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‘What is the Devil to me anyway?’ you ask. Could He not simply be anything which frustrates or thwarts intention? Or the opposite, the seduction of an easy life?

See how it gets so tricky, so quickly?

Taken a bit more seriously, ‘what does the Devil want with me and why?’ Psychologically, ‘what does it mean to ‘integrate’ the Shadow? Is it even possible? How exactly might you do that?

The problem of Evil existed way before the Church got a hold of it and turned it into such a polarized issue. In ancient times Good and Evil existed on much more of a continuum. The Gods were both good and bad, helpful and frustrating. This article examines some of the folk lore about the Devil, to see what we might learn about ourselves. We’ll explore the possibilities of a more diplomatic solution to the zero tolerance legacy we have inherited thus far which has, with the greatest irony, contributed in vast measure to it’s further proliferation.

The Devil and the Blacksmith.

According to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification of fairy tales this story derives from one of four prototypical stories preceding the division of Indo-European languages six thousand years ago, perhaps at a time when emerging ego consciousness was separating out from and having to come to terms with the Collective and its myriad oppositions of self and other, right and wrong, good and evil.

There was once a Blacksmith who decided to show his respect for the Devil by painting an image of Him on the gate of the Smithy. Whenever he went into the Smithy he would look at the Devil and say, ‘what-ho countryman’ and this way the Smith and the Devil remained on good terms his whole life long.

After the Smith died his son took over but the boy was not forged from the same fire as his father and bashed the painted image with a hammer. The Devil endured this maltreatment for some time and then decided to teach the young man a lesson. He turned himself into an aspiring apprentice and asked the new Smith for a job, soon becoming as proficient as his new master.

One day, when the new Smith was out, an old lady went by in her carriage. The Devil was at the forge and called out after her, telling her he could make her young again if only she would trust in his skills. She agreed, so the Devil took her in his pincers and burned her to ashes in the forge. He sent for a pail of milk and dunked the ashes into it, whereupon the most beautiful young maiden emerged. ‘Thank you, sir’, she exclaimed, ‘I will send you my husband directly.’

When the old man arrived all breathless with excitement the Smith had returned and it was to him that he made the request to be transformed. Understanding there was money involved, the foolish Smith did his best and copied what he’d heard the Devil had done, first burning the old man in the forge and then putting his ashes in the milk pail but nothing happened.

The youthful wife was understandably upset and had the Smith dragged off to the gallows. At the last moment the Devil appears with the old man now transformed and so the hanging is called off, provided the Smith promise to stop bashing the Devil with his hammer. The now much wiser Smith readily agrees.

For transformation to occur the Devil has to be part of the mix.

These days it’s fashionable to combat ‘negative emotions’, like the inexperienced Smith bashing the Devil with his hammer, reinforcing the split between persona and shadow, hoping to become ‘good’, but soon getting ourselves into trouble for our efforts as the denied Other drags us to the gallows of depression and anxiety.

What we think of as ‘negative’ has the seeds of change in it. This is why the traumas of childhood need not crush us. The fact that the past cannot be changed does not stop us from changing our relationship with it, both by connecting up to painful feelings and finding value in the wound.

When I was a child the garden was full of snakes. We lived on the outskirts of a sprawling African city with a thriving rat population, the fittest and plumpest of which would make it to the very fringes of the city where generations of grateful snakes slithered in from the surrounding bush to take advantage of the feast.

My father would go out into the garden armed with a grass slasher ahead of us kids and kill the snakes he could find, an array of green and black mambas, both deadly, and boomslang, even more deadly, along with the occasional cobra or puff adder.

Consciously, I had been persuaded by my father’s mighty efforts but playing at anything, particularly football, was always a bit odd because the snakes would get involved. Pitch invasion took on a meaning all of its own and could involve eight foot mambas with all their friends and relatives out for an afternoon slither or perhaps in search of tea..

Within a short space of time I acquired an intuitive ‘knowing’ about the whereabouts of the snakes. It was as though the dangerous environment had triggered a natural defense in my psyche, just as the body produces antibodies in the presence of germs which strengthen the immune system and bring to life the very resources needed to enrich the inner world. ‘Character,’ says Helen Keller, ‘cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.’

We grow by way of adversity. Hence the Gnostic saying, ‘there is good and there is bad and that is good.’ We grow when times are hard and rest when times are easy. The good and the bad are necessary to each other. Likewise, there is no consciousness without its opposite. Consciousness itself presupposes a world of subject and object. ‘Implicit in this primal duality is every other duality, including good and evil.’ Freke and Gandy 2001

If we choose to respond to the complexity of all this by simply pitting good against evil, life is soon drained of its vitality. In childhood its necessary to graze your knee, to get lost in the woods, to experience betrayal. The developmental process needs some grit in the oyster if pearls are to be made. ‘The situation of primal trust is not viable for life. The essential truth about both trust and betrayal; they contain each other.’ J Hillman 2010

When we are very little everything is just so and taken for granted. The psyche is what you know of it. Then come intrusive experiences which usher you over the threshold into a world suddenly complicated by ambivalence and life beyond conscious control.

This transition is going to be a bumpy ride. All kinds of things that are not supposed to happen, do. The Smith realizes he has to contend with this Devil he doesn’t respect. Events have overtaken him, and he is compelled to make propitious amends. Through this fearful metanoia, brought about by a brush with death, the Smith is initiated into a wider reality and ultimately escapes with more than his neck. He becomes a new man.

It is not just the old lady and her husband who have been touched by the eternal. The inexperienced Smith has himself been transformed by his change of heart. He is compelled to re-frame his place in the scheme of things. It is the end of a whole way of experiencing life, yet one which then gives rise to a new beginning and a new respect for life’s depths. “Every dark thing one falls into can be called an initiation. The first step is generally falling into the dark place and usually appears in a dubious or negative form.” Marie-Louise von Franz, 2001

Of course this doesn’t mean to say that wickedness is then justified or that we should throw ourselves into difficult situations. Yet the question remains… What did you develop as a result of your adversity? How has your wound sensitized you? How has your suffering helped to make who you are?

Bearskin.

Once upon a time a discharged soldier had nothing left to live on and so he took himself into the forest, despairing of what was to become of him. Suddenly there appeared a little man who looked right stately but had a hideous cloven hoof….

Grimm’s fairy tales have a number of stories about the Devil. They all have a pronounced theme running through them. He is instrumental in the protagonist’s transformation and wants not their souls but their old worn out identities.

Before the Church got hold of the Devil and gave him responsibilities absent from his job description, it was widely recognized that the Shadow of Consciousness had to be carefully propitiated in order not to run foul of it. In other words, the Devil had to be given his due, not by way of succumbing to wickedness, nor even by the prudent psychological hygiene of respectful gestures and diplomatic compromises to ward off his worst effects, but by the recognition that he plays a meaningful part in the evolution of consciousness. As the alchemists say, ‘A warring peace; a sweet wound; a mild evil.”

Grimm’s stories show that trying to run the Devil out of town ends very badly, creating all kinds of splits, disasters and neurotic conflicts. You can see this in our culture’s obsessive preoccupation with excessive politeness and being ‘positive’. In full blown Orwellian tradition becoming whole now involves dividing the psyche against itself rather than inquiring into the meaning of things.

This involves a collective spiritual bypassing of such proportions it has its own service industry and several shelves in your local book store full of advice on how to get rid of all those warty, all-too-human parts of you which fall so far short of perfection’s tyranny. When they are denied such forces are then bound to become all the more powerful , because they are beyond influence let alone transformation.

‘I understand well what you need’, said the Devil, just as the Old Soldier was about to speak, ‘but there must be some fair exchange’. The soldier agrees provided their arrangement does not compromise his salvation for he knows only too well to whom he speaks…

The Devil’s request is subtle, poetic and symbolically intriguing. The Old Soldier must kill a bear and wear it’s pelt for seven years during which time he may neither wash nor cut his hair or nails. If the Old Soldier survives this experience he is free to go with great riches.

Once agreed, the Devil throws into the bargain his own coat, whose magical pockets are always filled with gold,…

which was nice of him..

wasn’t it?

Why else would a trickster who delights in mischief give you magic pockets full of gold for any reason other than because he is a really nice chap? Though, they do say that the Devil comes to you not with horns and a tail but as everything you ever wanted….

And so it was that the newly dubbed, ‘Bearskin’, went out into the world ‘refraining from nothing that did him good’. He could indulge any whim money could buy, live out his wildest material fantasies, though slowly, year by year, his appearance deteriorated. Bearskin’s hair matted into his beard. His face arms and feet became encrusted with filth. He smelled terrible and though he showered the poor with golden ducats to pray for his soul he couldn’t shower himself, so he was soon invariably shunned wherever he went…

In the fourth year of his travail he stopped at an Inn whose landlord would not receive him, directing him to the stable instead. There he sat alone in the dirt and the dung until his attention was drawn by someone crying. He went to see what was the matter and found a ragged old man weeping bitterly in his room.

