After a significant encounter with the dark feminine recently, an encounter which I needed to have in order to jog me into a new stage of adult life I didn't have the power to reach in the past, I serendipitously read this incredible story and analysis from Marie Louise Von-Franz charting the role of the dark feminine as other and anima. Other in the sense of the enactment of this story in the relation between man and woman seeking to wrestle and writhe in the journey of the mature soul through parent complexes and into a state of mature and trustable individuation. Anima in the sense of the enactment of this story in the relation between a man and his unencountered, shadowed-off, and undeveloped feminine, as she seeks to be known through him in order that he might not displace her onto a projective object (a partner) in the future, but rather, play in the waters of nakedly individuated maturity. In dealing with the mother complex in both early childhood and later years, I've made space for encountering the raw anima as both projected onto my love partner and as repressed in my own identity. It's tough going at first - the pain of looking squarely at what I had been unconsciously clinging to, what had been unconsciously clinging to me, and the harm done by and to me in that configuration is very difficult to digest at first sitting. However, as time has traversed, the next layer of story in the emergence of the submerged feminine has started to take shape, and she's a wonderfully instructive aspect. In liberating this corner of the psyche, I have a strength in understanding and dealing with my own decisions, and in deeply encountering the longings of the encounters I have with women incarnate. I feel increasingly aware of the propensity in the uninitiated mind to run to the mother object, and in those who don't, to merely intellectualise the feminine in order to keep it digestible merely as concept - or as Von Franz puts it (in reference to the first stage encounter at the priest's altar) the immature urge for intellectuals to "dance up and down with their brain". As she instructs, "Why don't they ever come down to earth, touch earth?", and the answer is that they fear the black anima will get them". I have been encountering this in myself and in the distracted, shallower relations of this contemporary urban predicament for some time now, and I'm deeply warmed by the power of story to once again wrap around the newfound view which has emerged in my intrapsychic and interpersonal relations as I continue to choose the path of a depthy individuation in the service of personal emergence, relational intimacy and the nurturing of an appropriately matured happiness. All I have left most of the time is awe, praise and a stoic awareness that the road of individuation is very had won... and when surveying what's lost when this work is not done, that difficult view is reward enough for this traveller.
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There are two versions of this European fairy tale which illustrates the dark aspect of the anima. When the anima appears in such a way, we must remember that both versions come from Catholic countries, where the light side of the anima is already recognized and projected onto the Virgin Mary, and so in compensation the emphasis is on the dark side, the black side of the anima.
The Austrian version of "The Black Princess" starts with an old king and queen. The queen desperately wants to have a child, but they had none. A river runs through the town, with a bridge spanning it. On the right side of the bridge is a crucifix, and on the left side a stone figure of Lucifer. (It is common in Europe for a crucifix to stand near bridges in order to protect travelers, because the devil lives under the bridge and tries to pull people under.)
The queen goes regularly to the bridge and cries and prays to Christ to give her a child, but after a while she becomes tired of doing this and getting no results, so she decides to turn to the devil. Then, after three months, she finds herself pregnant.
The king feels that he isn't responsible for this pregnancy, but he says nothing about it. At the end of six months he gives a huge festival, and at the end of nine months the queen gives birth to a coal-black baby girl.
This child grows as much in one hour as any other would in a year, and so in twenty-four hours she is already an adult. At this time she says to the king and the queen, "Oh, you unhappy fa- ther and unhappy mother, now I must die. Bury me behind the altar in the church, and always keep a guard in the church during the night, or I will bring a terrible catastrophe on the land."
(The South German parallel of this story says that a witch gives the old couple tea, which makes the queen pregnant with the black child. The witch tells the king to drink it "in the name of God," but the king is so excited that he blurts out: "in the name of God and the Devil." The black child is born, and calls, "Father." The king answers, "Yes, my child." She replies, "Now I have talked for the first time." This happens three times, after which she says, "l have talked for the third time. Now make an iron coffin, because I must die," giving instructions as in the other version for her burial behind the altar and for the guard).
And so the black woman is buried behind the altar, and every night a soldier guards the coffin. But every morning when they open the church at 4:00 a.m., they find that the guard has been torn to pieces.
Naturally the people strongly resist being drafted to stand guard in the church, only to be torn to bits, and they come near to starting a revolution because they don't want to serve. And so the king finally brings a regiment of soldiers in from a foreign country where what happens in the church is not known.
Among the foreign regiment there are three brothers, one a major, one a captain, and the third a common soldier who is apparently never going to amount to anything: he lives light heartedly, carouses and spends his money freely, frequently getting into trouble and serving time in prison.
