The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  In “The Bewitched Princess” the hero must surmount certain trials before he reaches the anima, while in the alternative version the hero and his companion are pursued by three witches. Frequently witches are initial anima manifestations and often resemble the mother-image, like the stepmother in “Prince Ring.”

  Peter’s companion hurls a spool of golden thread across the river to form a bridge. After the two have run across, they dismantle it in time to forestall the witches’ crossing behind them, and so the witches go down to a watery death. This golden thread is a secret link with the meaningfulness of the unconscious. It is the invisible tie that threads things together, the thread of destiny which is woven by our unconscious projections.

  In this story the companion is a suprapersonal guide to destiny, and it is he who has the thread and who throws it. The spool, bouncing back and forth like the shuttle of a loom, balances at a perilous stage between the uncertain present and the immediate future until the bridge to what is to come is sturdy enough. In this way one may throw projections which make it possible for him to cross over to a new inner realm. Often there is an oscillation between the opposites until a stability is achieved whereby one can cross over; that is, one can change the inner attitude.

  The hero arrives at the city, which is in mourning for the bewitched captive princess, and learns that several princes have perished trying to save her. The anima is under a spell and is trapped because a process in the unconscious is not understood: hence her riddles, which must first be answered. The riddles of the anima mean that she does not understand herself and is not yet in her right place within the total psychic system. Moreover, she cannot solve this problem by herself but needs the help of consciousness. On the other hand, the hero is in the same fix because he too has not yet found his place and he too does not know himself. Thus the riddle is something between both of them, something they have to solve together. It is the riddle of right relationship. The riddle recalls the Sphinx, also half-animal, like the girl dressed in a troll skin in the Norwegian version. The classical question of the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth concerns the being of man, which is the great mystery we cannot yet understand.

  When the anima problem is not understood, the anima, like the princess, who is a creature of moods, either sulks and becomes silent and sullen or becomes angry and hysterical. The anima poses a moral problem, although she herself is amoral. She can be counted on to set the most confused and intricate problems, but she is released when the hero lives up to his name, and then she guides him to higher consciousness.

  The shadow companion equips the hero with wings so that now he can fly in the world of the anima. This means a new conscious attitude, a certain spiritualization, because wings belong to a fantasy being rather than an earthly being. The ability to go into the realms of fantasy is essential to the finding of the anima; one must be freed from profane reality, at least to the extent of trying to fantasize. Detachment is also needed, objective observation with open eyes, a willingness to observe without interfering and judging.

  The companion also equips the hero with a rod, a means of criticism to soften the powerful effect of the anima. The rod signifies the implacability which is necessary in order to punish the anima for her murderous and demonic behavior. The hero must follow her, stay with her, and yet criticize her negative side. Though he beats her with the rod, it must not be hard enough to beat her into the earth.

  The princess, like the unconscious, is a piece of nature and therefore undiscriminating. Consciousness surpasses her in the ability to adapt to a situation because consciousness is normally more cool and resourceful; it has patience and appreciates distinctions. But as a piece of nature the unconscious is unconfined, turbulent, and elementally powerful. The not-yet-human impulses of the unconscious often appear, therefore, as giants who represent the uprush of instinctive power. Despite their might, they are easily fooled, and therefore there needs to be wisdom to give direction to this energy.

  The mountain that Peter and his companion fly to signifies the effort toward self-knowledge. It is here that the hero must learn the anima’s secret.

  The mountain spirit belongs to the archetype of the wise old man, who frequently has a daughter in thrall in a sort of incestuous relationship. That he has an altar suggests secret religious ceremonies, and he may be regarded as a kind of priest. At the same time, there is something chthonic and underworldly about this “father” of the anima. He is analogous to the dragon in the Russian parallel to the tale of the three feathers—a dark, pagan god. Often he assigns insurmountable tasks to the hero who wishes to win his “daughter,” and here the anima presents riddles that he has devised. The mountain spirit behind the anima represents a secret, meaningful plan or image governing her, which means that behind the anima is the possibility of a further inner development of the hero. The anima’s “father” is the greater wisdom which is in touch with the laws of the unconscious. That the mountain spirit is a superpersonal force is indicated by the altar and by the fish being worshiped in his domain. He denotes a part of the spirit of nature and a wisdom that have been neglected in civilized development. In the Norwegian version the mountain spirit is personified by a troll who is the lover of the princess, and the troll has a he-goat, often a theriomorphic form of the devil. The troll is afraid of the hero.

