Marie-Louise von Franz: The Bird Motif
Now we should return to our main motif, that of the bird, because I have told all these five stories as a further amplification of the parrot problem.
In our Hassan Pasha story, the bird is called Anka, or Anka-Kush, and on its feathers are written wise sayings.
The last sentence of our story says, “As Hassan always read what was written on the feathers of the mysterious bird, Anka-Kush, he became learned in all human virtues and ruled wisely over his Kingdom.”
The Anka is a bird which often appears in Oriental fairy tales.
Anka is the Arabic word for the Persian Simurgh, a bird which functions as does the bird called Greif (griffin) in German and Austrian fairy tales.
It is generally a carrier bird, for it carries the hero into the land at the end of the world, or beyond the sea, or takes him back.
Usually one has to climb on its back, and one always has to take a lot of food and have water to feed it.
Sometimes the hero does not have enough food and has to cut some flesh off his own legs to feed the bird, so that it doesn’t fall.
So sometimes the bird asks for great sacrifices, but, being basically benevolent, it generally then heals the wound of the hero who has devoted himself to it with its beak.
The Arabic word Anka means a bird with a long neck, and the Persian word Simurgh means a bird of silver color.
In folklore, Simurgh and Anka are enormous.
When the Simurgh or the Anka spreads its wings, one does not see the sunlight any longer; it darkens the whole horizon.
In many versions, it has in its feathers all the colors of all the other birds in the world, and that is why, in certain Oriental versions, it is also called the “thirty b1rd,” from which connection we can understand why our nightingale was called “thousand.”
It is a b1rd which represents the collective soul of all birds.
It is the super-bird which, as a totem spirit, contains all the b1rds of the world, or sums up the qualities of all living b1rds, which is why it is a thousand bird or a thirty bird, and why its feathers contain all the colors of the world.
It lives two thousand years and lays enormous eggs and can even carry a camel or an elephant.
According to certain Oriental versions, this bird has a human face, and there it comes close to our parrot, which has a human voice.
This bird is somehow a bit human, for either the face or voice is human, and it can speak like a human.
According to certain folk tales, the birds had an assembly and elected Anka-Simurgh as the King of the Birds.
This same miraculous bird reappears in our Austrian fairy tale in the form of the phoenix, the strange name “Wehmus” is a distortion of “phoenix.”
The phoenix played a great role in antiquity and survived as a symbol of Christ in the Middle Ages and also in alchemical symbolism, on which Jung has elaborated in Mysterium Coniunctionis.
The phoenix, when it feels itself ageing, builds a nest out of aromatic plants, mainly myrrh, and then burns itself in it.
In the ashes a little worm is born, which moves about like a caterpillar and slowly acquires feathers, and then develops into another phoenix.
Thus, in Christian times the phoenix naturally became an allegory for Christ, for He, too, resurrected.
In alchemy, there is a famous peregrinatio, or journey, described by the seventeenth-century alchemist Michael Maier, who relates how he goes through all countries looking for an animal or a bird called Ortus.
Ortus means the rising sun and is also a name for the East, the place of the rising sun; this is similar to the phoenix.
He does not find this bird, which is obviously, in this connection, a symbol for Mercurius, but, at the end of the story, finds one of its feathers.
Jung, commenting on this journey of Michael Maier, writes that the Ortus is connected with the phoenix as a well-known allegory of the resurrection of Christ, and the resurrection of the dead.
It is a symbol of transformation.
It is amazing that the Erythraean Sibyl shows Maier the way to the phoenix and not the way to Christ.
It shows where he can find Mercurius, which indicates very clearly that, for Maier, Christ and Mercurius were the same figure.
It is interesting that this phoenix is called by Maier a remedy against rage and suffering, remedium irae et doloris; for he who finds this bird is cured of all suffering and affect.
It therefore shows something like a possibility of spiritual transcendence, or of getting above these most common sufferings of mankind.
The phoenix, according to Jung, is a bird of the spirit, and it is important to say that here the goal of the journey is not a human figure (it would be if it were Christ or Mercurius), but a bird, which is a more impersonal symbol.
This compensates the too-personal representations in the Christian religion, though the Holy Ghost also has the appearance of a bird, and that the alchemists were mainly interested in the Holy Ghost hypostasis of the Godhead.
We might say, therefore, that the likeness to a human being—it can talk like one and has a face like one, but is basically not a human being—is stressed in all these aspects of the bird.
In other alchemical parallels, the bird, representing Mercurius, the substance of transformation, is also sometimes represented as an ouroboros, the snake which eats its tail—for the bird flies up and eats its own wings, and then falls down, and is, in this way, reborn.
An antique eagle saga, that eagles can eat their feathers and so make themselves fall down to earth, has been transferred to all the alchemical b1rds.
This was a symbol for the chemical precipitation of a volatile substance.
Whenever a substance was sublimated into steam, into what the alchemists call a volatile form, then the precipitation, or the steam, coming back in liquid form, was very often represented as such a bird, which plucked itself of its feathers and fell to the ground.
The bid thus represents a process in which the spiritual aspect, or the prima materia, becomes visible and returns in a purified form, in some liquid or solid form which, psychologically, would represent a process of realization.
In its bi1d shape, it is like a spiritual hunch, or a mental realization, in a more or less ecstatic moment.
It refers to an inner spiritual experience which is, or remains, transitory, if it does not come down to earth again.
Most people, sometime in their lives, have a moment in which they realize something exceedingly meaningful, or have some kind of religious insight by which they are tremendously, emotionally gripped and elated.
They feel that now things are all right; but strangely enough, the damned thing does not last; slowly the misery of life ties into them again, and two or three years later this whole inner experience seems lost.
That is why, according to the alchemical view, the b1rd is not the whole thing, but only a beginning; it is a guide toward inner experience.
It is one of these first elating experiences, or realizations, which one can have, but it is still necessary for it to eat its wings and come down in some solid form again.
That is, the inner experience consolidates, and instead of being a kind of emotional spiritual experience, it becomes a realization in the most literal sense of the word.
We use the word “realization” rather too lightly; but if we “realize” something in its basic meaning, it becomes a real thing forever.
And that, in that sense of the word, is what is still behind the bird.
This is why Mercurius in the alchemical process is very often compared in its volatile form to a bird; it is called a goose, or the chicken of Hermes, or a swan, or an eagle, or a vulture, or the phoenix.
There is the same parallel in the Cabala, where the Sefira Yesod is also called a b1rd. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Individuation in Fairy Tales, Page 178–181
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