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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.

Once there was a young hero whose prospective father-in-law threw him out of the house, threatening to beat him if he ever returned. The poor lad was entirely dejected. He didn’t know what to do.

One day, a strange little man in red clothes appeared to him as he walked aimlessly through the woods, promising him great wealth if only the lad would give him the amulet he wore around his neck, gifted to him by his Grandmother. The poor boy’s thoughts were so taken up by his current situation that he readily parted with the amulet, eager to find out more. The Devil, for ’twas He, then led him further into the woods saying that this very night the magical Fern Flower will come into bloom. If only he could find it, it would grant his greatest wish.

Once our hero finds the Flower, the Devil takes him to a ramshackle cottage in which lives an Old Crone… who is also her cat. When she leaps at them from the cottage doorway the Fern Flower sinks into the ground, bewitched. The Crone tells the hero he can have it back if he stabs to death the figure she presents him, shrouded in a cloth. He pulls back the covering to see…himself, aged ten, the amulet around his neck.

He strikes and kills the child.

After blacking out for a day or a week, he wakes in warm sunlight to find himself surrounded by bulging sacks of gold. Delighted, he runs back to his village and showers his prospective father-in-law with the coins who then duly consents to the marriage. When the day comes, our hero goes through the ceremony like a gollum, feeling nothing, expressing less. He is vacant, distracted, uninvolved. The food tastes bland, the music is jarring, his bride seems bloodless…

That night his new wife tries to embrace him but strange visions and ghastly apparitions appear between them, preventing their union. Our story ends with the hero weeping like a child into the lap of a wife he can no longer love.

At the beginning of this tale we find the protagonist being thrown out by his prospective father-in-law. He has nowhere to go and so we can assume this is not the first home he has been ejected from by some dread fate.. The rejected child cannot help but concur with the Universe’ seeming judgement on him. The forest begins to swallow him up. In order to keep step with the world he internalizes its condemnation and rejects himself with a steady stream of silent scorn running beneath entreaties for life to be otherwise. Branches close overhead.

This is not a very good place from which to be negotiating any deals with little men in red suits. Discrimination and reflection are all shot to pieces. You can’t focus very well from a thousand yard stare. So he doesn’t think too much about why the Devil might want his amulet. All he knows is that he’s been given the means to rectify his situation and get his agenda back on track.

‘Everything that ye entreat from the god-sun begetteth a deed of the devil.’ CG Jung

Of course the denouement of the story is his killing of the inner child, severance from authentic memory and experience, from an essential sense of self; paradoxically, a defense against overwhelming feelings of abandonment and loss. Yet the ground for this self murder is laid at the moment he parts with his seemingly insignificant amulet, given to him by his Grandmother.

What is this amulet? Why does its loss give rise to such catastrophe?

In Grimm’s story, ‘The Devil and his Grandmother’, we find out that ‘Grandma’ is able to outwit the Devil. She works on behalf of the hero to uncover the Devil’s secrets and help him get out in one piece. In Jack and the Beanstalk she is the Giant’s wife who helps Jack escape with the treasure hard to attain. This is because she is the Great Mother herself whose help and protection are essential to the heroic quest. Without Hera’s help the Argonauts would have been wrecked. Without Athena, Orestes wold have been pulled apart by the Furies.

Grandmother is Great Mother Earth. To lose her amulet is to lose all kinds of connections on all kinds of levels, from Nature in an outer sense but then also from the Ground of one’s own Being and then to the extent intimacy might be possible with a significant other.

The loss of these inner and outer connections is disastrous for our hero. The rejected Goddess assumes a demonic form and compels consciousness to split and attack itself…

‘The archetype of the Great Mother comes in through the back door and does something horrible, [the hero] has to sacrifice his children. When something in the unconscious is rejected, the disturbance goes around the corner and the rejected content attacks something else.” M.L. von Franz.

Without the connection to the Great Mother in her life giving aspect, not only is her protective connection lost but the Principle of Relatedness is turned on its head, manifesting as violent division. The Old Crone in our story is a manifestation of what Marion Woodman would call ‘The Death Mother’, who compels inner conflict and kills off spontaneity. It is these internal chasms opening up that consumer culture, compulsion and addiction, are all trying to fill, a compensation for the loss of Grandma’s lap and the creative wholeness of the murdered child. As we see from our story, the great piles of stuff promised to our hero do nothing for him. The gold has cost him the child-like capacity to enjoy it, to enjoy anything. Some variants of the story have the earth simply swallow him up at the end, consumed with loss and remorse.

