Transcript (Excerpt):

This episode is going to be something of a departure from the standard format I generally follow in this podcast. I want to come back one more time to the relationship between Ahab and Starbuck that I started to look at in the last episode –Episode 9 of this season, The Gorgon’s Eye.

Of course, there’s so much more that plays out between these two figures in the novel than it’s possible to address in any comprehensive way in just of couple of podcast episodes. But what I want to do here is to take a close look at one very powerful scene that takes place between the two of them towards the end of the book. And it’s a scene that acts as a kind of heartbreaking coda, in a way, to their particular story.

In it, as we’ll see, we get that image again of the eye that was so central to the theme of the last episode. But here it reappears in a very different and, I think, surprising way.

The scene that I’m talking about occurs in Chapter 132: The Symphony. In what follows, I am going to read through the entire chapter section by section, stopping along the way to highlight some of what I see as the crucial moments, and adding some commentary from the perspective of the Symbolic Life.

So, let’s just jump right in. Here is Chapter 132 from Moby-Dick, titled The Symphony:

I have noted before that this is a novel that is thoroughly devoid of female characters. That’s obvious enough on the surface. You don’t need me to point that out. However, there is a way to understand this aspect of the novel from a symbolic perspective.

When we’re looking at a fairy tale, let’s say, through a Jungian lens, one way to begin to understand what’s going on is to identify what’s missing. For instance, in the Grimm’s collection of tales there are dozens of stories that begin with a king and his three sons. There is no mother or sister and the action of the story often involves the search for a bride for one of the sons.

In such cases, as Marie-Louise von Franz points out in her book The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, “the general structure seems to point to a problem in which there is a dominating male attitude, a situation which lacks the feminine element.”

If we approach the situation of Moby-Dick with a similar understanding, we could say that one of the central problems of the novel is the “lack of the feminine element.” And so, when it shows up, as it does here in this passage contrasting the “feminine air” with the “masculine sea,” we know something of vital importance is being highlighted.

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It's not really possible to open up the whole question of the masculine and the feminine in any real depth here. It’s enough for now to get a sense of what they point to simply within the context of this chapter….

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: S4 E10: Becoming (Merely) Human.

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Transcript:

In the previous episode of this season—Episode 8: A Collision Course with Life—I suggested that the figure of Ahab is not simply another character involved in the unfolding action of the story. He is equally, and perhaps more importantly, a psychological event visited upon the minds of the other characters in the novel and bringing them, at times, to the extremest limit of their very souls. We can see this, perhaps most poignantly presented, in the relationship between Ahab and his first mate Starbuck.

In many ways, Starbuck personifies the very humanity from which Ahab is increasingly detached. This sets up a sort of battle of wills between them that plays out over the course of the novel with each striving to bring the other into his way of seeing things. Ahab wants Starbuck to wholeheartedly join him in his pursuit of vengeance against Moby Dick, while Starbuck, for his part, tries to hold onto reason and human feeling, and to resist what he sees as the madness of Ahab’s obsessive quest: “with the soft feeling of the human in me,” Starbuck declares at one point, “will I fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!”1

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It is just this “soft feeling of the human” that sets Starbuck apart from the other characters in Moby-Dick. Ishmael describes him as “Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence.”2 These qualities give him a steadiness and an independence of mind that tempers his rougher sailor’s nature, an effect that is strengthened by the love he has for the family he has left behind. And so it is that we read about Starbuck:

“And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his faraway domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.”3

Last episode, we heard one of the Pequod’s owners, Captain Peleg, suggest something similar about Ahab. Pointing to the fact that Ahab was married and had a child, Peleg proclaims that “Ahab has his humanities.”4 But, in reality, it is Starbuck of whom this statement is true. It is Starbuck who possesses the humanity with which Ahab is at war in himself. And it is Starbuck who sees most clearly the dreadful fate towards which Ahab’s monomaniacal quest is leading.

And yet, despite his independence of mind and his willingness to directly confront his captain about the recklessness of his plan, in Ahab Starbuck finds himself face to face with the limits of his courage.

As Ishmael, in his role of narrator, explains:

“And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery, chiefly visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.”5

You see, there is something uncanny about Ahab. There is a power and a terror in his gaze. …

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: S4 E9: The Gorgon’s Eye.

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Transcript:

Captain Ahab, the haunted commander of the Pequod, is one of the most compelling figures in American literature. In equal measures noble and tortured, Ahab is described as bearing “a crucifixion in his face” and of displaying “all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.”1

A woe so mighty, in fact, that its powerful gravitational pull will eventually draw everyone into its orbit. “Character is fate,” said the ancient philosopher Heraclitus and from the moment the story of Moby-Dick moves from the land to the sea, Ahab’s character becomes the force of fate for every soul aboard his ship.

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Approaching this novel as we are, with a symbolic sensibility, the question that needs to lead us is this: what kind of archetypal energy is being expressed in the figure of Ahab? In particular, in this episode, I want to consider the nature of the archetypal situation – the inner geography, so to speak – that is indicated by Ahab’s presence as he first enters the action of the story.

Just as we saw back in Episode 2 of this season – Outcasts of the Spirit – that Ishmael, both in the name he gives himself and in his own description of his state of mind at the beginning of the novel, presents us with an image of the human experience of alienation, so here we want to get a sense of the psychological constellation of which Ahab is the embodiment.

One possibility that suggests itself is that Ahab is an instance of that well-known motif frequently found in myths and fairy tales of the Wounded King. Countless stories begin with the figure of an old king who is either wounded or sick, or even dying. It’s a common symbol that can generally be understood as an image of an old order, an old way of being, that no longer functions and is, perhaps, fading away.

The action of these stories usually involves some effort to heal or restore the old king, or it leads in some way to a renewal of the kingdom, as when the unlikeliest of the king’s sons marries the beautiful princess and ascends to the throne.

There are certainly aspects of Ahab that fit with this motif. For instance, one of the first things that we hear about him is that he is wounded. We learn that on his most recent voyage he lost his leg to a “monstrous” whale, which will later be revealed to be Moby Dick himself. In connection with this, Captain Peleg, one of the owners of the Pequod, hints at some kind of sickness that seems to affect Ahab.

“I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him,” says Peleg, “but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either.”2 (Peleg, Ch. 16, p. 73)

Another possibility we could consider is Ahab as an expression of the motif of the Evil King. There is a great deal of evidence to support this idea, the first piece of which is his own name. …

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: A Collision Course With Life.

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In this second of two episode taken from a previously recorded talk titled Moby-Dick: An American Myth, I return to a theme I explored in Episode 4, Healing the Splintered Heart — the split in the human soul

This time, I explore this idea through the contrast of the two main characters of the novel, Ishmael and Ahab. Each of these characters represent a different way of dealing with this split. Briefly stated, Ahab’s way might be called The Way of Vengeance, while Ishmael’s would be The Way of Wonder.

