50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

Father, Nikolaus Caussinus. He gives such funny stories about the
elephant, having summed up what the antique idiom says and then
adding a little bit of medieval fantasy. "Elephants wash very
often," he continues, "and use flowers to perfume themselves. Hence
they represent purification, chastity, and pious worship of God."
This shows that the same thing happened to the Europeans as to the
Africans when they met up with an elephant for the first time: they
projected the archetype of the hero onto it. In Africa it is
considered a great honor if a person is given the title of lion, but
the highest title anyone can be given is that of elephant. It is
considered to be far above the lion, which is the image of a
courageous man of the Chief type, for the elephant is the archetype
of the medicine man, who also has courage but, in addition, wisdom
and secret knowledge. So, in their hierarchy, the elephant represents
the individuated personality.
Strangely enough, the European automatically projected the same thing
onto the elephant and took him as the image of the divine hero, the
image of Christ, outstanding in virtue, except for being moody and
inclined to fits of rage. That is amazing, but those were two
outstanding qualities in Saint-Exupéry, so that it could be said to
be an exact picture of his character. He himself was subtle, chaste—
to a certain extent, in the sense of being sensitive in his feelings—
very ambitious and very sensitive about everything affecting his own
honor. He was continually on the search for religious satisfaction—he
did not worship God, for he had not found Him—but he was always on
the search. He was generous and intelligent and taciturn but very
irritable and inclined to terrible moods and fits of rage. So in the
elephant there is an amazing self-portrait, and one sees the
archetypal pattern illustrated in a simple individual, without even
much difference. It can be said that the elephant is the model
fantasy of the grown-up hero, and already this model fantasy—the
image in his soul of what he wanted to become—is swallowed back by
the devouring mother, and this first picture shows the whole tragedy.
Very often childhood dreams anticipate the inner fate twenty or
thirty years ahead. The first picture shows that Saint-Exupéry had a
hero aspect, alive and constellated, and that this aspect would never
quite come through but would be swallowed back by the regressive
tendencies of the unconscious and, as we know from later events, by
death.
The devouring-mother myth should naturally also be pinned down in
connection with his own mother, but, as she is still alive and, in a
way, in a conspicuous position, I hesitate to comment on her too
much. I recently saw a photograph of
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her in a newspaper, which shows that whatever else she may be, she is
a very powerful personage. She is a big, stout woman, about whom the
newspaper article says that she has a tremendous amount of energy, in
interested in all kinds of activities, and tries her hand at drawing
and painting and writing. She is a very dynamic person and, in spite
of the fact that she is now pretty old, is still going strong.
Obviously, it must have been very difficult for a sensitive boy to
pull away from the influence of such a mother. It is also said that
she always anticipated her son's death. Several times she thought he
was dead and very dramatically dressed herself in large black veils
such as French women like to wear when they become widows, and then
rather disappointedly had to take them off again as he was not yet
dead. So the archetypal pattern of what we call the death-mother was
alive in her psyche. In our layers of society the death-mother is
something not so openly acknowledged, but I got the shock of my life
when I had the following experience.
I had to go somewhere to meet someone, and at that place the houseowner
had a puer aeternus son whom she had quite eaten up. They were
very simple people. They had a bakery and the son did no work at all