Four Archetypes (19 page)

434

The archetype of the spirit in this, be it said, by no means primitive fairytale is expressed theriomorphically as a system of three functions which is subordinated to a unity, the evil spirit, in the same way that some unnamed authority has crucified the raven with a triad of three nails. The two supraordinate unities correspond in the first case to the inferior function which is the arch-enemy of the main function, namely to the hunter; and in the second case to the main function, namely to the hero. Hunter and hero are ultimately equated with one another, so that the hunter’s function is resolved in the hero. As a matter of fact, the hero lies dormant in the hunter from the very beginning, egging him on, with all the unmoral means at his disposal, to carry out the rape of the soul, and then causing him to play her into the hero’s hands against the hunter’s will. On the surface a furious conflict rages between them, but down below the one goes about the other’s business. The knot is unravelled directly the hero succeeds in capturing the quaternity—or in psychological language, when he assimilates the inferior function
into the ternary system. That puts an end to the conflict at one blow, and the figure of the hunter melts into thin air. After this victory, the hero sets his princess upon the three-legged steed and together they ride away to her father’s kingdom. From now on she rules and personifies the realm of spirit that formerly served the wicked hunter. Thus the anima is and remains the representative of that part of the unconscious which can never be assimilated into a humanly attainable whole.

435

Postscript
. Only after the completion of my manuscript was my attention drawn by a friend to a Russian variant of our story. It bears the title “Maria Morevna.”
⁵⁴
The hero of the story is no swineherd, but Czarevitch Ivan. There is an interesting explanation of the three helpful animals: they correspond to Ivan’s three sisters and their husbands, who are really birds. The three sisters represent an unconscious triad of functions related to both the animal and spiritual realms. The bird-men are a species of angel and emphasize the auxiliary nature of the unconscious functions. In the story they intervene at the critical moment when the hero—unlike his German counterpart—gets into the power of the evil spirit and is killed and dismembered (the typical fate of the God-man!).
⁵⁵
The evil spirit is an old man who is often shown naked and is called Koschei
⁵⁶
the Deathless. The corresponding witch is the well-known Baba Yaga. The three helpful animals of the German variant are doubled here, appearing first as the bird-men and then as the lion, the strange bird, and the bees. The princess is Queen Maria Morevna, a redoubtable martial leader—Mary the queen of heaven is lauded in the Russian Orthodox hymnal as “leader of hosts”!—who has chained up the evil spirit with twelve chains in the forbidden room in her castle. When Ivan slakes the old devil’s thirst he makes off with the queen. The magic riding animals do not in the end turn into human beings. This Russian story has a distinctly more primitive character.

436

The following remarks lay no claim to general interest, being in the main technical. I wanted at first to delete them from this revised version of my essay, but then I changed my mind and appended them in a supplement. The reader who is not specifically interested in psychology can safely skip this section. For, in what follows, I have dealt with the abstruse-looking problem of the three- and four-leggedness of the magic horses, and presented my reflections in such a way as to demonstrate the method I have employed. This piece of psychological reasoning rests firstly on the irrational data of the material, that is, of the fairytale, myth, or dream, and secondly on the conscious realization of the “latent” rational connections which these data have with one another. That such connections exist at all is something of a hypothesis, like that which asserts that dreams have a meaning. The truth of this assumption is not established
a priori:
its usefulness can only be proved by application. It therefore remains to be seen whether its methodical application to irrational material enables one to interpret the latter in a meaningful way. Its application consists in approaching the material as if it had a coherent inner meaning. For this purpose most of the data require a certain amplification, that is, they need to be clarified, generalized, and approximated to a more or less general concept in accordance with Cardan’s rule of interpretation. For instance, the three-leggedness, in order to be recognized for what it is, has first to be separated from the horse and then approximated to its specific principle—the principle of threeness. Likewise, the four-leggedness in the fairytale, when raised to the level of a general concept, enters into relationship with the threeness, and as a result we have the enigma mentioned in the
Timaeus
, the problem of three and four. Triads and tetrads represent archetypal structures that play a significant part in all symbolism and are equally important for the investigation of myths and dreams. By raising the irrational datum (three-leggedness and four-leggedness) to the level of a general concept we elicit the universal meaning of this motif and encourage the inquiring mind to tackle the problem seriously. This task involves a series of reflections and deductions of a
technical nature which I would not wish to withhold from the psychologically interested reader and especially from the professional, the less so as this labour of the intellect represents a typical unravelling of symbols and is indispensable for an adequate understanding of the products of the unconscious. Only in this way can the nexus of unconscious relationships be made to yield their own meaning, in contrast to those deductive interpretations derived from a preconceived theory, e.g., interpretations based on astronomy, meteorology, mythology, and—last but not least—the sexual theory.

437

The three-legged and four-legged horses are in truth a recondite matter worthy of closer examination. The three and the four remind us not only of the dilemma we have already met in the theory of psychological functions, but also of the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, which plays a considerable role in alchemy. It may therefore be rewarding to examine more closely the meaning of the miraculous horses.

438

The first thing that seems to me worthy of note is that the three-legged horse which is assigned to the princess as her mount is a mare, and is moreover herself a bewitched princess. Threeness is unmistakably connected here with femininity, whereas from the dominating religious standpoint of consciousness it is an exclusively masculine affair, quite apart from the fact that 3, as an uneven number, is masculine in the first place. One could therefore translate threeness as “masculinity” outright, this being all the more significant when one remembers the ancient Egyptian triunity of God, Ka-mutef,
⁵⁷
and Pharaoh.

