Once upon a time there was a king with three lovely daughters. One day he decided to go to market and asked what they would like him to bring them. The eldest wanted a golden dress. The middle one wanted a silver dress. The youngest, who was a bit difficult, wanted a bunch of talking grapes, a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.
The king confidently set off and easily found the dresses of gold and silver but nowhere could he find the magical fruits and had to return without them. On the way back the road became so churned up with mud that his royal coach got stuck fast. He called for help and all the people turned out to lend a hand but it was to no avail. The coach would not budge.
Then a grunting pig showed up and to the king’s surprise offered to help him in exchange for the hand of the youngest Princess. Well, the king was in a bit of a pickle, after all it was already past tea time, so he agreed. When he got back he had to explain to the Princess that not only had he failed to find what she wanted but he had inadvertently and quite by mistake promised her to the pig…
who would be arriving shortly to carry her off.
The Princess was not best pleased. In fact she cried and cried. Then the king had a marvelous idea. They could dress up some other poor shmuck for the pig to have instead and a palace maid was duly sacrificed. But when the pig showed up with his wheel barrow he was having none of it regardless of the costume and jewels.
‘Oink! Send out the real Princess!’
Then the king had another marvelous idea and dressed the Princess up in rags before sending her out thinking this would put the pig off but he was ecstatic, popped her in the wheelbarrow and took her off to his sty. By now the Princess is beside herself with grief but the pig is kind and offers her his soft bed of filthy straw. She lays down, still crying. The pig comforts her with his warty trotter. She bursts into tears again. So he offers her some of his swill, with extra added corn…
which she accepts, taking the tiniest bite.
Eventually the Princess cries herself to sleep. It’s a deep, deep sleep. When she wakes up the world has changed. She is in a feather bed being attended by maids who help her dress in fine clothes. They then lead her out into the banqueting hall of the castle where she’s met by a fine young Prince. He shows her the gardens in which she finds the magical fruits growing.
‘All this is yours and I am too, if you will have me.’ He goes on to explain that he is the pig who had been bewitched, a spell only to be broken by someone, someone difficult, who wanted a talking vine and a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.
This quaint Hungarian folk tale has parallels in Italy, Straparola’s ‘The Pig King’, and in Germany, Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’, which suggests common and therefore ancient roots. There is something about a Princess betrayed, an animal husband and magical trees which strikes some deep allegorical chord in us. What could it be?
At the time these stories were beginning to impress themselves on the popular imagination some six thousand years ago, the development of ego consciousness was burgeoning. The problem with teasing the individual from the collective is that s/he then has to contend with it. In deed, you can only really hope to keep yourself afloat in this new situation by the most strenuous effort.
Ego consciousness which feels it is sufficient to itself is symbolized by the old king. He believes he can find meaning in the local market place. His attitude is, ‘the psyche is what I know of it.’ The treasure hard to attain must exist within the auspices of his own personal kingdom. This leads to the stuckness of existential crisis where no amount of effort can get you out of the muddy rut you are in. One of the features of ego consciousness, despite all the bells and whistles, is that it cannot provide its own meaning. For that it has to broker a relationship with the non-rational, primordial soup from which it has emerged.
Its popular these days to think of the Unconscious as a rubbish heap you have to rake through in therapy, as though all there was to contend with in life was the stuff of childhood. But what about the figures further back than that? What about the mytho/poetic layers of the psyche beyond the continental shelf, which were there way before ego consciousness had the great idea of going its own rutted way?
‘One is inclined to think that ego consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious. Unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown?’ Jung CW9 p520
The appearance of the pig leaves the king in a terrible dilemma. He does not know what to do with these fascinating and possessive archetypal energies. He agrees to it’s proposal without thinking things through and in so doing omnipotently draws the pig into serving the ego’s partisan needs, getting home in time for tea.
Sometimes the primal energies of the psyche get projected onto powerful others who then positively glow with manna and into whose arms we then throw all of life’s responsibilities. Equally disastrous is it to try and employ the psyche to one’s own personal ends. It inflates the ego such that everyone else simply becomes the means to an end.
‘He gets involved in a ridiculous self deification. The mistake he makes comes from attributing to himself the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself either god or devil. Here we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of [the king] with a kind of primeval force and compels [him] to transgress the bounds of humanity.’ Jung CW7 p110
When the king strikes his bargain he renders himself inert as a container for numinous experience. His easy way out ends his relevance to the story. He is left alternately justifying his grandiosity and gnashing his teeth with regret. It is now up to the Princess to see what she can do with the pig.
The Princess has been betrayed and sold out like chattel. She is the rejected black sheep in the family, cast out for having her eyes on something other than worldly values. Her grief at her father’s bad faith, her loss of belonging, the horror of being cast down, all would lead her to believe that she has fallen into the grip of evil. Hers is a dark night of the soul.
The theme of being abducted by an animal husband has a class of its own in the ATU classification of fairy tales, (ATU 402), identified by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva as being among the earliest of proto IndoEuropean stories. It seems such stories convey an ancient truth, that to identify with emerging reason is a disaster, for with it comes either inflation or projection. To survive being caught between these opposites one must forge a narrow path full of suffering in wedlock to the irrational.
The Princess manages to do this by refusing passive acquiesce to what is happening whilst refraining from blame or trying to claw her way back to the throne.
‘The only person who escapes the grim law of [inflation/projection] is the [one] who knows how to separate themselves from the unconscious, not by repressing it—for then it simply attacks from the rear—but by putting it clearly before you as that which you are not. The patient must learn to differentiate what is ego and what is non-ego, i.e., collective psyche.’Jung CW7 p113
Most crucially the Princess accepts the swill (with added corn) offered by the pig. She allows herself to be fed by the Unconscious. The swill is generally a poorly regarded thing, like the conviction that your dreams are nothing but the brain winding down at the end of the day, the dung heap upon which the philosopher’s stone may or may not be found, meaningless daydreams. Yet the mean swill is also a communion, a sacred experience of between which then breaks the spell of separation and ultimately yields the magical fruit of selfhood.
The Princess finds a way to accommodate the pig without being caught in the trap of either rejecting or identifying with it. In so doing her circumstances are transformed, her inner world blooms and she is restored to wholeness.
