Tag: devil

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 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!”

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.