The wheel of fire refers to the spontaneous movement of the psyche which manifests itself as passion or as an emotional impulse—a spontaneous uprush from the unconscious that sets one on fire. When this happens, one may say, “That idea kept on turning in my head like a wheel.” Similarly, the revolving wheel illustrates the senseless circular motion of a neurotic consciousness. This happens when one has lost his connection with the inner life and is cut off from the individual meaning of his life.
In our tale the wheel in its roundness is analogous to the mountain spirit’s head—a symbol of the Self but in its dark aspect. A South American Indian tale illustrates the idea that the head may have a thoroughly destructive aspect: a skull begins to roll in an uncanny way, acquires wings and claws and becomes a demonic, murderous thing, preying on men and devouring everything. This has to do with the separation of head from body and the autonomy of the head. The violent wrenching of head from body is psychologically fatal.
Like vampires, the anima and the mountain spirit love the blood of their victims. The vampire motif is worldwide. Vampires are the spirits of the dead in Hades to whom Odysseus must first sacrifice blood. Their lust for blood is the craving or impulse of the unconscious contents to break into consciousness. If they are denied they begin to drain energy from consciousness, leaving the individual fatigued and listless. This story indicates an attempt on the part of unconscious contents to attract the attention of consciousness, to obtain recognition of their reality and their needs and to impart something to consciousness.
By getting the head, the hero integrates its knowledge and its wisdom. With it in his possession he breaks the spell which had been cast on the princess. Although she is released, she is not yet redeemed, because the symbolic head has been grasped only in a negative form. The cutting off of the head means separating this special content from its collective unconscious background by an intuitive recognition of its specific character. In this way the hero integrates a part of the meaning, but he does not get what it is in its entirety or how it is connected with the collective unconscious. In other words, while he was able to discriminate (to separate out) the essential disturbing factor behind the anima and thereby put an end to it, he could not completely realize the roots of it; he probably never suspected the presence of the god of the early Germans, Wotan. The positive aspect of the head, the deeper understanding possessed by it, could only become manifest through a process of transformation such as that which takes place later in the anima.
One’s understanding of many European fairy tales is greatly increased if one taps the rich symbolic fund of alchemical texts. As comparative material this is very useful because the alchemistic speculations were an attempt to blend the natural, heathen strain with the Christian strain in collective consciousness. The one-sided spiritualization of Christianity had brought about in certain classes an estrangement from the instinct. As Jung observes in Psychology and Alchemy, we are Christianized in the higher levels of the psyche, but down below we are still completely pagan. While fairy tales are for the most part entirely pagan, some of them, especially those of a late date such as this one, contain symbols which one can understand only as being an attempt of the unconscious to unite again the sunken pagan tradition with the Christian field of consciousness.
One big difference between alchemical writings and fairy tales is that the alchemists not only produced symbols by projecting their unconscious into physical materials, but they also theorized about their discoveries. Their texts abound not only in symbols but in many interesting, semipsychological associations linked up with the symbols. One can use alchemical images as connecting links between the distant fairy tale images and our world of consciousness.
In alchemy some of the usual stages described in the pattern of development—which corresponds to the refining of the crude prima materia into gold—are the nigredo, the Latin word for the blackness of the material when subjected to fire; the albedo, the white substance which when washed becomes silver; and the rubedo, the red, which through further heating turns into gold.
The albedo signifies the individual’s first clear awareness of the unconscious, with the accompanying possibility of attaining an objective attitude, and the lowering of consciousness necessary to attain such states. The albedo means a cool, detached attitude, a stage where things look remote and vague, as though seen in moonlight. In the albedo, therefore, it is said that the feminine and the moon are ruling. It also means a receptive attitude toward the unconscious. This is the ordeal of coming to terms with the anima; whereas the former stage, the nigredo, marks the first terrible facing of the shadow, which is torture, and should be followed by working on and differentiating one’s inferior side. The alchemists call this “the hard work.” With the progress of the albedo, the main stream is relieved. Then simple heating changes the albedo into the rubedo, which is ruled by the sun and heralds a new state of consciousness. The sun and the moon, the red slave and the white woman, are opposites which often marry, signifying the union of objective consciousness with the anima, of the masculine Logos with the feminine inner principle. With this union, more and more energy is poured by degrees into consciousness, bringing a positive connection with the world, the possibility of love and creative activity.
The image of the mountain spirit is a parallel to Saturn, who symbolizes in alchemy a dark, low, not-yet-thought-out content which must be brought up into consciousness, the severed head. Saturn is the head, the round thing, or the “destructive water” (Zosimos calls Saturn the Omega or head). This dynamic mountain spirit does not appear to be a new god himself but a priest or an acolyte devoted to a god. Behind him must lie an unanthropomorphic figure of the Self. The worship in the mountain temple is dangerous because it is hidden in the collective unconscious.
