‘The light needs the dark to become articulate.’
Laurence Whistler, Scenes and Signs on Glass
A striking feature of the myths and folk tales of the world is how often their central figure is an orphan. In particular, at the beginning of a story, we often meet a little hero without a father or a heroine without a mother. Aladdin, Perseus, Theseus, the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk are all familiar examples of heroes with dead or absent fathers, who begin their story living alone with mother. Cinderella and Snow White are instances of heroines who lose their mothers, shortly before or after the story begins.
We thus begin the story with a family scene in which one major figure is conspicuously absent: in all these examples, the parents of the same sex as the central figure. What happens next?
In Aladdin a mysterious older man appears, the Sorcerer, who claims to be the dead father’s long-lost brother, and who seems initially to be a replacement for the hero’s lost father. He says he will look after the boy as his father would have wished. But this shadowy figure then turns out to be the hero’s chief antagonist throughout the tale. Perseus finds himself with a wicked would-be stepfather, the tyrant king Polydectes, who is trying to force his attentions on Perseus’s mother Danae. It is he who sends the boy off on the trail of perilous ordeals which make up the story. Theseus eventually finds himself confronted by the tyrant king Minos. Jack climbs the beanstalk and is faced by the towering, threatening figure of the giant, who he learns has killed his real father and dispossessed Jack of his rightful inheritance.
The central key to the story thus lies, in each case, in the struggle between the young hero and a fully-grown man who, as a Dark Father-figure or Tyrant, is a negative version of the father absent at the beginning. And when, after a long period of struggle, the hero at last comes to the end of his adventures, what happens? In each case the hero finally manages to overthrow this dark figure: Aladdin kills the Sorcerer; Perseus kills Polydectes; Theseus kills Minos’s terrible representative, the Minotaur, Jack kills the giant. And we then see Aladdin, having at last grown up into a fully mature man, fully united with the Princess he has liberated and succeeding to her father’s kingdom. Perseus and Theseus have likewise liberated their Princesses from the shadow of the dark power and succeeded to their kingdoms. Jack has won the Giant’s treasures and, even though he returns at the end to live with mother (which merely shows that this is a version of the story intended to be told to very young children) we no longer see him as the idle, good-for-nothing, dependent boy he was at the beginning, but as an independent, powerful young man in his own right, who has redeemed his father’s lost inheritance, won a great treasure and is now capable of protecting and looking after his mother.
In each case we have seen a young boy whose most conspicuous lack was a strong, loving father. He has then been confronted with the negative version of this, a powerful but egocentric, unloving male authority-figure. And at the end, having killed off this figure, he has himself been transformed into a light and positive version of the figure he has overthrown. The hero has become a powerful, independent, fully-grown man, but at the same time – unlike his dark antagonist – he is whole, both strong and loving.
In the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, where the heroine is the central figure, once they have lost their true, loving mothers, we see the familiar pattern in the arrival of the wicked stepmother, cruel, treacherous and vain, who then becomes the chief dark figure of the story. Again, as a fully-grown woman, mother or queen, she represents the negative, unloving, egocentric version of what the heroine herself is eventually destined to grow up into. When, at the end, the heroine has been through her long maturing transformation and is finally liberated from the grip of the dark power by the Prince, she has at last become a perfect potential mother and queen in her own right, fit to succeed alongside her prince to rule over the kingdom.
In all these stories the chief dark figure thus signals to us the shadowy, negative version of precisely what the hero or heroine will eventually have to make fully positive in themselves. In fact, as we shall see, this principle whereby the nature of the dark figures gives us a direct, unconscious clue as to what needs to be transformed into its positive, light version for the story to reach a happy ending applies in stories of every kind. It is the key to the function played by the dark figure throughout storytelling. And once we learn to recognise how subtly and consistently this principle works, the drama which lies at the heart of storytelling opens up in a remarkable new way.
There are few themes more familiar to stories than that which traces the growing up of a little hero or heroine from immature, dependent childhood to some ultimate state of independent maturity, where he or she is united with a perfect ‘other half’. There we can leave the newly-established couple with the reassurance that some profoundly important pattern has come to its proper resolution.
On a literal level, as we have noted, it might seem odd that we should find this so satisfying an ending to a story, since in real life marriage is far from being an ending. It is a new beginning, which may be merely the preface to the longest period of a human life.
