SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
Series of Two Lectures by MBM
One of the Friday Evening Background Courses
March 1939
Wisdom from various traditions. The first was from Syria (the preceding background course, the Lost Sayings of Jesus) from the Christian Tradition. The second was on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras (Greek). Today we are to try to find wisdom out of folk lore.
It is a little unusual to think of looking for wisdom lore in fairy tales. Are they only for children? Some claim they are too fanciful. Others, that imagination is a valuable faculty, and that fairy tales develop it. Even today we are seeing that adults take to fairy tales. Snow White has gone into 4l countries. Now it is on the screen here. Fairy tales are not of much value, with a few exceptions. They are like sands on the shore of the sea. Among them a few jewels that have been lost. That have been washed over and over again, and they come to look like most other pebbles. And not recognized except by those who know that some gem has been covered and are going on that shore to look for it. Of such is the story of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs. A jewel that has become tarnished on the shores of popular acclaim. Its genealogy is very different from that of a fairy tale spun by mere imagination. Among them (the great fairy tales) are: the Twelve Brothers, Sinbad, Blue Beard, Cinderella, The Frog Prince, and a score of others. But not many more. These are valuable jewels.
These have come down the ages and are familiar in nearly all countries. Interpretations of how it is possible that these things have come down. They have come by the same powerful momentum which has succeeded in making stories like Snow White and the Dwarfs accepted, whether as entertainment or for whatever reason. For some psychological reason. It is one of the forces which has kept these stories down the ages.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales had come down by word of mouth. The great traditions were otherwise preserved, but not that which had dropped down into folklore. That has come down through word of mouth. You would think it would destroy the content. Great traditions have come down by word of mouth. Laws govern the handing on. The Vedas were handed on, too, and the Kabbala. So, with the great fairy tales.
Two main forces that have operated to keep those fairy tales intact. I don’t want to tell you the fairy tale in its meaning but to tell you how they have come about in these modern times. The two forces that protect the preservation of the story down the ages are the conservative tendency and the tendency to variation. The science of folk tales. Voluntary changes are rare. Involuntary ones natural and unavoidable if the story is to continue its existence in the midst of a shifting social organism. A psychological determinant which is in the deeps of being. It makes of these stories a kind of magnet which pulls us, and which in turn keeps it accurate.
Theories as to the sources of these fairy tales. Andrew Lang conceived that they had their origin in some ancient fact story. With accretions. These great stories are really out of wisdom lore. Like crumbs from a great banquet table, by dropping off, coming into another level of life. They are gladly received but not understood. Those who receive those crumbs, the folk who become the carriers of that tradition, do not understand what those crumbs are derived from. Those who have been at the banquet table know — the enlightened ones. They can tell from what this or that crumb has broken off and has dropped into the lap of people.
In these tales, therefore, is something precious. Of deep and enduring values. Meanings that apply to all humanity. That brings about an unconscious response. That is why these things take us. But which as today, like those who receive the crumbs, are not understood. I am alone in that I am sad about the Disney film. I regret the distortion, the magnitude of the errors. He has done something with that story that thousands of years have not done. A facile technique and the story is distorted. The value, the thing that makes its connection with the banquet table, is virtually lost.
The word fairy. Three main theories regarding its derivation. Peri, in the Persian. The Arabs have no p in their language and replace it with an f. That is one interpretation. Another, that it comes from the Latin, fatum, genii which can change fate. Also, from the French, fay. A woman, usually, who was trained and developed, and capable in magic.
Snow White is not a genuine fairy story, though it contains miraculous events. It has some of the connections between the banquet table and the crumbs. One of the common motifs among the crumbs of great stories is that something precious is cast out — is not valued or understood, and that some other creature – witch, giant, etc., or as in our story the stepmother, is in league against that good. Frequently a girl or lovely child of some sort. That is a frequent motif.
And it is possible to divide the great stories into groups, in which certain definite patterns appear and reappear. And you remember that our story of Snow White opens with a mother who is without a child. She is sewing. Apparently there is snow on the ground, and that as she sews she is thinking of how lonely she is. And how much she would give if she had a child. With that, she pricks her finger, or arm, or breast, and three drops of blood fell on the snow. Whereupon, as in this story, she cries: “Would that I had a daughter, a child as white as the snow and with cheeks as red as the blood.” And, in the magic of this type of tale, it is not long before such a child is born.
