Once upon a time, many years ago and faraway, there lived an aging king with three daughters. He was undecided about whom to leave the richest of his three kingdoms, so he called them together to put them to the test, saying the greatest treasure would go to the one who could tell him best how much he was loved.
The first daughter came forward and curtsied low, ‘ Father, I love you as a dove loves good grain.’ The second daughter curtsies lower, ‘Father, I love you as the hot summer day loves a cool breeze.’ The third daughter scratches her chin for a bit and then says, ‘Father, I love you like salt.’
‘What?’ screams the king,’ how dare you compare me to such a common, lowly thing?’ and banishes her from the kingdom.
The Princess flees into the forest. There she subsists on roots and berries, hiding herself in a hollow tree at night for safety. One day a neighboring Prince is passing by on the hunt and spies her. He follows her to the hollow tree and orders her out at gun point.
Prince and Princess fall in love and get married. The wedding is so grand even the dogs have beef broth. In time she explains to him what happened. The Prince devises a plan to teach the Old King a lesson and invites him for dinner. A great feast is prepared but the cooks are told in advance to put no salt in the food nor any on the table. The Old King is frustrated to the point of busting, unable to enjoy the lavish treats which smell so wonderful but taste so bland.
‘This is terrible..’ he blurts eventually.
‘Why, your majesty I heard you didn’t like salt..’
‘Who told you that?’
And so the game is up. The king comes to his senses and gives the young couple the greatest of his kingdoms.
This story can be understood in a number of ways. At the interpersonal level there’s the moral guidance against acting in haste which also bears the hope injustice can be redeemed in a Brer Rabbit kind of way, by the Prince’s use of native wit.
At the intra-psychic level, we find a soul in crisis. The dominant function has become time worn and ineffective, inflated with excessively long rule. It rejects the rejuvenating possibility into the unconscious, the wild forest. There she is rescued by a Prince from outside the kingdom, something autonomous from the collective Psyche, much as a redeeming image may well up in a dream by way of response to an imperiled situation.
At this more archetypal level the story seems to be a parable about transformation. Salt is so essential to life, so seemingly magical in its properties that it cannot help but attract projections from the more profound levels of the Psyche. Salts in general are the products of opposites interacting, acids and alkalis. The salt we need, vital to life, is a compound of two poisons, sodium and chlorine. Apart they kill. Together they sustain the body and act both as a transformer of taste and a preserver of food. For millennia our forbears have concluded that such an amazing substance must surely contain a god….
‘As the soul, our most divine element, preserves life by preventing dissolution of the body, just so salt, controls and checks the process of decay.’ Plutarch.
Salt, like a god, appears spontaneously, at the interface of heaven and earth, land and sea.
‘Salt arises from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’. [Pythagoras]
Material salt then recapitulates something spiritual, what Boehme called salliter; heavenly salt, an explosive force of light and fire likened to gunpowder (sal-nitre). This heavenly and earthly salt are indicated by the two “halves” of the conventional symbol for salt, a pair of hemispheres facing each other, one yet two.
This dynamic, imperishable, self generating quality of salt and its capacity to find expression in matter for generative psychic processes occurring outside ego functioning and therefore beyond awareness is poetically expressed by it’s etymological roots. In its prototypical Indo-European form Sel means, ‘to move forth, to start up’. From this derives the latin, Salio, ‘sexual leaping’. From this then comes saltus ‘to leap’ and then saltare, dance, salubris health, salutare, greeting, salvus, safety, salve as both hail and balm, and salary to keep the roof over your head, manifestations of ecstatic psychic contents perhaps best expressed by the image of Salmon, the leaping fish.
Something further about the nature of this spirit-in-matter may be gleaned by the way we talk about salt metaphorically. We refer to people being worth their salt or being the salt of the earth which suggests material value. We also talk about taking situations with a pinch of salt, which gives it allegorical value. A literal pinch gives perspective to food, an allegorical pinch gives perspective to a situation. To take things with a pinch of salt is to refrain from identifying totally with any one situation or point of view. This preserves a person from psychic contamination and is therefore indispensable in seasoning the healthy psychological diet of an open mind. Jesus says to his disciples before they depart to their respective ministries, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” Matt IO. 6.
Salt prevents one-sidedness because it is also two-fold.
Salt is liberating because it gives you the capacity to think about what you are thinking about, in other words in affords the capacity for reflection. If you are able to reflect on something you are no longer at its mercy, no longer limited to a single perspective on things. Suddenly there is inner elbow room to entertain different and even opposing realities. Salt is therefor also sal sapietiae, consciousness itself.
‘Who therefor knows the salt and its solution knows the hidden secret of the wise men of old. Therefor turn your mind upon the salt, for in it alone is the science concealed.” [Rosarium Philosophorum]
‘Salt’ opens things up. It prevents freezing. It displaces but also creates buoyancy. Developmentally, the first salty encounter is with the intrusive reality of mother being her own person. Then you get another dose of salts a little later as the growing persona, my version of myself, experiences other versions of itself attended by the uncanny experience of there being more to me than I can know. Worse still is the pinch of salt a mature ego then has to take as it encounters the many mansions of the Collective Psyche and beyond that to the salt which precipitates out everything but Pneuma, content-less consciousness, the still point of the turning wheel.
At each threshold there is an encounter with an ancient dual natured god, alchemical Mercurius, the Prince from beyond the bounds of the kingdom who presides over life’s transformations. In psychoanalysis the value of a good interpretation is not so much that the patient’s story means something else but that it can be given a pinch of salt, some further context or elucidation, something added which does not deny or detract from what went before but somehow also subtly changes or deepens the experience of it.
Our story’s end goes beyond reconciliation. The Old King has been transformed. The scales have fallen from his eyes. The salt, her love for him, suddenly gives him perspective. Aristotle said that we do not grow by leaps….and perhaps that’s mostly true. What we do seem to do is to grow by pinches.