Nevertheless, in terms of our deepest instincts, this obviously corresponds to one of the most basic and universal patterns in life. If we look around the natural kingdom, we see one impulse in every form of life which transcends everything else. From the protozoa to the higher primates, the central underlying concern of each species is to reproduce its kind, so that the chain of life can continue. And in the majority of life-forms this requires an absolutely fundamental process. Each individual creature, once it is born, must evolve and mature to the point where it can mate with another of the opposite sex, to ensure the birth of the next generation; and, in the higher life forms, must then ensure that those newly-born young are nurtured and provided with the conditions which can enable them in turn to grow up to the point where they are ready to continue the process. Both the drive to do this and the framework of ‘knowledge’ necessary to achieve it are instinctively programmed into every species which relies on sexual reproduction, as the central fact of its genetic inheritance. To this the human race is obviously no exception.
Every human being born into the world begins as a child, with a father and a mother. If the genetic imperative is to be fulfilled and the chain of life is to continue, the child must grow up, leave home and eventually find a mate with whom to establish a new home as a new centre for the generation of new life. In every generation, for life to be handed on, this is the drama which must be enacted: the son emerging from the shadow of his parents, to be united with a wife and take on the role of father; the daughter emerging from the shadow of her parents, to be united with a husband and become a mother.
We thus see essentially four characters in the drama, with a changing interplay of roles as the process unfolds: first the father and mother; then the child, growing up to adulthood; and finally the ‘other half’, necessary to bring the whole process back to its starting point, with the creation of a new child. Here, embedded in a web of our deepest and most powerful instinctual drives, are the most basic of all human relationships. And when we consider the main ‘dark figures’ who continually recur in stories, we have already begun to see how they correspond to each of the four figures in this primordial drama.
First there is the older man whom we see as the Dark Father-figure or Tyrant. He is powerful, often holding authority as the head of a household or a ruler, but he is heartless, using his power only to dominate others. He is thus seen as completely opposed to the flow of life.
Secondly there is the older woman whom we see as the Dark Mother-figure, Dark Queen or Witch. She is a more complex figure because outwardly she may seem to have ‘feminine’ attributes. She may make a show of being caring or protective. She may in her guise as a Witch have visionary, intuitive powers, the capacity to see behind the immediate surface of things to some hidden reality. But she no more possesses the real ‘feminine’ attributes of selfless feeling for others and the ability to ‘see whole’ than the Dark Father. Her ‘feminine’ facade is thus treacherous. Underneath, like the Dark Father, she is totally egocentric, possessed by the ‘masculine’ drive to power and domination.
Thirdly there are the Dark Rivals or the Dark Alter-Ego, of the same sex as the hero or heroine, who stand in some way more directly as competitors for the same goal, or as a ‘dark opposite’.
Fourthly there is the Dark Other Half, the Temptress or False Wooer, who selfishly seeks to seduce or beguile the hero or heroine from their true path by offering a treacherous, false or inadequate version of the complete, perfect union they are striving towards.
We can see how these four types of dark figure correspond in a shadowy way to the four key roles in the most basic drama of human life. But once we grasp the significance of the ‘unrealised value’, the role of the dark figures in representing that which needs to be turned into its light version for the story to come to a happy ending, we can see how the real purpose of each of these dark figures is to present the hero or heroine of a story with a specific challenge. Each poses a particular negative threat which the hero and heroine must surmount by showing themselves as its positive equivalent.
On the face of it, the simplest of these challenges to identify is that posed by the Dark Father or Tyrant, because he usually makes no pretence of his true nature. He is simply a full-grown man, full of strength and power but self-evidently brutal and oppressive. In other words, he represents the fully-developed masculine values, in terms of his power and the fact that he embodies the ruling or dominant order, but completely without the life-giving feminine balance: and whenever the hero of a story comes up against such a figure (or turns into one himself) it is a sign that his ultimate task, if he is to succeed, is to become a positive, light version of the same figure.
The same is true when the hero encounters a strongly masculine ‘Dark Rival’. In either case, he must show himself to be not just their match in masculine terms, but selfless where they are egocentric; good-hearted where they are heartless; able to see whole where their vision is limited. That is why the hero’s ultimate prize from his struggle with the ‘dark masculine’ is that he can release the life-giving feminine from its deadly grip, and can replace the Dark Father as a potential light father or ‘king’.
