‘What is the Devil to me anyway?’ you ask. Could He not simply be anything which frustrates or thwarts intention? Or the opposite, the seduction of an easy life?
See how it gets so tricky, so quickly?
Taken a bit more seriously, ‘what does the Devil want with me and why?’ Psychologically, ‘what does it mean to ‘integrate’ the Shadow? Is it even possible? How exactly might you do that?
The problem of Evil existed way before the Church got a hold of it and turned it into such a polarized issue. In ancient times Good and Evil existed on much more of a continuum. The Gods were both good and bad, helpful and frustrating. This article examines some of the folk lore about the Devil, to see what we might learn about ourselves. We’ll explore the possibilities of a more diplomatic solution to the zero tolerance legacy we have inherited thus far which has, with the greatest irony, contributed in vast measure to it’s further proliferation.
The Devil and the Blacksmith.
According to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification of fairy tales this story derives from one of four prototypical stories preceding the division of Indo-European languages six thousand years ago, perhaps at a time when emerging ego consciousness was separating out from and having to come to terms with the Collective and its myriad oppositions of self and other, right and wrong, good and evil.
There was once a Blacksmith who decided to show his respect for the Devil by painting an image of Him on the gate of the Smithy. Whenever he went into the Smithy he would look at the Devil and say, ‘what-ho countryman’ and this way the Smith and the Devil remained on good terms his whole life long.
After the Smith died his son took over but the boy was not forged from the same fire as his father and bashed the painted image with a hammer. The Devil endured this maltreatment for some time and then decided to teach the young man a lesson. He turned himself into an aspiring apprentice and asked the new Smith for a job, soon becoming as proficient as his new master.
One day, when the new Smith was out, an old lady went by in her carriage. The Devil was at the forge and called out after her, telling her he could make her young again if only she would trust in his skills. She agreed, so the Devil took her in his pincers and burned her to ashes in the forge. He sent for a pail of milk and dunked the ashes into it, whereupon the most beautiful young maiden emerged. ‘Thank you, sir’, she exclaimed, ‘I will send you my husband directly.’
When the old man arrived all breathless with excitement the Smith had returned and it was to him that he made the request to be transformed. Understanding there was money involved, the foolish Smith did his best and copied what he’d heard the Devil had done, first burning the old man in the forge and then putting his ashes in the milk pail but nothing happened.
The youthful wife was understandably upset and had the Smith dragged off to the gallows. At the last moment the Devil appears with the old man now transformed and so the hanging is called off, provided the Smith promise to stop bashing the Devil with his hammer. The now much wiser Smith readily agrees.
For transformation to occur the Devil has to be part of the mix.
These days it’s fashionable to combat ‘negative emotions’, like the inexperienced Smith bashing the Devil with his hammer, reinforcing the split between persona and shadow, hoping to become ‘good’, but soon getting ourselves into trouble for our efforts as the denied Other drags us to the gallows of depression and anxiety.
What we think of as ‘negative’ has the seeds of change in it. This is why the traumas of childhood need not crush us. The fact that the past cannot be changed does not stop us from changing our relationship with it, both by connecting up to painful feelings and finding value in the wound.
When I was a child the garden was full of snakes. We lived on the outskirts of a sprawling African city with a thriving rat population, the fittest and plumpest of which would make it to the very fringes of the city where generations of grateful snakes slithered in from the surrounding bush to take advantage of the feast.
My father would go out into the garden armed with a grass slasher ahead of us kids and kill the snakes he could find, an array of green and black mambas, both deadly, and boomslang, even more deadly, along with the occasional cobra or puff adder.
Consciously, I had been persuaded by my father’s mighty efforts but playing at anything, particularly football, was always a bit odd because the snakes would get involved. Pitch invasion took on a meaning all of its own and could involve eight foot mambas with all their friends and relatives out for an afternoon slither or perhaps in search of tea..
Within a short space of time I acquired an intuitive ‘knowing’ about the whereabouts of the snakes. It was as though the dangerous environment had triggered a natural defense in my psyche, just as the body produces antibodies in the presence of germs which strengthen the immune system and bring to life the very resources needed to enrich the inner world. ‘Character,’ says Helen Keller, ‘cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.’
