A Jungian Interpretation of Hansel and Gretel

 

Hansel and Gretel, we are told, ran off into the woods to escape their parents. A common enough story; two children, abused by their parents, run off together into even greater danger: drug addiction, prostitution and homelessness. But fairy tales are different; they're designed to tell us something about the archetypal nature of humankind. On one  level, of course, children are simply being told 'don't speak to strangers', that is, the figure of the witch in the tale of Hansel and Gretel1 is, at the level of narrative, a symbol of the evil that can lie in wait for the young and vulnerable.

 

        

On the other hand, from  the point of view of a literary analyst influenced by the archetypal psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961),2 the children's 'Terrible Mother'3 (and Father) is a symbol of the necessity for growth and development; in other words, and we have probably all experienced this at some time, the parental imago, in its 'evil' phase for the child, is pushing the burgeoning adolescent out into the 'real world' where it will begin to struggle and, hopefully, overcome those barriers and obstacles preventing it from fulfilling its potential. The witch inside the 'gingerbread cottage', at this level of interpretation, then becomes a secondary manifestation of the 'Terrible Mother' who, as the children have discovered, is good to begin with or, as it were, seemed 'nice on the outside' but, upon closer inspection, is revealed  to be a wicked sorceress4 seeking to prevent them from doing all sorts of things - like growing up, for example. We're all familiar with the child 'tied to mother's apron strings', the 'mother's boy' or 'daddy's little girl', perpetually infantile Peter Pans and Jewish Princesses who never 'grew up' because they were never encouraged to become independent or, as Jung says, individuated5 individuals.


If we are right, then the witch, as an individuational symbol, must have a positive aspect in some shape or form. So, what happens? She traps the boy and girl, and begins to prepare the oven in which she is going to cook and eat them. A horrific scenario in anyone's language, and it's particularly interesting that this story is Germanic in origin because, of course, it tells us something of the collective psyche which went on to produce the ovens of Belsen and elsewhere in which the corpses of millions of lives were consumed.

 

        

 

  But this abhorration resulted, according to Jung, from the Nazi's elevation of Nietzsche's 'transcendental will'6 to  the status of godhood, that is, a transcendent consciousness which denied the existence of what Freud termed the 'Id'.7 That negative aspect of the psyche, the shadow of Jung's philosophy, represented by the devil in Christian iconography; the unconscious which contains unexpressed fears and incohate desires that, repressed collectively for generations or suppressed by people or groups of people seeking to attain spiritual transcendence, suddenly breaks out afresh in an apocalyptic display of what the Greeks termed enantiodromia: a word used to describe a process whereby the adoption of one extreme mode of behaviour or belief system results in its exact opposite. In this case the advocation of the philosophy of the Nietschean übermensch resulting in the creation of a collective shadow and the expression of a nation's deformed desires - because unconscious and therefore unrealizable without conscious comprehension - in the shape of a projection of itself onto the jews and other minorities in their midst.8


Are minors minorities too, then? Are Hansel and Gretel symbolically 'minorities', a warning from the past to 1930s Germany not to put the children of Israel into ovens? Or are we also being told that attitudes toward children are, though consciously and collectively we all espouse Children's Rights, school slogans such as  'A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body', and do-gooding organisations like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, secretly and unconsciously oriented in a different direction, simply because we are conditioned to consciously and collectively nurture our young? Was the holocaust a nation's way of sublimating the killing and eating of its own children and, if so, is this the real desire that lies behind the emergence of a collectively repressed id?


Taboos, as we know, are such because what is forbidden is - or has been - attractive at some stage in social development. Cannibalism, as one of the great taboos, is presumably so because it was once widespread and enjoyed. Taboos become so because what they prohibit is viewed as a threat to societal growth, and therefore what is made a taboo has to be understood in the light of something that was once widely practised otherwise society would not have found itself sufficiently threatened enough to make that practise taboo. Incest or endogamy is a good example. It became taboo in order to strengthen ties between tribes, so allowing such concepts as city-state and nation to develop. Exogamy or 'marriage with a stranger' therefore became desirable for societal cohesion and peoples developed an incest taboo.9

 

        

