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

Chicken Little: Messiah, Meshuggeneh or Metaphor? 9
dence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect
[her] from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. 2
Did Chicken Little feel the hand of God, then? Was her shrill
warning really an apotropaic attempt to protect herself against the
mass? We don’t know. Only one thing is sure: Chicken Little could
not contain herself. Believed or not, she had to speak out, that was
her destiny. Which is to say, she did what she had to do.
To my mind she is a perfect example—perhaps even the original
model—of the woman M. Esther Harding describes as “one-in-herself”:
The woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does, not
because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved,
even by herself; not because of any desire to gain power over another,
to catch his interest or love, but because what she does is
true. 3
The heart-wrenching saga of Chicken Little, like the heroic epic
of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, has been passed down from generation
to generation. No one knows exactly how old it is. It first surfaced
some three hundred years ago on seven stone tablets discovered in
Lower Kraznac, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, by a traveling
monk looking for succor. Some tablets are whole, others are merely
fragments. There are huge gaps. The first seems to start in midstory,
and the seventh ends so abruptly that one cannot help but
think that others are still to be found.
It took 73 years to decipher the Kraznac tablets—three generations
of astute hermetic linguists working 10 hours a day, 7 days a
week, 365 days a year. Indeed, their labors have been aptly compared
with the construction of the pyramids, medieval cathedrals
and the Great Wall of China. It is true that modern Chicken Little
scholars dispute some of their interpretations, but all honor is due
these diligent pioneers, for they did lay the groundwork and gave
us indisputably rich insights into the fowl psyche.
2 “The Undiscovered Self,” Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 511.
3 Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, p. 147. This theme is further developed
in Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological
Transformation.