At first the old man is terrified of Bearskin but then perceives him to be human. Bearskin shows him kindness, inquiring into his suffering and soon the old man tells him all his troubles; he is about to be imprisoned for debt and so his three daughters will have no-one to support them.

Bearskin swiftly hands him a small sack of gold, resolving all his problems in one go. The old man is so grateful he offers Bearskin the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. The older two are totally put off by the filth and the stench but the youngest sees only the kindness of his gesture towards her father and volunteers herself. Bearskin vows to return once his tenure to the Devil is paid and gives her half a gold ring, keeping the other half himself.

Eventually the seven years are up. The Devil admits Bearskin’s success and is compelled to wash and comb him, to trim his nails and shave his beard, to dust his coat and polish his boots. Then the transformed Bearskin returns to his beloved who recognizes the handsome stranger by his half of the ring.

At the beginning of our story we find our hero at the end of his road. Peace has broken out and his old war time identity is redundant, a classic existential crisis. You have fulfilled your collective obligations, developed all kinds of personal skills, but feel internally bankrupt. Exploration of the dark forest compelled by an emergency..’the symptoms [of which] turn out to be the opening up of the path of individuation.’ G. Adler. 1961

This sudden complication is bound to leave you feeling a bit vulnerable and diminished. Things which used to be terribly important are now not so important. Things which used to be irrelevant become all consuming. Is infinity a number or not? And what is an expanding universe expanding into…? What do dreams mean and where they come from?

Suddenly everything seems dangerous and overwhelming, throwing the personality back on its own as yet unacknowledged depths with considerable loss to normal functioning. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” C G Jung 1945

Bearskin is impelled to discover who he is, besides both his socially adapted ego identity which no longer provides him with meaning and the fantasy of endless riches which he’ll soon discover won’t do it either. It’s not going to be fun. Suddenly he is swamped by the numinous pelt with its primal associations of ancient gods, of archaic tooth and claw. The great hide is disorienting, clumsy making, inveigling him with wild and shaggy, closing round him as a cocoon. He is sequestered from the world as much as rudely thrown into it.

In many shamanic traditions the initiate must identify with an animal spirit and regress into a primitive state before being returning to the community enriched. Many a modern mental illness has similar connotations…. crises born of the Psyche’s own need to become more conscious, to cross developmental thresholds which burden the ego with archaic collective material.

So the Devil is not out to get our hero. Rather he sets in motion the individuation process with an initiatory challenge. Like the alchemical Mercurius, he provides both the difficult test and the means to accomplish it. When the time comes he admits defeat and honors Bearskin’s success with a generous preening session.

Bearskin manages to survive his foray into the unconscious because he develops the capacity for relatedness. When he arrives at the Inn it seems that his suffering and wretchedness can be endured because they have also given rise to kindness and the capacity to be touched by the suffering of others. Life’s uncertain chaos has opened his heart. He wants to hear the old man’s trouble without knowing if there is anything he can do about it because he has learned what value there is in the simple charity of giving comfort, of lending a sympathetic ear. ‘The reason for evil in the world,’ says Jung, ‘is that people are not able to tell their stories’. C G Jung 1945

Relatedness and the sharing of stories anchor the soulful life. Without it consciousness itself is diminished leaving you isolated and unable to be fed. Bearskin discovers, through the humble recognition of his dependence on others, the value of turning up, of being there for another..

..despite his terrible smell.

You can’t help wondering if the weeping old man is the Devil in disguise come to test Bearskin, to see if he has become sufficiently tender to survive seven years on the fringes of the community and perhaps at the edges of his own sanity. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu cautions us, ‘The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life. Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle. A tree that is unbending is easily broken.’ Lao Tzu 1993

So perhaps the gold goes full circle, as do the two halves of the ring at the end of the story. This transitional gesture of seeking out the crying man protects Bearskin. He has found the strength to endure his liminal experience through charity and being together. He’s invested beyond himself. Wordsworth says of the redeemed wanderer.. ‘Unoccupied by sorrows of his own his heart lay open. He could afford to suffer with those he saw suffer.’ Wordsworth 1994

This between-ness of ‘affording with’, is the treasure.

The Devil hosts Bearskin’s redeeming bath corroborating his capacity to ‘bear’ the strain of their arrangement. This gesture speaks to the importance of the humble kindness Bearskin has developed during his adventures. This has had an apotropaic effect on events. He makes it through the forest not only in one piece but with a deeper sense of wholeness and belonging..

The Devil’s Sooty Brother.

This story is a variant of ‘Bearskin’ and will amplify our theme. As before, a decommissioned soldier down to his last piece of bread happens upon a dark wood. Unable to find work or food he throws himself on the mercy of the Forest and wanders in. Suddenly a strange little man is stood before him. He promises him wealth and riches if only the soldier will come down to Hell and serve him seven years. In addition, as with the story of ‘Bearskin’, the soldier may not wash or cut his hair and nails as he goes about his duties.

The Old Soldier agrees, so the Devil takes him down, down, to the kitchens of the Underworld where he must tend giant steaming cauldrons bubbling with hell broth and feed the furnaces burning white hot beneath them. The Devil further admonishes him that under no circumstances may he peek in the cauldrons on pain of something only the Devil could dream up and so the soldier cheerfully sets to work.

After a long while of dutiful labor, dragging about great stumps to throw into the furnaces, sweeping up the twigs and bark chips behind the door just as the Devil had shown him, he became curious about what might be in the smallest of the cauldrons. One day, when the Devil was out, he set up a ladder against it and climbed up for a peek. There he found his old Corporal looking pensive in the bubbling stew.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said delightedly, climbing back down to throw some extra big logs onto the fire.

After a much longer time of exemplary service the Old Soldier became curious about what might be in the second larger cauldron, a great metal vat suspended from massive beams. He shimmied up the side of the cauldron and there was his former Ensign, with just his head sticking out.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he exclaimed, jumping back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the roaring fire.

The Old Soldier continued to work at his duties with great dedication. He tended the flames and swept the floor every day, careful to put the sweepings behind the door just as he had been told. Meantime his hair became long and matted.. His beard had grown to the floor and his nails stuck out like claws.

Finally, his curiosity about the third and largest of the cauldrons got the better of him. This monstrous vessel was an infernally wrought iron ark, mounted upon a great tripod of fossilized trees. The furnaces raging beneath it consumed whole saplings at once. The heat from it had thoroughly singed the Old Soldier from head to foot. Undeterred, he clambered up, and there, with just his nose sticking out of the broth, was his old General.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, squeaking with excitement, and clambered back down to feed this mightiest of the three furnaces with some massive gnarly oak stumps he had been saving for a special occasion.

By this time the Old Soldier has become unrecognizable. Layer upon layer of ash and soot is mashed into hair become mane. His beard has to be knotted to keep it out of the flames. One day the Devil looks in to see how he’s doing. He lets him know his time is up and that he can go home now.

‘How did you get on?’ asks the Devil.

‘Oh quite well,’ replies Old Soldier, ‘I did what you said….

‘Ah, but you did peek in the *^!% cauldrons didn’t you, matey?’ spits the Devil with gritted teeth. ‘I should bring down all kinds of unspeakable punishments upon you, but…. because you’ve performed your duties so well and kept the fires so wonderfully bright’, he adds cheerily, ‘I will let you off….

Here are your wages…’

and he hands the Old Soldier a satchel full of sweepings from behind the door. ‘When people ask you who you are you can tell them, ‘I am the Devil’s Sooty Brother and my King as well.”

Pleased to have gotten away with his life the Old Soldier sets off for home. He decides to dump the satchel before too long only to discover that it is now full of gold…

The first motif in the story is the disbanded soldier without prospects. He is the ‘all revved up with nowhere to go’ experience of the personality which has fought its battles and become accomplished, but has started to ask, ‘what for? To what end and purpose? Who am I besides the roles I’ve been given? What lies beneath the surface?’ Dante begins his classic tale of the Inferno in a similar quandary, ‘‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death:” Dante Alighieri 2012

In his diary Tolstoy writes of this experience, ‘at first it was moments of perplexity and arrest of life as though I did not know what to do or how to live.. expressed by the question, ‘what is it for?’ Tolstoy 2011

Such a state of mind is bound to evoke a compensatory response from the Unconscious personified by the ‘Little Man’ who our hero encounters as soon as he enters the forest. We could also call him Shiva, Loki, or Hades. This meeting and their ‘working arrangement’ prefigures a descent into the Underworld. In ordinary life this is often experienced as some form of crisis, a failed marriage, the death of a loved one, a bout of inexplicable depression, the development of symptoms.

Such a descent, like that of Innana from Sumerian mythology, who had to relinquish a garment at every one of seven gates leading down to her dark sister, Erishkigal, involves the difficult process of reducing consciousness down to its essential elements. This is symbolized by the sulphurous steaming cauldrons and their grizzly contents. Sulphur is the element of transformation. Its the rotten egg smell of decomposition, of one thing becoming another.

