Years ago and far away there lived a Miller and his wife who were famous for the fine flour made by their riverside Mill. Though they prospered, the Miller and his wife privately harbored a secret grief, they had no child.
As the years went by this secret sadness gnawed away at each of them such that all the things they prized seemed to wither away. The horse got thin and mangy. The roof had fallen in a bit, the flour had weevils and business had all but dried up.
One evening, the poor Miller, feeling cursed, went and sat down by the river, bemoaning his lot. All of a sudden came a voice from the Mill pond saying, ‘listen poor man, I will help you in your troubles. I will give you riches beyond your wildest dreams. All you have to do is give me the living creature that you haven’t got at home.’
The Miller scratched his head. Perhaps she meant a cat. Maybe one of the farmer’s cows had wandered in. So he agreed to the Water Fairy’s terms and strolled off home with a merry swagger. On the way he met the last of his servants running towards him. ‘Mr Miller, come quick! Your wife has given birth to a baby boy!’ Suddenly the Miller realizes what has happened and rushes back to the Mill Pond begging to have the deal rescinded but the Mill pond was still as.. well, a mill pond.
As the young lad grows up he is warned over and again not to go near the river, and especially the Mill Pond, lest the Water Fairy carry him away. Once he had become a man a local hunter took him into his service and liked him so much that when his daughter fell in love with the Miller’s son he happily consented to their marriage.
One day the hunter’s apprentice espied a magnificent stag and gave chase to it. He became so consumed with the hunt he didn’t notice the twists and turns they took and when he finally brought down the mighty stag he found himself by a stream in an unknown place. After he had butchered the stag he went to the stream to wash the blood from his hands, forgetting the lifelong warning he had been given. The moment he touched the water, the Water Fairy pulled him in.
Eventually, his new wife discovered his things by the stream and surmised what had happened. She pleaded with the Water Fairy to return her good husband go but to no avail. Finally, late at night and in despair, she lay down by the stream in the spot he had been taken and fell asleep. In her dream she saw a hut close by in the forest where there lived a very old lady who knew all kinds of things. So when she woke up she went in search of the lonely hut and there, sure enough, she found a very old lady whose eyes positively twinkled with secrets.
The young woman told the old lady what had happened. She mused a bit and then instructed her to return to the stream at full moon with a comb which she, the old lady, would give her. There she should comb her hair over the water. The young woman did as she was bid and to her delight her husband’s head appeared out of the water momentarily but then sank back into the depths. She told the old lady what had happened and was told that the next night she should take down a spinning wheel and spin by the stream. Again her husband appeared but only to the waist before retreating once more. On the third evening the old lady told her to take a flute and play sad music by the stream. This time the whole man appeared and his wife hauled him out of the water.
Fairies and fairy stories are as ubiquitous to human experience as language itself and nearly as old. Like dreams they find ways of representing the dilemmas and situations of the human condition and offer cryptic resolutions to collective issues constellated by the emergence of individual consciousness. From the soul-stones of the Australian Aboriginal to the Sioux Indian tradition of burying your heart before battle, leaving it in the keeping of the little people, our many different cultures have all symbolised our relationship with the unconscious the same way. Science likes to think it banished these denizens of the unconscious to the bottom of the garden forgetting that psychologically speaking that is exactly where they are from. They are boundary keepers to a world beyond the garden gate. As ‘kinsmen of the unconscious, they protect navigation I.e. the venture into darkness and uncertainty.’ CG Jung
Fairies live between worlds, they have both the attributes of complexes which are to do with individuality and archetypes which are the hall mark of the collective. So, power and attitude, both of which are expressed in direct measure to the stance of consciousness.
For example, a story with a similar beginning is ‘the Elves and the Shoemaker’. Here too we find a craftsman on the edge of bankruptcy. The Shoemaker is down to his last piece of leather and cries on his wife’s shoulder that he shall have nothing to feed their children. His wife comforts him, tells him to cut up the last piece of leather anyway and then come to bed. Over night the shoes are miraculously sewn together by Elves.
The Shoemaker and the Miller are very different men and so they elicit very different responses from the little people. The Shoemaker’s grief is not kept a secret. He shares his woes with his wife who is encouraging and comforting in return. The Principle of Relatedness in this couple is alive and well. Their authentic and shared despair creates the space for the unconscious to contribute in the form of the helpful elves, ‘the god’s of invention.’ ibid
In the beginning of our current story we find the impoverished Miller in a very different mind set. His despair is secret. He has become sufficiently estranged from his wife not to know she is pregnant and feels he has been cursed. He is in major ‘poor me’ and believes none of this should be happening. Such a personality is like blood in the water to the liminal world of complexes and their enactments. He is open to temptation and likely to make impulsive choices. The Water Fairy offers the Miller what you could call ‘the Devil’s Gambit’, ‘I will give you what you say you want but you will be my bitch.’ She approaches the Miller at his weak spot, the feeling he’s been hard done by, his pious isolation, offering him an easy way out. Almost immediately the Miller has a massive revelation which is perhaps the Water Fairy’s intent, showing that we often have to pay for what we think we want, with what we really want…. in order to find out what it is.
Meantime the child has to grow up bearing the sins of the parent, his fate tied from birth to the parent’s hidden incongruities which then mar the enjoyment of their child, their greatest wish.. Inevitably, there has to be some kind of denouement. The young man’s desire for his own self-hood symbolized by the stag, is going to throw up the issue of the unpaid debt to Nature still owed by his father, though its something he stumbles into without awareness and so he’s defenseless. Had he gone to the water’s edge in his best clothes, bearing gifts and called graciously upon the Water Fairy to grant him some kind of leeway on account of having to pay for someone else’s stupid lack of awareness it might have panned out differently.
Fortunately, the young wife is able to come to the rescue. Her relationship to the world is entirely different to her husband’s family. She immediately tries to negotiate with the Water Fairy and failing that falls asleep where she is, in dedication to her husband’s loss. This evokes a dream in which she is given an invaluable introduction to ‘the Old Lady’ who understands that possession by autonomous complexes gradually loosen their grip in the face of love and connection.
The combing of the hair is an intimate gesture. The spinning is also of home and hearth. The sad music laments and begs his return. All these gestures are relational counter magic to the short sighted bargain made by the Miller. The wife’s willingness to endure her situation for the sake of love invites the intervention of the Unconscious on her behalf in the form of a healing and instructive dream. Her co-operation with the Old Lady and the value she has placed upon relatedness sees them through.
The story has a curious ending. A great storm blows up so violent that the world is torn apart and upside down. Husband and wife are thrown to opposite shores of a great river, though one day, entirely by chance they cross the bridge which spans the river at the same time and recognize one another. This detail of the violent storm which tears the world apart and yet out of which the protagonists manage to find one another ‘by chance’ is very much like the conclusion of Rapunzel and seems to suggest that yearning for the beloved has real power in it, overcoming all blows of fate.
Our story doesn’t say how things end for the Miller. It’s difficult not to feel a bit sorry for him, just as you might for the Republican voter who has been similarly promised all the riches imaginable and no end of winning provided they sell out the next generation in a haze of confusion about the small print in the contract. Our story says that such a dark legacy cannot be avoided, but it can be redeemed by the Principle of Relatedness, by faithfullness to both the outer other, the husband, and the inner other, the mystical Old Lady, who appears of her own accord in response to grief and longing with the intuitive knowledge of how divisive wounds may be healed.
Another really good post.