The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  From all this you see that the carrot, like most vegetables, has an erotic and especially a sexual meaning. You can say that the vehicle bringing up the anima is sex and sexual fantasy, which in a man’s makeup is very often the way in which the world of Eros first wells up into his consciousness. It first is carried, as it were, by sexual fantasies.

  Mice have in some ways also a similar meaning. In Greece they belong to the sun god Apollo, together with the rat, but they belong to the boreal or winter phase of Apollo, to the dark side of the sun principle. In Europe, mice belong to the devil, who is the ruler of mice and rats. He is mentioned in that way, for instance, in Goethe’s Faust: “der Herr der Ratten und der Mäuse.” In the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, mice are looked on as being soul animals.25 In our language it would mean that they very often represent the unconscious personality of a human being. For example, as I mentioned above, a bird leaving a body means that the soul is leaving the body. It can also happen that the soul leaves in the form of a mouse. In certain verses or rituals it is said that you should not hurt or insult mice because poor souls might dwell in them. In Chinese poetry there is a poem by one of the most famous Chinese poets, which to my mind beautifully describes what a rat means; mice have similar meanings.

  Rat in my brain,

  I cannot sleep; day and night

  You gnaw out of me my life.

  I am slowly fading away,

  Oh, rat in my brain,

  Oh, my bad conscience.

  Will you never give me peace again?

  While the rat and the mouse do not necessarily stand for a bad conscience, the poet means any worrying thought that constantly and autonomously gnaws at and undermines one’s attitude. You probably know those sleepless nights when you worry and every little thing becomes a mountain of difficulty; you cannot sleep and things go around in your head like a mill. It is really very similar to being disturbed by mice. Those damned creatures gnaw and nibble all night, and you bang on the wall, and for a time there is peace, and then they start again. If you have ever gone through that, you will recognize the analogy of the mouse and the worrying thought—a complex that gives you no peace. The mouse therefore represents an obsessive nocturnal thought or fantasy which bites you whenever you want to sleep. It very often also has an erotic quality, which you see in those cartoons in which women stand on tables with their skirts pulled up when a mouse runs about. Therefore, the Freudians generally interpret mice as sexual fantasies. This can be true when the obsessive gnawing thought is a sexual fantasy, but actually it can mean any kind of obsession which constantly gnaws at one’s conscious mind. The carrot, meaning sex, and the mice, meaning nocturnal worries and autonomous fantasies, carry the anima figure up into the light. They appear to be the substructure of the anima.

  When Dummling brings together the young toad and the vehicle, then the toad turns into a beautiful woman. This would mean, practically, that if a man has the patience and the courage to accept and bring to light his nocturnal sex fantasies, to look at what they carry and to let them continue, developing them and writing them down (which allows for further amplification), then his whole anima will come up into the light. If, when doodling, he says, “Now what am I doing here?” and develops the sex fantasy he has expressed in his drawing, then often the whole anima problem comes up and the anima is then much less inhuman and cold-blooded. The repressed feminine world comes with it, but the first triggering-off is very often a sexual fantasy or an obsession of some kind: the necessity to look at women’s curves in the tram or looking at strip tease shows. If he lets such thoughts come up with whatever they bring with them, a man can in this way discover his anima, or rediscover her if he has repressed her for a while. If a man neglects relatedness, she at once regresses. And as soon as the anima becomes unconscious, then she also often becomes obsessional; she becomes a mouse again, so to speak, an intruding fantasy.

  Even the third test does not convince the king and the two elder brothers, and here we come to a classic motif—that in fairy tales there are often three steps and then a finale. You will always read that the number three plays a big role in fairy tales, but when I count it is generally four. Here, for instance, there are three tests, it is true: the carpet, the ring, and the lady. But then there is the finale of jumping through the ring. Wherever you look you will see that this is a typical rhythm in fairy tales. There are three similar rhythms and then a final action. For instance, a girl loses her lover and has to find him again at the end of the world. She goes first to the sun, which shows her the way to the moon, which shows her the way to the night wind, and then she finds, as a fourth stage, her lover. Or the hero comes to three hermits or three giants, or he has to overcome three obstacles. The three are always clear units: 1, 2, 3, with a certain similar repetition, which is why the fourth is so often ignored, for the fourth is not just another additional number unit; it is not another thing of the same kind, but something completely different. It is as if one counted, one, two, three—bang! The one, two, and three lead up to the real dénouement, which is represented in the fourth and which is generally something static; there is no longer a leading-up, dynamic movement in it, but something comes to rest.