And again, in this type of story, it is not long before the true mother dies and the husband, usually a king, marries again, and the child has a stepmother. Here comes the motif of the precious thing not wanted. Motif of the red and white and the three drops of blood. You must understand the language employed. The language of these great stories is invariably symbolic. It is accurate, not sentimental. The symbology is as accurate as a doctors prescription. It means specifics, and so color and number must be understood.
Three, an important number. Especially here, as linked with red and white, it represents potentiality. The triple force, the Trinity in small, the three-ness of things. And the red and the white, as in so many alchemical parables, represents the masculine-feminine motif, and that which is born as a little girl is really a symbol of something very much greater, that is beautiful, and later becomes invaluable.
What is the mother, the stepmother, and who is the father? Throughout the story we see the conflict of ideals: of various interpretations of life; of different standards; different objectives. The first mother, the mother of all of us, or the Source from which we come. Symbolic. The stepmother is the world which mothers us. And who does not really value us as we are — who finds in us something that is alien to her own nature. Snow White, that which is white as snow; and remember, the red does not come out (in the story), represents the purity of essence, of beginnings. That which remains beautiful. Not in the superficial sense but in the sense of the soul.
And when we are here in earth we all have stepmothers. And those stepmothers, as in the story of Cinderella, with its conflicting ideals, sensing something of the pure, as this stepmother does in the Snow White, the thing that is pure is violently in opposition to it.
Development of the story. Snow White grows up. Becomes obvious. The conflict comes into expression. But all the while the stepmother has been using her magic mirror. It has reported to her that she is the loveliest thing in earth. The pride of the queen at its peak. Conceive then, in the allegory, when another set of ideals, of new standards, threatens the old ones. I have seen the motif of Snow White and the stepmother and the mirror hundreds of times.
Mirror, an old symbol. It appears on the banquet table. For instance, in a Japanese tradition, the Sun-goddess, spirit, gives unto her grandson a mirror. And says: “Take this mirror and keep it with you. Keep it in the same room with you and beside your bed. And worship it as though it were my presence.”
In a Hindu tradition, some of the things on the banquet table, Lakme, who is an aspect of the Sun-goddess in the Japanese, says: “I am to be found in a lotus, in a blazing fire, in a polished sword, and in a mirror.”
And all four of these give a key. The sword is discrimination, highly polished and used. The fire is great desire, and ardor and aspiration, sufficient to be effective. And the mirror is that which reflects.
Now when you look into ordinary mirrors, you see the reflection, the likeness of your face, etc. Symbolically, the mirror that is given, as in this fragment here, is the soul. And the soul is supposed to speak the truth. And so, until this other nature who is called Snow White, grows up, the earthly self is beautiful.
The Books of Moses tell exactly the same story, in a long and interesting, quite complicated way. The lower nature and the higher nature are in battle. The higher nature is killed — Cain and Abel. The same as in this story. Because the lower nature must grow up first. And out of the lower nature must then come, and recognized as verity, the higher nature. Does not the fruit of a tree or a bush come later? “The last shall be first.” What follows after is the very objective for which the first came.
In our story they are described as separate beings. The earth in us resists. That there can be anything more desirable than success, prestige, automobiles, opportunity to travel, esteem of people. Is not that the highest? That is what the mirror said to the stepmother, the lower self. But when, out of that, the flowers have come, the flowers are more desirable than the tree. So Snow White becomes great to the mirror, more desirable than the stepmother.
The stepmother, as the material self, which is continually fighting spiritual ideals — the world. That is why the tale is as useful today, and why it has continued. It concerns us and our civilization. In the subconscious there is response, even though the conscious repudiates. That is the stepmother: “We must get rid of these irritating ideals which would make us change our standards and ways of living.” Add so, the queen, the step-mother.
The hunter. The stepmother finds a hunter whom she thinks she can trust to take Snow White out into the forest and dispose of her. You recall that the hunter takes her out, but finds her so beautiful that he cannot quite do it. He kills a deer instead and takes back the heart of the animal. Snow White wanders on. The hunter symbolizes those simpler trends in ourselves, the simpler folk in the world, who, not so sophisticated, egoistic, smug, entrenched with the things of earth, are capable of seeing and honoring, and revering, the beauty that is Snow White. And so she escapes this time.