The seemingly insignificant amulet from ‘Grandma’ has the power to avert this kind of disaster because it places relatedness at the heart of any value system, promoting traffic between I and me, between self and world, furnishing any venture into the unknown with sufficient internal cohesion necessary to suffer the hardships involved.

It seems our tale has a moral, desire for control leads to being controlled. The wish to posses leads to possession. Yet it conveys more than that, it points to the origins of all this suffering and invites us to reconsider our relationship with the Great Mother.

In Alex Hailey’s novel ‘Roots’, the ancestor Kunte Kinte is sold into slavery. His last act before being shipped away from his motherland is to take a handful of soil and wrap it into a banana leaf, smuggling this totem of belonging onto the slave ship. The amulet was passed on for seven generations, acting as a psychic anchor for the bearer, until it passed to Hailey who then told the whole story and journeyed back to the land of his ancestors.

We ourselves may not have such a dramatic story to tell and our journey may be less literal but it is also incumbent upon us to respond to life’s constraints with symbolic gestures and meaningful ritual. This connects us back to our own primordial roots so that we need not become divided against ourselves, nor kill off our own creative possibility in the search for quick fixes which rail impotently against circumstantial constraint..

The hero in our story suffers a fate worse than death on account of his desire to have control over events. The quick fix of Chlorox for Corona virus is likely to have a similar trajectory. It is not simply that people’s intelligence can be insulted only so much but that even the most ardent fan must surely suffer a chill at such a flagrant departure from reality, one which even bags of gold cannot comfort.

There was once an old soldier trying to get home after the war. He walked from village to village, begging alms along the way, for he had no money and nothing to eat. Every place had barely enough to give him the strength to get to the next and he began to wonder if he could make it, even though he was now close to home.

Finally, faint with hunger, he came upon an impoverished hamlet. His legs barely carried him in on blistered feet. Sunken cheeks and eyes in dark shadow foretold his starvation. He went slowly from house to house begging pitifully for just a scrap of bread or a rotting turnip. Everyone turned him away.

The old soldier sat in the village square looking about him, much as a condemned man might before the gallows. His end had come. Suddenly, despite himself and as though seized by something, he jumped up, grabbing a large stone from nearby. He tucked the stone into his knapsack and went back to the first cottage he’d tried where a kind old lady had explained politely that she simply had nothing to give him.

She was surprised to see him again so soon and more surprised still when, his eyes all agleam, he produced the stone from his knapsack as though it were a great treasure.

‘Since you have nothing to give me, allow me to make you some hearty stone soup, a recipe given to me by my auntie from the old country.’

‘Oooh’, said the old lady, ‘what do you need?’

‘Just a pan and some water,’ said he and gently began to bring the stone to the boil, tasting it every now and then, whilst the old lady looked on expectantly.

‘ How is it?’ she asked.

‘Just dandy,’ replied the soldier, ‘though it could use a little salt …and perhaps a few onions.’ The old lady promptly produced the salt and two onions which the soldier added ceremoniously.

Pretty soon some of the old lady’s neighbors came to the fence, drawn by the delicious smell. They were rather impressed by the idea of stone soup and wondered if they could have some as well.

‘Sure’, said the soldier, ‘there will be plenty to go around. Its a shame there is no thyme though. Stone soup benefits from just a sprig of thyme…

‘I have some,’ volunteered someone and off they went.

..and maybe a few sausages…,’ added the soldier, tentatively.

off went another..

‘and some vegetables, too, but only if you have them.’

The villagers duly returned and soon the stone soup was ready. Everyone ate to their hearts content, amazed at the miracle that such a tasty soup could be made from a stone.

At the end of the meal the grateful villagers clubbed together and offered the soldier twenty florins for the stone which he graciously accepted and set back off on his way, replete, enriched and freed forever from the fear of hunger.

Many of Grimm’s stories begin with an Old Soldier as the protagonist, someone who has been in conflict. Perhaps the old soldiers are our own time worn responses which no longer adequately reflect life and are in need of transformation.

In many of these stories the protagonist must resolve his situation by service to some sprite or demon, in other words by virtue of some initiatory process. He must wear a Bearskin for seven years, or stoke the Devil’s furnaces or scale the Glass Mountain.