  In number symbolism three is considered a masculine number (as all odd numbers are). It is the first, really, since the number one does not count as a number; it is the unique thing and therefore not yet a counting unit. So three is the first masculine odd number and represents the dynamism of the one. I can refer you to the number symbolism in Jung’s paper “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity.”26 To put it very briefly, the three is generally connected with the flow of movement and thus with time, because there is no time without movement. There are the three Norns, which represent past, present, and future. Most of the gods of time are triadic. The three has always the symbolism of movement in it, because for movement you need two poles and the exchange of energy between them—for instance, the positive and negative electric pole and the current which equalizes the tension.

  Often in mythology there is one figure accompanied by two acolytes (followers): Mithras and the Dadophores, Christ between the two thieves, and so on. Such triadic mythological formations stand for the oneness and its polarity, the one thing which unites, and the opposites as the two poles between which the uniting center appears. A certain difference has to be made between three things of the same kind, or a group of three where the one in the middle is really the whole thing and the two opposites are represented as a kind of illustration of what is within, of that wholeness. Or there is a dualism and a connecting third thing, but basically you never run off the main line if you keep in mind that the three has to do with movement and time, mostly an inexorable unilateral movement of life. That is why in fairy tales the story, the peripetia, is often divided into three phases, and then comes the fourth as a lysis or catastrophe. The fourth leads into a new dimension, which is not comparable to the three previous steps.

  6

  “THE THREE FEATHERS” COMPLETED

  Dummling now brings home his bride, who, sitting in her carrot carriage, has turned into a beautiful princess. But again when they arrive at the king’s court the two elder brothers will not accept the solution and ask for a fourth and last test. A ring is suspended from the ceiling in the hall, and all three brides have to jump through that. The peasant women whom the two other brothers have brought jump but fall, breaking their arms and legs. But the youngest son’s bride, probably on account of her past life as a frog or a toad, jumps through the ring with great elegance, so that now all protest is abandoned and the youngest son gets the crown and reigns for a long time in wisdom.

  Earlier in the story we had the ring as a symbol of union. In its positive meaning, it stands for a consciously chosen obligation toward some divine power, that is, toward the Self; in its negative aspect it means fascination, being caught, being bound, with a negative connotation: for instance, being caught in one’s complex or in one�
��s emotions, being caught in a “vicious circle.”

  Here we have yet another motif—jumping through a ring. This comprises a double action since it means jumping high and at the same time being able to aim accurately at the center of the ring to get through it. In folklore there is mention of the old spring festivals in German countries, when, riding on horseback, the young men had to strike through the center of a ring with a spear. It was a spring fertility rite and at the same time an acrobatic test for the young men on their horses. There again is the motif of aiming at the center of the ring in a contest. This brings us closer to the meaning of aiming at, or through, the center of the ring. Though it seems rather remote, a connection can also be made with the Zen Buddhist art of archery, where the idea is to aim at the center, not in the extraverted way Westerners would do it, by physical skill and conscious concentration, but by a form of deep meditation by which the archer puts himself inwardly into his own center (what we would call the Self ), from whence, naturally, he can hit the outer target. Thus, in their highest performances, with their eyes shut and without aiming, Zen Buddhist archers can effortlessly hit the target. The whole practice is meant as a technical help to find the way to dwell in one’s own inner center without being diverted by thoughts and ambitions and ego impulses.

  Now jumping through a burning ring is not practiced, as far as I can discover, except in the circus, where it is one of the most popular tricks. Tigers and other wild animals have to jump through burning rings. The more undomesticated the animal, the more exciting it is to see it jump through a ring, a motif to which I will return later.

  Aiming accurately through the center of the ring is not so difficult to interpret. We could say that, although exteriorized in an outer symbolic action, it is the secret of finding the inner center of the personality and is absolutely parallel to what is attempted in Zen Buddhist archery. But there is a second difficulty. The person who jumps has to leave the earth—reality—and get at the center in a movement through midair. So the anima, the princess figure, when she goes through the center of the ring, is hovering in midair; it is specially emphasized that she could do this well. The peasant girls, however, were so heavy and awkward, the story says, that they could not do it without falling and breaking their legs, the gravitation of the earth being too strong for them.