The Old Soldier must tend these cauldrons with their respective symbols inside them just as the alchemist tends the fires beneath his alembic vessel, ‘a kind of uterus from which the filius philosophorum, [son of the philosophers] is to be born.’ C G Jung 1953

In the smallest kettle we find the Corporal, a man of low rank who nevertheless had power over our soldier in his former life. A Corporal is forever at your shoulder, micro-managing the day with a bunch of directives not unlike the injunctions of childhood. These may make life work more smoothly but they can also keep you in line at the expense of your individuality. You can only transform what belongs to you. The ‘not-me’ of other people’s opinions and convictions have to be separated out from what I think and feel, like meat from the bone.

The Corporal used to ‘have’ the soldier much as blind adherence to unquestioned authority ‘has’ the personality, when it is unconsciously identified with something which runs it from within, something swallowed down without noticing, so that life can be lived without reflection, when fear of loneliness forces the child to adapt.

The Corporal, as ‘inner critic’, can make your life hell. He has to be boiled and boiled, so what’s useful and constructive can be separated out from what is oppressive and life denying, so that internalized values can become the possession of the personality rather than it’s master.

In the next cauldron, which requires a great deal more emotional heat, we find the Ensign, a man of higher rank who commands a squad, a varied, integrated personality with an organized structure capable of effective and responsible action…

..which is all very well, but its all still happening in the barrack room of the personality.

Not only does the ego need to be formed, it also needs a context. Regardless of its contents and whether they get along or not, so too is there the need to experience the personality as something you have rather than something you are, to have a vantage point, a super-ordinate perspective au dessus de la mellee, above all the activity.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.

The problem with such emancipation is that it invariably gets inflated along the way. Having chucked off the ‘not-me’ introjects of childhood and achieved the heroic crafting of a well oiled unit, task oriented and adapted to reality, the hero is bound to over reach himself, having forgotten about the ‘not-me’ within his own Psyche, still sweating out in the third giant cauldron.

Inside this mighty vessel he finds the General. It’s furnace requires whole trees to feed it, so great is the energy needed to develop a relationship with the collective psyche without being swamped by it… much.

and so you stoke the great fires till sweat binds grime to skin in testament to vigil over the flames whilst Selfhood is gradually coalesced from the largest of the cauldrons and alchemical gold spun from sweepings.

The Devil’s role in all this is initiatory. He does no more than show the Old Soldier in the door and give him his duties. This somewhat relativizes what we have come to consider to be evil. It means that the difficult things which happen are precisely those which help you to grow into the person you are to become and create clarity about what your priorities might be.

Freud observed that..’people lose their neurosis in times of war..’ Freud 1915. This is because crises require creative solutions, innovations and a kind of reinventing of oneself, all of which happily occupies and channels the upwelling of un-lived potentialities latterly plaguing daily life in the form of psychic affliction.

One way or another, life is suffering. Choices are really limited to trading in your chaos for chaos of a different kind. There’s no magical way out. Its more a question of would you like that served with fries or not? Will you also have the chips of meaning, and the sauce of good-natured humor at this Cafe of Uncertainty, facing dinner-time with fellow feeling and curious wonder? Or do you just want a table for one and the soup of ordinary misery with the manky croutons of being done to?

The Devil lets the soldier go because he knows there is no consciousness without flouting the rules, without thinking outside the box, without the grit in the oyster. What was important was not that the soldier obey but that he went about his duties as sacred tasks and devotedly fed the fires. It is this which makes gold of sweepings. Through devotion and disobedience the soldier brings together his own opposite natures so that he can finally say, ”I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my King as well!”

So the Devil gets consciousness evolving. He gives Old Soldier the means to transform his identify. At the end he is not only the Devil’s Sooty Brother but also ‘my King as well’. Archetypally, the King is himself semi-divine, mediating between the People and the Gods, between Heaven and Earth. Sooty Brother has become a Self, the ordinary sweepings of everyday life forged into something precious, alchemically represented by the satchel of gold.

The Devil and the Shoemaker.

This story, by Anton Chekov, tells us that once there was a poor Shoemaker who was so tragically hard up he had to work on Christmas Eve finishing a pair of boots for a wealthy Patron. He cussed and complained under his breath as he labored, taking frequent swigs from a bottle hid under the work bench. ‘Why must I slave like this whilst others are tucked up in their beds?’ he muttered. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the rich folk were destroyed! Then I could be rich and lord it over some other mean cobbler..’.

Dreaming like this he suddenly remembered his work. He grabbed the now finished boots and headed out of his shabby hovel into the freezing streets. Rich sleighs slide by, their handsome drivers all holding a ham in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. Well dressed ladies snicker at him. An old acquaintance, now made good, mocks his ragged clothes.

Eventually he finds his Patron’s enormous house, with lights at every window. Sullenly, he knocks at the door. Inside the place smells of sulfur. Fires roar in the grate. The Patron is pounding something unspeakable in a mortar. ‘I have come to deliver your boots, my lord… Let me help you off with the old ones..’ and in so doing, he discovers not a foot but a hoof…

‘Oh, so that’s who he is…,’ thinks the Shoemaker. ‘I should run, but hey, I can make this work for me…’ and so he begins to praise the Devil for being such a fine fellow. ‘Why, thank you, and what can I do for you?’ asks the Devil. The Shoemaker begins a litany of woes.. ‘Yes, yes,.. but what do you want?’

‘I want to be rich, your honor, Satan Ivanitch!’ pleads the Shoemaker, throwing himself to the floor. In a trice he finds himself seated at a huge table groaning with fine food and expensive vodka, all served by polite footmen in smart uniforms. During the feast he summons the old acquaintance he had met in the street and abuses him with mockery and blows. After dinner the Devil appears to make sure he has had all his needs satisfied but the Shoemaker is too uncomfortably bloated to answer, or to acknowledge the buxom wife the Devil has brought with him.

That night he cannot sleep or embrace his wife for the thought of thieves breaking in….

On Christmas morning the Shoemaker goes to church. As he sat praying the same prayer he used to pray when he was poor, he suddenly realized that there was little to distinguish the bowed heads all around about him. The same sins plagued them all. Death awaited him as before. The same black earth would cover him over.. He jumped up and ran out for fresh air, clawing at his collar, too distracted to pray for worrying about his money..

and his ruined soul…

The Shoemaker decides to cheer himself up with a song but a Watchman silences him saying it was not done for a rich man to sing in the street. He bought a concertina to play instead but met with the same rebuke. On the way home beggars call out for bread and alms.. ‘Away, you filthy scum.!’ When he gets home the Shoemaker tries to cuddle up to his wife but she rebuffs him…. and just as he is beginning to realize he is actually more miserable than before, the Devil arrives and drags him kicking and screaming to Hell.

On the very edge of the Infernal Pit, the Shoemaker woke up with such a violent start he sent everything flying. There was a fierce pounding at the door. It was the Patron, come to collect his boots. As he sewed the last stitches the Shoemaker asked, ‘If I may, your honor, what is your occupation?’ ‘ Well, if you must know, I am a Pyrotechnician,’ replied the Sulfurous One, who then paid the cobbler and left in a puff of burnt chicken feathers and pink smoke.

Our hero stumbles out into the street, wondering at the clean white snow, the crisp air, the beautiful people, the wonderful sights and smells around him. Everyone, he realized, was the same. Some rode in carriages and some played concertinas but the same choices in life, the same grave in death, awaited them all. They were all in it together.

The Shoemaker’s problem was not his poverty but his divided-ness. He despised himself, irrespective of his station in life, which then lent itself to misery in a way that rags alone cannot convey. The Others he encounters in his dream notice and respond to this, embodying the contempt he secretly feels for himself.

His poverty was one of spirit, brought on by the hateful split between his envious loathing of the have’s and his scornful disparagement for the have not’s. No-one could get it right for him, nor could he accept himself for as long as this internal schism existed, for as long as he abdicated his own authorship in favor of the shifting sands of collective opinion.

Without a sense of Self, without his own life to live and his own death to die, the Shoemaker is like chaff in the wind, eternally disgruntled, forever dissatisfied, perpetually at the mercy of others. His dream is a compensatory response from the Unconscious doing its best to draw his attention to the vain hypocrisy of his neurotic conflict, perhaps hoping that some humility might come from going more deeply into it.

‘Whether the patient is rich or poor, has family and social position or not, alters nothing, for outer circumstances are far from giving his life a meaning. It is much more a question of his quite irrational need for what we call a spiritual life. The patient’s unconscious comes to the aid of this vital need by producing dreams whose content is essentially religious.’ C. G. Jung.1991

Earlier, I showed how the shadow can serve as an initiatory figure into greater consciousness depending upon the protagonist’s attitude. Chekov’s story seems to take this idea forward. Where, you might wonder, has the Shoemaker’s diabolical dream come from? Though it has been encrusted with two millenia of moral overtones, the origin of the word ‘diabolical’ comes from the Greek, Dia, meaning ‘through’ and Ballos, meaning ‘with the aid of..’ The diabolical dream is unwanted and resisted, yet it is what’s needed….

The Devil gives the Shoemaker what he asks for knowing full well that it would thrust him up against his own divisiveness faster than any wagging ecclesiastical finger. He also gives him the chance to recant, to have a change of heart and learn from his error by way of what amounts to a dry run of the landscape in which he imagines meaning lies.

