The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  After nightfall Peter flew to the windowsill of the princess’s room, and when she threw open the window and flew away he followed, pummeling her with his rod. They came to a high mountain, which opened, and both entered a large hall where Peter saw a few scattered stars in the darkness overhead and an altar near the entrance. Then the princess ran to the arms of the mountain spirit, who had a snow-white beard and eyes like burning coals. She reported that another suitor would arrive the following day and wanted to know what riddle to confound him with. The mountain spirit swore that she must kill this man. “The more human blood you drink, the more you are really mine,” he said, “and the purer in my eyes you become. Think of your father’s white horse and charge the suitor to tell you what you are thinking of.” After this she flew back and went to bed.

  The next morning Peter presented himself and found her sitting on her sofa, quite melancholy but looking mild and fair. You would scarcely have guessed that she had already sent nine men to their death. She asked, “What am I thinking of?”

  Without hesitation Peter responded, “Of your father’s white horse.” She turned pale and bade him return the following day for the next riddle.

  That night Peter again found the princess, but when he entered the mountain hall, he saw on the altar a prickly fish and the moon shining above it. This time the princess was thinking of her father’s sword, and Peter again divined the answer at once.

  On the third night the spirit-companion equipped Peter with a sword and two iron rods. This time he found that there was a fiery wheel on the altar beside the prickly fish and overhead a sun so bright that he had to hide behind the altar to avoid being seen. He heard the mountain spirit decide that the riddle should concern the mountain spirit’s head. “Because no mortal can think of it,” he assured the princess. So when she left, Peter resolutely lopped off the head of the mountain spirit, took it with him, and pursued the princess, striking her with both iron rods.

  The next morning when she asked him to guess the riddle, Peter threw the head of the mountain spirit at her feet, saying, “That is what you are thinking of.” The princess, torn between terror and joy, fainted, and when she recovered, she consented to marry her suitor.

  On the wedding day, Peter’s companion cautioned him to have a large vessel full of water ready when he went to bed that night. “And when the bride gets up, toss her into it,” the companion said. “Then she will turn into a raven. Put this raven back in the water, and she will become a dove. Plunge the dove under water, and she will come out in her true form, as gentle as an angel.” The companion then disappeared.

  Peter acted on this advice, redeemed the princess, and later became king.32

  In a parallel Norwegian tale, the following substitutions and variations occur: The man whose burial the hero pays for is a wine merchant who was wont to dilute his wine with water. The mountain spirit is a troll to whom the princess rides every night on a male goat. Instead of guessing, the hero must produce the objects she is thinking of, which are a pair of scissors, a golden spool, and the troll’s head. Before they reach the domain of the princess, the hero and his companion have to overcome three witches, and then they have a river to cross. The ghost companion makes the crossing possible by throwing the golden spool to the opposite side of the river, and the spool then returns by itself. In this way golden threads unwind back and forth until a bridge is spun, sturdy enough to walk across. Finally, after winning the princess, the hero must bathe her in milk and beat her until she loses her troll skin; otherwise, she would have slain him. In return for his companion’s help, the hero had agreed to surrender one half of all that he gained, so after five years the companion turns up to exact payment, and he asks the hero to divide his child in two. But when the companion sees that the hero is willing to perform the sacrifice, he releases him from his obligation and confides that he himself may now return to heaven, having cleared his own debt to the hero.

  The corpse that the hero finds is usually that of some poor wretch who died in debt or the corpse of a criminal or a suicide. In the parallel tale, the shadow is either human or spiritual and does not appear in animal form as in the story of Prince Ring. Instead, he is a morally inferior person, a cheat who has diluted the wine.

  In the main version, the shadow lacked life energy—money is energy—and is therefore impoverished and must come into his own again. He represents an unlived part of the life within the hero, potential qualities that have not yet entered his character and his actions. Autonomous complexes often thrive without the ego suspecting that they exist, and sooner or later they will be constellated and will appear, usually in an unpleasant form at first.

  If one were Peter in the story, one might easily assume that one was not responsible for the corpse, but when it is one’s own shadow, one is responsible. Only a conscious and responsible attitude transforms the shadow into a friend. Giving one’s money for the burial of the corpse means that one has concern for the shadow and devotes energy to it. To those who refuse to do this, the shadow is deceptive and lives by cheating—by mixing water with the wine. The nature of this shadow is dishonest: by substituting ordinary water for the more valuable, effort-costing wine, he seeks to get more for less. His crime lies in shirking work.

  In antiquity it was considered an act of hubris to drink pure wine without diluting it with water, except in the Dionysian mysteries, where it meant spiritual exaltation. But this practice was ceremonial and exceptional and did not apply to everyday consumption. In the Christian symbolism of the Mass, wine represents Christ’s blood, or more exactly, Christ’s divine nature, and the water his common human nature (and the bread his body). I cite this only to point out that historically, wine was regarded as being spiritual and water as being common.

