Andy White Blog

The Shepherd and the Snake.

Carl Jung identifies two distinct kinds kinds of thinking. The first is rational, problem solving and rooted in language. He calls it directed or reality thinking which originates in,

‘the first stirrings of a cry to our companions that water has been found, or the bear been killed, or that a storm is approaching, or that wolves are prowling round the camp.’ Jung

The second kind of thinking is very different and way older, fantasy thinking. This kind of mental activity is not rooted in language but in feelings, images and daydreams.

‘The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously.’ ibid

Jung agreed with Freud that fantasy thinking is archaic, but stopped short of labeling it infantile and even less, as pathological. We moderns have become so identified with rationality and consider ourselves so emancipated from our forebears that we regard the products of fantasy thinking as a problem to be solved, as something to be grown out of. Ach! Stop daydreaming! Instead of using the two different types of thinking together, the one is pitted against the other. And we wonder why we are so split…

..having failed to delineate what Hiedegger calls the difference between ‘what I want to think about and what wants to be thought.’

That which is primitive is not the same as that which is mad. Far from being material that rational thinking must either dismiss or reductively interpret, fantasy thinking often serves to compensate the lopsidedness of the overly rational mind, a wellspring of wisdom it would profit from re-discovering. Unfortunately, our modern education values the one over the other, treating fantasy thinking as a poor relation hardly worth bothering with rather than the poemagogic font out of which rational thinking has itself only so recently emerged. Fortunately, not all thinkers are so prejudiced..

‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Einstein

Curiously, this tendency of the rational mind to deny and degrade the instinctual wisdoms of fantasy thinking, with its concomitant erosion of meaning, is something that clearly troubles the deeper reaches of the Psyche which then produces compensatory images and dreams to try and rectify the balance, its newly impoverished status notwithstanding.

The following story, ‘The Shepherd and the Snake’, from Hungarian folklore, represents the efforts of fantasy thinking to have its contribution re-evaluated.

Once there was a Shepherd Boy who spent all day long in the mountains with his flock. When he was not protecting the sheep from wolves, he spent his time racking his brains with thoughts of how to become rich. It seemed so unfair to him that some were rich and others poor.

He sat thinking and thinking..

when he suddenly became aware of the sounds of crying. ‘ Help, help!’

He went to investigate and saw a fiery pit in which a Yellow Bellied Snake was writhing.’ Help me Shepherd Boy! Help me and I will repay your kindness!’

So he helped the snake out of the pit, which immediately instructed him to follow and wriggled off, soon coming to a large forest in the center of which was a flat stone. The snake slithered under the stone commanding the shepherd to follow. He lifted the stone and saw steps leading down and down.

Eventually they arrived in a field made of diamonds in which stood a palace made of gold and precious stones. ‘This is my father’s palace,’ said the snake and led him inside, through a great arch of writhing snakes, where they found the Snake King sat on his throne. The Yellow Bellied Snake explained to his father that the Shepherd Boy had saved him and so the Snake King offered him the choice of two rewards..’You can be given the gift of understanding the language of animals, or you can have a large bag of gold.’

The Shepherd Boy considered his options. He really, really wanted to be rich… but he also thought he would never again be given the chance to learn the language of animals so that is what he chose. When he re-emerged into his own world he sat reflecting upon everything which had happened. Above him, two birds conversed in the branches of a tree. ‘If only that poor Shepherd Boy knew what lay beneath the roots of the tree he would be poor no longer!’

That night the Shepherd Boy returned with a spade and dug up the tree to find nestled in its roots a great treasure of gold and jewels..

Many heroes of myth and legend are heroic by nature of their brave deeds, by defeating dragons or giants. Less glorious but just as important are the heroes who are receptive, kind and make counter-intuitive decisions in favor of the irrational.

‘Their heroism resides in that they have drawn their goals and their vocation not only from the calmly ordered course of events which the reigning system has consecrated but also from an underground source in the inner spirit whose content is hidden and which has not yet broken through the surface of actual existence.” Merleau-Ponty

The Shepherd Boy is heroic because he makes a decision against rational thinking which must have been screaming at him to take the gold. You can imagine the pressure..’What, are you crazy? How can you make your way in the world learning the language of animals? Of what practical use is that? Do you want to be poor and herd sheep for ever? TAKE THE GOLD.

Yet something has already begun to stir in the Shepherd Boy’s soul. He’s had a whole morning of talking snakes and underground kingdoms, things he could barely imagine and so he goes with the flow and makes the irrational choice against his own ego. In doing so he aligns himself with a deeper sense of self which in turn produces the synchronicity of the talking birds who just happen to know where the earthly treasure is to be found.

”Synchronicity is like a collaboration with fate, its when the ego is no longer the driving force in your life.” Wayne W. Dyer.

Our story seems to be pointing to more than the necessity of fantasy thinking. It seems to suggest that allowing dream/reverie, affording it with value and, following where it goes not only yields a new connection with the instinctual basis of life but also brings about the earthly agendas renounced in the process. In deciding against the gold, he gains both the language of animals and the gold as well.

‘‘If, against all your own wishes and plans, you obey that voice which deep in your soul is subject to no rational control, then roads open up of their own accord which lead to the preservation of what you thought you have given up.’ Weatherall

This means taking fantasies and daydreams seriously. It means wondering about the significance of bothersome intrusions which interrupt the more noble sentiments of coherent reasoning. It means giving space to musing and reverie, paint and mud. It means being curious about the ear-worm going around and around in your head, the doodles you make in the margin of more ‘serious’ work, the embarrassing slips of the tongue which draw attention to there being more under consideration than the ego’s rational intent. Moreover, as our story seems to suggest, when we pay attention to these counter-intuitive impulses nagging at the fringes of consciousness, many of our more immediate concerns resolve themselves.

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

The Hedgehog Prince.

Once upon a time there was a Poor Man, a Merchant and a King. One day the Merchant was out hunting in the forest and became lost. For three days he tried to find his way out. Eventually he exclaimed, ‘if only someone could show me the way out of this terrible forest I would give him three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of the most beautiful of my three daughters. Immediately, a small hedgehog appeared and said, ‘come with me, for three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of your most beautiful daughter I will show you the way.” The Merchant agrees in a flash and in no time he was sat back at home in his comfy chair recounting tales of his brave adventures.

