This fairy tale became one of my
teachers, for it made me explore and question what was going on in my own life
and in the culture at large. As I struggled
to find a sense of my identity as a woman, these marvelous images illuminated
my path. This story speaks of a feminine
initiation, a process by which a woman can achieve a conscious feminine
standpoint. At the same time, it
explains how the feminine transformative mysteries deepen and enrich our
connection to both the masculine and feminine creative spirit, and how these
forces are renewed in the culture. For
the question we are all asking ourselves, collectively and individually, is,
"How do we find a new spirit, a new orientation, a new way of being
alive?"
It is important to remember that the
thing that makes these fairy tales and myths so compelling is their connection
to the archetypes, those unknown factors in the psyche that manifest through
archetypal images. The archetypes are
the patterns of behavior inherent in human beings. As Jung and his colleague, Marie-Louise von
Franz, have pointed out:
"Fairy tales are the purest
and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific
investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their
simplest, barest and most concise form.
In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the
understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche."8
The
fairy tale is its own best explanation, for its meaning is contained in the
totality of its motifs, connected by the thread of the story.9 But a symbolic and psychological
re-telling of the tale becomes necessary since our ability to understand the
language of images has been diminished by too strong a dependence on
rationality. Just as many of us have
difficulty understanding the logic and images of our dreams when we first begin
to work with them, so too, we have to look at the separate elements in a fairy
tale before we can see it as a whole. We
have to track and stalk the symbols and images and even the thread that holds
the story together. We have to let our
imagination play with it. We have to
look at it from different perspectives, using our intuition, feeling, thinking
and sensation, and we have to bring our psychological understanding and
experience to it, for our age is engaged in the discovery of this old and yet
new psychic reality.
Fairy tales, like dreams and myths,
are expressions of the things left out of collective and individual
consciousness. Throughout the ages,
different stages of human development have fostered stories that reflect different
phases of individual development. Allerleirauh is one of the many variants
of the story of Cinderella. The
Cinderella motif is also concerned with the re-discovery of the feminine
principle, hidden away among the ashes and dirt of life. On a more spiritual level, it depicts the
search for Wisdom as the Feminine Spirit.
"Among the ancients, 'Wisdom'
implied Love and Knowledge blended in perfect and equal proportions."10 Matthew Fox, in his book The Coming of
the Cosmic Christ, speaks of the dying of Wisdom in our culture and the
need to search for it. He describes
Wisdom as belonging to Earth and creativity.
"...Wisdom is of Mother
Earth, for nature contains the oldest wisdom in the universe. Wisdom requires the right brain as well as
the left, for it is birthed by both analysis and synthesis. Wisdom requires imagination and nurtures
it. Wisdom often comes via the creative
spokespersons of a culture, in the handing on of stories, sagas, myths, and
images from the past and from the future."11
Many of the names of the heroines of
these Cinderella tales imply the idea of the Light-Giver, the bright, shining
one.12 In Robin McKinley’s wonderful and
heart-wrenching modern re-telling of this tale, DeerSkin, Princess Lissar is named for the light. Allerleirauh's light is symbolized by her
three dresses, hidden under the robe of fur, that is, within the earthy
instinctual nature. This motif of three
dresses is used in many fairy tales about redeeming the feminine spirit, and
brings to mind the ancient tales of the Heavenly Sumerian Goddess Inanna, who
disrobes as She descends into the Underworld, where She suffers a death and a
rebirth, and then ascends once more to the heavens, robed in glory.13
On Being a Father’s
Daughter
Allerleirauh
depicts this process in a manner that speaks to our times, for collectively
we are in the situation of demanding the Father's gifts, as women look for
equality on the level of masculine achievement.
And if this is the only kind of equality we know to look for, women will
stay wedded to the Father. Women most
especially need to reconnect to our own earthy wisdom, for equality comes from
an inner spirit, and not an outer form.
The theme of renewal is personified
in this fairy tale by the fact that there is a king and a queen in the
beginning of the tale, and a new queen and a new king at the end. The images of the king and the queen
symbolize wholeness, a unity of forces or factors that make up a paradigm, a
cultural dominant, or a psychic identity.
The king and the queen are the kingdom, or our self-identity, in
microcosm. It is only when masculine and
feminine are united in a common vision that the kingdom can prosper. Hopefully, men and women will come to this
realization soon, for we must also heal our relationships if we want to heal
our culture.
The king symbolizes the central, dominant
content of collective consciousness, the central god-image that dominates a
civilization. For the West, it has
certainly been Christianity, and later, the rational, scientific outlook, which
led to the domination of Nature’s resources.
Our emphasis on the economy is another collective dominant. These masculine dominants keep pushing for
the search for perfection and continuous expansion, and therefore, they have
given rise to a very large shadow – the repression of all that is seen as
imperfect or impediments to progress.
Individually, the king represents the dominant attitude of subjective
consciousness or our ego attitude. He is
the inner 'king' who sets up standards for our behavior and belief.
The queen is the inner partner of
this king, and represents the intangible, intuitive, feeling side of this
dominant, the aspect that gives life and energy to this collective or
individual story. She is the passion and
enthusiasm which drives the collective impulse of our capitalistic economic
system or the deep spiritual viability of our religions. If the queen dies, the energy invested in a
particular system of belief is siphoned away.
When a cultural dominant, a crucial paradigm, a religious orientation,
wears out and needs renewal (and this is a natural and necessary occurrence),
the first thing to die out is the feeling attachments to it.