This story is different. Having tended more heroic crossings earlier in life he must now face this new threshold of consciousness [closer to home] with a very different attitude. He can use neither his heroic soldiering energy nor his skills in begging from others. Both valor and dependency, as ways of going-on-being, are frustrated. He is thrown back onto his own primal resources, instincts even deeper than those of self interest which then have the marvelous effect of creating collective abundance.

There is an old Yiddish proverb, ‘If you are hungry, throw a party.’ Redemption depends on everyone getting fed. At just the point where you might expect the soldier’s personal survival at the expense of others to be strongest. In fact you find the opposite, a taking care of the whole. This is the bodhisattva ideal of enlightenment being a collective event, the realization that your fate is tied to others.

This Principle of Relatedness gives rise to a kind of miracle, ex nihilo, something comes from nothing, born of the shift in perception from I, me and mine to ‘the between’ which is the philosopher’s stone. The soldier’s spontaneous and playful gesture is zen-like enlightened action. It is rooted in sharing and so it magically attracts both people and ingredients.

The mercurial inspiration of stone soup is its selflessness. Without it there is no soup but the stone itself does nothing. Yet something is done, insofar as the stone assumes a symbolic character, a third actor in the drama, something to stand for the life affirming quality of the shared experience, of being in relation to one another, of looking beyond personal interest to interdependence.

The stone, as a symbol of Self, has a unifying effect, which leaves everyone feeling the richer for it. The soldier’s identity has shifted, has had to shift, from beggar to leader. He morphs from ‘how can I survive?’ to ‘How can we survive?’ This opens up space for the intuitive, non-rational gesture. It almost seems inspired from without, as though some god had whispered in his ear the moment he renounced surviving at the expense of others.

The well-known ‘Parable of the Spoons’ has similar implications. A man asks God for a sneak preview of both Heaven and Hell to see what the real differences might be. He finds that all the folk in Hell are sat down a long table armed with even longer spoons which they can’t get to their mouths. Their efforts to feed themselves are torturous. They are surrounded by delicious morsels but no-one gets to eat. In Heaven the situation is exactly the same, the long table, the longer spoons.. but everyone is feeding each other.

Our current situation with Coronavirus requires a similar shift in values. Containing Covid-19 can only be done by means of radical co-operation. You can see daily how the attitude of ‘First and Only’ is rapidly translating into casualty figures. Whether we co-operate with one another really has become a matter of life and death.

The question remains, once Coronavirus has retreated to its lair, what then? Will you, ‘get back to normal’? Isn’t the old normal precisely the culture in which Covid-19 arose? There will be change. We can chose it or have it imposed on us by any one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Take your pick. Their name derives from the Greek, ‘Apo-kaluptein’, to uncover or reveal. Covid-19 is uncovering a great deal, our vulnerability, our dependence on one-another, the indolent corruption and deadly narcissism of First and Only.

Surviving is not enough. What are you learning from lock down? In what way has it quickened you? Can you remember how to make stone soup? If so, you will have crossed an inner threshold in yourself and been transformed by the ordeal. If not, Plague, or one of his mates, will return and give us all, once more, the opportunity to grow, just a little further down the orange brick road.

Years ago and far away there lived a Miller and his wife who were famous for the fine flour made by their riverside Mill. Though they prospered, the Miller and his wife privately harbored a secret grief, they had no child.

As the years went by this secret sadness gnawed away at each of them such that all the things they prized seemed to wither away. The horse got thin and mangy. The roof had fallen in a bit, the flour had weevils and business had all but dried up.

One evening, the poor Miller, feeling cursed, went and sat down by the river, bemoaning his lot. All of a sudden came a voice from the Mill pond saying, ‘listen poor man, I will help you in your troubles. I will give you riches beyond your wildest dreams. All you have to do is give me the living creature that you haven’t got at home.’

The Miller scratched his head. Perhaps she meant a cat. Maybe one of the farmer’s cows had wandered in. So he agreed to the Water Fairy’s terms and strolled off home with a merry swagger. On the way he met the last of his servants running towards him. ‘Mr Miller, come quick! Your wife has given birth to a baby boy!’ Suddenly the Miller realizes what has happened and rushes back to the Mill Pond begging to have the deal rescinded but the Mill pond was still as.. well, a mill pond.

As the young lad grows up he is warned over and again not to go near the river, and especially the Mill Pond, lest the Water Fairy carry him away. Once he had become a man a local hunter took him into his service and liked him so much that when his daughter fell in love with the Miller’s son he happily consented to their marriage.

