Once upon a time there lived an ancient ruler, the Red King, who presided over a land in sad decline. The king himself was miserable all day long. Despite his wealth and power he could not enjoy it. The most exotic foods tasted bland. His courtiers had forgotten whether he was short or tall. Eventually his son the Prince went to him, asking the matter. The king dolefully explained that his great friend, the White King, was trapped in the Golden Forest. He was held prisoner by a Wicked Witch who daily sent droves of her minions to the Silken Meadow where his tent was pitched at the very heart of the Forest, making it impossible for him to leave.
The Prince bravely offers to try and free the White King. Before he departs his father tells him to take the old six legged nag lying in the mud behind the stables and feed it live coals from the fire which make it strong and youthful. Next he gives him a rusty old sword that looks perfectly useless but has its own life and fights enemies twelve at at time.
The Prince saddles up and flies directly to the Golden Forest, eventually arriving at the Silken Meadow. At the centre of the meadow, the royal tent. The Prince calls out but there is no reply. He goes in and finds the Red King asleep on a golden bed. In a corner a young Princess also lies sleeping. The Prince himself settles down for a nap.
‘The hero of the fairytale is profoundly unconscious of himself. He is one of the “sleepers,” the unawakened .” Jung CW13.
On waking he introduces himself to the Red King and his daughter who explain that at sunrise the Witch’s minions will magically emerge from the mountain where she lives. Between the White King and the Red Prince, or at least by virtue of their enchanted swords, a path is carved through the enemies to the cave where the terrible crone sits at a mighty loom, weaving armed minions by the dozen at every cycle of the loom.
The Prince runs her through with his dagger and the curse is lifted.
Long ago, beyond the reach of folk with excessively glamorous hats, come stories that seem to point to something of our original condition before Church and State got too close a hold on it. Forbidden wisdoms retreated into the relative safety of allegory, waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes this was quite literally true, like the buried Gnostic scrolls found at Nag Hammadi. Sometimes it is the treasure of being able to glean some meaning from a seemingly insignificant story which nevertheless represents some collective experience sufficiently potent to endure in oral tradition for thousands of years.
At the time Christianity was eradicating the Old Ways, stories sprung up which told some aspect of the situation. It was a time when Gods were being banished, when our connection to Nature got lost. From behind the protection of city walls the world beyond suddenly began to feel ‘Other’. The birth of consciousness as we know it begins at the edges of territory, a firm boundary but also separation and loss.
Our story begins with the old Red King in a terrible state about the loss of his dear friend the White King, who has been trapped in the Silken Meadow at the heart of the Great Forest by the Wicked Witch.
‘The forest, dark and impenetrable to the eye, like deep water and the sea, is the container of the unknown and the mysterious. It is an appropriate synonym for the unconscious. Among the many trees… the living contents of the unconscious.’ Jung CW13
Our story seems to begin by saying that something has happened in the collective psyche such that the White King, a figure synonymous with the alchemical Mercurius, a divine spirit predating the subsequent sharp distinction between good and evil, has been swallowed up by the Unconscious. This is a very great loss to the ego which depends upon the mercurial spirit to replenish it and without which there is bound to be a crisis of meaning, symbolised by the despairing Red King, whose purpose is forfeit, whose lands wither and die, in response to the White King’s entrapment.
These two kings seem to typify what Jung called, on the one hand, the rationalistic component of the psyche, ‘Spirit of this Time,” and on the other a transcendent, primordial “Spirit of the Depths,” The Spirit of this Time represents humanity’s current perceptions and wisdom, insisting on orderly dogmas which try to divide supreme meaning into two halves: one, a God-image of accepted moral right and order, the other, a rejected devilish shadow of evil and chaos. The Spirit of the Depths, meanwhile, insists that the true Godhead is not this God-image, but is instead the sum of both the image and its shadow.
Our story has a counter narrative to the idea that we are created In God’s image. It rather suggests it is we who have made God in ours. In the attempt to have God as an object of consciousness we separate ourselves from the totality of the Spirit of the Depths. He then gets held captive in the Great Forest.
The Red King cannot save the situation himself. It is not within the ego’s power to intervene directly. Another principle must be bought into play and it’s not what you’d think. Rather than great bravery or cunning, the situation rests in the hands of a naive and unworldly prince, a Parsifal figure whose strength is in that he knows he is a beginner. He is under no pretensions as to his experience for he has none. What he does do very well is listen and receptively take advice. He follows the non-rational suggestion to feed coals to the Old Nag in the mud, a way of being emotionally involved with whatever it is in us we regard is dirty or inferior.
Such internal cohesion is more important from any repertoire of former heroic deeds, no matter how many dragons slain you have on your cv. You have to find the value in the rusty sword which then works on your behalf and through which the transcendent function begins to express itself via the symbolism of magical property. The sword fights autonomously, the transformed nag has six legs and can fly.
Humbly accepting help where it’s needed, even if it’s from unlikely sources, is what smooths the Prince’s path to the Silken Meadow. ‘To those who have the symbol’, say the alchemists, ‘the passage is easy’, though when he arrives his unpreparedness manifests as a form of sleeping on the job and so it is up to the White King to initiate discussion once the Prince wakes up. Both of them have been armed in the sleeping presence of the other, cause for trust. So they are then able to work together to defeat the Wicked Witch’s minions.
This co-operation between the White King and the Red Prince is crucial to psychological healing and spiritual growth. Often it is not just what you have endured but internal division in the face of it which makes it so intolerable. The idea that you can’t change the past forgets it’s how we hold it that’s important. The Prince is able to face down the Witch because he has access to resources and internal cohesion he didn’t have before, not because his history suddenly changed.
Analyst Donald Kalsched talks about ‘self care systems’, where the psyche’s defences against further trauma effectively seal the self off from the world in a way that protects but also limits and restricts like the witch in Rapunzel who imprisons the Princess ‘for her own good’. I wonder if something similar did not happen culturally when we lost the Great Mother, a collective trauma prompting a mass self care encapsulation symbolised by the Witch who lives in the mountain, the rejected Divine Feminine in her wrathful, destructive aspect, devouring and imprisoning life rather than creating it, in vengeful response to being so rudely deposed by the new religion.
This Stone Witch can only be defeated under specific circumstances. Firstly, the Prince’s naivety seems to work for him rather than against him. He typifies what we could call ‘beginner’s mind’, keeping it fixed in awareness that you know next to nothing, don’t have the facts and are largely dependant on others for help. This prevents him from getting inflated which is a tricky piece of navigating when you have a flying horse. Accumulation and amassing stuff is so second nature to us we forget that the central task in life is a form of remembering who you are behind all such clutter, especially the virtuous ones.
Secondly, the Prince is not in this for gain. He involves himself on behalf of another which depotentates the witchy complex of unrelatedness, giving rise to the possibility of a redeeming, creative feminine perhaps best expressed in the unexpected/synchronous appearance of the Princess. It is his relatedness which saves the day.
There is so much talk about ‘working on yourself’ in psychology we forget that what this largely constitutes is a matter of how we interact with others, what kinds of conversations are possible, whether you can be another’s equal.
If we are to collectively liberate the White King, a principle which reflects all the different colours of the spectrum; if we are to effectively address the divisiveness that leads to ecological disaster and human conflict, then it needs to be done by way of working on behalf of the Other, with the paradoxical humility that we ourselves need help to do so.