  The idea of a spirit is originally closely allied to the thought that the soul lingers on after death. The idea of spirit moves between its subjective and objective aspects. Primitives experience spirit as a wholly other, purely objective occurrence, whereas we tend to believe that a spiritual experience is subjective. But spirit originally was—and still is to a great extent—an autonomous archetypal factor.

  In fairy tales, according to Jung, the old man is usually a helpful figure who appears when the hero is in difficulty and needs counsel and guidance. He represents the concentration of mental power and purposeful reflection; even more important, he introduces genuinely objective thinking. Thus the symbol of the spirit has neutral or positive or negative aspects. If the old man in the tale is only positive or only negative, he represents but half of the nature of the archetypal old man, and in this connection one thinks of the double aspect of Merlin. In the present tale the old man is the animus of the anima, so to speak, and this means an objective spirit behind the anima.

  Such figures of old men in a mountain are a folklore motif; for instance, Barbarossa,36 or Mercurius in alchemy,37 who is now a boy, now an old man, now destructive, now inspiring, and whose character depended upon the attitude of the alchemist. In alchemical tales the student of alchemy often seeks the truth in the bowels of the mountains, where he meets an old man, a Hermes-Mercurius figure. This spirit is the goal and at the same time the inspiration that leads to the goal. He is called “the friend of God” and has the key or the book and preserves all the secrets. At a later date the alchemists asked themselves how this Mercurius figure was related to the Christian God and found that he was a chthonic reflection of the God-image.

  The temple in the middle of the mountain is also a frequently occurring motif in European fairy tales. A manmade edifice in the mountain means a structured form in the unconscious; that is, a cultural development that was suddenly uprooted or dropped without having undergone a transition into the mainstream of culture. Such an edifice symbolizes a broken-off cultural shoot, an interruption of cultural development like the sudden cutting-off of alchemy and of the qualitative view of nature (in favor of an exclusively quantitative approach) in the seventeenth century. This leaves the former development intact but merely as a piece of tradition, while its effectiveness is sealed off.

  The anima is bound to the mountain spirit because he has the secret which would make her live. Our modern consciousness has not given the soul enough room or enough life and attempts to exclude it. Therefore, the anima clings to the mountain spirit because she feels that he holds the promise of a richer life for her; this has to do with his being pagan and the fact that the
pagan Weltanschauung, in certain respects, gave the anima in man a more abundant chance to live.

  The clue to the mountain spirit’s being a non-Christian figure perhaps lies in the date of the origin of the tale. Fairy tales, like archetypal dreams, correspond to a slow, deep, progressive process in the collective unconscious. Their meaning takes a long time to strike root and penetrate consciousness, so one can only date them within a margin of about three hundred years. This tale must belong to a later time than the Renaissance, a period which shows the application of Christian principles to earthly things; for instance, Johann Kepler assigned to the universe the picture of the Trinity; for him, the three dimensions of space were an image of the Trinity, the Godhead being a sphere of which the Father is the center, the Son the superficies or outer side, and the Holy Ghost the radii. According to Kepler, all creatures long to be spheres—that is, to emulate God. The whole of the Enlightenment, so called, can be described as being based on a trinitarian form of thinking, an incomplete standpoint which excluded the problem of evil and the irrational elements in nature. Opposition developed between this new style of thinking and the former way of thought. The new thinking, because of its estrangement from the irrational and from the soul, was and is quite as one-sided as the former. In order to counterbalance the new tendency, the inheritors of the traditional way asserted its tenets more loudly. The two sides set up separate camps, and neither can complement the other’s distortions.