The Shoemaker’s wishes are all self centered, childlike, orally fixated, a 19th century version of wanting to win the lottery. ‘Be careful what you ask for’, goes the saying… ‘you might just get it’. Fortunately, the Devil is not just out to get the Shoemaker. He lets him learn from the dream.

It is not the shadow’s intent to snuff consciousness out. It gets active when consciousness is too narrow or divided against itself. The Devil is quite happy to bow out when the Shoemaker learns his lesson just as Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, agrees to a back seat once the sinful hero heals the divide with those he has betrayed despite the small print in his contract.

By means of the Shadow’s ‘cruel’ intervention, the Shoemaker experiences a moment of enlightenment, different from and transcendent to both the inferior and superior parts of himself. He had latterly just alternated between them, unconsciously swinging between the opposites without realizing what was happening. So he really does get a fresh perspective on life, even if his re-birth means having to be dragged to the edge of the abyss.

Baba Yaga.

Sometimes the Devil takes a feminine form. Baba Yaga is such a figure, the dark aspect of the Great Mother, grown wicked and vengeful from centuries of banishment in the Taiga. This story begins with the orphan Vassilisa the Brave who has been sent to live with her step mother and step sisters on the edge of the forest. The step sisters want to get rid of Vassilisa and so they douse all the candles in their cottage saying the wind blew them out and send Vassilisa into the woods to ask Baba Yaga for a light hoping the old witch will eat her.

Armed with no more than the doll given to her by her birth mother, Vassilisa goes in search of the Hut on Hens Legs, the hideous home of Baba Yaga. When she arrives there the old witch simply gives her endless chores to complete with the implicit threat that if they remain undone Vassilisa will pay the ultimate price. Then she disappears leaving Vassilisa to her mountain of work.

The doll comforts our heroine, telling her to rest while she, the doll, does all the chores. Sure enough, when Baba Yaga returns all the work is done. The old witch is a bit put out and asks Vassilisa if she does not have any questions for her, hoping the child will show enough impertinence to warrant being gobbled up. Vassilisa demures, asking only some general questions about what she has seen outside and mentioning nothing of the wonders within the cottage or the fact that it wanders about the woods by itself. Like Job on his Dungheap, she refrains from challenging the Divine on its bad behavior.

‘Don’t you have any more questions?’ hisses the witch, but Vassilisa just shakes her head.

‘How did you manage to complete all the tasks?’ Baba Yaga demands.

‘By the blessing of my mother.’ replies Vassilisa quietly, neglecting to mention the doll.

‘I don’t need blessings in my house,’ screeches the witch and turns Vassilisa out. As she leaves, Baba Yaga fetches a skull with flaming eyes from the hedge, mounts it on a pole and hands it to the girl, ‘the fire for your sisters.’ When Vassilisa returns this skull-fire burns into the souls of the wicked sisters and reduces them to ashes. She buries the skull and leaves the forest.

How does Vassilisa avoid being eaten? Let’s compare her attitude to the protagonist in another old story, ‘Mother Trude’. In this instructive tale there is an alternative ending for an impertinent and prying girl who begs her parents to let her visit Mother Trude as she has heard so many interesting stories about the old lady and the wonderful curiosities she has in her house. Her parents warn her, saying Mother Trude is a bad woman who does evil things to little children. But the girl was so intrigued by the stories she had heard that she skipped along to Mother Trude’s house anyway and banged loudly on the door. When the old witch answers the girl is white as a sheet. ‘Why are you so pale?’ asks the old lady.

‘Err, I saw you through the window, looking like a flaming Devil,’ she squeeked.

‘Ah, yes indeed,’ replied the witch, ‘and now you will flame for me.’ She turns the child into a block of wood and tossed her onto the fire.

Vassilisa manages to stay clear of the destructive effects of Evil by avoiding this naive head-on confrontation we find in the story of Mother Trude, which serves only to polarize and reinforce the witch’s power. Vassilisa forestalls the seduction of assuming any entitlement, or any holier-than-thou attitude, which mollifies the witch just enough not to be eaten.

In another story about Baba Yaga, a soldier (yes, another one) manages to avoid appearing on the menu by refusing the polarized option she dangles before him. ‘Did you get sent or have you come of your own free will, little one?’ The soldier assertively refuses to be seduced into infancy, demanding she address him as a man and it is this that saves him. It seems that the best way of avoiding falling into the clutches of a power principle, whether your own or someone else’s, is to refrain from thinking of yourself as ‘good’ and resisting the invitation to get too comfortable under circumstances where you are clearly outgunned.

I once asked my analyst, Chuck, who was also a renowned Potter, how he addressed the part of him which wanted to be famous for it’s own sake. Without any hesitation he replied, ‘I tip my hat to it.’

Such a response acknowledges the reality of the infernal pull down the route of least resistance whilst making sure you don’t get muddied with it at the same time. Evil is most rife where it is denied. Its an affliction of the great and the good or at least of those with such aspirations. In Arabic culture the name for an amulet which has the power to avert Evil is called ‘Nazar’, which means sight, surveillance, attention. To see it is to be protected from it. Hence the idea that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he doesn’t exist. Carl Jung made the terse observation, ‘there is nothing so dangerous as a mild man.’ The reason is precisely because he is blind to his own potential for wickedness which must then perforce be either projected or enacted.

Many of our stories about the Devil have an Old Soldier as the protagonist, someone who has been in the wars. Why is that? Perhaps it might help to think of neuroses as old soldiers who need, not ‘curing’ or ‘treating’, but rather appropriate recognition for services rendered since they are, in effect, time worn responses which no longer adequately reflect life and are in need of transformation. From this point of view a neurosis is a kind of treasure. ‘A neurosis is often a plus, not a minus, but an unlived plus, a possibility of becoming more conscious or creative, funked for some lousy excuse.’ M L von Franz 1995

A man may not be able to trust his mother but if he transfers this dynamic to his wife a much needed early defense will now spoil his adult life. His belief system has to collapse and be reborn. For this he will need to find a little man in a dark wood, someone who, from a subjective point of view, is about to destroy him because the loss of anything you are identified with will feel at best like robbery and at worst like death.

What we psychologists euphemistically call ‘resistance’ is rooted in this dread of dissolution, what M. Fordham calls ‘de-integration’, the necessary collapse of old ways of being that can feel like being pulled apart by evil forces. Paradoxically, the growth we seek is bound to include a brush with ‘wicked’ calamity. When they arrived in America in 1909, Freud turned to Jung and said, ‘they don’t realize we are bringing them the plague.’

Conclusion.

So, what can we glean from these stories? The Devil has an initiatory function, certainly. He is part of life’s complexity, to be sure. Yet it is more complex still. How the Devil behaves seems to have something to do with the relational attitude of the protagonist. In fact, so much hinges upon this that you begin to wonder from where the Devil draws his strength. From this point of view, staying out of the fight is no mere passive abdication. On the contrary, it means precisely to be impelled upon the difficult quest for the midpoint between extremes, the still point of a turning Earth. ‘It is a very profound, mystical solution.. The divine nucleus of the Psyche is the one thing beyond the problem of good and evil. [It is] the absolute factor which can lead us out of the situation.’ M L von Franz 1991

In the story of Vassilisa, she manages to save herself almost entirely by her careful dealings with Baba Yaga. She survives, not because she is good or saintly, but because she is wise and circumspect. She makes sure she stays clear of the impulse to be overly curious or make judgements about the Great Mother and so she doesn’t get inflated by their encounter. ‘Inflation,’ as the old alchemists warn us, ‘beckons the Raven’s claw.’

The Sooty Brother manages to survive his sojourn in Hell by his dedicated service and humble acceptance of the sweepings in payment. The Devil is testing him, like a Zen master, to see if there is any animus still left in him to take offense at such a provocative gesture. But all the boiling away of flesh from bone has changed Sooty Brother’s relationship with his various complexes. He has them rather than the other way around. So the Devil’s provocation does not affect him. Sooty Brother has become ‘poor in spirit’ which means he can refrain, like Vassilisa, from polarizing, from being the Devil’s judge or jury and thereby attains his inner gold.

Bearskin, likewise, manages to stay out of the clutches of Evil by remembering his own compassion. This manifests itself as a reaching out past the preoccupations of his own personal misery to the tears and concerns of others. The Shoemaker discovers the same thing, true wealth and protection from calamity are to be found in our shared inheritance, in belonging, in the Principle of Relatedness.

Bibliography..

G Adler. The Living Symbol.’ Bollingen New York. 1961.

A Chekov. ‘ The Complete Short Novels’ Penguin 1994.

R Christian. ‘Tolstoy’s Diaries’ Faber and Faber 2011

Dante. ‘The Divine Comedy’ Penguin 2012.

Freke and Gandy. ‘Jesus and the Goddess. Thorsons 2001

Freud/Jung letters, vol 2. Princeton Uni Press. 1976.

Freud. Reflections on War and Death.’ FV editions 2019.

