Four Archetypes (16 page)

405

The tendency of the old man to set one thinking also takes the form of urging people to “sleep on it.” Thus he says to the girl who is searching for her lost brothers: “Lie down:
morning is cleverer than evening.”
¹⁸
He also sees through the gloomy situation of the hero who has got himself into trouble, or at least can give him such information as will help him on his journey. To this end he makes ready use of animals, particularly birds. To the prince who has gone in search of the kingdom of heaven the old hermit says: “I have lived here for three hundred years, but never yet has anybody asked me about the kingdom of heaven. I cannot tell you myself; but up there, on another floor of the house, live all kinds of birds, and they can surely tell you.”
¹⁹
The old man knows what roads lead to the goal and points them out to the hero.
²⁰
He warns of dangers to come and supplies the means of meeting them effectively. For instance, he tells the boy who has gone to fetch the silver water that the well is guarded by a lion who has the deceptive trick of sleeping with his eyes open and watching with his eyes shut;
²¹
or he counsels the youth who is riding to a magic fountain in order to fetch the healing draught for the king, only to draw the water at a trot because of the lurking witches who lasso everybody that comes to the fountain.
²²
He charges the princess whose lover has been changed into a werewolf to make a fire and put a cauldron of tar over it. Then she must plunge her beloved white lily into the boiling tar, and when the werewolf comes, she must empty the cauldron over its head, which will release her lover from the spell.
²³
Occasionally the old man is a very critical old man, as in the Caucasian tale of the youngest prince who wanted to build a flawless church for his father, so as to inherit the kingdom. This he does, and nobody can discover a single flaw, but then an old man comes along and says, “That’s a fine church you’ve built, to be sure! What a pity the main wall is a bit crooked!” The prince has the church pulled down again
and builds a new one, but here too the old man discovers a flaw, and so on for the third time.
²⁴

406

The old man thus represents knowledge, reflection, insight, wisdom, cleverness, and intuition on the one hand, and on the other, moral qualities such as goodwill and readiness to help, which make his “spiritual” character sufficiently plain. Since the archetype is an autonomous content of the unconscious, the fairytale, which usually concretizes the archetypes, can cause the old man to appear in a dream in much the same way as happens in modern dreams. In a Balkan tale the old man appears to the hard-pressed hero in a dream and gives him good advice about accomplishing the impossible tasks that have been imposed upon him.
²⁵
His relation to the unconscious is clearly expressed in one Russian fairytale, where he is called the “King of the Forest.” As the peasant sat down wearily on a tree stump, a little old man crept out: “all wrinkled he was and a green beard hung down to his knees.” “Who are you?” asked the peasant. “I am Och, King of the Forest,” said the manikin. The peasant hired out his profligate son to him, “and the King of the Forest departed with the young man, and conducted him to that other world under the earth and brought him to a green hut. . . . In the hut everything was green: the walls were green and the benches, Och’s wife was green and the children were green . . . and the little water-women who waited on him were as green as rue.” Even the food was green. The King of the Forest is here a vegetation or tree numen who reigns in the woods and, through the nixies, also has connections with water, which clearly shows his relation to the unconscious since the latter is frequently expressed through wood and water symbols.

407

There is equally a connection with the unconscious when the old man appears as a dwarf. The fairytale about the princess who was searching for her lover says: “Night came and the darkness, and still the princess sat in the same place and wept. As she sat there lost in thought, she heard a voice greeting her: ‘Good evening, pretty maid! Why are you sitting here so lonely and sad?’ She sprang up hastily and felt very confused, and that was no wonder. But when she looked round there was only a tiny little old man standing before her, who nodded his head at her
and looked so kind and simple.” In a Swiss fairytale, the peasant’s son who wants to bring the king’s daughter a basket of apples encounters “es chlis isigs Männdli, das frogt-ne, was er do i dem Chratte häig?” (a little iron man who asked what he had there in the basket). In another passage the “Männdli” has “es isigs Chlaidli a” (iron clothes on). By “isig” presumably “eisern” (iron) is meant, which is more probable than “eisig” (icy). In the latter case it would have to be “es Chlaidli vo Is” (clothes of ice).
²⁶
There are indeed little ice men, and little metal men too; in fact, in a modern dream I have even come across a little black iron man who appeared at a critical juncture, like the one in this fairytale of the country bumpkin who wanted to marry the princess.