The next day the King went hunting in the forest, He too became hopelessly lost and could not find the way out.’ Oh, if only someone would help me, I would give them three carts of gold and the hand in marriage of my most beautiful daughter,’ whereupon the Hedgehog once more appeared and promised to show the King the way out. The King agrees but only after he’s really thought about it.

Then the Poor Man went out hunting and like the others soon became lost. ‘Oh’. he exclaimed, ‘I have nothing to give but if someone were to help me out I would make them my own dear child.’ Once more the hedgehog appeared and led the Poor Man to the edge of the forest.

Time passed. The King, the Merchant and the Poor Man had all but forgotten the Hedgehog. One wintry night when the Poor Man was tucked up in his bed he heard a plaintive tapping at the window. ‘Father, father, let me in, it is I your son.’ The Poor Man was puzzled and went to the door to find the Hedgehog all covered in snow. ‘My son! How happy I am to see you!’ He let the creature in and made up a bed for him. In the morning the Hedgehog asked, ‘Father if you have two pennies, would you go into the village and buy me a black cockerel and an old saddle?’ The Poor Man agreed and when he returned the Hedgehog saddled up the cockerel and rode away like the wind, soon arriving at the house of the Merchant who was shocked and not a little put out to see him. He grudgingly called his daughters forward and the Hedgehog chose the one he liked best but she cried and threw herself to the ground wailing and beating the floor with her fists.

On the way back the Merchant’s daughter continued her refrain. ‘Are you still crying?’ asked the Hedgehog. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and I will continue to cry to my dying day!’ ‘Oh dear,’ said the Hedgehog, ‘well, you’d better go home then.’ So he sent her home…but kept the gold.

Once he had dropped off the gold with the Poor Man, the Hedgehog rode away on the black cockerel to the King’s castle. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I wish I did not but I do,’ sighed the king and called for his daughters, the most beautiful of which was chosen by the Hedgehog who was only too happy to repay the favor shown to her father. The king was glad he had such a kind-hearted daughter but was also sad to lose his only kind-hearted daughter.

The King loaded up a coach full of gold and diamonds. Then the Princess got in as well and, with the Hedgehog riding alongside, they set off. After a few hours the Hedgehog put his head in the window and was pleased to see the Princess was not crying. ‘Why do you ride when you could be sitting here with me?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ he replied, ‘and don’t you find me ugly?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘I know you will do me no harm..’ and with that a great miracle occurred. The Hedgehog was transformed into a shining Prince and the Black Cockerel into a prancing stallion. A great palace appeared and celebrations prepared. Invitations were sent out to everyone in the land and all attended the great feast except the Merchant and his daughter… who were too busy crying.

The Merchant, the King and the Poor Man represent three distinct attitudes to life, identified in the Gnostic tradition as Hylic, Psychic, and Pneumatic. They symbolize stages of psycho-spiritual development.

The simplest and least developed of these is the hylic Merchant and by extension his daughter who only have a single point of view. Events can only have one inevitable outcome. Everything is preordained.

“The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.’ H. Marcuse.

You can only chose a path if you have tried the others and know where they go. Those who have only one ‘take’ on life have not chosen. They are compelled, by the partisan interests of persona which creates self affirming realities. These realities then justify knee jerk responses which create in turn a kind of negative feed back loop or self fulfilling prophecy. Everything is always awful or hopeless whether the daughter is being carried off or returned, whether they get invited to the wedding or not.

The problem for the hylic Merchant and his daughter is that they have not evolved sufficiently out of narcissistic self pre-occupation. They can’t take in or relate to the Other and so real meaning and purpose is denied them, hence the true origin of all those tears.

‘Where there is no “other”, or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases’ Jung (1950: 193).

Instead of consciousness the Merchant has only reason. He reasons that he should pay the Hedgehog’s price for giving him safe passage out of the forest, then he reason’s once he’s safe that he has made a bad investment, followed by reasoning that they have been robbed of an opportunity once the truth of the Prince comes out.

“Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own … constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining. In short, reason can only find what it is looking for; it may, however, not be what really matters.” ibid

The King is what the Gnostics identify as psychic and represents a more evolved kind of consciousness, one that is complicated, full of moral problems and ambivalent attitudes precisely because he acknowledges the Other and is no longer constrained by black and white thinking. This is most poetically expressed by his happiness and sadness about the same thing, that he has a kind-hearted daughter. He can walk and chew gum at the same time, though it’s because of his complexity that he suffers and prevaricates and dithers.

The Poor Man represents pneumatic or spiritual consciousness. The Greek word ‘pneuma’ means ‘breath’ which was held to be identical with a person’s essence or life force. He is poor in that life’s complexity has collapsed into the tolerance of paradox. His strange new son is something he accepts without being troubled by its irrationality. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and he doesn’t need to. He can go with the flow and accept what life brings. He knows life’s treasure is a matter of heart.

The ‘hidden’ fourth in this triad is the Hedgehog himself, the Spirit of Nature who becomes humanized by the trust and gratitude of the kind-hearted daughter. The alchemists used to describe the difficulty of transforming base material into the precious philosopher’s stone as ‘the problem of three and four’. Why? Because three into four won’t go. Consciousness and the Unconscious have a way of flying off from each other like magnetic opposites. They are tenaciously irreconcilable.

‘Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky. Jung CW11

Yet, despite all this and perhaps because of this, these opposites can be bridged once a feeling of loving kinship can be established between the Poor Man and the Hedgehog, a necessary precursor to marriage with the blithe and trusting spirit of the kind-hearted daughter.

The Fox Princess.

Once upon a time there was on old king who had two sons. The king was so old and sick he could not leave the castle. One day, from a window, the old King spied a magical bird atop a steeple which then flew off into the forest. Filled with longing, he asked his youngest son to go and fetch it. The Prince happily set off and spent the day searching the forest.

When darkness falls the Prince built a fire. As he sat warming himself a Fox approached the camp. The Prince sets his dog on the Fox but before any harm could come to him the Fox turns the Prince and his dog to stone.

