The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  The myth is something national. If you think of the Gilgamesh myth, you think of the Sumerian-Hittite-Babylonian civilization, for Gilgamesh belongs there and cannot be put into Greece or Rome, just as the Hercules and Ulysses myths belong to Greece and cannot be imagined in a Maori setup. If one studies the psychological implications of myths, one sees that they very much express the national character of the civilization in which they originated and have been kept alive. They have a beautiful form because generally either priests or poets, and sometimes priest-poets—in certain civilizations that is the same thing—have endeavored to give them a solemn, ceremonious, and poetical form. With this form we have in the myth a conscious cultural addition, which makes its interpretation easier in some ways, for certain things are said more explicitly. Gilgamesh, for instance, is said to be favored by Shamash, the sun god, about whom material can be collected and tied up into the amplification, providing all that is necessary. Sometimes a fairy tale hero also has solar qualities, but these may be indicated only by a small detail—for instance, that he has golden hair. There is no mention of his being favored by a specific sun god.

  So it can be said that the basic structure or archetypal elements of a myth are built into a formal expression, which links it up with the cultural collective consciousness of the nation in which it originated, and that therefore, in a way, it is closer to consciousness and to known historical material. In some ways it is easier to interpret, being less fragmentary. Often it is also much more beautiful and impressive in form than the fairy tale, so that some scholars are seduced into saying that the myth is the big thing and the rest just miserable remnants. On the other hand, by lifting such an archetypal motif to a cultural and national level and by linking it with religious traditions and poetic forms, it more specifically expresses the problems of that nation in that cultural period, but loses some of its generally human character. Ulysses, for example, is the essence of the Hermetic-Mercurial Greek intellect and can easily be compared to trickster heroes of other nations. But the Ulysses myth as a whole is more specific and Greek. It can be said to have lost certain general human features.

  For us the study of fairy tales is very important because they depict the general human basis. They are especially important if one analyzes people from the other end of the world; if a Hindu or an Australian walks into the consulting room of a European analyst who has only studied his own myth, he will not find a human bridge to the analysand. If, however, the analyst has the knowledge of those basic human structures, he will be able to contact him. I have read of a missionary in the South Sea Islands who says that the simplest way to contact those people is by telling them fairy tales. It is a language in which each understand the other. If he told some big myth, that would not work so well. He has to use the basic material in its simple form because that is the expression of the most general and, at the same time, basic human structure. Because the fairy tale is beyond cultural and racial differences, it can migrate so easily. Fairy tale language seems to be the international language of all mankind—of all ages and of all races and cultures.

  Sometimes when I do not understand a fairy tale, I use myths as parallels because the greater closeness to consciousness of the myth material often gives me an idea about the meaning. So do not leave out myths, because they can be used to make a bridge when you do not see what the fairy tale material means; sometimes the tale is so terribly remote from one’s own collective-conscious world.

  With religious myths we still have to make a subdivision because some are told in connection with a ritual and others not. On a certain day the myth is told at a certain festival, and the song which belongs to a certain mythological event is sung. Or, in some schools—the Talmud school, for instance—there are the holy texts which are read on certain occasions and so are built into a liturgy of some kind. Then there are religious myths which are not built into a liturgy, the Gilgamesh epic, for example. That was generally retold at the king’s court, but we do not know that it was ever built into a liturgy. Now those religious myths which are not built into a liturgy or not told at a certain ritual, or which do not comprise sacred knowledge, given either orally or in writing on certain occasions, I would classify with the myths I mentioned earlier.

  But then we come to the specific case where, as liturgies or songs sung by certain priests, myths are built into religious rituals. In my opinion, such liturgical myths are not basically different from the others except that they have become a part of the conscious tradition of the nation; they have been integrated into the body of conscious knowledge of that nation, into its officially recognized body. That does not make them in any way secondary; it is only that they have been elaborated for a long time. Generally such myths have been influenced by historical traditions; these sacred texts and songs are very often almost unintelligible: they have been so worked upon that they merely allude to something that everybody knows. For example, we have some Christmas carols out of which, if you were to dig them up two thousand years from now and knew nothing about Christianity, you would not be able to make head nor tail. A German Christmas carol says, “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen aus einer Wurzel zart” (“From a tender root a rose has blossomed forth”), and then there follow a few more remote allusions to an untouched virgin. Now assuming that you knew nothing about Christianity and discovered this carol, you would say that here is something about a rose and something about a virgin, but what does that mean? To us the song is intelligible because it alludes to a mystery we all know. With us the Christian teaching is so integrated that the many songs which refer to it are mere allusions; however, only archetypal motifs which have been meaningful to many people for many hundreds of years are treated in this fashion. If Christianity had been confined to a local sect in Asia Minor, it would have died with its myth and would not have attracted other material and would not have been elaborated. Extensive elaboration of the original material probably depends on the impact that the nuclear archetypal event has on people.