The motif of child eating is not a new one, and though we might loathe and despise it - as we are supposed to; that's why we make taboos - it's not, as we might think, because we find the act itself loathsome and despicable: but more likely because we find it in some measure attractive and that's why society found it threatening enough to put a taboo on it. The god Chronos is depicted in Greek mythology devouring his offspring to prevent the future from happening, that is, time from beginning; his son Zeus only escaping the fate of his mother Rhea's other children - devourment - by her substitution of a stone instead of the baby (Christ, focus of Herod's attempted infanticide, is the 'Foundation Stone' in the Bible [Psalms 118.22] ); the infant 'King of the Gods' (or 'King of the Jews' in Christ's case), representing the spectre of unwanted succession. So, apart from the simple element of cannibalism upon one's children, there's the metaphorical aspect; truncating lives' possibilities in order to maintain one's own position. Chronos would then come close to Freud's understanding of our earliest origins in which the 'Alpha male' dominates the 'Primal Horde' by dint of superior strength and brutality. However, myths are myths and facts are facts. Nazi Germany implemented a pogrom of genocide against the descendants of Abraham which, though technically not infanticide, was clearly a step towards a vision of the future across the corpses of the descendants of a particular Patriarch. Infanticide was implemented by King Herod at the time of the birth of Christ (Matthew 2: 16), a measure aimed at preventing the infant Messiah or nascent future from happening (Herod as Chronos, as it were).


It would seem, therefore, that behind our apparent concerns with children's welfare, in the guise of organisational umbrellas such as UNICEF, lies a deeper, more sinister and - by most of us - barely conscious desire: to kill and eat our children. According to Jung, the symbolic devourment of the god, in the Catholic Mass10 or certain Aztec ceremonies, has to do with the imbibing of the god's power: manna from heaven, as it were. Consequently, it would appear that, behind our ostensible regard for the nurturing and nourishment of children is a desire to imbibe or absorb their 'powers', which is probably why the Germans put the jews into their ovens, to offer up to God the incense of His children's burning, the sacrificial offering of the 'Chosen People': a Black Mass murder by an evil coven. Our witch in Hansel and Gretel puts the children into her oven in order to cook and eat them. In a sense she is more sensible: ovens are for cooking. Clearly that taboo was too strong even for the Nazis; but it is clearly understood amongst all of us now that these were ovens at Belsen and Buchenwald. 'Only kill what you can eat' is another maxim that would seem to apply to our witch, and we might add, if you can't stomach eating it, don't kill and cook it. Hansel and Gretel is, therefore, a cleverly presented taboo strengthener against mass murder - while ackowledging those repressed truncatory desires that seem to attend a native conservatism. In postulating a figure that cooks and eats children, we are meant to be turned off the idea of killing human beings per se because it's clearly not for food and that's why we kill: a useful conservative point worth underlining.


Hansel and Gretel also poses a carefully structured symbolic societal question: to what extent is it permissible to suck out the lives of our children for our own benefit? Just how our parents feed upon us is not so mysterious from a practical modern man's perspective; they simply have us educated in order to become successful money-makers so that we are able to care for them in their old age: but from a parasitical man's point of view fairytales are about 'magic' and 'god-eating' is a ritual, the purpose of which is to obtain mana, that is, the magical properties of the eaten.

 

       

One who 'eats children' is, therefore, symbolically one who appropriates that which is brought into being by the 'gifted  child', that is, the  child 'with gifts', symbolized if you like by the Christ child to whom the magi gave the gifts of magi-c. Noone, of course, would suggest that Christ's gifts were simply 'appropriated'. Yet, given what we already know, we could be forgiven for conjecturing that, at some point, there'd be an attempt to cook and eat him. He was certainly hung on the cross in the heat of the Middle East for long enough (John 19: 18), and in the shape of the wafer and the wine - as the symbolic body and the blood - in the Catholic Mass, he's now consumed daily. Because he performed many wonders; turning water into  wine (John 2: 9), raising the dead (John 11: 38), and walking on water (John 6: 19) - to name but just a few of the miraculous manifestations of his gifts. His progress and end, therefore, reflect a familiar cannibalistic pattern. He was a persecuted jew throughout a life-span of only thirty-three years before being consumed.