But to reach the point where he is ready to do this, he must first have shown his true masculinity: which is why, when the hero comes up against the ‘dark feminine’, the Dark Mother or the Temptress, his challenge has a different emphasis. Although, like the ‘dark masculine’, the ‘dark feminine’ is fundamentally egocentric and out for power, she works in a different way because she approaches the hero on his own softer, more feminine side. The ‘dark masculine’ is obviously aggressive and combative. But the ‘dark feminine’ works through a superficial show of feminine qualities, by appearing to feel and to care. She gets her way by guile, seduction, placation, deception. She disguises her true predatory intent beneath a pretence that she is serving the hero’s best interests, like Circe or the Witch in Hansel and Gretel who offers the children gingerbread as a lure. It is only later that her real nature and purpose emerges, that she really wishes to imprison or devour her victims. The Dark Mother/Temptress promises the hero ease and self-gratification, that he does not have to make any effort or show firmness, that there is a short cut to becoming a man. She seeks to flatter his vanity or to gratify his physical appetites – for food, sex, comfort, relaxation. Always she appeals in some way to the hero’s egocentric desires, as a way of furthering her own. And here, in order to resist her wiles, the hero’s task is to show himself as fully masculine. He has to show strength, judgement, the ability to discriminate. He has to remain his own man. The purpose of the ‘dark feminine’ is to unman him, to make him weak and dependent, to turn him into ‘the boy hero who cannot grow up’. His way to resist her is certainly to hold onto true feeling and ability to ‘see whole’. But even more directly it requires him to summon up all his masculine strength, will-power and self-reliance, as Odysseus does when he finally manages to break free from the enchantments of Calypso. That is why the great prize won by the hero from the battle with the ‘dark feminine’ is his independent manliness.
We also here come to a complication, in that it is perfectly possible for a male character in a story to remain unrealised in a positive sense on both sides of his personality at the same time. He lacks masculinity as well as the inner feminine. Although this makes him outwardly weak, it does not mean that he is not driven by the urge to exert power over others. But because he is unable to show his desire to dominate openly, he resorts to acting in the manner of the ‘dark feminine’, by guile and treachery. Such a character may pretend to be concerned for the interests of others, like Aladdin’s Sorcerer or those Dark Rival figures, Blifil, the ‘goody-goody’ and ‘sneak’ in Tom Jones, Joseph Surface in A School For Scandal, Molière’s Tartuffe; but this is only a hypocritical front for his ruthless self-seeking.
In fact the most extreme form of this outwardly male character who works through the insinuating manner of the ‘dark feminine’, trying to get a hold over the hero by pretending to be acting in his interests, represents the ultimate type of dark figure in stories, the Tempter. This figure, who is extremely dangerous because he is so deceptive, is most commonly seen in Tragedy. An obvious example is Mephistopheles in Dr Faustus, pretending to offer Faustus all sorts of illusory powers and the ability to know and see ‘hidden things’ (i.e., to see whole), when in fact he is appealing only to the weak, deluded Faustus’s ego and seeking to destroy him. Iago is a similarly devilish example, pretending to be serving Othello’s best interests, but in fact seeking only to trap and destroy him. Lord Henry Wootton plays the same role in luring Dorian Gray onto his path to self-destruction.
The Tempter is in fact the supreme ‘dark opposite’ in stories because he stands at the ultimate pole from the state of wholeness. He represents in its most extreme form egotism pretending to be its opposite. As such, if the hero is weak in judgement and self-control, he can become the most dangerous adversary of all.
In those stories where the central figure is the heroine, the emphasis of the challenges presented by the dark figures is reversed. When a heroine comes up against the ‘dark masculine’, like Leonore against the Tyrant Pizarro or Portia against Shylock, it is her strength which has to be called primarily into play, her ‘masculine’ qualities (although coupled with an unshakeable hold on her femininity). When she is up against the ‘dark feminine’, like Cinderella faced by her wicked stepmother and the ugly sisters, it is her own genuine femininity, her innocence, beauty and goodness of heart, which is the most obvious measure of her superiority, and it is this which in the end attracts the ‘light masculine’ figure of the hero to release her. But, like the hero, the heroine may also come up against that most ‘inferior’ figure of all, a male figure working through his ‘dark feminine’ wiles, like St John Rivers trying to lure Jane Eyre into a marriage which we know would first imprison and then kill her. St John Rivers is the Tempter as Dark Other Half, like those weak, treacherous false wooers who attempt to seduce several of Jane Austen’s heroines, or Anatole Kuragin, the would-be seducer of Natasha in War and Peace. The Tempter, as the ultimate ‘dark opposite’ of the state of wholeness, is thus just as much the most dangerous enemy to the heroine as he is to the hero, and like him she needs to summon up all her potential for wholeness to resist him; just as does Jane Eyre does in her final struggle to free herself from succumbing to Rivers.