We grow by way of adversity. Hence the Gnostic saying, ‘there is good and there is bad and that is good.’ We grow when times are hard and rest when times are easy. The good and the bad are necessary to each other. Likewise, there is no consciousness without its opposite. Consciousness itself presupposes a world of subject and object. ‘Implicit in this primal duality is every other duality, including good and evil.’ Freke and Gandy 2001
If we choose to respond to the complexity of all this by simply pitting good against evil, life is soon drained of its vitality. In childhood its necessary to graze your knee, to get lost in the woods, to experience betrayal. The developmental process needs some grit in the oyster if pearls are to be made. ‘The situation of primal trust is not viable for life. The essential truth about both trust and betrayal; they contain each other.’ J Hillman 2010
When we are very little everything is just so and taken for granted. The psyche is what you know of it. Then come intrusive experiences which usher you over the threshold into a world suddenly complicated by ambivalence and life beyond conscious control.
This transition is going to be a bumpy ride. All kinds of things that are not supposed to happen, do. The Smith realizes he has to contend with this Devil he doesn’t respect. Events have overtaken him, and he is compelled to make propitious amends. Through this fearful metanoia, brought about by a brush with death, the Smith is initiated into a wider reality and ultimately escapes with more than his neck. He becomes a new man.
It is not just the old lady and her husband who have been touched by the eternal. The inexperienced Smith has himself been transformed by his change of heart. He is compelled to re-frame his place in the scheme of things. It is the end of a whole way of experiencing life, yet one which then gives rise to a new beginning and a new respect for life’s depths. “Every dark thing one falls into can be called an initiation. The first step is generally falling into the dark place and usually appears in a dubious or negative form.” Marie-Louise von Franz, 2001
Of course this doesn’t mean to say that wickedness is then justified or that we should throw ourselves into difficult situations. Yet the question remains… What did you develop as a result of your adversity? How has your wound sensitized you? How has your suffering helped to make who you are?
Bearskin.
Once upon a time a discharged soldier had nothing left to live on and so he took himself into the forest, despairing of what was to become of him. Suddenly there appeared a little man who looked right stately but had a hideous cloven hoof….
Grimm’s fairy tales have a number of stories about the Devil. They all have a pronounced theme running through them. He is instrumental in the protagonist’s transformation and wants not their souls but their old worn out identities.
Before the Church got hold of the Devil and gave him responsibilities absent from his job description, it was widely recognized that the Shadow of Consciousness had to be carefully propitiated in order not to run foul of it. In other words, the Devil had to be given his due, not by way of succumbing to wickedness, nor even by the prudent psychological hygiene of respectful gestures and diplomatic compromises to ward off his worst effects, but by the recognition that he plays a meaningful part in the evolution of consciousness. As the alchemists say, ‘A warring peace; a sweet wound; a mild evil.”
Grimm’s stories show that trying to run the Devil out of town ends very badly, creating all kinds of splits, disasters and neurotic conflicts. You can see this in our culture’s obsessive preoccupation with excessive politeness and being ‘positive’. In full blown Orwellian tradition becoming whole now involves dividing the psyche against itself rather than inquiring into the meaning of things.
This involves a collective spiritual bypassing of such proportions it has its own service industry and several shelves in your local book store full of advice on how to get rid of all those warty, all-too-human parts of you which fall so far short of perfection’s tyranny. When they are denied such forces are then bound to become all the more powerful , because they are beyond influence let alone transformation.
‘I understand well what you need’, said the Devil, just as the Old Soldier was about to speak, ‘but there must be some fair exchange’. The soldier agrees provided their arrangement does not compromise his salvation for he knows only too well to whom he speaks…
The Devil’s request is subtle, poetic and symbolically intriguing. The Old Soldier must kill a bear and wear it’s pelt for seven years during which time he may neither wash nor cut his hair or nails. If the Old Soldier survives this experience he is free to go with great riches.
Once agreed, the Devil throws into the bargain his own coat, whose magical pockets are always filled with gold,…
which was nice of him..
wasn’t it?
Why else would a trickster who delights in mischief give you magic pockets full of gold for any reason other than because he is a really nice chap? Though, they do say that the Devil comes to you not with horns and a tail but as everything you ever wanted….
And so it was that the newly dubbed, ‘Bearskin’, went out into the world ‘refraining from nothing that did him good’. He could indulge any whim money could buy, live out his wildest material fantasies, though slowly, year by year, his appearance deteriorated. Bearskin’s hair matted into his beard. His face arms and feet became encrusted with filth. He smelled terrible and though he showered the poor with golden ducats to pray for his soul he couldn’t shower himself, so he was soon invariably shunned wherever he went…
In the fourth year of his travail he stopped at an Inn whose landlord would not receive him, directing him to the stable instead. There he sat alone in the dirt and the dung until his attention was drawn by someone crying. He went to see what was the matter and found a ragged old man weeping bitterly in his room.