“Ishmael's language is the language of awe. He is driven by curiosity. He is driven by mystery. He is driven by the sense of marvel. Ishmael responds with a quality of wonder. And it's those two different ways of responding that create two very different fates.” (excerpt from Episode 7)

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In addressing ways of healing the psychic split brought about by modern life, I turn to Jung’s thoughts on the role of art and the artist in the life of the culture. It is art that has the power to reconnect us with the life of the depths that Melville calls “the ungraspable phantom of life.” But such a reconciliation can only take place if we are able to be full participants with the work of art, if we open ourselves fully to its impact on us. As Jung puts it, if we are to grasp the meaning of a work of art:

“we must allow it to shape us as it shaped [the artist]. Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole.”1

Ultimately, it is this interconnectedness of all beings — “where all are caught in a common rhythm” — that heals the split within. This is the true goal of the individuation process, which is as much an overcoming of oneself as it is an unfolding of oneself. It is not a path to some detached, self-insistent individualism or aloof spiritual inaccessibility. No. Individuation, says Jung, “emphatically includes our fellow man.” 2

Until next time.

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I hope you enjoy this new episode of Digital Jung. Please be sure to check it out. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Moby-Dick: An American Myth, Part 2

Thanks for listening and take good care!

The podcast returns today with a new episode after several weeks of what turned into something of an unexpected hiatus.

The first few months of this year found me teaching four different classes for three separate organizations. Each of those classes has been a privilege and a wonderful experience — I’m always grateful for the opportunity to interact with reflective and thoughtful people — but they have, understandably, demanded all of my focus and attention. Now, as those commitments wind down, I am able to return my creative energies to the podcast.

The next two episodes — continuing this season’s theme of exploring the symbolic world of Melville’s Moby-Dick — are compilations of excerpts from a talk that I gave several years ago titled Moby-Dick: An American Myth.

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Episode 6 begins with an exploration of the creative process and the importance of art for the psychological life of the culture. I explore the distinction that Jung makes between what he calls psychological (meaning ‘personalistic’) art and visionary art. A visionary work of art, he states, brings an important corrective to the collective values of a culture. It is just this, I believe, that makes Moby-Dick an American Myth with something crucial to say, not only about the American psyche, but about the spiritual and psychological concerns of contemporary life in general. As Jung writes:

“What is of particular importance for the study of literature, however, is that the manifestations of the collective unconscious are compensatory to the conscious attitude, so that they have the effect of bringing a one-sided, unadapted, or dangerous state of consciousness back into equilibrium.”2

In the second part of the episode, I compare the hunt for the white whale — approached in very different ways by the two main characters, Ishmael and Ahab — with the mythological motif of the hero’s fight with the dragon.

In connection with this image I consider this question: Is Moby-Dick, like the mythological dragon, an image of primordial chaos to be overcome? That certainly reflects Ahab’s belief and underlies his motivations. Or is the whale an image of the life of the depths, the life of nature — a symbol for something that might help us “find our way back to the deepest springs of life?”

As I discuss in the episode, the consequences of these radically divergent attitudes have profound implications for the collective life of the planet.

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I hope you enjoy this new episode of Digital Jung. Please be sure to check it out. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Moby-Dick: An American Myth, Part 1

Thanks for listening and take good care!

Transcript:

There is a great deal that transpires between the time of Ishmael’s declaration, just four sentences into Moby-Dick, when he says, “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” — a great deal that happens between that declaration of his intention and its realization. And so here we find ourselves, already in the fifth episode of this season, still standing, so to speak, on dry land.

It is not until Chapter 22, titled Merry Christmas, that the Pequod — that “noble, but somehow most melancholy”1 whaling ship that Ishmael and Queequeg sign on to serve — finally sets off on its voyage, “blindly [plunging] like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

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Interestingly enough, it is right at this moment that Melville draws our attention as readers back to the shore. In a very brief chapter titled The Lee Shore — chapter 23 — he offers up a meditation on the tension between the comforts of land and the call of the sea. This is presented through Ishmael’s reflections on the seemingly minor character of Bulkington, who he sees standing at the helm of the Pequod as it leaves the harbor for its years-long journey. It’s a meditation that speaks to an important but difficult aspect of the experience of the symbolic life that I want to explore further in what follows here

Bulkington makes his first of two brief appearances in the novel in the chapter on The Spouter-Inn, just prior to Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg. He is part of a ship’s crew that has just arrived home that very evening after a three years’ voyage. The crew crowds into the bar at the Inn to celebrate their return, but Ishmael, who is observing this scene, notices one sailor standing apart from the rest of the group. As Ishmael puts it: “He seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face.”2 The impression that Bulkington gives is of someone who is quiet, serious, and perhaps somewhat haunted. “In the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy,” we read.

Like I said, Bulkington’s appearances in the novel are brief. The few sentences dedicated to him essentially amount to no more than, say, a cup of water in what is an ocean of words. And yet it is implied that the meaning that he carries for the story is far greater than might be assumed based on the amount of time and space allotted to his character.

Discussing the scene at the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael notes that Bulkington will soon be his shipmate and then adds as an aside: “though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned.” The term “sleeping-partner” here means something like a secret or a silent partner, such as we might think of in terms of a business venture, and the implication is that his influence is felt in the background, even if he is not seen much, or even at all, in the center of the action.

And, indeed, right after this first glimpse of the man, he slips away from his companions unnoticed. But his absence is soon felt and before long the other sailors are calling out “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?”3 and they all run out to find him. Clearly, he is a figure that exerts some strange pull on the others, Ishmael included. He exudes some quality that impresses, attracts, maybe even comforts others, though comfort is a luxury he himself can never know.…

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: The Call of the Shoreless Sea.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

Upcoming Events

Courses & Presentations:

• Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon

  • This is the third in a series of classes working through the essays in C.G. Jung’s book Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, vol. 13) and being offered through Jung Archademy.

  • Reading through Jung’s essays on Paracelsus, this class will explore the questions connected with the need for a religious or philosophical outlook and its relationship to the process of individuation.

  • 6 Mondays beginning on March 10th. For more information and to register visit: https://www.jungarchademy.com/paracelsus

Transcript:

The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg is, without question, one of the most important elements, if not the most important element, of all of Moby-Dick. Symbolically, their relationship is the expression of a fundamental experience that opens the way to real and lasting psychological growth and transformation. And, as we continue to make our way through this story, we’ll see the impact that this relationship has on Ishmael. In this episode, though, we will focus on their initial meeting and their budding friendship.

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One of the interesting things about the character of Queequeg is that he is based off a real person. In a book called The New Zealanders, Melville came across the story of Tupai Cupa, a Maori chief who had a longing to go to Europe and who stole aboard a merchant ship in order to do so. Many of the details of Queequeg’s story are borrowed from that of Tupai Cupa, including the very arresting detail of his elaborately tattooed face.