One day the hunter’s apprentice espied a magnificent stag and gave chase to it. He became so consumed with the hunt he didn’t notice the twists and turns they took and when he finally brought down the mighty stag he found himself by a stream in an unknown place. After he had butchered the stag he went to the stream to wash the blood from his hands, forgetting the lifelong warning he had been given. The moment he touched the water, the Water Fairy pulled him in.

Eventually, his new wife discovered his things by the stream and surmised what had happened. She pleaded with the Water Fairy to return her good husband go but to no avail. Finally, late at night and in despair, she lay down by the stream in the spot he had been taken and fell asleep. In her dream she saw a hut close by in the forest where there lived a very old lady who knew all kinds of things. So when she woke up she went in search of the lonely hut and there, sure enough, she found a very old lady whose eyes positively twinkled with secrets.

The young woman told the old lady what had happened. She mused a bit and then instructed her to return to the stream at full moon with a comb which she, the old lady, would give her. There she should comb her hair over the water. The young woman did as she was bid and to her delight her husband’s head appeared out of the water momentarily but then sank back into the depths. She told the old lady what had happened and was told that the next night she should take down a spinning wheel and spin by the stream. Again her husband appeared but only to the waist before retreating once more. On the third evening the old lady told her to take a flute and play sad music by the stream. This time the whole man appeared and his wife hauled him out of the water.

Fairies and fairy stories are as ubiquitous to human experience as language itself and nearly as old. Like dreams they find ways of representing the dilemmas and situations of the human condition and offer cryptic resolutions to collective issues constellated by the emergence of individual consciousness. From the soul-stones of the Australian Aboriginal to the Sioux Indian tradition of burying your heart before battle, leaving it in the keeping of the little people, our many different cultures have all symbolised our relationship with the unconscious the same way. Science likes to think it banished these denizens of the unconscious to the bottom of the garden forgetting that psychologically speaking that is exactly where they are from. They are boundary keepers to a world beyond the garden gate. As ‘kinsmen of the unconscious, they protect navigation I.e. the venture into darkness and uncertainty.’ CG Jung

Fairies live between worlds, they have both the attributes of complexes which are to do with individuality and archetypes which are the hall mark of the collective. So, power and attitude, both of which are expressed in direct measure to the stance of consciousness.

For example, a story with a similar beginning is ‘the Elves and the Shoemaker’. Here too we find a craftsman on the edge of bankruptcy. The Shoemaker is down to his last piece of leather and cries on his wife’s shoulder that he shall have nothing to feed their children. His wife comforts him, tells him to cut up the last piece of leather anyway and then come to bed. Over night the shoes are miraculously sewn together by Elves.

The Shoemaker and the Miller are very different men and so they elicit very different responses from the little people. The Shoemaker’s grief is not kept a secret. He shares his woes with his wife who is encouraging and comforting in return. The Principle of Relatedness in this couple is alive and well. Their authentic and shared despair creates the space for the unconscious to contribute in the form of the helpful elves, ‘the god’s of invention.’ ibid

In the beginning of our current story we find the impoverished Miller in a very different mind set. His despair is secret. He has become sufficiently estranged from his wife not to know she is pregnant and feels he has been cursed. He is in major ‘poor me’ and believes none of this should be happening. Such a personality is like blood in the water to the liminal world of complexes and their enactments. He is open to temptation and likely to make impulsive choices. The Water Fairy offers the Miller what you could call ‘the Devil’s Gambit’, ‘I will give you what you say you want but you will be my bitch.’ She approaches the Miller at his weak spot, the feeling he’s been hard done by, his pious isolation, offering him an easy way out. Almost immediately the Miller has a massive revelation which is perhaps the Water Fairy’s intent, showing that we often have to pay for what we think we want, with what we really want…. in order to find out what it is.

Meantime the child has to grow up bearing the sins of the parent, his fate tied from birth to the parent’s hidden incongruities which then mar the enjoyment of their child, their greatest wish.. Inevitably, there has to be some kind of denouement. The young man’s desire for his own self-hood symbolized by the stag, is going to throw up the issue of the unpaid debt to Nature still owed by his father, though its something he stumbles into without awareness and so he’s defenseless. Had he gone to the water’s edge in his best clothes, bearing gifts and called graciously upon the Water Fairy to grant him some kind of leeway on account of having to pay for someone else’s stupid lack of awareness it might have panned out differently.