Forest. Full of symbolism – means in contrast to the city – the terrain, the place, which is not yet cultivated, established. The new territory. We finally have to conquer it. So Snow White, or that which is good, or permanently of value, as against the temporary value of the stepmother, must also demonstrate its place and its right in the world.
It is not long in the story before Snow White finds the little house, raps at the door, enters, and then discovers its miniature furniture, tables, beds, dishes, chairs, etc.
Who are the dwarfs? Of all the terrible things Disney has done, what he has done to the dwarfs is the worst of all. He has made them funny — ludicrous. Has given them names which stir up mockery, play. The dwarfs are the profoundest in their meaning in the entire story. “Dopey” does not exist. That is part of the distortion.
Dwarfs appear in many fairy stories. Also in sacred legends. Also in some countries, and there are some people who say they have seen dwarfs, or gnomes, which are the same. What is the meaning behind it? First of all, they are small people, small folk. Therefore, they represent that which is embryonic, or young, undeveloped. That which is potential. That which, in its potentiality, is capable of doing many things, as the dwarfs are in so many stories.
Dwarfs also symbolize another order of life. Norse traditions. Dwarfs in Wagner. In the sacred tradition of the Northern countries there is the story of the Fenrir the wolf, who is running wild, and who must somehow be held back. And the gods send him to the dwarfs. They are to make a chain that binds this wolf, the symbol of the collective animal nature of the world. It is the dwarfs who make a chain. And that chain, or fetter, is made up of a number of curious things: the sound of a cat’s paw, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of birds. And once you get that, it is in code, it is tremenduous. The bear(?) and the Great Scriptures. They are written that way, too, in code. Patently, it was not a cord that held the bear. In India where the dwarfs appear.
I am trying to cure you of laughter at these seven dwarfs. You will share with me in righteous indignation over the mockery of something supremely fine. There, in India, a creature had also won the land away from the gods. The gods had no place left. Man is three-fold. That had been taken away from the godly nature and become animal — in service to earth, material things. And Vishnu changed himself into a dwarf and appeared to Bali, the wicked one who had gotten this land, and speaking, plausibly enough, said: “Bali, give us back the land just as far as I can take three steps.” And Bali looked at this little dwarf, and, with a certain tolerance of the lower world towards great things, said; “Yes, you may have that much back for the gods and yourself.” And Vishnu took his famous three steps, and the three lands were again in the hands of the gods.
Can you read the allegory? The Christian would see it as the redemption of the world, from material absorption. Bali, like Fenrir, had won the world. In both stories the dwarf comes in. So Vishnu, the Preserver in the triad of the Hindus, is the one who transforms himself. In other words, it seems to be a very small thing, this power of spirit — so small that the world can laugh at it, can say: “Yes, take what you can.” But the measure that is in it, that is in the power of Vishnu and the dwarf, a universal thing, that power is able to gather (cover?) the whole territory, and the three lands are redeemed again, or accomplished to the higher nature in a magic act.
They are not accomplished with three steps. That is an allegory. You see the events in a theatre covering years while you sit there two or three hours. And you don’t find it incongruous. This story condenses the transformation, which may take aeons. But the dice are loaded; Snow White will win, Vishnu will win, etc.
The dwarfs represent the potentialities which are not seen as very dangerous to the standards of material things, but which eventually conquer. Therefore the dwarf is, in this case, the symbol of what appears insignificant but is of titanic capacity.
The dwarf may also appear as Rumpelstiltskin: a little elemental, another order than the human order, and so, often plays a part in events. Does the work for someone in trouble. The Irish know the little folk are not imaginary. Have kept their sensitivities, and can see beyond materiality. If we don’t see beyond materiality we are in the same category as our ancestors who didn’t have telescopes or microscopes. The extension of the eyes with these things is excellent. This is another kind of extension. Eyes which have to do with sensitivities. The work of Dr. Rhine at Duke University. Clairvoyance is normal for those who have developed it. The Irish have still kept it. Not all, but generally. Sometimes the dwarfs referred to are of this category.
