Once there were four brothers. When the three eldest were grown-up they set off to find wives for themselves. Their journey took them through a dark forest where night soon fell. The brothers found a little cottage in the middle of the forest and asked the strange old man who lived there to give them shelter. He invited them in, giving them food and lodging, on the condition that when they returned on their journey homewards they bring him a wife as well. The brother’s hid their amusement and agreed. When they reached the next land they entered into the service of the king who had three beautiful daughters. The brothers served the king so well he gave them his daughters’ hands in marriage and so they returned home, passing once more through the forest where the old man lived. ‘And where is my wife?’ he demanded. ‘Er, we forgot’, they relied. The old man promptly turned them all to stone, except for one of the princesses whom he imprisoned and had her cook and clean and sew.
The remaining princess was terribly upset but resolved to do as the old man asked to the best of her ability. One day she asked, ‘why did you turn them all to stone?’ and he answered, ‘because my heart is made of stone.’ ‘And where do you keep your heart of stone?’ she asked again. ‘Under the bedsheets,’ he replied and went off into the forest. The young woman then went out into a meadow and picked wildflowers which she made into a beautiful wreath. She placed it upon his bed, ‘so that your stone heart may know joy’, she explained when he got home. ‘You are kind,’ said the old man, softening. ‘In fact, in the middle of the forest is a huge rock and in that rock is a small bird and in that bird is my heart. If anyone should be able to smash the rock and capture the bird, I will have my heart back again.’ ‘Oh’, thought the Princess, ‘who could manage such a feat?’
Meanwhile, when the youngest brother heard that his older brothers had disappeared he vowed to find them and set off into the forest. Along the way he became hungry and set out his picnic, calling out, ‘is anyone there who needs to eat? Come and join me.’ A great ram with mighty horns suddenly appeared and the young lad shared his meal with him. ‘Take one of my hairs,’ said the ram, ‘if ever you need me take it out and I will come to your aid.’ Further down the path the boy became hungry once more and again set out out his picnic, ‘I still have some food left.’ he called out, ‘if anyone is there and needs to eat, come and join me.’ A dove lighted upon his blanket and shared his meal then saying, ‘take one of my feathers, if ever you need me I will come to your aid.’
When the young man came to the little cottage he found the princess who told him everything that had happened. He then went to the rock in the middle of the forest and took out the ram’s hair from a pocket whereupon the ram appeared directly and broke the rock in two. Out flew the bird and when he saw it he pulled the feather from his other pocket. The dove appeared in less than a moment and caught the bird, delivering up the old man’s heart which the youngest brother then carried carefully back to the cottage. The old man was overjoyed and released the brothers and sisters from their stone prison. There was a huge wedding and they all lived happily ever after.
The transgression of the three brother’s forgotten promise results in them being arrested in their tracks by the chthonic powers of the old man and either turned to stone or enslaved. The theme of being turned to stone is one which has a rather particular meaning in myth and folklore. Lot’s wife in the Old Testament is turned to stone for disrespecting God’s command not to look back at the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the plain below. She is fixed in the past, unable to move forward. She cannot accompany the movement of her family into a new future. Petrification is what happens when the possibility of transformation is forsworn.
In the story of Medusa, her power to turn others into stone is given by the gods to prevent further transgressions against her after she was raped by Poseidon. The story of Niobe is equally instructive. She boasts of her superiority to Leto because she has many children; Apollo and Artemis then destroy the children, and Niobe herself is turned into weeping stone. Her grief becomes geological. ‘Niobe became that representative of human nature liable to pride in prosperity and forgetfulness of the respect and submission due to the gods’. (wiki)
Petrification is symbolic of an arrested psychic process. It does not necessarily mean the disappearance of psychic life; but that psychic life has become imprisoned in an excessively rigid form. Becoming fixed in stone is what happens when the encounter between consciousness and the autonomous Other cannot continue. Whilst the petrification seems wholly punitive it also has the connotation of an entirely natural process. A person becomes stone because some psychic event cannot be metabolised. This is quite different from punishment. The stone becomes necessary as a container of unbearable affect.
Two thousand years of Christian theology has made it difficult for us to come to terms with the reality that the divine is both loving and malevolent, that God has his own shadow to deal with. We are generally left floundering in our efforts to take this psychological reality seriously and, like the three brothers, tend to ignore or forget the debt of responsibility due to the dark face of the Self.
Nevertheless, ‘to be divine, to be an adequate symbol of the Self, God must be endowed with a shadow’, (O’Kane 1990 p32) whose impact we are bound to feel in life’s tragedies, sufferings and incomprehensions. God is both terrifying and lovable because the numinous exceeds the ego’s comprehension. There is no defence or protection from the Unfathomable as Job discovered to his cost. This dark, scary aspect of the Self is hinted at in religious teaching but we are generally given little guidance in developing a sufficiently propitious attitude to address it. In psalm 111 we find, ‘The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ And in an otherwise upbeat and joyous Christmas carol, ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’ we find the angel who is announcing the birth of the Christ child also having to sooth terrified shepherds, ‘fear not’, said he, ‘for mighty dread had seized their troubled minds’.