It’s this face that gives Ishmael his first impression of his soon-to-be companion. And like so much about Queequeg, Ishmael at first completely misunderstands what he sees: “Good heavens! What a sight! Such a face!”1 These are his initial reactions when, in the middle of the night, he first sees the “large, blackish looking squares” on Queequeg’s face. He takes them for bandages and assumes that this stranger, with whom he is supposed to share not just a bedroom but a bed, has been in a fight and gotten cuts all over his face. It’s an impression that reinforces his suspicion that his proposed bedfellow is really a dangerous savage.

Eventually, with the aid of the landlord, who mediates between the two strangers, Ishmael is able to quell his fears enough to finally get to sleep that first night. But it’s really only later, in the clear light of day, as he sits watching Queequeg from a distance that he can make a more considered assessment of his new roommate, and it leads him to that statement that we heard in the opening quote: “Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.”

And here I want to suggest that this is exactly what Queequeg represents in the story: the soul. In a book almost completely devoid of female characters, Queequeg is the closest thing, in my estimation, to what we might think of as an anima figure. …

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Healing the Splintered Heart.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

Upcoming Events

Courses & Presentations:

• The Secret of the Golden Flower: Meditations on the Way of Individuation

  • Jung Society of Washington, starting on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. For more details visit: Golden Flower Course

• Anatomy of the Psyche Video Course

  • An in-depth guide through Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche • Includes PDF with a link to course videos and additional materials. Available from Jung Archademy. For more details visit: Anatomy of the Psyche Course

“When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.”

~ C.G. Jung1

The Problems of Conscious Living

To understand what Jung is talking about in this passage, it is important to know what he means when he uses the word ‘problems.’ He is not simply talking about the occasional difficulties and inconveniences that come with daily living – those issues that tend to be logistical in nature and generally only require some minor adjustments of organization to solve. There is no “obscurity” involved in these kinds of difficulties, just the application of one’s consciousness toward some straightforward problem-solving.

What Jung is designating with the word ‘problems’ here is something deeper, something potentially more disturbing. He is not talking about the challenges of practical living, but rather the problems of conscious living.

In the first case, one encounters constraints imposed by external conditions. In the second, the constraints rise up from within – “one impulse,” writes Jung, “is opposed by another.”2 The first experience may be frustrating, but it poses no “problem” beyond the question of whether or not one can find a way to overcome whatever external barrier presents itself. The problem of consciousness, on the other hand, confronts the individual with a situation in which one finds oneself at odds with oneself.

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The I and the Not-I

Consciousness, we could say, comes as a kind of rupture. It is a shattering of the undisturbed peace of our native state of unconsciousness caused by the dawning awareness of separateness and difference. One becomes aware, that is, that not only is there an ‘I’ but also a ‘not-I,’ and that this ‘not-I’ is moved by different needs and wants than those of the ‘I.’ Our relationship to this ‘not-I’ grows more complex over time.

At first, it reflects our relationship to the outer world and the other people around us who populate that world – parents, siblings, friends, authority figures, romantic interests, and the countless acquaintances and strangers that cross our path. After a while, if we are sensitive enough, we will also begin to recognize the presence of this ‘not-I’ within – thoughts, feelings, and fantasies that seem incompatible with, or even opposed to, the preferred self-image of the ‘I.’

We may resist all of this, of course, both without and within, keeping it at a distance by calling it ‘other.’ But if we allow our relationship to any of these aspects to go deep enough, we soon discover that the otherness of the ‘not-I’ is not absolute, but relative, and that its concerns are somehow also our concerns. “For here,” writes Jung, “the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as a part of his own life, as a kind of ‘also-I.’”3

“Something More”

And it is just here that we come upon the ‘problems’ to which Jung refers. Consciousness, as it develops, involves the growing recognition that there is a something more that one also is. And this recognition can be disturbing because this ‘something more’ comes with a sense of responsibility. It seems to ask something of us, and what it asks may be more than we feel able or willing to give. It calls us into life in a particular way, but we’re not so sure that we want to go.

It can be hard to take this ‘something more’ seriously. It seems like a vague feeling for which there is little evidence to vouch for its reality. Its faint urging is easily drowned out by the inexorable demands of everyday life – the responsibilities of family, the obligations of work, the merciless fact of one’s bank balance. It is easier to try to turn away and deny the ‘more’ that calls us. As Jung writes, “We wish to make our lives simple, certain, and smooth and for that reason problems are taboo. We want to have certainties and no doubts…”4

It is natural, then, to turn to approaches that offer what appear to be practical and common-sense solutions to whatever gnawing dissatisfaction one may feel about life. But the way does not run through systems of self-help and time-management. Rather, Jung declares, it “leads through obscurity and darkness.”

The Fate We Ourselves Are

And what is this way of “obscurity and darkness?” We are. It is the mystery of our own lives, the mystery of our individuality. It is what Jung calls the Self, by which he means much more than what we typically mean by our own use of the word ‘self.’ The Self for Jung is the meeting of the ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I.’ It encompasses both the conscious and the unconscious aspects of our personality, what we know about ourselves and what still wants to be known by us. As such, it is our as-yet-unknown wholeness, our being and becoming, and what Jung describes as “the fate that we ourselves are.”5

It is a way of obscurity because there is no prescribed way. It is not just the “road less traveled,” it is a road that has never been traveled. “Traveller,” writes the poet Antonio Machado, “There is no path. Paths are made by walking.”6 Or, as the novelist Hermann Hesse writes, “Each person’s life represents a road toward oneself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path.”7

It is a way of darkness because it leads us deep into the mysteries of our own being, tempering consciousness with the unconscious, the rational with the nonrational, knowing with not-knowing, the ‘I’ with the ‘Not-I’: “In each of us there is another whom we do not know,” teaches Jung. “He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.”8

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And so, this other within who at first seemed to be the source of our problems turns out to be the guide to their solution. It leads us out of our narrow focus on what we want out of life, and reminds us that life, too, wants something from us. By doing the hard work of learning to hear what this other within us has to say, we begin to forge a path to becoming the more that we are.

Until next time.

Upcoming Events

Courses & Presentations:

• The Secret of the Golden Flower: Meditations on the Way of Individuation

  • Jung Society of Washington, starting on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. For more details visit: Golden Flower Course

• Anatomy of the Psyche Video Course

  • An in-depth guide through Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche • Includes PDF with a link to course videos and additional materials. Available from Jung Archademy. For more details visit: Anatomy of the Psyche Course

Transcript:

The first part of the novel Moby-Dick is haunted by darkness and the feeling of a kind of descent into some strange netherworld. The tone is set with the title of the very first chapter: Loomings. And it becomes more pronounced in chapter two, when we find Ishmael searching the back streets of the town of New Bedford, looking for a place to spend a couple of nights before making his way to Nantucket where he will begin his voyage on the Pequod.

