The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  This touches upon the problem of evil as seen from the standpoint of nature. As this fairy tale and others indicate, evil incitements provide us with the opportunities to increase consciousness. It seems that nature takes this view and represents it in this way. When we are able to see our own greed, jealousy, spite, hatred, and so on, then these can be turned to positive account because in such destructive emotions is stored much life, and when we have this energy at our disposal, it can be turned to positive ends.

  The dominant characteristic of this false and crafty steward is envy, and envy is a misunderstood compulsion to achieve something within oneself that one has neglected. It springs from a vague awareness of a deficiency in one’s character, a deficiency that needs to be realized; it points to a lack which can be filled. The object of envy embodies what one might oneself have created or achieved, and therefore it is a fault that can be remedied.

  The figure of Rauder shows little that is animal-like or instinctive but rather that which is sinister and shrewd—shadow qualities of which the hero could and should be conscious, contents that should fuse with and be contained in the archetype of the hero. This brings up the following question: to what extent do such negative factors support the king’s position? Sometimes they are embodied in the king, in which case he himself imposes the impossible tasks on the hero because the new system (personified by the hero) must demonstrate that it is stronger and better than the old one; in other words, that it will create a better state of collective psychic health and give a more abundant cultural life. This is the old king’s secret justification for imposing formidable tasks on the one who aspires to inherit the kingdom. One can see this in the struggle between early Christianity and the old pagan gods. The early Christians felt more alive, they had greater vitality, new enthusiasm, and a hopeful attitude, and they were active socially, whereas the heathen were disillusioned and their esprit was worn out. Because of these things the issue was decided. People watch for signs of vitality and join the movement that looks as if it will make them feel better and be better. That is how a new system demonstrates its superiority and wins the anima (the king’s daughter)—in other words, the souls of men.

  Service at the court of a foreign king is a recurring image, and the hero who undertakes this is almost always the heir to the throne. This motif arises when the ruling principle of collective consciousness becomes oppressive and the time has come when it should abdicate.

  Turning to the tasks of the hero, one finds that they are generally the work of civilizing: the taming or slaying of wild animals, agricultural labor, the building of a church in a single night, and so on. One of the tasks in the present story is the felling of trees; that is, the clearing of a place where the light of consciousness can fall into the realm of the unconscious and subdue a part of it. A wood is a region where visibility is limited, where one loses one’s way, where wild animals and unexpected dangers may be present, and therefore, like the sea, it is a symbol of the unconscious. Early man lived in jungles and forests, and the making of a clearing was a cultural step. The unconscious is wild nature, which swallows up every human attempt, like the forest against which primitive man must keep eternally vigilant.

  Aside from this, wood is vegetable life, an organic form that draws life directly from the earth and transforms the soil. Through plants, inorganic matter becomes living. Since plants take their nourishment in part from the mineral contents of the earth, they signify that form of life which is closely connected with inorganic matter, and this can be said to parallel the life of the body in its intimate connection with the unconscious.

  In order to accomplish the difficult tasks, Prince Ring has to have the help of his other shadow side, the dog, which increasingly takes the initiative. The two become strongly allied, and the hero acquires the help of the instincts in the form of the positive shadow. On the other hand, the helpful instinct provides the hero with the sense of reality that he needs and gives him roots in this world.

  Ring’s second assignment is to vanquish wild bulls. The slaying of the bull was of primary importance in the Mithraic mystery rites, vestiges of which still exist in Spain and Mexico. The killing of the bull is an assertion and demonstration of the ascendancy of human consciousness over the wild, emotional animal forces. Nowadays the bull is not dominant in the unconscious psyche; on the contrary, our difficulty is to find the way back to our instinctive animal life, and in this story the hero must assert his self-control and his masculine qualities before the dog can be redeemed.

  The next section of the tale has to do with the giants from whom the hero must recover the stolen treasures, and it is important that the action takes place on a mountain. In Hinduism the mountain is connected with the Mother Goddess. Being close to the heavens, it is often the place of revelation, as in the transfiguration of Christ. In many creation myths it signifies a place of orientation, for example, the initial appearance of four mountains at the cardinal points. The apostles and spiritual leaders of the church were identified with mountains by certain Fathers of the Church. The medieval author Richard de Saint Victor interprets the mountain on which Christ stands as a symbol of self-knowledge that leads to the inspired wisdom of the prophets. Often the mountain is the goal of a long quest or the site of the transition into eternity. The mountain motif also denotes the Self.

  Summing up the aspects of the mountain symbolism that connect with our tale, we note that the mountain in the story has to do with the moon goddess in the person of the giant-mother. The mountain also marks the place—the point in life—where the hero, after arduous effort (climbing), becomes oriented and gains steadfastness and self-knowledge, values that develop through the effort to become conscious in the process of individuation. Actually, the mother aspect is paramount, and in relation to the problem presented by the mother, the hero must make a tremendous effort and must be able to rely on his instinct. For this reason Ring lets his dog lead him.

  Self-knowledge is symbolized by the precious golden objects that the prince finds on the mountain, and this knowledge is also symbolized by the salt, which Ring tosses into the groats, inducing an agonizing thirst in the giants, so that they emerge from the cave and run to the sea one by one and are all drowned.