Fortunately, the young wife is able to come to the rescue. Her relationship to the world is entirely different to her husband’s family. She immediately tries to negotiate with the Water Fairy and failing that falls asleep where she is, in dedication to her husband’s loss. This evokes a dream in which she is given an invaluable introduction to ‘the Old Lady’ who understands that possession by autonomous complexes gradually loosen their grip in the face of love and connection.

The combing of the hair is an intimate gesture. The spinning is also of home and hearth. The sad music laments and begs his return. All these gestures are relational counter magic to the short sighted bargain made by the Miller. The wife’s willingness to endure her situation for the sake of love invites the intervention of the Unconscious on her behalf in the form of a healing and instructive dream. Her co-operation with the Old Lady and the value she has placed upon relatedness sees them through.

The story has a curious ending. A great storm blows up so violent that the world is torn apart and upside down. Husband and wife are thrown to opposite shores of a great river, though one day, entirely by chance they cross the bridge which spans the river at the same time and recognize one another. This detail of the violent storm which tears the world apart and yet out of which the protagonists manage to find one another ‘by chance’ is very much like the conclusion of Rapunzel and seems to suggest that yearning for the beloved has real power in it, overcoming all blows of fate.

Our story doesn’t say how things end for the Miller. It’s difficult not to feel a bit sorry for him, just as you might for the Republican voter who has been similarly promised all the riches imaginable and no end of winning provided they sell out the next generation in a haze of confusion about the small print in the contract. Our story says that such a dark legacy cannot be avoided, but it can be redeemed by the Principle of Relatedness, by faithfullness to both the outer other, the husband, and the inner other, the mystical Old Lady, who appears of her own accord in response to grief and longing with the intuitive knowledge of how divisive wounds may be healed.

King Sisyphus was renowned for being a braggart. He had a reputation for being mean to travelers and way farers because it helped to promote the image of his iron-fisted rule in the popular imagination. This annoyed Zeus under whom travelers and strangers are protected. But mostly what pissed Zeus off was that Sisyphus betrayed secrets. He thought himself magically beyond the rules of confidence, once revealing the whereabouts of Asopus’ daughter Eagina, who was having it off with Zeus at the time, to her father in a Quid Pro Quo for causing a spring to flow on the Corinthian Acropolis.

Eventually Zeus had enough and sent Thanatos, God of Death, to have a quiet word with Sisyphus and escort him out of play but Sisyphus claimed he was a fake messenger and tricked Thanatos into demonstrating how the chains for his journey would work, thus escaping his divine impeachment. This ticked Zeus off even more. He sent Ares, the God of War, to free Thanatos and in the process Sisyphus was accidentally, well, collateral damage. But the trickster king had thought ahead, making sure that his wife left his body un-buried so that when he met Persephone, Queen of the Underworld en route to Hades, he managed to persuade her to send him back to ensure he was buried with the proper rites, as was indeed required by the Gods before anyone could enter the land of the Dead. Needless to say he skipped bail and did not return, magically returning to life.

Eventually Zeus has to send Hermes, part messenger/part bailiff, to drag Sisyphus back to Hades after which he is punished by having to carry his famous rock up the hill only to have it tumble down of its own enchantment. The Gods’ punishments are invariably a poetic form of justice. Sisyphus thought he could evade and defy the gods. He behaved as though he was magical…

”One day it will just disappear. It will be like a miracle.’ D J Trump

and so he had to be on the receiving end of magical actions, experiencing the Gods’ frustration as his own. Both Sisyphus and his apprentice Trump have self constructs rooted in magically circumventing the law, turning night into day, having lies be truth. Their identity is derived from magical exemption, the proof of which is behaving as you please and being locked in combat with anyone who says otherwise because their disagreement means annihilation. Identity could be lost along with the argument, which is why the magical always seem to be fighting for oxygen no matter what the content of the conversation.

The following, from a Corona virus briefing and in a robust push back to reporters, is noteworthy, not simply because it is a bare faced lie delivered seamlessly and without a flicker of conscience but because in the space of a single sentence, a fantasy future is magically transformed into factual history, ”When you have fifteen people and the fifteen within a couple of days will be down to zero, that’s a good job we have done.” Trump Jan 30th.