The angel does not say ,’there is nothing to fear’. The shepherds dread is an appropriate response to a numinous encounter which shreds ordinary categories of knowledge. The angel is ‘mind blowing’. Angels descending and glory shining around is enough to make anyone wet themselves and in the face of which ‘being good’ doesn’t quite seem like adequate protection. ‘Every angel is terrifying,’ says the poet Rilke, ‘if I were taken to his heart, into the presence of his greater being, would I not be consumed?’
Thus it is not just the shadow of the personality which tends to be split off and repressed but also the shadow of the divine itself which is then compelled to live out its days in the forest of the unconscious, exerting its influence in tangential ways. The disrespect shown to the old man by the three brothers provokes a response commensurate with the frightening power of the dark self. Its as if the stone hearted man were saying, ‘if you cannot afford me the kind of respect which acknowledges the complexity of the divine then you are ill-equipped to enter into the complexities of life itself and so, for your own sakes, you will have to tarry here a while’.
Arrested development is not a punishment, it is a form of safe guarding. Those who do not have sufficient resources to manage the contrary rigours of life as it is must develop rigid character structures accordingly. They become ‘encapsulated’ and think ‘concretely’. A worldview uncomplicated by vexing promises or annoying responsibilities results in folk being impervious, like stone, to the needs of others. The conviction that the world is what I know of it renders us prisoners of sedimented paradigms, unable to think outside the box.
We all know people who seem hard-boiled, walled off, unavailable to influence or appeal and who are therefore childlike and even infantile. The recent renaming of Lake Ontario as a response to American domestic and international crisis is a case in point. So the stone hearted man, whilst dark, is not necessarily evil. The brothers’ forgotten promise makes it unwise for them to proceed because, by their own admission, they lack the necessary wherewithal to fully engage with the relational demands of adult life.
Our story presents us with two worlds, one of which is presided over by the lofty king in his protective castle, the other is a deep dark forest presided over by a very different kind of man, wild, mysterious, primal, the stone that the builder refused. The three older brothers make the mistake of disrespecting the stone-hearted man; they mock his vital instinctually, with the unfortunate consequences that their own vitality is then petrified.
The youngest brother’s attitude is quite different. He is able to accommodate the disparate aspects of the psyche with equal respect and attention, sharing his picnic with both the chthonic and instinctual ram and then later with the aerial purity of the dove.
Before the split had opened up between Olympus and Hades, the ram and the dove were both considered sacrificial animals which mediated between humanity and the gods. They represent the polarity of divine energies. The youngest brother’s skill is not about any kind of heroic endeavour. It lies in his capacity to enter into relation with two radically different manifestations of the numinous. He honours both the transcendent receptivity of the dove and the scary, vital ferocity of the ram. This is what Jung calls the coniunctio oppositorum, out of which emerges the capacity to resolve an apparently intractable situation.
The ram is the destructive, turbulent force capable of busting open what has become closed, the de-integrating effect of the numinous which, to quote Kahlil Gibran, ‘breaks open the shell of our understanding’. The dove is that surgical delicacy which can retrieve the bird/heart without hurting it and make it available to the hero whose skill, like Parsifal is in being able to ask the right question. This question is not ‘who is out there?’ which reduces the other to an object of consciousness but ‘is there anyone there who needs to eat, anyone who would like to join me?’ which makes of the other a fellow subject with whom a feast can be shared.
The propitious attitude necessary to creating a redeeming and transformative possibility is primarily established by the princess’s enduring patience and the kind gesture of making the mandala of flowers by which she gains the secret knowledge of the heart’s whereabouts. Later it is embodied by the youngest brother’s generosity to the `Ram and the Dove within the temenos of his picnic blanket, the sacred protective space where opposites can meet without mutual destruction, all of which sets in motion the possibility of bringing about the restoration and remembrance of the lost heart. What has been lost is recovered and restored, not by heroic action but by the propitious attitude. The temenos is the psychic space in which this attitude becomes effective and recovery can occur.
The hero’s task is to open the rock without destroying what it contains. If the heart were destroyed, the story would be about defeating an evil power. But the heart is returned and when it is returned, the apparently monstrous/stone-hearted man becomes a benevolent agent of transformation. What looked like an enemy was actually a disordered sacred power whose centre had been displaced.
The aim is not annihilation of the dark power. It is restoration of relatedness between dissociated elements. The sacred has both an aerial and a chthonic face. Human psychic wholeness requires relationship with both. This is remarkably close to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, not the elimination of opposites, but the emergence of a third position from the tension between them. Initially the divine appears split into radically different symbolic forms, the dove that descends from above and the ram that breaks through from below. The hero’s task (and skill) is to recognise both as belonging to the same sacred field. Then the heart can be recovered, the old man restored and the nuptial party liberated.
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