When the younger Prince fails to reappear the older Prince is then sent to find out what has happened to him. He too finds himself in the forest and lights a fire. Again the Fox appears but this Prince greets him kindly and offers him something to eat.

Jung identifies two distinct ways in which people habitually relate to the Unconscious. One way is to identify with it utterly and to become inflated as we saw in the last blog, ‘The Pig Bride’; an old king loses everything by simply subsuming himself to the desires of the Pig, by abdicating his personal responsibilities and inhumanly sacrificing his daughter.

The second way in which we habitually deal with the Unconscious is quite the opposite, to pretend it doesn’t exist. This denial of the Unconscious and the scrambling to re-establish the Persona which follows is symbolized in our current fairy tale by the younger Prince who chooses to kill the Fox rather than negotiate anything with him or suffer his intrusion. Aliveness is thus petrified. The fructifying potential in the Unconscious is cut off and so the Prince becomes benumbed and transfixed.

This Prince is identified with his Persona. He can be told nothing new. He knows everything there is to know. His is a world of ‘first and only’. Everything outside the purview of his personal bubble is irrelevant, so he lacks curiosity…

and caution.

Such a man tends to sneer at the world because anything which doesn’t immediately concern the Persona is deemed irrelevant, mock worthy. In fact the maintenance of his Persona may require him to degrade and vilify others, which means he is unprepared for the possibility that the Fox might be more than his match.

Jung notes that Goethe’s Faust exemplifies this denial of the Unconscious…

‘Towards the Beyond the view has been cut off; Fool—who directs that way his dazzled eye. To roam into eternity is vain! Thus let him walk along his earth long day; Though phantoms haunt him, let him go his way, CW7 p472

The foolish Prince is oblivious to anything in the Psyche which is non-ego and so he has nothing to look out for until it turns him to stone. Indeed he lived ‘happily and without a care in the world’ until he gets zapped. His refusal to look beyond his own hide bound concerns is his fatal undoing…

Keep to the narrow round, confine your mind, And live on fodder of the simplest kind, Mephistopheles in Goethe CW7p475

Its interesting to note that the operation of evil in Goethe’s epic, Mephistopheles, is intent not upon leading Faust astray, but upon keeping him fixed to what he knows, to his Persona. His efforts are aimed at keeping Faust’s nose to the grindstone such that a soulful life may never develop in the first place, let alone that it might be lost. In the process the problem of good and evil fade away. They say that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he does not exist.

The mischief, then, lies neither with the collective psyche nor with the individual psyche, but in allowing the one to exclude the other. Jung CW7 p481

The older brother in our story is not so hampered by the blinkered narcissism of his sibling. In his own travels he seems to have learned that life is complicated and so when the Fox appears he can think beyond his own assumptions sufficiently to be circumspect. He takes the Fox’s power seriously and so engages its co-operation. As soon as he is offered warmth and food the Fox turns into a young man who promises to help the Prince find the mysterious bird which, he says, resides seven lands away in the gardens of the Red King.

Eventually they arrive at the palace of the Red King. In the center of gardens they find a Pear tree and in that tree nests the magical bird. The Fox warns the brother not to bite any of the fruits in the tree for that will alert the guards but of course he does and is dragged before the Red King who offers him an alternative to summary execution. He is to find and abduct a Princess in a castle at the edge of the sea and bring her to the Red King. The older brother accepts the challenge and the Fox pledges his support…

‘Again you took the difficult task. I won’t let you do it alone. You were good to me, unlike your brother.’

Prince and Fox journey together. The Fox has solutions for every hazard they encounter. Eventually they find the Princess, who is not too keen on the idea of marrying the Red King. So the Fox transforms himself into a stunning bride for the occasion, escaping during the festivities to rejoin the Prince and Princess who are slowly making their way back home. On the way the Fox transforms the younger brother back from stone. When they all return the older brother gives the magical bird to his dying father who is then youthfully restored.

Jung identifies several ways in which the Persona may be freed from it’s stony encapsulation. These methods are personified by the actions of the more mature Prince. Firstly, he refrains from setting his dog on the Fox. In other words he avoids the mistake of having only a single knee-jerk point of view and accepts the non-rational to his fire side.

‘The human psyche is both individual and collective. Its well-being depends on the natural co-operation of these two apparently contradictory sides.’ Jung CW7 p486

When the Fox tells the Prince that the magical bird he’s looking for lies seven lands away and suggests they go in search of it, he’s inviting him to pursue a set of allegorical symbols, in other words, a fantasy whose contents are beyond the horizon. The Prince has to go off piste on the understanding that the symbol..

‘acts as a signpost, providing the clues we need in order to carry on our lives in harmony with ourselves. The meaning [of the symbol] resides in the fact that it is an attempt to elucidate something that is still entirely unknown or still in the process of formation.‘ pp492

Thirdly, the older brother has developed a sense of relatedness. Whilst he values the Fox and is prepared to go along with him on the symbolic quest to find the Red King and subsequently the Princess, he does not abdicate his own moral ground in the process. When he finds out that the Princess is unwilling, he does not force her despite the fact that this may well incur the wrath of the Red King and stymie his efforts to return to his own lands with the magical bird.

‘He who does not possess this moral function, this loyalty, will never get rid of his neurosis. But he who has this capacity will certainly find the way to cure himself.’ pp499

When the Prince finally returns to his own lands with the magical bird, the treasure hard to attain, it rejuvenates the old King. The magical bird is a symbol of the transcendent function, the synthesis of consciousness and the unconscious, which, like the Grail, has the power to reanimate and bring fresh meaning.

The Pig’s Bride.

Once upon a time there was a king with three lovely daughters. One day he decided to go to market and asked what they would like him to bring them. The eldest wanted a golden dress. The middle one wanted a silver dress. The youngest, who was a bit difficult, wanted a bunch of talking grapes, a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.

The king confidently set off and easily found the dresses of gold and silver but nowhere could he find the magical fruits and had to return without them. On the way back the road became so churned up with mud that his royal coach got stuck fast. He called for help and all the people turned out to lend a hand but it was to no avail. The coach would not budge.