Narcissistic supply goes way beyond folk using others to puff up their ego. It goes way beyond him wanting to slurp his beak in a sacrificial dish of your essence. There is a kind of magic in inverting reality all the time and having your words make things so. It fascinates as much as it confuses, like any stream of magical thinking, tinkling uphill. Originally, magic was the power to transform ideas into reality, the word made flesh. The meaning of the ancient invocation, ‘Abracadabra’, is “I will create as I speak”

Such magic is hard work…

“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.” Lev Grossman, The Magicians.

So magical thinking has to have backup, generously provided by the noble art of sadistic with-holding. Being magical and keeping everything to yourself go together, which you’ll know if you’ve ever had to take a toy off a two year old. The cadenza it produces is like Sisyphus being dragged of to Hades.

This with-holding is clearly evidenced in Trump’s handling of the Corona virus crisis. He’s not just incompetent and its not just that he doesn’t care about you. Perhaps a clue to the underlying and more fundamental dynamic is in the one campaign promise he has kept, to run the country like he ran his businesses, namely, as his to trash; or as a magical penis extension, his to fondle till his hands get furry.

The President’s choreographed in-action is a strategy which works hand in glove with the magical thinking. Life shouldn’t be like this and so it is not. Such an attitude has huge voter appeal and seems to be a significant part of what got him elected, perhaps as much as political affiliation or cultural prejudice. You no longer have to reflect. Willing can make it so. The reefs of life can be negotiated representationally. For example, the recent fetishistic hoarding of toilet paper in the face of the pandemic. You have to admit its a bit strange. The rush for the luxury of Charmin has been far more fierce than the one for more essential needs like foodstuffs which you’d think might have greater priority in the apocalyptic imagination.

Perhaps it is the concretisation of fear, an expression of crapping oneself. Or is it deeper still, the eternal loo roll standing for the stable preservation of a known way of life, symbolically imposing a sense of order and regularity on the inconvenient shittiness of plague, as though anything can be defended against, even death itself, provided you’ve got clean knickers and polished your nipsy. It would be much better to beat a drum and sing magical songs. At least you would be clear about what you were involved in…

Trump is a loathsome, soulless monster but he is not the problem. He represents a certain spirit of our age, fixated at the developmental stage of pull-up Huggies. Whilst it is truly scary that suited toddlers have nuclear codes, perhaps there’s also some comfort in the notion that we might still, having avoided the attention of Thanatos, yet grow into short pants.

In the wake of the Civil War in America a curious movement sprang up across the South, Pentecostal snake-handling. Putting the dramatic and often deadly details of these rituals aside for a moment, a most fascinating aspect of this evangelical burlesque, one in which no member of the congregation could guarantee they’d make it through to tea and biscuits, is that it arose by what Rupert Sheldrake would call ‘morphic resonance’.

‘The beginnings of Pentecostal snake handling rituals cannot be ascribed to a single person. The observance arose independently on multiple occasions.’ Wiki

In other words, the snake handling pastors didn’t get the idea a box of copper heads might liven up the service from each other. Like blue tits across the land figuring out how to take the tops off milk bottles faster than blue tits can communicate the news, the snake handlers all came up with the same original idea to take a clutch of rattlesnakes to church on Sunday at the same time and for the same reason.

Now, waddafug is that all about?

At what point did worship and the prospect of sudden death get conflated in the collective imagination?

Way, waay back when some bright spark decided that he wanted to be a king rather than a chief, when he developed a taste for status superfluous to his already being the boss by way of also being the incarnate deity, perhaps that was the moment when there arose in humanity the wish to remain identified with the Gods. It might not even have been his own idea, after all…

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” – Edward R. Murrow

In what way, you might wonder, might it serve the people to have this now divine and deadly figure in their midst? The prospect of protection from the regal right hand palls, given the likely activities of the left. It seems as though the need for kings, like the need for rattlers on Sunday, has some deeper significance.

Over the millennia, as individual consciousness has been slowly emerging out of the fogbank of collective identity, it has been faced with the problem of developing a relationship with that out of which it seeks to be differentiated. Some kind of diplomatic process has to be set up between ego and self, something that both connects and separates.

We managed this collective scam by designating the ruler a god, which is what the transition from chief to king entails. Having the ruler be a god is a kind of intermediate state between the extremes of being entirely identified with the collective to the detriment of individuality or pursuing it at the expense of communion.

The king gets to be God and through him you get to be God too, whilst also enjoying the new fangled development of individual consciousness and the lark of personal destiny without having to be separated from or rejected by the Gods, as the doleful story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden so fearfully portrays.

