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.