At first the old man is terrified of Bearskin but then perceives him to be human. Bearskin shows him kindness, inquiring into his suffering and soon the old man tells him all his troubles; he is about to be imprisoned for debt and so his three daughters will have no-one to support them.
Bearskin swiftly hands him a small sack of gold, resolving all his problems in one go. The old man is so grateful he offers Bearskin the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. The older two are totally put off by the filth and the stench but the youngest sees only the kindness of his gesture towards her father and volunteers herself. Bearskin vows to return once his tenure to the Devil is paid and gives her half a gold ring, keeping the other half himself.
Eventually the seven years are up. The Devil admits Bearskin’s success and is compelled to wash and comb him, to trim his nails and shave his beard, to dust his coat and polish his boots. Then the transformed Bearskin returns to his beloved who recognizes the handsome stranger by his half of the ring.
At the beginning of our story we find our hero at the end of his road. Peace has broken out and his old war time identity is redundant, a classic existential crisis. You have fulfilled your collective obligations, developed all kinds of personal skills, but feel internally bankrupt. Exploration of the dark forest compelled by an emergency..’the symptoms [of which] turn out to be the opening up of the path of individuation.’ G. Adler. 1961
This sudden complication is bound to leave you feeling a bit vulnerable and diminished. Things which used to be terribly important are now not so important. Things which used to be irrelevant become all consuming. Is infinity a number or not? And what is an expanding universe expanding into…? What do dreams mean and where they come from?
Suddenly everything seems dangerous and overwhelming, throwing the personality back on its own as yet unacknowledged depths with considerable loss to normal functioning. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” C G Jung 1945
Bearskin is impelled to discover who he is, besides both his socially adapted ego identity which no longer provides him with meaning and the fantasy of endless riches which he’ll soon discover won’t do it either. It’s not going to be fun. Suddenly he is swamped by the numinous pelt with its primal associations of ancient gods, of archaic tooth and claw. The great hide is disorienting, clumsy making, inveigling him with wild and shaggy, closing round him as a cocoon. He is sequestered from the world as much as rudely thrown into it.
In many shamanic traditions the initiate must identify with an animal spirit and regress into a primitive state before being returning to the community enriched. Many a modern mental illness has similar connotations…. crises born of the Psyche’s own need to become more conscious, to cross developmental thresholds which burden the ego with archaic collective material.
So the Devil is not out to get our hero. Rather he sets in motion the individuation process with an initiatory challenge. Like the alchemical Mercurius, he provides both the difficult test and the means to accomplish it. When the time comes he admits defeat and honors Bearskin’s success with a generous preening session.
Bearskin manages to survive his foray into the unconscious because he develops the capacity for relatedness. When he arrives at the Inn it seems that his suffering and wretchedness can be endured because they have also given rise to kindness and the capacity to be touched by the suffering of others. Life’s uncertain chaos has opened his heart. He wants to hear the old man’s trouble without knowing if there is anything he can do about it because he has learned what value there is in the simple charity of giving comfort, of lending a sympathetic ear. ‘The reason for evil in the world,’ says Jung, ‘is that people are not able to tell their stories’. C G Jung 1945
Relatedness and the sharing of stories anchor the soulful life. Without it consciousness itself is diminished leaving you isolated and unable to be fed. Bearskin discovers, through the humble recognition of his dependence on others, the value of turning up, of being there for another..
..despite his terrible smell.
You can’t help wondering if the weeping old man is the Devil in disguise come to test Bearskin, to see if he has become sufficiently tender to survive seven years on the fringes of the community and perhaps at the edges of his own sanity. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu cautions us, ‘The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life. Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle. A tree that is unbending is easily broken.’ Lao Tzu 1993
So perhaps the gold goes full circle, as do the two halves of the ring at the end of the story. This transitional gesture of seeking out the crying man protects Bearskin. He has found the strength to endure his liminal experience through charity and being together. He’s invested beyond himself. Wordsworth says of the redeemed wanderer.. ‘Unoccupied by sorrows of his own his heart lay open. He could afford to suffer with those he saw suffer.’ Wordsworth 1994
This between-ness of ‘affording with’, is the treasure.
The Devil hosts Bearskin’s redeeming bath corroborating his capacity to ‘bear’ the strain of their arrangement. This gesture speaks to the importance of the humble kindness Bearskin has developed during his adventures. This has had an apotropaic effect on events. He makes it through the forest not only in one piece but with a deeper sense of wholeness and belonging..
The Devil’s Sooty Brother.
