The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  Naturally, that is to be found in the collective situation as well. A whole society may first be violently antagonistic to some religious reform and afterward suddenly recognize it. To mention a classical example, twelve sentences written by Saint Thomas of Aquinas, the great pillar of the Catholic Church, were condemned by a Concilium in 1320. So you can see that through the collective prejudice of the time, something which is later recognized as not being inimical to the dominating attitude is at first resisted. That extends into political and religious persecution, newspaper pressure, and business persecution, and so on—all that is going on now and always will in social setups everywhere in the world. There is the phobia that something new is in itself terrifying. All that is typical behavior of the old king, and it can be stiffened into mistrust and real tragedy—or, as happens here, it need not become a tragedy. This story mirrors the possibility of a renewal occurring without any crisis or tragedy. It is a mild story, which is why it is not particularly interesting, but it has all the classical features we need.

  We come next to the ritual of the three feathers. This general custom of the time is not very different from throwing a coin. Whenever consciousness cannot decide rationally, one can have recourse to such a chance event and take that as an indication. That the coin falls this way or the wind blows that way is a “just-so” story taken as a meaningful hint. This in itself is important because it is the first move toward giving up ego determination, one’s own conscious reasoning. One could say that this old king proves to be not too bad because, though he will soon be dead and therefore has to be replaced by a successor, he is quite willing to leave it to the gods to decide who shall come next. It again fits the whole setup of the story, which is not dramatic and which has not stiffened into a conflict.

  To carry the symbolism further: in mythology, feathers generally represent something very similar to the bearer of the feathers—the bird. According to the principle of pars pro toto (the part stands for the whole), a magical form of thinking, the feather signifies the bird, and birds in general represent psychic entities of an intuitive and thinking character. For instance, the soul of the dead leaves the dying body in the form of a bird. There are medieval representations of this. In certain villages of Upper Wallis even today, in every house, in the parents’ bedroom, there is a little window called the soul window, which is opened only when someone is dying, so that the soul can leave through it. The idea is that the soul, a fluttering being, goes out like a bird escaping from its cage. In The Odyssey Hermes gathers the souls of Ulysses’ enemies, and they chatter like birds (the Greek word is thrizein) and follow him with wings like bats’. Also, in the underworld where Enkidu, the friend of Gilgamesh, goes, the dead sit around in the feather garments of birds. So birds, you could say, stand for a nearly bodiless entity, an inhabitant of the air, of the wind sphere, which has always been associated with breath and therefore with the human psyche. Therefore, especially in the stories of North and South American Indians, where it is used very often, one meets the idea that gluing feathers to an object means that it is psychically real. There is even a South American tribe which uses the word for feather as a suffix to describe something which only exists psychologically and not in outer reality. You can speak of a fox-feather, an arrow-feather, or a tree-feather, the word feather indicating that the fox or the arrow or the tree is not contained in physical reality but has to do with psychic reality. When North American Indians and certain Eskimo tribes send messengers inviting others to a religious festival, the messengers carry sticks with feathers on them, the feathers making the bearer sacrosanct. Because they carry a spiritual message, such messengers may not be killed. By attaching feathers to himself, the primitive marks himself as a psychic and spiritual being.

  Since the feather is very light, every breath of wind carries it. It is that which is very sensitive to what one could call invisible and imperceptible psychological spiritual currents. Wind, in most religious and mythological connections, represents spiritual power, which is why we use the word inspiration. In the Whitsun miracle the Holy Ghost filled the house like a wind; spirits make a kind of cold wind when they come, and the appearance of ghosts is generally accompanied by breathings or currents of wind. The word spiritus is connected with spirare (to breathe). In Genesis the Ruach Elohim (the Spirit of God) broods over the waters. Therefore you can say that an imperceptible wind whose direction you can only discover by blowing a feather would be a slight, barely noticeable, almost inconceivable psychic tendency—a final tendency in the current psychological flow of life.

