The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  We are just the same. If you cut off elderly people from their roots or make them move their homes, they often die. Many cling in an absolutely amazing way to their territory, and if you have ever watched your own dreams during a move, you will know that psychological upsets happen in your own psyche. Women, especially, suffer tremendously when they lose their territory, which is why Jung once said that he felt sorry for American women because of the moving from one place to another which is usual for them. Men can stand that much better because they have a more roaming tendency, but for a woman it is really difficult. To us too the territory means the mother, and for some of those North African nomadic tribes the carpet is that same thing, for they need the continuity of the maternal soil; and now having it outwardly, living practically every night on a different bit of sand, they carry their symbolic territory with them.

  Now Islamic people, like the Jews, may not make an image of their Godhead, so the elements in carpets are mostly abstract designs which have a symbolic meaning. Most of them are motifs of the gazelle, of the camel, of the tree of life of Paradise, of a lamp, and so on, which have been transformed into purely geometrical designs. Carpet specialists are still able to say this is a lamp and that is really a gazelle, transformed into a pattern. Most of the elements in Oriental carpets refer to religious ideas: the lamp refers to illumination through Allah’s wisdom, and the gazelle represents the human soul seeking for the Godhead. So the carpet represents not only Mother Earth for those people but also the inner basis of their whole life. Carpets very often appear in this way in the dreams of modern people. There is also the quotation from Faust, spoken by the spirit who visits Faust at the beginning of part one:

  So schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit

  Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.

  Thus at Time’s whirling loom I ply

  And weave the vesture of God.

  I think Goethe got this motif from Pherekydes’ creation myth, which speaks of the earth as an enormous sort of cloak with woven patterns in it, spread over a world oak.

  From these amplifications, you see that the woven cloak or carpet with its designs is often used as a symbol for the complex symbolic patterns of life and the secret designs of fate. It represents the greater pattern of our life, which we do not know as long as we live it. We constantly build our lives by our ego decisions, and it is only in old age when one looks back that one sees that the whole thing had a pattern. Some people who are more introspective know it a bit before the end of their lives and are secretly convinced that things have a pattern, that they are led, and that there is a kind of secret design behind the ephemeral actions and decisions of a human being. Actually, we turn toward dreams and the unconscious because we want to find out more about our life pattern in order to make fewer mistakes and not to cut with our knives into our own inner carpet, but to fulfill our destiny instead of resisting it. This purposiveness of an individual life pattern, which gives one a feeling of meaningfulness, is very often symbolized in the carpet. Generally carpets, especially Oriental ones, have those complicated meandering patterns such as you follow up when in a dreamy mood, when you feel that life goes up and down and along and changes around. Only if you look from afar, from a certain objective distance, do you realize that there is a pattern of wholeness in it.

  Therefore, it is not off the point if, along with the forgotten feminine principles, there are no longer good carpets at the king’s court and they need one, for they have again to find the pattern of life. In this way the story tells us that the subtlety of the inventions of the unconscious and the secret design woven into a human life are infinitely more intelligent than human consciousness—and more subtle and superior than man could invent. One is again and again overwhelmed by the genius of that unknown mysterious something in our psyche which is the inventor of our dreams. It picks elements from day impressions, from something the dreamer has read the evening before in the paper, or from a childhood memory, and makes a nice kind of potpourri out of it, and only when you have interpreted its meaning do you see the subtlety and the genius of each dream composition. Every night we have that carpet weaver at work within us, who makes those fantastically subtle patterns, so subtle that, unfortunately often after an hour’s attempt to interpret them, we are unable to find out the meaning. We are just too clumsy and stupid to follow up the genius of that unknown spirit of the unconscious which invents dreams. But we can understand that this carpet is more subtly woven than any human could ever achieve.

  Naturally this first test is not accepted by the king and the two elder brothers, and so the second time they have to find the most beautiful ring. There again the ritual of the three feathers follows and the elder brothers bring an ordinary iron cartwheel with its nails pulled out, being too lazy to look for anything better, while Dummling goes down to the toad and gets a beautiful gold ring shining with diamonds and precious stones.

  The ring, as a circular object, is obviously one of the many symbols of the Self. But in the fairy tale there are so many symbols of the Self that we have to find out what specific function of the Self is stressed in this particular symbol. Now we know that the Self, being the central regulating factor of the unconscious psyche, has an enormous number of different functional aspects. It preserves the balance or, as we saw before with the hero symbol, it builds up an ego attitude in the right balance with the Self. The symbol of a ball would represent more the capacity of the Self to effect movement out of itself. For the primitive mind the ball was obviously that object with an amazing propensity for moving along on its own volition. So the primitive might suppress that little factor that an initial push is needed, since for him the ball becomes that thing which can move without outside impetus, of its own accord; by its own inner life-impulse it moves and keeps moving through all the vicissitudes and frictions and difficulties of the material world. Therefore, it stands for this very factor in the unconscious psyche, which Jung has discovered; namely, that the unconscious psyche has a capacity for creating movement born out of itself. It is not a system which reacts only to already existing outer factors but can, without traceable causal impulse, produce something new out of itself. It has a capacity for spontaneous movement, which in many philosophies and religious systems is otherwise only attributed to the Divinity, the first mover.