What we thus see is just how directly our human need to imagine stories is related to the most central instinctive drive in human life. Each of us born into a family unit soon becomes conscious that we are the third and youngest of a ‘three’: ‘Daddy, Mummy and me’, the primal triad. We are aware that, as the ‘third’ of that ‘three’, we are the central focus of a process of growth and transformation which naturally preoccupies us more than anything else in the world. From this beginning, as we gradually become aware, the deepest instinctive drive programmed into any of us is that we should eventually find that ‘other half’ who can complete the process by enabling us to repeat the continuation of life. We thus instinctively know that the original ‘three’ must become a ‘four’: in a way which also creates that new state of ‘one-ness’ which forms the core of a new family unit.
This essential pattern is programmed into our unconscious around a set of archetypes; which is why so many stories centre round the same little group of archetypal figures: father, mother, hero and heroine (whose symbolic roles are often enhanced, particularly in myths and folk tales, by giving them royal status as a King, a Queen, a Prince and a Princess). If a story manages to reach the complete happy ending, what it shows us is its hero and heroine finally coming together to become a potential new Father/King and Mother/Queen, reflecting that process central to human life whereby each new generation grows up to succeed to the one before it.
But stories are not concerned with this succession in its biological sense. Their concern is with its psychology. What they are showing us is those psychological qualities which are essential for the succession to take place in the right way. This is why the role of the dark figures in a story is to exemplify those negative qualities which the central figure must overcome in order to achieve the proper happy ending. In this respect, however many characters may appear in a story, its real concern is with just one: its hero or its heroine. It is he or she with whose fate we identify, as we see them gradually developing towards that state of self-realisation which marks the end of the story. Ultimately it is in relation to this central figure that all the other characters in a story take on their significance. What each of the other characters represents is really only some aspect of the inner state of the hero or heroine themselves.
This is why in so many stories we see a central figure who begins young, immature and single then falling in some way under the shadow of the dark power. For a long time the state of incompleteness which the dark power itself symbolises continues to hold sway, because this corresponds to the stage of development reached by the hero or heroine themselves. Only when they are finally ready to emerge to maturity can the dark power in the story be overthrown or fade away. We thus see the central figure developing through the story towards that moment of final emergence into the light, much as a butterfly evolves through all the incomplete stages of its development, first as a caterpillar, then as a chrysalis and only lastly in its complete state as a butterfly: imago, as it is called, the final perfect image of what it has been striving towards. Through all those phases of the story when hero or heroine are still psychologically incomplete, we see the dark figures looming over them, as negative symbols of the values they must still make positive in themselves before the story can reach its final resolution.
So central is this to understanding how stories take shape in the human imagination that it is time to look at how it works in practice. We begin with two of the most famous stories of the ancient world, each describing how its hero matures from immature boyhood to a final state of kingly manhood. We then see how a modern Hollywood version presents the same theme.
The story of the great mythical hero Perseus begins even before he is born. It opens with a king, Acrisius, who has a daughter Danae. We thus begin with the image of a King/Father with a beautiful young woman by his side. He is then told by the oracle that one day in the distant future he will be killed by his grandson. In other words, he learns that he will one day have to die and that a new generation will succeed. Faced with this threat Acrisius turns dark and shuts up Danae in a tower, so that no man may reach her. It is a classic image of the dark power of the Tyrant imprisoning the light feminine in its shadow. Made selfish by the thought that he has to die, Acrisius has lost touch with the ability to feel or to see anything beyond his own self-interest.