  The guilt of the dead man was that in everyday life he blurred the divine and the human by mixing what should be discriminated. The act of mixing can be forgiven, but the dishonesty lies in his palming it off as genuine and unadulterated. People who are led by the shadow cheat themselves by thinking their motives are highly moral, while in fact they are crude drives for power. The shadow mixes things in an unclean way, mixes up facts and opinions, for instance. People fool themselves that sexual fantasies are mystical experiences. One should call a thing what it is and not pretend a physical thing is spiritual. If one unites wine and water, it should be done consciously and not in an underhanded way. The shadow gets hold of a good idea and carries it out on the wrong level, on an archaic level. When one is unaware of the shadow, it falsifies the personality.

  Getting more for less has also its psychological implications. People avoid the difficult individual way. Men frequently have a shady corner in which to arrange a deal the easy way, and women who are in love or are jealous know how to make scenes in order to get their own way. Such behavior is a common human failing because the shadow is a low fellow and acts in this fashion. If he can get returns without hard work, he cannot help not working. To be able not to go the easy way is a sign of great self-discipline and culture.

  In the initial situation in our tale there is also a lack of psychic energy, and this creates a sort of greed and causes men to cheat. One who is really fascinated by the inner life has no energy or time for deliberate conniving or fraudulent maneuvers. But as long as the anima is unredeemed, life does not flow, and this locks up energy in evil and greedy tendencies.

  Because the shadow is a part of the psyche which is not understood and because it has been spurned, it kills itself. If one goes too far in repressing the shadow, if one is too hard and too severe over too long a time, an unlived complex will die. This is the aim of the ascetic. When the hero drops the corpse onto the floor—that is, into reality—the shadow vanishes as a corpse and reappears as a ghost. It returns in the aspect of a spirit, so there is still a shadow problem but on a better level.

  The nature of the hero also reveals the nature of the shadow. Peter is not a king’s son but an ordinary lad, the anonymous common man. (Of
ten this kind of hero does not even have a name.) He represents the average man who is also an aspect of the Self—the Anthropos—the eternal human being in common yet eternal form. (Compare Christ, who is often called Knecht in German, which means servant.) The shadow figure has a compensatory function and is the completion of the hero. The path of this Everyman, Peter, leads from the common form to the special royal form, whose meaning was discussed above.

  The realization of the Self can be experienced through such widely different classes of heroes as prince or common stable boy. We see, for instance, that young people often identify themselves with an “inner prince” or a supernatural creature. Many others want above all to be ordinary and like everyone else. Each level yearns secretly for the other, and both types are really two sides of the Anthropos, the cosmic Man. The unconscious insists on both sides because, paradoxically, individuation means to become more individual and at the same time more generally human.

  The hero often appears in the role of a deserter. He has left the collective order and is thrown into a special destiny. In our tale the shadow is transformed into an otherworldly spirit. He becomes the servant-companion of the hero, and he rounds out the boyish naiveté of the hero by his skill and knowledge. Because the hero is too low, the shadow is spiritual; Ring, being a prince, was high up, so his shadow was an animal.

  The hero gives his whole heritage for the burial. This is far beyond what is customary and even beyond the means of the hero himself—a typical heroic attitude. The shadow is disposed of by burial so that it ceases to make any further claims upon human life. After this, it does not come back into life but is transformed into a spirit in the realm where it is at rest.

  Providing for the burial of the shadow has a double aspect: the hero gives money (i.e., energy) and he frees himself of the shadow disturbance. To recognize the shadow is to be prepared to keep it in its place. In this tale the shadow is allowed to carry out its own purposes, and from this comes its spiritualization. When the shadow is only half-conscious it is most disturbing and indeterminate—neither fish nor fowl. The spiritualization occurs because the newly acquired shadow-companion is instrumental in accomplishing the tasks and becomes an arranger of fate. He becomes a figure more like Mephistopheles in Faust, a nature spirit or symbol of the dark side of the Self. Only if one throws a shadow is one real. The shadow plunges man into the immediacy of situations here and now and thus creates the real biography of the human being, who is always inclined to assume that he is only what he thinks he is. It is the biography created by the shadow that counts.

  Only later, when the shadow has been somewhat assimilated, can the ego partially rule its own fate. Then, however, another content of the unconscious, the Self, takes over most of this fatearranging function, and that is why the shadow-companion in our story disappears later.

  In our tale the hero is completely goalless. He has no commitments at home, no specific destination abroad. This is a good precondition for the heroic action—a point that is frequently stressed. He gets bored at home, takes his heritage and sallies forth, all of which indicates that energy has already left consciousness and has reinforced the unconscious. One can only discover the mystery of the unconscious as a reality when one is naively curious, not when one wants to harness its power for the furtherance of some conscious design.

  As soon as the first step is taken in relation to the shadow problem, the anima is activated. In the Norwegian parallel she has a troll skin; that is, she belongs to an older, more primitive order of life and has a heathen character. The anima often appears uncanny and troll-like in Nordic myth, and then she represents a challenge to the traditional Christian life. In order to amplify this pagan aspect of the anima, let us digress from our story and consider a couple of Scandinavian tales. The following is the story of a man crippling himself by refusing to have anything to do with his pagan anima.