This story is a variant of ‘Bearskin’ and will amplify our theme. As before, a decommissioned soldier down to his last piece of bread happens upon a dark wood. Unable to find work or food he throws himself on the mercy of the Forest and wanders in. Suddenly a strange little man is stood before him. He promises him wealth and riches if only the soldier will come down to Hell and serve him seven years. In addition, as with the story of ‘Bearskin’, the soldier may not wash or cut his hair and nails as he goes about his duties.
The Old Soldier agrees, so the Devil takes him down, down, to the kitchens of the Underworld where he must tend giant steaming cauldrons bubbling with hell broth and feed the furnaces burning white hot beneath them. The Devil further admonishes him that under no circumstances may he peek in the cauldrons on pain of something only the Devil could dream up and so the soldier cheerfully sets to work.
After a long while of dutiful labor, dragging about great stumps to throw into the furnaces, sweeping up the twigs and bark chips behind the door just as the Devil had shown him, he became curious about what might be in the smallest of the cauldrons. One day, when the Devil was out, he set up a ladder against it and climbed up for a peek. There he found his old Corporal looking pensive in the bubbling stew.
‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said delightedly, climbing back down to throw some extra big logs onto the fire.
After a much longer time of exemplary service the Old Soldier became curious about what might be in the second larger cauldron, a great metal vat suspended from massive beams. He shimmied up the side of the cauldron and there was his former Ensign, with just his head sticking out.
‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he exclaimed, jumping back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the roaring fire.
The Old Soldier continued to work at his duties with great dedication. He tended the flames and swept the floor every day, careful to put the sweepings behind the door just as he had been told. Meantime his hair became long and matted.. His beard had grown to the floor and his nails stuck out like claws.
Finally, his curiosity about the third and largest of the cauldrons got the better of him. This monstrous vessel was an infernally wrought iron ark, mounted upon a great tripod of fossilized trees. The furnaces raging beneath it consumed whole saplings at once. The heat from it had thoroughly singed the Old Soldier from head to foot. Undeterred, he clambered up, and there, with just his nose sticking out of the broth, was his old General.
‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, squeaking with excitement, and clambered back down to feed this mightiest of the three furnaces with some massive gnarly oak stumps he had been saving for a special occasion.
By this time the Old Soldier has become unrecognizable. Layer upon layer of ash and soot is mashed into hair become mane. His beard has to be knotted to keep it out of the flames. One day the Devil looks in to see how he’s doing. He lets him know his time is up and that he can go home now.
‘How did you get on?’ asks the Devil.
‘Oh quite well,’ replies Old Soldier, ‘I did what you said….
‘Ah, but you did peek in the *^!% cauldrons didn’t you, matey?’ spits the Devil with gritted teeth. ‘I should bring down all kinds of unspeakable punishments upon you, but…. because you’ve performed your duties so well and kept the fires so wonderfully bright’, he adds cheerily, ‘I will let you off….
Here are your wages…’
and he hands the Old Soldier a satchel full of sweepings from behind the door. ‘When people ask you who you are you can tell them, ‘I am the Devil’s Sooty Brother and my King as well.”
Pleased to have gotten away with his life the Old Soldier sets off for home. He decides to dump the satchel before too long only to discover that it is now full of gold…
The first motif in the story is the disbanded soldier without prospects. He is the ‘all revved up with nowhere to go’ experience of the personality which has fought its battles and become accomplished, but has started to ask, ‘what for? To what end and purpose? Who am I besides the roles I’ve been given? What lies beneath the surface?’ Dante begins his classic tale of the Inferno in a similar quandary, ‘‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death:” Dante Alighieri 2012
In his diary Tolstoy writes of this experience, ‘at first it was moments of perplexity and arrest of life as though I did not know what to do or how to live.. expressed by the question, ‘what is it for?’ Tolstoy 2011
Such a state of mind is bound to evoke a compensatory response from the Unconscious personified by the ‘Little Man’ who our hero encounters as soon as he enters the forest. We could also call him Shiva, Loki, or Hades. This meeting and their ‘working arrangement’ prefigures a descent into the Underworld. In ordinary life this is often experienced as some form of crisis, a failed marriage, the death of a loved one, a bout of inexplicable depression, the development of symptoms.
Such a descent, like that of Innana from Sumerian mythology, who had to relinquish a garment at every one of seven gates leading down to her dark sister, Erishkigal, involves the difficult process of reducing consciousness down to its essential elements. This is symbolized by the sulphurous steaming cauldrons and their grizzly contents. Sulphur is the element of transformation. Its the rotten egg smell of decomposition, of one thing becoming another.
