The following sketchy account has been composed from incomplete notes of a talk given by Vladislav Rozentuller in Ghent, New York, on September 29, 2005. It has not yet been revised or filled out by the speaker, and therefore is not presented here as a fully satisfactory elucidation of the fairy tale. Nevertheless, I (Steve Talbott) have found it to throw a striking light upon the tale.

At the beginning, as so often in fairy tales, we have an old, dying king and his young heir. The old man typically images, in one way or another, the dying, disappearing consciousness of an earlier, more purely spiritual world; the young king represents a new consciousness that needs to discover for itself the earlier, spiritual treasures, but in a more self- aware manner. It begins in a state of great ignorance. (I suppose you could say that the old king represents Eden and life before the Fall -- or represents that part of our life which is still connected to higher realms. The young king must inherit the earth outside the gates of Eden and learn to transform it.)

Then he said, "Let Faithful John be sent for." Faithful John was his best-beloved servant, and was so called because he had served the King faithfully all his life long.

At the king’s request, Faithful John promises to take care of the young heir. "I will never forsake him, and will serve him faithfully, even though it should cost me my life."

So we see here the one link between the two worlds -- between the old, purer, and more innocent world, and the many challenges of the fallen, earthly world. That link is Faithful John. He can be understood as a resource within each of us -- that part of us where we remain connected, whether consciously or otherwise, to the spirit. The inner nature of this being is stated clearly: to serve faithfully.

After receiving the promise of faithful service, the old King said,

"Then I die, being of good cheer and at peace." And he went on to say, "After my death, you must lead [my son] through the whole castle, into all the chambers, halls, and vaults, and show him the treasures that in them lie; but the last chamber in the long gallery, in which lies hidden the picture of the Princess of the Golden Palace, you must not show him. If he were to see that picture, he would directly fall into so great a love for her, that he would faint with the strength of it, and afterwards for her sake run into great dangers; so you must guard him well.

Think of a golden palace compared to other buildings. It has a high, brilliant, heaven-like roof. Gold reminds us of the world’s beauty. But there is a danger here -- a danger of something so beautiful that we will fall in love with it. We all carry within us an innermost chamber posing this danger. The beauty is one side of Sophia -- the eternal feminine.

Yet, danger or not, the young King feels the hidden treasure as essential to his destiny and forces Faithful John to show him the forbidden chamber.

And when he saw the image of the lady that was so wonderfully beautiful, and so glittering with gold and jewels, he fell on the ground powerless.

The King’s love is so great (as he afterward expressed it) that "if all the leaves of the forest were tongues, they could not utter it! I stake my life on the chance of obtaining her, and you, my Faithful John, must stand by me." The hope is that the King’s love and longing will endure and prove great enough to see him through all the dangers of the journey ahead.

How does one get the princess? Faithful John lays out a strategy with several elements:

** First: "All that she has about her is of gold -- tables, chairs, dishes, drinking-cups, bowls, and all the household furniture; in your treasury are five tons of gold; let the goldsmiths of your kingdom work it up into all kinds of vessels and implements, into all kinds of birds, and wild creatures, and wonderful beasts, such as may please her; then we will carry them off with us, and go and seek our fortune."

In this activity whereby one creates artistic objects in diverse forms -- golden objects radiating light into the world -- we see the creative imagination at work. In all such activity the need is to distinguish purely personal contents from the pure, radiating image.

** Then the King and Faithful John must load the objects in a ship and journey over the seas. On this journey one is carried on an element less solid than earth.

** Upon arriving at the Golden Palace, they must try to attract the Princess through the artistically appealing objects wrought of gold.

As an aside: there’s a question here about how anyone (Princess or otherwise) can be attracted by and take in the truthful artistic image. If we prepare a place within ourselves, free of our own inclinations, where we can receive the objective and revelatory image, then the being of this image can take up residence within us. For example, the actor strives, not merely to express some feeling or thought of his own, but to become a subjective vessel that can receive an objective imagination.

** Once the Princess is enticed to the ship by her interest in the golden works of art, the King must hold her there, even when she wants to leave. This requires from the King a continuing, focused effort to retain possession of what is most important.

** Finally, the King must love the Princess with his whole being. Only this can convince her to remain with him.

All of these steps can be understood as one way of expressing how we can relate to spiritual beings. Likewise, the King’s long journey back home after winning the Princess can be understood as a necessary return from spirit to body, from a more spiritual world to his earthly engagement. Of course, in making this return journey, he will hear the voices of instinct and egotism that speak out of his lower, earthly nature. So there are temptations to be encountered and battles to be fought. The balance of the fairy tale deals with these temptations and battles.

Throughout these battles, until nearly the end, the King himself does nothing. Faithful John is always the one acting decisively. Think by comparison of when we act intuitively, not knowing why. This intuition can come from the higher servant in us. The task we are confronted with in the whole process is to bring together this higher servant with our normal consciousness.

