An African Tale
By Helen Luke
A real story touches not only the mind, but also the imagination and the unconscious depths in a person, and it may remain with him or her through many years, coming to the surface of consciousness now and then to yield new insights. A great teacher of English at Swarthmore College, the late Harold Goddard, wrote in his book, The Meaning of Shakespeare, “The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.” I heard the following story a number of years ago told by Laurens van der Post at a conference. He had heard it from a Zulu wise man in Africa, and he was retelling it as an offering of gratitude and respect to the women of the world.
All those stories that deal with basic human themes draw their power from the archetypal world that is common to people of all cultures and of all times, but the images in each culture will, of course, differ greatly, and it is for us to penetrate through these varying pictures to the universal wisdom that underlies them. I propose to tell the story first, simply, as it is told in its African context; and afterwards I will go through it again with a few indications as to how it may yield its wisdom in terms of our own lives. It is a story about young women on the threshold of their adult lives – and that is a rare thing to find. There is no hero in it at all – only one somewhat devastating male figure!
In an African village, a group of young women had banded together to humiliate one of their number of whom they were jealous and whom they had rejected because she was “different,” and especially because it seemed to them that she had a necklace of beads that was more beautiful than their necklaces.
These jealous young women ran down to the banks of the river and there they planned a trap for the envied one. When she joined them, they told her that they had all thrown their necklaces into the river as an offering to the river god. The young woman was a person of generous heart, so she at once took off her own necklace and threw it into the river; whereupon the others dug up their necklaces, which they had buried in the sand, and went off laughing and sneering.
The young woman, left alone, was very sad. She had been duped into a well-meant but foolish act, and she wandered along the riverbank, praying to the god to restore the necklace. There was no answer until at last she heard a voice, bidding her plunge into a deep pool nearby. She did not hesitate, for she knew it was the voice of the god. She plunged down into the unknown and found herself on the riverbed, where an old woman sat waiting. This old one was exceedingly ugly, even repulsive, for she was covered with open sores, and she spoke to the girl, saying, “Lick my sores!” At once the girl obeyed out of her compassionate heart, and licked the repulsive sores as she had been asked to do. Then the old woman said to her, “Because you have not held back and have licked my sores, I will hide and protect you when the demon comes who devours the flesh of young women.” At that she heard a roar and a huge male monster came, calling out that he smelled a maiden there. But the old woman had hidden her away, and soon he went off cursing.
Then the old woman said to the girl, “Here is your necklace”—and she put around her neck beads of far greater beauty than any had had before. “Go back now,” the old woman said, “to your village, but when you have gone a few yards from the pool, you will see a stone in the path. Pick up this rock and throw it back into the pool. Then go on without looking back and take up your ordinary life in your village.”
The young woman obeyed. She found the stone and threw it back and came to the village without a backward look. There the other girls quickly noticed her beautiful new necklace and clamoured to know where she had found it – to which she replied that it had been given to her by the old woman at the bottom of the pool in the river. Not waiting for more, they all rushed off in a body and jumped into the pool. And the old woman said to each of them as she had said before, “Lick my sores!” But these girls all laughed at her and said they wouldn’t dream of doing anything so repulsive – and useless, too – and they demanded to be given necklaces at once. In the midst of all this there came the roar of the giant demon, who seized upon those girls, one after the other, and made a mighty meal of them. And with that the story comes to an end.
I shall look briefly at the images in the story as symbols of certain attitudes, conscious or unconscious, that are alive in each one of us and influence us in often unrealized and subtle ways. Stories like this are not manufactured by the intellect; they are the symbolic dreams of humanity.
The necklace in Africa is a highly-prized symbol of a woman’s identity and worth as a person. The group of girls in the story plays a particularly unkind trick since it concerns devotion to a divine, transpersonal value. It is the product of group mentality, mass thinking, which so often covers and excuses hatred and cruelty. This is perhaps the worst menace in our society, requiring great effort and integrity to resist.
Notice the ease with which the simple girl falls into the trap. This is surely a warning of the dangers that lie in wait for the generous hearted, who are so quickly induced by the slogans of some cause or crusade, fine in itself perhaps, and sponsored by people we long to please. We lose sight of our individual responsibility to reflect and to choose, and thus, as it were, we throw away out identity. Nevertheless, the story goes on to show us that such naive enthusiasms, if they truly involve the intention of a personal sacrifice to that which is greater than our egos, to the river of life itself, may indeed bring about the shock that leads us out of group thinking to the discovery of our meaning as individuals on a much deeper level.
The young woman in the story had a rude awakening from her identification with her peers. We may notice that she did not waste energy on resentment or remorse; she stayed alone beside the river of life, praying that she might rediscover her value as a person, waiting for an inner voice to bring her wisdom. And it came. She was to look for her necklace down under the water. Only by going down, not by striving upwards, would she find herself. She must plunge into the river of life unconditionally, risking mistakes or failure, not just throwing things, however valuable, into the river. Only by trusting herself to the unknown, both in her outer life and in her own hidden depths, would she find her unique way.
