Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz

Author:Marie-Louise von Franz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The trigram K’an means a plunging in. A yang line has plunged in between two yin lines and is closed in by them like water in a ravine. The trigram K’an is also the middle son… . As an image it represents water, the water that comes from above and is in motion on earth in streams and rivers, giving rise to all life on earth.[35]

So moving waters are also like the dragon, which represents movement:

In man’s world K’an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light inclosed in the dark that is, reason. [The sign itself] has the additional meaning, “repetition of danger.” Thus the hexagram is intended to designate an objective situation to which one must become accustomed, not a subjective attitude. For danger due to a subjective attitude means either foolhardiness or guile. Hence too a ravine is used to symbolize danger; it is a situation in which a man is in the same pass as the water in a ravine, and, like the water, he can escape if he behaves correctly.[36]

If you look at the commentaries in the second section of the I Ching, [37] you find that K’an also means heart disease or difficulty in hearing. It has to do with dark passion and with the dangers of a passionate nature with the dynamic, creative aspects of the unconscious, to put it in psychological language, and all its terrible closeness to the instincts and the passions.

The trigram of fire, Li, appears in hexagram 30 of the I Ching, called “The Clinging.” Whereas K’an is a masculine figure, the second son among the heavenly family of the trigrams, fire, when it is represented by the trigram Li, is feminine. It means to be conditioned, to depend, and it means rest, brightness. But Li means much more in Chinese. It also means order, not in a rational sense as we would see it, but as an orderedness of nature. The whole logos side in the Chinese civilization, the whole idea of “order,” is not about an order imposed by human consciousness onto nature, but rather of order that human consciousness deduces from nature, or reads into nature. Therefore it is an order that is completely contained in the mystery of nature.

Li has to do with the designation of a pattern, and one of the oldest patterns from which the Chinese deduced order was the surface of the tortoise shell. The tortoise shell displays a roughly laid-out matrix of little squares, and when one put such a shell in the fire, it cracked the shell along these squares. According to how the fire cracked the tortoise shell, the priests read the future and what had to be done. That was an ancient form of oracle used even before the yarrow stalks of the I Ching. It is historically the oldest form of oracle in China, and this pattern on the back of a tortoise shell is also designated by the word “Li.”

So

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