The King encountered three temptations, or trials:

First trial:

When they come on land a fox-red horse will spring towards them; then will the King try to mount him; and if he does, the horse will rise with him into the air, so that he will never see his bride again.

[But] if another man mounts quickly, and takes the pistol out of the holster and shoots the horse dead with it, he will save the young King. [But he who] does it will become stone from toe to knee.

John does indeed mount the horse and shoot it dead. We see in the red horse carrying one up into the air an image of the force of passion. Passions -- wishes and desires -- live in the soul.

Second trial:

When they arrive at the castle there will lie a wrought bride-shirt in a dish, and it will seem all woven of gold and silver, but it is really of sulfur and pitch, and if he puts it on it will burn him to the marrow of his bones.

[But] if another man with gloves on picks up the shirt, and throws it into the fire, so that it is consumed, then is the young King delivered. [But he who] does it will be turned into stone from his heart to his knee.

Again, John snatches the bride-shirt before the King can take it and throws it into the fire. The shirt looks AS IF it were made of gold and silver, but it is in reality sulfur and pitch. If you take it, you will be burned. The temptation here is the drive to possess. It relates to all our urges to possess -- not only to possess the essentials of life such as food, clothing, and shelter, but anything we want to make "our own." Here we are moving beyond passion into the deeper realm of instinct (grounded in the physical body) of which the drive to possess is an example. When we try to possess something, we find it gains a different character than it had before we grasped it.

Third trial:

When at the wedding the dance begins, and the young Queen dances, she will suddenly grow pale and fall to the earth as if she were dead, and unless some one lifts her up and takes three drops of blood from her right breast, she will die. But he that knows this and does this will become stone from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. [According to Jeanne Bergen, a fuller version of the story says that, after being drawn, the blood must be spit out.]

Blood must be drawn -- blood that is the deepest expression of both our passions and instincts, carrying us beyond them (in one direction) to the very source of our will and egotism. The Princess will live again when this blood that is the root of our passions and instincts is drawn out.

All these trials are successfully endured through John’s action. The force of loving sacrifice is all that can protect the King from the dangers coming from the unconscious and our life body.

However, the necessity was for the King to become aware of this power of loving sacrifice. He had to learn to trust it -- despite the fact that many of the other servants (other voices in the King) were suspicious of John for his "irrational" actions in shooting a beautiful horse, destroying a valuable bride-shirt, and drawing blood from the Princess’ breast. ("Oh, you’re just making a fool of yourself with these strange sacrificial deeds" -- this is the kind of counter-voice our good works often arouse.)

The King accepts John’s action at the first trial, and still accepts it doubtfully at the second. But when he sees John doing such intimate violence to the Queen in the third trial, his passion and his desire to hold the Queen solely as his own possession is too much for him. The drive to possess leads all too naturally to the compulsion to kill -- to kill the one who threatens one’s property. So John is condemned to death.

The last part of the tale shows how Faithful John becomes united with the King as part of his own consciousness. This, we will see, requires a power of transformation reaching right down into physical substance.

At the gallows, John tells the King how he had taken all his actions as a result of a higher knowledge and in order to save the King from disaster.

Then cried the King, "O my Faithful John, pardon! pardon! Lead him down [from the gallows]!" But Faithful John, as he spoke the last words, fell lifeless, and became stone.

In order to awaken the stone to life again, deeds of sacrifice were required. So it was that the King cried out to John (when the stone statue spoke to him), "All that I have in the world will I give up for thee!" What was required was for the King to kill his two young children with his own hands and smear their blood upon the stone statue. Here it is not the blood of passion but the pure blood of the guileless human being that must be smeared upon the stone.

It is important not to read such things literally. The sacrifice of the children simply indicates the sacrifice of something perfectly innocent. We have to sacrifice not only ourselves, but our hope for the future -- our seemingly legitimate hope.

This sacrifice, it turns out, brings the power of resurrection of matter. The dead children are restored to life along with the stone statue.

It is worth meditating upon the beginning and ending images of this tale:

** A Golden Palace and the attraction of a beautiful Princess

** The sacrifice of one’s life-body and future in order to achieve transformation.

Our deepest instincts have great power to grasp and possess. This is the power to turn things to stone. The process we saw:

** When the King became jealous, John turned to stone.

** When the stone spoke, the King became consciously aware for the first time that the power that saved the Princess was the power of [John’s] sacrifices.

** The resurrection of the stone was the one thing that could not be achieved by John -- that is, could not be achieved by the power of a connection to the spiritual world that remained unconscious. Unlike all the earlier decisive actions in the tale, this final act could only be performed by the King himself in full, sacrificial awareness of what he was doing. And in doing this, he gained back the service of Faithful John, but now more fully as his own capacity to serve.