: Ambivalence is one of the more handy and frequent terms in psychoanalytic toolkit and yet it does great work in obscuring the theory’s rather more shocking implications. Like for example, as opposed to love/hate, it would probably be more accurate to explicate the ambivalence we have to our father according to the rubric of the now popular road-trip game: Fuck, Marry, Kill. I think that resorting to blanket ambivalence can dull or erase what is truly radical in Freud’s theory, as when Adam Phillips refers to the death-drive as mere extreme ambivalence. This erasure is in effect what Freud’s late dual drive theory accomplishes.
