The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  Anthropologists quarrel about whether they are animals disguised as human beings or human beings disguised as animals. But that is idiotic, to my mind. They are just what they are! They are animals and human beings. No primitive would puzzle about it; there is no contradiction. From our standpoint they are symbolic animals, for we make another distinction: we say the animal is the carrier of the projection of human psychic factors. As long as there is still an archaic identity, and as long as you have not taken the projection back, the animal and what you project onto it are identical; they are one and the same thing. You see it beautifully in those animal stories which represent archetypal human tendencies. They are human because they really do not represent animal instincts but our animal instincts, and in that sense they are really anthropomorphic. Let us say, for instance, that the tiger in a story represents greed; it is not the real tiger’s greed that is represented, but our own tigerish greed. It is when we are as greedy as tigers that we dream about a tiger. So it is an anthropomorphic tiger. Such animal stories are exceedingly frequent, and there are many investigators who assert that they are the most ancient type of mythological story. I am very much tempted to believe that one of the most ancient and basic forms of archetypal tales have this form—stories about anthropoid animal beings, where fox speaks to mouse and hare talks to cat.

  Because I am known as being interested in fairy tales, I have again and again been pulled in by families to tell their children fairy tales, and I have seen that below a certain age children prefer animal stories. When you start stories about princes and princesses being stolen by the devil, then they ask, “What is the devil?” and so on. They need too many explanations. But if you say, “The dog said to the cat . . . ,” then they listen most eagerly. So it seems to be the basic material, the deepest and most ancient form of tale.

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  A METHOD OF PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

  The next problem is the method of interpretation of fairy tales. How do we approach the meaning of a fairy tale?—or stalk it, rather, because it is really like stalking a very evasive stag. And why do we interpret? Again and again investigators and specialists on mythology attack Jungians on the grounds that a myth speaks for itself; that you have only to unravel what it says, and you do not need psychological interpretation; that the psychological interpretation is only reading something into it which is not in it; and that the myth with all its details and amplifications is quite clear in itself. This seems to me to be half true. It is in the same way true, as Jung says, that the dream is its own best explanation. That means the interpretation of the dream is never as good as the dream itself. The dream is the best possible expression of inner facts, and you could just as well say that the fairy tale and the myth are the best possible expressions. So, in that sense, those who hate interpretation and say the myth is enough are right. The interpretation is a darkening of the original light which shines in the myth itself. But if someone tells you a marvelous dream and is very excited and you sit back and say, “Yes, there you had that dream,” he will say, “But I want to know what it means!” You may then answer, “Well, look at the dream! It tells you all it can. It is its own best possible interpretation.” That has its merits because then the dreamer may go home and keep turning the dream around in his mind and suddenly get his own illumination about it. And that process of rubbing one’s churinga stone—treating the dream as one might a churinga stone or a talisman till it gives you some strength—is not interrupted by a third person who interposes himself.

  On the other hand, this method is often not sufficient, for the most amazing and beautiful dream messages do not get over. Then the dreamer is like somebody who has an enormous bank balance and does not know about it, or who has lost the safe key or deposit number. And what is the use of that? It is certainly true that one should be tactful, hoping and waiting to see whether the dream will not build its own bridge toward the dreamer’s consciousness and whether that process cannot take place by itself, because it is certainly more genuine and people are much more impressed by what they find out about their dreams than if one presents them with even a good interpretation. But very often those millions in the bank are not made use of and people are impoverished. There is another reason why interpretation has still to be practiced: people tend to interpret their own dreams and myths within the framework of their conscious assumptions. For instance, a thinking type will naturally tend to extract only some kind of philosophical thought which he feels is contained in the dream, and he will, for instance, overlook the emotional message and the feeling circumstances. Then I have also known people, men especially, who, when they are caught in their own anima mood, project their mood into the dream and perhaps see only its negative aspects.

  The interpreter is useful, for he says, “Yes, look here! The dream begins very badly, but the lysis is very good! Surely it says that you are still a fool or half-blind, but it also says there is a treasure.” Interpretation gets a bit more objective. The dream or tale is not only pulled into the already existing trend of consciousness. Hence, we practice interpretation in analysis.

  As I have already suggested, interpretation is an art or craft that can be learned only by practice and experience. However, there are some rules to guide one.

  Just as for a dream, we divide the archetypal story into the four stages of the classic drama, beginning with the exposition (time and place). In fairy tales time and place are always evident because they begin with “once upon a time” or something similar, which means in timelessness and spacelessness—the realm of the collective unconscious. For example some tales begin with:

  “Far beyond the end of the world and even beyond the Seven Dog Mountains there was once a king . . . ”

  “At the end of the world, where the world comes to an end with a wall of boards . . . ”

  “In the time when God still walked about on earth . . . ”

  There are many poetical ways of expressing this once-upon-a-time, which, following Eliade, most mythologists now call the illud tempus, that timeless eternity, now and ever.