This young woman was not obedient, not to convention or opinions or slogans, but to that voice from within that may be heard by us all at the crucial moments of life, if we will truly listen.
She plunged down into the pool and there she found – not a radiant woman, symbolizing her potential beauty and power, but an old, ugly, repulsive thing with open sores. How shall we read this image for ourselves? When we enter with open eyes into the river of life, we find ourselves face to face with the ugliness, the suffering from which we have perhaps been protected hitherto in many different ways. And it is now that the story yields to us its specifically feminine wisdom.
We may take this image of the old woman on two levels. She may stand for the suffering that contempt for the feminine values has brought to all women through the ages – a contempt of which not only many men have been guilty, but also large numbers of women themselves, especially in our time. And secondly, the old woman is an image on the personal level of the most despised repellent things in our own psyches that we refuse to acknowledge and from which we turn often in disgust.
The old woman’s invitation is clear. “You can’t bring help to me by any kind of technical, scientific, impersonal and collective panacea, or by being told about justice and freedom. Only with our own saliva can you bring healing to these sores in yourself and the world.” Saliva is symbolically a healing water that we are all born with. The licking of an animal is its one means of healing wounds, and we may remember Christ’s saliva on the blind man’s eyes. So the girl is asked to give her own unique essence – to bring healing to the sores, not by words out of her mouth but by water from her mouth. Because she is on the threshold of true womanhood the girl at once responds out of the essential core of the feminine being – the compassionate heart. Here I would emphasise that true compassion bears no resemblance to a vague and sentimental pity. Compassion is not just an emotion; it is an austere thing and a highly-differentiated quality of soul.
And now comes the universal threat – the demon of inferior masculinity that can so easily devour our womanhood. When this happens, we simply lose ourselves in an imitation of men, which kills the truly creative masculine spirit in a woman, and, however, outwardly successful she may be, all hope of equality of value in the world of men disappears.
Had there been a male “hero” present, we might imagine the old woman telling him to take up his sword and fight the monster of greed and aggression. But to every woman she will always say, “Because of your compassion you will be freed from him.”
So it came about that the devouring ambition and greed had no power over the woman who had the courage and humility to lick the repellent sores. It is at this moment that she receives her own individual and unique necklace – she does not just recover the old one that had come from her family before her initiation into life. This necklace is hers and hers alone.
It is time to return to her life in the world, to the daily, ordinary tasks and relationships. In her case, marriage and children awaited her and the building of a home; with or without the ancient way of woman in the home. But whether she marries and bears children or not, this ancient responsibility of woman remains. She is the guardian of values of feeling in her environment, and if she remains aware of the compassion, that quiet, hidden nurturing that is the centre of her feminine nature, then her skills in any kind of work whatsoever will grow in the manner of trees, well rooted and strong, and her creative spirit will be free. The woman who has received the necklace from the old woman in the pool does not seek compulsively to achieve success after success, collecting necklace after necklace, so to speak. Always she will remember to “lick the sores” and to remain still and hidden when the demon of greedy ambition threatens, whether at home or in the public arena.
Now, as to the stone that the girl was to find and throw back, I’ll give you one hint and leave you to work it out. The stone in all cultures is the symbol of the immortal self, and this is the true offering to the divinity in the river. Don’t pick it up and put it in your pocket!
The last bit of the story speaks for itself. All those greedy girls who did not bother to reflect on the meaning of life went rushing off in a mob, all wanting more and better necklaces, which in our day would be more and more demands for wealth, or success, or men, or publicity, or security, or even for spiritual experiences. They refused with contempt the essential task of a woman, the compassionate “licking of the sores” in themselves devoured by the demon that rages around, assimilating such women to itself.
Charles Williams, the English poet and novelist who died in 1946, once defined the art of living as the ability “to live the ordinary in an extraordinary way and to live the extraordinary in the ordinary way”. The story illuminates this beautiful saying Dame Janet Baker, a great singer and a great woman, said recently in an interview, “I’ve found that the ordinary things are the important things. . . We all—in life and music—have our back up against the wall trying to preserve order and quality. . . My gift is God- given and it must be given back. We all have a gift to give, and if you give it with a sense of holy obligation everything clicks into place.”
Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift. Whether that gift is great or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all—not at all; it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the centre of both the dark times and the light.
Taken from The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine; Doubleday Publishing: New York, 1995
Helen Luke has spent the second half of her long life exploring the symbolic dimensions of the human psyche through dreams, images, and myths. As a compassionate Jungian counsellor, she serves as a guide for many who pursue the demanding journey toward self- knowledge and transformation. She is the author of Dark Wood to White Rose: A Study of Meaning in Dante’s Divine Comedy; The Way of Woman: Ancient and Modern; and Woman: Earth and Spirit.