Seven. We have next to note something about the number seven. We must know something of the meaning of number to get the crumb. This little house with the seven dwarfs has a definite meaning. And that there are seven dwarfs, not two or five is significant. May I remind you of some references to seven? The seven branched candlestick. Why seven? “Wisdom has built herself a house, and rested it on seven pillars.” Seven appears in the dream of Pharaoh. Seven altars in the Hebraic-Christian. The Kabbala is full of it. Seven baskets of bread after the feeding of the four thousand. Full of meaning. Seven in the Book of Revelation. This symbolism is not unique to the Hebraic-Christian. In the Greek wisdom lore, for instance, seven is just the same. In the Egyptian: the seven beings who make decrees. Seven, the ever virgin number. Pythagoras. The seven sleepers. The seven days of the week. Part of the Lunar cycle.
Seven is a profoundly sacred number, and it is therefore the evidence of the seven, the seven dwarfs, who symbolize here seven great potentialities, seven dynamics, seeds, sources (?) which surround the evolving creature, the evolving self, here in our story called Snow White. In one of the Hermetic traditions we have the seven beings who each give a soul seven seeds. Watch over the development of those seven seeds in every soul. There must be something to it.
The idea of the seven is that which surrounds the evolving self, to which the evolving self has gone, because the world will have nothing of it.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
MBM Lecture II March 10, 1939
Sacred scriptures are written in a three-fold-way, and therefore the outer way, or outer expression, is not the real meaning of the story. A parable about it. That simple folk are concerned with the vestments or garments of the story, and they are like people who are interested in clothes, appearances. Then there come the more instructed, and they do not look at clothes, nor regard them much. They regard what is behind the clothes, the person. That is what is behind the body. And the third, the wise, regard neither of these, save for outer instruction, and look at the soul of the thing, that which only to the eyes of enlightenment becomes visible.
So, down the centuries, whether in Assyria or Greece, or Persia, it has been invariably said that there is the outer tradition, then the ethical tradition, and then the esoteric.
Or again, there is the historical, the outer garment or fact; the moral, or parable; and the pneumatic, that which belongs to the plane invisible to man as man, and which is the occult content in this story.
Or again, the simple narrative, the allegorical, and the hieratical. All sacred scriptures are to be studied that way.
In that sense we have been looking into the significance of Snow White, because it is a fragment, or crumb, out of the sacred tradition, or the great lap of wisdom lore. Like a jewel lost on the shores of the sea. Only a few of the fairy stories are worthy of this classification.
So we followed through as to why that which is valuable is not valued. Or, as our story tells it, is first valued by the real mother, then thrown out by the stepmother, the earthly conditions, the lower adaptation to earth; and though we think this earth is our mother, it is our stepmother. And all experiences in earth are on the stepmother side of the allegory. So that Snow White, the child of value, the higher self, is discarded. The first steps via the hunter and to the place of the dwarfs.
With the dwarfs another motif we must understand, via the ethical interpretation of scripture. What are mountains? Why are the dwarfs in the mountains, and why are they mining? In the Christian scriptures: “I will look unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” The mountain is the higher state of being. If it concerns man it is the state of his aspiration, or condition. Extension. Mountains are great and noble souls, hills little souls, and the crowd lives in the valley.
In these regions belonging to a higher life dwell the dwarfs, the symbols of the embryonic seven, of which the Lamps around the Throne are the perfection. The seven tiny flames which dwell in the higher places, which embrace now the outcast higher self. Because the world has no valuation for the higher self.
Snow White is dwelling now in places beyond the material world. If we were talking pure psychology, we would say this higher self was cast back into the sub-conscious. And in the subconscious are genuinely, the embryonics, or lights, which surround that higher self, until somehow that higher self will come back into the world again.
Let us think of Snow White as discarded by the material world, and as typical of our own day. The soul valuations are not desired by the world. So here, on the other side of being, is Snow White, living with the dwarfs.
In the world, the queen, still indignant, because it would crush ultimately, or completely, the higher self. Is it not true that the materialist will not tolerate the higher world? Materiality has no place for spirituality. The queen, who symbolizes that side of things, must follow through to attack even the concept that there is such a thing as the higher self. Hence, she attacks Snow White by different processes. They vary somewhat in the story, but have virtually the same meaning: a comb which is poisoned; a ribbon, or hair-band, which is poisoned, the apple which is poisoned.