Then a grunting pig showed up and to the king’s surprise offered to help him in exchange for the hand of the youngest Princess. Well, the king was in a bit of a pickle, after all it was already past tea time, so he agreed. When he got back he had to explain to the Princess that not only had he failed to find what she wanted but he had inadvertently and quite by mistake promised her to the pig…

who would be arriving shortly to carry her off.

The Princess was not best pleased. In fact she cried and cried. Then the king had a marvelous idea. They could dress up some other poor shmuck for the pig to have instead and a palace maid was duly sacrificed. But when the pig showed up with his wheel barrow he was having none of it regardless of the costume and jewels.

‘Oink! Send out the real Princess!’

Then the king had another marvelous idea and dressed the Princess up in rags before sending her out thinking this would put the pig off but he was ecstatic, popped her in the wheelbarrow and took her off to his sty. By now the Princess is beside herself with grief but the pig is kind and offers her his soft bed of filthy straw. She lays down, still crying. The pig comforts her with his warty trotter. She bursts into tears again. So he offers her some of his swill, with extra added corn…

which she accepts, taking the tiniest bite.

Eventually the Princess cries herself to sleep. It’s a deep, deep sleep. When she wakes up the world has changed. She is in a feather bed being attended by maids who help her dress in fine clothes. They then lead her out into the banqueting hall of the castle where she’s met by a fine young Prince. He shows her the gardens in which she finds the magical fruits growing.

‘All this is yours and I am too, if you will have me.’ He goes on to explain that he is the pig who had been bewitched, a spell only to be broken by someone, someone difficult, who wanted a talking vine and a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.

This quaint Hungarian folk tale has parallels in Italy, Straparola’s ‘The Pig King’, and in Germany, Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’, which suggests common and therefore ancient roots. There is something about a Princess betrayed, an animal husband and magical trees which strikes some deep allegorical chord in us. What could it be?

At the time these stories were beginning to impress themselves on the popular imagination some six thousand years ago, the development of ego consciousness was burgeoning. The problem with teasing the individual from the collective is that s/he then has to contend with it. In deed, you can only really hope to keep yourself afloat in this new situation by the most strenuous effort.

Ego consciousness which feels it is sufficient to itself is symbolized by the old king. He believes he can find meaning in the local market place. His attitude is, ‘the psyche is what I know of it.’ The treasure hard to attain must exist within the auspices of his own personal kingdom. This leads to the stuckness of existential crisis where no amount of effort can get you out of the muddy rut you are in. One of the features of ego consciousness, despite all the bells and whistles, is that it cannot provide its own meaning. For that it has to broker a relationship with the non-rational, primordial soup from which it has emerged.

Its popular these days to think of the Unconscious as a rubbish heap you have to rake through in therapy, as though all there was to contend with in life was the stuff of childhood. But what about the figures further back than that? What about the mytho/poetic layers of the psyche beyond the continental shelf, which were there way before ego consciousness had the great idea of going its own rutted way?

‘One is inclined to think that ego consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious. Unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown?’ Jung CW9 p520

The appearance of the pig leaves the king in a terrible dilemma. He does not know what to do with these fascinating and possessive archetypal energies. He agrees to it’s proposal without thinking things through and in so doing omnipotently draws the pig into serving the ego’s partisan needs, getting home in time for tea.

Sometimes the primal energies of the psyche get projected onto powerful others who then positively glow with manna and into whose arms we then throw all of life’s responsibilities. Equally disastrous is it to try and employ the psyche to one’s own personal ends. It inflates the ego such that everyone else simply becomes the means to an end.

‘He gets involved in a ridiculous self deification. The mistake he makes comes from attributing to himself the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself either god or devil. Here we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of [the king] with a kind of primeval force and compels [him] to transgress the bounds of humanity.’ Jung CW7 p110

When the king strikes his bargain he renders himself inert as a container for numinous experience. His easy way out ends his relevance to the story. He is left alternately justifying his grandiosity and gnashing his teeth with regret. It is now up to the Princess to see what she can do with the pig.

The Princess has been betrayed and sold out like chattel. She is the rejected black sheep in the family, cast out for having her eyes on something other than worldly values. Her grief at her father’s bad faith, her loss of belonging, the horror of being cast down, all would lead her to believe that she has fallen into the grip of evil. Hers is a dark night of the soul.

The theme of being abducted by an animal husband has a class of its own in the ATU classification of fairy tales, (ATU 402), identified by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva as being among the earliest of proto IndoEuropean stories. It seems such stories convey an ancient truth, that to identify with emerging reason is a disaster, for with it comes either inflation or projection. To survive being caught between these opposites one must forge a narrow path full of suffering in wedlock to the irrational.

The Princess manages to do this by refusing passive acquiesce to what is happening whilst refraining from blame or trying to claw her way back to the throne.

‘The only person who escapes the grim law of [inflation/projection] is the [one] who knows how to separate themselves from the unconscious, not by repressing it—for then it simply attacks from the rear—but by putting it clearly before you as that which you are not. The patient must learn to differentiate what is ego and what is non-ego, i.e., collective psyche.’Jung CW7 p113

Most crucially the Princess accepts the swill (with added corn) offered by the pig. She allows herself to be fed by the Unconscious. The swill is generally a poorly regarded thing, like the conviction that your dreams are nothing but the brain winding down at the end of the day, the dung heap upon which the philosopher’s stone may or may not be found, meaningless daydreams. Yet the mean swill is also a communion, a sacred experience of between which then breaks the spell of separation and ultimately yields the magical fruit of selfhood.

The Princess finds a way to accommodate the pig without being caught in the trap of either rejecting or identifying with it. In so doing her circumstances are transformed, her inner world blooms and she is restored to wholeness.

The Shoemaker and the Devil.

based on a story by Anton Chekov.

Once there was a poor shoemaker who was so 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 large house and knocks sullenly at the door. Inside the place smells of sulfur. 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… 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 and in a trice he found himself seated at a huge table groaning with fine food and expensive vodka, all served by deferential 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 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 went to church. As he sat praying the same prayer he used to pray when he was poor, he realized that there was little to distinguish the bowed heads around about. The same sins plagued them all; death awaited him as before, the same black earth would cover him, the same hell fires would burn and so he ran out for fresh air clawing at his collar, too distracted to pray for worrying about his money..

and his ruined soul…

He thought he would cheer himself up with a song but a watchman silenced 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 as he begins to realize he is actually more miserable than before the Devil arrives and drags him kicking and screaming to Hell.

