Once upon a time there was on old king who had two sons. The king was so old and sick he could not leave the castle. One day, from a window, the old King spied a magical bird atop a steeple which then flew off into the forest. Filled with longing, he asked his youngest son to go and fetch it. The Prince happily set off and spent the day searching the forest.
When darkness falls the Prince built a fire. As he sat warming himself a Fox approached the camp. The Prince sets his dog on the Fox but before any harm could come to him the Fox turns the Prince and his dog to stone.
When the younger Prince fails to reappear the older Prince is then sent to find out what has happened to him. He too finds himself in the forest and lights a fire. Again the Fox appears but this Prince greets him kindly and offers him something to eat.
Jung identifies two distinct ways in which people habitually relate to the Unconscious. One way is to identify with it utterly and to become inflated as we saw in the last blog, ‘The Pig Bride’; an old king loses everything by simply subsuming himself to the desires of the Pig, by abdicating his personal responsibilities and inhumanly sacrificing his daughter.
The second way in which we habitually deal with the Unconscious is quite the opposite, to pretend it doesn’t exist. This denial of the Unconscious and the scrambling to re-establish the Persona which follows is symbolized in our current fairy tale by the younger Prince who chooses to kill the Fox rather than negotiate anything with him or suffer his intrusion. Aliveness is thus petrified. The fructifying potential in the Unconscious is cut off and so the Prince becomes benumbed and transfixed.
This Prince is identified with his Persona. He can be told nothing new. He knows everything there is to know. His is a world of ‘first and only’. Everything outside the purview of his personal bubble is irrelevant, so he lacks curiosity…
and caution.
Such a man tends to sneer at the world because anything which doesn’t immediately concern the Persona is deemed irrelevant, mock worthy. In fact the maintenance of his Persona may require him to degrade and vilify others, which means he is unprepared for the possibility that the Fox might be more than his match.
Jung notes that Goethe’s Faust exemplifies this denial of the Unconscious…
‘Towards the Beyond the view has been cut off; Fool—who directs that way his dazzled eye. To roam into eternity is vain! Thus let him walk along his earth long day; Though phantoms haunt him, let him go his way, CW7 p472
The foolish Prince is oblivious to anything in the Psyche which is non-ego and so he has nothing to look out for until it turns him to stone. Indeed he lived ‘happily and without a care in the world’ until he gets zapped. His refusal to look beyond his own hide bound concerns is his fatal undoing…
Keep to the narrow round, confine your mind, And live on fodder of the simplest kind, Mephistopheles in Goethe CW7p475
Its interesting to note that the operation of evil in Goethe’s epic, Mephistopheles, is intent not upon leading Faust astray, but upon keeping him fixed to what he knows, to his Persona. His efforts are aimed at keeping Faust’s nose to the grindstone such that a soulful life may never develop in the first place, let alone that it might be lost. In the process the problem of good and evil fade away. They say that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he does not exist.
The mischief, then, lies neither with the collective psyche nor with the individual psyche, but in allowing the one to exclude the other. Jung CW7 p481
The older brother in our story is not so hampered by the blinkered narcissism of his sibling. In his own travels he seems to have learned that life is complicated and so when the Fox appears he can think beyond his own assumptions sufficiently to be circumspect. He takes the Fox’s power seriously and so engages its co-operation. As soon as he is offered warmth and food the Fox turns into a young man who promises to help the Prince find the mysterious bird which, he says, resides seven lands away in the gardens of the Red King.
Eventually they arrive at the palace of the Red King. In the center of gardens they find a Pear tree and in that tree nests the magical bird. The Fox warns the brother not to bite any of the fruits in the tree for that will alert the guards but of course he does and is dragged before the Red King who offers him an alternative to summary execution. He is to find and abduct a Princess in a castle at the edge of the sea and bring her to the Red King. The older brother accepts the challenge and the Fox pledges his support…
‘Again you took the difficult task. I won’t let you do it alone. You were good to me, unlike your brother.’
Prince and Fox journey together. The Fox has solutions for every hazard they encounter. Eventually they find the Princess, who is not too keen on the idea of marrying the Red King. So the Fox transforms himself into a stunning bride for the occasion, escaping during the festivities to rejoin the Prince and Princess who are slowly making their way back home. On the way the Fox transforms the younger brother back from stone. When they all return the older brother gives the magical bird to his dying father who is then youthfully restored.
Jung identifies several ways in which the Persona may be freed from it’s stony encapsulation. These methods are personified by the actions of the more mature Prince. Firstly, he refrains from setting his dog on the Fox. In other words he avoids the mistake of having only a single knee-jerk point of view and accepts the non-rational to his fire side.
‘The human psyche is both individual and collective. Its well-being depends on the natural co-operation of these two apparently contradictory sides.’ Jung CW7 p486
When the Fox tells the Prince that the magical bird he’s looking for lies seven lands away and suggests they go in search of it, he’s inviting him to pursue a set of allegorical symbols, in other words, a fantasy whose contents are beyond the horizon. The Prince has to go off piste on the understanding that the symbol..
‘acts as a signpost, providing the clues we need in order to carry on our lives in harmony with ourselves. The meaning [of the symbol] resides in the fact that it is an attempt to elucidate something that is still entirely unknown or still in the process of formation.‘ pp492
Thirdly, the older brother has developed a sense of relatedness. Whilst he values the Fox and is prepared to go along with him on the symbolic quest to find the Red King and subsequently the Princess, he does not abdicate his own moral ground in the process. When he finds out that the Princess is unwilling, he does not force her despite the fact that this may well incur the wrath of the Red King and stymie his efforts to return to his own lands with the magical bird.
‘He who does not possess this moral function, this loyalty, will never get rid of his neurosis. But he who has this capacity will certainly find the way to cure himself.’ pp499
When the Prince finally returns to his own lands with the magical bird, the treasure hard to attain, it rejuvenates the old King. The magical bird is a symbol of the transcendent function, the synthesis of consciousness and the unconscious, which, like the Grail, has the power to reanimate and bring fresh meaning.
