The cult legend of Attis expresses most clearly the meaning of the animal-sacrifice, i.e., sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido. The myth depicts through the arrangement and nature of the protagonists, the typical fate of a libido regression that is played out mainly in the unconscious:
Attis was the son-lover of Agdistis-Cybele, the mother of the gods
CW5 ¶ 659Driven mad by his mother's insane love for him, he castrated himself under a pine-tree. The pine-tree played an important part in his cult (fig. 042)
CW5 ¶ 6597 CW5 Par 659 (b) FigNo 042
Every year a pine-tree was decked with garlands, an effigy of Attis was hung upon it and then it was cut down
CW5 ¶ 659Cybele then took the pine-tree into her cave and lamented over it. The tree obviously signifies the sonaccording to one version
CW5 ¶ 659Attis was actually changed into a pine-treewhom the mother takes back into her “cave,” i.e., the maternal womb
CW5 ¶ 659At the same time, the tree also has a maternal significance, since the hanging of the son or his effigy on the tree represents the union of mother and son. Common speech employs the same image: a person is said to “hang on his mother”
CW5 ¶ 659Again, the felling of the pine-tree parallels the castration and is a direct reminder of it. In that case the tree would have more of a phallic meaning. But since the tree is primarily significant of the mother, its felling has the significance of a mother-sacrifice
CW5 ¶ 659These intricate overlappings of meaning can only be disentangled if we reduce them to a common denominator. This denominator is the libido
CW5 ¶ 659The son personifies the longing for the mother which exists in the psyche of every individual who finds himself in a similar situation. The mother personifies the (incestuous) love for the son. The tree personifies the mother on the one hand and the phallus of the son on the other. The phallus in its turn stands for the son's libido. The felling of the pine, i.e., castration, denotes the sacrifice of this libido, which seeks something that is as incongruous as it is impossible
CW5 ¶ 659The impulse to sacrifice comes from the mater saeva cupidinum, [passionate, fierce mother], who drives the son to madness and self-mutilation
CW5 ¶ 660As a primal being the mother represents the unconscious; hence the myths tell us that the impulse to sacrifice comes from the unconscious. This is to be understood in the sense that regression is inimical to life and disrupts the instinctual foundations of the personality, and is consequently followed by a compensatory reaction taking the form of violent suppression and elimination of the incompatible tendency
CW5 ¶ 660It is a natural, unconscious process, a collision between instinctive tendencies, which the conscious ego experiences in most cases passively because it is not normally aware of these libido movements and does not consciously participate in them
CW5 ¶ 660