The Taboo: The suggestion that primitive wo/man was not merely a remedy-supplying imagination but also an emotional life brings this discussion to the contribution of one of the greatest modern researchers, Sigmund Freud. Freud spoke of the dominance of the father figure in the memory of sons who rebelled against their parent and killed him in order to release his hold on the women in the family. In the well-known continuation of Freud's story, when the son overcomes his father and kills him, his siblings place a collective prohibition on themselves against conducting sexual relations with the women who have been freed from the father's possess in order to prevent the eruption of a familial blood feud. This is the origin of two elements of the taboo: The prohibition against patricide on the one hand and against sexual relations with one's mother and sisters on the other. This taboo, which is cross-generational according to Freud, is not the result of logic as much as its source is emotive - the trauma which the sons experienced and passed down to the following generations and cultures. Although I do not wish to contend with Freud at this stage, I want to recall here something which is found in many religious heritages, including Judaism, and which Freud should have known as a Jew. In many prayers, especially those recited during the Days of Awe, the expression "Our Father, our God" occurs as an invocation for protection. This does not present the Father as someone who should be killed, whom people are seeking to kill, or are afraid of, but a merciful God who, even if we are unworthy of His lovingkindness, promises to come and save us, the only condition being that we seek Him with a full heart and complete repentance as a sinful soul and out of a sincere desire to do what is right and proper - a foundation which constitutes a fundamental moral component in all theistic religions. Spirits exist in primitive religion and it is obvious that the human motivation out of which arises the ghost of the dead wo/man to whom one turns originates - as at least one possibility - from the fact that the person who is dead and hides his spirit is missing and longed for on the part of the living person who calls up his/her spirit. The person who calls up a spirit wishes to establish connection with him/her. This desire arises from the fact that the person who imagines senses that the dead person - had s/he been alive at that moment - would undoubtedly have given him his/her support, as if s/he had been standing by his/her side right then. To whom is it more natural that a person should turn for assistance and comfort than one's mother - and after her, to one's father? When talking about physical obstacles and threats, what figure calls up the idea of support and aid more than the strong father known from a person's childhood? This is the memory which the small child retains when s/he grows up and becomes an adult and which appears in the face of difficult and troubling problems. In such a situation, the adult once again experiences him/herself as the small child whose father protected and defended him/her against dangerous events and wild beasts. "If only my father was here" - cries the grown-up wo/man in face of his/her impotence. The father figure arises out of this distress and summons by means of the imaginative power innate in wo/man. At this moment, this figure is the similitude of the father's spirit, a figure which arises out of the reality of periodicity and the new growth of nature in which nothing vanishes from the world but always springs up afresh. This may be the origin of the institution of spiritism in general. It may be that this is the spirit of a hero (warrior?) from the past which the child received from his/her father in his/her childhood, whom his/her father believed protected him, as he himself received such a figure from his father, and so on and so forth. Or it may be a spirit defined according to the function which it plays, without a name. The Jewish expression "the Lord God of spirits" represents a development of this idea. Even Moses, when he came to the enslaved Israelites in Egypt, declared that he came as an agent of the God of their fathers, without mentioning His name. There is no contradiction between the figure of the father as protector, the spirit of the father out of whom other spirits also arose and became gods, and Freud's taboo theory. Ambivalence is a natural quality in human beings and it includes both spirits and gods which concretise and institutionalise the idea of spiritism. This is part of the inner wealth with which people have been blessed. What is important at this stage, however, is to present the benefits which primitive wo/man gains from religion. This has been illustrated above.