58 CAVENDISH MOXON
is not unprecedented in the Old Testament stories of Yahweli and indeed is the mark of every product of the infantile unconscious fancy. Nevertheless Joseph is recorded to have felt an excusable impulse to cast off his lover for unfaithfulness when he knows tliat she is with child. And it is only by means of assurances and promises in dreams, that God is abit; to induce Joseph to become the foster-father of his Son and to marry Mary the Mother.
It may well be that the Virgin birth stories in the (iospel are in harmony with the phantasy of Jesus himself From the strong heroic consciousness of divine Sonship it is only a step to the denial of the actual father. In an age when unconscious desires had free play in myths, the evangelist of Jesus the Son of God would almost inevitably express his Master's own phantasy in the form of a miraculous conception by a divine Father. The myth- maker would unconsciously identify himself with Jesus in the heroic revolt against the father implied by a virgin birth.
The legend of the virginal conception of Mary by the power of the Holy Ghost is, however, perhaps not the first attempt to symbolise faith in the divine origin of Jesus, but rather a secondary ; -
element due to Greek influence. The earliest Gospel (St. Mark) j|
ignores the story and dates the divinity of Jesus from the day of |^
His baptism. The Holy Ghost which descended into Jesus was regarded by some Jewish Christians as his Mother, For the Spirit in Hebrew is feminine, and the rAle played by the Spirit in the creation myth in Genesis is that of the Earth Mother. The Spirit "brooded" on the waters of chaos or the world egg like a mother bird, in order to call forth the creative activity of the male God Yahweh. Indeed, as Hannay has pointed out, the very words of the story imply a feminine aspect of the divinity. "God created man in his own image, male and female created he them". In the Aramaic gospel used by the Iibionites Jesus even speaks of "My Mother the Holy Ghost". For some the Spirit symbolised Yahweh's wife; for others it was the creative power which impregnated the mother goddess of chaos. The Jewish followers of Jesus could therefore naturally picture the Messiah as born when he issued forth from the waters of baptism and received breath from the Spirit of God. The non-Jewish Christians unconsciously saw in the Holy Spirit at the Baptism the Phallus of the Mysteries. Dieterich reminds us of the early baptismal rite in which the candle is thrice dipped into the wat6r of the font in order to
