Note 84 — Lohengrin

This phantasy of an enormous water is extremely suggestive of the large and widespread group of the Flood Myths, which actually seem to be no more than the universal expression of the exposure myth. The hero is here represented by humanity at large. The wrathful father is the god; the destruction as well as the rescue of humanity likewise follow one another in immediate succession. In this parallelization, it is of interest to note that the ark, or pitched house, in which Noah floats upon the water is designated in the Old Testament by the same word (tebah) as the receptacle in which the infant Moses is exposed (Jeremias, loc. cit., p. 250). For the motive of the great flood, compare Jeremias, p. 226, and Lessmann, at the close of his treatise on the Kyros saga in Europe, where the flood is described as a possible digression of the exposure in the water. A transition instance is illustrated by the flood saga told by Bader, in his Badensian folk legends. When the Sunken Valley was inundated once upon a time by a cloudburst, a little boy was seen floating upon the waters in a cradle, who was miraculously saved by a cat (Gustav Friedrichs, loc. cit., p. 265).

The author has endeavored to explain the psychological relations between the exposure-myth, the flood legend, and the devouring myth, in his article on the “Overlying Symbols in Dream Awakening, and Their Recurrence in Mythical Ideation” (“Die Symbolschichtung in Wecktraum und ihre Wiederkehr im mythischen Denken” Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, V, 1912).