50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

a wrong way, but if one lives it one is just impossible and reality
hits one over the head all the time. That is the problem. People who
have shelved their feelings, or their demands on other people, or
their capacity for trust, always feel not quite real, not quite
spontaneous or really themselves. They feel only half alive and they
generally also do not take themselves as quite real. To shelve the
divine child means not taking oneself completely seriously. One acts!
One can adapt throughout life, but if one is honest with oneself, one
knows that it is acting. Otherwise one would behave in such an
infantile way that nobody could stand one. So what can one do?
That is the problem of the divine child when it appears in this inbetween
state.
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One just does not know what to do. Theoretically the situation is
clear: one should be able to cut away the childishness and leave the
true personality. One should somehow be able to disentangle the two,
and if an analysis goes right that is what slowly happens. One
succeeds in disentangling and destroying what is really childish and
in saving the creativity and the future life. But, practically, this
is something which is immensely subtle and difficult to accomplish.
The divine child, or star prince, whom Saint-Exupéry meets in the
desert, asks for a sheep, and we learn that he has come down to fetch
a sheep to take back with him. Later in the story it is said that on
the planet there is an overgrowth of baobab trees which are
continually sprouting. The star prince wants a sheep to eat the
shoots as they appear so that he does not constantly have to work at
cutting them off. But this he does not explain to Saint-Exupéry, and
the real reason only comes out later.
At first we have to look at the symbolism of the sheep in the
personal life of Saint-Exupéry and then also in general mythology. In
one of his books, Saint-Exupéry says himself:
There is no bad outer fate, only an inner one. There comes a moment
when you are vulnerable and your own mistakes seize you and pull you
down like a sort of whirlpool. [He naturally must be speaking with
reference to flying. He means that there is no such thing as a chance
crash: the one day you have an accident is the result of a whole
inner and outer process.] It is not the big obstacles that count so
much, but the little ones: three orange trees on the edge of an
airfield, or thirty sheep which you fail to see in the grass and
which suddenly emerge between the wheels of your plane.
You know that at one time in many places flocks of sheep were used to
keep down the grass on the airfields, and it could happen that your
plane by some mistake ran into them. One could say that he projects
onto the sheep that fateful thing which one day kills the puer
aeternus, or in this case himself. It is the fatal enemy.
The sheep has a very revealing name in Greek. It is called probaton,
which comes from the verb "to walk forward," so it would mean "the
walking forward animal." This is a marvelous name: the animal has no
other choice and no other function than the capacity to walk forward!
That is all it can do! The Greeks are even more witty, for they make
the animal neuter and call it "the walking forward thing.'' That
illustrates the most negative aspect of the sheep, which always
follows the leading ram wherever it goes. You can read again and
again in the
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papers that if a wolf or a dog chases the leading ram over a
precipice, two or three hundred sheep will jump over after him. This
happened about ten years ago at Lenzerheide on an Alp when a wolfhound
chased the leading ram over the precipice and afterward men had