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“Such dreary streets!,” he declares, “blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.”2 Ishmael eventually finds the Spouter-Inn where he will stay, and where he will first meet Queequeg, the so-called “savage” harpooner who will have a transforming effect upon him. I will explore that meeting in the next episode. For now, I want to stay with this atmosphere of darkness — the quality of doom that permeates the opening of the novel.

We get a further glimpse of this atmosphere in visual form just inside the entryway of the Spouter-Inn. There Ishmael finds himself mesmerized by an old, disfigured oil painting that seems, as he says, “to delineate chaos besmirched.”3 This murky, muddy painting — suggesting everything from a storm to the four primal elements to a “blasted heath” — points us to the psychological geography of this stage of the story.

It is something akin to what the old alchemists called the prima materia or the nigredo. This, as I talked about back in episode 9 of season 3 — The Heart of the Matter — was the original, undifferentiated state of the material that was to be worked on in the alchemical opus. Psychologically, it represents the highest potential, which, however, is often first found in the lowest places, for example, in a time of depression, or in keeping with our theme, a time of darkness. As he revisits and stares at the painting, a “portentous something” takes shape in its center. Ishmael seems to recognize in this massa confusa, the form of the whale – “the great leviathan himself.”

And, of course, it is the whale that is, in a manner of speaking, the cause of this lingering darkness. Or to be more precise, it is the looming whale hunt that casts a kind of gloom over Ishmael’s thoughts, a fact that comes into focus in the chapter titled The Chapel.

“In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel,” the chapter begins, “and few are the moody fisherman, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure,” Ishmael goes on to narrate, “that I did not.”4

Staring down from the walls of this chapel are the plaques of the dead, of sailors lost at sea — a reminder to Ishmael, and to the scattered mourners and worshippers around him, not only of the whalemen named on those “bleak tablets,” but also of the countless unrecorded deaths, those souls “who have placelessly perished without a grave,” the ones who have no plaque, no remembrance, no marker of their living and dying. And it is their own nearness to this mournful possibility, of course, that has gathered all these gloomy worshippers to the chapel. …

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Tending the Spiritual Imagination.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

“Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature. It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina1 that cross our path.”

~ C.G. Jung2

The Jungian analyst James Hillman once wrote that one of Jung’s chief contributions to culture was in giving us a means of approaching that age-old human imperative: Know Thyself.3 In four sentences, this passage of Jung’s, quoted above, not only lays out the essence of that approach, but it offers a glimpse of the psychological world-view that underlies it. There is a lot that could be unpacked in this quote, but for now I want to focus on what it suggests about the nature of our psychological life.

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The fundamental idea here is that, as conscious beings, we find ourselves in a situation that involves us whether we know it or not; one that affects us whether we participate in it or not. The psyche is a world of experience as real and as unavoidable as the physical environment in which we live and move.4 It is populated with figures as impactful and as demanding as the people that surround us in the day-world. These inner figures go by familiar names. We call them our fears and our joys. We think of them as anxieties, temptations, doubts, certainties, questions, desires.

These names make us think of them as subjective qualities, functional or dysfunctional states of being, that are somehow our responsibility or our fault. We imagine them as rewards or punishments for our behavior, or accidents of our brain chemistry that we must learn how to regulate. We have forgotten — or we never knew — how to understand them as something objective, realities that arise, as Jung says, “from the depths of our unconscious nature,” realities that we must learn how to understand, with which we must find a way to come into relationship.

These inner realities, says Jung, “come to our aid.” That is, they serve a purpose in the process of psychological growth and development. They are the agents, so to speak, of individuation — the inborn process of becoming; the instinctual urge toward self-realization.

Individuation is not something that one chooses. It is not something we can decline. It is a naturally occurring psychological process with which, in one way or another, we must come to terms. Just as the body undergoes a series of changes and developments throughout the life-cycle, so the psyche seeks its own particular unfolding and differentiation. In neither case is the growth process dependent upon the individual’s conscious awareness of it, though both can be influenced either positively or negatively by the attention one gives (or fails to give) to it.

“Our consciousness,” writes Jung, “does not create itself — it wells up from unknown depths.”5 The unconscious psyche, then, is an active, creative force of nature. It is not simply the absence of consciousness. It is, on the contrary, the matrix of our consciousness. The unconscious is not rendered inert or ineffective by our unconsciousness of it, but remains the ever-present maker of our moods, influencer of our decisions, weaver of our projections. It is, one could say, the atmosphere that surrounds us, and therefore, it is an inescapable condition of our human existence.

This can be an unsettling idea to consider because of the responsibility it lays on our shoulders. It demands that we take up a relationship to these psychological depths. Of course, we can refuse to take up this challenge, but that does not relieve us of the burden of the individuation process. “The only difference,” as Jung writes, “is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright.”

A simple way to put this is that life happens. We will be met by challenges, crises, and opportunities. We will grow older and need to take on new identities and new attitudes. We will experience conflicts between competing duties, such as the duty we have to those in our care and the duty that calls us to our own creative unfolding. We will suffer disappointments and injustice, as well as triumph and joy. All of these are the raw material of our spiritual and psychological growth. And depending on our ability and our willingness to meet them consciously, they can come to us as tests, initiations, and even ordeals through which we are tempered and transformed, or they appear as the blows of fate — a series of crises and catastrophes that batter us and threaten to break us.

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Something is demanded of us by this life we are given. What we do and who we become matters. There is no doubt that even if we take it up consciously, the work individuation will be a challenging one. As Jung notes: “The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of humankind.”6

Until next time.

Transcript:

This is, arguably, one of the most familiar openings in all of literature – particularly that very first sentence. Even if you have never read Moby-Dick before, you are likely, at some point, to have heard that terse, opening phrase: “Call me Ishmael.”

Moby-Dick, of course, is an epic novel. It delights in expansive reveries that multiply image on top of image. It readily digresses into heady passages that, as one reviewer at the time the book was published put it, are full of “high philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, [and] soaring speculation.”1 Yet here it opens with a simple three-word sentence. This simplicity, however, doesn’t prevent it from being, as Melville might say, “a most meaning thing.”

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In her book, Melville’s Use of the Bible, Nathalia Wright, a leading scholar of early American literature and of Melville in particular, notes that the characters in his novels are “types rather than individuals.”2 They are figures, she writes, “embodying the most general states of mind: aspiration, utilitarianism, innocence.” Translated into Jungian language, we would say they are archetypes.