J. Hillman. ‘A Blue Fire.’ Harper. 2010.

CG Jung ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ Routledge 1991

CG Jung. ‘The Philosophical Tree.’ Routledge. 1945.

CG Jung. ‘Psychology and Alchemy.’ Routledge 1953.

Lao Tzu. ‘Tao te Ching.’ Hackett. 1993.

Wordsworth. ‘Collected poems’. Wordsworth Editions. 1994.

ML von Franz ‘The Feminine in Fairy Tales’ Shambhala 2001.

ML von Franz ‘ Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales Shambhala 1995.

H Zimmer. ‘Imagination’ Freies and Geistesleban. 2004.

A man goes into a bar. At the door he pauses and straps a large potato to his head. He then strides forward purposefully and orders a beer. The regulars look at one another doubtfully. One taps his temple. Another makes la-la noises. A third eventually asks, ‘Dude, why are you wearing a potato on your head? The stranger turns to him like he was sat in his own back yard and says in a lazy drawl, ‘to keep the tigers away, of course.’ The regulars exchange confused looks, ‘but there are no tigers in these parts, stranger.’ ‘Yep,’ says the stranger, oozing confidence, ‘mighty effective ain’t it?

Much of the current confusion about what it means to be a man has contributed to the malignant narcissism of our culture, currently spearheaded and symbolized by the fiasco of entitlement that is Donald Trump who daily does incomprehensible things whilst invoking the feeling in others that they must be the stoopid one.

We get so dazzled by what-Donald-did-next, so caught in the daily gut punch of crudity, corruption and orchestrated chaos that there is barely time to draw breath and wonder quietly how such a man ascended to highest office in the first place. The Kim’s of this world had power handed to them on a plate and so you expect them to be narcissistic babies. But how did the democratic process produce the same phenomenon?

Would you expect to find the Trump Administration at the end of two hundred years of fervent democracy? It is rather like the puzzle of the upstanding citizen who nevertheless harbors a secret and compulsive fetish behind closed doors. At first it all seems ‘mad’ but only because you do not have all the facts. There is an X in the equation for which a value has yet to be found.

I once knew someone who could not bear the sight of a number 6 bus. It turns out she used to ride that route which passed a road whose name was the same as an unmourned lover driven off years before by her foul temper. She could not bear her complicity let alone the loss. The bus route jogged her memory and so the psyche had leapt to her protection, parceling off unwanted life, preserving both her conscience and equilibrium in the process.

Collectively we do something similar. Patriotic self idealization requires the nation to split off it’s genocidal history, it’s greed, aggression and Imperialism. These have to be ejected beyond the borders onto Evil Others which must then be nobly warred against. This idealized group self then has to be rigorously policed and purged of self reflection, empathy, or care, all of which must now be regarded as ‘weakness’. Even this may not be enough. As the group unravels it may also need to demonize subgroups of its own members.

Like the story of the number 6 bus, whole swathes of collective awareness must be parceled off leaving us with the same split reality of competence and strength masquerading over fragility, emptiness and disconnection.

An iconic moment for this particular form of collective terror of ‘weakness’ came when Robert O’Neill, the former Navy Seal who claims to have been the one to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, tweeted a mask-less photo of himself on a Delta flight, captioned “I’m not a pussy.”

‘In the background of the photo was another, older man, wearing a fatigues-green United States Marine Corps hat — and a mask. When I saw his tweet I almost felt for him. What is it in our culture that has filled so many men with such an anxiety of impotence that even firing a bullet into the face of the most wanted terrorist alive and gaining the glory isn’t enough to reassure you that, yes, you are a man? Anand Giridharadas

From this point of view, the cultural crisis of male identity, the X in the equation, Donald Trump makes perfect sense. It’s much more than how to look rich when you ain’t. This particular deception is subsumed under the umbrella promise of being able to hide from yourself, regularly symbolized in the political tumult by hidden affairs, hidden payments, hidden grades, hidden tax returns, hidden connections and conversations, secret servers, hidden investments, hidden health details… hidden children.

When all else fails and you can no longer hide from horrible others you can take refuge in hiding from yourself and count on your buddy to do the same. The flaws in your personal character, the weakness, doubt and limitation can all be swept away by the warm and comforting tide of collective identity rooted in what RD Laing calls ‘alteration’, playing at being oneself.

‘The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.” ~C.G. Jung.

Our problem is not Trump. Our problem is that he represents a collective idea of a real man who, in turn, continues to feed the deification of persona which allows the rest of us, including many who outwardly oppose him, to hide from ourselves in good conscience.

Mother Goat had seven Kids. One day she left them at home while she went to the meadow to cut some fresh grass. ‘Don’t let anyone in’, she warned them,’ the big bad Wolf is hereabouts.’

Sure enough within half an hour the Wolf shows up pretending to be Mother. He puts on his sweetest caring voice, ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

The Kids laugh out loud because they can hear the gruff voice belongs to the Wolf and mock him from the safely shuttered windows. The Wolf goes off, educated in his error and eats some turnips to soften his voice. ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

The Kids are about to open the door when one of them sees the Wolf’s dark paw on the windowsill. ‘Stop, its the Wolf; see his dark paw’. So they mocked him some more and the Wolf slunk off further educated. He went to the Miller and stole some flour, covering himself from nose to tail and tried again…’oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

Sure enough, the foolish Kids let him in and all are gobbled up except the smallest who manages to hide in a cuckoo clock. When Mother Goat returns she finds the lone survivor who tells what happened. ‘So that’s who I saw sleeping off a heavy meal in the meadow.’ She took scissors, needle and thread then snuck up on the Wolf and cut him open. Out came the kids. Mother Goat then told them to fill the Wolf with rocks which she sewed back up.

When the Wolf woke up he had a mighty thirst. He staggered to the river but when he bent down to drink fell in and was drowned, much to the jubilation of the Kids who sang and danced and feasted on their grass.

So, what is the moral of the story?

Folklore is full of such simple tales, the good and the innocent triumphing over the seemingly greater figure of evil personified by the Wolf. It makes you wonder if folk are just trying to comfort themselves with the wish fulfilling idea that though life’s troubles cannot be surmounted, some brave soul will come along and save the day, a life stance of passivity which existentialist Irvin Yalom calls, ‘the myth of the ultimate rescuer’. Mother Goat will swoop into view and save us all from death anxiety.

But did the Kids learn anything along the way? The dancing and feasting suggests not. You can’t help but notice that they survived by pure luck which rather compels one to rethink what good and evil might be. After all, the Wolf is just doing what Wolves do. It is the inflated naivety of the Kids which is the author of their demise. In a parallel universe somewhere the Wolf gets to keep his prize. After all it seems like a just reward for discovering that if he can accurately fulfill the Kids fantasy expectation for just a moment they will let him in, all against better judgement which might caution, ‘he’s been twice before, don’t you think we ought to think twice before answering? Mother if it is you what did you give us for breakfast? List our names in order of birth. Tell the story of what happened to Father Goat. Lets see some ID….

‘The Devil comes to us not with horns and a tail but as everything you ever wanted..”

Why? Because everything you ever wanted is where the route of least resistance lies. You really will get tired of winning. The wish that the Wolf is Mummy is more compelling than the scary prospect of being breakfast which then cannot be adequately defended against.

The recent Presidential debate is a good example of this. The naive assumption that Trump was simply going to let Biden have his time on the basis of gentlemanly agreement displays a staggering failure to grock the situation. After three years of aggressive bombast and steamrolling falsehoods, the nation thought he would be nice and polite for TV.? Its like offering candy to a cornered wolverine and being surprised when it takes your arm off.

If you are to come to grips with evil then, like charity, it has to begin at home. The idea that it is enough to simply vote Trump out is as foolish as the notion that he will behave himself in debate with Biden. We, like the Kids, want it to be Mama at the door and so we forget it could be the Wolf despite the fact he’s already tried to get in several times. The unthinkable happens because no-one thought about it. They could not confer, nor talk to themselves about what was going on.

We prefer to think that big bad Trump has produced a culture of contempt and uncaring, conveniently forgetting that it is he who was produced, brewed, distilled and oak barrelled by us, by a culture so in denial of its greed and avarice that it had to get elected to be noticed…

Wanting to be rid of Trump is like the urge you get to pop a really ripe pimple, feeling somehow vindicated and triumphant when it finally coughs its load, the underlying conditions blinkered off by momentary victory. We forget that Trump was made like this, just as surely as pizza makes pimples and by the same wishing as the Kids wanting the knock at the door to be Mama. He was made by the ferment of instant gratification, by saccharine values that just wants what it wants, by our eternal stirring over celebrity, by giddily identifying with those who seem to be living-the-dream.

All of which is a kind of wickedness…

which somewhat relativizes the honest wish for bbq’d Kid.

When Trump said, ‘you knew I was a snake when you let me in’, he was telling the truth. He had openly and un-apologetically lied, cheated and grifted his way through life. It was all in plain sight and yet this still somehow made him the best man to run the country, voted into office by the same narcissistic streak in the electorate, who either lapped up the opportunity to regress or who were regressed already and then, in their millions, couldn’t be arsed to vote.

