The Power to Stand Apart

illustration by Ivan Bilibin

A merchant and his wife had a daughter named Vassilisa. When the girl was eight years old, the mother fell gravely ill.  On her deathbed, the mother gave the girl a blessing and a wooden doll. “Care for it and keep it with you always, and whenever you are in trouble it will help you,” she told the child and then she died.  After a time, the girl’s father remarried and with the help of the doll Vassilisa was able to perform the endless tasks imposed on her by her cruel stepmother and two lazy stepsisters.  One day, when the father had gone on a long journey, the stepmother put out all the lights in the house and ordered Vassilisa to fetch the fire from Baba Yaga’s hut deep within the forest, knowing that whomsoever should enter the lair of Baba Yaga would be eaten by the witch.  The girl consulted the doll who advised her to go. “Never fear,” said the doll to Vassilisa. “Keep me always beside you, and you will be all right.” So Vassilisa slipped the doll in her apron pocket and went into the forest.  At nightfall, Vassilisa found the hut of Baba Yaga.  “It is I, grandmother,” she called out.  The skulls on the old witch’s fence began to glow. “What do you want?” Baba Yaga growled from inside the hut.  “My stepmother sent me to ask you for fire to light our house,” Vassilisa replied, bowing low. “Very well,” said Baba Yaga emerging from the hut and she invited the girl to come inside.  That night, with the help of the doll, Vassilisa performed all of the tasks the witch had set for her on pain of death so that, marveling, the old crone wondered the next day how the girl had survived.  ”By my mother’s blessing,” the girl replied. “Is that so!” Baba Yaga shrieked and, pushing Vassilisa out the door,  grabbed a skull lantern with glowing eyes from the fencepost and thrust it at her.  “Here is the fire you came for.”  When Vassilisa returned home, the eyes from the lantern fixed themselves onto her stepmother and stepsisters and burnt them all to ashes.  Vassilisa buried the lantern and went to live with an old woman she knew.  One day, wishing to do something to pass the time, Vassilisa asked the doll to fashion her a loom.  By the end of that winter Vassilisa had made so much fine cloth that she went to sell it in the capital where her work was admired by the Tsar and he married her.  

In this Russian version of the Cinderella fairytale, the doll is the symbol of the young self as it separates from the mother and learns to stand on its own.  

Women are more relationship-oriented than men and have more difficulty distinguishing themselves from others of their sex, especially from their mothers. They are more prone to losing themselves in relationship.  So in the story, when the mother dies, the daughter is suddenly confronted with the task of finding her own identity, which is the great problem in feminine psychology, according to Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz.  

In her book, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, von Franz notes how girls go about in pairs, copying each other’s hairstyles, dress and even their way of talking.  The fact that girls have trouble sorting out who is who accounts, she says, for certain catty or spiteful behavior:

Because they are so apt to identify, they malign each other behind their backs.  Being unconscious of their own unique personality, they indulge in all such tricks in order to make a separation.

The cruelty exhibited by the stepmother is an example of this.  The stepmother’s value of herself is mixed up with the stepdaughter.  The older woman does not appreciate her own worth and tries to do away with the girl so that her ego can survive.  The stepmother has no desire for insight into the problem either, as symbolized by her putting out all the lights in the house and sending the girl away.  

Vassilisa, on the other hand, chooses another path.  Strengthened by her mother’s positive blessing (symbolized by the doll), the girl bravely accepts the difficult course of individuation.

The daughter’s task of finding “her own femininity in her own form” – as von Franz puts the problem – is presented at the mother’s death, when the girl is eight years old, a time when a child is just beginning to experience a sense of self.  Instead of seeing herself through her own eyes, or through the eyes of her mother (with whom until now she was one), the child begins to realize that there are “others” who are separate and apart from her.  Indeed, it is as if her consciousness has split in two and she now experiences herself as she imagines others see her.  This is the birth of self-consciousness.  But Vassilisa goes even further.  When confronted at this tender moment with the malignant force personified by the stepfamily, the doll instructs the girl to go deep into the forest – to face the witch.

This is no coincidence. According to von Franz “that first intuitive realization of the Self”—much more profound than mere self-consciousness – is always accompanied by the appearance of the powers of darkness and desolation. “Where the pearl is,” she says, “There is also the dragon, and vice versa.  They are never separate.”

Put another way, there can be no birth of the Self without an encounter with and insight into the shadow. Vassilisa instinctively knows that in order to be released from the dark forces that surround her, she must face them. The girl’s discussion with the doll as to whether to enter the forest is an example of the conscious decision to do so.