  The psyche has something of this in itself as well; thus, for instance, we can analyze someone for a long time and the dreams seem to discuss certain obvious life problems and the person feels all right, but suddenly he will have a dream out of the blue which starts something completely new. A new creative idea which one could not expect or explain causally has arisen, as if the psyche had decided to bring up something new, and these are the great and meaningful healing psychological events. The symbol of the sphere or the ball (remember that spheres or balls or rolling apples very often replace feathers in our tale) primarily means this. That is why so often in fairy tales the hero follows a rolling apple or a rolling sphere to some mysterious goal. He just follows this spontaneous self-impulsiveness of his own psyche to the secret goal. (I have amplified the symbol of the ball in order to show its difference from the ring and to show that to say “a symbol of the Self ” is not specific enough, but that you have always to go into the particular function of each Self symbol.)

  The ring has in general two functions besides its quality of roundness, which makes it an image of the Self. It symbolizes either a connection or a fetter. The marriage ring, for instance, can mean connectedness with the partner, but it can also be a fetter—which is why some people take it off and put it in their pocket when they go traveling! So it depends on your own feeling toward it, whether it is a fetter or a meaningful connection. If a man gives a ring to a woman, he expresses, whether he knows it or not, the wish to be connected with her in a suprapersonal way, to be connected with her not just in an ephemeral love affair. He wants to say, “This is forever. It is eternal.” And that means a connection via the Self, not only vi
a ego-moods. Thus in the Catholic world marriage is a sacrament, and the connection is not only that of two egos making up their minds to have, as Jung expressed it, “a little financial society for the bringing up of children.” If a marriage is more than that, it means the recognition that something suprapersonal, or, in religious language, divine enters into it and that it is meant forever in a much deeper sense than just the love mood or some calculation which brings people first together. The ring expresses an eternal connection through the Self, and whenever an analyst has to cope with marriage troubles or to accompany a human being on the last terrifying steps to the guillotine of his wedding day, very interesting dreams often point in this direction—that the marriage has to be made for the sake of individuation. That gives you a profoundly different basic attitude toward the everyday troubles which may arise. One knows that for better or worse, it is the fate by which one has to work through to higher consciousness and that one cannot just throw one’s marriage over the first time something upsets one. That is secretly expressed by the wedding ring, which symbolizes a connection through the Self.

  In general the ring means any kind of connectedness, and therefore it sometimes has quite a different aspect. Before performing many religious rituals, people must take off their rings. No Roman or Greek priest was allowed to perform any sacramental act without first removing all his rings. There it meant that he had to connect with the Godhead and therefore must put aside all other connections; he must strip himself of all other obligations so that he may be open only to the divine influence. In this sense the image of the ring stands—very often negatively in mythology—for being tied to something to which one should not be tied, being enslaved by some negative factor such as, for instance, a demon. In psychological language that would symbolize a state of being fascinated and being the slave of some emotional unconscious complex.

  In amplifying the ring symbolism, we could pull in not only the ring for the finger but all other rings, such as a witch’s ring or marching in a ring to carrying a hoop. In general the ring in this wider sense has the meaning of what Jung describes as a temenos, the sacred space set apart either by circumambulation or by drawing a circle. In Greece, a temenos was simply a small sacred place in a wood or on a hill, into which one might not enter without certain precautions, a place where people could not be killed. If one who was persecuted took refuge in a temenos, he could be neither captured nor killed while there. A temenos is an asylum, and within it one is asulos (inviolable). As a place of the cult of the god, it signifies the territory that belongs to the Godhead. Witches’ rings have a similar meaning; they are a piece of earth marked off, a round place reserved for a numinous, archetypal purpose. Such a place has the double function of protection for what is within and exclusion of what is without, and of concentration on what is within. That is the general meaning which is to be found in so many forms. The word temenos comes from temno, to cut. It indicates being cut out from the meaningless, profane layer of life—a part cut out and isolated for a special purpose. But I do not think this is particularly relevant to our story, in which we have a finger ring.

  The ring in our story is golden. Gold, as a most precious metal, has always in the planetary system been ascribed to the sun and is generally associated with incorruptibility and immortality. It is everlasting and in former times was the only known metal which did not decay or become black or green and resisted all corrosive elements. Gold treasures can be buried in the earth and dug up unharmed after a thousand years, unlike copper or silver or iron, so it is the immortal, the transcendental element, that which outlasts ephemeral existence; it is the eternal, the divine, and the most precious, and whenever something is made of gold, it is said to have that eternal quality. That is why a wedding ring is made of gold, for it is meant to last forever; it should not be corrupted by any negative earthly influences, and the precious stones emphasize this even more. Precious stones generally symbolize psychological values.

