Thus the Hindoo fire-bringer is called Matariçvan, meaning the one swelling in the mother. The hero striving towards the mother is the dragon, and when he separates from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon.[99] This train of thought, which we have already hinted at previously in Christ and Antichrist, may be traced even into the details of Christian phantasy. There is a series of mediæval pictures[100] in which the communion cup contains a dragon, a snake or some sort of small animal.[101]
The cup is the receptacle, the maternal womb, of the god resurrected in the wine; the cup is the cavern where the serpent dwells, the god who sheds his skin, in the state of metamorphosis; for Christ is also the serpent. These symbolisms are used in an obscure connection in I Corinthians, verse 10: Paul writes of the Jews who "were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea" (also reborn) and "did all drink the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ." They drank from the mother (the generative rock, birth from the rock) the milk of rejuvenation, the mead of immortality, and this Rock was Christ, here identified with the mother, because he is the symbolic representative of the mother libido. When we drink from the cup, then we drink from the mother's breast immortality and everlasting salvation. Paul wrote of the Jews that they ate and then rose up to dance and to indulge in fornication, and then twenty-three thousand of them were swept off by the plague of serpents. The remedy for the survivors, however, was