Former child star of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club (1993-94), Britney Spears' sanity was once questioned when she called herself the 'Antichrist'. What she probably meant  - albeit with belated apologies and, doubtless, with reservations - was that she feels Anti-Christian. But does that make her a bad person? As a child with a gift for singing, she clearly belonged to the 'at-risk' category of children in danger of being - let's say 'consumered' - by her Christian society.


In the Egyptian myth of the sun god Ra, his son Osiris is cut into pieces by the evil god Set and it is the role of the goddess Isis to collect all of the pieces of Osiris' dismembered corpse - last of all his phallus - and re-member him. In this context we might remember Marvin Gaye's classically taboo 'Anti-Christian' pop song Sexual Healing (1982) and how D. H. Lawrence - also heavily tabooed by Christianity in his lifetime - borrowed heavily from the Osiris theme for his novella The Man Who Died (1929) in which Jesus' resurrection is brought about by a young worshipper of Isis who restores him through sex. In the myth of Osiris, the god is reborn as Horus. It's a mythologem that symbolizes how it is not enough to rise each day like the sun if one's consciousness remains undeveloped and prone to evil. What is required is a development of consciousness that can resist evil, and the figure of Isis represents that female complementarity which masculine egocentricism lacks but which, according to Jung, exists in man for his guidance in the form of the anima or soul, a feminine side to a man's consciousness that, recognized and integrated, that is, introjected, has the role of Eros to his Logos, a principle of relatedness that is needed to attain that perspective which allows him to perceive evil in himself as well as others - and neutralize it.


In the song Piece of Me from the album Blackout (2007) Britney Spears' constant refrain is: 'You want a piece of me?' It might be Osiris' call to Isis to collect the pieces of his body and remember him. It's not coincidental that the piece Isis found last was the penis, which we call a man's 'member', and that fellatio is the method used by her to re-member, that is, resurrect Osiris. Oral Fixation (2005) was the album title of one of Britney's main pop competitors, Shakira. These stars know instinctively that that's what it's all about. It's about god-eating. Fellatio is similar to the god Chronos' eating of his children, that is, although the erect penis - as in the fertility cults surrounding the myth of Osiris - indicates that 'the god is risen', keeping a man happy by fellating him so that he's not full of repressed orally-fixated desires or fears about being devoured - and anger-based cannibalistic projections because of it - is more important in terms of healing a potential split in relationships than reproduction. In the song Piece of Me that's what this modern day Isis is singing about; that piece of her in man that is the eternal woman, the soul which - activated by a woman's love - can save him from himself.


Actaeon, when caught spying paparazzi-like by the goddess Diana, was torn apart by hounds in Greek mythology.11 The refrain 'You want a piece of me?' is therefore also a challenge; this goddess can Hecate-like have you torn into pieces because your several members aren't directed at her, they're schizophrenically directed at an unattainable internalized archetypal imago of the anima or man's sexualized female component as sex symbol. A splitting of psyche that requires the introjection of the anima, representing man's latent abilities to relate external and internal realities, to restore him to himself  in recognition that the object of arousal is a woman and not a goddess. This is what Jung terms the 'individuation process' between a man and a woman. Piece of Me is therefore about that piece of a man which is first instrumental in getting him to forget his ego and then helps him to remember himself at a higher level; in the video Britney Spears is the Hollywood sex goddess anima figure symbolically torn to pieces by the press dogs of Christian morality for daring to be memorable. In asking 'You want a piece of me?' Britney is,  in effect, taking the role of Osiris and throwing down a challenge to the ancient evil that is Set, the god that cut Osiris into pieces and that now represents the shadow of the collective Christian consciousness. Voted the most beautiful woman in the world, her role is the membering of men insofar as she corresponds to the archetype of the ever-desirable sex goddess. In other words, it's the archetype of which she is a sexually charged icon that is memorable, and Piece of Me is a statement that she's ready to claw back those pieces of herself that are her rather than the projected fantasies of male consumers and, no longer cannibalised in this fashion, be reconstituted at a higher level of self-awareness.


In Jungian psychology a woman's penis is her animus or spirit, often symbolized as a sword; a masculine component which appears to her in projection as a discriminatory crowd of appraising male onlookers (with penetrating gazes and sword-like erections). We might say that Piece of Me is an indication that Britney Spears' spiritual nature has matured so that she no longer needs men's validation. She is more than a sex  icon and, in the shape of her introjected animus, has a sword of her own by which she can defend herself from the 'death of a thousand cuts' of a deprecatory collective Christian consciousness to rise to a new level of development that is Antichristian insofar as it isn't judgemental.
 

