‘The Giant Tree’ is a Hungarian precursor to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. According to the Aarne-Thomson-Uther classification of fairy tales this makes it one of the Indo-European proto-stories, a story which would have been established in the oral tradition at the dawn of kingship, tens of thousands of years ago.
This older story gives us a closer look into the collective situation with it’s greater and nuanced detail. It is a story stood on the threshold of a whole new social structure, City states and their semi-divine kings, alongside the further emergence of ego consciousness, all at a time when the multiple Old Gods of Earth and Wood were being driven out by equally unhinged variants of the stand alone Sky God. If you are going to invent kingship you need a warlike god to back you up. And he would have to be the only one for the king to justify why he is the only one…
I digress.
Once upon a time, many many years ago there lived a king with his daughter. In their garden there was a Mighty Tree which reached all the way up to the Heavens. One day when the Princess was out walking a Great Wind blew up and carried her to the very top.
The King offered half his kingdom to any brave hero who could fetch her down. Many tried and failed. Some broke their legs, some their necks. Out in the forest there lived a swineherd called Jack. One day one of his pigs said to him, ‘you should go and save the Princess.’
‘but I don’t know how..’ said Jack.
So the Pig whispered in his ear and next day Jack presented himself at Court. The King was unimpressed at this lowly man but Jack persuaded him that if only he would kill a Buffalo and make seven coats and seven pairs of boots from its hide he would return before they had all worn through.
Jack set off. He used a sword given him by the King to chop toe holds in the Great Tree. He climbed for a year and a day, gradually wearing out his coats and boots. Eventually he arrived at the topmost leaf which sprung him up into a world above, much the same as the one below, in which there was a garden and a castle and..
the Princess…
who hid him so she could introduce him properly to the fearsome three headed Dragon who was lord of this realm and a bit of a stickler being particularly hot on good manners. When the time came she revealed him,
‘My lord, this is my swineherd Jack who has come to serve me.’
‘Well, we might have a use for you,’ said the Dragon and showed Jack the stables where there were a large number of sleek horses. In a corner and all alone was a thin, miserable horse. The Dragon cautioned Jack never to give this horse what it asks for. ‘If it asks for hay give it oats, if it asks for oats give it water.’
As Jack goes about his duties, the Thin Horse says, ‘ ‘I know your purpose Jack and I can help you. Ask the Princess to find out the source of the Dragon’s strength and then come and tell me.” Jack talks to the Princess who invites the Dragon to have a few drinks with her and manages to persuade him to tell his secret. ‘Out in the forest is a Silver Bear, split its skull and find a Rabbit, split that skull and find a box with nine Wasps in it. Kill the Wasps and I will lose my strength.’
Jack tells all this to the Thin Horse who then asks him to fetch embers from the fire for him to eat. Once he has eaten the coals he transforms into a golden stallion with five legs. Off they went into the forest to find the Silver Bear in whom they find the Rabbit and within that the box of Wasps. The Dragon’s strength is broken and the now Golden Horse then flies Princess and Swineherd back home where Jack is made King.
Our story begins with the Giant Tree. You may be sure it was there way, way before the first King came along and decided to throw a fence around it. And you may be sure that the Tree had feelings about being ‘owned’ and responded in poetic kind by abducting the Princess. The price paid for the King’s presumption is the loss of the Principle of Relatedness with all her nascent, creative, possibility.
In many ancient cultures the World Tree connected Heaven and Earth. Yggrdasil, the origin of our Christmas Tree tradition, represented a living connection to the Divine.
The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 321.
In our story emerging ego consciousness, the King, has become inflated with the idea that the throne can do a better job as divine interlocutor and that the Tree is just one more plant in the royal garden, as if it could be the object of consciousness.
The Three headed Dragon as theriomorphic representation of the Tree seizes the Princess. None can save her, disdain for the Tree has put her beyond help. Only someone who can remember the old ways, who is humble and brave enough to take a pig’s advice before a King can help….
The metaphor of killing a Buffalo and making seven jackets and seven boots from it is very much like the task of the protagonist in ‘Bearskin’ who must kill a bear and wear its pelt for seven years. To wear the skin of an animal is to deliberately identify with it and its protective powers. Buffalo was the power that made city states and kings possible. It was associated with the Gods Enlil and Enki in the Mesopotamian tradition and so the killing of the Buffalo is invocation of protection from ancient maternal goddesses akin to Egyptian Hathor and the sacred cows of India. The Swineherd knows how to approach the Tree in the right way..
The Great Mother is ritually propitiated and her skin worn as an amulet against being swallowed up like all his predecessors. The gradual wearing out of the seven coats as he ascends the Tree is reminiscent of Inanna’s descent and the seven stages of her disrobing on the way to the Underworld of Erishkigal.
Jack has yet to dis-empower the Dragon who holds the Princess. This Dragon is the alchemical Mercurius, an ancient God as yet undifferentiated into Good and Evil. His heads represent the trinity of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur, which preside over the various stages of Jack’s transformation. The way to dis-empower this dangerous aspect of the Psyche is not head on but by way of the inferior function, the Thin Horse, the wounded healer.
‘The magic horse or Taltos is also the same Hungarian word for shaman, or people with shamanistic knowledge, so it is not a far reach to connect the figure of the horse-spirit to more ancient symbols.’ Zalka Csenge Virág
The Thin Horse is even older than Mercurius. He belongs to the era of the Hunter Gatherer for whom everything, but mostly fire, was alive. As in Grimm’s story of ‘The Dragon and his Grandmother’, this more ancient spirit knows how to outwit the fearsome Dragon. She lulls him into a stupor and lets him boast how clever he has been.
Then Jack must give embers to the Thin Horse. He has to trust and feed the primal part of his being with life giving embers without which there is no transformation. This Promethean gift rejuvenates connection to ancient psychic roots and helps resolve the Dragon’s riddle obliquely. In the ‘Dragon and His Grandmother’ the riddle has this same quality of something impossible to know. The protagonists first meal in Hell shall be found in a really obscure place you could never guess or figure out.
‘In the great North Sea lies a dead dog-fish, that shall be your roast meat, and the rib of a whale shall be your silver spoon, and an old horses hoof as a wine glass.’ Grimm’s
Jack succeeds not because he’s clever or heroic but because he connects with the Thin Horse, remembers his aboriginal self and trusts in its directions. The source of the Dragon’s power, a box of wasps in a rabbit in a silver bear deep in the forest, is something that you can never know except that you gain help and trust.
In this older version of the story there is no chopping down of The Tree. By the time the story reaches, ‘Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman’, the Princess is written out of the story, The Tree is felled, Jack is no longer crowned and has to go back to living with his Mum.
I once had a friend who told me he had a dream whereby he cut down a Great Tree. He was hospitalized three weeks later. I discovered him standing naked, knee deep in shredded paper with a box of matches in one hand and a can of kerosene in the other. Gibbering. Men in white coats took him away.
