Once upon a time there was a Poor Man, a Merchant and a King. One day the Merchant was out hunting in the forest and became lost. For three days he tried to find his way out. Eventually he exclaimed, ‘if only someone could show me the way out of this terrible forest I would give him three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of the most beautiful of my three daughters. Immediately, a small hedgehog appeared and said, ‘come with me, for three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of your most beautiful daughter I will show you the way.” The Merchant agrees in a flash and in no time he was sat back at home in his comfy chair recounting tales of his brave adventures.
The next day the King went hunting in the forest, He too became hopelessly lost and could not find the way out.’ Oh, if only someone would help me, I would give them three carts of gold and the hand in marriage of my most beautiful daughter,’ whereupon the Hedgehog once more appeared and promised to show the King the way out. The King agrees but only after he’s really thought about it.
Then the Poor Man went out hunting and like the others soon became lost. ‘Oh’. he exclaimed, ‘I have nothing to give but if someone were to help me out I would make them my own dear child.’ Once more the hedgehog appeared and led the Poor Man to the edge of the forest.
Time passed. The King, the Merchant and the Poor Man had all but forgotten the Hedgehog. One wintry night when the Poor Man was tucked up in his bed he heard a plaintive tapping at the window. ‘Father, father, let me in, it is I your son.’ The Poor Man was puzzled and went to the door to find the Hedgehog all covered in snow. ‘My son! How happy I am to see you!’ He let the creature in and made up a bed for him. In the morning the Hedgehog asked, ‘Father if you have two pennies, would you go into the village and buy me a black cockerel and an old saddle?’ The Poor Man agreed and when he returned the Hedgehog saddled up the cockerel and rode away like the wind, soon arriving at the house of the Merchant who was shocked and not a little put out to see him. He grudgingly called his daughters forward and the Hedgehog chose the one he liked best but she cried and threw herself to the ground wailing and beating the floor with her fists.
On the way back the Merchant’s daughter continued her refrain. ‘Are you still crying?’ asked the Hedgehog. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and I will continue to cry to my dying day!’ ‘Oh dear,’ said the Hedgehog, ‘well, you’d better go home then.’ So he sent her home…but kept the gold.
Once he had dropped off the gold with the Poor Man, the Hedgehog rode away on the black cockerel to the King’s castle. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I wish I did not but I do,’ sighed the king and called for his daughters, the most beautiful of which was chosen by the Hedgehog who was only too happy to repay the favor shown to her father. The king was glad he had such a kind-hearted daughter but was also sad to lose his only kind-hearted daughter.
The King loaded up a coach full of gold and diamonds. Then the Princess got in as well and, with the Hedgehog riding alongside, they set off. After a few hours the Hedgehog put his head in the window and was pleased to see the Princess was not crying. ‘Why do you ride when you could be sitting here with me?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ he replied, ‘and don’t you find me ugly?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘I know you will do me no harm..’ and with that a great miracle occurred. The Hedgehog was transformed into a shining Prince and the Black Cockerel into a prancing stallion. A great palace appeared and celebrations prepared. Invitations were sent out to everyone in the land and all attended the great feast except the Merchant and his daughter… who were too busy crying.
The Merchant, the King and the Poor Man represent three distinct attitudes to life, identified in the Gnostic tradition as Hylic, Psychic, and Pneumatic. They symbolize stages of psycho-spiritual development.
The simplest and least developed of these is the hylic Merchant and by extension his daughter who only have a single point of view. Events can only have one inevitable outcome. Everything is preordained.
“The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.’ H. Marcuse.
You can only chose a path if you have tried the others and know where they go. Those who have only one ‘take’ on life have not chosen. They are compelled, by the partisan interests of persona which creates self affirming realities. These realities then justify knee jerk responses which create in turn a kind of negative feed back loop or self fulfilling prophecy. Everything is always awful or hopeless whether the daughter is being carried off or returned, whether they get invited to the wedding or not.
The problem for the hylic Merchant and his daughter is that they have not evolved sufficiently out of narcissistic self pre-occupation. They can’t take in or relate to the Other and so real meaning and purpose is denied them, hence the true origin of all those tears.
‘Where there is no “other”, or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases’ Jung (1950: 193).
Instead of consciousness the Merchant has only reason. He reasons that he should pay the Hedgehog’s price for giving him safe passage out of the forest, then he reason’s once he’s safe that he has made a bad investment, followed by reasoning that they have been robbed of an opportunity once the truth of the Prince comes out.
“Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own … constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining. In short, reason can only find what it is looking for; it may, however, not be what really matters.” ibid
The King is what the Gnostics identify as psychic and represents a more evolved kind of consciousness, one that is complicated, full of moral problems and ambivalent attitudes precisely because he acknowledges the Other and is no longer constrained by black and white thinking. This is most poetically expressed by his happiness and sadness about the same thing, that he has a kind-hearted daughter. He can walk and chew gum at the same time, though it’s because of his complexity that he suffers and prevaricates and dithers.
The Poor Man represents pneumatic or spiritual consciousness. The Greek word ‘pneuma’ means ‘breath’ which was held to be identical with a person’s essence or life force. He is poor in that life’s complexity has collapsed into the tolerance of paradox. His strange new son is something he accepts without being troubled by its irrationality. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and he doesn’t need to. He can go with the flow and accept what life brings. He knows life’s treasure is a matter of heart.
The ‘hidden’ fourth in this triad is the Hedgehog himself, the Spirit of Nature who becomes humanized by the trust and gratitude of the kind-hearted daughter. The alchemists used to describe the difficulty of transforming base material into the precious philosopher’s stone as ‘the problem of three and four’. Why? Because three into four won’t go. Consciousness and the Unconscious have a way of flying off from each other like magnetic opposites. They are tenaciously irreconcilable.
‘Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky. Jung CW11
Yet, despite all this and perhaps because of this, these opposites can be bridged once a feeling of loving kinship can be established between the Poor Man and the Hedgehog, a necessary precursor to marriage with the blithe and trusting spirit of the kind-hearted daughter.