When it is the major's turn to serve as guard, he tricks this common-soldier brother into taking his place. The soldier goes into the church, prays first, and then goes into the pulpit, making crosses on all the steps leading up to it.
At midnight the black woman comes out of her coffin, enveloped in fiery flames. She flies into a rage when she finds him in the pulpit, but she can't climb the steps to reach him because of the crosses. She goes mad trying to get to him, overthrowing the seats, throwing down the statues, even stacking up chairs near the pulpit, trying to reach him. But he is saved because the clock strikes twelve, at which time she must return to her coffin.
The next morning the people are astonished to find the soldier alive. They tell him that since he is so clever, he had better stand guard again the next night. But he is afraid. It seems to him that he has done enough and he tries to escape.
While he is trying to get away, he meets an old beggarman who tells him to go back and stand guard, but this time to hide behind the statue of the Virgin Mary.
The soldier does as he is advised. and this time the black princess is even more enraged. It takes her a long time to find where he is hiding, but then just as she is about to catch him the clock strikes twelve and he is saved as before.
The people rejoice to find the soldier alive again the next morning, and now, naturally, he is elected to return for a third night. Again he wants to run away, but again the old beggar intervenes, telling him that this time he should climb into her coffin as soon as she leaves it. He must lie there with his eyes closed. as if he were dead, and make no answer when she discovers him. The old man says the princess will be alarmed when he doesn't get out-she will shout at him, rant and rave; then she will beg him, but only when she says in just the right way, "Rudolph, get up," should he come out of the coffin.
The soldier does as he is told. When the princess quiets down, she turns into a white maiden, and in the morning when the church is opened the two lovers are found. They marry, and later he becomes a king.
(In the other version, it is God, not an old beggar, who intervenes. God becomes tired of all these tricks of Lucifer's daughter; he can't stand them anymore and teaches the soldier how to redeem her).
The story of the black princess has a compensatory function for the modern Christian man. It is the modem situation of the anima problem. The anima in fairy tales is very often represented as the devil's daughter. This is because the feminine principle in Protestant countries is lacking: there is no goddess, and so she has fallen into the unconscious where she takes on a dark aspect. So in Protestant countries it is the entire anima which is lacking, but in Catholic countries only the dark side is missing, for the Virgin Mary represents the light side.
In the thirteenth century the introduction of the cult of Mary gave the Christian man an idealized feminine figure onto which to project his anima. That is fine as far as it goes, but it had the disadvantage that the individual choice of an anima projection was gone - there was only the single identical anima for every man. In the days of chivalry, each knight chose to serve a particular lady. Then, as Christianity and the cult of Mary took hold, there came the increasing persecution of witches as men experienced the fascination of a specific woman.
You see, the element of reality carried by an individual woman is not represented in the goddess or in an ideal figure such as the Virgin Mary. To put together all these paradoxical aspects of the feminine, and to know how to relate to them, is one of the great difficulties.
The initial situation in "The Black Princess" is that the king and queen have no children. This means that the ruling attitude, personified in the king, has become sterile. Though there is a balance between the masculine and feminine powers, the situation lacks new life-perhaps because darkness is excluded. The Queen wants desperately to have a child, and that is why she eventually prays to Lucifer when she has had enough of praying to Christ without result.
In a similar Austrian tale, the devil has a wife who is also his grandmother, and at the same time he has a daughter who lives with them. Thus there is an incestuous relationship. So we have the double set-up:
in the Christian religion: God -> Son -> Holy Ghost
and below: Devil -> Grandmother -> Daughter
The general Christian way of thinking is that the Holy Ghost is a necessity for humanity. It enters us and enables us to do things even beyond Christ. In the dark side, it is the devil's daughter who has the true feeling for mankind, who loves men. This devil's daughter is the link between the dark side and the light.
In our story the king feels that he isn't responsible for the pregnancy; it is really Lucifer who has impregnated the queen. There are medieval legends that the devil will have a daughter and will commit incest with her, and her child will become the Anti-Christ.
There is the queer fact that the devil's daughter, the Black Princess, grows so quickly: she speaks only three times, and she grows as much in one hour as a natural child does in a year. This characterizes her as being inhuman, with magic powers, living outside the human world of time and space.
We are in the habit of speaking of the unconscious as having no time and space boundaries, and because we ourselves are imprisoned in time and space, we cannot understand the unconscious. But this tale tells us that the archetypes in the unconscious cannot understand our life either, because they live outside time and space, that is, in another rhythm of life.