Just as he was about to be tumbled into the Infernal Pit, the Shoemaker woke up at his bench with such a start he sent everything flying. There was a 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 choice to live right in life, the same grave in death, awaited them all. They were all in it together.

The Shoemaker’s presenting problem was not his poverty but his dividedness. He had an unacknowledged part of himself which despised him irrespective of his station in life, which then lent itself to misery in a way that rags alone cannot induce or 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, irrespective of his station in life, 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 and 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. CW8 p686

In previous posts about Grimm’s stories of encounters with the Devil, I showed that the shadow can serve as an initiatory figure into greater consciousness depending upon the protagonist’s attitude. Chekov’s story seems to support this idea. 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 may well be what you need to get through personal entrenchment with the aid of a salutary kick in the pants.

The Devil gives the Shoemaker what he asked for knowing pretty well that it will 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.

The Devil is sometimes known as the ‘Adversary’. He is the source of adversity, which can become necessary to jolt a person out of the rut worn for themselves once conventional attempts at educating the personality have failed.

You could say that evil is simply all the shit in life you’d rather didn’t happen, that which confronts or negates conscious intention. Yet it is subtly more than that. Satan is also the Accuser, the merciless and infernal/ underground light thrown on the ego’s double standards in claiming to want growth and change whilst clinging to inauthentic or childlike constructs about how life has to be..

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.

The Virgin and the Unicorn.

The perennial story of the Virgin and the Unicorn sprang into our popular imagination at a time when monotheism and the moral codes of kings supplanted the subtle distinctions to be made between spirit and soul with faith and being good. A living connection with the gods which had thus far kept people in charge of their own religious life was broken. Spirit and soul had to go underground, burying themselves in the universal symbolism of a collective dream.

There are few perennial stories. So when you find one, its worth psychological inquiry. The tale of the Virgin and the Unicorn can be found throughout European folk lore. The exception is in Greek mythology but only because the Greeks attributed it to the fauna of India. The Chinese have stories of Unicorns, as do the Persians. In fact the wee beastie features from Patagonia to Japan, from Scotland to Mongolia and spans a time period dating from Adam.

Apparently, Noah had to leave the Unicorns off the ark because they were so troublesome. Several thousand years later Emperor Fu Xia of China supposedly spotted one, as have other notables, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Confucius. The fact that no-one ever actually produced one doesn’t seem to have prevented people all over the world believing in them since time immemorial.

The unlikely Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th century merchant from Alexandria, made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote about things he had seen along the way. He tells of a brass unicorn he spotted in the palace of the Ethiopian King and recounts the story … “It is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,’ He says, ‘all its strength lies in its horn. When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound.”

The Unicorn’s horn is the focus of it’s universal fascination. Despite the great differences in descriptions available everyone agrees on the horn and it’s qualities of purification and healing. According to legend the problem with obtaining such a medicine is that Unicorns are almost impossible to catch.

‘The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap.’ Leonardo da Vinci.

Then and only then, can the Unicorn be caught and killed, though even this is not the end of the creature for it is often depicted thereafter, alive and well, lain beneath a Pomegranate tree having broken the chains which had previously restrained it.

This motif of resurrection caught the Church’s attention and the story has been given ecclesiastical overtones ever since, though this seems inadequate for a myth which predates the birth of Christ by several millennia.

What then can we make of this story? What is it that’s common to human experience that it could be so universally represented by the motif of the Virgin and the Unicorn?

The Alchemical tradition might provide us with some clues. The various descriptions we have of the Unicorn, though they are widely divergent, do have something in common. It is depicted as a composite creature. Marco Polo describes it as having the body of a horse, head of a boar, feet of an elephant and the hair of a Buffalo. Some traditions throw in a lion’s tail. The Chinese afford it green scales, the tail of an ox and the body of a stag. In the Arabic tradition it has the wings of a vulture, the head of an elephant and the tail of a dragon.

Such descriptions are reminiscent of the monstrous personifications of the ‘prima materia’, the starting off place in the alchemical process, symbolized by a confused mass or complex of opposites all jumbled together, the unvarnished and contradictory personality of the alchemists themselves replete with illogical admixtures of vice and virtue, a ‘complexio oppositorium‘ whose hermaphroditic nature further befuddles efforts to apprehend it.

Such a contradictory melange of traits and attributes is very much like the human personality with all its strange foibles, conflicts and idiosyncrasies, it’s strange admixtures of light and shade out of which eventually grows, all being well, a one-pointed sense of centerdness, of ‘I’ which transcends the chaos of conflicting traits.

‘ I suffered for years on the horns of a dilemma before I discovered it was a unicorn.’ D. Winnicott.

This emerging sense of identity au dessus de la melee, transcending the chaos of conflicting drives and the tension of opposites is qualitatively different from the content of the personality, all the various soapbox oratarios being held by the vested interests of being a son, a brother, an artist or a biker. Its different from the hodge-podge of lion’s tail and dragon’s scales. It has assumed a singular identity, symbolized by the horn out of which cups for kings were supposedly carved to protect their majesties from the poisoning of life’s cruel vicissitudes. The horn is..

‘an emblem of vigour and strength and has a masculine quality but at the same time it is a cup, which as a receptacle is feminine. So we are dealing with a uniting symbol.. C G Jung.

As such the Unicorn represents spirit, the still point, the hub of the wheel, what the Hindu tradition calls Atman. But even so the Unicorn is still wild and intractable. S/he lacks context and so peace. This can only be found in the Virgin’s lap.

At the time these tales were written, what it meant to be a Virgin had a broader meaning than it does today. It went further than chastity to the sense of belonging to oneself, which seems like a good way of describing the anima/us, the soul or psyche which represents the autonomy of the unconscious. Its something you can’t integrate like the repressed stuff of childhood because it was actually there first. It is not a part of you. It is a partner of you, with its own life, in whose lap peace may finally be found.

