Fresh Elimination of the Father, Repetition of the Guilty Deed

Freud makes several references to Christianity and the religions of Fathers/Sons during this essay and describes the Eucharist as displaying, "the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed down but of which they must none the less feel so proud...[communion is] essentially a fresh elimination of the father, a repetition of the guilty deed" (509). He emphasizes this use of communion as a ritual Christians have adapted in order to constantly repeat and rediscover a complicated act of killing the father through the rise of the son. The story of Jesus Christ is complex in that Jesus's death is a sacrifice to God (the Father) in order to pay for the guilty sins of mankind (the children). However, as Freud mentions, this sacrifice of life is both the "greatest possible atonement to the father" AND an "attainment of his wishes against the father, displacing the father-religion with a son-religion (508-509).

This process of acknowledging and reliving the Last Supper and the ascension of Jesus to God is constantly referenced in music and film, and I chose to briefly analyze it in relation to the song/music video "Becoming A Jackal" by Villagers. (And I'm definitely taking a bit of a creative license with this!) Many of Villagers songs deal with themes of religion, conflict, and intricate family relationships, and "Jackal" can be interpreted as an emergence of the son understanding his desires to overpower a larger force preventing him from attaining his desires. In the case of this song/video, the narrator can be interpreted as abandoning the person presented "in the scene beneath the window pane/where the jackals preyed on every soul/where they tied you to a pole/and stripped your of your clothes" (the Jesus figure, made Father figure by his rise to God). The music video shows him surrounded by carcasses of meat and dancing pigs (pigs are often referred to as "taboo" in the Bible), and finally shows him breaking out of the "shackles" placed upon him by some higher power as he towers over the landscape. In the final lines of the song, the narrator references what could be the acts of confession and communion ("how i benefit from you being here/lending me your ears/while i'm selling you my fears") and reflects on this continuous destruction of the Father, killing him again and again through the consumption of flesh and blood.