Tag: fairy tales

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.