  That is what happens when someone comes into analysis and tells you all his troubles and you say, “Well, I am not more intelligent than you. I do not see through this, but let us look at what the dreams say.” And then we look at them from a final angle; we look to see where the current in the dreams seems to point. According to the Jungian point of view, they are not only causal but also have a final aspect and we therefore look to see where the libido tends to go. We “throw a feather in the air” and look to see the direction it takes, and then say, “Let’s go that way because there is a slight tendency in that direction.”

  That is what the king does; he makes himself completely flexible and consults the supernatural powers. One feather goes to the east, the other to the west, and Dummling’s feather settles on the ground right away. According to some more witty variations, it settles on a brown stone just in front of him, and then Dummling says: “Well, that means I can go nowhere”—and then finds a stair leading into the earth, which is in beautiful accord with his character. Very often we look God-knows-where for the solution of our problem and do not see that it is right in front of our noses. We are not humble enough to look downward but stick our noses up in the air. That is why Jung often told the beautiful story of a Jewish rabbi who was asked by his pupils why in the Bible there were so many instances of the apparition of God, whereas nowadays such things did not happen, and the rabbi replied, “Because nowadays nobody is humble enough to bend down low enough.” But Dummling, because he is naive and unsophisticated, has a naive and unsophisticated attitude toward life. He is naturally led to what is right on the ground and right in front of his nose—and there it is. We know from the first sentence of the story that it is the feminine which is lacking, so naturally it is found in the earth and nowhere else. That belongs to the inner logic of the whole story.

  5

  “THE THREE FEATHERS” CONTINUED

  Although we have amplified the three-feathers motif, we have not yet taken the second step of expressing its psychological meaning in a nutshell. Feathers represent thoughts or fantasies; they replace, pars pro toto, birds, and the wind is a well-known symbol for the inspiring spiritual quality of the unconscious. So this motif would mean that one lets one’s imagination or thoughts wander, following the inspirations which well up from the unconscious. You might perform this ritual if you were at a crossroads and did not know what direction to take. Instead of deciding out of ego considerations, you wait for a hunch from the unconscious and let it have a say in the matter. We could understand that as a compensation for the dominant collective situation, which seems to have lost contact with the irrational, feminine element. If a single man or if a whole civilization loses contact with the feminine element, that usually implies a too rational, too ordered, too organized attitude. Along with the feminine go the feeling, the irrational, and fantasy, and here, instead of telling the sons where to go, this old king makes a gesture toward possible renewal by allowing the wind to tell them. Dummling’s feather falls straight ahead of him onto the ground, where he discovers a trapdoor with steps beneath it leading into the depths of Mother Earth. In the Hessian parallel, the frog princess tells him that he should sich versenken—he should go into the depths. Always the downward movement is emphasized.

  If there is a trapdoor and then steps leading into the earth, it is not the same as if there were just a natural cavity. Here, human beings have left their traces; pe
rhaps there has been a building, or perhaps this is the cellar of a castle of which the upper part has long ago disappeared, or it was once a hiding place in a former civilization. Often when figures go down into the earth or into the water in a dream, people superficially interpret that as a descensus ad inferos, as a descent into the underworld, into the depths of the unconscious. But one should see whether it is a descent into unconscious virginal nature or whether there are layers and traces of former civilizations. The latter would indicate that there were elements which had once been conscious, but which had sunk back into the unconscious, just as a castle may fall into ruins but its cellars remain, leaving traces of a former way of life.

  Interpreted psychologically, this would mean that the unconscious not only contains our instinctive animal nature but also contains the traditions of the past and is partially formed by them. This is why in analysis, elements of an earlier civilized past frequently reappear. A Jew may not care in the least about his cultural past, but kabbalistic motifs appear in his dreams. We once saw the dreams of a Hindu who had been educated in America and who consciously had not the slightest interest in his cultural past, but his dreams were full of Hindu godheads still alive in his unconscious. It has often been erroneously believed that Jung had a tendency to force people back into their cultural background; for instance, that he insisted that Jews should again dig up Orthodox symbolism or that Hindus should again pray to Shiva. This is not at all the case. There is absolutely no “should” or “ought” about it; it is simply a question whether such elements come up and want to be recognized in this person’s unconscious or not.

