A poor tailor becomes lost in the forest. As night falls, he sees a light shining and follows it to a lone hut. An old man lives there and after the tailor begs for shelter, allows him to stay for the night. In the morning, the tailor awakes to a mighty commotion. Outside a terrible fight is going on between a great stag and an even larger bull. Eventually, with the greatest effort and despite his wounds, the stag wins. Quite unexpectedly, it then bounds up to our hero and carries him off in its antlers to arrive, finally, at a Wall of Stone.
The Stag pushes him against a door in the Wall of Stone, which grinds open. Inside the tailor is told to stand on a large round rock. He does so and it sinks down into a Great Hall, where a voice directs him to look into a glass chest. Inside is a beautiful maiden, deeply sleep. She wakes and asks him to open the chest.
So he did.
The maiden then tells him her story: She was the daughter of a rich Count. After the death of her parents she had been raised in the forest by her brother. One day, a traveler stayed over and used magic to get to her in the night, asking her to marry him. She was outraged at his intrusion and rejected his proposal. In revenge the magician then turned her brother into the stag and imprisoned her in a glass coffin, enchanting all the lands around them.
When the tailor and the maiden emerge from the enchanted hall they find that the stag had been transformed back into her brother. The bull/magician is dead and the curse entirely lifted.
Hooray.
The tailor is successful not out of heroic daring-do or manly slaughtering of dragons, but by three simple things, letting himself be lost, being able to ask for help and doing as he is told by the Stag.
Getting lost is not much fun. People generally pride themselves on knowing their own heading. Questioning stuff that used to be set in stone seems at best like foolishness and at worst like madness. Yet many a story begins with the confusion of not knowing how to proceed, with the loss of a value system that no longer serves, a sense of self that no longer fits, tedium with the known yet un-nourishing. Sometimes getting lost can be in the tangible form of an addiction, or a relationship that is more rut than track. Perhaps some blow of fate that deprives us of what we know. Sometimes getting lost is the loss of youth, initiation into the second half of life.
“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Dante.
Being lost has a humbling effect on the personality. It strips you of arrogant presumption, makes you ask for help, feels gratitude in the place of entitlement, feels comforted by the meanest favour. When you are lost you let yourself be little. You proceed with caution, excruciatingly aware of vulnerability, dependence on others and the limits of your own abilities.
The tailor does not confront the Bull himself. It is defeated on his behalf, as part of a larger plan, with events then unfolding around him in a blur. He stumbles to his salvation in a manner that is decidedly unheroic. In fact he’s entirely bewildered. All he wanted was a quiet night’s kip and suddenly Great Beasts are tearing the garden up. Then one of them whisks you off in antlers set to steak knife, and buries you in stone with a set of instructions. Its all a bit much.
Without realizing it the tailor has set up the preconditions for a redeeming of himself that he scarcely knows he needs. It seems that he is just being swept along but he has evoked these events by his attitude. The person convinced by their own sufficiency would never allow themselves to be lost or admit it even if they were. The tailor has just the right mix of humility in knowing that he’s basically an ordinary bloke and just the right amount of courage to go sufficiently off the beaten path and lose his way.
Quests involve getting lost. Its not just a distinct possibility or even a rum chance. Its a requirement, like papers you’d hand over at a border check point to certify that you had no idea which land you were exiting, where you are headed or the name of the place. Or what you’ve done with your passport.
The reason is that the inner world is way bigger than anyone ever imagines. You think you’re just going to have a look around in the basement and find that, first off, it has no walls and then, that far from being a place of relics, it is full of life. You’re bound to wander off. And may not be back for tea.
Begging to be looked after by the Old-Man-of-the-Forest, suggests a propitious attitude that’s well advised. Those that live in the forest are generally also part of its dangers. In fact, does it not turn out that this is the very cottage once visited by an evil traveler who did away with the previous occupants?
