Some Notes, Historical and Psychoanalytical on the People of Israel and the Land of Israel with Special References to Deuteronomy

In recent studies, the writer had occasion to note the remarkable absence in post-Biblical Judaism of any vestige of the worship of a mother-goddess. The word “remarkable” was used advisedly, in view of the fact that the Judaic religion developed in a culture area where the cult of the mother-goddess was universal. How did it happen that a form of worship so deeply rooted in the folk soil could wither away to nothing? It is scarcely an easy matter to deprive a people of an essential part of its thought-patterns without supplying an adequate substitute.1 In Christianity, which also grew up in that same culture area, there is at least the presence of Mary in the theology to remind us of one phase of Christianity's Semitic origin.2

Interest in the question so briefly stated here led the writer to a reflective inquiry resulting in then unsupported hypotheses involving early Hebraic and general Semitic practice, as well as psychoanalytic theory as it seemed to bear upon ethnographic data. The study here presented is a result of investigation of all materials involved in the attempt to test the validity of those hypotheses. It has been the particular concern of the writer to examine the extent to which the field of psychoanalytic teaching can be employed to throw light upon otherwise unclear phenomena involved in general studies, such as this one. He has availed himself of the