Baba Yaga is not an entirely evil figure, however.  In fact, Vassilisa calls her grandmother.  Her power, exemplified by the staring eyes of the skull, symbolize what Sylvia Brinton Perera in her book Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women calls “the cold yin of Erishkigal’s vision,” Erishkigal being the Sumerian goddess who survives alone, Queen of the Underworld, cold, brutal and uncaring, completely detached from others, stuck in childbirth, groaning in pain and deepest despair.  Here, in these cold chambers, there is a complete standstill “where all is miasmic and inhuman and inchoate.”  There is no hope of “effective, yang answer” as Brinton puts it, “no way out by work or will.”  And yet, as the story shows, the encounter with and indeed acceptance of the cold, dark goddess, exemplified in Vassilisa’s story by her willingness to confront Baba Yaga leads to illumination and rebirth.    

How does Vassilisa do it? 

She holds on to her self (care for it and keep it with you always).  

Too often women lose themselves in relationship, giving in to the urge to merge with another in love, or denying parts of themselves, especially that cold impersonal potency symbolized by the staring skull lantern, frightened no doubt by its powerful effect.

Letting go of sentimental forms of loving and the sense of well being she may have once gotten from being merely agreeable or loyal or good, Vassilisa claims her right to fire and survives the night in Baba Yaga’s hut.  It is her birthright and she owns it, proclaiming that she has come through the night "by my mother's blessing," whereupon she is immediately released from possession by the witch - and from the bondage of her cruel stepmother.  

The story teaches us that to become a graceful, whole and self-loving person, capable of taking action in the world (weaving our fine cloth), a woman must care for herself and hold on to all of her parts, acknowledging the dark powers of the goddess rather than attempting to destroy or escape them. 

Is there some part of you that you have lost and need to reclaim?

Call to Adventure

When a pretty and kind-hearted girl is eight years old, her mother dies.  Her father remarries and the new mother is jealous and mean, foisting all of the housework on the lovely young girl while favoring her own lazy and spiteful daughters.  Toiling under this unbearable situation, the girl eventually loses sight of her charms.  Her journey then, as a young woman, is to rediscover the beauty that she lost. 

This is the story of Cinderella, one of the oldest and best-loved fairy tales in the world. 

According to Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the journey begins with a crisis and a call to adventure, which is set in motion by the merest chance – a maiden loses her slipper, or a ball rolls into a pond, or there is a knock at the door, or someone loses his way in the woods – and the individual is drawn into an unfamiliar and terrifying world.

The figure that first appears to announce the adventure – be it a repulsive toad who offers advice or a benevolent fairy godmother who turns a pumpkin and field mice into a coach drawn by six gray horses – belongs to the realm where the hero must go.  To answer the call, the hero must turn away from familiar things and enter the dark forest or the underground way to grapple with the hidden and irrational forces of a place where one cannot see “to the bottom of things.”

The crisis has come about because the old ideals, thoughts and behaviors are no longer appropriate. 

In The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Marie Louise Von Franz suggests that, for a woman, the call may be to live more boldly and in line with one’s nature, as in the case of Cinderella who has been hiding in the shadow of her domineering step-mother and sisters – or it may be to get over hurt feelings as in the case of Snow White whose response to the deadly opinion about her is to sleep for a hundred years.  Or perhaps, Von Franz suggests, it is necessary to connect with officially rejected thoughts or feelings, as in the case of the sister in The Six Swans who must work for many years in the deepest introversion sewing shirts for her brothers who had been turned into swans by their unhappy mother. 

Failure to answer the call means the loss of “the power of significant affirmative action” and reduces the subject to a victim to be saved.  But answering the call, Campbell says, sends up all kinds of supernatural aid.

As in fairytale, so in real life.  Answering the call and following courageously as the path unfolds, we find all of the forces of the unconscious at our side.  

In moments of crisis, the unconscious sends up "living beings" that are concealed in the emotions but which sometimes appear to us in dreams.  According to psychologist C.G. Jung, these aspects of instinctive impulse have the power to destroy as long as they remain hidden or submerged in the unconscious.  Answering the call, then, on some level, is to listen to what is being asked of us in our dreams – that is, to embrace the quest for a new synthesis of personality that involves taking into account those parts of the whole that have been neglected.

 The way Jung himself responded to the call – and what he urged his patients to do – was to translate these instinctive impulses into images.  He urged his patients to draw and paint their fantasies, finding that this technique both helped them to rediscover hidden parts of themselves and also to portray the psychological journey upon which they were embarked.

What is being asked of you?