The King of Egypt lies dying. His daughter, the Princess Jasmina, is desperate to find a cure for her beloved father. She has swan suits made to fly across the Great Sea with her two step sisters to the faraway North, to the land of the Marsh King where a sacred healing flower grows…
Once they arrive, Jasmina’s stepsisters betray her and steal back to Egypt with her swan suit leaving her to be swallowed up by the Marsh King, events carefully noted by the Marsh’s resident Stork, who has an innate sense of knowing right from wrong and decides to use his migration South as an excuse to follow the step sisters to Egypt. Just to see what they were up to.
Back in Africa, the step-sisters tell the Egyptian court that Princess Jasmina was shot by a hunter and killed. They claim her swan suit was all they could save, followed by an elaborate story as to the vengeance they supposedly extracted from said hunter and how they burned him in his shack in the woods….
Papa-Stork listened, incredulous at the barefaced lies being told. His earlier whim to simply keep an eye on things now forged into determined resolve, a sudden feeling that his honor is at stake.
Papa-Stork heists the step-sisters’ swan suits. Every year thereafter he managed to carry the heavy suits some part way of the migratory route back to the Viking Marsh thinking that the Princess might need them if he ever found her. Year after year he faithfully criss-crossed the Marsh during the summer months looking for any sign of Jasmina. His wife berated him for ignoring his chores and taking so much time away from family life but Papa-Stork endured, fired by the injustices perpetrated against the noble Princess.
One day, as Stork-Papa kept his winged vigil, he saw a green stalk shoot up from the slimy depths, a leaf unfurled and from that a bud in which there lay asleep a beautiful little girl, daughter of Princess Jasmina and the Marsh King. Stork-Papa takes her to a Viking Mother (from whence come our tales of storks delivering babies) who is delighted, though slightly perplexed, since her beautiful but tempestuous child turns into a frog as soon as the sun is set….
It seems that a curse had been placed upon the child, Helga. She looks like her mother Jasmina, yet has her father’s temper by day. At night she has her father’s looks but her mother’s kindly disposition, croaking mournfully.
Helga’s split nature is healed by her concern for a christian priest enslaved by the Vikings. She frees him from captivity though he is killed as they make their escape. She mourns him all night, hidden in a tree. In the early dawn she digs his grave. When she speaks sacred words and makes a holy sign over him, her frog skin falls from her. Her grief for the young man is so great that his spirit appears and magically returns her to the Marsh from which she first emerged, where her mother Jasmina and Stork-Papa are waiting..
The two swan suits fit mother and daughter perfectly and so at long last they fly back to Egypt. Helga herself is the healing flower needed and her grandfather the King returns to full health as soon as she embraces him.
And so they all lived happily ever after. Except the step-sisters who were indicted for corruption, lying to the government, criminal conspiracy, money laundering and sent to the pen for a long stretch….
What does it mean psychologically to marry the Marsh King? Why is it that Helga’s grief is the key to her becoming whole?
Being swallowed up by the Marsh King is an involuntary descent into the Unconscious. It’s what happens when we are consumed by the rage, grief and abandonment exemplified by the step-sisters’ betrayal. It’s what happens when you are overtaken by circumstances way out of your control that still demand a response, some relationship with them so that consciousness can come from experience.
This is represented by the eventual birth of Helga who, despite feeling cursed, still manages to contain the opposites in herself and finally manages to mourn the death of the christian priest in a directly feeling way, honoring him with sacred gestures. This is the Principle of Relatedness in action. She is made whole by being letting herself need and grieve, by use of ritual gesture and the holy names reserved for things of ultimate value.
“Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.” – Marion Woodman 1985 The Pregnant Virgin.
Sometimes life presents you with moments when you are helpless to influence events and all you can do is sink down into your own boggy depression, saturated and stagnant, when you come to the limits of heroic action and just surrender to deeper processes that may feel like they’re sucking you down at the time but somehow, after much patient vigil, also give birth to new consciousness.
Stork-Papa’s devotion to Princess Jasmina is forged in the crucible of the stepsister’s betrayal. It is a good example of what ethologist Robert Ardrey calls the Amity/Enmity complex, coined out of speculation as to how a strong and apparently dominant species of our ancient ancestor Australopithicus, ‘East Rudolf Man’, failed to prevail over physically smaller representatives of the species with equally smaller brains that evolution would suggest be left behind.
The smaller Australopithicines seem to have banded together as never before, as a direct result of the threat of East Rudolph Man, evolving gesture, language, and kinship bonds that more than made up for any apparent shortcomings..
”the greater the pressure of inimical force against a group, the greater the amity within it.’ ibid
Provided circumstances are not entirely destructive they can evoke from us strengths, values, and dedication to common purpose we may not have otherwise known lay within, urgently quickened to life by Adversity. Papa-Stork’s righteous indignation sets alight a feeling of absolute commitment to Princess Jasmina, of faithfullness to the truth, something of ultimate importance that normally lay outside his usual daily concerns suddenly bursting in…
So if you are ever disposed to write yourself an enemies list, you might like to consider the possibility that it could assume a life of its own, grow by itself, that folk may elect to add their own names, and that this shared spirit of defiance creates the very bipartisan solidarity required to end the tyranny of its author.
