Once there was a very poor man with a dozen hungry kids. Full of despair he wandered into the forest to see what he could find to feed them all. There he encountered a rather strange little man who smelled of burnt chicken feathers and had hooves instead of feet. The Devil, for that’s who it was, asked after the poor man’s situation and when the story was told he reached deep into his pocket and drew out a Little Walnut.
‘Here, take this walnut, ask anything of it and it will provide.’
‘But, you must surely want something for it..’
‘Oh well, if you insist, let’s just say, whatever you don’t know about back home.’
The Poor Man wracked his brains to think about all the things he didn’t know about but because he didn’t know about them the wracking did no good. So he agreed, thinking that what he couldn’t think about could not be such a big thing.
When he gets back he tells his wife about what happened and she erupts.. ‘You fool, the thing you don’t know about is that I am pregnant and that you have forfeited our child. WTF? Its not as though you don’t know about how these things happen..’
Yet what was done was done. The Poor Man became rich and bought a grand house for his family. The babe was born and was loved, yet their joy was palled by the prospect of the Devil showing up to claim his due. One night, two simple sages emerged from the forest and knocked on the door. The announced that they knew about what had happened and they had come to help save the baby. The Poor Man was amazed and asked what they should do. They told him to bake a loaf and leave it on the window sill, for the Devil would appear that very night.
Sure enough just before dawn the Devil arrived and called over the window sill..
‘Yo, my man.. I’m here to collect what you owe.. bring out the baby.’
To his surprise, to all our surprise, the Bread then spoke up, saying..
‘You are having to be patient and wait as I once had to be patient and wait..I was sown in Autumn and waited patiently in the soil the whole winter long as you wait patiently now. I was cut in my prime and threshed and beaten, just as you suffer now. I was ground down and pummelled into dough, then roasted in flames just as you now sit and roast in your own flames…’
The Loaf quietly expounding their mutual suffering until dawn broke. This particular Devil had no power by day. In any case he felt so tired out by the Loaf’s harrowing story that he crept quietly away and never returned.
In the more commonly known story of ‘Rumplestiltskin’, there is also the theme of a baby who will be forfeit to ‘a strange little man’ unless the protagonist can tell his name. In both stories the power of naming resolves the crisis. In Rumplestiltskin it is the little man’s name itself. In The Little Walnut, the naming of shared suffering.
You might say the Poor Man was not so deserving. The situation was of his own making. Yet he was desperate for his children. Moreover, he loved the new child and suffered the prospect of its loss. This love evokes powerful transforming energies from the deep psyche despite his foolishness, symbolised by the two wise men emerging from the forest just in the nick of time..
The Poor Man’s strength lies in his relatedness. His willingness to throw caution to the wind for the sake of feeding the family, despite its unfortunate consequence, also sets in motion the means to redeem the situation because his actions have not gone unnoticed by the Gods. The Principle of Relatedness, personified by Demeter as archetypal fairy godmother, well known for her love of her child, intercedes on behalf of the Poor Man in the form of a loaf of bread. As Goddess of grain and provision she speaks with the Devil and manages what Devils are generally starved of, tea and sympathy. She identifies with him without losing her own point of view. ‘You are suffering as I have suffered. You are having to wait as I waited.’ I really sympathize and you are not having the baby.
So too is it with our own Devils. If they are not to become neuroses then they need a maternal touch rather than heroic intervention. They need to be spoken with, at great length. Demeter intuits that the Devil’s wish for the child is ultimately the wish to identify with and be the child. She generously gives him the good stuff, the good maternal mirror. He is held and filled up without quite knowing how it happened, and so loses interest in its mere symbolic representation.
The shameful fury of all Devils, that they are rejected, has to be spoken to and soothed for them to begin to settle down. They feel demoted and are surly on account of it. In the absence of dialogue they’ll take the baby, the creative moment, instead. The way forward is not via heroic effort but by the invocation of Demeter to act as daycare for a while.
So, the Devil is contained by the relatedness of the Old Religion. The mysterious wise men from the forest who appear just when needed are the representatives of the Old Ways. They understand that if the situation is going to be helped it will have to by something other than a prejudicial sky god with an axe to grind.
In certain African tribes the village deals with transgressors in a very similar way. The person is made the centre of everyone’s attention. Then they take it in turns to remind the errant one of all their qualities, their good deeds, their shared experience. This repairs and vitalises tribal relations which they assume must have been damaged in some way for the person to transgress in the first place.
Once the Principle of Relatedness is restablished the danger passes and the scales of justice balanced without the need for sanction. Imagine if we approached the shadow like this? In our story the Devil is not vanquished. It’s not necessary to cast him down or out. Demeter has a way with him even if the Poor Man does not. His skill is rather in getting out of his own way, faithfully heeding and placing himself at the service of the two wise men.