  Salt is a part of the sea and has the inherent bitterness of the sea. The idea of bitterness is also associated with tears and with sadness, disappointment, and loss. In Latin, sal also means “wit” or “joke.” Salt in alchemy is called “the salt of wisdom” because it endows one with a penetrating spiritual power and is a mystical world principle like sulfur and quicksilver. Thus wisdom, a skeptical turn of mind, pungent sorrow, and irony may according to Jung all be symbolized by salt. Some alchemists prescribe salt as being the only means of overcoming the devil. On the other hand, in alchemy, salt is praised as the Eros principle, and it is called “an opener and a uniter.” From this we may conclude that salt symbolizes the wisdom of Eros, its bitterness together with its life-giving power—the wisdom acquired by feeling-experiences.

  In the present tale, the Eros principle leads the hero on his quest, and the salt works to isolate the giants and make them beatable. The hero has a sort of spiritual attitude which is more resourceful than the slow wits of the giants.

  If we sum up the aspects of the shadow in this story, we see that there are two shadow figures: the dog and Rauder—an animal double and a malicious human double, two forms of the shadow, one positive and the other negative. The dog is intimately bound up with the hero, whereas Rauder is separable and transient. The two have played out their respective roles only when the hero is joined with his anima.

  Although we cannot get past the fact that the dog is an unknown part of man’s psyche, a part best expressed by the image of a dog (like all symbols it is its own best expression), if we wish to circumscribe its meaning, we recall that in antiquity the dog was regarded as a guarantor of eternal life (for example, Cerberus of Hades and the images of dogs on antique Roman graves). In Egyptian myth
ology, the jackal-headed god Anubis is a guide into the underworld and is said to have gathered together the dismembered body of Osiris. The priest who performed the rites of mummification was costumed as an Anubis figure. In Greece, the dog belongs to the god of healing, Asklepios, because he knows how to cure himself by eating grass. The dog is usually very positive in his relation to man; he is a friend, a guardian, and a guide. But as the carrier of frenzy or madness (hydrophobia) he was also much dreaded in earlier times and was thought to bring disease and pestilence. Of all animals the dog is the most completely adapted to people, is most responsive to their moods, copies them, and understands what is expected of him. He is the essence of relationship.

  Snati-Snati, however, is not really a dog, and in the end we learn that he is a prince, also called Ring and also under the spell of the giant-woman, whom they finally overcome. He could not be released until he had slept on the wedding night at the foot of the bed of a prince who bore his name, and so one can say that this dog represents an instinctive urge which later turns into a human quality. One can also say that this animal drive which needs and wants to be integrated contains a hidden strain of the hero. The dog is the hero’s complementary instinctive side, whose assimilation brings the hero’s realization of himself into three-dimensional life.

  The shadow depicted in Rauder is sometimes replaced in other tales by two backbiting brothers of the hero, and these brothers represent tendencies toward a one-sided development which is either too “spiritual” or too instinctive. Rauder has a jealous nature, with the consequent dangerous tendency to narrow one-sidedness. He symbolizes passionate possessiveness, but he performs a positive function by imposing the impossible tasks on the hero. When the anima comes, however, he must go.

  Finally he attempts to murder the hero, and then he is attacked by the dog—by an instinctive reaction that disarms him and defeats his purpose. In his attempt to murder Ring, Rauder shows his hand—and the dog bites it off. Endurance is of great importance when dealing with evil forces. The one who can hold out without losing his temper is the one who wins. There are even tales featuring a wager between the hero and the evil spirit, in which the one who is the first to let loose his emotions forfeits his life. Losing one’s temper always means a lowering of consciousness, a lapse into primitive or even animal reactions.

  Rauder was formidable while he pitted human shrewdness against Ring, but then his animal passion for sheer destructiveness got the better of him, and that is why he was overcome by the animal. He represents a bit of unassimilable evil in the psyche which resists sublimation and which must be thrown out. One alchemist observed that in the prima materia there is a certain intractable amount of terra damnata (accursed earth) that defies all efforts at transformation and must be rejected. Not all dark impulses lend themselves to redemption; certain ones, soaked in evil, cannot be allowed to break loose and must be severely repressed. What is against nature, against the instincts, has to be stopped by main force and eradicated. The expression “assimilation of the shadow” is meant to apply to childish, primitive, undeveloped sides of one’s nature, depicted in the image of the child or the dog or the stranger. But there are deadly germs that can destroy the human being and must be resisted, and their presence means that one must be hard from time to time and not accept everything that comes up from the unconscious.

  Snati-Snati turns out to be a prince, and one wonders why he had been transformed into a dog. This has to do with the dual nature of the instinct, which is an ambiguous phenomenon. Biologists regard it as the meaningful but unreflective mode of behavior of animals, as an inborn pattern of behavior which only the higher animals are able to modify. This pattern consists of two factors: a physical activity and a picture or image of the activity, this being necessary to energize the activity. The image works as a catalyst for the physical action and also represents the meaning of the action. Normally the two factors exist and work together, but they can be separated. If another image is substituted for the original one, the instinctive behavior can attach to the new image. Woodcocks, for instance, which were hatched out in a stove addressed their mating play to the wooden clogs of the human attendants, the clogs for them being “imprinted” with the mother-image. These images or pictures are what we call archetypal images.

