Chapter 4 Faithful John the Mediator

melvingiganticus

93s!
Chapter 4 is my favorite tale so far. In this chapter, we find the story of Faithful John being tasked with navigating teaching a young prince and the paradox of betraying the request of the king. It is also the first appearance of a prominent female character in these stories. Ponder the following and please share your thoughts.

Who best represents the hero in this tale? Faithful John, the Prince, the Princess?
How does the male/female dynamic balance, or unbalance the story?
Does sacrifice and resurrection in this story resonate in any particular way to you? Especially after the initial “betrayal” of the king’s wishes.
How does this fairy tale deal with the conscious and the unconscious?

zeph

I’m not sure I know who the hero is, but I will say that the prince, at least, acts heroically. If we take the princess as being the repressed anima, which repression prevents the prince from fully synthesizing himself, then I will call heroic the prince’s efforts to bring her to the bridal chamber. These efforts in this case consist generally of non-attachment, or letting go of attachment, both to the pleasures of life (five tons of gold) and to notions of physical immortality, or to that which is held most dear (the decapitation of the children).

I would have liked to see the children changed a bit after their resurrection, rather than playing “as though nothing had happened.” Something did happen. The children may represent the creative output of the prince, or perhaps even the childish ego of the prince which remains immature until it is properly reckoned with by our individuation (the prince and princess are synthesized). That individuation does not destroy these things, it elevates it. I guess I would have liked if the children had “played more languidly”. [^1]

Perhaps it is also heroic that Faithful John opened the door. The king instructed that the door remain closed, but the king represents collective consciousness, and it does not take a lot of looking around at the world to recognize that the collective consciousness is not the most faithful arbiter of right and wrong. Opposing the collective in the name of deeper integration of Self, of turning our attention wholly to the divine light within us, is in my mind one of the most heroic acts a person can achieve, even if the act does not (at the moment) result in an auto-da-fé.

[^1]: LVX IV:16.

melvingiganticus

@zeph I would say that your examples of the hero are the two I wavered on the most. At first, I felt it a betrayal of Faithful John, but later felt it was the right way to go. One cannot always hold true to a commitment when in dire circumstances (the prince saying he will remain until the door is opened). Although, it did make me wonder how long the prince would have waited. In the end, I think it was the prince’s conviction that made me feel that he was the hero. Even with all of the sacrifices John had made, the prince’s actions struck me deeper.

Hannah

@zeph my first response is to see Faithful John as the hero and the prince and princess as perhaps the anima and animus. I find your description of the children so interesting... I was horrified by the thought of decapitating the children, it made me think of the story of Abraham(?) who was told to kill his own son to demonstrate his faith for God. I don't know what is up with all the sacrificing children! Is it in the AC sense of sacrificing children? Lol, that puts a different spin on things.

Hannah

@melvingiganticus I really liked this chapter too but there were a few things that bothered me when thinking about answering #2..

Mainly that this fairy tale and so many like it always seems to be from the perspective of men, with the figure of the female as muse and unconscious. I want to read a story where the princess is protagonist and the prince acts solely as her creative genius! Rather than the other way around. There were also a number of blatantly sexist and old-fashioned things in this chapter, like the idea of the princess naturally being poisoned and needing exorcism before she is pure enough to marry the prince. Sure, as a metaphor for the subconscious that makes sense, but that just rubs me the wrong way.

She then goes on to describe how women are more flexible with their views but also air-headed in "[bringing] up these seed ideas, these creative hunches, in an unadapted, undigested way." I think this really highlights the danger of Jungian gendering of the essential male and female principles. One has to reduce things to a very basic dual symbol, which in my opinion is most elegantly expressed with yin and yang, but even then, this bleeds out into cultural interpretations of "maleness" and "femaleness," pigeonholing people into stereotypes and expectations. I am sorry, I feel very passionate about this subject and to this date confused about how we reconcile the naturally gendered aspects of the Tree of Life, alchemy, and so on, which we use often in this work.

Despite all of that, I do believe the male and female principles are balanced in the story, in my opinion. In that both are powerfully represented. I just wish Franz had the capacity to hold those symbols independent from "innate characteristics" of biological women.

jjones

Does sacrifice and resurrection in this story resonate in any particular way to you? Especially after the initial “betrayal” of the king’s wishes.

I found the sacrifice and resurrection in this story to be significant though I had wished the story didn't hinge on the resurrection. I appreciated von Franz's interpretation of the story in that she identified Faithful John as a sort of Alchemical Mercury and pointed to that transcendent function. The story had some significant parallels to the process of Initiation, but I had not considered that it is the transcendent function that dies and gets reborn specifically. It is difficult to make a clear cut comparison between Jungian theory and Initiation since they are separate systems, however it provided me a lot of food for thought in terms of my own experience.