  This points to a very subtle problem in connection with the realization of the anima. Men who know nothing about psychology tend simply to project the anima onto a real woman, experiencing her entirely outside. But if through psychological introspection they realize that the attraction exerted upon them by the anima is not only an outer factor but is something they carry within themselves—an inner image of a feminine being which is the true ideal and the soul guide—then often, as a next problem, the ego raises a pseudo-conflict between the inner and the outer realms by saying, “I don’t know if this dream figure is my anima inside or if it concerns the real woman outside. Shall I follow up an anima fascination in the external world, or shall I introject it and take it as purely symbolic?” When people use that phrase, there is a slight “nothing-but-purely-symbolic” undercurrent. With our strong disbelief in the reality of the psyche, people usually add something like, “Must I only realize it within? May I not have something outside and concrete as well?” There you see that consciousness, with its extraverted bias, gets caught in a false conflict between concrete outer and symbolic inner realization and in this way cuts the phenomenon of the anima artificially in two.

  This only occurs if a man cannot lift his anima away from the earth, if she is not capable of jumping as the frog lady can, if she is like a peasant idiot. To get into this conflict indicates a lack of feeling-realization; it is a typical conflict, raised not by the feeling function but by thinking, which makes an artificial contrast between inside and outside, between ego and object. Actually the answer is that it is neither the outside nor the inside because it has to do with the reality of the psyche per se, and that is neither outside nor inside. It is both and neither. It is precisely the anima which has to be realized as a reality per se. If she, the anima, likes to come from outside, she has to be accepted there. If she likes to come from within, she has to be accepted there. The task is not to make any artificial and clumsy difference between the two realms. The anima is one phenomenon, the phenomenon of life. She represents the flow of life in a man’s psyche. He has to follow up its tortuous ways, which move very specifically just between the two borders of inside and outside.

  Another aspect of this pseudo-conflict is: “Must I think of my anima with spiritual devotion? For instance, pray to the Virgin instead of looking at a beautiful woman’s legs and loving her sexually?” There is no such difference! The upper and lower are one and, like all contents of the unconscious, have a whole range of what we would call spiritual and instinctual manifestations. Basically in their archetypal appearance there is a oneness of those two factors, and only consciousness cuts these aspects apart. If a man has really learned to contact his anima, then this whole problem collapses, for then the anima will manifest immediately, and he will always remain concentrated on her reality and look away from such a pseudo-conflict which arises around her. To put it in very plain and simple words, he will try constantly to follow his feeling, his Eros side, without considering any other elements, and in that way walk through seemingly incompatible worlds on the razor’s edge. Keeping to what Jung calls the reality of the psyche is an achievement like that of an acrobatic test, because our consciousness has the natural tendency always to be pulled into unilateral interpretations, always formulating a program or a recipe instead of simply keeping between the opposites with the flow of life. There is only one loyalty or constancy within all that: a loyalty to the inner reality of the anima, and this is beautifully expressed in the jumping through the ring, the anima in a midair position, accurately in the center and moving through it.

  Another typical anima conflict raised by the unconscious to force a man to differentiate his Eros is the marital triangle. When he gets into this conflict, he is liable to say, “If I cut off the other woman, I am betraying my own feeling for the sake of conventionality. If I run away from my wife and children with the woman on whom my anima projection has fallen, then I am behaving irresponsibly and following a mood that will collapse fairly soon, as one always knows. I cannot do both, and also I cannot prolong an impossible situation forever.” (If the anima wants to impose herself upon a man’s consciousness, she often brings about such a conflict.) His wife’s animus will say, “You must make a decision!” And the girlfriend’s animus goes up in the air and says, “I cannot just hang on like this!” Everyone and everything push him toward wrong decisions.

  There again loyalty to the reality of the psyche gives the only possible solution, and generally the anima tends to maneuver a man into a situation which is meant to be without issue. Jung said that to be in a situation where there is no way out or to be in a conflict where there is no solution is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out everywhere,” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally, because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self,
in which he will be inwardly open to an interference by the tertium quod non datur (the third, which is not given, that is, the unknown thing). In this way, as Jung said, the anima is the guide toward the realization of the Self, but sometimes in a very painful manner. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.