Snow White: A Road Map for Our Time: Individuality and Primal Unity: Ego's Struggle for Dominance in Today's World, #3

By Jim Willis

In the story of Little Snow White, the metaphorical Queen Ego, secure in her castle, seeks to destroy Snow White, the personification of Intuitive Innocence. Snow White lives in the wild forest "across the seven mountains" with the seven dwarfs. In the end, Innocence triumphs over Ego through her interaction with earth energies. Once victory is assured, her marriage to the prince from a faraway, mysterious land, unites the physical and the spiritual aspects of life in our perception realm. An old fairy tale thus becomes a roadmap for fulfillment in modern day life.        

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dimensionfold Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781989940341

Book preview

The Map Legend

E

very map has a legend, an explanation of the symbols it uses and some useful information about who put it together and printed it. This chapter is such a legend and explores how the story of Little Snow-White came to be.

First of all, no one knows how old this tale is or how far back in time its genesis really lies.

Joseph Campbell believed it to be a remnant of what he calls high culture myths. By this he meant that he believed myths to be the result of an intellectual elite who transcended the common people of their day when it came to art, poetry, music, dance, or cultural norms.

Robert Bly thought, as do I, that the origins of these kinds of stories can be traced all the way back to shamanism, before the agricultural revolution and the rise of so-called higher civilizations. Perhaps they even predate what we call our civilization, going back to ancient cultures that passed on their wisdom before they tragically disappeared. If this is the case, they are valuable indeed, because they originated with very ancient peoples who learned the hard way what life is all about and, like a venerable, elder grandfather or grandmother, wanted to pass on what they had learned before they died.

Marie-Louise von Franz, a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, taught that what she called Fairy Tales resulted from those who experienced paranormal or parapsychological journeys into what we now call the soul or psyche. Heavily influenced by Carl Jung and his theories about archetypes, she searched out their roots in the classic experience of deep psychological exploration.

The Shamanic Experience

Perhaps the most insightful way of exploring the origins of myth and fairy tales involves turning to what I like to call the shamanic experience. When shamans, using a variety of trance-inducing techniques, actually encounter extra-dimensional beings who grant them instructions, healing methods, and wisdom, they bring these teachings back for the benefit of their tribes. This would explain the animal-human hybrids so often associated with shamanic journeying, or the ability of animals found in nature to speak in human language or engage in human-like mannerisms. Such experiences, being deeply entwined with nature and animal envoys, often speak of unifying connections in these terms. Mythology is full of such entities, which are called therianthropes. They are found painted on cave walls and pecked into rock art. Egyptian murals, Mayan depictions, and Chinese pictures prominently feature them. They are found in the Old Testament of the Bible.

Probably because ancient people lived much closer to nature than we do, the farther back in time we go, the more we find them. Although specific therianthropes are not found in Snow-White, nature figures prominently in this tale. So, we have to be alert to nature themes and shamanic images.

Setting the Stage

However the tale of Little Snow-White originated, it was first popularized by the brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were aptly named. Some of their tales make for pretty grim reading, especially if you read them to your kids before they go to bed at night. The violence and explicit scenes can lead to nightmares.

In 1819 they cleaned Snow-White up a little. In the original 1812 version, Snow-White's own mother poisoned her. The 1819 version changed it to a wicked step-mother. Disney, of course, scrubbed it up even more. His 1937 film made no mention of the fact that at the end the wicked queen was forced to put on red-hot iron shoes and dance herself to death. Early editions even describe her heels and toes being cut off to fit inside the shoes. This is definitely not your run of the mill, kiddy entertainment that we like to view today. If Disney's cartoon had included an episode like this it would never have been given the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

On the assumption, though, that the earlier version of the tale was probably closer to the truth of the original story, I'm going to cite the earliest possible version in the pages to follow. Let the chips fall where they may. There is usually a reason for the violence we will encounter. It's meant to shock us into awareness.

First Premise: Snow White = Intuitive Innocence = Primal Soul

First, my basic interpretive premises.

