by Robert Bly
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For my beloved wife, Ruth, who taught me much about fairy stories
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With deepest gratitude to the master storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, a rare being who has followed the wisdom of fairy stories all her days.
Many thanks to Libby Burton, an enthusiastic supporter of this project since she first saw it. Her welcoming of the material and her fine and careful editing have been a great blessing.
At times in the last twenty years, people have read portions of this book and given me valuable advice; I am thankful to each of them.
INTRODUCTION
The wisdom of the ancients hints that the old people know more than we do: the amazing harmonies of wedding rings imagined as gold crowns; the castles where the fat King lives; the agony of the daughter who keeps near her father by asking riddles; the great hammock let down from the stars, lovers playing on its fringes—such abundance is dazzling. The human soul arrives as a frog, having regressed since the Council of Nicaea. A boy needs the help of so many others to overcome his father’s jealousy; he’s subtly moved to a meadow bordering a lake, where a dragon eats sheep every night at dusk. There are stories with naked narratives that some speculate are remnants of vast festivals of narrative operas, retold in the simplest language seven hundred years later.
In Norwegian fairy tales, the storyteller kept his audience in thrall with certain possibilities of fabulous healing—changing the King to the local rich farmer, the gold services to a silver spoon, the castles to a well-built Norwegian farmhouse with towers dazzling only by comparison with the surrounding fine woods.
Other stories come down from the mystery initiations, and teachings later destroyed by forces that preferred Christianity, and were unlike ancient mass festivals in that they contained secret symbols and paid attention to stages of human growth. Some stories contain information meant for men and women on private journeys, seeking their way. And there are accounts of practices in which the community would drum around the shaman as he or she ascended, calling out from each successive “world.”
Sometimes fairy tales are stories of incidents, supernatural or otherwise, told and retold, in which the psyche is trying to communicate what it knows, trying to slip something past the guards of the dictator ego, embroidering it, adding elements, altering original effects, until it finally reveals some complicated truth that the fundamental imagination has wanted to see embodied for a long time.
So the psychological genius, who might have been an observant shaman or rebel priest or wise woman of the tribe, not only had to convey some important idea—for example, the stages in development of the psyche—but also had the problem of making the stages clear, while creating incidents so vivid, so astounding, so colorful, so amusing, so obscene, so satisfying to the rebellious mind, that these incidents would not be forgotten. They hoped that the story might be remembered for hundreds or thousands of years and the details would still arrive fresh in the resonating soul ready to take them in.
Somehow, the old King and the golden-haired Princesses and the dangerous high-crested dragons with evil tempers have resonated for centuries in the unconscious mind. These Princesses and dragons are folded buds that, after several thousand years of development in language, have begun to unfold in the conscious mind, and this book is an attempt to help with the later opening, so that the conscious mind may receive the fragrance of the old stories, tales told centuries ago by male and female geniuses.
My wife, Ruth, and I have enjoyed reading and talking about fairy stories together for years. They are gifts that help both of us understand the craziness of our lives. When I decided to do this book, I realized that my job would be to use my intuition and write about stages of men’s growth as I see them in these tales. I have no authority for my interpretation of themes in such stories, but I admire some astonishing thinkers on those matters: James Hillman, Ernest Becker, Gurdjieff, Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, Yeats, and of course the two men who first turned over the closed box of male growth by standing on their heads and so putting their heads down near Hades. I mean those two old clowns, Freud and Jung. And now we also have the work of Martín Prechtel, Robert Moore, Robert Johnson, and Malidoma Somé.
What has endured through human history are the stories. They are amazing trees of sound that grow inside the human memory and are fed by some longing for intimacy with others. The stories examined here are fed by the praise of the group after the last word of the story is spoken. These stories are full of information; they belong to us all.
—ROBERT BLY
ONE
THE SIX SWANS
As the story begins, a King, who has hunted “too hotly,” is separated from the rest of the hunting party and soon finds himself lost in the forest, where he comes upon an old witch. He asks her whether she can help him find his way out of the forest. “Oh yes, indeed I can. But there’s a condition first. If you don’t agree to it, you won’t find your way out at all and you’ll starve and die here.” “What’s the condition then?” “Make my daughter your Queen. If you agree to that, I will help you.”
The King agreed and followed the witch to her hut, where the daughter was waiting. She was beautiful—though he did not like her. Still, he set her up on his horse and they made their way to the palace, where they soon married.