  Then we turn to the dramatis personae (the people involved). I recommend counting the number of people at the beginning and end. If a fairy tale begins, “The king had three sons,” one notices that there are four characters, but the mother is lacking. The story may end with one of the sons, his bride, his brother’s bride, and another bride—that is, four characters again but in a different setup. Having seen that the mother is lacking at the beginning and there are three women at the end, one would suspect that the whole story is about redeeming the female principle, as in one of the stories I shall use later as an illustration.

  Now we proceed to the naming of the problem. You will find this in the form of the old king who is sick, for instance, or the king who discovers every night that golden apples are stolen from his tree, or that his horse has no foal, or that his wife is ill and somebody says she needs the water of life. Some trouble always comes at the beginning of the story, because otherwise there would be no story. So you define the trouble psychologically as well as you can and try to understand what it is.

  Then comes the peripeteia—the ups and downs of the story—which can be short or long. This can go on for pages because there can be many peripeteiai; or perhaps you have only one, and then you generally get to the climax, the decisive point, where either the whole thing develops into a tragedy or it comes out right. It is the height of the tension. Then, with very few exceptions, there is a lysis, or sometimes a catastrophe. One could also say a positive or negative lysis, an end result, which is either that the prince gets his princess and they marry and are happy ever after, or they all fall into the sea and disappear and are never heard of again (the latter being either positive or negative, depending on how one looks at it). Sometimes in very primitive stories, however, there is neither lysis nor catastrophe, but the story just peters out. It suddenly gets stupid and fades away, exactly as if the storyteller were suddenly to lose interest and fa
ll asleep.

  Then again, there may be a double end to the lysis, something you don’t find in other kinds of legends or mythic materials: namely, a happy ending followed by a negative remark by the storyteller. For instance, “And they married and there was a big feast, and they had beer and wine and a marvelous piece of meat, and I went to the kitchen but when I wanted to take some, the cook gave me a kick in the pants, and I rushed here to tell you the story.” Or the Russians sometimes end: “They married and were very happy. They drank a lot of beer and wine, but mine ran through my beard and I never swallowed any.” Or some Gypsies say: “They married and were happy and rich to the end of their lives, but we poor devils are standing here shivering and sucking our teeth with hunger”—and then they go around with the hat, collecting.

  These formulas at the end of a fairy tale are a rite de sortie, because a fairy tale takes you far away into the childhood dream world of the collective unconscious, where you may not stay. Now imagine that you live in a peasant house and you stay in the fairy tale mood, and then you have to go to the kitchen. If you have not kicked yourself out of the story, you will certainly burn the roast because you will continue to think about the prince and the princess. So the story must be accentuated at the end with “Yes, that is the fairy tale world, but here we are in bitter reality. We must return to our everyday work and may not be absent-minded and puzzle about the story.” We have to be switched out of the fairy tale world.

  So much for the general method by which we watch the structure and bring some order into our material; and, we should remember especially to count the characters, and to notice the number symbolism and the part that it plays. There is another way which I sometimes adopt, but which cannot be done with all stories. For instance, there is a Russian story, “The Virgin Czar,” in which the czar has three sons. You could diagram it as shown in the illustration on page 42.

  First there is a male quaternity in which the mother is lacking, and the hero, the fourth of the system, goes into the Beyond (into the unconscious, we would say), where there are three witches (Baba Yagas) and the Princess Mary, whom the hero wins. At the end Mary is redeemed by the hero, and they marry and two sons are born. So there is a quaternity which is purely male and one purely female, and in the end we have (in the middle) a mixed quaternity of three males and one female. You cannot make this kind of pattern with all stories, so do not try to ram it in when it is not there. There are a lot of stories structured in this way, however, so look to see if there is such a pattern. If there is not, that is also revealing, because a lack of pattern tells you something too, as does an irregular pattern in science. The exception belongs also to the regular phenomenon, but then you have to explain why.

  To continue the rules of our method: we simply take the first symbol. Let’s say there was an old king who was sick because he needed the water of life, or there was a mother who had a disobedient daughter; and now we have to amplify this, which means that we must look up all the parallel motifs we can get hold of. I say all because initially you will probably not be able to find too many; when you get about two thousand you might stop! In the Russian tale “The Virgin Czar,” for instance, the story begins with an old czar and his three sons. The youngest son is the Dummling hero of the story. I once compared the czar’s behavior to that of the main function and the son’s to that of the fourth function, but it was disputed. It cannot be proved from this tale because the czar is not eliminated at the end, nor does he fight his son. But if you draw in all other parallel stories, then it becomes quite clear that the czar represents the outworn main function and the third son is the bringer of renewal, that is, the inferior function.

