by Robert Bly
In the story, at dusk six swans fly in through the window where their sister rests stretched out on the floor, waiting. They settle down, blow the feathers off each other’s bodies, and stand before her as six young men. In certain Japanese stories the storyteller has a goddess appear from the sky rather than swans. What we call “sky” they call the “celestial realm.”
We imagine this little hut as a place of the divine, a temple, some sort of sacred precinct, in which exchanges between the human culture and the divine occur; or, as depth psychology has it, a place full of possibility, awe, and intensity where the archetypes, rising from levels of the psyche utterly inaccessible to the ego, meet, if briefly, with the fearful, frail, attentive human soul.
That meeting, like the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, trembles with the future; the moment itself is pregnant. All possibilities inherent in our history hover over the roof or behind the half-open doors; the little beds and tables flow with secret life, penetrating the room from the other world. This intensity will prove too much for human beings and when the sister asks to stay with the brothers, they say that robbers live in the hut, too, and if they find her there they will kill her. They tell her they can only be human for one quarter of an hour each day and then they must turn into swans again. They are hardly in the world at all, and they cannot act as protectors for her during the time when they are not human. The girl says she would like to free them. “No. It’s too hard. For six years you couldn’t speak or laugh, and in that time you’d have to sew six little shirts of starwort. If a single word fell from your lips, all the work would be lost.”
Then the brothers turn into swans again and fly away.
What does it mean, this detail: “This is a shelter for robbers: if they come home and find you, they will kill you”? From one point of view, the six boys are themselves the robbers: men like this, who are not earthly and are committed to nothing but their own ease of movement. They live at the edge of the world, and they prowl about the borders of society and take from it more than they give.
The business of living alongside robbers also seems to have a meaning. In The Golden Ass by Apuleius, important events happen to the hero when he is in the robbers’ cave. And the male hero in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Raven” finds himself among robbers. Robbers allow certain greeds to appear naked. Civilized people generally dress them up in pants and suits. Robbers take what they want, without worrying about what is best for the society as a whole; in that way, they resemble complexes that steal psychic energy when they can. A failure complex, a miser’s complex, and a sexual complex absorb into their system libido that might have gone to other people, nature, the nation, art. Over the course of the psyche’s slow unfolding, we experience what it is like to be among these naked energy-grabbers; their power over us and their ruthlessness become clear. We have experienced the robbers’ fanatical energy absorption all our lives without realizing what it was. To know these robbers well and to humanize their complex is difficult and requires labor and constant insight.
So the soul has to leave this small hut where the dangers are too great and the inhuman powers too strong, and go about her work of redeeming the six brothers out of doors. Her tasks have been described to her.
Our whole grasp of the redemption or cure of the swan boys depends on how well we understand the metaphor of their sister’s work and her silence. We could say that “recovering your destiny is like living for six years making entire shirts from delicate, easily broken blossoms.” That is how it looks when we imagine that our job is to help the King, or the center of the psyche, rediscover our destiny. If we imagine that the task of the soul is to help the young male become human again, recover his ground, that is, to help the young male descend from his compulsive, rather heartless spirituality so that he can commit himself to hunting-gathering, or agriculture, or fatherhood, or husbandhood, or religious fierceness, or love itself, the task is like living for six years without talking or laughing, and it is like making entire shirts from delicate blossoms.
And as for the silence imposed on the soul, we know that the ego activates much of our talking. It does that in order to maintain the illusion of its control. This nervous Prime Minister we call the ego rearranges everything he comes across, claiming it as his own. He pretends to represent the body’s position when the body has something else entirely in mind. He represses all interferences from minor beings, fearing they will add to life’s chaos. Not to talk for six years would be to experience the interior community as it is: an ecology of complicated and intricate beings, as in the fully developed forest, with no species dominant.
Laughing implies community that we have a share in; we laugh when the others in our group laugh. Laughter expresses insight, joy, discovery, cruelty, half-apprehended fear, and victory over fear. To be without it is to be without community, to be alone. That is what the soul daughter is asked to experience in our story when she lives without laughing. And she decides that she will redeem her brothers even if she has to give her life for that. Again she walks into the forest. She climbs into a tree to spend the night. The next morning she begins gathering starwort blossoms and practicing her sewing. In sewing, she resembles God, who sewed the thread of spirit into the grass and trees and the vast matter of the universe that surrounds us. By sitting in the tree to do her sewing, the daughter declares herself to be not “earthly” like those Gnostic men and women who at some point direct their attention upward toward the spirit place from which their soul-spark originally fell. The loss of human community soon is dangerous for her.
The King of that area and his retinue are out hunting and discover the girl sitting in the tree. They ask her who she is but she says nothing. Come down, we won’t hurt you. She answers their questions not with words but by throwing down, piece by piece, all she is wearing except her shift.