Then the greatest king of all, Zeus, king of the gods, representing the power of masculine authority at its most numinous because it is serving the cause of life, comes to Danae disguised as a shining shower of gold and she becomes pregnant with the hero of the story, Perseus. When he is born, the fearful, enraged Acrisius turns loose the infant hero and his mother in a chest on the sea, whence they are eventually washed up alone together on a strange shore. The hero thus, like any human child, enters a new world close to his mother – but it is not long before a new presence enters their life in the shape of the king of the land they have come to, Polydectes. He tries to force his attentions on Danae and treats her cruelly, thus redoubling the shadowy image of the Dark King/Father which lies so heavily over the early stages of this story. The boy Perseus grows up to the verge of manhood, loving his mother and attempting to defend her against the tyrannical ‘dark masculine’ of Polydectes, and eventually, to buy him off, he promises the Tyrant he will do anything to save her from his clutches. This courageous declaration of loving unselfishness tells us that Perseus begins with a good relationship to the feminine; but in order to prove its worth he is first going to have to establish his manhood, for without the manly strength to back them up, such declarations are merely empty expressions of sentiment. The king sends him off to kill the dreadful Medusa. The terrible, once-beautiful Gorgon, with her deadly power to turn all who see her to stone, freezing the life and growth of all who fall into her shadow, is one of the most indelible images of the ‘dark feminine’ ever conceived. Eventually, after a long journey and much preparation, with the aid of the goddess of wisdom Athene and the god Hermes, Perseus manages to cut off her head. At the moment he does so, out of her body spring fleeting images of the shining warrior Chrysaor and the winged horse Pegasus, symbols of the bounding power of manhood which Perseus has released from his victorious struggle with the ‘dark feminine’.
Now he has become a man, the only danger is that he will misuse his new-found power and strength for selfish purposes. He has one more task to become complete: to prove that his power has life-giving balance, by showing that it does not overshadow the ‘light feminine’. This is precisely the test which awaits him when, on his journey home, he sees the beautiful Princess Andromeda chained to a rock as the terrible sea-monster sent by Poseidon approaches. The shadowy presence of Poseidon, grim king of the inferior realm beneath the sea, is always a sign in Greek mythology that the ‘Dark Father’ of unbalanced masculine power is at work. He is, for instance, the father of Polyphemus, the ‘dark opposite’ to Odysseus. He is the shadowy presence behind King Minos and his creature the Minotaur, the ‘dark opposite’ to Theseus. Here his sea-monster stands as the ‘dark opposite’ or ‘Dark Rival’ of Perseus, the representative of the ‘dark masculine’ with whom he is in competition for the Princess. By using the trophy of his new-found manhood, the head of Medusa, to outwit the monster, Perseus slays it, frees Andromeda and marries her. He returns to kill Polydectes, again using the Gorgon’s head, to free his mother Danae. Finally, at a funeral games, he by mistake (and therefore innocently) kills the watching Acrisius, his grandfather – and at this point Perseus at last succeeds to the kingdom. The original oracle has been fulfilled. Perseus has succeeded in every sense. He has unravelled all the intricate series of challenges back to the beginning, turning darkness in each case to light. The story ends, as it began, on the image of a king, a proud, full-grown bearer of masculine authority, standing with a beautiful woman by his side. The torch has been passed to a new generation. The cycle of regeneration is complete.
Another instance of a young hero who grows up in the shadow of the Dark Father until he eventually succeeds to the kingdom is the biblical story of David, recorded from Jewish legend in the two books of Samuel and the first book of Kings. We look here at just the first part of his story, up to the point where he becomes king, because of its particularly subtle emphasis on the fact that, unlike his dark, one-sided antagonist, young David is in masculine and feminine terms so well balanced, and therefore always potentially whole.
The story begins with King Saul having just won a series of tremendous, bloody victories over his country’s enemies, but incurring the wrath of God for his disobedience. Saul has failed. He is becoming a dark figure. God decides that his days as king are numbered. At this point we meet David as an obscure young shepherd boy, and almost the first thing we learn about him is that he plays the harp beautifully, a first intimation of his softer, feminine side. Then follows the most familiar episode of the story when the great enemies of Israel, the Philistines, invade, led by their champion, the boastful giant Goliath, representing ‘dark masculine’ strength at its most brutal. Alone of all the Israelites the little shepherd boy dares to step forward to challenge the giant. Goliath looks down in contempt, because it is emphasised that David was not only young but ‘fair of countenance’; again the softer value. And of course it is not because David is stronger than Goliath that he wins the contest, but because he is cleverer and more imaginative. Like so many other little heroes confronted by giants in folklore, he catches Goliath out on the blind spot of his self-regarding stupidity, his limited awareness. David has the wider vision to use the little slingstones which enable him to attack from out of the giant’s reach; and having slain Israel’s greatest enemy by his combination of manly courage and intuitive imagination, he becomes his country’s greatest hero.