 

Actress Sharon Tate is remembered in the newspapers for being 'hacked to pieces' by Charles Manson and his 'disciples' in 1968 because the Manson 'Family' were reputedly influenced by the fictional Valentine Michael Smith, the central Messianic character of Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) who is eaten by adherents after being dismembered; ostensibly by reactionary elements against his doctrine of free love.12 Britney Spears' Piece of Me might equally be about Valentine Smith, an Osiris-type figure who'd advocated that form of familial love - including incest - that the early Christians called Agape and which, in keeping with our theme of dangerously repressed orality, involved that Madonna-Britney style same-sex kissing now truncatingly considered iconoclastically Anti-Christian and taboo in society because of its homosexual overtones but, in the third century of the Christian Era, was an expression of love between followers of the church. Smith's followers - male and female - decide that, unable to make love with him after he's been 'kissed off', the next best thing to do is eat him: a clear conflation of  orality and sex with god-eating. A dead man can't be membered with fellation. But he can be taken into the mouth and swallowed. In this way Smith's followers imbibe the power of the god. It's a part of the mystery of sex: what causes the god to rise in the phallus, and why do we feel it necessary to fellate him? Fellatio and cannibalism are clearly interrelated at the level of power users. Chronos ate his kids,  fellatio - and homosexual kissing - prevents reproduction, and Valentine Smith is eaten for his power to make love. The point of his whole philosophy in its entirety, and it's not far off Christ's assertion that 'God is love.' Irrespective of notions to do with sex as being solely concerned with the making of babies, which clearly is psychologically disagreeable.  Being eaten by one's disciples is, however, power dilution; controlling rather than harnessing: which might be construed as 'make love more slowly', that is, Messiahs tend to be too revolutionary even for the most zealous of their followers. This god-eating is, therefore, once again a truncating of the future envisioned by the visionary.


Interestingly, born on Mars and arriving amongst us fully grown and innocent, Smith first has to be taught sex. The power of love, as it were, has to be 'incarnated' in a child-like adult, which itself has cannibalistic echoes. Roman Polanski, Sharon's Hollywood director husband was, in Valentine Smith fashion, later  'crucified in the newspapers' for having had 'child sex'. Curiously, Manson's truncatory robbing Polanski of a wife had revealed a sexual latency in Polanski that otherwise may never have surfaced. The concern over under age sex is to do with the idea of a nascent future's being truncated for the purposes of sexual gratification by an older partner, which itself is viewed as a form of cannibalism (perhaps Madonna was trying to eat Britney rather than kiss her much younger rival at that infamous August 28th 2003 MTV Awards' ceremony). Should we, then, congratulate Mr Manson for revealing to us something more of the Truth? Christ was hung in the sun to cook while still a life-long celibate (evidently being child-like in one's physical emotionality is in some part necessary to the cannibalistic impulse), and this partly self- truncation or self-cannibalism (Jesus wills it) of a life's potentiality is still lauded today as being a good thing indicative of great spirituality (give me physical love every time, please), though our very own reporters Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (Luke 24: 50) say Jesus Christ was translated into the Heavenly Kingdom to live in  Eternal Bliss. So, that's alright then, isn't it? Yes, well... Bread and wine anyone?

 

       

Christ was reluctantly crucified by Pontius Pilate (John 19: 16)  - at the behest of his Roman masters and the jewish Pharisees - because they didn't want this 'King of the Jews',  they wanted someone who would maintain the status quo and prevent the change in consciousness represented by Chistianity that would one day put a man on the moon and introduce us all to our home computers. Which is reflected in Jesus' acceptance of what he saw as his fate, the element of self-sacrifice for ' cake tomorrow'. This, of course, is the Christian message; devote yourself to the Logos and, one day, technology with its improved medicine will give you immortality - save you (in Microsoft perhaps) - and give you a better world to live in. If we survive technology's zenith, the atom bomb...13 And self-sacrifice isn't child-sacrifice, although if we're unconsciously afraid of bringing the future into being then it's a logical truncation. Or are we so afraid of being replaced by our children that we'd kill and eat them? Isn't that how wars are organized? Change isn't wanted and the children are sent to kill each other? Symbolically devoured by their elders. In atomic wars, of course, we don't need to send the children; we can devour them from a distance.