The dwarfs are able to heal Snow White from two of these attacks. The challenge of materiality, the physical world only, follows through to the dwelling place of Snow White with the tempting bid of the comb. Two of them are attacks on the head. In fact all three of them are. It is the head, symbolizing the mind, which exposes the danger of succumbing in the mind to false things. To those things which are in anyway beguiling.
Snow White, the symbol of the higher self, in its immature stages, succumbs to the rationality of the physical interpretation of life. Again and again, it wins people back to the physical, even when they have had an intimation of spirituality, or of ideals that were not material. So Snow White accepts the comb. So Snow White uses the comb. And falls over as dead. That is, as soon as you let the false thoughts, false ideals, affect you it benumbs your higher faculties – your Snow White faculties. So Snow White is as dead. The danger of taking in false thoughts. People take in a mixture of facts and the false.
The dwarfs symbolize the higher powers, which are called magical. They understand what has occurred. They swiftly remove the false, and Snow White is again in health.
What is the magical power of the dwarfs? If you associate the word with the Three Magi, it will take the first step in that direction. The word means the wise. Magical means: that which is done by wisdom. And so the magical powers of the dwarfs are the powers able to accomplish the recovery of Snow White.
The labeling of the seven dwarfs is absurd. Instead of Grumpy, etc. . . . . The seven dwarfs are. Seen from the human side, we would have to accept (them as) the four classic virtues. The four in embryonic stage. The four virtues in embryonic stage are the seven dwarfs: fortitude, temperance, justice, prudence. All these seven, because the other three or four are disputed. Perhaps valor, serenity, balance. Whatever they are, they are ultimate qualities which are in embryonic states in everyone. In the mountain.
And so the embryonic powers of these seven virtues, like clear thinking, your endurance, because you are no longer expecting to get results swiftly. These things cure the self of false conclusions, thus removing the comb. And again the beauty of Snow White shines forth.
A second time the lower world comes with its temptations. It comes three times. The higher self is not secure until it has lived down temptations. This is part of the old mystical idea of initiation.
And the lower self, finding there is still valuation in Snow White, gives her a poisoned ribbon for the hair, — this time an appeal to the sensual side. It does this because that is the way the higher self learns. She accepts the gift. The dwarfs tell her she should not. The small development of the good in everyone, the genuine mystical consciousness, begins to speak through, and warns. Nevertheless, the worldly side wins, and a second time she accepts and falls as dead. The queen, the material self, now thinks “That is settled. I have answered every challenge of the higher nature. I have proved that it is not.”
But the higher self is still dwelling with the dwarfs. And the third episode takes place. What shall the queen do to convince these fools who believe that there is a spiritual reality? What can the hard-headed, practical realists do to demonstrate that these folk are foolish who think there is something else – a soul, another world, continuity of life, a mystical ideal, the quest of the grail, etc. And the material self sets forth with the poisoned apple.
The apple is a great symbol. And, as it is used in the Hebraic scriptures, you have it only in its outer garments, the narrative, literal sense. But if you are studying sacred scriptures on the second level, you will run into a vast lore about apples.
They are first of all, fruits, an end product of a tree. Food, and delightful food. What is it that is an end product on a tree, and is delightful food? Tree is the symbol that means evolving, growth; and the apple is that which grows on that tree.
You are all growing trees, which will produce apples, in the nature of this allegory, and in Genesis. It is the goal of the evolution. It is therefore analogous to wisdom.
The allegory in Greece of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Marvelous in its second interpretation. In Genesis, the promise that was told by the serpent: “If you eat of the fruit of this tree you will be wise as gods.” Why the allegorist of the books of Moses chose to make the thing appear so crooked I do not know. But in the second and third undoing the story straightens itself out, and runs like this: the incipient souls had two possible paths — to stay in the state they were in, that means you, which was called the Garden of Eden, or to descend into denser forms, where they would have a variety of experience — hard, harrowing, long, difficult to endure, but very productive of results. That was the accepting of the apple. It was not a man and a woman.
