‘The world is an illusion, a dream. It only appears to be real

to the person who is unaware that it is a dream.’ Alan Watts

There is a famous story about a trickster named Rumpelstiltskin. The daughter of a Miller must spin straw into gold. Her father has promised the King she has this skill, but she does not. A strange impish man appears and spins straw into gold on behalf of the Miller’s daughter for three nights. In return, she has to promise him her firstborn child. When she marries the king, she forgets her promise. So, the strange man appears again and demands her child, but she refuses. He says she has three days to guess, otherwise he will take the child. A servant happens to find the little man who is singing a rhyme, which includes his name. The Queen reveals she now knows his name, and Rumpelstiltskin sinks into the ground.

https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/rumpelstiltskin

The story has appeared in different guises but has the same structure worldwide. Academics have categorised the form as ‘The Name of the Supernatural Helper’ in the genre of ‘fairy tales’.

Like most such tales, it hides meanings beyond the level of a nursery audience. The Miller is clearly also a trickster archetype, as he tells a complete lie to the King, putting his daughter in peril of being called a fraudster. She, in turn, must make a Faustian bargain with the Devil to hide the truth from the King.

It is worth noting that politics today contains similar patterns of lies and pacts with hopelessly untrustworthy tricksters, for personal power and gain. Both President Putin in Russia and the Zionist Israeli government have invaded and made war with their neighbours, disproportionate to the threat posed to their own countries. They expect the world to be fooled by their deceit. A trickster ‘Trump’ ineffectively poses as a ‘peace maker’ to gain a gold medal.

Historically, Jeffrey Epstein is alleged to have made pacts on behalf of shadowy organisations with a view to shaming and blackmailing public figures. He could not spin golden threads from straw, but he convinced many that he could.

Such alluring but shady dealing describes the energy of the trickster archetype well.

To the princess, the character of Rumpelstiltskin is both a blessing and a curse. Psychologically, the creature represents the trickster archetype within her own shadow animus. ‘Stiltskin visits her at night and produces the desired golden threads each morning for three days, to get her out of trouble. It is worth noting that three is a magical number, as in the expression ‘third time lucky’. Names, numbers and spells sustain the suspense of this story.

The transmutation of base matter into gold is a representation of an alchemical and psychological mutation of lead into the noble metal gold, and a feminine persona and a male animus into a noble human, respectively. Perhaps the Miller’s daughter learnt risky deceit for personal gain from her father – her animus model?

We must question why the gold is spun into gold ‘threads’ instead of, say, gold coins? The spinning wheel is again a very ancient symbol. Mahatma Gandhi used it to represent ‘honest work’ to make a political point, but the wheel also represents ‘wholeness’ and the turning of the Universe we call ‘time’.  

A sphere is the shape on the crown of the great creator and sun god Ra.

A thread is another old symbol going back to Ariadne and the Minotaur in ancient Greece. It represents the ability of the rational mind to follow a line of reasoning, the product of which today is the basis of science. A thread also suggests woven cloth or carpets, as in the magic carpets of the One Thousand and One Nights tales. Today, the World Wide Web is capable of transporting anybody anywhere in the world instantly.

The whole of the ‘reality’ in which we live has been described as an illusory matrix. In The Matrix cinematic trilogy, the character Neo can move from one reality into another. The Matrix is depicted on a computer screen as lines of descending pictograms. This is certainly an oversimplification and a product of the limits of computers when the film was made.

Two eminent scientists, University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram have put forward a theory that the whole Universe is a hologram. In his book ‘The Holographic Universe’ Michael Talbot describes a ‘revolutionary theory of reality’. We may be familiar with lasers producing talking images of people located elsewhere in real time. There is now a holographic performance by the Swedish pop group ABBA in a London theatre, which many find remarkably real.

A holographic Universe involves ‘warping and wafting’ lines of information-rich energy to create what humans experience as matter. The ancients demonstrated the pivotal moment of their supreme control of matter by building the pyramids on the Giza plateau. Their dynastic evolution moved from an energetic world focused on minor gods and the afterlife, into solid matter.

In a way, this is what Rumpelstiltskin is doing. He uses golden straw to create the eternal element, Au or Gold. Intriguingly, the symbol Au derives from the Latin aurum, for Aurora, the goddess of dawn. Each day, poetically, the beginning of a new world; a new beginning for mankind, and the Miller’s daughter. So perfect are her tricks that she transforms herself from a humble citizen into a Queen. This is the alchemical marriage, as depicted in many of the Alchemist’s works and represents spiritual perfection.

In the story, Rumpelstiltskin says that he wants nothing except a living child. He has mastered the material world and now craves what he can not create, a living child, or you might say, consciousness. This also happens to be the limit of modern science, but perhaps Artificial Intelligence will take up the role of the ancient demigods?

The Agent Smith character/s in the film The Matrix are demonic autonomous programmes which have penetrated the firewalls of The Oracle and threaten humankind.

Key to unravelling the complex layers of our story is the riddle of the trickster’s name. Today, passwords allow us to enter a programme and keep others out.

Words represent ideas, and ideas are the initial stage of the Creation process. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ (John1.1)

In magical spells, words and their ‘spelling’ are important. The most well-known might be ‘Abracadabra’, which it has been suggested to mean ‘may it be so’. It is a spell of manifestation and, more darkly, deconstruction. Abracadabra can be spoken, losing one letter at a time to ‘deconstruct’ something.

Rumpelstiltskin, somewhat vainly, believes the princess will never discover his name. Commonly, tricksters can become victims of their vanity and underestimate those whom they are trying to deceive. The politics of the USA today is poisonous with self-important deceivers.

So fundamental to his very existence is the name Rumpelstiltskin that when revealed, he physically deconstructs as a programme uninstalls.

He never achieves his goal of possessing and perhaps creating life. He is beaten at his own game of deceit by one who is more deceitful. The Miller’s daughter has done this by confronting the mischievous spirit within herself. When humans confront their shadow side in this manner, they become whole or ‘holy’. The trickster disappears.

A child will readily listen to this tale, not knowing and not needing to know its levels of meaning. It is a healing story; one that may be carried through life as a mental ‘anti-virus’ programme, always scanning for what will spin the creation process through the realm of dreams.