The evil traveler is that regressive streak in us all which clings to omnipotence and magically getting whatever you want or think you deserve. He reckons he has the right to invade the Countess’ privacy and can’t contain his own petty feelings of vengeance when she asserts her own destiny. He is consumed with envy at her autonomy and narcissistically attacks that which he cannot control or dominate.
Children take in a great deal that doesn’t belong to them. We internalize the parent who seduces and uses the child to meet their own needs as well as the parent who wants us to grow. Kids already have a tendency to take on board responsibility for parental ills and failings let alone the pressure to fulfill expectations that have nothing to do with them.
This is especially true when either parent is unfulfilled in their own ambition and needs the child to sing their song for them rather than finding their own voice, imprisoning the child with expectations that stifle autonomy and so despite being special cannot grow.
I recall being given a guitar out of the blue by my mother. It was expensive, a fine gift, only, I had never expressed any interest in learning to play whatsoever. I dutifully tried but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it because my interests lay elsewhere. None of which stopped me having to shamefully confess that I had failed in my efforts. She traded the guitar in for an accordion which I also failed to play. I was clearly a disappointment and felt myself to be so for some time after. My more humble harmonica, which I did love and did want to play, became a source of embarrassment, a symbol of failure, soon to be left lying around and lost.
Parental co-dependence with their kids, what analyst Masud Kahn calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,’ sometimes looks like a really special bond, sometimes distant and uninvolved or strangely switching between the two. The child is not so much a person as they are ambiguous receptacles for expectation and as such, more like museum exhibits or specimens in glass jars rather than sentient beings with destinies of their own. Yet, still special enough to want to pickle, a garnish to parental ‘magic’.
Archetypally, the wandering traveler is the dark aspect of Odin who, a thousand years earlier, demonstrated his tendency for using children to his own ends by allowing his son Sigmund to die for a crime he committed unknowingly and then by punishing his daughter, Brunhilde and putting her into a similar deep sleep for defying him and wanting to help her brother. If this were a Greek myth rather than a Norse one, he would be Saturn, devourer of his children.
The stag represents that aspect of the child’s soul that needs to sharpen its antlers on adversity, waiting for an auspicious moment to confront the two horned dilemma of being so special on the one hand but like a specimen in a jar on the other. Cervus fugitivus, the fugitive stag, is soul as spirit animal or guide, evoked by the sudden shock at the strange vastness of the forest. He represents..
”the bush soul, a ‘doctor’ animal, like the Celtic Kerrunos who presides over death, rebirth and the urge to individuate”. M L von Franz.
It’s in the nature of the fugitive stag to burst from the bushes, to protect its own from the entropy of being caught on the bulls horns, to be forever in dilemma, a life style of procrastination and the provisional life. We resist it because it’s noisy, disruptive and a bit scary. You may know from experience what happens if you try and ignore it, but perhaps also what can happen if you allow the white knuckle ride of being scooped up in its antlers.
My analyst Chuck Schwarz once said that 90% of therapeutic work is done by heeding the Stag, picking up the phone and making that first appointment, whether its because a person is lost in the forest, awoken by the commotion in the garden, or being carried pellmell to the Wall of Stone. After that phone call is made, he told me, the soul has gotten involved. When people arrive for their first session they already feel much better.
How you think about the Stag and his Sister will depend on your attitude to the unconscious. One way of looking at them is as though they were parts of you and so its all about you which eventually gets boring. Another way is that the Stag shares the forest of the Psyche with you and comes to aid when, like the tailor, we are made ready by getting lost, asking for help and doing as prompted by the inner voice.
The story takes the alchemical perspective that we are both redeemer and redeemed, which got them into quiet some trouble with the church who thought such a belief was tantamount to playing God, yet we can see that nothing could be further from the truth. The tailor’s part is a humble one. He frees the sister/soul from her imprisonment in matter but only at the behest and careful instructions of the stag. He is crucial to her deliverance but only by agreeing to be party to events rather than central to them.
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