"It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it." - Goethe

In this quote, Goethe describes the core function of myth. Myth allows us to grasp truths that are beyond their physical expression, and that escape mere mental-symbolic description. We do, of course, require these facilities to study myth, and use them as our tools as we encounter and try to comprehend it. Through the study of examples and the unraveling of their inherent symbolism (on the most primitive level in the form of language as such), we can encounter mythic stories and in moments grasp the truths behind them that in turn furthers us in our own personal process of transformation.

We encounter myth as a central function of existence whether we choose to or not, we cannot escape it. In his book “The Mythic Imagination” Stephen Larsen describes six patterns of mythical experience (Larsen, pp. 22-25). According to him we encounter myth:

1. Through a spontaneous mythmaking experience
2. In our feelings
3. Through a belief system
4. In a relationship problem
5. In unconsciously ritualized or repetitive behavior patterns
6. Through conscious mythmaking

Myth consists of archetypal patterns, which we all live out in our subjective experiences. The study of myth allows us to connect to these underlying archetypes and begin to move toward conscious mythmaking, toward creating our own reality. Myth allows us to grasp our reality on a different level: “Myth helps us to enter the complexity of our situations more deeply, with more love of the perplexities themselves and of those caught up in them” (Downing in Young p. 30).

Myth itself is difficult to analyze as due to its very nature it combines symbols in crystalline structures that are complex and near impossible to put into a linear format, as would be required to describe it from an analytical perspective. To understand myth, we need to integrate the literal and symbolic and at the same time keep our gaze fixed on the spiritual above. We cannot fully grasp the truths in myth, if we have not integrated the other dimensions as well.

A common model in a variety of esoteric traditions is the model of four levels of existence: literal, mental, mythical, and spiritual dealing with the four properties of physical existence, the symbolic, the archetypal, and the energetic. They can also be related to the body, the mind, the soul, and the spirit; and also to earth, fire, water, and air as e.g. in the alchemical tradition (Newcomb).

A mythical story that not only has meaning on all of these four levels, but in its very storyline contains symbols that point to these four levels is Cinderella, a fairy tale recorded among others by the brothers Grimm. Cinderella is a beautifully complex crystal of deep meaning and inherent truths. Similar to a poem that expresses in its cadence, rhyme scheme, and structure the essence of its imagery, so does Cinderella serve as a story that describes the core process of transformation on all of these four levels while containing them within the story itself.

The only stable thing in life is change. Transformation cannot be escaped. Our body ages, our mind deteriorates, we live through archetypal journeys, and our energy continuously changes form. Cinderella is a core myth describing a path of personal transformation and individuation. It is rich in the same symbolism which can be found in many esoteric systems, and it relates to other core human mythological stories. It finally even describes ontogenetic evolution and the creation story of the universe as such.

On the literal level, Cinderella is “simply” a fairy tale. Especially, in the butchered Hollywood version, it is a rags to riches story, or a love story for little girls to keep them dreaming about the prince they might marry one day (as such, it has been rightfully attacked by feminists). But even on the literal level there are certain important truths contained in the story. To begin with: in the original story, the beginning is one described as harmonious. Everything was well until the death of the mother and the questionable choice of the father in his marrying an apparently fully superficial and narcissistic woman. This indicates that sometimes things in life don’t “go too well”, sometimes things happen beyond our control that can be tremendously uncomfortable, sad, or even devastating. From there, the story continues and the young woman endures hardships, honing her will power, discipline and humility, until one day she has the opportunity to assert herself, grab life with both hands, get the man she wants to marry, and live happily ever after. On the literal level, this story is one of encouragement, one that praises endurance in the face of opposition, one that says “stay on your path, no matter what, and you will succeed in the end”. It is a story that reminds us to honor our history, to be connected to our environment, to do our duties with patience – and most of all to be true to ourselves.

On the symbolic level, the story explodes into a prism of meaning. Beginning with her very name, “Cinder-Ella”: Cinder pointing at ashes and ultimately fire, as well as “Ella” meaning light, again pointing at fire and also toward the idea that, for en-light-enment, fire, will, is required.  One of the main jobs Ella has to perform in her household is to keep the fire lit.

The four elements and levels of esoteric systems were mentioned earlier. Those four also relate to the main characters in the story. We have father, mother, daughter, and the son in form of the prince. They relate to king, queen, princess and prince of the tarot, and they relate to Chokmah, Binah, Malkuth, and Tiphareth in the cabalistic symbol system of the tree of life. As such, they further relate to the Tetragrammaton: Father (Yod – Fire - Will), Mother (Heh – Water - Emotion), Daughter (Vau – Earth – Physical world) and Son (Heh – Air - Reason) (Newcomb pp. 33-49).