So, when the narrator of this story begins by saying “Call me Ishmael,” he is essentially concealing his personal identity and inviting us as readers to identify him with what we might call the Ishmael archetype. And if we want to get a sense of the nature of this archetypal figure, we’re going to have to know the biblical story associated with him. And that, in a nutshell, is this:

Ishmael is the first child of Abraham, the great patriarch of the Bible. Because Abraham was unable to conceive a child with his wife Sarah, she suggests that Abraham sleep with her slave Hagar to ensure that he will have an heir. He does as Sarah suggests and Ishmael is born. But then Abraham and Sarah do conceive a child of their own – Isaac. Jealous for the birth rights of her own son, Sarah demands that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael, which he agrees to do.

Hagar and Ishmael wander in the desert, and eventually they run out of water. Not wanting to witness her son die, Hagar puts Ishmael under a bush and goes off in despair. But God hears the boy crying, calls to Hagar and assures her that Ishmael will be the father of a great nation. A well of water is revealed to her and the two are saved.

Now, to me, this story suggests two main components of the Ishmael archetype. …

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Outcasts of the Spirit.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

“I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.”

~ C.G. Jung1

I love the note of awe with which Jung speaks of the psyche in this passage. It is so important to recognize this aspect of Jung’s work: the sense of awe, dread, and wonder — all those responses that belong to the encounter with the numinous — in the face of that inexhaustible mystery that is human existence. “The psyche,” he writes elsewhere, “is part of the inmost mystery of life.”2

And this is essential to the understanding of the symbolic life, as well. The symbolic life, as I’ve said before, is both a recognition of the larger life of meaning in which our everyday lives are embedded and by which they are nourished, and it is a practice that brings us into contact with that life of meaning.

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It is a central principle in Jungian analysis, for instance, that an important component of healing involves the capacity to discover the symbol in the symptom. Now, this does not mean that the painful experience of the symptom is not real or is some kind of illusion. Rather, it means that our personal experiences gain meaning, and even purpose, if we can recognize them as expressions of archetypal — that is to say, universally human — struggles. And this, in a sense, means seeing the “universe without” in connection with the “universe within.”

As the Jungian analyst Jolande Jacobi puts it, when we recognize this deeper dimension of our symptoms then, “The individual, who hitherto has been caught in his [or her] personal entanglements, is then confronted with a problem which no longer represents solely [a] personal conflict but gives expression to a conflict that it has been incumbent on [human beings] to suffer and solve from time immemorial.”3

In a similar vein, but speaking from the standpoint of the religious attitude, Evelyn Underhill, in her book Mysticism speaks about the “eye which looks upon Time.” When this eye, she writes, “usurps the conscious field, that spiritual eye which ‘looks upon Eternity’ can hardly act at all.”4

This distinction of these two kinds of “eyes” — one that looks upon time and one that looks upon eternity — is a helpful image for understanding the difference between what is meant when we speak of the personal and the archetypal levels of experience. The use of different images like this is necessary because we are talking about a very subtle experience that can’t be directly described, but only experienced. As Jung says, “the most we may be able to do is misunderstand” it because no concept can finally capture what is a far-reaching idea — that the human being is a kind of threshold between two equally important realms of experience: the universe without and the universe within.

To be sure, for most of us, the physical universe without dominates and the “non-spatial universe” within is hardly recognized — until, that is, it manifests in symptomatic form. An essential component of the symbolic life is the recognition that there is a reciprocal relationship between these two universes. The more conscious our relationship to the “universe within” becomes, the deeper and more meaningful we will find our experience of the “universe without.” Absent the inner world, we become lost in the outer.

As Edward Edinger declares, “The symbolic life in some form is a prerequisite for psychic health. Without it the ego is alienated from its suprapersonal source and falls victim to a kind of cosmic anxiety.”5  

Until next time.

Transcript:

This is a quote from the novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville. This season, which I’ve subtitled “Jung Aboard the Pequod,” I’m going to be using Moby-Dick as the main source of symbolic material from which I’ll be drawing. Each episode this season will be focusing on one or more passages from this – frankly – astonishing novel.

In general, I’ll be moving through the book sequentially, though I will also jump around from time-to-time. So, if you’ve never read Moby-Dick before – or, if you have read it and want to re-experience it – this could be a good opportunity to do just that in conjunction with this season of the podcast. You certainly don’t have to read the book, of course, so if you have no interest in doing so, please know there will be plenty for you this season, as well.

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And to that point, I just want to be clear – what I’m not going to be doing is a Jungian interpretation of Moby-Dick. I think that could end up being quite plodding, to be honest, and would quickly grow stale. Rather, I’m thinking of this season more as a Jungian appreciation of Moby-Dick – a recognition that this novel is a vast treasury of symbolic meaning and so much more than simply a story about a hunt for a whale.

Jung, in fact, considered Moby-Dick to be “the greatest American novel,”2 a worthy example of what he described as visionary literature. And the Jungian analyst Edward Edinger, in his own exploration of this work, wrote “This book is palpitatingly alive. It is awesome in the intensity of the depths that it reveals.”3

So, I’m excited to get to explore some of those depths with you this season. And like I said, this isn’t going to be an interpretation of Moby-Dick and, in fact, it’s not even really going to be about Moby-Dick at all. But, like everything that I talk about on this podcast, it’s going to be about the soul. The novel is really a lens through which we have the opportunity to come to know more about the soul, about the deep imagination, about what it means to live a symbolic life.

And this, I would argue, using Melville’s words from our opening quote, is a mighty theme…

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Unfathomable Depths: Jung Aboard the Pequod.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

Upcoming Events

Join me next week:

• The Spirit Mercurius: Jung’s Alchemical Studies Reading Group

  • Jung Archademy, starting on Monday, Oct. 21st, 2024. For more details visit: jungarchademy.com/mercurius

“There are people who use psychology only to get a label to attach to things. Then they are done. Then it just belongs to psychology. One must never forget, psychology is only a stammering stopgap measure, so that one is able to talk about life at all.”

~ C.G. Jung 1

I love this quote because it reveals how much Jung was aware that his psychology not only was a means for gaining a deeper understanding of the symbols that appear in dreams, myths, and religion, but that it was, in fact, a symbol itself.

The point of psychology is not to justify psychology. Nor is it to reduce the whole of human experience to some part of our functioning — the firing of neurons, the activity of thought, or even the relative consciousness of one’s shadow. The point of psychology, says Jung, is Life.

If what we are doing does not facilitate a more complete engagement with this life that we are living, then we are like people who diligently study and try to memorize the menu but never order a meal. We are bound to stay hungry.

And although the idea of living life may seem self-evident, the truth is that we can be so deceived by the familiar ordinariness of our days that we forget, or fail to see, that we walk in the midst of mysteries. I know that is certainly the case for me. The unmistakable presence of the ten thousand things that surround me, of course, present themselves to be so obvious and tangible that the sheer impossibility of existence fails to make an impression on me.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel once noted that, as people of a technological age, we have lost a capacity for wonder. He wrote, “Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”2

Our attachment to “words and notions,” to concepts, categories, names, and systems of thought, then, does not reveal life to us, nor does it open our hearts to receive it. Rather, it becomes a defense against life, foreclosing the possibility of our full participation in and with it. It is only when we can hold these objects of our attachment loosely and even, in the end, let them go altogether, that we are free to participate in life directly, with immediacy and intimacy.