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.

The Founding Fathers were afraid of greedy men coming into power but they had not reckoned on the collective wolf in the electorate, invisible behind the white picket fence of constitutional ideals and moral rectitude. Discussion ceases because everyone thinks the same thoughts, so what’s to talk about? Kant reminds us that there is no synthesis, no progress, without thesis and antithesis, without dialogue. The Kids do not talk to one another and so they come to a regressive end, swallowed up by the Unconscious.

‘Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny.’ CG Jung

The idea that we are more evolved ain’t so. In the absence of the Great Mother the Kids lose their individuality, their capacity for relatedness, the truth of their vulnerability, the flimsiness of their protection. The Kids fucked up, very badly. Like them, we have made a mistake. We forgot to take the Wolf seriously. We forgot his persistence. After all, it could never happen here… or to us.

Realizing you made a mistake is the beginning of change.

Pull over, don’t beat yourself up, learn to confer in the Wolf’s belly.

‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.” S Dali

When you face your own naivety, learn to ask for help and begin to value relatedness, then outer threats can be more adequately defended against because the Kids start pulling together. More importantly, the refusal to be seduced into the comfy notion of shared specialness will also keep the inner Wolf from the door and limit the chances of you being gobbled up by the idea that life should be easier than it is…

I read somewhere that the average adult, male or female, has a sexual fantasy every eight seconds. What I want to know is, what are the rest of you doing with your other seven seconds? ‘Cos it seems to me that most of mine last quite a lot longer than the time it takes for the next one to kick in; giving rise, if you will, to the frolicking joy of fantasy overlap. Or is it that everyone else somehow manages to compress the heaving bosom of their carnal saga into an infinitesimal sound bite, extrapolating, Zen-like, some quintessential erotic marrow, enough to sustain one at least until tea time, just a fleeting moment but one of buoyant reassurance….

Analyst Otto Kernberg makes the observation that the fantasies we have, our attitudes to sex and the extent to which we can let ourselves enjoy it largely depend upon and are recapitulations of early experience had at the breast. Both are potentially orgiastic, life affirming one moment, frustratingly autonomous the next, fraught with the possibility of denial and rejection, with-holding and manipulation.

We learn about life at the breast and not at the knee. It is the template of carnal experience. Complications at the breast will play out in the bedroom. Yes, its your mother…

or rather, the two thousand years of shit that’s been laid at her door.

When mother and child are ‘a bad fit’ then lining up your bits with an other in later life might well become problematic. Moreover, the otherness of the breast and just how that is experienced informs fundamental patterns of relatedness. So it is not just sexuality that is molded by it, our relation with the human other, but also our relationship with Nature and the Gods.

If there is no on-going orgiastic connection in infancy, where baby’s pleasure in receiving and Mama’s pleasure in giving merge in a love train of mutual feasting then its difficult to feel connected to or care about the wider world in later life. Sex and spirituality are all too often pitched against each other as if they were natural foes, yet they are both expressions of engagement with the other. Jung goes as far as to refer to the libido as, ‘the lower soul,’ a different form of the same thing, the transporting awesome encounter. Its no wonder our response to the sublime is all too often, ‘Fuck!’ nor that sex be attended by a litany of ‘OMG’s’.

Without some sense of sustainable between successfully negotiated with the earliest other, then none of the above unfolds too easily, leaving both lower and higher souls itchy and frustrated. The price the Patriarchy pays for the denigration of women and the desacralizing of motherhood is that we predominantly get to be cut off from life’s joys. In place of feasting we have consumption, porn instead of friendly pleasures and your inner compass traded for stone tablets.

So whilst Trump is hopefully removed from office without too much further bloodshed, the danger is that he is made into ‘the problem’, forgetting that he is the natural expression of a collective something which increasingly struggles to be part of life, that denigrates and demonizes the Other.

‘Even before Donald Trump entered politics America had clearly entered the most mediated, entertainment saturated, celebrity era ever.’ Ari Melber.

We have collectively achieved what any infant does in the absence of and denigration of Mother, we regress. Instant gratification and idealized grandiosity become the highest good. Truth becomes fluid in a pre-moral state of undifferentiated opposites, not quite so sophisticated as Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ or ‘double think’, which require annoying reflection, the intrusion of implied purpose.

Centralized power requires such regression. Huge collectives cannot hold together without the additional glue of a depressed and demoralised population carelessly sinking into magical thinking in lieu of being stuffed full of good things.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along, admiring the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. The people were conditioned to..

“believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” The Atlantic.

These are not new ideas, from the sixth century in China you can find official advice in keeping a population pliable..

‘A ruler should on no account encourage ‘perfecting the individual life’, for should he do so his minister’s will apply themselves with alacrity. And what is this ‘life-nurturing’? It consists in feasting music and love.’ Kuan Tzu.

The larger the collective it seems, the more autocratic, the more both the lower and higher souls of all the individuals involved get eroded to make the wheels of faceless government turn more easily. You can lie and deceive openly those whose souls have been immured. It’s not that they no longer care, they haven’t begun to.. Alternative facts are pre moral, pre-fact. Right and wrong have sunk back into the primordial soup of it is what it is.

I had the most terrible nightmare. I was being chased through thick forest by a pack of hunting dogs. Though they were still a ways behind but there was no escape. They would find and tear me to pieces. It was just a matter of time. My trying to escape was futile. The only freedom, the only meaningful expression left to me was to prepare for my end. I lay down, held and comforted myself, half in despair, half in acceptance. As I did so the bank against which I lay gently swallowed me into a warm, dry, egg like chamber. The dogs could not get in.

Without the Earth womb of the Great Mother, life is a jungle of Running Dogs, the Sky God left to himself unravelling over millennia into a blind madness of tooth and claw. We’re asking the wrong questions. The issue is not whether god exists but whether or not he ought to have a fucking chaperone.

Sleep and wakefulness are not as easy to tease apart as you might expect or hope for. They sometimes seem to invade one another. In lucid dreams you find yourself awake in another world. Sometimes ‘reality’ can seem entirely dreamlike. Why is there a Christmas decoration in the bathroom soap dish? Or goons on the streets?

‘And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?’ DJ Trump.

How would it be to live as though you weren’t all that sure if you are awake or not, to shift the emphasis from the assumption you are awake to the more immediate challenge of addressing whatever you are facing without asking for its credentials. This seems to be the essence of Chuang Tzu’s parable about whether he was a butterfly dreaming a man or the other way around. Man and butterfly dreaming each other perhaps.

I once owned a narrowboat with a snug wooden cabin at the stern. I woke up one night from a dream that a great light was breaking through a copse of ancient oak trees. It was a stupendous sight. I got up to write about it at my desk further down the boat, tripping over discarded shoes in my half sleep. As I began to write, I woke up in my bed. Again, I got up and stumbled down the boat. This time to make tea and try to understand what had happened. Then I woke up again but this time in my flat in Streatham where I had lived for ten years. It was dawn. I felt exhausted and confused. I got up, dressed warmly for the chill October morning and headed up to Baldry Gardens to clear my head with a brisk walk. The early sun cast a brilliant light between ancient trees. At the top of the road the tarmac was strewn with five pence pieces….

This dream exercised me for decades because it seemed to pose a greater question than what the various symbols ‘meant’. It was more like an awkward blind date, which I could integrate no more than I could swallow down a person.

Asking what dreams ‘mean’ can be a good way of keeping them at arms length, implicitly colluding with the hegemony of Consciousness which wants to incorporate and intellectually triumph over Dream rather than introducing yourself nicely and tipping your hat, all of which relativises ego’s place in the scheme of things from being the house manager to having a short-hold tenancy agreement. Such deflation, however, does come with some perks….

Once, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming so I searched about for some clues. It made sense that if this were ‘mere’ dream I would be able to see the sutured seams of something cobbled together. I searched the pitted surface of a brick wall, testing the abrasive surface with my finger tip which I then turned over to study the perfect whorls of my finger print. Then I picked up a sprig of three red leaves and followed the veins in it against the light. I still couldn’t tell if I were awake or asleep and concluded that it perhaps didn’t matter as much as I thought it did. It all felt real, regardless. At that moment I felt a tickling in my throat and coughed up a kilo of broken glass.

Better out than in…

You can spend years trying to digest things which are actually not yours, other people’s opinions, their projections and prejudices. Some things are to be spat out rather than swallowed down, the broken mirror of an unseen childhood, the clinical shards which divide us from mystery and wonder. The predominant opinion in our culture is that we are some how at some pinnacle of civilization. Yet the ruler of the Free World has the mental age of a three year old, whilst the rest of us, also three, bask in the omnipotence of ego jelly so freshly constellated it hasn’t quite set. Our monotheism of Consciousness is about as evolved as my son, aged three, running down the garden yelling to the sheep, ‘I am Jack, I am here.’