Little Snow-White presents a description of the intuitive innocence that sleeps within each of us. To make things easier to understand, from now on I'll call it the Primal Soul.

Primal Soul is our essential life force. It is the eternal energy that came from the Source and will return to the Source upon the death of our material body. It is open, receptive, curious, and responsive. It does not think as much as it feels. It is intuitive, and constantly seeks to explore new ideas and enter into new experiences.

In describing Primal Soul, I would love to use a descriptive word such as virgin, were that not such a loaded concept. We associate virginity with gender, and Little Snow-White has little to do with our concepts of male and female, although it has everything to do with the concept of male and female.

This has to be made clear right at the beginning. When I talk about feminine energy and masculine energy, I'm not talking about biological men and women. Physical men and women are simply material expressions of the yin and yang of cosmic energy that form the basic, dualistic, creative force that pervades the cosmos. When you peek beneath biology, you soon discover that each and every one of us, indeed, each and every cell in our body and each sub-atomic particle in the universe, demonstrates this duality. It is the driving force of creation. That's why sex is so powerful and, down through the ages, has been hedged in and regulated by rules and regulations, both stated and unstated.

Sex is the desire for spiritual union that was necessarily severed when our Primal Soul chose to enter into human life where it could explore and experience individual freedom and opportunity. Deep down inside us we yearn to once again return to that spiritual unity, but realize we cannot until the time of exploration and education that we call life has ended. Nevertheless, divine unity is still part of us, even if we have temporarily forgotten it. Why else have people been known to exclaim, My God! at the point of sexual climax? At that point of union, we briefly remember what it was to be united in the timeless One.

What all this means is that every single one of us exhibits both feminine and masculine energy. It is true that our culture, which often perversely elevates division over unity, tries to teach us that men are completely different from women. Such division allows one gender to overpower the other. It does so by emphasizing differences, such as introducing clichés such as women's intuition or it's a man's world into our vocabulary. This is a perversion. We are all male and female, despite our gender and sexual preference.

So, when I talk about Snow-White representing intuitive innocence, or the feminine energy that sleeps within each of us, I really mean each of us. Our gender has nothing to do with it, unless we heed the siren call of a misled culture and allow superficiality to dominate our thinking.

Second Premise: Wicked Queen = Ego Identity

This immediately leads to my second interpretive premise. If Snow-White represents our Primal Soul, eternal and divine, the wicked queen represents our Ego.

Ego is all about individuality and separateness. You'll notice as we continue together that the first letter of the word Ego is usually capitalized. There's a reason for this. Ego is often a proper name. It has an identity of its own. When let out of its cage, it becomes a fallen angel, the demon who wants to conquer and triumph. Rather than seek unity and one-ness, it wants to stand alone in the end zone of life, spike a football hard onto the turf of the natural world, bruising the very skin of the mother who gave us birth, lift a single finger to the skies, and shout, I'm number 1! Used in this way, Ego is not something we have. It is someone we become, if we allow it to take over our identity.

Ego is all about power, recognition, and individual accomplishment. Why does it so fear the Primal Soul which sleeps within? Because it recognizes that its life span is limited. When the body dies, Ego dies. As such, it spends its time prowling the world like a hungry lion, looking for food and nourishment so it can be sustained as long as possible. It is, quite literally, deathly afraid: that is, afraid of death. It knows its time is short, limited to a human life span.

In the story of Little Snow-White, both Primal Soul and Ego are represented by female figures. But that doesn't mean that male energy is absent. As we shall see when we begin to unroll the narrative, male energy seeks, in different and diverse ways, to lend a hand and sometimes offer help. But we enter the domain of the material creation through the womb of the Earth Mother, so it is only appropriate that the ancients presented the central figures of this particular story as contrasting women.

Other stories feature the trials and tribulations of male energy. One has only to read about mythical figures such as Atlas, Sisyphus, Odysseus, and Hercules, in order to explore the realm of male energy. But those tales are for another time. What concerns us now is the relationship between the sleeping Primal Source and the powerful and controlling