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mother. These incestuous unions are explained by the circumstance that in the Zend Avesta the marriage of relatives was directly commanded;[23] it emphasized the resemblance of rulers to the divinity, and, therefore, was more of an artificial than a natural arrangement, because it originated more from a theoretical than from a biological inclination. (A practical impetus towards that lay often in the peculiar laws of inheritance left over from the Mutter recht, "maternal right" [matriarchal], period.) The confusion which certainly frequently involved the barbarians of antiquity in regard to the choice of their sexual objects cannot very well be measured by the standard of present-day love psychology. In any case, the incest of the semi-animal past is in no way proportionate to the enormous significance of the incest phantasy among civilized people. This disproportion enforces the assumption that the incest prohibition which we meet even amongst relatively lower races concerns rather the mythical ideas than the biological damage; therefore, the ethnical prohibition almost always concerns the mother and seldom the father. Incest prohibition can be understood, therefore, as a result of regression, and as the result of a libidinous anxiety, which regressively attacks the mother. Naturally, it is difficult or impossible to say from whence this anxiety may have come. I merely venture to suggest that it may have been a question of a primitive separation of the pairs of opposites which are hidden in the will of life: the will for life and for death. It remains obscure what adaptation the primitive man tried to evade through introversion and regression to the