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

Chicken Little: Messiah, Meshuggeneh or Metaphor? 17
Chicken Little as a dissociated neurotic.
Just then Turkey Lurkey appeared, strutting, stroking his handsome
comb.
“You sillies,” he said, “you winged stick-heads, feathered furies,
stop your fussing and squawking and wailing. If anyone is to call for
help, I shall.”
And with that he stalked off to the village.
And there the tablets end.
Were the police fetched? We don’t know. Did the sky fall? Apparently
not—though there is chronological evidence to consider
analogies with the Biblical Flood. 27
Let Chickle Schtick fill in the gaps. For already, you see, we
have all we need to support the orthodox Jungian view that the end
of the world is an archetypal motif; that is, it may be constellated
by circumstances (inner or outer) in anyone or in any culture, at
any time and in any place.
As it happens, this was synchronistically confirmed by two personal
incidents while I was preparing this paper.
First, my dentist confided to me that mankind was done for.
“Decay,” he said, changing drills. “I see it everywhere. We’re all
going down the tubes.”
And then, the very next day, I spoke to my broker.
“Your stocks are down because the Dow Jones is down because
the whole world is,” she said. “I’m down too. God knows where it
will end.”
Chicken Little and others have been predicting a falling sky for,
what, 7,000 years, and it’s still there.
That says something.
27 See A. Heidel, Chicken Little and Old Testament Parallels, pp. 78-132.