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We therefore come back to our hypothesis that the Devil with whom the painter signed the bond was a direct substitute for his father. And this is borne out by the shape in which the Devil first appeared to him - as an honest elderly citizen with a brown beard, dressed in a red cloak and leaning with his right hand on a stick, with a black dog beside him¹ (cf. the first picture). Later on his appearance grows more and more terrifying - more mythological, one might say. He is equipped with horns, eagle’s claws and bat’s wings. Finally he appears in the chapel as a flying dragon. We shall have to come back later to a particular detail of his bodily shape.

It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father. But this is only so at first sight, for we know a good many things which lessen our surprise. To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual’s idea of God. We also know, from the secret life of the individual which analysis uncovers, that his relation to his father was perhaps ambivalent from the outset, or, at any rate, soon became so. That is to say, it contained two sets of emotional impulses that were opposed to each other: it contained not only impulses of an affectionate and submissive nature, but also hostile and defiant ones. It is our view that the same ambivalence governs the relations of mankind to its Deity. The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.²

¹ In Goethe, a black dog like this turns into the Devil himself.

² Cf. Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and Reik (1919).