  How can it be that in our story the feminine element was at one time more conscious and has now sunk back into the unconscious? The original pagan Germanic and Celtic religions had many cults of Mother Earth and other nature goddesses, but the one-sided patriarchal superstructure of the Christian civilization slowly repressed this element. Naturally, therefore, if there is a question of bringing up the feminine element and integrating it again, we shall (at least in Europe) find traces of a past civilization in which it was much more conscious. In the Middle Ages with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Troubadours, the recognition of the anima was much more alive than it was from the sixteenth century onward, a time which is characterized by an increasing repression of the feminine element and of Eros culture in our part of the world. We do not know the date of this fairy tale, but the opening situation shows a condition where the feminine element is not recognized, though obviously it had been at one time, which is why there is an easy possibility of getting back to it. Dummling can go down into the earth step by step and does not fall headlong or get lost in the dark. (In the Hessian parallel the steps have a round cover with a ring in it, like the rings on the covers of manholes in the street, so there is an allusion not only to the symbol of the anima but to the Self.)

  When Dummling goes down, he finds a door and knocks at it, and he hears that strange little poem.

  Virgin, green and small,

  Shrivel leg,

  Shrivel leg’s dog,

  Shrivel back and forth.

  Let’s see who is outside.

  It is a kind of childish ditty with only a partly understandable, dreamlike combination of words. When the door opens, Dummling sees an enormous toad surrounded by a circle of little toads, and when he says he wants a beautiful carpet, they produce it out of the box.

  We have first to amplify the poem and mainly the symbol of the toad. In many other variations of this fairy tale, the toad is replaced by a frog, so we have to look at the frog as well. In general, the frog in mythology is often a masculine element, whereas the toad is feminine. In Europe there is the frog prince, and in African and Malayan stories the frog is also a male being, while in practically all other civilizations the toad is feminine. In China a threelegged toad lives in the moon and together with a hare produces the elixir of life. According to a Taoist tradition she has been fished up from the “well of truth” and as a kind of protecting spirit works with the hare to make the elixir pills which heal and prolong life. In our civilization, the toad has always been associated with the Earth Mother, especially in her function of helping at childbirth. She was looked on, and is even now regarded, as being a representation of the uterus. In Catholic countries, after a leg or a hand or some other part has been cured by a saint, a wax image is made of the injured part and suspended as an ex voto (a token of the fulfillment of one’s vow) at the church where healing was requested. Now if a woman has a disease of the uterus or some trouble connected with childbirth, she will not make a wax image of her uterus but will suspend a wax toad in the church, for the toad represents the uterus. In many churches and chapels in Bavaria, the statue of the Virgin is surrounded by such toads made out of wax. There the Virgin Mary has taken over the function of the Greek goddess Artemis Eileithyia, the helper in birth, the positive mother who helps the woman carry the child and give birth to it without harm. This analogy of toad and uterus shows how much the toad in this connection actually represents the maternal womb, the mother—just that which is lacking in the royal family.

  The big toad in the middle could be looked upon as the mother of all the little toads sitting around her. Our Dummling does not marry the big toad; he takes one of the little ones out of the ring and she turns into the beautiful princess, which shows even more clearly that the big toad is the mother figure from whose circle he gets his anima. For, as we know, the anima is a derivative of the mother image in a man’s psychology. Here the Mother Earth goddess is really in the center. The word shrivel is rather more difficult to understand. Certainly in the German language hutzel, the original word, is always associated with old age, ancientness, something which has lasted for a long time. It could allude to the fact that the Mother Goddess has been excluded from the realm of consciousness and neglected and has thus shriveled up in the cellar like an old apple.