The King and his first wife had brought to birth seven children—six boys and a girl. They loved them all beyond telling. The mother had died, and since the King feared the new Queen might not treat them kindly, he kept the children so concealed in the forest that he himself could find them only by means of a ball of yarn a wise woman had given him. As the ball unrolled in front of him, he had only to follow the yarn to find the lonely castle where they lived. He went so often to see them that the new Queen grew suspicious. She commanded the servants to follow him and report back to her. They told her about the ball of yarn.
The new Queen had a plan: she made seven shirts of white silk and sewed a charm into each one. Then she found where the King had hidden the ball of yarn, took it, and followed it to the castle where the children waited for a visit from their father. When the boys ran out to greet him, the stepmother threw a shirt over each one and their bodies were changed into those of swans. The Queen didn’t know about their sister. She thought she had done away with all the children.
When the King visited the castle, he found the little girl alone and he asked about her brothers. She said they had flown over the forest in the shape of swans and now she was by herself in the castle. The King wanted to take her home with him, but the girl was afraid of the stepmother and begged him to let her stay another night. That night she walked out into the forest and kept walking day and night until she found a little hut with six beds in it. Not daring to sleep in one of the beds, she lay down on the floor, where she slept until she heard the rustle of wings and saw swans coming in through the windows. As soon as they took off their swans’ skins she saw t
hey were her brothers. They greeted each other with great joy, but soon the brothers said, “You can’t stay here. Robbers live here. If they come home they’ll kill you.” “You can’t help me?” “No. We have only a quarter of an hour as humans. Then we’re swans again.” The little girl said, “Can’t I set you free?” “Well, if you’re willing to go for six years without speaking a single word, or laughing, and to spend the whole time sewing shirts of starwort for each one of us you could—but that’s too hard.” Then the brothers changed to swans and flew away.
The girl left the hut and went to the forest to sit all night in a tree. When she woke she began sewing the first starwort shirt. The King of a different country was out hunting, and when his men asked her what she was doing alone in the forest, she simply kept on sewing. They kept pestering her until she threw down her jewels one by one and bits of her clothing until she was there in nothing but her slip. The men climbed the tree and brought her down for the King to question her. But she wouldn’t answer.
The girl was so beautiful that the King fell in love with her. He put his mantle around her shoulders, set her on his horse, and when he got her to his castle he dressed her so richly that she shone more brightly than his palace or any of his courtiers. The King decided he must marry her, and so he did.
Meanwhile the King’s mother saw that the new Queen was mute and thought she wasn’t worthy of her son, so when their first child was born she took it away and smeared the mother’s mouth with blood. She wouldn’t speak a word in her own defense, but the King refused to think ill of her. Still, when the same thing happened two more times, the King gave his wife over to the court and she was sentenced to die by fire.
The day she was to die was the last day of the six years that she was forbidden to speak or laugh. She had finished all but the sleeve of the last shirt and she carried all six over her arm to the stake on the hill where she was to meet her death. She looked up and saw six swans flying so close to her that she was able to throw a shirt over each one. The brothers returned to their human form, except for the youngest, who still had a wing descending from his shoulder. They all kissed one another and the girl went to her husband and said, “Dear one, I have been accused, but I am innocent.” And then she told him that his own mother had taken away their children and had accused her falsely. The King had great joy when he saw his wife’s six brothers. He ordered his mother bound to the stake, where she was burned to death. Then the King and the Queen and the six brothers lived in peace and happiness the rest of their lives.
* * *
In the ancient tales we receive as fairy stories, a human being may suffer transformation and de-evolution: through ill luck a man or a woman may be turned into a frog as in “The Frog Prince,” or into a raven or a mouse, fish, ox, and so on. A bird is another favorite. Birds inhabit both air and earth worlds. In a bird we touch on the qualities of lightness, heavenliness, freedom from earth, flight from enclosure, and ascension into light. With the swan, we have joined the water world as well.
If we consider the characters of “The Six Swans” as making up a human family, or even a single human being, we see the tangled history of the swan boy. He will eat, work, sleep, and act in earthly ways, but without the help of a father. He will have fear of conventional relationships, fear of taking one job, one career, one artistic form, or one religion. He is full of longing, and he can fly long distances and migrate to other countries. He prefers light to dark and the transpersonal to the person. He feels himself to be special. Even when he becomes a man in body, his psyche will remain “the eternal boy” or the “puer aeternus.” He senses something precious and secret inside himself, and he is aware that a relationship might destroy that precious thing. He becomes a “boy god.” For a young male with such longings, fears, and abilities, a bird does very well as a symbol—and the long-necked swan even better.