408

In a modern series of visions in which the figure of the wise old man occurred several times, he was on one occasion of normal size and appeared at the very bottom of a crater surrounded by high rocky walls; on another occasion he was a tiny figure on the top of a mountain, inside a low, stony enclosure. We find the same motif in Goethe’s tale of the dwarf princess who lived in a casket.
²⁷
In this connection we might also mention the Anthroparion, the little leaden man of the Zosimos vision,
²⁸
as well as the metallic men who dwell in the mines, the crafty dactyls of antiquity, the homunculi of the alchemists, and the gnomic throng of hobgoblins, brownies, gremlins, etc. How “real” such conceptions are became clear to me on the occasion of a serious mountaineering accident: after the catastrophe two of the climbers had the collective vision, in broad daylight, of a little hooded man who scrambled out of an inaccessible crevasse in the ice face and passed across the glacier, creating a regular panic in the two beholders. I have often encountered motifs which made me think that the unconscious must be the world of the infinitesimally small. Such an idea could be derived rationalistically from the obscure feeling that in all these visions we are dealing with something endopsychic, the inference being that a thing must be exceedingly small in order to fit
inside the head. I am no friend of any such “rational” conjectures, though I would not say that they are all beside the mark. It seems to me more probable that this liking for diminutives on the one hand and for superlatives—giants, etc.—on the other is connected with the queer uncertainty of spatial and temporal relations in the unconscious.
²⁹
Man’s sense of proportion, his rational conception of big and small, is distinctly anthropomorphic, and it loses its validity not only in the realm of physical phenomena but also in those parts of the collective unconscious beyond the range of the specifically human. The atman is “smaller than small and bigger than big,” he is “the size of a thumb” yet he “encompasses the earth on every side and rules over the ten-finger space.” And of the Cabiri Goethe says: “little in length / mighty in strength.” In the same way, the archetype of the wise old man is quite tiny, almost imperceptible, and yet it possesses a fateful potency, as anyone can see when he gets down to fundamentals. The archetypes have this peculiarity in common with the atomic world, which is demonstrating before our eyes that the more deeply the investigator penetrates into the universe of microphysics the more devastating are the explosive forces he finds enchained there. That the greatest effects come from the smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics but in the field of psychological research as well. How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing!

409

In certain primitive fairytales, the illuminating quality of our archetype is expressed by the fact that the old man is identified with the sun. He brings a firebrand with him which he uses for roasting a pumpkin. After he has eaten, he takes the fire away again, which causes mankind to steal it from him.
³⁰
In a North American Indian tale, the old man is a witch-doctor who owns the fire.
³¹
Spirit too has a fiery aspect, as we know from the language of the Old Testament and from the story of the Pentecostal miracle.

410

Apart from his cleverness, wisdom, and insight, the old man, as we have already mentioned, is also notable for his moral qualities; what is more, he even tests the moral qualities of others and makes his gifts dependent on this test. There is a particularly instructive example of this in the Estonian fairytale of the stepdaughter and the real daughter. The former is an orphan distinguished for her obedience and good behaviour. The story begins with her distaff falling into a well. She jumps in after it, but does not drown, and comes to a magic country where, continuing her quest, she meets a cow, a ram, and an appletree whose wishes she fulfils. She now comes to a wash-house where a dirty old man is sitting who wants her to wash him. The following dialogue develops: “Pretty maid, pretty maid, wash me, do, it is hard for me to be so dirty!” “What shall I heat the stove with?” “Collect wooden pegs and crows’ dung and make a fire with that.” But she fetches sticks, and asks, “Where shall I get the bath-water?” “Under the barn there stands a white mare. Get her to piss into the tub!” But she takes clean water, and asks, “Where shall I get a bath-switch?” “Cut off the white mare’s tail and make a bath-switch of that!” But she makes one out of birch-twigs, and asks, “Where shall I get soap?” “Take a pumice-stone and scrub me with that!” But she fetches soap from the village and with that she washes the old man.