I have described my motivation for Initiation as having arrived after my ability to create meaning was destroyed. I had arrived at place in my life where things simply didn't make sense anymore. I started practicing some of the exercises in Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson, specifically an exercise in that book that is supposed to get you very close to the Buddha Mind. I remember trying to hold two opposites in my head at the same time, confront the cognitive dissonance, and still keep my head on. Naturally, something "snapped" in my brain (what I believe snapped was my intellectual rigidity) and suddenly things were simply not the same. It was really hard for me to justify anything for or to myself, and my self image continued to fall apart. I found my life putrefying rapidly and I could do nothing to stop it. However, it was precisely because I was no longer capable of making sense of the world with what I had been raised with that I felt so strongly about throwing myself into the Great Work.

The reason I bring this up is that von Franz seems to be pointing to that as an archetypal experience. In fact, I agree with her that at the time I was going through this form of existential angst, I was Anima Possessed. The other connection I made while reading von Franz's explanation was that when people talk about "calcified pineal glands," they are also attempting to refer to this occurrence, when the transcendent function breaks down, and the aspirant must discover how to access it again.

I found myself wishing that the story continued. Although the resurrection of Faithful John is arguably the climax of the story, I found myself wishing we knew what came after it. Of course, this was written during a time when the Christian Mythos was still more powerful than today, so naturally it would focus on death and resurrection. However, as a Thelemite, I found myself wanting to know what came after the resurrection. How does the King and Queen integrate Faithful John into their dynamic? What struggles does the King face when Faithful John, who has remained Faithful, expresses opinions opposing the Queen? Etc. If my interpretation of the resurrection is relatively accurate, then the resurrection is really just the beginning of the story, since it is a symbol of Initiation. As von Franz points out, the resurrection is the point at which they regain access to the transcendent function. Naturally, as a Thelemite and an Initiate, I want to see fairy tales where we see the characters confronting their decision to regain access to the transcendent function and face all of the repercussions that might occur from having taken the leap of the Fool. Of course, one might say, "Write your own!" but alas, von Franz also states that fairy tales actually written by people are not "real" fairy tales. Guess I have to wait for fairy tales to catch up to the New Aeon!

jjones

@Hannah I so agree.

I read the more gendered sections of this chapter and thought, "Wow!" A lot of it reminded me of Jung's hang ups on Gender and Biological Sex, to the point where I wondered if von Franz had taken any attempt at separating Jung's own difficulty with gender from his ideas. A lot of her projections seem directly inspired by some of the more unappealing aspects of Jung's ideas on Gender (as MANY have written that Jung was NOT comfortable around women, even given his emphasis on uniting the gendered opposites within the psyche, some even going so far as to argue that the ideas of "Anima Possession" and "Animus Possession" are inherently sexist concepts used to justify and explain the female hysteria written about so prevalently in Jung & Freud's time).

I know that we have the luxury of modern gender theory and modern biology, but it makes it really difficult to parse through some of the ideas. The most interesting idea that von Franz presented in terms of gender was the idea (and perhaps this was in the next chapter, I can't remember) was when von Franz describes an archetype of the Divine Feminine mating with a demon in the Woods. The reason I found this so interesting is that this seems to be a "pseudo code" for a specifically feminine shadow, and men often speak about women as if this mating with the demons is something that actually occurs (have you seen the movie The VVitch? That is the first, modern expression of this archetype that comes to mind). Von Franz, being a woman and having had to deal with patriarchy, would've been such a fascinating person to explore this as an interpersonal archetypal situation and possible solutions to get the diversity of genders to work together. Instead, she clings to Jung's weirdly male centric notion that this is just the Anima, and that the Man needs to rescue the Feminine Aspects of Psyche for her to have any value (going so far as to say that, by default, the Anima, and therefore the Feminine Aspects of Psyche, are poisonous without Masculine intervention, which has really negative implications about how Jungian thought perceives women).

Again, I want to be able to overlook these hang ups, but let's be honest. If we're going to genuinely explore a polarized, gendered view of the psyche, then why are we only seeing the Male Shadow in this book? There is hardly anything that deals specifically with a Female Shadow in this book thus far, which makes me extremely suspicious of taking the polarized gendered approach seriously. I cannot find any reasonable justification as to why that wouldn't be discussed, because even from a Male, Polarized perspective, if we take gender to be "real" in the biological sense, wouldn't men want to read about the "Female Shadow"? Wouldn't it only serve to explain and make conscious these strange gendered projections we've developed from growing up in Western Society? Even if they aren't just projections, wouldn't men want to read these things to learn how to better harmonize with women? I could only imagine that exploring fairy tales that do express a feminine Shadow would be infinitely more useful than young men going on Google and looking up, "How to get a woman to like you."

I hope my language in this response isn't too incendiary, and I hope that I didn't mislead anyone. It's difficult for me to justify using such polarized language in this realm of discussion, but given that this book is written from that place, I wanted to emphasize that it still fails to explore any nuance even within polarization. To put it more plainly, even if we take the notion of Biological Gender seriously, von Franz's argument still fails to provide any type of nuance on the discussions of gender, sex, and the psyche. It's really disappointing to see her, as one of the few women to achieve a level of stature at that time and in this realm of study, regurgitate Jung's own misogyny!