So the black princess lives life in a different rhythm, which probably refers to a fact that we observe in everyday life-that the anima in anima-possessed men acts on age levels quite un- connected with the actual age of the man himself, and her timelessness prevents him from getting into the "here" and, especially, the "now" of the present moment. There is always the anima outside time, pulling the man outside time, disturbing the whole normal rhythm of his development.
Then you have these "wise" young boys and "childish" old men'. In the story she appears in fiery flames, too full of uncontrolled energy and libido, destroying life.
She represents a vitality which doesn't carry a man into life, but somehow carries him outside of life. (In the German parallel, she doesn't tear the men to pieces, she eats them. She is always hungry.)
This anima contains the element of impatience that you find in anima-possessed men: their unwillingness or refusal to do what is necessary right now, at this moment. That is also seen in the fast growth of the black princess, because she is living in this un- natural rhythm. She belongs to eternity and to the gods, and it is illegitimate to pull her into human areas of life.
Three times she calls, "Father," and then she says, 'Now I will die and you must bury me behind the altar and every night there must be a guard in the church." Here she reveals who she really is-what she really represents - namely, the shadow of the prevailing Christian dogma. She is behind the altar, the shadow side; she makes known who she is by asking to be buried there. One could say that she has taken a step toward her redemption by revealing her divine nature, dark as it is. Regarding the iron coffin, iron is the metal of the planet Mars and is associated with the god of the same name. Iron has to do with conflict, because Mars is the god of war. Also, in alchemical writings it refers to the mortal, decaying body, because iron rusts so easily. Therefore it comes to represent the decaying mortal matter of the body, that aspect of our nature which is corruptible. This meaning probably derives from the Biblical reference to treasures which rust cannot eat. [Matt. 6:19]
The black princess is now imprisoned in the iron coffin, which reflects the fact hat what we reject psychologically often be- comes imprisoned in the body. She is dead during the day, but alive at night, which shows the shadowy aspect of this anima figure. In just this way, men may be unconscious of the influence of their anima during their daytime life, and then be assailed by her at night, in dreams. Now she starts to kill human beings, and threatens to bring about a catastrophe in the land. For the most part, she destroys simple men, namely soldiers-not the rulers, but the simple people-which shows how the anima attacks the emotional side, the side of the inferior function is on the collective level. we see this occur in so-called populist movements, such as Communism or Nazism, where this aspect of anima possession is at work.
In fairy tales it is typically the "inferior" man, the fool or dummling, who redeems the princess. Here he is a light-hearted spendthrift, drinking too much and ending up in jail. But he has the ability to redeem the princess. He becomes the great hero because he is naive and not afraid of the dark. The naive one has the gift of being spontaneous and the ability to expose oneself to new facts; that is the proper attitude toward the unconscious.
On the first night, the young soldier climbs up into the pulpit, making little crosses on the steps. And the second night, he hides behind the Virgin Mary. Thus twice he escapes by climbing up.
The first escape is very subtle: he goes to where the priest talks to the community; that is how he saves himself. Though the priest usually carries a collective role as a spiritual leader, here the soldier is taking the priest's role as a leader of the collective, the teacher and truth-teller to the community. He takes on this role of one who knows and leads, in order not to be overcome by the unconscious. There is a hint here that one way a man can deal with the anima is not to become overwhelmed and simply passive, but rather to try to take action in some way. The real essence of a priest is that he has renounced the experience of the anima in its earthly aspect, that is, through an actual woman, and he keeps himself above the situation as much as he can. At all costs, he must keep his head and not be overrun.
Of course, this only puts off the solution for our hero; it is a temporary solution, too near the old attitude to be the final answer. It is a form of escape-but then, for a soldier to play the role of a priest means he is trying to get above the situation. We say in German that intellectuals "dance up and down with their brain." If we ask, "Why don't they ever come down to earth, touch earth?" the answer is that they fear the black anima will get them.
Sometimes, for the time being, nothing else can be done. This is at least a putting off of the problem. The pulpit also represents that part which is relatively intellectual. It is only a putting off, because the fiery black princess pulls up chairs and would have got him except that midnight comes. This does indicate that she is bound to a certain time rhythm here, and appears in that time rhythm. She is bound-and not bound.
That is the great problem with the unconscious. It is only a relative lime and relative space. The unconscious is not completely outside time. As the figure of a human person, the prlncess has come into the human realm to this extent. The striking of the clock, or the crowing of the cock, which ends her activity for the night, may be connected with the turn toward morning, when consciousness begins increasing again.
One could say that the anima is also affected by the fact that if a man tries to relate to her, the poor girl becomes bound to the human. Animus and anima are not always happy to have this relationship-they lose part of their power when they are made conscious. They would prefer to remain gods and goddesses and keep their power. That is why there is a certain amount of energetic resistance to their integration.