Humanistic psychology, as benevolent as it is by comparison with what preceded it, has much to answer for because it does insist in placing the ego at the center of the psyche. It still manages to view the unconscious as a rubbish tip of stuff repressed from and therefore originally belonging to consciousness. ‘Everything in your dream is part of you..’

All of which goes to show how centuries of repression can dry clean numinosity from experience, leading people to believe that the unconscious is ‘nothing but..’ the derivative, edited clippings of ego. There could not possibly be interior, a priori factors in the psyche; autonomous, archetypal complexes which have had to take to the woods like outlawed bandits. Despite and perhaps because of their disenfranchisement, they continue to raid and harass the now civilized citizens who have disavowed them.

Cultures relatively unscathed by monotheism have managed to preserve the felt sense that we humans are full of gods. Shamanic culture in particular recognizes, and uses, the fact of the inner other. It recognizes that if this connection is lost it can constitute a loss of soul which is why the Unicorn is so wild and ill tempered.

Its not enough to be ‘spiritual’. There has also to be a felt sense of the inner other.. the ‘not-me,’ in whose lap meaning can be found that the Unicorn cannot provide for itself.

In alchemy this figure, the Anima, is equated with Mercurius, the agency of transformation, who appears as ‘most chaste virgin’. {Jung Alchemical studies.} She is the representative of a depth of experience previously unknown to the Unicorn, peace and dream and belonging. The double edge of this homecoming is that it also involves a death, the end of a mind set seduced by notions of its own self-sufficiency, a de-integrating initiation into a new inter-relatedness which, though mortally wounding to ego-constructs, breaks the chains of its isolation and places it at the roots of the Pomegranate, the Tree of Life.

The Devil’s Sooty Brother.

A decommissioned soldier down to his last crust 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 soldier agrees and 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 sets cheerfully 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, and climbed back down to throw some extra big logs onto the fire.

After a much longer time of exemplary service the soldier became curious about what might be in the second larger cauldron, a great metal vat suspended from massive beams. He shimmied adeptly up the side of the cauldron and had a look inside. There was his former ensign with just his head sticking out.

‘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 old soldier continued to work at his duties long and hard. He tended the flames and swept the floor every day, careful to put the sweepings behind the door 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, an infernally wrought ark mounted upon a tripod of fossilized trees and fed with whole saplings, got the better of him. So 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, and climbed back down to feed the greatest furnace with some gnarly 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 and 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 and lets him know his time is up and that he can go home now.

‘How did you get on?’ asked the Devil.

‘Oh quite well,’ he replied, ‘I did as you asked….

‘Ah, but you did peek in the cauldrons didn’t you, matey?’ said the Devil with gritted teeth. ‘I should bring down all kinds of unspeakable suffering upon you but because you’ve performed your duties so well and kept the fires so wonderfully bright, he added cheerily,’ I will let you off. Here are your wages…’ and he hands the 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 without wetting himself but peeved at his meager wages the 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, the disbanded soldier without prospects, 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?’

‘‘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’s Inferno.

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?’

Such a state of mind is bound to evoke a response from the Unconscious personified by the mercurial ‘little man’, who we could also call Shiva, Loki, or Hades. This encounter 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.

This descent, like the descent 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 boiling consciousness down to its essential elements, 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 soldier must tend these cauldrons with their respective men inside just as the alchemist tends the fires beneath his alembic vessel,

‘a kind of uterus from which the filius philosophorum, is to be born.’ C G Jung

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 life with a bunch of directives not unlike the introjections of childhood which may be designed to make life work more smoothly, yet can become values designed to 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.

People sometimes lament,’ oh, you can’t change the past,’ as though working on oneself were hopeless because the past is carved in stone. In fact, what it often boils down to is not the facts of the past but our relationship with them. Do you have them or do they have you?

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 which you’ve swallowed down without noticing so that life can be lived without reflection. The corporal, like the 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 needs a context and so regardless of its contents and whether they get along or not so too is there the need to disidentify from it, to experience the personality, whatever it is, as something you have rather than something you are, to have a vantage point, a superordinate 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 the ‘not-me’ within his own collective psyche, sweating out in the third giant cauldron.

Inside this mighty vessel he finds the General, a collective figure with whom he is inflated and therefor still possessed by, much as he might tout his freedom from more earthly, barrack room constraints.

The third cauldron requires whole trees in its furnace, so great is the energy needed to develop a relationship with the collective psyche without being swamped by it.

I dreamed an alien queen was coming to earth and I had to prepare an environment for her that was nitrogen rather than oxygen based. She arrives, I dare not look at her… ”Humm, very good, now why should I keep you alive? she purrs. ‘Er, to be of continued service to your majesty…’

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

The Devil’s role in all this is initiatory, he shows the soldier in the door and gives him his duties. This somewhat relativizes what we have come to consider to be evil. It means that the bad things which happen also help you to grow into the person you are to become.

“The manner of [our] growth is by abrupt occurrences, crises, surprising events, and even mortifying accidents. Everything is forever going wrong; and yet, that is precisely the circumstance by which the miraculous development comes to pass.” H. Zimmer.

So the Devil gets consciousness evolving. At the end of the process he lets the soldier off for disobeying him and gives him a satchel of gold..

and a bath.

Can you imagine Old Testament Yahweh being that nice? Me neither. His response to Adam and Eve for doing the same kind of thing was to punish curiosity. Yahweh likes his flock neutered. 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 both 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!”

Bearskin.

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 psychological hygiene of respectful gestures and diplomatic compromises to ward off his worst effects but by the recognition that he played a meaningful part in the evolution of consciousness.

‘A warring peace; a sweet wound; a mild evil.” Alchemical saying

Grimm’s stories show that trying to run the Devil out of town on a rail ends very badly, creating all kinds of splits, disasters and neurotic conflicts. You can see this in our culture’s obsessive preoccupation with combating ‘negative emotions’, political correctness turned moral crusade. In full blown Orwellian tradition becoming whole now involves dividing the psyche against itself, a collective spiritual bypassing of such proportions it has its own service industry and several shelves of any good book store.

