The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  In contrast to this, the red and black woman in the hidden chest bestows magic food and is life-giving. Yet the other woman cannot accept her because she cannot coordinate the dark woman and the Moon-god; she cannot deal with the undeveloped figure of the Self and also become more feminine. Between the protecting Polar Star and the evil, body-devouring Kele there is a similar breach. Both are divine principles engaged in eternal warfare.

  Like the woman in “The Magic Horse,” mentioned above, she makes good her escape from the evil spirit with the help of an animal. By putting spirit and nature into an intolerable opposition, the animus may draw a woman into a split situation. When this happens she has to trust her instinct. In this case, her instinctive nature is represented by a fox. In China and Japan the fox is a witch-animal. Witches are wont to appear in the form of foxes. Cases of hysterical and epileptic women are explained as bewitchment by foxes. To the Chinese and Japanese the fox is as much a feminine animal as the cat is to us, and it also represents the primitive, instinctive feminine nature of woman.

  The fox in the story counsels the woman to throw the shoes at the Kele to retard him while she climbs up the spider’s thread to heaven.53 The shoe is a symbol of power, for which reason we speak of being “under someone’s heel” or “stepping into one’s father’s shoes.” Clothing may represent either the persona, our outer attitude, or an inner attitude, and the changing of clothes in the mysteries stood for transformation into an enlightened understanding. Shoes are the lowest part of our clothing and represent our standpoint in relation to reality—how solidly our feet are planted on the ground; how solidly the earth supports us gives the measure of our power.

  Throwing the shoe at the Kele is a gesture of propitiation that hinders him in his pursuit. It is necessary to sacrifice something in order to escape from his grasp. In this case it is the sacrifice of the old standpoint. In the clutches of the animus, no woman is able to give up whatever power she may have or her conviction that it is right and necessary and valuable. The convictions a woman has lived by spring from inferior masculine thinking; the less she herself is able to evaluate them, the more passionately she clings to them. This is a reason for the persistence of the animus possession. Unfortunately such a woman never thinks that anything could be wrong with herself and is convinced that the fault lies with others. The fox really is saying to her: “Don’t become stiff. Unbend a little. Give up part of your standpoint and see what happens.”

  Then at once a thread from heaven gives her the means of reaching the Pole Star, which signifies the animus refined to the highest form, an image of God. (Parallel to this is Sophia, who is the highest, most spiritual form of the anima.) If one goes deeply into what the animus is, one finds that he is a divinity and that through woman’s relation to him in this form, she enters into genuine religious experience. In the story, the discovery of the Pole Star is the woman’s personal experience of God.

  When the Kele pursues her and storms the summit, a conflict on a cosmic scale rages between him and the Pole Star so that the woman is placed between the two overwhelming world principles of good and evil—God and the Devil. When the Pole Star opens his box, light pours out, and when he closes it, snow falls on the earth. The evil spirit is flung into this box and tortured by cruel rays of light. The animus must sometimes be handled severely by a higher power.

  By going to heaven, the woman has removed herself from human reality, and this affords no real solution. Anyone in this condition would be very near to borderline psychosis, swinging back and forth between exaggerated negative and positive animus possession. This tale apparently reveals the case of a weak consciousness, which is to be expected in a primitive culture. It therefore makes sense that the Pole Star says to the woman: “You had better go home; you had better get back to earth.” He demands the sacrifice of two reindeer, knowing that the woman will have to make a sacrifice in order to reenter the life on earth. (There is a similar motif in Grimm’s “The Golden Bird.”) To come down out of the clouds of fantasy into reality is charged with danger. In this moment all one’s effort and work can be lost. For example, one understands one’s problem as presented in a dream, but what is one going to do about it practically? The issue is joined and the outcome awaits one’s effective participation in life. The problem has been dealt with only when the latent possibilities of one’s nature have been realized in creative work. The return to reality takes another form when practical problems arise that compel one to return from the adventurous quest in the unconscious. A problem also arises when one has developed an individual relationship with another and then has to face the world’s disapproval and hostility. There is always the danger that one will completely reject the experiences in the unconscious and regard them cynically as nothing but this or that or, as in this story, that one becomes too dreamy and unaware of reality and tries to live out one’s fantasies when a realistic adaptation is demanded.

  Often in primitive tales when a satisfactory ending seems imminent, the whole thing blows up. In this one the father and daughter die and there is no dissolution of the identification between them, so the entire problem of animus-possession remains unconscious.

  It is often imperative for a woman to escape from the baleful mastery of the animus. This tale tells of such an attempt, but the whole experience is known only to the unconscious. A comparable unconscious interplay is portrayed in the South American tale of the anima as a skeleton dancing in the Beyond, with the subsequent death of the hero. Early primitive tales are filled with melancholy because many primitive tribes experience the unconscious as being dismal, doleful, and frightful. It has this aspect especially for those who need above all to go into life; that is, for young people and for those who are too sheltered and secluded; the hero’s escape from the unconscious is the equal in high achievement to his subsequent great deed of killing the dragon.