411

As a reward he gives her a bag full of gold and precious stones. The daughter of the house naturally becomes jealous, throws her distaff into the well, where she finds it again instantly. Nevertheless she goes on and does everything wrong that the stepdaughter had done right, and is rewarded accordingly. The frequency of this motif makes further examples superfluous.

412

The figure of the superior and helpful old man tempts one to connect him somehow or other with God. In the German tale of the soldier and the black princess
³²
it is related how the princess, on whom a curse has been laid, creeps out of her iron coffin every night and devours the soldier standing guard over the tomb. One soldier, when his turn came, tried to escape. “That evening he stole away, fled over the fields and mountains,
and came to a beautiful meadow. Suddenly a little man stood before him with a long grey beard, but it was none other than the Lord God himself, who could no longer go on looking at all the mischief the devil wrought every night. ‘Whither away?’ said the little grey man, ‘may I come with you?’ And because the little old man looked so friendly the soldier told him that he had run away and why he had done so.” Good advice follows, as always. In this story the old man is taken for God in the same naïve way that the English alchemist, Sir George Ripley,
³³
describes the “old king” as “antiquus dierum”—“the Ancient of Days.”

413

Just as all archetypes have a positive, favourable, bright side that points upwards, so also they have one that points downwards, partly negative and unfavourable, partly chthonic, but for the rest merely neutral. To this the spirit archetype is no exception. Even his dwarf form implies a kind of limitation and suggests a naturalistic vegetation-numen sprung from the underworld. In one Balkan tale, the old man is handicapped by the loss of an eye. It has been gouged out by the Vili, a species of winged demon, and the hero is charged with the task of getting them to restore it to him. The old man has therefore lost part of his eyesight—that is, his insight and enlightenment—to the daemonic world of darkness; this handicap is reminiscent of the fate of Osiris, who lost an eye at the sight of a black pig (his wicked brother Set), or again of Wotan, who sacrificed his eye at the spring of Mimir. Characteristically enough, the animal ridden by the old man in our fairytale is a goat, a sign that he himself has a dark side. In a Siberian tale, he appears as a one-legged, one-handed, and one-eyed greybeard who wakens a dead man with an iron staff. In the course of the story the latter, after being brought back to life several times, kills the old man by a mistake, and thus throws away his good fortune. The story is entitled “The One-sided Old Man,” and in truth his handicap shows that he consists of one half only. The other half is invisible, but appears in the shape of a murderer who seeks the hero’s life. Eventually the hero succeeds in killing his persistent murderer, but in the struggle he also kills the one-sided old man, so that the identity of the two victims is clearly revealed. It is thus possible that the old man is his own opposite, a life-bringer
as well as a death-dealer—“ad utrumque peritus” (skilled in both), as is said of Hermes.
³⁴

414

In these circumstances, whenever the “simple” and “kindly” old man appears, it is advisable for heuristic and other reasons to scrutinize the context with some care. For instance, in the Estonian tale we first mentioned, about the hired boy who lost the cow, there is a suspicion that the helpful old man who happened to be on the spot so opportunely had surreptitiously made away with the cow beforehand in order to give his protégé an excellent reason for taking to flight. This may very well be, for everyday experience shows that it is quite possible for a superior, though subliminal, foreknowledge of fate to contrive some annoying incident for the sole purpose of bullying our Simple Simon of an ego-consciousness into the way he should go, which for sheer stupidity he would never have found by himself. Had our orphan guessed that it was the old man who had whisked off his cow as if by magic, he would have seemed like a spiteful troll or a devil. And indeed the old man has a wicked aspect too, just as the primitive medicine-man is a healer and helper and also the dreaded concocter of poisons. The very word
means ‘poison’ as well as ‘antidote,’ and poison can in fact be both.