We no longer burn witches, we just neuter them with guilt inducing self help books, chokka with any amount of advice to get rid of all those warty, all-too-human parts of you which fall short of perfection’s tyranny, forces which are all the more powerful because they are denied and therefore beyond influence let alone transformation.

A story which can teach us something about negotiating with the shadow and give some hope for integration over enactment, is Grimm’s ‘Bearskin’, written down by the brothers in 1812, but with its roots in the pre-Christian psyche.

A discharged soldier had nothing left to live on and so he took himself off into the forest in despair of what was to become of him. Suddenly there appeared a little man who looked right stately but had a hideous cloven hoof.

‘I understand well what you need’, said the Devil, just as the 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 show his courage in killing a bear and then wear it’s pelt for seven years during which time he may neither wash nor cut his hair or nails. If the soldier survives this experience he is free to go with great riches.

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

which was nice of him..

allegedly.

Because why else would a trickster who delights in mischief give you magic pockets full of gold other than because he was a really nice chap?

And so it was that the newly dubbed, ‘Bearskin’ went out into the world ‘refraining from nothing that did him good’, 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 like a drain and though he showered the poor with golden ducats to pray for his soul he couldn’t shower himself, so he was 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 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; his daughters have no-one to support them and he is about to be imprisoned for debt.

Bearskin 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 restored Bearskin hightails it back 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 wartime identity is redundant. This is the classic existential crisis. You have fulfilled your collective obligations but feel internally bankrupt, a crisis which compels exploration of the dark forest..

...’where you discover that there are some things in your nature which can forge your signature”. M. Gurevitch.

This sudden complication of life at just the point you feel the Universe ought to cut you some slack is bound to leave you feeling a bit desperate, a bit vulnerable and diminished. Where it wasn’t before, there’s now perplexity about whether infinity is a number or not and what an expanding universe might be expanding into…what 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

Once Bearskin agrees to the proposal the devil gives him his coat to wear beneath the Bear’s pelt. It is a magical garment, like Mithral, whose pockets are always full of gold to both sustain and yet to tempt the personality with inflation as he begins to explore the forest.

Bearskin is impelled to discover who he is besides his socially adapted ego identity which no longer provides him with meaning. 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, 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 are inherantly disorienting and weigh the ego down 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. 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 and lending a sympathetic ear.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories. C G Jung

Relatedness and the sharing of stories anchors 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 his own being there for another despite his terrible state.

You can’t help wondering if the 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 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

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 that the strength to endure his liminal experience is through charity and being together. He’s invested beyond himself.

Wordsworth says of the redeemed wanderer..

‘Unoccupied by sorrow of its own, His heart lay open; and, by nature tuned And constant disposition of his thoughts To sympathy with man, he was alive To all that was enjoyed where’er he went, And all that was endured; for, in himself Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness, He had no painful pressure from without That made him turn aside from wretchedness With coward fears. He could ‘afford’ to suffer With those whom he saw suffer.” W. Wordsworth

Bearskin survives and is transformed by The Devil, who hosts his inaugural bath by way of celebration and an end to his ordeal. It purifies and coroborates the hero’s capacity to ‘bear’ the strain of his arrangement with the Devil. It speaks to the humble kindness Bearskin develops along the way which has an apotropaic effect (the power to avert evil influence) on events, and so he makes it through the forest not only in one piece but with a deeper sense of wholeness and belonging..

……………………….

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The Devil and the Blacksmith.

This is a story from Russia, identified by the ATU classification of fairy tales as deriving from one of four prototypical stories anteceding the Indo-European language divide, six thousand years ago, perhaps at a time when emerging ego consciousness was separating out from and having to come to terms with the ground of its being.

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 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 Smith junior for a job, soon becoming as proficient as his master.

One day, when the Smith was out, an old lady went by in her carriage. The Devil 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’, she exclaimed, ‘I will send you my husband forthwith.’

When the old man arrived the master had returned and it was to him the old man 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 duly had the Smith dragged off to the gallows. At the last moment the Devil appears with the old man restored to his now youthful self and 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 winding up at death’s door after the denied Other has his way with him. The effort to divorce air and water from earth and fire ends at the gallows.

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 connecting up the painful feelings and finding value in the wound. What did you develop as a result of your adversity? How has your wound sensitized you? How does what you suffer make you who you are?

When I was a kid 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 and breed as never before.

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

Though I had been consciously persuaded by my father’s mighty efforts, I knew deep down that our playground was a death trap. Playing at anything, even 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 somehow acquired an intuitive knowing of the whereabouts of the snakes. I was once changing a light bulb in the kitchen and went to step back off the stool I was standing on when I suddenly thought the better of it and looked down to see a young green mamba right underneath my foot. Another time, I sensed the presence of an adder in the garden shed moments before I could actually see its motionless hiding place.

It was as though the snake infested environment had triggered a natural defense in my psyche, just as the body will produce antibodies in the presence of germs. The antibodies’ response to infection then strengthens the immune system. So too can adversity bring to life the very resources required to adapt to it and enrich the inner world.

So whilst living with snakes stressed me out majorly and produced some fairly deviant pre-teen behavior, so too did it seem to switch on an early warning system, an intuitive sense of self preservation, which has served me well in scenarios less snake infested but just as troublesome.

In my twenties I was once on walkabout in central Africa, in the middle of virgin bush on a lonely road with out traffic or habitation. Suddenly, I felt the awful bow wave of an event just half an hour away. I was about to be arrested. I rushed off the road and dug through my pack for anything liable to get me in trouble, an old set of commando wings, a military style bush hat, some weed. I got back on the road flushed and breathless but kind of confused that there was no-one there after such certainty. I walked on for a while, still no-one. I had become slightly hysterical by the time a car pulled up with a couple in it from Malawi who offered me a lift to a police checkpoint three miles down the road where I was duly arrested.

The old Gnostics had a great way of describing how this happens. They identified three basic types of people according to their consciousness. The first is called ‘hylic’, folk whose every day is groundhog day; everything is known and taken for granted. The psyche is what you know of it and everyone’s king of their castle. Then comes intrusive experiences ushering you over the threshold into a world suddenly complicated by awareness of the unconscious and its autonomous contents bringing an uncanniness to life the Gnostics called ‘Psychic’.