  It has been suggested that perhaps Christianity could also have had its origins in a local saga and so have developed into a more general myth. In his book Aion Jung elaborates that the unknown and mysterious and impressive personality of Jesus of Nazareth, about whom we know very, very little, attracted an enormous number of projections, as, for instance, the symbols of the fish, the lamb, and many other archetypal symbols of the Self well known to humanity in general. Many of these, however, are not mentioned in the Bible—for example, the peacock, an early Christian symbol of the resurrection and of Christ. The whole web of existing mythological ideas of late antiquity had slowly crystallized around the personality of Christ. The specific features of Jesus of Nazareth are blurred to such an extent that we are mostly confronted by the symbol of the God-Man, which is amplified by many other archetypal symbols.

  In this way the figure of Jesus is generalized, but in another way it is made specific, as can be seen in the fight of the early Church Fathers against the tendency of that time to say that Jesus Christ was just another Dionysus or another Osiris. People then were saying, “Oh, your Jesus Christ, we know him: we worship him in the form of Osiris.” But then the Apologists were furious, saying that Jesus Christ was not the same; he was a new message. There then ensued that fight over the new message—that it was to be seen in another light and—such people said—must not be pulled regressively into those older myths. About Jesus people said, “But this is Osiris! This is our Dionysus! We have known the suffering and dismembered god from long ago.” And they were half right: what they saw was the same general archetypal pattern. But the others were right too when they insisted that this was now a new cultural consciousness in a specific new form.

  The same kind of thing happened when in South America the Conquistadores discovered the ritual of crucifixion among the aborigenes. Some Jesuit Father even said that the devil must have put it into those people’s heads to weaken the possibility of their conversion. But the hypothesis of the archetypa
l disposition of the human psyche simplifies many of these questions, so that one does not need to get lost in unnecessary quarrels about the religious myths. The different versions are the different elaborations of various forms of the archetype. One could say that whenever an archetypal content of vital importance is constellated, it tends to become the central symbol of a new religion. When, however, an archetypal content belongs merely to the body of general human welfare and is not specifically constellated, it is handed on in the form of folklore. But at the time of Christ the idea of the God-Man—which had existed for ages—had become the eminently important message, the one thing that had now to be realized at all costs. That is why it became the new message, the new light. And its emotional impact has created all that we now call the Christian civilization (just as Buddha’s enlightenment created all that we now call the Buddhist religion).

  There is another problem connected with this. In his book Primitive Culture, Tylor tried, with this theory of animism, to derive fairy tales from ritual, claiming that not only should they be regarded as the remains of a decayed faith but that they are specifically the remains of an old ritual: the ritual died, but its story has survived in fairy tale form.17 I do not believe this, because I think that the basis is not a ritual but an archetypal experience. However, rituals are so age-old that one can only guess how they may have originated. The best examples of how a ritual might have originated that I have found are in the following two stories.

  One story is the autobiography of Black Elk, a medicine man belonging to the American Indian tribe of the Oglala Sioux.18 As a boy, when Black Elk was suffering from a severe illness and was almost in a coma, he had a tremendous vision or revelation in which he was transported to the skies where many horses came to him from the four points of the compass, where then he met the Grandfather Spirits and was given the healing plant for his people. Deeply shaken by his vision, the youth kept it to himself, as any normal human being would do, but later on he developed an acute phobia about thunderstorms, so that when even a little cloud appeared on the horizon, he would shake with fear. This forced him to consult a medicine man, who told him that he was ill because he had kept his vision to himself and had not shared it with his tribe. The medicine man said to Black Elk, “Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do what the bay horse in your vision wanted you to do. You must perform this vision for your people upon earth. You must have the horse-dance first for the people to see. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you.” So Black Elk, who was then seventeen, and his father and mother and some other members of the tribe gathered together the exact number of horses—a certain number of white, a certain number of black, a certain number of sorrel, a certain number of buckskin, and one bay horse for Black Elk to ride. Black Elk taught the songs that he had heard during his experience, and when the vision was enacted, it had a profound effect on the entire tribe, even a healing effect, with the result that the blind could see, the paralyzed walked, and other psychogenic diseases were cured. The tribe decided to perform it again, and I feel sure that it would have continued as a ritual if soon afterward the tribe had not been almost destroyed by the whites. In this account we are close to witnessing the way in which a ritual can originate.

  I have found another trace of the origin of a ritual in an Eskimo tale reported by Knud Rasmussen.19 Certain circumpolar Arctic tribes have an Eagle Festival. They send messengers out, with feathers glued onto their sticks, to invite the other tribes to a big feast. The hosts build a large igloo, sometimes a big wooden assembly house. Once a year the people come in their dog sledges. In the hall there is a stuffed eagle, and they dance, tell stories, exchange wives, and trade. The Eagle Festival is the big half-religious, halfprofane meeting of all the tribes.