 

       

Hansel and Gretel escaped from  their 'cage', possibly also a symbol of  that 'false conditioning' which imprisons and prevents children from realizing their true value, and put the witch into the oven. "Hooray!" I hear you  cry. "The children are saved!" Aren't they? Looked at realistically, the witch is only following that recipe for truncation which is normal in terms of the cultural values we have uncovered. We could even look at her as a Germanic projection in which she is an Old Testament jew preventing the Christian future from happening through its children. In Jungian terms, therefore, the witch is a 'Terrible Mother', a representation of the libido or life energy that the child has had stifled/smothered and her demise symbolizes the release of that energy, symbolized by the oven that fiercely consumes her (more concretely in 1930s Nazi Germany and elsewhere) and which will fuel the child (like food) enabling it to tackle life's problems, realize its full potential and, hopefully, achieve success. But isn't success ultimately just survival? Christ died a celibate at thirty-three on the cross. "My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?" he cried. (Matthew 27: 46) Was he successful? Clearly it's a case of cake tomorrow. He had a crown of course - of  thorns. (John 19: 1)
       

 

Legend has it that a small bird, a robin, removed it at the price of its own life, speared itself by one of the thorns; but Christ was grateful. The bird, stained by its own as well as the blood of Christ, becoming a symbol of Christmas, along with the holly wreath; its red berries signifying not only the robin's self-sacrifice in removing the wreath of thorns from about the head of Christ but also the symbolic intermingling of their blood - Holy berries, as it  were.
 

       

The berries are especially interesting symbolically, because they're poisonous to man; which may be designed to further strengthen the idea of the symbolism of the body and the blood of Christ. In Cain and Abel, the Old Testament biblical story, Cain murders his brother Abel (Genesis 4: 8) because God does not seem as pleased with his fruit offering as He is when Abel sacrifices the flesh of some poor dumb creature. Here the blood of Christ in the form of the red berries could be said to refer to Abel's similarly involuntary sacrifice at the hands of Cain (the fruit has  now become poisonous), and there is the added suggestion that the sacrifice of His son is not pleasing to God either. In other words, the body and the blood represents a tainted sacrifice which has to undergo a symbolic reassessment before its transformed or spiritual meaning becomes receivable.


Christmas means Christ's Mass, a ceremony in which the body and the blood, in the form of the bread and the wine, are eaten by the petitioner seeking to obtain the power of God. Hansel and Gretel is, therefore, a god-eating story in which the eater is thwarted because the witch represents the older path that seeks its own continuation: a pathway that, in concrete and vile terms, was rejected by the Nazis as children ridding themselves of the Old Jew in Auschwitz and Belsen. What was missing from their collective consciousness was the idea that the power of God is spiritual, that is, notions of symbolic transformation, which we find in the transubstantiation of the Catholic Mass. In psychological terms, this is understandable as shadow-integration, a concomitant of shadow-recognition, that is, the realization that one is a projector of the negative components of one's own psyche onto others, and the attendant flowering of the previously infected soul (the Jungian anima), in terms of a greater fellow feeling for those others, is what is represented in the Service of the Communion by the eating of the body and the drinking of the blood of Jesus in the symbolic shape of the bread and the wine.
        

 

A kind of transformation which is also to be found in the folkloristic transmogrification of the Robin's breast feathers with their care for others selfless-symbolizing new redness, representing an archetypal signpointing that what appears to our shadow-contaminated conscious mind - in the case of 30s Germany, the jew with the face of the witch in Hansel and Gretel - is not a recipe for concrete action, but a need for inner psychological change and spiritual transformation symbolized in Hansel and Gretel by the children's turning the tables on the witch and putting her into the oven.


In hindsight Hansel and Gretel is a real warning against evil people who would seek to place children in ovens, but it's also clear that the story is archetypal, that is, in large measure, also symbolical; the meaning being that, if we can recognize and integrate our shadow-projections - in this case represented by the witch and her behaviour - we can obviate the consequences, that is, possession by the shadow and allowing ourselves to be turned into the kind of people who, in our turn, would seek to put people into ovens. Hansel and Gretel is, then, though potently pregnant in imagery, somewhat poorly developed in terms of our Twentieth-Century consciousness. For the Twenty-First Century, I have, therefore, imagined a more appropriately told tale with pertinent modern content: the names have been changed to enhance the innocence.