  The first object of thought that the mountain spirit proposes to the princess in order to baffle the hero is her father’s white horse, and here a new figure and a king, the real father of the anima, is introduced indirectly. One thinks of Sleipnir, Wotan’s horse, which represents the positive energy behind the archetype of the Wotan image. As I suggested earlier, the king sometimes symbolizes a moribund system of spiritual and worldly order. Possibly the father of the anima may stand for a worn-out Christian Weltanschauung, in contrast to which the renegade mountain spirit plays a parallel role as a father. The latter is an exuberant upwelling of libido that stirs in the unconscious—the living archetype, which is threatening because it has been repressed. The hero must be on his guard against the opposites denoted by the two kingly figures, which like all extreme opposites are mysteriously one. The white horse is a symbol for the unconscious powers at the disposal of consciousness.38

  The second object that the princess must think of is the sword, which stands for justice, authority, decision (consider Alexander’s splitting of the Gordian knot), and discrimination, both in understanding and in willing. The motif of the sword plays a great role in alchemy.39 The dragon, for example, is cut up by the sword, and this signifies the attempt to discriminate the instincts so that undefined unconscious contents are made more definite. One must cut the prima materia “with its own sword”: a conscious decision is necessary in order to free the libido offered by the unconscious. In other words, the decision about which course to take has to be made by the conscious personality and is an essential precondition for the unconscious to go ahead. “Take the sword! Cleave the dragon!”—then something will develop. In the ceremony of the Mass the sword symbolizes the Logos, and in the Apocalypse it is the Logos functioning as God’s decisive Word, judging the world. The flaming sword placed before the garden of Eden is explained in alchemy as the wrath of the Old Testament God. In the Gnostic system of Simon Magus the flaming sword was interpreted as the passion which separates the earth from Paradise. The sword has also a negative meaning; namely, to be destructive and to cut off possibilities of life. Like the horse, the sword signifies libido from the unconscious, a portion of psychic power. The horse and the sword are in this way linked, but the sword is an instrument made by man and the horse is instinctive libido.

  The third object is the head of the mountain spirit, a thing of which no mortal being can conceive. The Greek alchemists declared that the great secret lies in the brain. In the Timaeus Plato also pointed out that the head repeats the ball-form of the universe, or of God. Similarly, it carries man’s divine secrets. This is probably one of the reasons why primitives frequently have cults of the head. The Sabians, for instance, steeped a “golden-headed” (blond) man in oil, then cut off his head and used it as an oracle. The alchemists called themselves “children of the golden head,” and the alchemist Zosimos taught that the Omega (Ω) is the great secret. In alchemy the head is also a symbol of the Self. With the help of the head we have the key to the solution of inner problems. The head was later interpreted as essence or meaning. About the head it was said that “no one could think of it,” meaning that it is beyond human ability to fathom this concealed mystery. In our story, it is the head that propounds the riddles and is therefore at the bottom of all the riddles of the anima. Thus the hero’s acquisition of the head is the solution of his problem, because possessing it, he is then able to understand his inner psychic processes.

  The three objects of thought—the horse, the sword, and the head—express the fact that the old conscious system has a certain will and energy, although its dynamism and meaning have reverted to the unconscious. There is therefore the split between conscious energy and unconscious meaning, which is a primary problem of our day.

  Let us now consider the symbols found in the temple of the mountain spirit. On the hero’s first trip there are only stars, and the hall is dark and the altar bare. The random stars are latent, indefinitely dispersed germs of consciousness.

  On the second trip the moon is shining and a prickly fish lies on the altar. The moon, a symbol of the feminine principle, signifies a feminine attitude toward the inner and the outer worlds, one of acceptance, a receptive registering of what goes on. In some Chinese poems the moon brings repose and calm after a previous struggle.

  The Greek philosopher Anaximander suggested that man was descended from a prickly fish. The fish is famous as a Christian symbol; the apostles were called “fishers of men,” and Christ himself (ichthys) is symbolized by the fish and was so celebrated in the eucharistic meal of fishes. Both Christ and the fish are symbols of the Self. Christ draws the projection of the fish symbol out of nature, unburdening nature and concentrating it upon himself. The fish also plays a prominent role in astrology since it is the zodiacal sign that governs the first two thousand years of the Christian era. But in this sign there are two fishes, one vertical, one horizontal, the one symbolizing Christ, the other anti-Christ. The prickly fish in our tale would seem to point to the anti-Christ as a central unconscious content, but devilish. It is unapproachable, a prickly, slippery content of the unconscious which is hard and dangerous to reach. In the Middle Ages the fish was thought to be a symbol of earthly pleasure “because they are so greedy”; perhaps also because Leviathan was a fish-monster. Jewish tradition asserts that the pious will eat Leviathan as a eucharistic meal on Doomsday. Leviathan being pure food, this means immortality. So we can see a certain ambivalence concerning the meaning of the fish.