At first Saul welcomes the emergence of David as his leading general. David marries his daughter, the Princess Michal, and becomes the inseparable friend of Saul’s son Jonathan, a ‘light alter-ego’, emphasising that David is now almost a son to Saul himself. But increasingly Saul becomes jealous and bitter towards the happy, balanced, harp-playing young man. He turns more and more into a moody, scheming, heartless Dark Father, inwardly possessed by the ‘dark feminine’, making a succession of treacherous attempts to kill David. David is driven increasingly into the position of being a hunted outlaw, first in the wilderness of Israel itself, then in exile in the land of the hated Philistines. As Saul, ‘above the line’, sinks ever further into darkness, David is being polarised ever further into the shadows ‘below the line’. But never for a moment does he lose his balance, his sense of loyalty, his true feeling and his ability to see whole. Even when he has a chance to kill the sleeping Saul in the darkness of the cave, he merely cuts off a piece of Saul’s coat to show that he has no desire to cause Saul injury. In the ‘shadow realm’, in short, he is developing more and more completely into Saul’s ‘light opposite’, integrated and whole, while Saul in the ‘upper realm’ becomes ever more dark and unbalanced. Finally the nightmare gathering round Saul comes to a climax. He and his army suffer a huge defeat at the hands of the Philistines, Jonathan is killed, Saul himself commits suicide in despair. David is recalled by popular acclamation from the ‘inferior realm’ of his exile, and the seemingly perfect hero becomes king.1
One of the most popular Hollywood movies of recent times was the Disney Studio’s animated version of this basic theme, The Lion King (1994).2 This begins in Africa with different species of animals and birds congregating in the bush round Pride Rock, home of Mufasa, king of the lions and acknowledged lord of all the other animals. Their gathering symbolises the ‘Circle of Life’. Mufasa, strong and mature, is presenting his young cub Simba as his heir, proudly watched by Simba’s mother Sarabi. Deliberately absent from the ceremony is the king’s younger brother Scar, disfigured by a scar over one eye, physically weaker than his brother but crafty and cruel. His dark hope that he might one day himself succeed as king has now been dashed.
Initially we see Simba, the story’s hero, as foolish and immature, as he takes his little friend Nala, a young lioness, to the ‘elephants’ graveyard’ where they have been told never to go. They are rescued from a pack of evil hyenas by Simba’s father, the king, who has come to look for them. But then Simba’s recklessness leads him to be nearly trampled to death by a stampeding herd of wildebeeste. After again coming to save his son, Musafa escapes up a cliff from which Scar, waiting at the top, pushes him to his death. Simba imagines he has been the cause of his father’s death, and wanders miserably off into exile, leaving Scar, helped by the treacherous pack of hyenas, to claim the kingship.
We thus see the archetypally familiar situation of a good King/Father dying or being murdered, at a time when his immature young heir is not yet ready to succeed, so that the role of King/Father is taken on by a usurping dark brother (as in Hamlet, Aladdin and many other versions), leaving the son-hero disconsolate and dispossessed.
The lost and exiled Simba is taken into the care of a warthog and a meerkat, who become his friends, and he stays with them, enjoying a happily irresponsible life out in the bush, without noticing that he is gradually maturing into a full-grown lion (archetypally, this playful relationship with his friends echoes Prince Hal’s friendship with Falstaff and Co.). But eventually a full-grown young lioness intrudes on their peace, who turns out to be Nala. The news from the kingdom could not be worse. Under the misrule of Scar and his hyenas (like Saruman and his orcs in The Lord of the Rings), all has gone to wrack and ruin. Food and water are exhausted. It seems the very survival of the Pride is in question. At first Simba seems apathetic, but thanks to Nala and a wise monkey Rafiki, he is called back to himself. This is emphasised when he looks at his reflection in water, to see that he now looks just like his father – who then appears in a heavenly vision to tell him ‘you have forgotten who you are ... the one true king’.