This cage of time and space can also be helpful. In the case of the clock striking midnight, the soldier is saved by time. Thus, a man should fight his impatience, which is an anima trick. He should accept the boundaries of time and space. If he would take the attitude that this is a helpful thing, this prison of time and space, then just waiting, putting off, using time as an element, sometimes helps to bring about an increase in consciousness.
When a man is possessed by the anima, then he feels that he must immediately do something about the situation - it is terribly urgent to send off a letter, for instance, or telephone and speak his mind. The tip-off to this state of possession is often just this feeling of urgency that it has to be done this minute.
There are stories among primitive tribes and in northern Europe which revolve around a competition as to who can annoy the opponent into exploding first. The one who endures the annoying and tormenting the longest without losing control of his temper wins the contest, and the loser must become his servant, obliged to do the most demeaning things. But this servant plays his tricks too, and one day the other will explode, and then the servant can cut off his head!
If one doesn't allow such a panic or rush to get the better of oneself, then the figure in the unconscious will begin to change. This happens in our story when the soldier gets into the coffin and plays dead; he won't listen or answer or pay any attention to the black princess's threats.
I know an analyst whose patient came to say good-bye, since he intended to commit suicide immediately afterward. She didn't discuss his decision with him-she couldn't have answered the threat directly-but just persuaded him to first drink a glass of wine with her . . . and another. . . and another. Thus time intervened and the suicide didn't happen.
If one can contain the excitement, delay acting on it, one finally becomes tired, which is a good way of dealing with such a destructive emotional outburst. Therefore time is a terribly important factor in dealing with the anima.
Next time the soldier wants to run away because he thinks he has done enough, but he meets the old man (or, in the German tale, God, who is fed up with the devil's tricks) who tells him to climb up behind the Virgin Mary. This is the place of the shadowy, dark aspect of the feminine, the aspect that has not been included in the collective. When he goes there, it is already the same thing as later when he gets into her coffin. That is, he takes her place away from her, as though saying, "l know you, know where you belong, where you come from."
A man threatened by the anima can become conscious by going into the place where the anima is, and then resisting her. This is a double trick, to follow the fascination and at the same time to deal with it. Some men always try to escape when they see the anima situation coming up; or else they say, "To hell with it," and go straight into it. But to go into it without falling into it, that is the difficult thing. lt is a slap in the face to the usual male attitude, because it goes against the grain.
A man wants something to be either this or that, not be so paradoxical. Following the fascination but dealing with it at the same time is not the puer aetemus situation, where the attitude is to have the whole experience, but not to commit to anything. Rather it is the struggle for the light and the search for meaning which require the man to assume moral responsibility.
In the animus situation, his destructiveness takes the form of an inner argument, which makes it necessary to give him something to chew on. But for a man, if he goes into a place where the anima herself is, it would mean that here he takes a step into life. This has to do with the fact that the anima is an archetype of life, and the animus an archetype of death.
There is a Gypsy romance in which a woman marries Death. He disappears from time to time, and she begs him to tell her where he goes. He tells her she wouldn't be able to face it, but she wears him down and he finally reveals himself as Death. The shock of this discovery kills her. While he stayed with the woman, Death would forget to kill people on the earth, and then the people would multiply until there were too many. It is necessary that he perform his duties as Death.
In the human realm, men do the actual work of death in the outer-world, as hunters and warriors, etc., while women do the work of life, giving and preserving it. That is why it reverses itself on the inside - why animus possession makes a woman fall out of real life, while a man possessed by the anima gets entangled in it. The anima's darkness is that she wants to entangle the man in the doubtful ambiguities of life, while the dark side of the animus is a demon who would pull women away from life, cut them off from it. So the man must take a step into real life, into the dark side, in the place where the anima is. In the case of the woman, she must run away and not step into death.
Naturally, these comments refer to this particular story: if the anima appears like this, as a dark power, and sleeps like this in an iron coffin, then we must say that the man will not get away without doing certain things in life. It is from the hint of darkness and fire that we must conclude that he must step into life. This compensates Christian consciousness, where very often a man doesn't want to step into a situation because he might get some spots on his lily-white shirt.
The third night, the soldier actually has to go into the black princess's coffin. The coffin has to do with the place where the dead body, the corpse, lives-it is a rejection of the physical. In the Christian dogma, it is the rejection of the "natural man."
The general attitude in Christian countries considers the body to be sinful, and so it is rejected. That is why here he must step in, realize what she wants. He goes into the coffin, shuts his eyes and doesn't move. He goes through a symbolic death. He lets himself be symbolically killed. He must give up completely in order that the anima can show a different aspect.