I come back to this quote of Jung’s often. I find it is a good reminder to lift my eyes from the page and to return my attention to the living, breathing world around me. It does me no good, for instance, to understand, say, the symbolism of a tree, if I have never experienced the way that watching the wind blow through the crown of the old maple just outside my window changes the rhythm of my own breathing. If I do not feel that secret kinship, I will never know the truth of that tree, nor the one spirit that moves in us both.

As rich and deep and meaningful as I find Jung’s psychology to be, it can be no help to me if the only thing it gives me is a way to think about life. The point, of course — as Jung well knew — is not to think life, but to live it.

Until next time.

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“If we are authentically engaged in the practice of the symbolic life … then we may find ourselves being led in unexpected and unlooked-for ways.”

After a long and unanticipated absence, Digital Jung returns today with a new season of episodes. Listen to the Season 4 announcement here:

Transcript:

There is a voice inside the body.
There is a voice and a music,
a throbbing, four-chambered pear
that wants to be heard, that sits
alone by the river with its mandolin
and its torn coat, and sings
for whomever will listen
a song that no one wants to hear. 

Hi. This is Jason Smith, and the poem that you just heard was ‘A Man Lost By The River,’ written by Michael Blumenthal. This has been one of my favorite poems for a long time, ever since I first encountered it in a collection of poetry called ‘The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart’ – a collection edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade.

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I wanted to share it with you here for a couple of reasons. First, I think it describes a common experience of the symbolic life — one I’ve talked about before on this podcast — the value of getting lost, the value wandering from the familiar to discover the not-yet-known, the value of letting oneself end up in places you didn’t expect to end up.

Sometimes, as I said back in an episode titled Wandering off the Path — episode 24 from the first season of the podcast — sometimes, “we need to go into the wilderness, wander off the straight path, to find that bit of ourselves that is missing.”

And that brings me to the second reason I wanted to share this poem with you. Because those ideas and experiences that it expresses have a personal resonance for me these days, as I have been, in some ways, that man who wandered off the beaten path and got lost for a while.

You will know, of course, if you are a regular listener to this podcast, that it has been quiet for more than a year now. I’ve been quiet for more than a year. What started as a regular summer hiatus at the end of the last season of the podcast, turned, somewhat unexpectedly, into an extended sabbatical. And as time wore on and the break became longer and longer, I began to hear from many of you wondering if I was going to return with a fourth season…

Please be sure to check out the rest of the episode. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: In Search of a Song.

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Thanks for listening and take good care!

This week I released the final part of my series on the Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Iron Stove.’ It also happened to be the last episode of this third season of Digital Jung.

Coincidentally, as my podcast host Buzzsprout informs me, it was also the 75th episode that I’ve published of the podcast since I started it three years ago.

I’ll be honest — I’m looking forward to taking a summer break.

As long as I go on producing this podcast — and I have no plans of stopping in the near future — I want it to stay fresh and interesting for me to create, so that it can continue to be fresh and interesting for you to listen to. Stepping away from time to time and resting is vital to being able to keep an adequate perspective and to maintain my energy for the project.

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Taking a break also allows me time to ensure that I am not just talking about the practice of the symbolic life, but living it. It gives me the opportunity to simply listen to the world within and around me in an unhurried way — and as I say in the latest episode, the art of listening is central to this practice:

This episode, of course, explores the final sections of our story — the journey over and past several daunting obstacles, the reunion of the King’s Daughter with her prince, and the resulting dis-enchantment of the land.

Each of these sections is related to key aspects of the symbolic life and the particular challenges that accompany them. I use as my lens for this portion of the tale a quote from Jung in which he talks about the importance of “immediate experience,” which is sometimes translated as “irrational experience.”

The first translation — “immediate” — helps us to understand the second — “irrational.” Irrational experience, in the sense that Jung uses it, means the immediacy of the encounter with life as it is given, as it presents itself to us, prior to our sorting it into rational categories of thought. That is, life in the living of it and before the thinking about it.

“In this way,” says Jung, “the matter-of-fact and the commonplace come to wear an altered countenance, and can even acquire a new glamour.”1

Please check out the new episode for more discussion on these ideas and images. You can find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: The Goal of the Symbolic Life.

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Remainders

The final difficulty in the story ‘The Iron Stove’ is that the prince is kept asleep by a sleeping potion, which prevents the final reunion between him and the King’s Daughter. I thought I’d offer a quote here which, in a sense, speaks to this image and, at the same time, is a succinct summary of the the goal of all inner work. This comes from Thomas Merton:

“The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake.”2

Reminders

If you want to experience the complete tale of ‘The Iron Stove,' you can read or listen to it by clicking on the link immediately below:

Thanks for listening, and take good care!

If you are a regular listener of the podcast, you will have noticed that the last few episodes have been coming out at a faster pace than usual. I have been releasing one every week recently instead of the usual interval of every other week. This is a temporary change as I begin to wrap up this third season and prepare for a summer hiatus.

The current flurry of episodes are all part of my ongoing series on the Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Iron Stove.’ This past week I released part three of the series — an episode that looks at the importance of deliberate and concrete action in the work of the symbolic life.

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Referring to the poem “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” by Rainer Maria Rilke, I describe this aspect of the work this way:

The central symbol in the tale for this quality of grounding is that of the toad. The King’s Daughter, the hero of the story, comes to a house in which there live several toads. These, I note, play the role of the “helpful animal” in the story. This is a common motif in fairytales. The helpful animal is an important figure that provides the main character with the advice or with specific objects that will help her to resolve the challenges she encounters on her journey.

The toad as a symbol is associated with the element of earth. Whereas its cousin the frog tends to be seen in relation to both water and land, the toad, though it is also an amphibian, is considered to be more earthbound. That the helpful animals in this story are toads, then, suggests the need for the solidity, stability, and steadiness of earth. Reflecting on this image, I begin to look at the relation of the spirit to the body. As I say in the episode:

In the next installment, I will be bringing this series to a close, and with it this third season of the podcast. The theme for the next episode will be “What is the goal of the symbolic life?” Look for it to be released on Thursday, June 29th.

I hope you enjoy this latest offering from Digital Jung. You can find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Embodying the Spirit: The Iron Stove, pt. 3.

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Remainders

As I mentioned above, I make use of part of Rilke’s poem “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” in the episode. It is definitely worth reading all the way through, however, so I am including the full poem here:

Just as the winged energy of delight 
carried you over many chasms early on
now raise the daringly imagined arch 
holding up the astounding bridges.

Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes —
being carried along is not enough.

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

(translated by Robert Bly)

Reminders

If you want to experience the complete tale of ‘The Iron Stove,' you can read or listen to it by clicking on the link immediately below:

Thanks for listening, and take good care!

For this week’s episode — the second part of my series on the Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Iron Stove’ — I take up the theme of change and the ways that it can activate in us the energy of resistance.

In the story this energy is personified by the figure of the Old King. He is the agent of resistance, working to prevent his daughter from an encounter with the larger world outside the boundaries of his kingdom.

As I state in the episode about this figure:

The “Old King” is a common symbol in myths and fairytales. It is an image of the attitude or principle that rules our conscious outlook. When it is functioning in an effective way, this ruling principle can lead us into meaningful action in the world, or in our relationships to others. Too often, however, we cling to such attitudes or ideas long after they have been outgrown.

As the Jungian Analyst D. Stephenson Bond explains:

“Disturbing as the idea may be, in analysis and certainly in everyday life it is imperative to have some overarching awareness that the beliefs we hold dear at one phase of life may age and decay as life continues. Their motivating energy wanes, no matter how beloved to the ego they are.”1

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In the episode I explore some of the ways that we attempt to outsmart the process of change by trying to rearrange some of the externals of our lives in order to avoid the challenging work of psychological growth and transformation.

I also look at what it is involved when we finally recognize there is nothing left to do but move forward into the new phase of life that is waiting for us. This last exploration involves a closer look at the symbol of the Iron Stove itself, which I’ll leave for you to discover by giving the episode a listen. Please check it out.

I hope you enjoy this latest offering from Digital Jung. You can find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: Resisting Change: The Iron Stove, pt. 2.

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Remainders

Just a reminder that if you want to experience the complete tale of ‘The Iron Stove,' you can read or listen to it by clicking on the link immediately below:

Thanks for listening, and take good care!

We are in the final stretch of this third season of Digital Jung. In just a few weeks, I will be taking a summer break — resting up, yes, but also taking some time to make preparations for Season 4. Before this season comes to an end, however, I thought I would put together a series of episodes that takes an in-depth look at one fairytale: ‘The Iron Stove’ from the Grimm Brothers’ collection of tales.

I have done a few series like this in the past with several episodes dedicated to one tale. In season one I looked at the stories of ‘The White Snake’ in episodes 14, 15, and 16, and ‘Old Sultan’ in episodes 32 and 33. And I explored the tale of ‘The Seven Ravens’ in episodes 16 and 17 of season two.

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In many ways, ‘The Iron Stove’ is a classic example of the Hero’s Journey, this time with the figure of a King’s Daughter in the role of the hero. Her adventure is an opportunity to explore themes such as the encounter with beauty and transcendence, the resistance to change, the importance of humility and perseverance, the relationship between the masculine and feminine dimensions of experience, and more.

As is clear from the title, this first episode of the series looks at the experience of the spirit. As Jung writes, “Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living.”1 And while the particular fairytale that I’ve chosen to look at is, in part, about this encounter with a “certain spirit,” it is also true that every fairytale, approached in the right way, is an encounter with the spirit.

Expressed in Jungian language, every fairytale has the potential to bring us into a right relationship with the archetypal background of our lives when we engage it consciously and with our full attention.

As I say in the episode:

The archetypal background, then, is imagined not so much as a place, as it is a different quality of time. Hence the familiar formula “Once Upon a Time.” If we take the symbolic world of the story seriously, it can direct our awareness to this vitalizing sense of time that lies within and beneath our everyday experience.

It is when we are brought into connection with this dimension of experience, Jung notes, that the fullest realization of our potentials becomes possible.

Each of the episodes in this series will look at a different section of the story and I will be proceeding through the fairytale section by section. The downside of this approach, as I acknowledge in the podcast, is that it can make it easy to lose the thread of the overall narrative. Because of this difficulty I have created a separate page where you can access both the text and a recording of the ‘The Iron Stove,’ in case you would like to experience the story as a whole.

The text and recording can be found at the link immediately below:

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I hope you enjoy this latest offering from Digital Jung. You can find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: The Life of the Spirit: The Iron Stove, pt. 1.

Thanks for listening, and take good care!

Remainders

In this week’s episode, I spend some time discussing the difference between historical time and mythic time. Here is a quote from Mircea Eliade that describes the significance of these different experiences of Time.

“Just as modern man proclaims himself a historical being, constituted by the whole history of humanity, so the man of archaic societies considers himself the end product of a mythical history, that is, of a series of events that took place in illo tempore, at the beginning of Time. But whereas modern man sees in the history that precedes him a purely human work and, more especially, believes that he has the power to continue and perfect it indefinitely, for the man of traditional societies everything significant — that is, everything creative and powerful — that has ever happened took place in the beginning, in the Time of the myths.”2

The Tale:

In the days when wishing was still of some use, a king's son was bewitched by an old witch, and shut up in an iron stove in a forest. There he passed many years, and no one could rescue him. Then a king's daughter came into the forest, who had lost herself, and could not find her father's kingdom again. After she had wandered about for nine days, she at length came to the iron stove.

Then a voice came forth from it, and asked her, "Whence do you come, and whither are you going?" She answered, "I have lost my father's kingdom, and cannot get home again." Then a voice inside the iron stove said, "I will help you to get home again, and that indeed most swiftly, if you will promise to do what I desire of you. I am the son of a far greater king than your father, and I will marry you."

Then was she afraid, and thought, "Good heavens. What can I do with an iron stove?" But as she much wished to get home to her father, she promised to do as he desired. But he said, "You shall return here, and bring a knife with you, and scrape a hole in the iron." Then he gave her a companion who walked near her, but did not speak, and in two hours he took her home.

There was great joy in the castle when the king's daughter came home, and the old king fell on her neck and kissed her. She, however, was sorely troubled, and said, "Dear father, what I have suffered. I should never have got home again from the great wild forest, if I had not come to an iron stove, but I have been forced to give my word that I will go back to it, set it free, and marry it."

Then the old king was so terrified that he all but fainted, for he had but this one daughter. They therefore resolved they would send, in her place, the miller's daughter, who was very beautiful. They took her there, gave her a knife, and said she was to scrape at the iron stove. So she scraped at it for four-and-twenty hours, but could not bring off the least morsel of it. When the day dawned, a voice in the stove said, "It seems to me it is day outside." Then she answered, "It seems so to me too, I fancy I hear the noise of my father's mill." "So you are a miller's daughter. Then go your way at once, and let the king's daughter come here."