This transition is going to be a bumpy ride because all kinds of things that are not supposed to happen, do. The Smith realizes he has to contend with the Devil he doesn’t respect. Events overtake him, the intensity of both fear and then relief is overwhelming.

Ultimately the Smith escapes with more than his neck. He is actually a new man. Not only have the old lady and her husband been touched by the eternal, the inexperienced Smith has himself been transformed by his change of heart. He is compelled to reframe his place in the scheme of things which amounts to a brush with death, the end of a whole way of experiencing life, yet one which gives rise to a new beginning, a new respect for life’s depths and hopefully not getting too badly done over by the law.

Before the Law.

There is a parable about a man from the country who goes in search of The Law. He arrives at the entrance to the Halls of the Law, guarded by a mean looking Gatekeeper who blocks his path, saying he may not enter at this time. The man from the country tries to persuade, then to cajole and finally to bribe him but the gatekeeper is resolute and will not let him in, though he does give him a stool to sit on.

Hours turn to days and weeks to years. The man from the country continues to badger the gatekeeper to let him pass, citing his right to know the Law, trying to wheedle snippets of the Law from the Gatekeeper himself, begging and pleading, even enlisting the fleas in the Gatekeepers beard to mediate on his behalf.

Finally, the man from the country lies dying. He beckons to the Gatekeeper for a final exchange.. ‘What now?’ asks the Gatekeeper, ‘you are insatiable.’ ‘Everyone strives to attain the Law,’ answers the man, ‘how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?’ The doorkeeper bellows in his ear: ‘ This door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

Its tempting to feel sorry for the man from the country but then his MO is precisely to get people to feel sorry for him so that no-one need notice he has wasted his life. The parable is told by Kafka in his novel, ‘The Trial’. The protagonist, Joseph K is inexplicably arrested for unknown crimes, charged by an unknown law and ultimately executed by unknown assailants. You quickly understand that his crime is this waste of his life, an endless stream of self justification besprinkled with pathological entitlement dressed up as a virtue. Its as though eternally importuning the Gatekeeper were some heroic venture. In this passive refusal to be himself he also forgets what others are for and so they become dehumanized, mere extensions of his determination to have his own way.

“Next time I come here,” Joseph K said to himself, “I must either bring sweets with me to make them like me or a stick to hit them with.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

The man from the country, who is Joseph K himself, cannot gain admittance to the Law because he cannot detail his own crimes, his failings and shortcomings, he cannot acknowledge his own shadow. His strategy for getting past the Gatekeeper is entirely based on the concept of his own innocence which, ironically, amounts to the crime for which he is finally condemned. The man from the country looks earnest but is actually the duplicitous weasel of you and me, more interested in the drama of how hard done by he is than in facing the elaborate strategy he has constructed to keep himself from the stream of life. Even his final end, murdered with a butcher’s knife, has the feel of orchestration to it. His final words, ‘like a dog…’ are as much stage directions as protest.

By the same token you can’t help wondering if the trial of the century about to unfold is really not the whole point of the Trump Presidency rather than its nemesis and whether it has not been brewing since the ink was still wet on the Constitution. My analyst Chuck always used to say, ‘you are possessed by whatever you are unconsciously identified with.’ The Man from the country was unconsciously identified with his own entitlement which then kept him trapped on his stool for a life time. The President is unconsciously identified with the trickster showman, which cares little for out come so long as there is a good crowd. PT Barnum’s genius lay in the recognition that for the showman ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity.’ Or, as Oscar Wilde put it. ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’

It will be a perfect Trial. Like you’ve never seen before. The crowds outside will be bigger than any other impeached president. They’re already saying that its the greatest trial on the planet, ever. More criminal than Nixon. More lurid than Clinton. Believe me. We’re having a hard time tonight. Roll up, roll up.

What more exciting finale for the showman than to be front and center on the world stage for his own swan song, to have committed never before seen impeachable acts to dizzy the imagination and delight the senses. See the amazing bearded lady collude with a foreign power. Sit aghast at the clowns with-holding military aid as leverage over an ally. Thrill to the twisting and turning senate who risk their acrobatic necks in legal jeopardy whenever they open their mouths. Roll up, roll up.

In the meantime, clutching popcorn and snacks, the public settle into their sofas for the spectacle. The reality TV show host never disappoints. Whatever he says or does can be guaranteed to fire you up one way or another. Isn’t that what he’s for? Isn’t the real news here how we have grossly underestimated the extent of our collective need to be entertained.?

I recently heard corruption described as ‘improper dependence’. Its a great definition because it captures the ides that corruption can be psychological as well as financial. The man from the country is corrupted by improper dependence on his notion of being without stain coupled with slavish yet secret dependence on the Gatekeeper as arbiter of his meaning and purpose. It fails to occur to him that there is more to life than the satisfaction of his personal desires, even the virtuous ones.

Mr Trump’s financial corruption may be more evident than the corrupt loss of soul involved in passively giving yourself over to an archetype though it is the lion’s share of the complex. The Showman is guaranteed an audience just as the Man from the country may be sure of his stool and the Gatekeeper’s eternal gaze. It is arranged for you to be the center of attention with the same assuredness then presided over your demise.

And we millions on our softer stools, commenting one way or another at TV coverage which will make OJ look like a commercial break, are no different the man from the country berating the Gatekeeper or Joseph K eternally citing others as reasons why he cannot live. We are consuming what we paid for, the drama of a reality TV host with nuclear codes whose gonna entertain you in a whole new way. Future generations, if there are any, will refer to us as Homo Vaudvillus, identifiable by the reflexively hunched shoulders of heightened anxiety and lowered center of gravity associated with hyper vigilance and eternal sitting.

Sometimes we grow, not by valiant effort but by accepting defeat. You cannot change your husband. You job doesn’t satisfy even if you put smiley face stickers on your lunch box. No amount of entertainment ultimately satisfies your itch. You find yourself walking away from the spectacle. Life itself steers us to experiences of defeat in order to lay bare our improper dependencies, the corruption of being a mere audience or bystander to life.