Told from within this symbolic framework, the story suddenly takes us to a whole different level: the story begins at some point with Father, the creative will, and Mother, the fertile womb, united happily, who give birth to a beautiful daughter, the physical universe. Psychologically, they relate to the creative self, the intuitive self, and the physical body. Something is missing, though. If that was all there was to the story, the story would have standstill. For time to continue, the process of transformation has to continue. Consequently, suddenly the daughter gets cut off from mother and father. The mother dies, the father seems to have “checked out”, lost his drive, his spine, his fire (and appears to die unsung later in the story). The daughter is caught in the basement, earth in its thickest, mud and ashes, the chtonic elements of life, the material universe, ultimate separation and suffering. Here we are at Buddha’s first noble truth, that all life is suffering stemming from the illusion of separation. But Ella does not want to stay in the basement. She dutifully performs her chores there, integrating her earth element, but she is not planning on remaining in the material world forever – unlike her stepsisters and stepmother.

The stepmother and Ella’s stepsisters are interesting. The mother does not appear to be particularly mothering, rather comes across as simply another older sister. This indicates that all three are essentially other “Daughter” archetypes, though daughters, who have become side-tracked into the world of the material, into their own narcissistic psychosis. They are trapped themselves, and they have Ella trapped in the basement. The stepmother makes it particularly difficult for Ella’s to go to the ball by giving her impossible tasks to do. Similarly, it seems at times that every day life leaves no time for “spiritual” transformation, an excuse materialist like to use who do not wish to advance and close their eyes to imagination and the possibilities ahead. The stepmother never even tried (at least not in this story – little is said about her prior life). She married a dead man, a man living in denial of his loss, who decided to give up. The step sisters are looking for “Mr. Right”, for the prince in shining armor within the material world, and are blinded by the glitter of the ball and palace. Later, they try to change their bodies to fit the shoe, reminiscent of modern day plastic surgery undergone to fit stereotypical sensual demands.

Ella is different: being the daughter, she has integrated her earth element. But she has more: she has fire; she has the will her father lost. Not having her father present or emotionally accessible meant she had to integrate her own will, keep the fire lit, connect with and integrate her creative self. Father standing also for wisdom, she has to proof her own wisdom as she does when she asks her father not for material goods, but for a freshly broken branch of a tree. This branch in turn would help her to connect again with her mother as she plants it on her grave. In connection with her tears, water, she grows a tree on her mother’s grave – a tree of life?

Her mother’s grave is a portal for Ella to connect with nature, with her feelings. As she is crying – allowing herself to grief in face of her suffering and loss – she reconnects with her intuitive self, finds the mother within herself. She connects with nature around her, with the animals around her mother’s grave, especially the birds (birds as such providing additional symbolic layers). Her connection with nature also corresponds to her identification with cosmic consciousness, Binah, understanding. Through that she can talk to animals; through that they learn of her plight and help her later in the story when she is ready to embark on the next step in her transformative process.

The prince, Tiphareth stands for imagination, for beauty, for a glittering ball so different from Ella’s normal environment – and also for the hero who takes off, the beginning of the process of individuation returning home, climbing up the tree of life. He stands for communication with cosmic consciousness: The courting period, the ball, the dancing with each other, the shoes all as means of communication (it is curious to note the shoes as symbols of left and right brain halves on which the transpersonal self stands, and which male and female bring together for the coniunctio, the chymical marriage Ella and the Prince are about to experience, the brain serving as our physical vessel for self/ego). The prince also stands for heart, and love – Tiphareth furthermore corresponding to the heart chakra in Hindu mythology.
In order to go to the ball, and connect with the Prince, Ella needs to exert her will, rising in the face of oppression against her stepmother, she needs her intuition and connection with nature as expressed in the help of the animals which allow her to fulfill impossible tasks, and she needs her imagination. Bringing these elements together, she and the prince unite, archetypically overcome dualism, and take on the roles of the new father and mother and from there to a new level of unity at the top of the tree of life.