The Old Soldier must tend these cauldrons with their respective symbols inside them just as the alchemist tends the fires beneath his alembic vessel, ‘a kind of uterus from which the filius philosophorum, [son of the philosophers] is to be born.’ C G Jung 1953
In the smallest kettle we find the Corporal, a man of low rank who nevertheless had power over our soldier in his former life. A Corporal is forever at your shoulder, micro-managing the day with a bunch of directives not unlike the injunctions of childhood. These may make life work more smoothly but they can also keep you in line at the expense of your individuality. You can only transform what belongs to you. The ‘not-me’ of other people’s opinions and convictions have to be separated out from what I think and feel, like meat from the bone.
The Corporal used to ‘have’ the soldier much as blind adherence to unquestioned authority ‘has’ the personality, when it is unconsciously identified with something which runs it from within, something swallowed down without noticing, so that life can be lived without reflection, when fear of loneliness forces the child to adapt.
The Corporal, as ‘inner critic’, can make your life hell. He has to be boiled and boiled, so what’s useful and constructive can be separated out from what is oppressive and life denying, so that internalized values can become the possession of the personality rather than it’s master.
In the next cauldron, which requires a great deal more emotional heat, we find the Ensign, a man of higher rank who commands a squad, a varied, integrated personality with an organized structure capable of effective and responsible action…
..which is all very well, but its all still happening in the barrack room of the personality.
Not only does the ego need to be formed, it also needs a context. Regardless of its contents and whether they get along or not, so too is there the need to experience the personality as something you have rather than something you are, to have a vantage point, a super-ordinate perspective au dessus de la mellee, above all the activity.
‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.
The problem with such emancipation is that it invariably gets inflated along the way. Having chucked off the ‘not-me’ introjects of childhood and achieved the heroic crafting of a well oiled unit, task oriented and adapted to reality, the hero is bound to over reach himself, having forgotten about the ‘not-me’ within his own Psyche, still sweating out in the third giant cauldron.
Inside this mighty vessel he finds the General. It’s furnace requires whole trees to feed it, so great is the energy needed to develop a relationship with the collective psyche without being swamped by it… much.
and so you stoke the great fires till sweat binds grime to skin in testament to vigil over the flames whilst Selfhood is gradually coalesced from the largest of the cauldrons and alchemical gold spun from sweepings.
The Devil’s role in all this is initiatory. He does no more than show the Old Soldier in the door and give him his duties. This somewhat relativizes what we have come to consider to be evil. It means that the difficult things which happen are precisely those which help you to grow into the person you are to become and create clarity about what your priorities might be.
Freud observed that..’people lose their neurosis in times of war..’ Freud 1915. This is because crises require creative solutions, innovations and a kind of reinventing of oneself, all of which happily occupies and channels the upwelling of un-lived potentialities latterly plaguing daily life in the form of psychic affliction.
One way or another, life is suffering. Choices are really limited to trading in your chaos for chaos of a different kind. There’s no magical way out. Its more a question of would you like that served with fries or not? Will you also have the chips of meaning, and the sauce of good-natured humor at this Cafe of Uncertainty, facing dinner-time with fellow feeling and curious wonder? Or do you just want a table for one and the soup of ordinary misery with the manky croutons of being done to?
The Devil lets the soldier go because he knows there is no consciousness without flouting the rules, without thinking outside the box, without the grit in the oyster. What was important was not that the soldier obey but that he went about his duties as sacred tasks and devotedly fed the fires. It is this which makes gold of sweepings. Through devotion and disobedience the soldier brings together his own opposite natures so that he can finally say, ”I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my King as well!”
So the Devil gets consciousness evolving. He gives Old Soldier the means to transform his identify. At the end he is not only the Devil’s Sooty Brother but also ‘my King as well’. Archetypally, the King is himself semi-divine, mediating between the People and the Gods, between Heaven and Earth. Sooty Brother has become a Self, the ordinary sweepings of everyday life forged into something precious, alchemically represented by the satchel of gold.
The Devil and the Shoemaker.
This story, by Anton Chekov, tells us that once there was a poor Shoemaker who was so tragically hard up he had to work on Christmas Eve finishing a pair of boots for a wealthy Patron. He cussed and complained under his breath as he labored, taking frequent swigs from a bottle hid under the work bench. ‘Why must I slave like this whilst others are tucked up in their beds?’ he muttered. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the rich folk were destroyed! Then I could be rich and lord it over some other mean cobbler..’.