Such divine truculence on the behalf of God necessitates the advent of kings, rulers beyond the law, both as a safe conduit to the Gods and as figure to blame when the Gods are unforthcoming. Paradoxically, it serves the people for another to have such power over them. We get to have our cake and eat it, sufficiently differentiated from the Gods to be able to say ‘I’ and ‘me’, whilst maintaining connection to the divine by being the king’s subject. He will do all the fancy officiating stuff on your behalf, leaving you free to go fishing, write poetry, make love.

There is, however, a teensy wee problem.

This arrangement has some unfortunate small print in the contract, namely that it gives rise to a rather particular form of paranoia. The conflation of king and God required to pull off this Brexit from collective consciousness is an act of inflation which has to be appeased, traditionally in blood. So there is something to be paranoid about. The kings are bound to sacrifice their people to this end, just as the people are bound to sacrifice their kings.

Many cultures in ancient times sacrificed their kings to the Gods after fixed terms, to make the crops grow and give someone else a turn. During their lifetimes these same royals waged war upon each other whose singular purpose was to obtain captives for sacrifice to impatient God.. The Aztecs had a special name for it, ‘the Flower Wars’, whose purpose was not rape or pillage but capture and sacrifice.

Only recently have we given making war the glaze of righteous indignation. The Trobriand Islanders of the Pacific made ritualized war on each other without any personal animus. In mid April you went off and fought the Blue Parrot tribe. Not because you disliked them but because the gods required it. When the first man died, but mostly before then, someone would call a halt, the Gods having been mollified by all the hollering and cool gear everyone is wearing for the occasion. So then, it being apparent just how everyone gave the day their best effort, all participants would slope off to easier tasks like feasting on wild pig and drinking coconut wine.

We, more civilized, cannot bear the idea that in our meek souls there lies anything resembling blood debt to ambivalent gods and so we fondly imagine wars to be about other things, booty, land, slighted honor. Having missed the point, thousands perish were a few bruises would do.

The waste of numberless dead notwithstanding, how shall we propitiate the Gods when peace breaks out? Well, we seem to have found all kinds of interesting ways to deal with the ego/self paradox. The snake handlers of Appalachia, Tennessee and Carolina found a uniquely homegrown solution to appeasing the Gods whilst continuing to identify with them.

This ecumenical two step confers salvation on the snake handler for not getting bitten without condemning him if he does. Every once in a while someone gets sacrificed. The others pray over him, their collective sin momentarily expiated to live and sin another day. If the pastor lives he is filled with the living faith and all is well. If he dies, then his sacrifice cleanses the community and all is well. You can see how it might appeal, how people might even fight for the constitutional right to put themselves in harms way.

In 2013, a Mr. Coots published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making an argument for U.S. Constitutional protection regarding religious freedom, especially freedom to practice the unique variety of religion found in snake-handling churches. Unfortunately, Mr. Coots died on 15 February 2014 from a snakebite before having the chance to further represent his cause.

It’s easy to dismiss such folk as fools though maybe we’d be given pause for the thought by the idea that they are the visible and flamboyant end of a dynamic in which we have all been participating for several thousand years, a cycle of kings sacrificing subjects and subjects sacrificing kings to propitiate un-named Gods for taking such chummy liberties with them.

The bedecked warriors of the Flower Wars or the ecstatic Snake-Handler may seem to belong to another time and place. Yet isn’t the news entirely filled with stories of people baying for the leader’s blood? And hasn’t said leader sacrificed his people with inaction, denial and obstruction?

The historian Jon Meecham notes that there is a growing correlation between covid cases and whether a county in the USA is red or blue, with Trumpeters claiming they’d rather die than [omnipotently] ‘kill the economy’.

So you might blanche at the barbarism of the Aztecs or scratch your head at the Snake-Handlers but we aren’t so different. We too have found creative ways to propitiate the Gods, though less directly, through catastrophe, incompetence, refrigeration trucks of the dead.

The Snake Handler’s belief that he can avert disaster by faith is no different from Trump’s belief that Corona virus would disappear by a miracle. Or that a laying on of hands might make him a half decent person. We should expect, when he gets bitten, as he will, that it wasn’t his fault. We must also expect him to pass the snakes around before he succumbs, knowing that not all of us will make it through to the end of the hymn sheet from which we are all so faithfully singing..