  Another Siberian tale that illustrates the realization of the animus is “The Girl and the Skull.” At the beginning of the tale a girl, living with her elderly parents, finds a skull in the wilderness and brings it home and talks to it. When the parents discover what she has done, they are horrified, decide she is a Kele, and abandon her.

  That the animus appears first as a skull in this tale shows his deathlike nature. The alchemists used a skull as the vessel in which to cook the prima materia. According to primitive beliefs, the skull contains the immortal essence of mortal beings, and from this belief come the hunting of skulls and skull cults. For the North American Indians, the scalps they took contained the essence of the enemy. In this tale, the skull again represents the animus in his death aspect, especially in his activities that relate to the head, such as poisoning women with his noxious opinions or blinding their eyes to the treasures of the unconscious.

  The parents ruefully conclude that their daughter has been changed into an evil spirit, a Kele, by marrying one and that she is beyond redemption. Their mistrustful attitude is typical of the primitive fear of being possessed by spirits, which are numerous, far-ranging, and ever-present, and thus always an imminent danger. The idea of a skull ghost has to do with the head or intellect becoming autonomous and separated from the instincts; then it can roll downhill to destruction. On the other hand, the skull is a symbol of the Self. (The aspect presented by a content of the unconscious depends on the conscious attitude with which it is viewed.)

  Because they feel that the daughter is possessed, the elderly parents break up their home and travel across the river with all of their belongings. The girl was an only child and had no comrades to help her enter life. Such a situation—for instance, when the parents marry late or have no children for a long time—often brings on tragic difficulties. By taking the skull to her room, the girl calls forth hostile reactions from her surroundings; she arouses the fear and hatred of her parents. An animus to which the woman is not related often attracts hostility (aimed at the woman) without her suspecting the reason. The negative reactions of other people are a sign that
an essential part of her personality has not been realized by her. The environment seeks to irritate and prod her, as it were, into recognizing what she lacks.

  When the girl is forsaken, she reproaches the skull for her loneliness. The skull tells her to gather faggots, make a big fire, and throw him on it; in that way he will acquire a body.

  Fire generally represents emotion and passion, which can either burn one up or spread light. Sacrifices are burned in order to dissolve the physical part so that the image or essence may rise with the smoke to the gods. When, however, a “spirit creature” is burned, the burning confers a body upon it. Passion compels one to sacrifice a too-independent, too-intellectual attitude, and passion enables one to realize the spirit. When one undergoes passionate suffering, the spirit is no longer an idea but is experienced as psychic reality. Therefore the skull implores the girl to throw him into the fire. “Otherwise,” he says to her, “we are both suffering in vain.” One must fight suffering with suffering—with the acceptance of suffering. Torturing the skull in the fire means to fight fire with fire and to repay the torment she has suffered from him. The animus awakens passion in a woman. His plans, purposes, and whims stir up self-doubt within her and cause her to drag her feminine, passive nature out into the world and to expose herself to the resistance of the outer world. Then, when a woman has been successful in a man’s world, it means acute suffering to narrow down the scope of her activities, or to give them up altogether, in order to become more feminine again.

  In alchemy, fire frequently symbolizes one’s participation in the work and is equated with the passion one gives to the different stages of the alchemical process.

  The skull tells the girl that she must cover her eyes and be sure not to look at the burning. Here again is the motif of the danger of too-early enlightenment. One must not grasp intellectually all that happens in the psyche, by no means always define and categorize all inner happenings; often one must curb one’s curiosity and simply wait. Only a strong person, however, is able to control his or her impatience and let the interplay go on without looking, whereas a weaker consciousness wants to have the dream interpreted at once because it is so afraid of the uncertainty and the darkness of the situation. The girl has to wait in the darkness while she listens to the roar of the flames and the confusion of horses and men rushing past. Being terrified yet remaining firm and untouched by panic denotes a strength beyond hope and despair. But many cannot wait and prefer sudden decisions. In this way they disturb their fate and its inscrutable working. In the end there stands before the girl a man robed in animal skins, attended by a group of people and animals. He is very rich and she becomes his wife, with the result that she now has a powerful positive animus and much joy in life. Later her parents return to visit her, and she kills them by giving them splintered marrow bones—which is more than they can swallow.

  THE MOTIF OF RELATIONSHIP

  There are many tales whose leading characters can be interpreted as representing either the anima or the animus. These tales depict the human patterns of relationship: the processes that take place between man and woman or the fundamental facts of the psyche beyond the masculine and feminine differences. Most tales of mutual redemption are of this type.

  In such tales, children often have the leading roles—for instance, “Hänsel and Gretel.” Because children are relatively undifferentiated both sexually and psychically, they are much closer to the hermaphroditic original being. The child is thus an apt symbol of the Self—of an inner future totality and, at the same time, of undeveloped facets of one’s individuality. The child signifies a piece of innocence and wonder surviving in us from the remote past, both that part of our personal childishness which has been bypassed and the new, early form of the future individuality. Seen in this light, the saying “The child is father to the man” has deeper significance.