I feel something immensely significant in the brief scene of the King’s turning to a negative female power for help in leaving the forest. The King has been hunting too hotly and is lost. How much do we know of the early life of our fathers? This introductory drumroll to the story seems a true prelude for the lives of so many men I know. The King chooses protection from the risk of finding his own way and chooses magical escape over discipline and suffering. With that rejection of risk, he rejects his own destiny. This is a common choice in a culture such as ours in which the help that would have come through initiation has been lost.
Adults live in fear of one kind or another—fear of failure, poverty, isolation, fear of loss of soul in the destruction of the earth. Those fears create a mood of “being lost in the forest.” Men in their twenties and thirties respond to those fears by leaning on a corporation, or an addiction, and sometimes by living off a woman, which can have the unanticipated effect of putting him in touch with a negative side of her nature. The King’s solution, when fearing for his own life, was to accept the witch’s way out.
After his children are hidden away in the forest, the King is in a relatively comfortable situation, and he dozes away and dreams of what actually needs to be done—while his Queen makes de-evolving shirts for his offspring. In fairy tales, a “dead” mother often continues to help her children through a prayer or a gift. But in stories that allow the mother to truly die, we the listeners can distinguish two sides of the mother that we spend so much childhood energy denying.
Though our mothers may have acted in a nourishing, supportive, protective, self-sacrificing, and empathetic way, we know that every human has a shadowy, hostile side that invades our lives at times and seizes us. It can be reckless, devouring, destructive, undermining, and self-aggrandizing. In fairy tales, this cluster of attitudes, impulses, and behavior patterns is called “the stepmother.” In the swans’ story, the death of the “good mother” lets us see this shadowy side clearly. Like her mother, the witch, the new Queen possesses moon magic—sideways, dark-winged methods of doing and knowing. This one knows about the longing to de-evolve.
If we apply this story to the family, we could say that the son who becomes ungrounded, flighty, airy, a puer aeternus or flying boy, has a father whose male destiny has already suffered a wound. Such a father can succumb to pressure to live a life others want him to live, or some twisting of his nature through religious heavy-handedness, or some squashing of his adventuresomeness by poverty and necessity. When there is this failure in the father, the young males never receive the grounding they need. The father removes himself from his sons, and he is unable to pass down the stiffening of the will, the strengthening of the soul, and the concentration of spirit that the old initiatory male groups worked to pass down to the young men. His entanglement with his own losses and distractions has already caused him to accept the witch. The son—our King—is acting out his father’s wound and making it visible.
The witch force may take the shape of a general nervousness in the family, a sense of remoteness, or an unspoken desire that the son lead a higher life than the father is living. In a house where the husband lives no spiritual life or inner life, or the wife is left to take care of the physical or object world by herself, all her busyness becomes a form of not doing in her own life. She doesn’t pray, she doesn’t dance. Not praying and not dancing are forces in the house, forces for not doing—no creation of art, no drawing or painting, no intimate conversation with a spouse, no creation of grief-speech together, no poems written about paths lost or never found, no “depth” in the house. The power of non-doing is like a black hole—it is stronger than any of the galaxies.
I have experienced this grief, and I know it. Men who have lived as swans are aware that all human beings move toward their own fulfillment, and yet the swan man de-evolves. He seems to himself special. He wants special food, a special road without caring whether someone else has no food at all. He believes it is right for him to have what he wants. This callousness fits perfectly the fate that the cowardice of his father led him to. He is remote from all men. He feels himself a m
an among men for only fifteen minutes a day.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in the following poem, says that if a father leads a religious life, his children will bless him even if he has left the house. But if he refuses to lead a religious life, he remains in the house as a kind of dark force:
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
And walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
Because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him, as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house,
Dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
So that his children have to go far out into the world
Towards that same church, which he forgot.
The little girl in the story—the seventh child—is most likely an inner female among the male aspects of the young man. If we wanted to call her “the soul,” I think it would be all right. When a man has lost his destiny and flown away, his soul remains behind. It is this soul that grieves. It is often through our grieving that we first notice the soul at all. Once the de-evolving shirts fall on the boys, the threads back to their father, the King, are broken.
The scene in which the soul comes upon the forest hut moves me deeply.
My soul must have had this experience often. Perhaps the traveling psyche remembers the scene from dreams. Or it could be that some early civilizations created and lived a ritual around this hut and the afterimage lingers. The hut has an eerie quality. It is empty of people, and the objects—the beds, window frames, and rugs—wait for the spirit beings to return. The objects seem filled with some great sorrow and absence, as a body whose spirit has left. We remember that the shaman’s body lies on the floor when his soul is flying elsewhere; and his relatives sit about, anxiously waiting, softly beating a drum in this world, holding it down, keeping it stable for the stretched-out, waiting body.