As I pointed out earlier, in northern countries Mercurius was partially identified with Wotan, as can be seen in the fairy tales. With the cutting off of alchemy and the decline of folklore, people severed the connections with the pagan gods within their unconscious. Before this happened, it was in alchemy and folklore and astrology that the pagan gods had areas where they could live. In these three fields they made their last stand.
The mountain spirit is not redeemed, only the anima. Thus the deeper problem remained unsolved, remained a seventeenthcentury anticipation of the continuing presence of Wotan waiting to be roused in the German psyche.
In our tale the danger is not yet over. On the wedding night the hero must plunge the princess three times into water until she is restored to her former self. In the Norwegian version she has to wash off her troll skin in milk. In the ancient mysteries milk played a prominent part as nourishment for the newly born initiate. In the Dionysian mountain orgies, the Maenads drank milk and honey flowing freely from the earth. Milk and honey were also the food of the reborn in early Christian baptism. In an ode of Solomon milk is extolled as a symbol of the friendliness and kindliness of God. Saint Paul says that the new Christians are children drinking the milk of the new doctrine. Milk is a symbol of the beginning of a divine rebirth in man. In ancient Greek sacrifices, milk was offered to the chthonic gods and to the newly dead. In these cases milk is cathartic (cf. the many German superstitions about obstructive demons bewitching milk and turning it blue, and the many prescribed precautions against them). Hence the washing of the anima in milk means the purging of the demonic elements in her as well as the purging of her link with death.
Skins of animals and of trolls are evidence of an unredeemed nature. In alchemy the anima may wear dirty clothes and, in alchemical parlance, be “the dove hidden in the lead.” Then again, the washing or scouring off is often not done at the right time. This means that psychological contents which are insufficiently developed when the washing off takes place turn up in an unpleasant guise. Then positive drives contained in unconscious contents go unrealized and are not only disguised but pollute the instincts, materializing in ugly impulses; man’s spiritual aspirations express thems
elves in a craving for drink, for example. Indeed, most neurotic symptoms are like troll skins covering up important positive contents of the unconscious.
In the German version, the anima emerged from the first dunking as a raven, from the second as a dove, so she evidently has the flighty element in her. Because she represents an uncontrollable, capricious, evasive content, she often appears in fairy tales as a bird.
In the Christian world, the raven was thought to be a representation of the sinner and also of the devil.42 In antiquity, on the other hand, the raven belonged to the sun god Apollo, and in alchemy it symbolizes the nigredo and melancholy thoughts. The old man in the mountain who is accompanied by a raven is a frequent character in fairy tales.
The dove, on the other hand, is the bird of Venus. In the Gospel of John it represents the Holy Ghost, and in alchemy it stands for the albedo. The two aspects of the anima must be distinguished, her bird nature belonging to the other world and her woman side related to this world. The flighty, elusive bird nature must be released or separated out by being bathed.
The bathing is a sort of baptism, a transformation through the medium of the unconscious. This happens practically by the hero’s pushing the anima back into the unconscious, which means having a critical attitude toward what is awakened and emerging into consciousness. Such an attitude is necessary because the anima and the reactions she induces in a man, although apparently human, are often deceptive. For this reason a man must always question an anima inspiration—“Is that my own real feeling?”—for the feeling of a man can be really lyrical and can soar like a lark in flight, or it can be bloodthirsty and hawklike, scarcely human—a mood or atmosphere unrelated to the human state. The milk bath of the Norwegian tale serves the same purpose—that of purifying and taking the curse out of the anima; it is an act of discrimination.
The spiritual companion’s final concern is with this process of the cleansing of the anima. When her marriage to the hero is consummated, the comrade vanishes and becomes entirely spiritual. He really represents more than a shadow figure: he is an inspiring, creative spirit. But he can be this effectively only when the anima loses her demonic qualities. Only then can he come into his own.
With the fulfillment of the marriage of the hero and his anima, the task of the shadow is accomplished, as it was in “Prince Ring.” Dealing with the shadow is therefore not the primary goal here; rather, it is the finding of the genuine inner goal through which the fight between good and evil no longer holds center stage.
THE FEMALE SHADOW
Not many fairy tales tell about the heroine and her shadow. The usual pattern is the banal tale of the good and bad sisters, the one loaded with rewards and the other dreadfully punished. Another possibility is the one about the girl who is banished by her stepmother and neglected and made to do the most menial housework. (These two figures lend themselves equally well to interpretation from the masculine standpoint as the two aspects of the anima.) The female shadow appears rarely in fairy tales because real women are not very sharply separated from their shadows. Such a separation in a woman is usually an animus effect, nature and instinct being more closely interwoven than in men. The female psyche displays a pendulum-like tendency to swing over from ego to shadow, as the moon moves from new to full and back to new again. There is one tale, however, which seems to be a representative example of the feminine shadow problem. Here, as is frequent in fairy tales, the problem of the shadow is intertwined with that of the animus.
