Salty

Salty January 5, 2015

In a classic essay on the “Symbolic Significance of Salt,” Ernst Jones neatly summarizes how the natural properties of salt lend themselves to social and religious uses:

“Salt is a pure, white, immaculate and incorruptible substance, apparently irreducible into any further constituent elements, and indispensable to living beings. It has correspondingly been regarded as the essence of things in general, the quintessence of life, and the very soul of the body. It has been invested with the highest general significance far more than that of any other article of diet was the equivalent of money and other forms of wealth, and its presence was indispensable for the undertaking of any enterprise, particularly any new one. In religion it was one of the most sacred objects, and to it were ascribed all manner of magical powers. The pungent, stimulating flavour of salt, which has found much metaphorical application in reference to pointed, telling wit or discourse, doubtless contributed to the conception of it as an essential element; to be without salt is to be insipid, to have something essential lacking. The durability of salt, and its immunity against decay, made it an emblem of immortality. It was believed to have an important influence in favouring fertility and fecundity, and in preventing barrenness; this idea is connected with other attributes than the one just mentioned, probably indeed with them all. The permanence of salt helped to create the idea that for one person to partake of the salt of another formed a bond of lasting friendship and loyalty between the two, and the substance played an important part in the rites of hospitality. A similar application of it was for confirming oaths, ratifying compacts, and sealing solemn covenants. This conception of a bond was also related to the capacity salt has for combining intimately with a second substance and imparting to this its peculiar properties, including the power to preserve against decay; for one important substance namely, water it had in fact a natural and curious affinity.”

A devoted disciple of Freud, Jones cannot resist adding that the various symbolisms of salt indicate that it is a transferred symbol of another substance – “human semen.” The fact that salt is given an importance beyond its actual significance is a sign of its symbolic significance: “the idea from which the excessive significance is derived is more important psychically than the idea to which this is transferred; the radiation of the affect, like that of electricity, is always from the site of more intense concentration to that of less.”

But of course: Salt cannot be salt. Like everything else, it must really be sex. But Jones isn’t simply projecting. There’s actually a fair bit of evidence for the association of salt with fertility. For instance: “Salt has often, especially in former times, been considered to have an exciting influence on the nervous system, and it was thus thought to possess the attribute of arousing passion and desire. Schleiden writes: ‘The Romans termed a man in love ‘salax,’ (whence our ‘salacious’) and this view still survives with us when we jokingly say that the cook who has put too much salt into the soup must be in love.’ In Belgium the custom of visiting one’s sweetheart in the nights after festivals is called ‘turning one’s love into salt.’ Shakespeare evidently uses it in the same sense in the passage ‘Though we are justices . . . we have some salt of our youth in us. In some stories collected among African natives by Frobenius6 salt is referred to as a direct equivalent of semen. Paracelsus, in his De Origine Morborum Invisibilium? teaches that Incubi and Succubi emanate from the sperma found in the imagination of those who commit the unnatural sin of Onan, but that this is no true sperma, only corrupted salt. . . The celibate Egyptian priests had at certain times to abstain wholly from the use of salt, on the ground of its being a material that excited sensual desires too much.”


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