On a psychological level, interpreting some of the symbols, one can see in Ella’s story a process of personal transformation, of individuation: From child, to young woman, to queen-to-be. The first stages of her growth are reminiscent of Piaget’s model of psychological development. Piaget described a process of development from “the egocentric (magical) world of everyone’s childhood, yielding year by year in (now) fully recognizable stages through the first decade of life to the operational (logical-causal) mind of adulthood” (Larsen p.31-32) – though Piaget seems to stop after the first two levels, not moving past the logical-causal mind, the integration of personae, toward the realm of integration of archetypal patterns. This is where Carl Jung’s work is invaluable, especially his late work on alchemy.

The story of Ella describes a process of individuation: From a childhood state of innocent oneness, to the continued separation from family and a variety of peer groups in the process of forming identity and sense of self, the process of ego-formation through fear and guilt; further on to the rise again toward realizing human potential (self-actualization as Maslow called it), through dissolving of fear (e.g. through tears and proper grief – tears, water, relating to the alchemical process of solutio, or through will, fire, relating to the alchemical process of calcinatio), and through reason (air, corresponding to the prince, and sublimatio in alchemy) to reach again a state of oneness and unity, the alchemical coniunctio, the existence as a true individual.

The symbolic depth and the correspondences to models within several esoteric traditions suggest, though, that there is even more to the story than “simply” a theory of individuation. The links to the cabalistic tree of life, for example, suggests that we are looking at even deeper structures, archetypal patterns that relate not just to the individual, but to the process of transformation of soul.

On the mythological level, Cinderella has curious parallels: hers is the story of Job (the word being related to “suffering” in its etymological root), the story of paradise lost and found (“the necessary departure from naiveté, from infantile unconsciousness” to “moral ambiguity” and “personal and cultural duplicity” – Hollis p. 31, and finally to paradise regained, conscious awareness). It also corresponds to other myths about individuals who have reached enlightenment, e.g. the life of Buddha Gautama, as beautifully described in Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha”. Cinderella could actually be looked at as a female Bodhisattva. She begins in a paradisiacal state, just like Siddhartha. Through encountering sickness, old age, and death in Siddhartha’s case, or the death of the mother in Ella’s case, they both begin a process of transformation through hardship, asceticism and suffering, chosen in Siddhartha’s case, involuntary in Ella’s (unless she made that choice prior to her incarnation). Both eventually bring an end to their suffering, rise up and reach enlightenment. Both decide that they cannot be happy until others are as well. While Buddha served as a Bodhisattva, Ella insists that she cannot marry the prince, conclude her journey, until her stepsisters are married as well. In a way, she lives through the dark night of the soul for her fellow women: “The psychological task of the hero, as Campbell described it, is ‘to retreat from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Larsen p.98) Ella appears to view her stepsisters as innocent (maybe unaware and ignorant), and with the help of her prince arranges for them, and the stepmother, to also find “soul mates” and with that begin the process of individuation. Had she not, or worse, had she taken revenge, dualism would have remained and a total integration could not have occurred.

In the end, Cinderella is about total integration. In its order of events, it corresponds also to models of energetic process on the energetic level, in particular the new paradigm in Quantum Physics that Consciousness, not matter is the underlying essence of reality. Arthur Young’s theory of process, as expressed in particular in his work “The Reflexive Universe” describes a descent of consciousness into matter, and a return of matter into consciousness (Young, Arthur).

This dual process of a descent of spirit into matter and the rise of matter into spirit is also reflected in the story, especially in such elements as the prince reaching out to Ella by extending the ball several times and finally putting glue on the stairs to catch her shoe. While Ella strives to spiritualize her matter, spirit materializes to help her, in the form of the prince, or in the magical events that lead up to her making it to the ball in the first place. As Meister Eckhardt suggested, our longing for God is nothing in comparison with God’s longing for us (Young Lecture 1). “God”, the one consciousness, needs the Ego, the individual. “God” as such is only possibility, but through the individual, the Ego, “God” can experience actuality. Thus the Ego serves to do “God’s” work willfully. In that state dual non-duality, the Ego exists, the Individual is actualized, and at the same time aware of its being part of a greater whole. Cinderella begins with wholeness, and in the process encounters separation, solitude and suffering. But finally paradise is regained in the coniunctio of Ella and the Prince, now the new Father and Mother. And they lived happily ever after until another story that began “Once upon a time…”.

Hollis, James, Swamplands of the Soul, Inner City Book, 1996
Larsen, Stephen, The Mythic Imagination, Inner Traditions International, 1996
Newcomb, Jason, The New Hermetics, Weiser, 2004
Young, Arthur, The Reflexive Universe, Anodos Foundation, 1976
Young, Jonathan (ed.), Saga – Best New Writings on Mythology, White Cloud Press, 1996