Simba leads his friends back to Pride Rock to challenge the evil Scar, who scornfully accuses him of having killed his father. But when Scar then tries to kill Simba in the same way, by pushing him off the cliff, he admits that it was he himself who had murdered Musafa. Simba manages to leap upwards to safety, outwrestles Scar in a fight and, when the ‘dark king’ is pushed over the cliff in turn, he is set on and devoured by the hyenas. To the joy of his mother and the other unhappy lionesses, Simba has, like Odysseus, triumphantly reclaimed his kingdom. He marries his loving Nala, and the story ends with a hymn to the ‘Circle of Life’ sung by all the animals, as the new king and queen hold up a new-born daughter to confirm that the continuance of life into the future is now assured.
Once we begin to recognise the significance of the part played by the ‘unrealised value’ in stories, we see just how crucial it is to the unconscious logic by which they are constructed. All through a story the dark figures identify those negative qualities which must be redeemed into their positive opposites if it is to reach a happy ending. The whole story thus becomes the picture of a changing balance between the power of darkness initially dominant ‘above the line’ and the gradually developing centre of light ‘below the line’; until finally the balance can tip, the shadows fade away and light can flood up ‘above the line’ to show hero and heroine united and at one with life.
This kind of coding is so firmly built into the structure of myths and folk tales that we find it in storytelling all over the world. No culture could be more remote from our own than that of the ‘Stone Age’ bushmen of southern Africa. Yet consider the outline of a typical traditional bushman children’s story, from a collection made in the nineteenth century by Dr Wilhelm Bleek (later republished in The Heart of the Hunter by Laurens van der Post).
The story begins by describing how two of the little creatures of the veldt, a lizard and a black beetle, have a daughter. They keep her prisoner and force her to perform menial tasks, in such a cruel fashion that all the other creatures around are horrified. Eventually the other animals come together and resolve to liberate the little prisoner. First to attempt this heroic deed is a long-nosed mouse, but the lizard and the black beetle have no difficulty in killing him. A whole succession of other long-nosed mice try to succeed in his place, but all are killed. At last the mysterious Mantis, an insect which plays a central part in bushman mythology as a wise, far-seeing visionary, has a dream: with the result that a different creature, a striped mouse, sets out to free the unhappy young ‘beetle woman’. He goes into battle and by a combination of courage and ingenuity he succeeds finally in slaying both the lizard and the black beetle, exclaiming as he does so ‘I am, by myself, killing to save friends’. Not only is the young heroine liberated from her imprisonment, but all the slain mice come back to life as well. They march home in a triumphant column, at its head the victorious hero and by his side the young beetle woman: ‘for he felt that he was the husband of the girl and that she was utterly his woman’.
Although this tale comes from what might be regarded as one of the most primitive cultures in the world, nothing about its structure is unfamiliar to us. We recognise the initially dominant dark power, keeping the ‘light feminine’ imprisoned in its shadow, so cruelly that the shadow of its tyranny falls over the whole surrounding community. We recognise the way the storyteller describes the first inadequate attempts from within the ‘shadow realm’ to free her, which only helps to build up our sense of what a colossal task it is going to be. We recognise the intervention of the mysterious seer, whose wider vision leads to the emergence of the true redeeming hero (like Merlin arranging for the emergence of King Arthur); and, again, the careful emphasis placed on the point that the hero is only ‘killing to save friends’ (he is not doing it for selfish reasons but for the general good). Finally we recognise the familiar climax of that selfless act of liberation, which leads to the hero both winning the supreme prize of his own perfect union with the heroine and at the same time liberating the wider community of all those who had fallen under the dark power’s shadow.
What we may particularly note, however, is the way the story begins with the two overshadowing figures of a Dark Father and a Dark Mother and, after a long process of struggle, ends on the image of a fully-realised hero and heroine emerging together into the light. The essence of what has happened in the story is that the original dark and negative image we began with has been redeemed by the end into its light, positive opposite. The initial threatening presence of the Dark Father and Mother has been replaced by the young hero and heroine, who have emerged from the darkness to the point where they are themselves ready to become a Light Father and Mother. As in so many other stories, we see the older generation, characterised as being dark and life-denying, being succeeded by the new generation who are on the side of life. The very way in which the older generation are presented as dark provides a direct signal of the light values which the younger generation must embody, in order to show themselves as worthy to succeed.
But it is by no means only in the more overtly symbolic types of story, such as myths and folk tales, that we find the ‘unrealised value’ presented in this way. As we shall see in the rest of the book, it is absolutely integral to the way stories take shape in the human imagination.