439

Three-leggedness, as the attribute of some animal, denotes the unconscious masculinity immanent in a female creature. In a real woman it would correspond to the animus who, like the magic horse, represents “spirit.” In the case of the anima, however, threeness does not coincide with any Christian idea of the Trinity but with the “lower triangle,” the inferior function triad that constitutes the “shadow.” The inferior half of the personality is for the greater part unconscious. It does not denote the whole of the unconscious, but only the personal segment of it. The anima, on the other hand, so far as she is distinguished from the shadow, personifies the collective unconscious.
If threeness is assigned to her as a riding-animal, it means that she “rides” the shadow, is related to it as the
mar
.
⁵⁸
In that case she possesses the shadow. But if she herself is the horse, then she has lost her dominating position as a personification of the collective unconscious and is “ridden”—possessed—by Princess A, spouse of the hero. As the fairytale rightly says, she has been changed by witchcraft into the three-legged horse (Princess B).

We can sort out this imbroglio more or less as follows:

440

1. Princess A is the anima
⁵⁹
of the hero. She rides—that is, possesses—the three-legged horse, who is the shadow, the inferior function-triad of her later spouse. To put it more simply: she has taken possession of the inferior half of the hero’s personality. She has caught him on his weak side, as so often happens in ordinary life, for where one is weak one needs support and completion. In fact, a woman’s place is on the weak side of a man. This is how we would have to formulate the situation if we regarded the hero and Princess A as two ordinary people. But since it is a fairy-story played out mainly in the world of magic, we are probably more correct in interpreting Princess A as the hero’s anima. In that case the hero has been wafted out of the profane world through his encounter with the anima, like Merlin by his fairy: as an ordinary man he is like one caught in a marvellous dream, viewing the world through a veil of mist.

441

2. The matter is now considerably complicated by the unexpected fact that the three-legged horse is a mare, an equivalent of Princess A. She (the mare) is Princess B, who in the shape of a horse corresponds to Princess A’s shadow (i.e., her inferior function-triad). Princess B, however, differs from Princess A in that, unlike her, she does not ride the horse but is contained in it: she is bewitched and has thus come under the spell of a masculine triad. Therefore, she is possessed by a shadow.

442

3. The question now is,
whose
shadow? It cannot be the shadow of the hero, for this is already taken up by the latter’s
anima. The fairytale gives us the answer: it is the hunter or magician who has bewitched her. As we have seen, the hunter is somehow connected with the hero, since the latter gradually puts himself in his shoes. Hence one could easily arrive at the conjecture that the hunter is at bottom none other than the shadow of the hero. But this supposition is contradicted by the fact that the hunter stands for a formidable power which extends not only to the hero’s anima but much further, namely to the royal brother-sister pair of whose existence the hero and his anima have no notion, and who appear very much out of the blue in the story itself. The power that extends beyond the orbit of the individual has a more than individual character and cannot therefore be identified with the shadow, if we conceive and define this as the dark half of the personality. As a supra-individual factor the numen of the hunter is a dominant of the collective unconscious, and its characteristic features—hunter, magician, raven, miraculous horse, crucifixion or suspension high up in the boughs of the world-tree
⁶⁰
—touch the Germanic psyche very closely. Hence the Christian
Weltanschauung
, when reflected in the ocean of the (Germanic) unconscious, logically takes on the features of Wotan.
⁶¹
In the figure of the hunter we meet an
imago dei
, a God-image, for Wotan is also a god of winds and spirits, on which account the Romans fittingly interpreted him as Mercury.

443

4. The Prince and his sister, Princess B, have therefore been seized by a pagan god and changed into horses, i.e., thrust down to the animal level, into the realm of the unconscious. The inference is that in their proper human shape the pair of them
once belonged to the sphere of collective consciousness. But who are they?

444

In order to answer this question we must proceed from the fact that these two are an undoubted counterpart of the hero and Princess A. They are connected with the latter also because they serve as their mounts, and in consequence they appear as their lower, animal halves. Because of its almost total unconsciousness, the animal has always symbolized the psychic sphere in man which lies hidden in the darkness of the body’s instinctual life. The hero rides the stallion, characterized by the even (feminine) number 4; Princess A rides the mare who has only three legs (3 = a masculine number). These numbers make it clear that the transformation into animals has brought with it a modification of sex character: the stallion has a feminine attribute, the mare a masculine one. Psychology can confirm this development as follows: to the degree that a man is overpowered by the (collective) unconscious there is not only a more unbridled intrusion of the instinctual sphere, but a certain feminine character also makes its appearance, which I have suggested should be called “anima.” If, on the other hand, a woman comes under the domination of the unconscious, the darker side of her feminine nature emerges all the more strongly, coupled with markedly masculine traits. These latter are comprised under the term “animus.”
⁶²

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5. According to the fairytale, however, the animal form of the brother-sister pair is “unreal” and due simply to the magic influence of the pagan hunter-god. If they were nothing but animals, we could rest content with this interpretation. But that would be to pass over in unmerited silence the singular allusion to a modification of sex character. The white horses are no ordinary horses: they are miraculous beasts with supernatural powers. Therefore the human figures out of which the horses were magically conjured must likewise have had something supernatural about them. The fairytale makes no comment here, but if our assumption is correct that the two animal forms correspond to the subhuman components of hero and princess, then it follows that the human forms—Prince and Princess B—must correspond to their superhuman components. The
superhuman quality of the original swineherd is shown by the fact that he becomes a hero, practically a half-god, since he does not stay with his swine but climbs the world-tree, where he is very nearly made its prisoner, like Wotan. Similarly, he could not have become like the hunter if he did not have a certain resemblance to him in the first place. In the same way the imprisonment of Princess A on the top of the world-tree proves her electness, and in so far as she shares the hunter’s bed, as stated by the tale, she is actually the bride of God.