Dreaming like this he suddenly remembered his work. He grabbed the now finished boots and headed out of his shabby hovel into the freezing streets. Rich sleighs slide by, their handsome drivers all holding a ham in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. Well dressed ladies snicker at him. An old acquaintance, now made good, mocks his ragged clothes.
Eventually he finds his Patron’s enormous house, with lights at every window. Sullenly, he knocks at the door. Inside the place smells of sulfur. Fires roar in the grate. The Patron is pounding something unspeakable in a mortar. ‘I have come to deliver your boots, my lord… Let me help you off with the old ones..’ and in so doing, he discovers not a foot but a hoof…
‘Oh, so that’s who he is…,’ thinks the Shoemaker. ‘I should run, but hey, I can make this work for me…’ and so he begins to praise the Devil for being such a fine fellow. ‘Why, thank you, and what can I do for you?’ asks the Devil. The Shoemaker begins a litany of woes.. ‘Yes, yes,.. but what do you want?’
‘I want to be rich, your honor, Satan Ivanitch!’ pleads the Shoemaker, throwing himself to the floor. In a trice he finds himself seated at a huge table groaning with fine food and expensive vodka, all served by polite footmen in smart uniforms. During the feast he summons the old acquaintance he had met in the street and abuses him with mockery and blows. After dinner the Devil appears to make sure he has had all his needs satisfied but the Shoemaker is too uncomfortably bloated to answer, or to acknowledge the buxom wife the Devil has brought with him.
That night he cannot sleep or embrace his wife for the thought of thieves breaking in….
On Christmas morning the Shoemaker goes to church. As he sat praying the same prayer he used to pray when he was poor, he suddenly realized that there was little to distinguish the bowed heads all around about him. The same sins plagued them all. Death awaited him as before. The same black earth would cover him over.. He jumped up and ran out for fresh air, clawing at his collar, too distracted to pray for worrying about his money..
and his ruined soul…
The Shoemaker decides to cheer himself up with a song but a Watchman silences him saying it was not done for a rich man to sing in the street. He bought a concertina to play instead but met with the same rebuke. On the way home beggars call out for bread and alms.. ‘Away, you filthy scum.!’ When he gets home the Shoemaker tries to cuddle up to his wife but she rebuffs him…. and just as he is beginning to realize he is actually more miserable than before, the Devil arrives and drags him kicking and screaming to Hell.
On the very edge of the Infernal Pit, the Shoemaker woke up with such a violent start he sent everything flying. There was a fierce pounding at the door. It was the Patron, come to collect his boots. As he sewed the last stitches the Shoemaker asked, ‘If I may, your honor, what is your occupation?’ ‘ Well, if you must know, I am a Pyrotechnician,’ replied the Sulfurous One, who then paid the cobbler and left in a puff of burnt chicken feathers and pink smoke.
Our hero stumbles out into the street, wondering at the clean white snow, the crisp air, the beautiful people, the wonderful sights and smells around him. Everyone, he realized, was the same. Some rode in carriages and some played concertinas but the same choices in life, the same grave in death, awaited them all. They were all in it together.
The Shoemaker’s problem was not his poverty but his divided-ness. He despised himself, irrespective of his station in life, which then lent itself to misery in a way that rags alone cannot convey. The Others he encounters in his dream notice and respond to this, embodying the contempt he secretly feels for himself.
His poverty was one of spirit, brought on by the hateful split between his envious loathing of the have’s and his scornful disparagement for the have not’s. No-one could get it right for him, nor could he accept himself for as long as this internal schism existed, for as long as he abdicated his own authorship in favor of the shifting sands of collective opinion.
Without a sense of Self, without his own life to live and his own death to die, the Shoemaker is like chaff in the wind, eternally disgruntled, forever dissatisfied, perpetually at the mercy of others. His dream is a compensatory response from the Unconscious doing its best to draw his attention to the vain hypocrisy of his neurotic conflict, perhaps hoping that some humility might come from going more deeply into it.
‘Whether the patient is rich or poor, has family and social position or not, alters nothing, for outer circumstances are far from giving his life a meaning. It is much more a question of his quite irrational need for what we call a spiritual life. The patient’s unconscious comes to the aid of this vital need by producing dreams whose content is essentially religious.’ C. G. Jung.1991
Earlier, I showed how the shadow can serve as an initiatory figure into greater consciousness depending upon the protagonist’s attitude. Chekov’s story seems to take this idea forward. Where, you might wonder, has the Shoemaker’s diabolical dream come from? Though it has been encrusted with two millenia of moral overtones, the origin of the word ‘diabolical’ comes from the Greek, Dia, meaning ‘through’ and Ballos, meaning ‘with the aid of..’ The diabolical dream is unwanted and resisted, yet it is what’s needed….