  The old king and the two elder brothers at the king’s court will not accept the fact that the youngest son has won this test again, so a third test is set. Now the kingdom will belong to the one who brings home the most beautiful wife. Dummling goes down to his toad, and this time the toad is not quite so ready to help. She says, “Well, well, the most beautiful wife! That is not at hand just now, but you shall have her!” So it seems to be a little bit more difficult this time, and she gives him a yellow carrot shaped in the form of a carriage and drawn by six mice. He takes one of the toads and puts it into this coach, and as soon as she sits down and they move along, she turns into a beautiful princess. Thus in order to get this most beautiful woman he cannot just seize her, as he does the carpet and the ring, but a special vehicle is needed. The lady toad is transformed when she sits in that carrot vehicle; only as it starts to carry her toward the king’s palace, is she transformed.

  In other versions, the beautiful girl exists from the very beginning. If you remember, in the Hessian version Dummling finds a beautiful girl spinning down in the earth, and it is only when she comes up that she appears as a frog. That is a very strange thing, for sometimes she is a toad or a frog in the earth and changes when she moves upward toward the human world, whereas in our story she becomes a human being when above the ground. In other versions, while down in the earth she is a beautiful human being and above, in the ordinary world, she is a frog, and only when Dummling jumps with her into a pond does she turn again into a human being. This is a relatively frequent variation: that under the earth she is already a human being but in the upper sphere appears as a frog or a toad or a dog. We therefore have to go into this symbolism more closely. We have already concluded from the steps and human construction in the earth that formerly the cult of the mother, or the relationship to the mother principle, must have been integrated into the realm of human awareness and later have regressed into the earth. Our story is concerned with bringing up something which was once realized in the human realm. The many parallels which tell us that a beautiful woman is sitting down in the earth waiting for her redemption confirm this hypothesis.

  The anima—which means for a man the realm of fantasy and the way he relates to the unconscious—was once integrated in the field of consciousness and had reached a human level, but now, under unfavorable cultural circumstances, has been shut off and repressed into the unconscious. That explains why this beautiful princess is down in the cellar waiting for somebody to bring her up. It also explains why she is looked upon, and appears, as a frog. On the earth, at the king’s court, a conscious attitude rules which sees the anima only as a frog. This means that in the conscious realm an attitude prevails which has a contemptuous “nothing but” outlook on the phenomenon of Eros, and in those circumstances the anima appears, in the eyes of these men at the king’s court, to be a frog. We have a modern example of this in the Freudian theory in which the whole phenomenon of Eros is reduced to the biological sex functions. Whatever comes up is explained in the “nothing but” terms of rational theory. Freud had very little recognition of the feminine element and therefore always explained it as sex. From the Freudian standpoint, even a Gothic cathedral is only a morbid surrogate for unlived sex, as is proven by the phallic towers! Viewed from such a standpoint, the sphere of the anima cannot exist. However, it is not only the Freudian attitude that does this to the anima. A moral prejudice against Eros or a repression of the Eros principle for political or other reasons also may reduce the anima to a frog or a louse or whatever other form and level she may be repressed into. Then a man’s anima becomes as undeveloped as the Eros function of a frog.

  A frog, however, is not completely unrelated. It is possible to tame frogs, and you can make them take their food from you; they have a certain capacity for relatedness. Men who have a frog anima would behave in much the same way. So we understand why in the Hessian version an operation is needed to restore the human nature of the anima. In our main story it is the other way around. The anima appears below the earth a
s a toad, needing a carrot vehicle to bring her up and turn her into a human being.

  In the Russian version of the frog-princess, Dummling has to introduce his frog-bride to the czar’s court. He thinks that it will not be very agreeable when she turns up hopping along in the form of a frog, but she asks him to trust her and says that when he hears thunder he will know that she is putting on her wedding dress, and when he sees lightning he will know that she has finished dressing. Shivering with horror, he waits in the thunderstorm for his frog-bride to appear. Then she arrives as a most beautiful woman in a coach drawn by six dark horses, having transformed herself during this thunderstorm.

  So this Russian Dummling has only to trust her and be ready to stand by her even if she appears in a ridiculous and inhuman shape. In other versions there are mixtures of the frog-prince motif—namely, that she, like the famous frog-prince, asks to be accepted and to eat from his plate and be taken into his bed and be fully accepted in private life as a human being, with all the awkwardness that this imposes on the hero. Then she transforms herself into a human being. So we can say that she is generally redeemed by trust, acceptance, and love in different variations. But in our story she is not accepted by trust but is carried by the carrot vehicle. We have to go into the symbolism of the carrot. In the Handwörterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens (Dictionary of German Superstitions) you will find that the carrot has a phallic meaning. It is said in Baden that when you sow carrot seed you say, “I sow carrots, boys and girls, but if somebody steals some of them, may God grant that we have so many that we do not notice it.” There it is quite clear that sowing carrot seed is like sowing girls and boys. In other countries they say, “Now I sow carrot seed for the boys and girls . . . ”; then it continues in the same way. In the sowing of carrots there are a lot of other amusing allusions which all hinge on the fact that carrots seem to be food for very poor people, so when they are sown one must always be very generous and must say, “I sow these carrots, not only for myself but for my neighbors as well”; then one harvests a lot. Once, however, a man felt stingy and he said, “I sow carrots for myself and my wife.” He got only two when he dug them up! Carrots contain a lot of water, probably the reason they are called pissenlit (piss-in-the-bed) in dialect.