When we begin to realize the
devastation that our economic system has caused to the environment, it is hard
to believe that 'progress is our most important product'! When religions cannot give their people a
viable connection to Spirit, people stop attending their religious
services. The images of that particular
dominant no longer capture the feelings and imaginations of the people. Western culture is experiencing this death –
we no longer believe what our ancestors once did. On an individual level, when a conscious
attitude is no longer life-giving, the feeling tone is lost, and the psychic
energy goes back into the unconscious.
Life loses its meaning.
Individuals go into a depression and we get a society that is depressed,
addicted, obese and unbalanced.
When a cultural dominant dies, we
witness the tremendous energy and chaos underlying the need for renewal being
expressed in the many fads, cults and excesses that abound in modern
times. Human beings seem to need a
dominant, some form of psychic wholeness to relate to that helps them channel
the tremendous energies of life. The king
and the queen represent that psychic wholeness.
In Allerleirauh, the fact that the queen dies implies that the
predominant spirit of the times is in need of renewal. But what form will this renewal take? The tale tells us that women are called upon
to find our own feminine standpoint, independent of the expectations of the old
masculine culture, if a new wholeness and perspective is to be achieved. Of course, men must engage in this struggle
too, but I feel that it is women who must incarnate this renewal in our lives,
and stop selling out to masculine values.
"The basic rejection and
denigration of feminine values as compared to masculine values is the heritage
of our historically patriarchal culture.
This has resulted in a situation in which the feminine individuation problem
has become a pioneering task that perhaps is meant to usher in a new period of
culture."14
For women today, and for our
culture, the dying queen represents the aspects of the feminine that are
approved of by the patriarchy. For far too
long, women have shaped our lives to masculine ideals of womanhood. We often repress our own concern with
personal authority and the satisfaction of our own needs for the sake of
others. We struggle to transform our
mature, womanly bodies into that of young teenage girls to attract men’s
attention. Our wise, womanly mothering wisdom is discounted in political and
academic circles.
The devaluation of the feminine over
the past 4000 years led to the second-class status of women, and women began to
accept this view of our own sex. We were
told that, like our mother Eve, we were the source of humanity's fall from
grace, as well as being the source of temptation for men. Women, 'liberated' women, still have a sense
of guilt when some strange man follows them home or molests them! They cannot help thinking that somehow, they
are at fault. And this theme is carried
over into the stories our culture tells itself, such as movies about the
'obsessive' woman in Fatal Attraction,
or the violence depicted against women in movies like Sleeping with the Enemy or The
Silence of Lambs. The 'dark' side of
the feminine – the earthy, often uncanny, aspects - were vilified by men who
were afraid of it, and so women lost touch with our sexuality, our feelings,
our imagination, our mystery, and our wild freedom.
The queen in this fairy tale carries
the projection of the masculine ideal of womanhood. No dark, mysterious woman is she, but rather
a 'heavenly' light being. This is
symbolized by her golden hair, which is emphasized in the tale. Hair often symbolizes the life-force, and the
golden color indicates that it is a sun-like, rational force. This feminine aspect is removed from the
Earth, from the 'darkness' that is also a part of the Feminine Spirit. This feminine dominant serves the heavenly,
and in Western culture, masculine ideals.
She is like the Greek Goddess Athena, the virginal daughter of the
Father, in the Father's service, open and receptive to his spirit alone.15
Like Athena, this queen carries and reflects
and defends the masculine spirit in all things.
Why else would she demand that the king marry someone who is as
beautiful as she, with exactly the same golden hair. This demand assures the continuance of this
particular masculine dominant, whether or not it is the necessary and
beneficial thing to do. Instead of
promoting change, which is life, she stops it. She is the epitome of a Father’s Daughter, a
daughter of patriarchy. Unfortunately, father’s daughters have been
cut off from the earthy knowledge of the cycle of life.
This queen is removed from her
feminine roots, which would connect her to the natural rhythms of life, death
and rebirth, which are so basic to the feminine mysteries and spirit. In fact, she resists those rhythms by
demanding the king make this promise.
This is an aspect of the patriarchy which we often overlook; namely,
that there is a feminine element that wants to perpetuate the old value
system. Part of the reason we overlook
it, and therefore why it becomes so troublesome, is because it is unconscious. Psychologically, the fact that the queen dies
symbolizes that this feminine component has worn out and has sunk back into the
unconscious. It now rules the king unconsciously,
through the promise, and so keeps him tied to outer forms, regardless of his
own inner feelings and their demands.
The queen herself condemns her
daughter to marriage with the Father.
This could only happen in a culture or an individual where a true
feminine standpoint is lacking. If the feminine
viewpoint brings into life feeling-valuation, imagination, natural rhythms and
unity, then we find that this dead queen operates behind the scenes to keep
this life force from entering into our governmental, economic and religious
structures.
This is an apt image of what
happens when the American government, in the name of democracy, liberty and
justice, supports tyrants and their repressive regimes. Or when we are told that our liberties need
to be curtailed for our own security.
Or that we must make war to bring about peace. The promise that the king makes to the queen
reflects the refusal to trust that life renews itself, and that it will bring
about the necessary changes if we let it.
The promise stops the flow of life into new forms; it would rather see
the old husks live on past their time.
This is an image of the dragon that would devour the Woman and her divine child in The Book of Revelation. Psychologically,
the collective or individual dominant has become rigid and petrified, dry and
lifeless. It becomes a Wasteland.
We
are all Father’s Daughters, women who have been sold out by mothers who have
forgotten their own feminine wisdom. We
make our decisions about life based on a belief system that does not value the
gifts of Feminine Spirit. How do you
feel about it? Are your life decisions
based on what your heart knows or what your head thinks?
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