The Devil gives the Shoemaker what he asks for knowing full well that it would thrust him up against his own divisiveness faster than any wagging ecclesiastical finger. He also gives him the chance to recant, to have a change of heart and learn from his error by way of what amounts to a dry run of the landscape in which he imagines meaning lies.
The Shoemaker’s wishes are all self centered, childlike, orally fixated, a 19th century version of wanting to win the lottery. ‘Be careful what you ask for’, goes the saying… ‘you might just get it’. Fortunately, the Devil is not just out to get the Shoemaker. He lets him learn from the dream.
It is not the shadow’s intent to snuff consciousness out. It gets active when consciousness is too narrow or divided against itself. The Devil is quite happy to bow out when the Shoemaker learns his lesson just as Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, agrees to a back seat once the sinful hero heals the divide with those he has betrayed despite the small print in his contract.
By means of the Shadow’s ‘cruel’ intervention, the Shoemaker experiences a moment of enlightenment, different from and transcendent to both the inferior and superior parts of himself. He had latterly just alternated between them, unconsciously swinging between the opposites without realizing what was happening. So he really does get a fresh perspective on life, even if his re-birth means having to be dragged to the edge of the abyss.
Baba Yaga.
Sometimes the Devil takes a feminine form. Baba Yaga is such a figure, the dark aspect of the Great Mother, grown wicked and vengeful from centuries of banishment in the Taiga. This story begins with the orphan Vassilisa the Brave who has been sent to live with her step mother and step sisters on the edge of the forest. The step sisters want to get rid of Vassilisa and so they douse all the candles in their cottage saying the wind blew them out and send Vassilisa into the woods to ask Baba Yaga for a light hoping the old witch will eat her.
Armed with no more than the doll given to her by her birth mother, Vassilisa goes in search of the Hut on Hens Legs, the hideous home of Baba Yaga. When she arrives there the old witch simply gives her endless chores to complete with the implicit threat that if they remain undone Vassilisa will pay the ultimate price. Then she disappears leaving Vassilisa to her mountain of work.
The doll comforts our heroine, telling her to rest while she, the doll, does all the chores. Sure enough, when Baba Yaga returns all the work is done. The old witch is a bit put out and asks Vassilisa if she does not have any questions for her, hoping the child will show enough impertinence to warrant being gobbled up. Vassilisa demures, asking only some general questions about what she has seen outside and mentioning nothing of the wonders within the cottage or the fact that it wanders about the woods by itself. Like Job on his Dungheap, she refrains from challenging the Divine on its bad behavior.
‘Don’t you have any more questions?’ hisses the witch, but Vassilisa just shakes her head.
‘How did you manage to complete all the tasks?’ Baba Yaga demands.
‘By the blessing of my mother.’ replies Vassilisa quietly, neglecting to mention the doll.
‘I don’t need blessings in my house,’ screeches the witch and turns Vassilisa out. As she leaves, Baba Yaga fetches a skull with flaming eyes from the hedge, mounts it on a pole and hands it to the girl, ‘the fire for your sisters.’ When Vassilisa returns this skull-fire burns into the souls of the wicked sisters and reduces them to ashes. She buries the skull and leaves the forest.
How does Vassilisa avoid being eaten? Let’s compare her attitude to the protagonist in another old story, ‘Mother Trude’. In this instructive tale there is an alternative ending for an impertinent and prying girl who begs her parents to let her visit Mother Trude as she has heard so many interesting stories about the old lady and the wonderful curiosities she has in her house. Her parents warn her, saying Mother Trude is a bad woman who does evil things to little children. But the girl was so intrigued by the stories she had heard that she skipped along to Mother Trude’s house anyway and banged loudly on the door. When the old witch answers the girl is white as a sheet. ‘Why are you so pale?’ asks the old lady.
‘Err, I saw you through the window, looking like a flaming Devil,’ she squeeked.
‘Ah, yes indeed,’ replied the witch, ‘and now you will flame for me.’ She turns the child into a block of wood and tossed her onto the fire.
Vassilisa manages to stay clear of the destructive effects of Evil by avoiding this naive head-on confrontation we find in the story of Mother Trude, which serves only to polarize and reinforce the witch’s power. Vassilisa forestalls the seduction of assuming any entitlement, or any holier-than-thou attitude, which mollifies the witch just enough not to be eaten.