  Snati-Snati, therefore, is the psychic pattern or image in which the course of self-realization appears first as an instinct, but within which lies a human complementary side. The dog form of this drive derives from a false conception of individuation, a collective misconception entertained by consciousness: hence the curse of the stepmother.

  In every age there are widespread collective convictions about what constitutes the path of individuation. For example, in the Middle Ages the idea that people should model their entire lives and their inner conduct on the life of Christ is what we would call individuation. Today there is a current notion that we are healed, fulfilled, and made complete when our physical instincts are normal, especially the sexual instinct. According to the Freudians, the root of all evil is sexual repression; if the amatory functions take their natural course, then everything is resolved and in order. Devotees of this belief bend their energy to this purpose but often find that they cannot get rid of their inhibitions in this way. Exactly because it is overvalued, the spontaneous thing cannot happen naturally. People saddle the instinct with psychological expectations and put a mystical idea of redemption into a biological fact. Thus something which does not belong to the animal sphere has been projected into it. Other examples of this sort of mixing can be found in the idea that the full meaning of life is celebrated when a communist or other social order enters one’s country and that one’s highest ideals are then fulfilled (or the warrior ideal of some cultures, as revived by the Nazis). The Nazis put the ideal of individuation into their program, but that ideal was spoiled and made soulless by false collective interpretations. The youth of the country gave to it devotion, intensity, and the willingness to sacrifice because they identified it with what we call individuation. Idealism and willingness to sacrifice are admirable in themselves, but they were given a false direction. Because the millennium is originally a symbol of the Self, it caught their imagination. Or take the fantastic idea of women having children for the Führer. The underlying idea is that feminine productivity should be under a spiritual guiding principle, that women should not produce children like animals but under the aegis of a guiding life principle. But this was falsified by projection and the wrong conception of spiritual development put too much weight on materialism, and thereby the women degraded themselves.

  When symbolic factors are repressed, they glut the instincts, and therefore they must be separated out so that the genuine instincts can function without being overloaded. As I have said, when people overemphasize sexuality, they put something in the animal sphere which does not belong there, and a real effort must be made to integrate the shadow in order to allow the instincts to function in some sort of harmony.

  If we depict the journey of the prince in a maplike fashion, his route turns out to be circular—like a ring—because the fourth station is secretly identical with the first, for both are ruled by the stepmother. (See diagram.)

  The hero ultimately winds up at the place from which he started, but his circuit has netted him the dog (Ring 2nd), the princess, and the kingdom. The whole process is a continuous adding on, a process of increasing completion, which is ordered like a mandala. This is a typical pattern in fairy tales.

  The course of these four stations leads deeper and deeper into the unconscious. Between stages II and III the hero leads the way, but between III and IV the dog guides the hero. At the fourth station, all evil elements disappear: the giant-couple on the island die of old age, the other giants, including the witch-giantess, are killed, and Rauder is hanged. Stages I and IV have a secret identity because they have to do with the same psychic complex realized on different levels. The hind, the seaside witch, and the giantess are secretly one an
d the same figure—the one who persecutes the two Rings.

  The fourth stage also fulfills what was latent: marriage with the anima and the emancipation of the second prince from bondage to his dog form (after having been freed earlier from bondage to the forbidden kitchen). Only with the attainment of the Self are the shadow and the anima really won because only then does the situation become stabilized. The fourth-station structure occurs frequently in fairy tales that feature royal personages, and these tales generally conclude with a group formed by four persons.

  This fairy tale in its entirety represents an energic process of transformation within the Self, and one may compare this to the transformations that take place within an atom or its nucleus.

  To sum up what we discussed, the fairy tale does not represent a personal shadow figure, but the collective shadow of the collective hero figure. It consists of an animal double which is positive, and an evildoer who is destructive. Actually, the animal double is more an undeveloped aspect of the Self.

  THE CHALLENGE OF THE ANIMA

  The Bewitched Princess

  A man had a son called Peter who wished to remain at home no longer, so he asked for his inheritance of twenty shillings and departed. On his way he came upon a dead man lying in the fields who had been left unburied because he was poor, and Peter, having a good heart, gave his twenty shillings to provide the man with a decent burial.

  Continuing on his way, Peter was joined by a stranger, and they decided to travel together. They came to a town where everything was veiled in black as a sign of mourning for the princess, who was bewitched by an evil mountain spirit. She put three riddles to each one of her suitors, and if he failed to guess every one, she killed him. Although none had been able to redeem her by guessing the riddles and many had lost their lives, Peter decided to try. His companion, who was really the ghost of the buried man, offered to help him. He strapped great wings on Peter’s back, gave him an iron rod, and told him to fly behind the princess that night wherever she might go and to beat her with the rod. Above all, Peter was to take in whatever she said to the mountain spirit whose captive she was.