  These tales are not concerned with human and personal factors but with the development of the archetypes; they show the ways in which the archetypes are related to one another within the collective unconscious.

  There is a fairy tale in which the coming together of the masculine and feminine psyches is presented from the angle of the unconscious; however, as the reader will see, the reality of the feminine psyche is more clearly revealed than that of the masculine psyche.

  The White Bride and the Black Bride

  Once upon a time, God appeared as a poor man to a woman, her daughter, and her stepdaughter, and asked them to tell him the way to the village. The woman and her daughter scorned him, but the stepdaughter offered to show him the way. In return God caused the woman and her daughter to become black and ugly and conferred upon the stepdaughter three blessings: very great beauty, an inexhaustible purse of money, and the kingdom of heaven when she should die.

  The stepdaughter’s brother, Reginer, who was the king’s coachman, thought his sister so beautiful that he painted her portrait and gazed at it daily. One day the king heard about the portrait and asked to see it, and because of her overwhelming beauty he fell in love with the sister of Reginer and ordered the coachman to fetch her. Brother and sister rode to the king, together with the black stepmother and stepsister. On the way the jealous stepmother pushed her beautiful stepdaughter into the river, an act for which Reginer was held responsible, and at the order of the king he was thrown into a snakepit. By means of her black arts the stepmother duped the king into marrying her boundlessly ugly daughter.

  The stepdaughter was not drowned, however. She turned into a white duck, which for three nights appeared to the king’s kitchen boy and talked with him. The kitchen boy reported this to the king, who came on the fourth night and beheaded the duck, who then instantly changed back into her most beautiful self. She then told the king about the stepmother’s perfidy, and the king punished the witch and her black daughter mercilessly, rescued Reginer from the snakepit, and married the bride.54

  The woman, her daughter and her stepdaughter can be regarded as a triad representing the feminine psyche. The woman would represent the conscious attitude, while the genuine daughter, who is negative, represents the shadow, and Reginer, the stepbrother, stands for the animus. The stepdaughter is the fourth, and she represents the true inner nature and source of renewal within the feminine psyche. However, she can reach fulfillment only when she gets in touch with the discerning Logos principle personified by the king.

  The king does not belong to a foursome, but he is one of three masculine figures, the other two being the coachman, who makes the connection with the anima, and the kitchen boy, who leads him to the revelation of the inner situation.

  God appears to the first triad of the woman and her two daughters and rewards the one who shows him the way, but the woman and her daughter are cursed and made black; that is, they are covered over by the veil of unconsciousness. Their sin was that they refused to show God the way, and this suggests that God needs man to help him. He asks man to be the instrument for reaching higher consciousness. In the mystical sense this means that the human psyche is the place where God can become conscious.

  Because the two women fail at this task, they forfeit their human essence and become witches. Falling under the dark veil of unconsciousness, they step out of their role as representatives of female consciousness, which they had at the tale’s beginning, and play the role of the negative anima. When this happens one cannot discriminate between an unconscious woman and the anima of a man. Psychologically there is no distinction. A woman who is lost in the sea of the unconscious is vague in herself and has neither critical understanding nor much will. Such an undefined woman easily plays the role of the anima for men. Indeed, the more unconscious she is, the better she can play the anima role. It is for this reason that some women are reluctant to become conscious; if they do, they lose the ability to be the witch-anima and thus lose their power over men. Similarly, a man who is drowned in the unconscious behaves like the animus of a woman. A possessed man—Hitler, for example—has all the animus traits; he
is carried away by every emotion, is full of unconsidered opinions, and expresses himself sloppily and didactically, often in an emotional uproar.

  The beautiful white bride is pushed into the water and swims away in the form of a white duck, while Reginer, the animus whose task it was to lead her to the king, the real contact with the Logos, is thrown into a snakepit. But the lowly shadow of the king, the kitchen boy, is instrumental in bringing out the truth.

  When the king beheads the duck, she again turns into a beautiful woman. If a psychic content is not recognized in the human realm, it regresses into the instinctual realm, as we saw in the case of Snati-Snati. After the witch and her daughter have been destroyed, a mandala of four persons emerges: the king, the white bride, Reginer freed from the pit, and the kitchen boy.

  While there is much more that one could say about this story, I cite it only to show how a factor which represents the consciousness of a woman can at the same time be identified with the negative anima of a man.

  Many tales light up different aspects, yet at the same time contain similar motifs such as witches, stepmothers, and kings, and always a similar process, the same energic way of proceeding, and this gives us a hint. The fact that the threads running through the tales all follow the same direction—so that several tales can be linked up into a circular chain of rings of tales, each amplifying the other—suggests that the order they refer to is a fundamental one. It is my feeling that when fairy tales are brought together in clusters and interpreted in relation to one another, they represent at bottom one transcendental archetypal arrangement.