Shaggy Top
A king and queen who had no children of their own adopted a little girl. One day when she was playing with her golden ball, it attracted a beggar-girl and her mother. The king and queen wished to chase them away, but the beggar-child said that her mother knew of a way to make the queen fruitful. After being coaxed with wine, the old beggar-woman told the queen that she must bathe in two vessels before retiring and then throw the water under the bed; then in the morning she would see two flowers in bloom under her bed, one fair and one foul; she was to eat the fair flower only.
In the morning when the queen tasted the fair bright flower, it was so delicious that she could not resist eating the black and ugly one as well. When her time came, her little daughter was gray and ugly and came riding to her on a he-goat. In her hand she held a wooden mixing ladle, and she was able to speak from the very first. An exquisitely fair younger daughter followed. The ugly one was called Shaggy Top because her head and part of her face were covered with shaggy tufts. She became a close friend to her younger sister.
One Christmas Eve, the noise of troll-women holding a festival reached them, and Shaggy Top went out with her ladle to chase them away. The fair princess looked out of the door, and a troll-wife snatched her head off and gave her a calf ’s head instead.
Shaggy Top took her unlucky sister on a ship to the land of the troll-women, found her head under a window, and made off with it. With the troll-wives after her, she raced back to the ship and changed the heads back again.
They landed in a region ruled by a king who was a widower with an only son. This king wished to marry the fair princess, but Shaggy Top made it a condition that the prince should marry her, so the king arranged for the double wedding in spite of the prince’s protests about having to marry Shaggy Top.
On the wedding day, Shaggy Top told the prince to ask her why she rode such an ungainly buck. When he did so, she replied that it was indeed a beautiful horse, and the buck thereupon changed into a beautiful horse. In a similar way, the ladle became a silver fan, her shaggy cap became a golden crown, and she herself assumed a beauty even more radiant than her sister’s. The wedding ceremony proved a happier event than anyone could ever have expected.43
The assimilation of the upper and the lower here is the same as in “Prince Ring.” Again the shadow is redeemed by being made conscious, and it seems possible to conclude that for man and woman the shadow really boils down to the same problem.
The motif of the childless king and queen is generally a forerunner of the miraculous birth of a very distinguished child. In itself the childlessness testifies that the connection with the creative earth of the psyche has been broken and that a gulf lies between the values and ideas of collective consciousness and the dark, fertile loam of unconscious, archetypal processes of transformation.
We may regard the two leading figures, the fair princess and Shaggy Top, as parallels to Ring and Snati-Snati. We took Ring to be an impulse in the collective unconscious that was tending to build up a new form of consciousness. Shaggy Top, however, may represent an impulse to restore the feeling connection with the depths of the unconscious and with nature, since in life it is the task of women to renew feeling values.
Before the birth of these two children the queen does her best to remedy the situation by adopting a girl. This very positive decision evokes—like magic by analogy—a fertilizing reaction in the matrix of the unconscious. By means of the golden ball, which may be taken as a symbol of the Self, the adopted child attracts a poor child and her mother. The function of the Self-symbol is to unite the dark and the light aspects of the psyche, and in this case Mother Nature is constellated: the beggar-woman personifies the instinctive knowledge that belongs to nature.
She gives clear advice to the queen to throw the water in which she has washed under the bed and to eat one of the flowers which will grow in it. To keep the dirty water within the bedroom probably means that the queen should not cast out her own dark side but should accept it within her most intimate surroundings, because in this dirty water—her shadow—lies also her own fertility. This seems to be the age-old maternal secret of the old woman.
The bright flower and the dark flower anticipate the opposite natures of the two daughters. They signify their as yet unborn souls and they also symbolize feeling. By eating both flowers instead of just one, the queen reveals an urge to integrate the totality, not only the brighter aspect of the unconscious, and by so doing, she also commits the sin of disobedience—
a beata culpa (a fortunate guilt)—which brings forth new trouble but with it a higher realization. This is similar to the motif where Ring opens the door of the forbidden kitchen and finds Snati-Snati.
Shaggy Top as the shadow of the new form of life has all the exuberance and initiative that is lacking in consciousness. That she grows up so rapidly points to her demonic qualities and spiritlike nature, while the he-goat on which she rides is the animal of Thor and suggests that the essence of Shaggy Top belongs to the chthonic and pagan world. The ladle characterizes her as witchlike, one who has always got something cooking, who stirs up a welter of emotions in order to bring them to the boil. The fur cap she wears is the sign of the animal traits in her and also can be a symbol of animus possession. In certain tales, the heroine puts on shaggy headgear when she is persecuted by her father, and this act indicates a regression into the animal domain because of the animus problem. It therefore looks as if an animal-like unconsciousness clings to Shaggy Top, which implies a possession by animal impulses and emotions. This, however, is only an outer appearance, just as it was with Snati-Snati.
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Page 17