If the choice were to you now, what would you do? Would you take the easier way and slip by, or have the hardihood to endure for the benefit? The benefit that is accruing from the more difficult path is apples, wisdom – which is knowledge and experience — not just knowledge. What is the poisoned apple? It is what every one of us is making as the result of our experience in earth, over ages of time, not just one life. We ate of that apple. We have chosen to come down into earth. And we are producing apples, that is, bit by bit the distillation that is knowledge and experience. You are a little ways along the line, beginning to understand what it is about. The poisoned apple is that which is falsified. The untrue. The lies, or series of lies. Understanding that, you can understand why it is that now Snow White falls dead. Because the higher self has taken in false knowledge, and that kills the action of the higher self. That is a serious error on the part of the higher self. Over this the dwarfs have no power. Because it has been taken in. It is lodged in the throat. It cannot become part and parcel of the higher self because it is literally not truth or Teaching. Therefore it is lodged in part way, and life is choked off.
So you sense why the story has gone down through the centuries, and the continents, with the tenacity of life. It is doing something to our subconscious. That will be held onto tenaciously. The conscious cannot let go if the subconscious takes it on.
The dwarfs, or the seven powers in their embryonic state, are still, as it were, surrounding Snow White, the higher self. They cannot let her go. They love her. They must see her. Therefore you understand why they do not bury her but put her in a glass casket. The seeds of the higher life, that is, the virtues plus. Why the dwarfs must keep seeing this higher self, which it is really theirs to serve. So this glass casket is set up in the household of the dwarfs in the mountains, and there it remains. They refresh themselves — come home from work and refresh themselves — by seeing this beautiful figure.
And now the new scene. Again the hunter. The hunter who searches and hunts, not for deer or rabbit or grouse, that is the garment: but behind that is seeking the precious things.
Now comes the active side from the world. Looking, questing. For something that has no physical reality. It is a mystical reality. It may have a correspondent in the physical world, in a cup, or, as with the Norse, in a golden bowl and spear. Bowl, the female side, and spear, masculine. They must go together. Not sex but two aspects of the soul.
So here the story for childish minds — a crumb, not the thing on the banquet table. Told simply. So the hunter appears. He has lost his way. Many a one who quests has lost his way. He does not know where he is seeking. Where is the goal you are seeking? Is it before the rising sun? It is something that has escaped the reality of the physical nature.
Wells, water. So the hunter is lost. Does not quite know what he is seeking. Knows he is seeking one thing. Remember what he comes to get — a drink of water. Wells, water, and drinking at wells. Like mountains, wells are important. There are about twelve mountains in the Hebraic-Christian scriptures that all mean specific states of higher consciousness. There are more than that number of wells, which mean certain definite ways of linking the soul to greater realities. It will bring up refreshment to the human self — not the material self but the self bound up in humanity, and which seeks refreshment. The allegory of the Samaritan and Jesus.
So the hunter is showing a gesture of right seeking. His deeps of being are seeking refreshment, in the allegory, of asking for water. And because no one answers, and he is still persistent enough, he enters. He was not blocked because he did not receive an answer. He went in. And going in he sees Snow White and the glass casket.
He falls immediately in love with her. He is lost to the world in his observation, devotion, love, for this dead figure. Sounds silly.
(Re: this love) Needles and a magnet. There is nothing coy in the iron filings. That is instantaneous love among chemicals. And it means that there is immediate cognition. Most people are so fuzzy, and have so many veils over their desires and fears, that they could not see.
It does not mean love for a person but for an ideal, a principle, a great reality. And it is because there were no fogs or veils before the eyes and ears of the young hunter that he immediately, like the iron filings and the magnet was attracted and stayed there.
So there the hunter sits until the dwarfs return. This is not just the spinning out of the story. Because right in that is an evidence of the scientific soul logic of the story. It is necessary that the seven — remembering what they are, that these seven come into action around Snow White; that they tell the story to the hunter before they are annealed (hunter and Snow White). He sits there until they come back and tell him the story.
Now he begs for the casket: “This is my love and I must have her with me always wherever I go.”
The hunter has come from that same side of things from which the queen came, and in which Snow White was for a time, the world. It is a second reaching from the world for the higher. And this time it succeeds.
