There was once a poor woman who had a single son. One day she returned home to find he had gone. Little did she realize that he had been spirited away by Devils who had taken him down to Hell where they made him work and slave in torment for seven long years. After his time was up they assigned him seven rooms for himself to clean and dust and sweep. In the seventh room was a magic lock in which lived twelve more Devils. He worked and worked on the lock until he freed it from its chains, then tucked it under his shirt and escaped home to Mother.
When he arrived home he sent Mother to the King to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The King laughed out loud when he heard all this, though humoured her by saying, ‘If your son can uproot the forest which surrounds the village so that not even an acorn remains, I will agree.’
The young man barely flinched when told of the task he must perform and set off at dusk into the forest with the lock. When he got there he turned the key and out came the twelve Devils to whom he gave the necessary instructions and by morning the forest was gone.
The King was impressed but had further conditions. ‘If by morning you can replace the forest with a fine field of green corn, I will agree…’ This was no problem for the lad who again instructed the Devils to help him. Once more he went to the King who set him a third and final task. ‘If by morning you can make me road of diamonds leading up to the palace lined with trees full of birds, the Princess shall be yours..’ By morning it was done and so the King was compelled to keep his word. The young couple were married and went to live in a spanking palace rustled up by the Devils.
One day the Prince went out hunting. In his absence an Old Witch approached the Palace shouting up that she had new locks for old… The Princess didn’t know about the magic lock and swapped it for a brand new shiny one… Suddenly their new home became a tumbled down shack. When the Prince returned he went to the King and told him everything. The King advised him to go and visit Old Mother Moon who was a hundred years old. She would know what to do.
Old Mother Moon couldn’t help though she gave him a dog and sent him off to see Old Mother Sun who was two hundred years old. She couldn’t help either, though she gave him a cat and sent him off to see Old Mother Wind. Old Mother Wind likewise shrugged, gave him a mouse and sent him off to an island in the middle of the churning sea where an even more ancient crone lived. He did as he was told and though it was a hard journey, they eventually arrived where the dog, mouse and cat conspired to steal back the lock. With a turn of the key all are safely home and, yes, live happily ever after.
The idea that you could be summarily carried off by Devils is as old as the hills. People in ancient times were suitably afraid of such possession which could grip both individuals and whole communities alike without reference to their upstandingness or moral rectitude. Even before early Christian preoccupation with baptismal protection against unclean spirits the ancient Greeks practiced the deliberate evocation of ‘daimons’ which possessed participants in the Eleusinian mystery schools and in the Bacchic rites of Dionysis. The oracle at Delphi made her pronouncements under the influence of daemonic possession as do Tibetan Buddhist oracles. In Islam these entities are called ‘Djin’ and in the Talmudic tradition, ‘Shedim’. In earlier societies practicing shamanism, demon possession and abduction was sufficiently feared to necessitate the extensive use of protective amulets and tattoos.
In a 1969 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, spirit possession beliefs were found to exist in 74 percent of a sample of 488 societies in all parts of the world. I wonder if the others simply considered themselves too ‘sophisticated’ for such things, behaving..
‘like some one who hears a suspicious noise in the attic and thereupon dashes down into the cellar, in order to assure himself that no burglar has broken in and that the noise was mere imagination.’ CG Jung.
Modern depth psychology understands this phenomena in terms of autonomous complexes which really do have the power to overwhelm consciousness and carry it away. We even say, ‘I got carried away,’ and ‘I don’t know what got into me’. Worse still you find yourself saying things you don’t mean. I once gave up an argument with an ex for lost when she suddenly blurted, ‘you are always out with your friends!’ The irony was that I was a stranger in a foreign city where I knew nobody and had no social life whatsoever at the time.
”Complexes delight in playing impish tricks. They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat just when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert. They bid us congratulate the mourners at a burial instead of condoling with them. They are the instigators of all those maddening things which are attributed to the “mischievousness of the object.” CG Jung
Invariably, the autonomous complex has an attitude contrary to consciousness, compelling it to behave all kinds of ways anathema to the ego’s intentions. You know you shouldn’t have another chocolate eclair but find yourself eating it anyway. You know smoking will kill you but have to light up nevertheless, pulling on the fag without pleasure and putting it out with disgust, wondering why you bothered with it in the first place. Collectively we elect leaders that crush us and give away our wealth to corporate billionaires who have no real use for it. We poison the air we breathe and destroy the environment we rely upon to sustain us.
‘Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, is that complexes can have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naïve assumption of the unity of consciousness and on the supremacy of the will. C. G. Jung
In our story, the hero is compelled to serve his Devils for seven years. He is in the grip of his complex and lost to the world of adapted reality. At the end of this time he is given seven rooms and is made to serve himself in their maintenance. In other words he manages to find some space to reflect on his situation and perhaps to wonder about how he got himself into such a mess. His attitude changes. He is no longer a victim. The magic lock he finds in the seventh room is something to be parried with and puzzled over rather than an inhibiting, proscribed fate which lies in the hands of others. The twelve Devils it contains are entities to relate to rather than forces to vainly suppress. Our hero renounces his narcissistic assumptions about the primacy and omnipotence of consciousness and gives the Devils their due. He acknowledges their power and thus frees himself from their malign influence. He transitions from the naive assumption that the unconscious is what he know of it, to the more mature realisation that he is not the master of his own house.
At this point in our story the Devils become helpful. A complex is not simply negative or destructive. It is only made so by the adversarial attitude of a dismissive ego. Having set his relationship with the Devils in better order our hero is now in a position to propose to the Princess which suggests a very different dynamic between the ego and the Unconscious. The King, as the dominant structure in the psyche is none too keen on this because it means the end of an old order, transformation which will cost him his crown, though having witnessed our hero being helped by the Devils to clear the forest, plant the corn and forge the diamond road, he gives way and helps the hero to find his way to the ancient crone who has stolen the magic lock.
The journey taken by the Prince, with his cat, dog and mouse helpers is synonymous with the individuation process. Our Prince, having addressed the contents of the personal unconscious, must now journey into the archetypal territory of the Great Mother, pursuing the magic lock as a talisman of the Self.
‘The via regia to the unconscious … is not the dream, as Freud thought, but the complex, which is the architect of dreams and of symptoms. Nor is this via so very “royal,” either, since the way pointed out by the complex is more like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath.’C G Jung
Fortunately for our Prince, he now has helpers which help him secure the lock, symbolising the reality of the fact that ego is unable to do this for itself, having to rely on redeemed aspects of the psyche to perform the final ‘theft’. Complexes wrought into a more conscious relationship become the equivalent of helpful spirits. From the life denying, imprisoning agents of Thanatos, they become the new life promoting servants of Eros.
We find this idea more explicitly stated in Grimm’s ‘Spirit in the Bottle’, much commented upon by Jung in his ‘Alchemical Studies’, where the spirit firstly wants to eat up the hero but then gives him a magical cloth which both heals wounds and transforms base metal into silver once the protagonist enters into a dialogue with it. This theme of the devouring complex become helper is also present in the story of Aladdin’s lamp. The ‘genie of the ring’ aids the recovery of the lamp which has been inadvertently swopped for a new one by the sultan’s daughter and spirited away, necessitating a transformational journey of forty days and nights into the wilderness which the hero could not possibly manage on his own.
These metaphors are important because they point symbolically to the means by which our afflictions may be redeemed, not by any amount of trying to be ‘positive’ which is simply more of the ego asserting itself, but by entering into a dialogue with the Unknown.
