Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

10 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
An alchemical scribe by the code name of Marcus Marcianus
recorded Chicken Little’s vision, albeit disguised and with a rather
optimistic hue, on a medieval illuminated manuscript:
Heaven above,
Heaven below.
Stars above,
Stars below.
All that is above
Also is below.
Grasp this and rejoice.
That memorable gem came to light in a French count’s library in
1745. It subsequently passed through many hands and was auctioned
off in London by Sotheby’s as recently as 1983. Jung himself
quotes it in “The Psychology of the Transference,” 4 though he
fails to track its source back to Chicken Little. It is also cited in
Marie-Louise von Franz’s classic, Puer Aeternus, where she uses it
as a stepping stone for all sorts of arcane speculations, like interpreting
the stars as archetypes of the collective unconscious—nuclei,
so to speak, in the dark sky of the unconscious. 5 I am a longstanding
admirer of Marie-Louise von Franz, and particularly of
that book, but she too fails to acknowledge Chicken Little’s seminal
influence on Western culture.
Needless to say, I have a thing about Chicken Little. It goes back
to when I first heard about her at the age of six. At that time I still
believed in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, and I thought God
made all the houses. Those fantasies died, but my interest in
Chicken Little survived.
Apparently I’m not alone. Since the tablets were unearthed,
Chicken Little’s story has been told and retold many times, often
with variations but always in the vernacular. At last count, I have
personally read thirty-seven versions. The details often differ but
the essentials are the same.
I’ve also read pretty well all the Chicken Little scholarship—
Chickle Schtick, as we call it—and I’ve been privileged to examine
4 The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 384.
5 Puer Aeternus, p. 143.