  The story about the origin of the festival is that a lonely hunter once shot an especially beautiful eagle. He took it home, apparently with a rather guilty feeling, stuffed it, and kept it, and even felt impelled from time to time to give it a little food-sacrifice. Then once he was out on his skis, hunting, and got into a blizzard. He sat down and saw suddenly in front of him two men with sticks onto which feathers were glued. The men wore animal masks and ordered him to come along with them and to hurry. So in the blizzard he pulled himself up, and they went very fast, he with them and in great exhaustion. Then through the mist he saw a village from which came an uncanny booming noise. He asked what the drum was saying, and one of the men said very sadly, “A mother’s heart is beating.” They took him into the village and led him to a very dignified woman in black, and he suddenly realized that she was the eagle-mother of the eagle he had shot. The dignified eagle-mother said that he had treated her son very well and had paid him honor and she wished this to continue; that therefore she was now showing him her people (all the people were really eagles who had temporarily assumed human form), who would now show him the Eagle Festival; that he must try to memorize everything and then return to his tribe and report it to them and say she wanted this done every year. After the human eagles had performed the Eagle Festival, suddenly everything disappeared and the hunter found himself back in the snowstorm, numb and half-frozen. He dragged himself back to his village, assembled the men, and delivered the message, and from then on, they say, the Eagle Festival has been performed in this exactly prescribed way. The hunter, nearly frozen, had obviously fallen into a coma and, in this state of deep unconsciousness, had what we would call an archetypal vision. That is why everything disappeared suddenly and he found himself numb in the snow; that was the moment when he returned to consciousness and saw animal tracks in the snow beside him—the last vestiges of the “messengers.”

  There again you see how a ritual came into existence in a way parallel to that of Black Elk—namely, from the archetypal experience of an individual; and if the impact is strong enough, there is a need to spread it abroad and not keep it to oneself. I have met, on a small scale, similar things in analysis when an analysand had an archetypal experience and, naturally kept it to him or herself. This is the natural reaction because it is one’s personal secret and one does not want others to disparage it. But then other dreams came which said that the individual should stand up for this inner vision, tell it to the wife or the husband, saying, “I have had that experience and have to stick to it. That is why I now have to tell you about it, for otherwise you will not understand my behavior. I have to be loyal to the vision and act in accordance with it.” In a close relationship one cannot suddenly begin to behave quite differently without any explanation. Or perhaps it must be communicated more widely, sometimes even to a group, as happened to Black Elk, to whom the medicine man said that his neurotic symptoms showed that Black Elk’s vision was something which belonged to the tribe and was not his private secret.

  From those two stories I concluded that this is a likely explanation of how a ritual can come into existence. In this Eskimoan example they say so themselves. We see again that the basis is an invasion of the archetypal world into the collective tribal consciousness of a group through the intermediary of an individual. One person experiences it first and then announces it to the others. Besides, if we really think about it, how else could it happen? It is the most obvious way for a ritual to have originated.

  Minor invasions of the unconscious and dreams can still alter a ritual later. There is a famous thirty-year-old ritual among Australian primitives called Kunapipi, and a meritorious ethnologist, Berndt, has collected the dreams referring to it. The aborigines say that they dream about the ritual, and in his book Kunapipi Berndt gives a collection of their dreams, all of which had made some slight alteration or additions to the ritual.20 The dream is told the tribe, and if the alteration is good and fitting, it is added to the ritual. In analyzing Catholics I have often seen that this still works in some way. Someone will dream about the Mass, and the dreamer’s unconscious makes all sorts of propositions as to how something more could be added. I remember a nun who dre
amed about the Mass, and the whole service was normal until the moment for the Sanctus came, but when the bell was rung, there was an interruption. In this most holy moment of the Mass, the moment of transformation, the bishop went into the pulpit and gave a short, prosaic, and down-to-earth exposition of what it meant that God became man, after which the Mass was resumed, as if that nun’s unconscious desired to point out that some understanding of the mystery had been lost sight of.

  There is still another type of archetypal story which might be worth mentioning. If you read Fairy Tales of World Literature, you will see that in certain ethnological setups what are called fairy tales are practically all animal tales, and even in the Grimm collection there are very many animal tales. According to Laurens van der Post’s The Heart of the Hunter, about eighty percent of the Bushman tales are animal tales.21 The word animal is not very good in this connection because although the characters are animals, everyone knows that these animals are at the same time anthropomorphic beings. Just as in the Eagle Festival story, in which there are eagles who are human beings and two minutes later are again eagles, there is the same idea in Bushman stories; sometimes they even say, “The hyena, which naturally was a human being, said to his wife . . . ” Very often, however, this is not said explicitly, but in the story the hyena takes a bow, or makes a boat, and so on. These figures are human beings in the shape of animals, or animals in the form of human beings; they are not what we nowadays would call animals.