He calls in his men and they prepare to take down the casket from the mountain – down from the higher states. It is a mystical experience. The experience on the mountain is on a higher plane — in your heart, if you like, or in your soul. From that you bring down again into the valley, among men, the things that you have won there.
So this figure in the glass casket — which means that it is visible all the while — that the consciousness is kept related to Snow White all the while, not covered over. And the retainers start the down journey, with the hunter, or prince, beside, riding beside the casket.
Horse, rider. Horse riders are riding the lower nature, through which they are able to become masters. And so it is logical that the hunter beside the glass casket slowly descends the mountain.
But the glass casket has been jolted several times, and presently, by that jolting, the poisoned apple has been dislodged from the throat, and Snow White awakens and looks out through the glass casket. And here too that quick realization of the prince. In vulgar, earthly language, “Love at first sight.” The magnet and the needles. It is an inherent relationship, which quickly cognizes.
You have known things sometimes with a quick flash, for which there was no process at all. That is a little degree of what this, in a vast way, implies. What was the jolt? An interesting bit that the poisoned apple had not gone down into the digestive organs. Represents the superficial. And the false teachings were thrown out by the violence of going down into the lower worlds. Very often the impact of material facts, of what men generally call reality, relating it to things of this world, makes one wake up — somehow or other see a new vision, free oneself, with a kind of violence, of the things to which one had been clinging.
And so, in the story of Snow White, that coming down again into the world, in which she was originally, until the stepmother threw her out, that coming down and throwing off the falseness of the poisoned apple. The distorted, or false, wisdom. Therefore not wisdom at all. Not like the golden apples, which have to be won. One of the things that Hercules must achieve. Because he who would become the perfect man, the complete man, the god, must win the golden apples; and they become gold when, out of the fruits of our experience, we take the poison and begin to transform them into a spiritual understanding. And all the while we have to be on guard that the poison of materiality, or literal thoughts, does not creep in and spoil what we have been building up.
The prince and his retainers open the glass box, and Snow White steps out. And, in the happy vein of the fairy tale, they both ride down together into the land in which the young hunter, the prince, is to presently take his place as king. So this new state of bond, or linking, between the higher self and the new endeavor of the worldly self, to bring in the spiritual, brings down the higher life, and they together shall rule. That is why, in great fairy stories, it is said “they lived happily ever after.” Just as long as those two live together intimately and closely they cannot but be happy. As long as the higher self, Snow White, and the self which has learned to become master over the lower world, therein is well-being and happiness. Therefore the story is allegorically right in saying that they lived together happily ever afterwards.
Death of old queen. Death of the stepmother, or the old queen. Since the story really concerns every individual, it is inevitable that when the higher self returns the lower self is gone. The death is simultaneous with the return of Snow White. The stepmother is found dead when Snow White returns. That is right. The material self is out of the picture with the descent of the higher.
Mountains. In Buddhism, Mt. Kailash. On which it is said that the moon shines with strange brilliancy. On the allegorical level. What is this mountain? Soul consciousness, freed from the material mind, is what is referred to. When the consciousness is lifted up to the soul stature, node of the soul, that is where the soul shines brightly. And soul and moon are identical in the mystical tradition. And you know that the allegory has something to do with soul consciousness. Mt. Sinai in the Hebraic. It is a literal place — in other words, historical facts, but the literal carries only the garment. What then beyond the literal Mt. Sinai is meant by reference in symbolic scriptures? The literal Mt. Sinai was known for thousands of years as a conditioned mountain, a mystical place, to which pilgrims from the adjoining countries would go for mystical experience. Do you know of a single place where you can go for conditioning and health that is not physical? This mountain had been known before the days of Moses as a place conditioned.
What occurred to Moses there? It was a place which for Moses was a communion between the messengers of God and Moses. And Moses received the tablets of the Law. That is an allegorical story of a rapport with the higher planes, through which teaching of lawful living comes.
Mt. Olivet, Mt. Carmel, Mt. Horeb, Mt. Tabor. The things that are precious are always difficult to get. Are worked for. Brunhild in the Wagner ring. The idea there is the precious being, the soul from above, on a mountain, and none but the hero shall find her. Therefore she is surrounded by that which keeps away feeble souls. That hunter, too, has been associated with dwarfs. And passing through the barrier, liberates Brunhild.