This is terrifically interesting. The story says that by not talking we become more naked. Those who have spent weeks or months alone in the woods or in a city know how that can be. At first one feels lonely, but then, wisp by wisp, a sort of cloud attaches itself to our body, and walking about inside it we feel sheltered, hidden, and even nourished. We wake up one morning to say, quite happily, that the prosecuting attorney’s evidence is incorrect; even if we have done the crimes we are accused of, we are long ago forgiven. We long for some way to tell that clearly and buoyantly to others. Each day we sense someone asking who we are, and our old answers make no sense at all. Strangely, the question keeps coming up from deep in the psyche: “Who are you?” I once addressed that question in a poem:
After walking about all afternoon,
Inside my lakeside shack, barefoot,
I have grown long and transparent.
By dusk I resemble the sea slug
Who has lived alone doing nothing
For eighteen thousand years!
In ancient China, Wang Wei, who had retired from his civil service career, and a younger poet, P’ei Ti, practiced writing comparison poems while each of them lived alone in an isolated river valley. Wan Wei wrote:
The mountain receives the last sunshine of fall.
Flocks fly off following the first that leaves.
Occasionally something emerald flashes in the trees.
The evening dark has nowhere to settle down.
P’ei Ti answered:
Settling down at dusk from the dome of light
Bird voices get mingled with the river sounds.
The path beside the river winds off into the distance,
Joy of solitude, will you ever come to an end?
The soul in nakedness and solitude convinces us that the person we truly are has been obscured and that this has been going on through many centuries and lifetimes. Great grief then overtakes us.
But as we live in this grief we understand that “the King of that area has come near” and, in comparison to that gift, our grief seems small, and we let what happens happen. The girl’s beauty touches the King’s heart. He
likes her reserved presence and he marries her.
This tells us that when the soul vows to redeem the de-evolved “brothers,” these brothers are not the only ones who benefit from the disciplines it practices. The soul itself gets closer to the King, who is the center of the psyche (that definition leaves us room for imagination and interpretation). I think that the one who gets in touch with the center of his or her psyche is lucky, as presumably life at the edges means a constant battle with complexes, fragmentation, distraction, and psychic poison, as well as anxiety and depression. In our story the soul meets the King and finds that he is in love with her! The King, like God in certain cultures, is lacking something; he needs completion by something tender and human. Here, it is a tongue-tied, obsessed being whom the King loves. But just getting in touch with the center of one’s psyche does not solve anything. The experience can get buried by the duties and necessities of adulthood. People “forget” and head back to the provinces at the edge of life.
And, we note, even when things are going well with us, it isn’t long before negative energies are stirred up. The King’s mother, herself a kind of witch, invents crimes for her daughter-in-law, which lead to a trial for her life, and the young one is condemned to fire. Witches seem to have curious links back to our early childhood. Maybe the “witch” accuses a mother of having done exactly what it wants to do itself, namely, eat a competitor. Perhaps we spent considerable energy framing our mother and hoping our father would then abandon her; and this framing is a habit now, and we apply it also to the “spiritual mother” and, through that framing, find a reason to be secular, or at least to avoid praising any feminine spirit. Perhaps this extrapolation is too elaborate, but the witch’s accusations do seem to belong to our early personal history.
And it echoes far, far back also in our cultural history. Celtic myths in written form date to the second half of the eleventh century and in oral form probably go back another thousand years or more into the Celtic past. In one, the Prince, after many adventures, marries Rhiannon, a name we recognize as belonging to a Celtic goddess. Somewhere along the way the storyteller begins calling the Prince a King. While the King’s first son is being born, the six waiting women fall asleep. The Queen does, too. When they wake and find the baby gone, the women smear the sleeping Queen’s face with the blood of a puppy. The Queen pleads with them to tell the truth for their own sakes, if not for hers. The King’s counselors direct him to put the Queen to death, but he will not. She is given penance—seven years during which she must carry people as if she were a horse, and tell everyone the story of that night.
The Celtic story suggests that there was a ritual disappearance of some holy child, involving six women plus the mother to make seven. There was animal sacrifice and probably the ritual drinking of blood. The old tradition, still alive among healers in Africa, says that drinking the blood of a ritually sacrificed animal puts the drinker in touch with the ancestors. Rhiannon remains with the ancestors by becoming a storyteller and by carrying, so to speak, the burden of the tribe.
In “The Six Swans,” the theme of the holy boy or holy girl who needs to disappear from his or her parents’ house and be brought elsewhere to live among strangers does not figure directly in our story, but the bloody mouth, the accusation, the husband’s resistance, and the final penance remain. If we consider that all figures in “The Six Swans” represent parts of a single psyche, and if we take that psyche to be that of a young male who has suffered a disaster that has made him spiritual in a mechanical or nonhuman way, then what meaning is there to be found in the bloody mouth and the accusations about it?