The Senoi people of Malaysia tell their dreams to one another every morning but no-one ever ventures an opinion. Its rather done in the spirit of an unfolding narrative, bearing witness to a journey beyond our ken. The emphasis in our culture has shifted from participating-in to knowing-about; the one step removed and somewhat schizy experience of believing you can examine, as if in a petri dish, that which has you on her lap.

The challenge is not to understand but to be curious and awed in the face of the unknowable with its stream of images and stories from which understanding may trickle down in the fullness of time if sufficient sacred space can be created to contain it.

‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.” C.G. Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, CW 10, p. 163

The sleep of Reason produces monsters because its denigration of the Unconscious forces the latter’s use of guerilla tactics in order to keep its seat at Psyche’s table. One way or another it will be represented. Our task, it seems, is not to understand but to enter into a fresh partnership with the Unseen from which meaning may be found as well as made, meaning which might be something objective to stub your toe upon as well as something subjectively ascribed. Perhaps some of the figures in your dreams are not part of you at all but rather a glimpse of transcendent reality of which you yourself …. are a part.

Horus had been seduced by his wicked uncle Seth. Confused and outraged he went to his mother Isis to tell her what had happened. Isis didn’t believe him. In fact she cut off his hands by way of both accusation and punishment, then threw them into the Nile where they sank into its deepest trench.

Fortunately, Ra, the Sun God, had seen all of this from on high. He wondered what he might do for Horus and approached Sobek, the Crocodile God, asking him if he might swim down and retrieve the severed hands. Sobek didn’t fancy the job. Naturally grouchy, he was also reminded of the dangerous Chaos Fish which swam in that region. By now they most probably guarded the hands. They were the one thing Sobek feared. Their speed and ferocity could drive a poor Crocodile God quite mad.

Eventually Ra persuaded Sobek to help by offering him an exquisite gold signet ring. It was so beautiful Sobek agreed. He dived down and down into the deepest part of the Nile, searching about for the hands. Eventually he saw where they lay but just as he was about to retrieve them the Chaos Fish snatched the hands away and led him such a dance he began to feel quite turned around.

Sobek retired to the banks of the Nile to ponder his dilemma. The Chaos Fish would always be one step ahead of him, always be driving him mad. He had to find another way…. something other than strength and speed.

Sobek began to gather up the rushes which grew by the Great River, weaving them this way and that. He worked long into the night. Next day he set out as before and chased the Chaos Fish up and down the Nile. He seemed a little off his game, though secretly he was simply biding his time. When the moment came Sobek sprung the trap he had made, a great net against which the Chaos Fish were helpless. He retrieved Horus’ hands and took them to Ra who gave him the precious signet ring he had promised. For the first time ever, Sobek smiled.

The failure to have abuse acknowledged as such is as damaging as the abuse itself which, having been split off into the unconscious, continues to wreak havoc on self esteem with the belief that the child is somehow responsible for its suffering. The child is pronounced guilty and the authorship of that guilt, the filthy touching things, expunged. The child is compelled to identify with the aggressor and must sacrifice his capacity to engage with and come to grips with the world in order to continue being able to experience Mother as good.

This Wound of the Unseen is, by its very nature, difficult to spot. After all, the cut off hands repair the relationship between the rest of him and Mother, so everything seems peachy. The ‘wicked’ part of him is at the bottom of the river. Nobody really notices the boy’s newfound incompetence, his failure to embrace life, the loss of curiosity and wonder. Aberration catches the attention more easily than absence, loss or separation. He doesn’t bond. He simply exudes a kind of helpless molasses which sticks him to others in lieu of relatedness. No wonder Horus’ legacy is the ‘Eye of Horus’, counterpoint to the coldness and envy of the Evil Eye, a protective amulet symbolizing witness and the concrete reality of the other.

In our story it is Ra’s witnessing and his subsequent intervention on Horus’ behalf which initiates Sobek’s descent into the depths. Horus cannot do this for himself, nor Ra on his own. There is a tendency to think of the hero’s journey as being equivalent to the ego boldly asserting it’s intention and carving a deliberate swath through the undergrowth. It is just as likely to be initiated by helpless despair, which then serves to initiate compensatory activity in the Unconscious symbolized by Ra and Sobek’s private arrangement.

Under [extreme stress] the ego complex ceases to play the important role. It is just one among several complexes which are all equally important, or perhaps even more important than the ego. All these complexes assume a personal character… ‘ Jung CW 3 pp 521

The opening dialogue between Ra and Sobek is a poetic rendering of how autonomous complexes within the Psyche, as different as sky from swamp, come together in response to the split occurring in Consciousness. Ra has to overcome some of his celestial prejudice in order to call upon his scaly cousin, the ‘lower soul’ which transcendence always wants to leap over. Sobek has to overcome his fear of the Chaos Fish. His first smile is the evolution of the God image. He has wider expression by virtue of his involvement with Horus’ hands. ‘Man is a gate through whom the God’s pass.’ [Jung. The Red Book]

The ring which Ra offers to Sobek is a signet ring, a gift which confers recognition, authority and belonging. The signet ring, pressed into sealing wax, makes documents official. It legitimizes the bearer and makes him the right hand of higher power. Sobek’s status is raised in the quest to restore Horus’ integrity. The boy has a chance if something of his instinctual life can be honored.

Sobek may not be very pretty and he lacks bedside manner but he is creative and can be placed in the service of order. The Unconscious contains a great deal more than the repressions of individual experience. It also contains responses to it from ‘the spirit of the depths’….,  

“from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time [ ie Horus]” p.229. The Red Book

Sobek does not persist in trying to beat the Chaos Fish at their own game. They represent Horus’ defenses which guard the traumatic event and prevent painful memories associated with the disenfranchised abuse from surfacing. They cannot be taken head on. They have to be creatively contained rather than outmatched.

Meantime Horus is paralysed with depression and helplessness. For some reason he just can’t get his act together. He doesn’t seem to be able to seize the day or put his hand to anything. Nor can he co-operate with others very well by way of shaking on a deal.

Fortunately the ego is not the only player in the game. The trauma and its poor reception from Mother have not gone unnoticed. Sobek’s subsequent contribution may well be difficult to detect, being mostly by night or deep in the waters of the Nile. You’d be mistaken for thinking there’s nothing going on. Perhaps that’s what faith is, the idea that something is working on your behalf even in the midst of adversity, a living sense that the implicit order of the Universe will kick into action all kinds of counterbalance when things get out of whack. Perhaps this is also at the heart of the idea that evil destroys itself from within, that it contains the seeds of its own undoing.

This is not to say that one should do nothing or that your own personal efforts are futile by comparison, but rather that for such efforts to be effective they have to be in the service of a greater principle operating below the water’s surface. Moreover, in order to employ Sobek’s services he has to be propitiated with the insignia of office and included in the soul’s caucus.

It is not enough to comprehend. Knowing the facts is only the beginning. They must also be apprehended, from the Latin ‘to lay hold of’, made emotionally one’s own. For that you need a grasp of things, and for that…. you need Sobek.

The Snow Queen is a story which charters an heroic journey to redeem a traumatized and divided self resulting from a very specific kind of emotional wound.

Our story begins with an evil hobgoblin who is commissioned to create a terrible, magical, mirror. It’s special power is to reflect back distorted images, leading those who look into it to believe they are ugly and without worth. Worst of all, the mirror is broken by clumsy underlings who then inadvertently shower the world with enchanted shards and slivers which can get into your eye causing you to see everything in a negative light, or into your heart, turning it to ice.

Two splinters manage to get into the heart and eye of Kay, a young boy. He turns on his playmate Gerda, whom he had loved dearly up until that moment, making her cry with his sudden hostility. He announces rudely that he’s off to play with his sled in the square where the big boys hitch themselves onto passing farmer’s carts for a free ride.

Kay attaches himself to a pure white sleigh which immediately heads out of town. He tries to get free but cannot. The sleigh runs faster and faster, over hedges and ditches, while snow storms whistle and roar. Soon the boy is frozen with cold and fear.

Eventually the sleigh stops and out gets… the Snow Queen. She takes Kay under her fur, kisses his head, lulls him into deathly sleep and drives on.

” They flew over forests and lakes, over many a land and sea. Below them the wind blew cold, wolves howled, and black crows screamed as they skimmed across the glittering snow.”

Meantime, Gerda is beside herself with worry. Kay has been acting strangely and has now gone missing.

One morning Gerda goes down to the river to ask if it has seen Kay. She offers the river her red shoes if only it will help and throws them in. The shoes are washed back so she stands in the prow of a rowboat for a better go but the mooring works loose and she is carried off down stream.

What on earth has happened?

The Snow Queen and her devastating ice splinters are a representation of what M. Woodman calls the Death Mother whose icy look..

”kills the imagination and cuts off from metaphorical thinking, compromising the process of psychological integration.” M. Woodman.

Normally we think of symbiotic relationships as unhealthy but its actually a stage you have to go through, one which is bound to find problematic expression if you get stuck in it.

When the child emerges from identification with Mother, how budding autonomy is received will be crucial. If Mother needs the special bond of his dependence for her own purposes, needs him to be a repository for un-lived aspirations, then a bid for the child’s own destiny is going to be construed as betrayal.