 

Robin and Red Riding - Hoods

 

Little Red Riding Hood had a quarrel with her parents and went off into the forest where she met with Robin Hood. The pair went on together until they  came to a cottage made out of chocolate ice-cream. 'I used to be a robin with wings,' said Robin Hood, but I helped remove a circlet of thorns from about the head of the one they call Christ, received a bloody red breast for my efforts and was transmuted into the do-gooding enemy of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham by English folklore.14 My symbol is the holly berry, which is poisonous. Its bloody redness symbolizes the ofttimes hatefulness of man towards his brother; so don't be fooled by appearances. My advice  is to understand that what looks good on the surface of it can result in much pain and suffering. It seemed a good idea to help the Christ, but my own wound was deep, and now I am an outlaw for helping the poor. Look at the sweetness of this dwelling's exterior and reflect upon what it could conceal. It might be Buchenwald.'

 

       

Little Red Riding Hood said 'I was in a story about a wolf that had an individuational meaning insofar as the girl had to say lines like 'What big eyes you've got grandma!'15 And the wolf, who'd eaten her and was wearing her clothes, would say, 'All the better to see you with.' And I'd say 'What big ears you've got! And she'd reply 'All the better to hear you with.' And I'd say 'What a big nose you've got!' And she'd say 'All the better to smell you with.' When I said 'What big teeth you've got!' she said 'All the better to eat you with!' You see it was about the need to integrate the shadow-inferior function into ego-consciousness which, here, is suffering from an inflation equivalent to possession by the negative personality that the psychologist Sigmund Freud calls the id but which Carl Gustav Jung terms the subconscious because he views it as developmental, and we can see that here, because, according to Jung, there are four functions of consciousness which correspond, in their undifferentiated form, to the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste. These four functions are 'Sensation', 'Thinking', 'Intuition', and 'Feeling'.16 I was late because of my undeveloped sense of feeling for my grandmother; I didn't care about her and even told the wolf where she lived. Symbolically, therefore, the shadow-inferior function that needs to be integrated is 'Feeling', represented by the wolf with the big teeth in its mouth that devoured my nan; symbol of the Jungian Wise Old Woman that I could be if I wasn't so lacking in care for the elderly. The wolf was that aspect of my character totally devoid of feeling for others; like the one in the film version of Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho (2000), screaming down the phone to someone he barely knew after committing a brutal premeditated torture and murder: 'You gotta kill a lotta people!' Thank heavens for my animus aspect who, in the guise of a woodsman like yourself, came with his sword to cut open the wolf that ate me too, thereby  releasing both aspects of my Self, rebirthing me, my nan, and my future as a caring Wise Old Woman like her. Our rescuer then put stones in the wolf's belly so he'd die; the wicked old Chronos archetype had had me swallowed and my  future was nearly truncated. My guess is that this cottage is a similarly archetpal motif often found in folktales and that we are being enticed into entering in order to face some terrifying manifestation of the collective shadow as a part of  our joint individuation as characters representing the male and female archetypes.'
       
Inside was the Sherriff of Nottingham who turned into a werewolf every full moon and who now chased them into a giant’s bird cage which he hoisted to the ceiling of the delicious-seeming hovel. 'It looks like the Sherriff has caged his Robin,' said Robin Hood, 'I'm Robin of the woods but I can't fly to Sherwood now.' 'He's a shadow-possessed necrophageous Nazi,' said Red, 'look at what big teeth he's got! I should've listened to your woodlore and understood that the chocolate hovel was the gateway to Buchenwald.'
       
Soon the oven was prepared and the two were put inside where they sat huddled together; Little Red Riding's Hood and Robin's pressed close together so that the werewolf could not see their faces. Imagine its surprise when, upon opening the oven's door, what should emerge but a single angry glowing six winged figure, carrying a tremendously powerful double-edged light sword; 'I'm Little Red Robin, the Seraph of Thou Shalt Nottingham, a symbol of that Judgement which, 'beyond the opposites' that give birth to good and evil,17 falls with justice upon those who seek to practise evil upon the Children of the Lord,' said the transfigured Avenging Angel.