  In India, too, the fish is connected with the savior symbol. The god Manu transformed himself into a fish and saved the holy books from the flood. In alchemy, a “round fish in the middle of the sea” with no bones and a wonderful fatness is frequently mentioned, and later this fish was connected with a glowing fish which causes fever. The nettle—fire in the sea—was interpreted by the alchemists as a symbol of divine love or hellish fire. These disparate aspects are generally combined in alchemistic symbolism. While Christianity does not permit any marriage of heaven and hell, alchemy is given to paradoxical thought.

  Psychologically the fish is a distant, inaccessible content of the unconscious, a sum of potential energy loaded with possibilities but with a lack of clarity. It is a libido symbol for a relatively uncharacterized and unspecified amount of psychic energy, the direction and development of which are not yet outlined. The ambivalence regarding the fish derives from its being a content below the threshold of consciousness.

  On the hero’s third trip the hall is brilliantly lit by the rays
of a sun. (The change of objects seen by the hero suggests a gradual lightening of the unconscious until clear discernment is attained.) A midnight sun inside the mountain recalls the midnight sun shining from below that Apuleius saw in the kingdom of the dead.40 Not only does the ego carry light but the unconscious itself has a “latent consciousness.” This midnight sun is probably the original form of consciousness—a collective consciousness, not an ego consciousness. Primitives and children experience this—a knowledge of what is known, not a matter of “what I know.” The light in the unconscious is first an uncentered, diffused haze. Our creation myth divides the creation of light into two stages: first the birth of light in general, then the birth of the sun. In Genesis, God creates light on the first day, but not until the fourth day does he create the sun and moon.

  On the altar lies a fiery wheel. In India the wheel is a symbol of power and victory, a guide to power and the Way.41 It is the wheel of redemption, moving the right way along the right line, and symbolizing the gradual intensifying of religious consciousness. In later times the wheel assumes a more sinister aspect as the wheel of rebirth, the senseless circular repetition of life processes from which one should try to escape. In either case the wheel symbolizes the self-moving power of the unconscious; that is, the Self. To move in rhythm with the movement of the psyche, the wheel, is the goal of the Indian. His aim is to keep in touch with the “course” given by the Self. But the Self may become a negative, torturing factor if its intentions are misunderstood; then the riddles go unanswered. In Babylonian times, the horoscope or astrological wheel of birth marked the appearance of the fatal wheel whereby man is caught in the wheel of his own destiny. Homage was paid to Christ as the only one who could destroy the wheel of birth by giving spiritual rebirth to the faithful. Again, in the Middle Ages Fortuna had a wheel, a kind of roulette wheel, which expressed the reckless working of blind fate upon men who are simply caught in their own unconsciousness. The alchemists often saw their work as a circular process of continual purification. The circular movement of the alchemical wheel creates a unification of the opposites: heaven becomes earthly and earth becomes heavenly. For the alchemists this was a positive symbol. Even God has been symbolized by the wheel. Niklaus von der Flüe, the Swiss mystic and saint, saw a terrifying vision of God which he portrayed as covered by a wheel. In this way he sought to soften the terrible God he had experienced and make him more acceptable and understandable. In a Caucasian tale in which God kills a berserk hero by sending a fiery wheel against him which smashes and burns him, the wheel expresses the avenging, ominous side of the Divinity. At midsummer festivals throughout the entire Germanic agricultural region, people roll fiery wheels down the mountains. While this can be explained as a relic of a ritual attempt to support and strengthen the sun, it may also be connected with the sun as the symbol of the source of consciousness in the unconscious. A popular belief in Germanic folklore speaks of unreleased souls spinning about like fiery wheels.