The male parts that have become spiritual too quickly, ascending too early and leaving the world behind, can only be redeemed by “the seventh,” that part that sews shirts, lives in nature, and cannot talk or laugh. The “shirts” call attention to the heart and chest area. And starwort, being a low-lying flower with star-shaped blossoms, unites sky and ground, mind and body, air and earth, stars and vegetation, the heavenly and the practical. When sewn together with the universal thread, all the polarities will come together.
The labor of making shirts is like the labor one finds in yoga practices, meditation, and concentrated psychotherapy. It is physical labor of the type that monks and Sufi students undertake while they study God, the daily tasks that Buddhists accept so that their meditation room remains spotless, their clothes simple and clean; they “intend” each action they take.
But our story seems to go one step further. If the witch, who represents some tremendous intelligence that knows all about the most intricate processes of growth, accuses the redeemer of having eaten her children, the chances are she has. She has eaten her children and they are still alive somewhere. Their simultaneous disappearance and presence somewhere else parallel the situation of the first King’s children, who have disappeared from the castle, though they remain alive elsewhere. This particularly parallels the fate of the six brothers, who disappeared entirely as human beings, namely in their hut that has six beds, six chairs, six chamber pots, six plates, and so on. Eating one’s children would mean psychologically forgetting about certain strengths they represent in us, losing touch with our spiritual life for years, losing fruits of long labor finished, as when Gerard Manley Hopkins omitted the effort to publish his poems, or Emily Dickinson didn’t mention to her relatives the thousand or so poems among her private papers, which were found after she died. This sacrifice (for it does resemble sending something that is alive into stagnation, or immobility, or death) seems to be necessary if the star-sewing process is to work all the way through. I don’t believe this sacrifice is made entirely consciously, and so the metaphor of the Queen’s having “eaten her children in her sleep” is a good metaphor for it, and her not defending herself, even with sign language or some sort of dance, seems to fit. To focus all the power required to complete her redemptive task, she has to eat her children and not eat them, and endure the pity, disgust, and disfiguring fantasies from her own distress, right up to the moment of the fire. Then the Queen can say aloud to the King (who was overwhelmed by what he had seen), Beloved, I am innocent. It is important to note that the King is overjoyed that their offspring are still alive. He wanted the novel finished, the poems published, the labors for the love of God not to be discarded.
The story says, to the great joy of the King, the children came out of their hiding place, the brothers were restored to their bodies, and the witch, for her punishment, was tied to the now empty stake and burned to ashes. It is important to see that this is not a story of a woman saving a man. There are no men or women in this story. The being who does the sewing and keeps the silence could just as well be called “the seventh.” She is the seventh, magical, hardworking, love-motivated, serving, tree-loving, poem-producing, art-producing, modest, well-mannered, powerful part of the psyche that understands the primitive value of sacrifice. She has not been ruined by the disasters that happened to her as they happen to us all. And at the end of the story the King and Queen live with her brothers in happiness for all time to come.
* * *
Obviously the male and female psyches have some fundamental structure in common, and this story describes, give or take a little, the healing operations that are as independent of time or place as the operations on the molecular level, when electrons jump a ring up or down. Or they are like the necessities of nest-building, or the manner in which the octopus makes an undersea house from stones. It is the same in all oceans. And yet “The Six Swans” carries, I think, some of the anguish of being a man or, more freely, of being a certain sort of man. The de-evolutionary experience described in “The Six Swans” does not happen to all men. Percy Shelley was one of those to whom it happened:
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.
During the Middle Ages the swan was imagined as the son of those sorts of women who perform i
ntercourse with their husbands on their wedding night, and never again. After that the mother transfers her libido to the son, the swan-son, and away from the boy’s father: and all such transfers suggest physical or psychic incest. As soon as he notices that he has replaced his father in the tournament of love, the boy picks up, through the power of fantasy-contamination, the ancient longing of his mother. She has a double hold on the boy and her longings disturb the son’s later relationships with women, as Yeats’s mother-longing, described by him in “The Wanderings of Oisin,” disturbed his life until he was over fifty, perhaps even longer. When Yeats was twenty-three he fantasized having his daily world with a passive woman called Niamh:
And on the shores were many boats
With bending sterns and bending bows,
And carven figures on their prows
Of bitterns, and fish-eating stoats,
And swans with their exultant throats:
Later the two of them find a strange place where monstrous beings lie sleeping, “naked and gleaming”:
And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,
And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.
And each of the huge, white creatures was huger than fourscore men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.
Yeats and Rilke were the two poets who described most vividly the swan man or swan god who made love to a curiously passive woman and fathered Helen, the moon-woman. There is a sort of triangle of swan, moon, and moon-boy.
