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From the analysis of the mythical Object-world and its way of being discovered and determined, the inquiry then turns toward “subjective actuality” and its unveiling in myth. Cassirer begins this discussion with a fundamental and biting critique of “animism,” which still dominates in the most diverse ways the investigations of ethnological research. The world of mythical Dasein cannot simply be interpreted on the basis of the prevailing conceptions of the soul; for then the “subject” as such still remains veiled. To the extent that mythical Dasein is familiar with itself at all, it does not interpret itself solely in relation to a world that is grasped purely in terms of things. Object [Objekt] and subject and the relation between them is understood by mythical Dasein within the horizon of what makes itself evident as the the general character of the actual, that is, it is understood in terms of mana. What has to be shown here is precisely how mythical Dasein, which in its “indeterminate life-feeling” remains bound to all beings, enacts a “confrontation” between world and I that is proper to it, rooted in its own specific way of being, i.e., in its “doing.” The sphere of the actual that is primarily discovered and delimited in doing, in a peculiar reflecting back upon doing itself, makes doing visible in its different “capabilities.” Within the horizon of magical power one’s own doing is a magical act. “The first force [Kraft] by means of which the human places himself as something proper and independent over and against things is the force of wish [Wunsch]” (p. 194) [Symbolic Forms, p. 157]. “The abundance of divine forms that the human creates for himself not only serves to guide it through the sphere of objective being and events but rather above all through the sphere of its own will and accomplishment and illuminates this sphere from within” (p. 251) [Symbolic Forms, p. 203]. The further process of the unveiling of “subjectivity” and its ways of comportment is carried out in the transition from nature-myths to culture-myths, until finally, in the more or less magic-free manipulation of tools, the Being-connected between things becomes manifest on its own terms as independent. The human thereby frees itself from being magically bound to things and in a retreat from the world lets that world be encountered “Objectively.”

Just as the subject does not discover itself in the emergence and return of things that stand purely over and against it, neither is it the case that a divided I-You relationship, or any such form of community, is primarily constitutive for the unveiling of subjectivity. Totemism, which is improperly posited as the grounding phenomenon of mythical Dasein, cannot be explained sociologically. Instead, all social divisions and the individuals that are given along with them, require, like totemism itself, a “grounding” developed from out of the original way of Being of mythical Dasein and the mana-representation that dominates it. The proper problem of totemism lies in the fact that not only the human as such stands in a certain inextricable relation to the animal or the plant, but that each particular group has its own particular totemic animal. Farmers, herdsmen, and hunters each discover themselves in reference to plants and animals in a way that is peculiar to each and that makes itself evident immediately as a magical affiliation. At the same time, however, this reference makes it possible, in a reflecting back, for the pertinent human life spheres to become explicit as such. Totemism is not caused by particular kinds of plants and animals but rather emerges from out of the elementary Dasein-relations of the human to its world.

Only when things are grounded in the mana-representation does it then also become possible to conceive how individual self-consciousness takes shape and how the “concept” of the soul comes to be articulated. What is later conceptually distinguished as body and soul, or life and death, is indeed also always already actual for mythical Dasein but in the mode of magical power, according to which what is dead also is, and a force of the soul makes itself known even when the human met with is not encountered bodily. Only in the unity of magical efficacy can the individual forces of the soul or the individual “souls” appear as split apart and dwell along side one another. Correspondingly the “development” of individual Dasein is also distributed among different subjects, between which determinate transitions take place. In its being threatened by magical powers, mythical Dasein’s “own” soul stands as an “alien” power over and against it. Even where the representation of protective spirits is awakened, one’s own self is still a power, as it were, which protectively takes up the individual I. Only first at higher levels does the magical daemon become daimonion and genius, in such a way that Dasein in the end comes to determine itself not as an alien power but rather from out of that for which it is freely capable, from itself and for itself as an ethical subject.