Ancient Germanic Mythos: Hitler the Archetypal Wotan and Savior
Regressus ad Uterum refers to the spontaneous regression to a time or a situation when a person or an entire nation felt like a child in the womb of their mother; safe and with the unhindered potential to realize its inner nature. So, to the defeated and fragmented post First World War Germans, the world of their ancestors, of Arminius and the much older one of the legendary myths, heroes, and the Valhalla of the great Nordic legends, became models of admiration and inspiration. The true German bard, Wagner, was able to bring this Mythos to the forefront and the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung identified certain archetypes manifesting in the collective subconscious of the German Volk.
Eastern Front theatre of World War I in 1916 (Public Domain)
What is most striking is the constancy and similarity of these archetypal figures and the violent power of their expansion, that led the German people to loosen their bond with the real world, luring them towards the unexplored universe of Mythos. Wotan's sons also rediscovered their ethnic-cultural origins through their exploration of the visionary cosmos of the Nordic fairy tales, following the publication of the fables of the Grimm brothers. In the Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology) by Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm, (1835) they tried to recover their Mythos in search of a superior spiritual light, hidden but powerful, within the Volk, to recompose the nation’s fragmented self.
