Once there was a young hero whose prospective father-in-law threw him out of the house, threatening to beat him if he ever returned. The poor lad was entirely dejected. He didn’t know what to do.
One day, a strange little man in red clothes appeared to him as he walked aimlessly through the woods, promising him great wealth if only the lad would give him the amulet he wore around his neck, gifted to him by his Grandmother. The poor boy’s thoughts were so taken up by his current situation that he readily parted with the amulet, eager to find out more. The Devil, for ’twas He, then led him further into the woods saying that this very night the magical Fern Flower will come into bloom. If only he could find it, it would grant his greatest wish.
Once our hero finds the Flower, the Devil takes him to a ramshackle cottage in which lives an Old Crone… who is also her cat. When she leaps at them from the cottage doorway the Fern Flower sinks into the ground, bewitched. The Crone tells the hero he can have it back if he stabs to death the figure she presents him, shrouded in a cloth. He pulls back the covering to see…himself, aged ten, the amulet around his neck.
He strikes and kills the child.
After blacking out for a day or a week, he wakes in warm sunlight to find himself surrounded by bulging sacks of gold. Delighted, he runs back to his village and showers his prospective father-in-law with the coins who then duly consents to the marriage. When the day comes, our hero goes through the ceremony like a gollum, feeling nothing, expressing less. He is vacant, distracted, uninvolved. The food tastes bland, the music is jarring, his bride seems bloodless…
That night his new wife tries to embrace him but strange visions and ghastly apparitions appear between them, preventing their union. Our story ends with the hero weeping like a child into the lap of a wife he can no longer love.
At the beginning of this tale we find the protagonist being thrown out by his prospective father-in-law. He has nowhere to go and so we can assume this is not the first home he has been ejected from by some dread fate.. The rejected child cannot help but concur with the Universe’ seeming judgement on him. The forest begins to swallow him up. In order to keep step with the world he internalizes its condemnation and rejects himself with a steady stream of silent scorn running beneath entreaties for life to be otherwise. Branches close overhead.
This is not a very good place from which to be negotiating any deals with little men in red suits. Discrimination and reflection are all shot to pieces. You can’t focus very well from a thousand yard stare. So he doesn’t think too much about why the Devil might want his amulet. All he knows is that he’s been given the means to rectify his situation and get his agenda back on track.
‘Everything that ye entreat from the god-sun begetteth a deed of the devil.’ CG Jung
Of course the denouement of the story is his killing of the inner child, severance from authentic memory and experience, from an essential sense of self; paradoxically, a defense against overwhelming feelings of abandonment and loss. Yet the ground for this self murder is laid at the moment he parts with his seemingly insignificant amulet, given to him by his Grandmother.
What is this amulet? Why does its loss give rise to such catastrophe?
In Grimm’s story, ‘The Devil and his Grandmother’, we find out that ‘Grandma’ is able to outwit the Devil. She works on behalf of the hero to uncover the Devil’s secrets and help him get out in one piece. In Jack and the Beanstalk she is the Giant’s wife who helps Jack escape with the treasure hard to attain. This is because she is the Great Mother herself whose help and protection are essential to the heroic quest. Without Hera’s help the Argonauts would have been wrecked. Without Athena, Orestes wold have been pulled apart by the Furies.
Grandmother is Great Mother Earth. To lose her amulet is to lose all kinds of connections on all kinds of levels, from Nature in an outer sense but then also from the Ground of one’s own Being and then to the extent intimacy might be possible with a significant other.
The loss of these inner and outer connections is disastrous for our hero. The rejected Goddess assumes a demonic form and compels consciousness to split and attack itself…
‘The archetype of the Great Mother comes in through the back door and does something horrible, [the hero] has to sacrifice his children. When something in the unconscious is rejected, the disturbance goes around the corner and the rejected content attacks something else.” M.L. von Franz.
Without the connection to the Great Mother in her life giving aspect, not only is her protective connection lost but the Principle of Relatedness is turned on its head, manifesting as violent division. The Old Crone in our story is a manifestation of what Marion Woodman would call ‘The Death Mother’, who compels inner conflict and kills off spontaneity. It is these internal chasms opening up that consumer culture, compulsion and addiction, are all trying to fill, a compensation for the loss of Grandma’s lap and the creative wholeness of the murdered child. As we see from our story, the great piles of stuff promised to our hero do nothing for him. The gold has cost him the child-like capacity to enjoy it, to enjoy anything. Some variants of the story have the earth simply swallow him up at the end, consumed with loss and remorse.
The seemingly insignificant amulet from ‘Grandma’ has the power to avert this kind of disaster because it places relatedness at the heart of any value system, promoting traffic between I and me, between self and world, furnishing any venture into the unknown with sufficient internal cohesion necessary to suffer the hardships involved.
It seems our tale has a moral, desire for control leads to being controlled. The wish to posses leads to possession. Yet it conveys more than that, it points to the origins of all this suffering and invites us to reconsider our relationship with the Great Mother.
In Alex Hailey’s novel ‘Roots’, the ancestor Kunte Kinte is sold into slavery. His last act before being shipped away from his motherland is to take a handful of soil and wrap it into a banana leaf, smuggling this totem of belonging onto the slave ship. The amulet was passed on for seven generations, acting as a psychic anchor for the bearer, until it passed to Hailey who then told the whole story and journeyed back to the land of his ancestors.
We ourselves may not have such a dramatic story to tell and our journey may be less literal but it is also incumbent upon us to respond to life’s constraints with symbolic gestures and meaningful ritual. This connects us back to our own primordial roots so that we need not become divided against ourselves, nor kill off our own creative possibility in the search for quick fixes which rail impotently against circumstantial constraint..
The hero in our story suffers a fate worse than death on account of his desire to have control over events. The quick fix of Chlorox for Corona virus is likely to have a similar trajectory. It is not simply that people’s intelligence can be insulted only so much but that even the most ardent fan must surely suffer a chill at such a flagrant departure from reality, one which even bags of gold cannot comfort.