Then she went away at once, and told the old king that the man outside there would have none of her - he wanted the king's daughter. Then the old king grew frightened, and the daughter wept. But there was a swine-herd's daughter, who was even prettier than the miller's daughter, and they determined to give her a piece of gold to go to the iron stove instead of the king's daughter. So she was taken thither and she also had to scrape for four-and-twenty hours. She, however, was no better at it. When the day broke, a voice inside the stove cried, "It seems to me it is day outside." Then answered she, "So it seems to me also, I fancy I hear my father's horn blowing." "Then you are a swineherd's daughter. Go away at once, and tell the king's daughter to come, and tell her all must be done as promised, and if she does not come, everything in the kingdom shall be ruined and destroyed, and not one stone be left standing on another."

When the king's daughter heard that she began to weep, but now there was nothing for it but to keep her promise. So she took leave of her father, put a knife in her pocket, and went forth to the iron stove in the forest. When she got there, she began to scrape, and the iron gave way, and when two hours were over, she had already scraped a small hole. Then she peeped in, and saw a youth so handsome, and so brilliant with gold and with precious jewels, that her very soul was delighted. So she went on scraping, and made the hole so large that he was able to get out.

Then said he, "You are mine, and I am yours, you are my bride, and have released me." He wanted to take her away with him to his kingdom, but she entreated him to let her go once again to her father, and the king's son allowed her to do so, but she was not to say more to her father than three words, and then she was to come back again. So she went home, but she spoke more than three words, and instantly the iron stove disappeared, and was taken far away over glass mountains and piercing swords, but the king's son was set free, and no longer shut up in it. After this she bade good-bye to her father, took some money with her, but not much, and went back to the great forest, and looked for the iron stove, but it was nowhere to be found.

For nine days she sought it, and then her hunger grew so great that she did not know what to do, for she had nothing to live on. When it was evening, she seated herself in a small tree, and made up her mind to spend the night there, as she was afraid of wild beasts. When midnight drew near she saw in the distance a small light, and thought, ah, there I should be saved. She got down from the tree, and went towards the light, but on the way she prayed. Then she came to a little old house, and much grass had grown all about it, and a small heap of wood lay in front of it. She thought, "Ah, whither have I come?" and peeped in through the window, but she saw nothing inside but toads, big and little, except a table covered with wine and roast meat, and the plates and glasses were of silver. Then she took courage, and knocked at the door, and immediately the fat toad cried,

 "Little green waiting-maid,
 Waiting-maid with the limping leg,
 Little dog of the limping leg,
 Hop hither and thither,
 And quickly see who is without."

 And a small toad came walking by and opened the door to her. When she entered, they all bade her welcome, and she was forced to sit down. They asked, "Where have you come from, and whither are you going?" Then she related all that had befallen her, and how because she had transgressed the order which had been given her not to say more than three words, the stove, and the king's son also, had disappeared, and now she was about to seek him over the hill and dale until she found him. Then the old fat one said,

"Little green waiting-maid,
 Waiting-maid with the limping leg,
 Little dog of the limping leg,
 Hop hither and thither,
 And bring me the great box."

Then the little one went and brought the box. After this they gave her meat and drink, and took her to a well-made bed, which felt like silk and velvet, and she laid herself therein, in God's name, and slept. When morning came she arose, and the old toad gave her three needles out of the great box which she was to take with her, they would be needed by her, for she had to cross a high glass mountain, and go over three piercing swords and a great lake. If she did all this she would get her lover back again.

Then she gave her three things, which she was to take the greatest care of, namely, three large needles, a plough-wheel, and three nuts. With these she traveled onwards, and when she came to the glass mountain which was so slippery, she stuck the three needles first behind her feet and then before them, and so got over it, and when she was over it, she hid them in a place which she marked carefully. After this she came to the three piercing swords, and then she seated herself on her plough-wheel, and rolled over them. At last she arrived in front of a great lake, and when she had crossed it, she came to a large and beautiful castle.

She went and asked for a place, she was a poor girl, she said, and would like to be hired. She knew, however, that the king's son whom she had released from the iron stove in the great forest was in the castle. Then she was taken as a scullery-maid at low wages. But already the king's son had another maiden by his side whom he wanted to marry, for he thought that she had long been dead.

In the evening, when she had washed up and was done, she felt in her pocket and found the three nuts which the old toad had given her. She cracked one with her teeth, and was going to eat the kernel when lo and behold there was a stately royal garment in it. But when the bride heard of this she came and asked for the dress, and wanted to buy it, and said, "It is not a dress for a servant-girl." "No," she said, she would not sell it, but if the bride would grant her one thing she should have it, and that was permission to sleep one night in her bridegroom's chamber. The bride gave her permission because the dress was so pretty, and she had never had one like it.

When it was evening she said to her bridegroom, "That silly girl will sleep in your room." "If you are willing, so am I," said he. She, however, gave him a glass of wine in which she had poured a sleeping-draught. So the bridegroom and the scullery-maid went to sleep in the room, and he slept so soundly that she could not waken him. She wept the whole night and cried, "I set you free when you were in an iron stove in the wild forest, I sought you, and walked over a glass mountain, and three sharp swords, and a great lake before I found you, and yet you will not hear me." The servants sat by the chamber-door, and heard how she thus wept the whole night through, and in the morning they told it to their lord.

And the next evening when she had washed up, she opened the second nut, and a far more beautiful dress was within it, and when the bride beheld it, she wished to buy that also. But the girl would not take money, and begged that she might once again sleep in the bridegroom's chamber. The bride, however, gave him a sleeping-draught, and he slept so soundly that he could hear nothing. But the scullery-maid wept the whole night long, and cried, "I set you free when you were in an iron stove in the wild forest, I sought you, and walked over a glass mountain, and over three sharp swords and a great lake before I found you, and yet you will not hear me." The servants sat by the chamber-door and heard her weeping the whole night through, and in the morning informed their lord of it.

And on the third evening, when she had washed up, she opened the third nut, and within it was a still more beautiful dress which was stiff with pure gold. When the bride saw that she wanted to have it, but the maiden only gave it up on condition that she might for the third time sleep in the bridegroom's apartment. The king's son, however, was on his guard, and threw the sleeping-draught away. Now when she began to weep and to cry, "Dearest love, I set you free when you were in the iron stove in the terrible wild forest" - the king's son leapt up and said, "You are the true one, you are mine, and I am yours."

Thereupon, while it was still night, he got into a carriage with her, and they took away the false bride's clothes so that she could not get up. When they came to the great lake, they sailed across it, and when they reached the three sharp-cutting swords they seated themselves on the plough-wheel, and when they got to the glass mountain they thrust the three needles in it, and so at length they got to the little old house, but when they went inside, it was a great castle, and the toads were all disenchanted, and were king's children, and full of happiness. Then the wedding was celebrated, and the king's son and the princess remained in the castle, which was much larger than the castle of their fathers. But as the old king grieved at being left alone, they fetched him away, and brought him to live with them, and they had two kingdoms, and lived in happy wedlock.

 A mouse did run,
 This story is done.