  The Secret Church

  The schoolmaster of Etnedal loved to spend his holidays by himself in a hut in the mountains. Once he heard the church bells, and since there was no church nearby, he looked about him, astonished, and saw a group of people in Sunday clothes trooping along in front of his hut on a path which had not been there before. He followed them and came to a little wooden church which was also new to him. He was very impressed by the old pastor’s sermon, but he noticed that the name of Jesus Christ was never mentioned and there was no blessing at the end.

  After the service, the schoolmaster was invited to the pastor’s house, and over a cup of tea the daughter told him that her father was quite old and asked if the schoolmaster would be willing to be his successor when he died. The schoolmaster begged to be allowed to think the matter over for a time. The daughter said that she would give him a whole year. As soon as she said this, he found himself back in the woods among familiar surroundings. He felt puzzled for a few days and then the matter slipped his mind.

  The following year he was again in his mountain hut and, noticing that the roof was weathering away, he climbed up with his ax to do some repair work. Suddenly he became aware of someone coming down the path in front of the hut. It was the pastor’s daughter. Seeing him, she asked if he was willing to accept the pastorship. He replied, “I cannot answer for it to God and my conscience, so I must refuse.” At that moment the girl disappeared and he inadvertantly brought the ax down upon his own knee, with the result that he was a cripple for the rest of his days.33

  This tale shows that repressing the anima for conventional reasons results in actual psychic self-mutilation. If one gets too high up (up on the roof ), one loses one’s natural contact with the earth (the leg). This anima figure is a heathen demon.

  Here is another example which illustrates the unfortunate consequences resulting from an inappropriate way of coping with the problem of the heathen anima.

  The Wood Woman

  A woodcutter once saw a beautiful woman sewing in the woods, and her spool of thread rolled to his feet. She bade him return it to her and he did, although he knew that this meant he was submitting to her charm. On the following night, though he was careful to sleep in the midst of his comrades, she came and fetched him. They went into the mountains where everything was quiet and beautiful.

  There he became infected with madness. One day when the troll-woman brought him something to eat, he saw that she had a cow’s tail, and he made it fast in a split tree trunk; then he wrote the name of Christ on it. She fled and her tail was left in the trunk, and he saw that his meal was only cow dung.

  Later he came to a hut in the woods and saw a woman and child, both with a cow’s tail. The woman said to the child, “Go bring your father a drink of beer.” The man fled in horror. Later he returned safely to his village, but he remained a bit queer for the rest of his days.34

  This tale shows the dangerous spell that the anima casts on a man whose ego and willpower are frail. To yield to her means losing human contact and going completely wild, while to repress her means a loss of spirit and of energy.

  The same type of dangerous anima figure appears in a story of the South American Cherente Indians:

  The Star

  A young man who was living in the bachelors’ hut looked with longing each night at a brilliant star in the heavens and thought, “What a pity I cannot carry you about in my bottle all day and admire you.” One night when he awoke from a deep dream about the star, he saw a girl by his bed with beautiful, deeply shining eyes. She told him that she was the very star that attracted him and that she had the ability to make herself small enough to dwell in the bottle and thus they might be together.

  They lived together by night, but during the day, while he pocketed her in his bottle, her eyes blazed like a wildcat’s. The young man soon became very unhappy, and his fears were realized one day when she told him that she was leaving. She touched a tree with a magic rod so that it towered up into the skies and she ascended to heaven. Against his will the young man followed her, although she begged him not to, and high up in
the tree he discovered a festival in full swing. He was alarmed to observe skeletons dancing in a circle, and he fled in terror. The girl appeared again and told him to take a bath of purification, but it was of no avail. When he touched earth again, he had a splitting headache and soon died.35

  The Indians seem aware of the alluring danger of the archetypal images of the collective unconscious and their power to take one away from reality. They discovered that although the stars seem to promise happiness, there is no bliss in heaven.

  The anima is portrayed as a miraculous spirit and at the same time as a ferocious animal. She often appears as deathly and dreadful, and when this is the case it is important to keep consciousness away from the unconscious. That is why, as a warning, the unconscious is depicted as a mortal danger. This motif is common in primitive tales. Then the hero must guard himself against exposure to the poisonous contents and not give himself up to anything that has a strange fascination over him, neither to fantasies from within nor to any dangerous and fascinating pursuits from without. So the anima has to be corked up sometimes, her powers reduced and confined, especially in an age of early culture. This is the intentional devaluation of a complex, and therefore the anima appears as a malicious, blazing-eyed animal. Her reaction is evoked by the hero’s conscious attitude, but at night she resumes her divine form.

  The Christian religion also uses a “bottle” for imprisoning the anima in order to limit and hold back explosive forces, namely, the cult of the Virgin, which serves as a vessel for the mother- and anima-images of man. While this conscious restraint is often necessary, there is danger in prolonging it beyond its season. It is a matter of feeling and of timing in order to desist before the unconscious gets too much cut off and dams up too much explosive power.