  Now we come to the leg (Bein), which I am inclined to interpret rather as a bone (also Bein in German) than as a leg because of a widespread ritual for a love charm in German, Swiss, and Austrian countries, according to which a man must take a toad or a frog and throw it alive into an ant heap. Then he must run away and not listen because the toad or frog might cry and that would mean that he was cursed by it. The ants will then eat the toad or frog until only the bones are left; then the man must take one of the leg bones and keep it, and if he secretly touches a woman’s back with it without her noticing it, she will fall hopelessly in love with him. Thus toads and frogs are very much used in witchcraft and magic for love charms and aphrodisiac potions. Also in folklore the poisonous nature of the toad is very much emphasized. Actually a toad, if touched, exudes a liquid which, though not dangerous to humans, can cause an eczema, a slight inflammation of the skin. Smaller animals can be killed by this exudation. Since in folklore this fact is much exaggerated, the toad is looked upon as a witch animal, and its pulverized skin and legs are used as one of the basic ingredients of practically all witch potions.

  To sum up, we see that the toad is an earth goddess which has power over life and death: it can poison or it can bring life, and it has to do with the love principle. Thus the toad really contains all the elements lacking in the conscious setup of our story. It is green, the color of vegetation and nature, and a third line in the verse speaks of Hutzelbeins Hündchen—Shrivel leg’s little dog. So there is a strange kind of association with a little dog, which is not quite clear but becomes clearer if you look up Bolte and Polivka’s collection of parallels, where you will find that in many other versions, particularly in many French parallels, the redeemed princess is not a toad but a little dog. Obviously there is a shifting or intermingling of motifs, for sometimes it is a little white dog and sometimes either a cat, a mouse, or a toad. Should the bewitched or unredeemed princess be a little dog, she would naturally be much closer to the human realm than a frog; she would have been neglected and have regressed to an unconscious level, but she would be
less low and less far away than if she had regressed to the level of a toad or a frog. So we could say that Dummling finds the lacking feminine element in a nonhuman form, as a cold-blooded animal or, if a dog, in the form of a warm-blooded animal.

  The formation of this big toad with a ring of little toads at the entrance, in that other parallel, also shows that together with the feminine, the symbol of totality is constellated.

  We now have to go into the symbolism of the carpet. In European civilization the carpet was not known until we came into contact with the East. The nomadic Arab tribes, who are still famous for their carpet weaving, say that the carpets they use in their tents represent that continuity of earth which they need to prevent them from feeling that they have no soil under their feet. Wherever they go, they first spread one of those beautiful carpets with its usually sacred pattern, and over that they put the tent. It is the basis on which they stand, as we do on our earth. It also protects them from the evil influences of a foreign soil.

  All the higher warm-blooded animals, including ourselves, have a strong attachment to their own territories. Most animals have an instinct to have and to defend a territory. We know that animals return to their territories. Efforts have been made to exile mice miles from their homes, but they walk back through all the dangers and difficulties, and only when the chance of survival is nil does the mouse not return but tries to get a new territory by fighting and driving out another mouse. In its own territory an animal has a kind of quick, intimate knowledge of the whole situation, so that when an enemy comes it can hide at once, whereas if it sees the shadow of a hawk in a strange territory, it has to look around to find a place to hide and may lose just that second required for its escape. Heinrich Hediger, a professor of zoology at Zürich University, has gone further into these problems and has tried to establish the fact that the territorial instinct in animals is derived from the mother attachment. He claims that the original territory of every young animal is its mother’s body; the young animal grows in and lives on the mother’s body, the clearest example being the kangaroo. This instinct is later transferred from the mother’s body to the territory. We know that when animals are caught and transported, they make a home territory of their transport cage, and if that is destroyed and they are put into a new home right away, they may die. The transport box, with the animal in it, must always be put into the new place so that the animal can slowly acclimatize itself to its new home, after which the transport cage can be removed. It is again the mother’s womb, a habitat with a maternal quality, the feeling of which is slowly transferred onto the new territory.