  Thus we have to look at the comparative material before we can say anything definite. We have to ask whether that motif occurs in other tales, and how it is in other tales, and take an average, and only then is our interpretation on a relatively secure basis. For example, there might be a fairy tale in which a white dove misbehaves. And you say that the white dove represents a witch or a wizard. Well, in this story it may be, but if you look up what a white dove usually means you will be astonished. As a rule, in the Christian tradition the white dove signifies the Holy Ghost, and in fairy tales it generally means a loving woman, a Venus-like woman. Therefore you have to ask why something which usually is a symbol for positive Eros appears to be negative in this particular story. You have a different slant on the image than if you had not taken the trouble to look up other stories. Suppose you were a doctor performing your first autopsy and found the appendix on the left and did not know, by comparative anatomy, that normally the appendix belongs on the right. It is the same with fairy tales: you have to know the average setup, and that is why you need comparative material—to know the comparative anatomy of all the symbols. That background will help you to understand the specific much better, and only then can you fully appreciate the exception. Amplification means enlarging through collecting a quantity of parallels. When you have a collection of parallels, then you pass on to the next motif and in this way go through the whole story.

  There are two more steps to be taken, for next we have to construct the context. Let’s say that in the fairy tale there is a mouse, and you have amplified it but see that this mouse behaves in a specific way. For instance, you have read that mice represent the souls of the dead, witches, that they are the bringers of the plague, and they are also soul-animals because when somebody dies, a mouse comes out of his corpse or he appears in the form of a mouse, and so on. You look at the mouse in your story, and some of the mice in your amplifications fit your mouse and explain it while others do not. Now what do you do? In such a case I first take the mice which explain my mouse, but I keep the other mice in my pocket, or in a footnote, because sometimes, later in the story, some of the other aspects of the mouse will appear in another constellation. Let’s say that in your fairy tale it is a positive mouse and there is no witch-mouse around, but later in the story there is something about a witch. Then you say, “Aha! There is a connection between these two images, so it is a good thing that I know that mice are also witches.”

  Then comes the last essential step, which is the interpretation itself—the task of translating the amplified story into psychological language. There is a danger of remaining half within the mystical mode of expression and talking about “the terrible mother who is overcome by the hero.” Such a statement becomes correct only if we say: “The inertia of unconsciousness is overcome by an impulse toward a higher level of consciousness.” That is, we must use strictly psychological language. Only then do we know what the interpretation is.

  Now if you are critical-minded you will say, “All right, but then you simply replace one myth by another—by our myth, the Jungian myth, you could call it.” There one can only answer: “Yes, we do that, but consciously; we know that we are doing it, and we know quite well that if in two hundred years someone were to read our interpretations, they would say, ‘Isn’t that funny! They translated the fairy tale myth into Jungian psychology and thought that was it! But we know that it is . . . ’ ” And they will bring a new interpretation, and ours will be counted as one of the outgrown interpretations—an illustration of how such material was regarded at that time. We are aware of this possibility and know that our interpretations are relative, that they are not absolutely true. But we interpret for the same reason as that for which fairy tales and myths were told: because it has a vivifying effect and gives a satisfactory reaction and brings one into peace with one’s unconscious instinctive substratum, just as the telling of fairy tales always did. Psychological interpretation is our way of telling stories; we still have the same need and we still crave the renewal that comes from understanding archetypal images. We know quite well that it is just our myth. We explain an X by a Y because Y seems to click for us now. One day this will no longer be the case, and there will be the need for a Z as an explanation. Therefore we should never present our interpretation with the undertone of “This is it.�
�� That would be cheating. We can only say in psychological language what the myth seems to represent and then modernize the myth in this psychological form. The criterion is: Is it satisfactory and does it click with me and with other people? And do my own dreams agree? When I make an interpretation, I always watch my dreams to see if they agree. If they do, then I know that the interpretation is as good as I can make it—that in relation to my own nature I have interpreted the material satisfactorily. If my psyche says, “That is all right,” then I can stop, but if it says, “You have not answered this yet,” then I know that I must go further. If my dreams make no further demands, there still may be other revelations in the story, but I have reached my own limits; I cannot go beyond myself. Then I can sit back satisfied, having eaten what I could digest. There is a lot more meat there, but I cannot digest it psychically.

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  A TALE INTERPRETED: “THE THREE FEATHERS”

  We can now proceed to the more practical problems of interpretation. For didactic reasons I have taken for interpretation a very simple Grimms’ fairy tale, not with the idea of making it fascinating or interesting, but simply to show you the method of interpretation. I will try to show you how to proceed and how you get at the meaning of such a story. It is called “The Three Feathers.”22

  There was once a king who had three sons. Two were intelligent, but the third did not talk much and was stupid and was called Dummling. The king was old and weak and thought about his death and did not know which of his sons should inherit the kingdom. So he told them to go out into the world, and the one who brought him the most beautiful carpet would be king when he died. To prevent any quarreling he went outside the castle, blew three feathers into the air, and said, “As they fly, so you must go.” One feather went toward the east, the other to the west, and the third just a little way straight ahead, where it fell to the ground. So one brother went to the right, the other to the left, and they laughed at Dummling, who had to stay where the third feather had fallen.