 

Endnotes

 

1 Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes (translators) 'Hansel and Gretel' from The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (1823).


2  C. G. Jung 'Psychology and Literature' (1930/1950), The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, The Collected Works translated by R. F. C. Hull (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London), CW, Vol. 15.


3 C. G. Jung 'Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype' (1938/1954), The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW, Vol. 9, Part I.


4 C. G. Jung 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales' (1945/1948), CW, Vol. 9, Part I.


5 C. G. Jung  'Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation' (1939), CW, Vol. 9, Part I.


6 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra (Penguin, London, 1980).


7 C. G. Jung 'Freud and Jung: Contrasts' (1929), Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW, Vol. 4.


8 C. G. Jung  'After the Catastrophe' (1945), Civilization in Transition, CW, Vol. 10.


9 C.G. Jung 'Psychology of the Transference' (1946), CW, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Vol. 16.


10 C. G. Jung 'Transformation Symbolism in the Mass' (1942/1954), Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW, Vol. 11.


11 Ovid Metamorphosis (Penguin, London, 1980).


12 Robert A. Heinlein Stranger In A Strange Land (New English Library, London, 1980).


13 C. G. Jung 'Answer to Job' (1952), CW, Vol. 10.


14 Howard Pyle The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883).


15 Taylor and Edwardes (transls.) 'Little Red Cap [Little Red Riding Hood]' from The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (1823).


16 C. G. Jung Psychological Types (192l), CW, Vol. 6.


17 C. G. Jung 'Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology' (1959), CW, Vol.10.

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Satan Is A Nasty Penis Snake Crushed By The Foot Of The Virgin Mary

21/05/2017 10:06
Satan Is A Nasty Penis Snake Crushed By The Foot Of The Virgin Mary   In the Christian iconography of the Roman Catholic church, which the nations of the Protestant church rejected in the 16th century, after the example of the Lutherian German church`s break with Catholicism, whose leader was...

Crushed Eons

16/02/2017 16:19
Crushed Eons     Christianity isn`t a Western religion because it originated with Jesus `Christ`, `the chosen`, in Palestine, the Middle East, where the Jews, who are called God`s `chosen people` from the Old Testament of the Bible, which is their history and law, that is, the Talmud and...

Bims

13/01/2017 12:55
Bims   Christianity teaches that Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross so that all humanity would be redeemed from sin, which was a curse that he took upon himself, and when the Romans, whose Empire was occupying Jewish Palestine during Jesus` lifetime, took him to the hill of Calvary outside...

Too Tall For The Jinn Of Man

07/01/2017 10:25
Too Tall For The Jinn Of Man   Christianity differs from Islam mainly because the Islamic nations believe in the existence of djinn, which belief derives from the Koran (610-30 C.E.) dictated to Mohamed by the angels of God, according to Islamic tradition, and in which the djinn are described...
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Male and female He created them both

12/02/2012 07:36
Male and female He created them both   In the Bible we're told that God created man and woman: 'Male and female He created them both.' (Genesis 1:27) Does this mean that he created man and woman as both male and female, that is, hermaphrodites? According to Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, the...

Wizardry with elephants

12/02/2012 07:27
Wizardry with elephants   When I was a small child of six or seven, I was 'transferred' from Pocklington, the tiny village and tinier school at which I had been taught, to a larger town in the middle of Yorkshire called Bridlington. The school was 'Moorfield', and a long time after its...

Fangs for the Mammaries

12/02/2012 07:21
Fangs for the Mammaries   It's a Mel Brooks vampire joke. Like the one about The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music when Mr and Mrs Hill awaken at the sound of the evening's piano after earlier being bitten by Count Dracula. The tune, of course, is Thanks for the Memories; but the vampire...

Woman cooks meat, men drink her blood.

01/01/2012 15:32
Woman cooks meat, men drink her blood   In the Bible the story of Cain and Abel is that of the first murder. Cain grows fruit and offers it to God, whereas Abel offers an animal sacrifice in what is, effectively, a cooked meal. Abel is murdered because he can cook, that is, Cain doesn`t want...
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