This collision of interests is going to be traumatic. It’s the immovable injunction to hitch your sled to Mamma’s sleigh for all eternity vs. the unstoppable push for individuation. Rather than being encouraged to fly the nest it seems that spreading your wings is something shameful, a failure of sacred duty which will cost all you hold dear.

The shadow side of being special is that symbiosis can’t be worked through towards inter-dependence because of subterranean hatred at the child’s autonomy which now threatens a bond on which identity has been built.

Of course, hating your child for wanting to fulfill it’s own ambitions is completely taboo. It has to be driven underground where its expression may be limited to passive with-holding, euphemistically called ‘maternal deprivation’. These veiled attacks upon the child’s competence are internalized as the icy splinters, against which the child maintains going on being by splitting its reality and becoming dissociated. Kay, the wounded self, falls into a trance whilst Gerda, the healthy self, sets out to find him.

The first thing Gerda does is to offer the river her red shoes, ‘her dearest possession’, as a sacrifice for Kay’s sake. It seems the river responds directly and carries her off to the first part of an adventure which will eventually reunite them.

What does it mean for Gerda to sacrifice her red shoes?

The red shoes are an iconic symbol with a multitude of associations and meanings. Just four months after publishing ‘The Snow Queen’, Hans Christian Anderson wrote ‘The Red Shoes’, a story of a wayward girl who dances herself to destruction. So the meaning is ambiguous, though in this context they seem to have some positive resonance with Dorothy’s red shoes from the Wizard of Oz in that they are instrumental in revealing routes of self remembrance. As her most precious possession, something with which she is identified, she has to sacrifice an ideal which then initiates a journey into the unknown.

”The red shoes are treasures but they also separate the sole/ soul from the natural world. They are also a narcissistic object  – ”oh look at my wonderful shoes – see how rich I am””. D. Mathers

This would seem to support the view of Clarissa Pinkola Estes who regards the red shoes as representative of a psychologically undervalued life, creating addictions. The red shoes are symbolic of a sophisticated persona which, though it might be very grand, is not the whole person and therefor have to be renounced as a nucleus of identity.

The magical mirror at the beginning of the story is a metaphor for what we learn about ourselves from others, the reflection/response to our own being from which we learn who we are. If mirrors can be either light or dark, bright or obscure, then that gives us four basic ways of being mirrored by the Great Mother; dark/obscure, dark/bright, light/obscure and light/bright.

In our story Gerda must encounter each of the four mirrors in the guise of four ancient crones in order to reconnect with Kay, her split off inner world.

The first is the Cherry Witch who, like the Snow Queen, is dark/obscure. She too pretends kindness, emerging from her riverside cottage to pull Gerda in to the bank with her crutch. Her motives are not to help Gerda but to satisfy her own loneliness. She invites her in and locks the door behind them….

Then she feeds the girl with endless cherries while combing her hair with a golden comb whose magic gradually makes Gerda forget about Kay. The witch also makes the roses in her garden shrivel up into the ground so that Gerda will not be reminded of the rose bower between their bedroom windows back home…

The cherries are interesting. Where I come from your cherry is your virginity, a symbol of innocence and unworldliness. Like Kay, Gerda is also drawn in to a make believe fantasy of how marvelous things are at the expense of her own quest, but unlike Kay she is able to respond. One day she notices a rose in the old lady’s colorful hat.

‘Where are all the roses?

And with that she remembers and grieves for Kay. Her hot tears fall upon the shriveled rose bushes which come back to life and reassure her that Kay still lives since, had he been in the ground, they would know about it.

The spell of the Dark/Obscure is broken. Not by being able to change circumstances but by paying the closest attention and letting herself ask the right question which leads straight to authentic grief and loss.

The flowers in the Witch’s garden try to beguile Gerda with cryptic stories to deflect from what the Dark/Obscure is actually doing, immuring the soul of the child, but Gerda has had a glimpse of her own separate destiny and knows it does not include the old lady’s woes..

“That’s nothing to me,” said little Gerda. “That does not concern me.” And then off she ran to the further end of the garden.

and out of the rusted garden gate into the great wide world.

With the misguided help of a precocious crow, Gerda tries to find Kay in a nearby castle. It comes to nothing but the Prince and Princess of the place are in good shape which bodes well for the next leg of the adventure, being captured by the Robber Queen.

The experience and remembrance of loss not only reduces the malign influence of a Dark/Obscure mother complex. It also transforms it. The Dark/Obscure becomes Dark/Bright in the form of this chaotic yet honest incarnation of the Great Mother.

The Robber Queen waylays Gerda as she rides along in her coach provided by the folk in the castle behind them. Her intention is murder and robbery with maybe a bit of tasty young girl to chew on at dinner. Only her daughter biting her ear prevents Gerda from going on the menu.

The Robber Queen seems worse than the Cherry Witch, but actually there is some improvement despite her ferocity..

and her beard…

which is that at least what you see is what you get. So even though she is a bitch from hell at least she doesn’t lie about it. Her licking her lips is at least congruent…

“How plump, how beautiful she is! She must have been fed on nut-kernels,” said the Robber Queen, who had bushy eyebrows that hung down over her eyes. “She is as good as a fatted lamb! How nice she will be!” And then she drew out a knife, the blade of which shone so that it was quite dreadful to behold.

The Robber Queen is an improvement on the Cherry Witch because the child does not have to sacrifice her integrity or perspective into the bargain. She doesn’t have to pretend or deal with distorted reality and so even though the old bag is horrible, Gerda is still permitted her own authentic response, which is that she really is in serious shit.

Luckily Gerda is befriended by the Robber Queen’s daughter, a girl of her own age who is almost entirely feral. She is the survival self, streetwise and handy with a knife. In order for poor Kay to be rescued, Gerda has to negotiate a relationship with her captor.

”The trauma self holds the split off and frozen experience; the healthy self is still there, but is ‘managed’ by our survival self which comes into being as a means of maintaining the split structure… ensuring that the trauma stays out of our consciousness.” V. Broughton.

The survival self holds life captive. Gerda is given a guided tour of all the caged creatures in the robber’s camp, particularly a reindeer whose neck the Robber Girl likes to tickle and torment with her knife.

Gerda and the Robber Girl get to know each other. When the wood pigeons corroborate Gerda’s story, saying they have seen Kay, the Robber Girl changes her mind and hatches a plan to help Gerda on her way. The survival self is made receptive by entering it’s world, acknowledging how it has protected you, being straight with it, but needing a different arrangement, all made possible by having the Cherry Witch out of the way.

The Robber Girl frees the Reindeer which carries Gerda to Lapland where the Snow Queen is holding Kay. On their way they stop at the humble cottage of the Lapp Woman who is the Great Mother in her Light/Obscure manifestation, a transformation achieved by Gerda’s managing to befriending the survival self.

The Lapp woman is an ample, salt of the earth matriarch, sympathetic but in a way that is still somehow in your face. She’s politically correct but able to argue for the validity of other points of view in a way that seems to be at the expense of your own point of view. She’s Polyanna crossed with Nursey from Blackadder. So even though she gives them shelter, feeds them and writes a note on a codfish for the final crone, the Finn Woman, she cannot help Gerda to find her way to Kay directly.

The Finn Woman is the fourth and most benevolent mirror of the Great Mother in our story. She is the Light/Bright mirror, brought into consciousness by Gerda forming a healthy symbiosis with her spirit animal, having had herself tied to Reindeer in order to make the difficult journey,

The Finn woman has no door to her cottage. Only a chimney. Inside it is so hot she goes about almost naked. Reindeer pleads for an elixir that will give Gerda the strength of twelve men but the old lady says that will not do.

“No power that I could give could be as great as that which she already has. Don’t you see how men and beasts are compelled to serve her, and how far she has come in the wide world since she started out in her naked feet?

The Finn Woman is Light/Bright because she has faith in the child. She both loves and believes in her, which gives Gerda the strength to endure. She tells Reindeer that Kay is indeed close by and what it is that ails him. When Gerda finds Kay her tears melt the ice in his heart. His own tears then wash out the splinter from his eye.

He has been trying to piece together icy shards at the Snow Queen’s behest, trying to spell ‘Eternity’, in order to gain his freedom, symbolically trying to make sense of that which does not and driving himself mad in the process. When Kay acknowledges Gerda the shards fall to the ground spelling out ‘Eternity’, all by themselves. Kay and Gerda leave the Snow Queen’s palace and are joined by the Robber Girl. Finally, all three aspects of the self are reunited.

The relationship between the personality and the Unconscious is dynamic. When we make strenuous efforts rooted in the desire for wholeness it is not just consciousness that is transformed. The face of the Deep Psyche also evolves, changing its adversarial attitude towards the personality into something life affirming and supportive. For this to happen you need Gerda’s longing, her willingness to sacrifice what is special, the courage to grieve her loss and the mystery of animal helpers.

Grateful acknowledgments to Dale Mathers for introducing me to the work of Steven Joseph on the four kinds of mirror and for first telling me the story of the Snow Queen thirty years ago.