In another story about Baba Yaga, a soldier (yes, another one) manages to avoid appearing on the menu by refusing the polarized option she dangles before him. ‘Did you get sent or have you come of your own free will, little one?’ The soldier assertively refuses to be seduced into infancy, demanding she address him as a man and it is this that saves him. It seems that the best way of avoiding falling into the clutches of a power principle, whether your own or someone else’s, is to refrain from thinking of yourself as ‘good’ and resisting the invitation to get too comfortable under circumstances where you are clearly outgunned.
I once asked my analyst, Chuck, who was also a renowned Potter, how he addressed the part of him which wanted to be famous for it’s own sake. Without any hesitation he replied, ‘I tip my hat to it.’
Such a response acknowledges the reality of the infernal pull down the route of least resistance whilst making sure you don’t get muddied with it at the same time. Evil is most rife where it is denied. Its an affliction of the great and the good or at least of those with such aspirations. In Arabic culture the name for an amulet which has the power to avert Evil is called ‘Nazar’, which means sight, surveillance, attention. To see it is to be protected from it. Hence the idea that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he doesn’t exist. Carl Jung made the terse observation, ‘there is nothing so dangerous as a mild man.’ The reason is precisely because he is blind to his own potential for wickedness which must then perforce be either projected or enacted.
Many of our stories about the Devil have an Old Soldier as the protagonist, someone who has been in the wars. Why is that? Perhaps it might help to think of neuroses as old soldiers who need, not ‘curing’ or ‘treating’, but rather appropriate recognition for services rendered since they are, in effect, time worn responses which no longer adequately reflect life and are in need of transformation. From this point of view a neurosis is a kind of treasure. ‘A neurosis is often a plus, not a minus, but an unlived plus, a possibility of becoming more conscious or creative, funked for some lousy excuse.’ M L von Franz 1995
A man may not be able to trust his mother but if he transfers this dynamic to his wife a much needed early defense will now spoil his adult life. His belief system has to collapse and be reborn. For this he will need to find a little man in a dark wood, someone who, from a subjective point of view, is about to destroy him because the loss of anything you are identified with will feel at best like robbery and at worst like death.
What we psychologists euphemistically call ‘resistance’ is rooted in this dread of dissolution, what M. Fordham calls ‘de-integration’, the necessary collapse of old ways of being that can feel like being pulled apart by evil forces. Paradoxically, the growth we seek is bound to include a brush with ‘wicked’ calamity. When they arrived in America in 1909, Freud turned to Jung and said, ‘they don’t realize we are bringing them the plague.’
Conclusion.
So, what can we glean from these stories? The Devil has an initiatory function, certainly. He is part of life’s complexity, to be sure. Yet it is more complex still. How the Devil behaves seems to have something to do with the relational attitude of the protagonist. In fact, so much hinges upon this that you begin to wonder from where the Devil draws his strength. From this point of view, staying out of the fight is no mere passive abdication. On the contrary, it means precisely to be impelled upon the difficult quest for the midpoint between extremes, the still point of a turning Earth. ‘It is a very profound, mystical solution.. The divine nucleus of the Psyche is the one thing beyond the problem of good and evil. [It is] the absolute factor which can lead us out of the situation.’ M L von Franz 1991
In the story of Vassilisa, she manages to save herself almost entirely by her careful dealings with Baba Yaga. She survives, not because she is good or saintly, but because she is wise and circumspect. She makes sure she stays clear of the impulse to be overly curious or make judgements about the Great Mother and so she doesn’t get inflated by their encounter. ‘Inflation,’ as the old alchemists warn us, ‘beckons the Raven’s claw.’
The Sooty Brother manages to survive his sojourn in Hell by his dedicated service and humble acceptance of the sweepings in payment. The Devil is testing him, like a Zen master, to see if there is any animus still left in him to take offense at such a provocative gesture. But all the boiling away of flesh from bone has changed Sooty Brother’s relationship with his various complexes. He has them rather than the other way around. So the Devil’s provocation does not affect him. Sooty Brother has become ‘poor in spirit’ which means he can refrain, like Vassilisa, from polarizing, from being the Devil’s judge or jury and thereby attains his inner gold.
Bearskin, likewise, manages to stay out of the clutches of Evil by remembering his own compassion. This manifests itself as a reaching out past the preoccupations of his own personal misery to the tears and concerns of others. The Shoemaker discovers the same thing, true wealth and protection from calamity are to be found in our shared inheritance, in belonging, in the Principle of Relatedness.
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