Wilna van der Walt Practice

Month: May 2026

  • Fire-bird

    Fire-bird

    The phoenix or fire-bird is a mythical bird the size of an eagle and graced with certain features of a pheasant. When it sees that its death is drawing near, it builds itself a nest and exposes itself to the rays of the sun until it burns itself to ashes. Another phoenix then arises from the marrow of the bones of the old one. In Egypt it was called the Bennu bird and was associated with the sun god Ra and with Osiris, the Wise Old Man as a representation of the positive father archetype. (1)

    This potentially transformative aspect of fire, as portrayed in the myth of the phoenix, is further demonstrated by the fairy tale, Fitcher’s Bird: an old man disguises himself as a beggar only to abduct one beautiful maiden after another. They all end up locked away, decapitated and hewn to pieces, until the third daughter is cunning enough to trick the old man; she makes her escape by disguising herself as a magical bird, and by burning down his house.

    Inspired by Fitcher’s Bird, Kalsched emphasizes the potentially beneficial influence of symbolical creative work in therapy with traumatized individuals. (2) In the story, the third daughter makes her final escape by ‘becoming a magical bird’. She gets into a barrel of honey and then rolls in feathers, after having cut open a feather-bed. Her act implies total commitment; she acts with ‘her whole body,’ with her whole being.

    By disguising herself she enters a fantasy space, but at the same time, she also exists in reality; she embodies energy from both consciousness and the archetypal world of the unconscious. In this way she creates a living symbol in the form of the magical bird that may bring about change. The symbol is not merely an intellectual fact.

    When she leaves, the house of the old man burns down, and the negative complex is destroyed. This in turn allows for positive masculine energy to enter, perhaps in the form of the Wise Old Man.

    Photo credit: website of Ancient Origins

    References

    1. JE Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1971, p. 253
    2. D Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma, 1996, p. 186 – 200

  • Otherness

    Otherness

    Otherness, in many forms, confronts us all the time. When looking for example into the eyes of a member of another culture, we project our personal relationship to the Stranger within, the estranged Self. In dreams, the estranged Inner Other is often portrayed as a member of ‘another culture’ and may appear as a beggar. Stories about the beggar Stranger in need tend to crop up at a time when the individual relationship to the divine, the Self, is not well. (1)

    So it is told how Jupiter and Mercury knocked and begged for shelter but were repeatedly haughtily turned away. But when they came to Philemon and Baucis, an old couple living in a hut in the forest, they were respectfully received and honored by the slaughter of the old couple’s only gander. The following day the gods revealed themselves, granting them their wish to remain together till death and even afterwards. Their humble hut became a temple, they the priest and priestess. Upon their death, they were turned into two trees, their branches entwined in eternal embrace. (2)

    To restore our conscious relationship to the Self is an individual task which is undertaken in analysis. Jung described the basic form of interaction with a stranger as participation mystique, an archaic form of identification with the other. By gaining a sense of one’s separateness, one may learn to withdraw projections, a sacrifice. In an advanced stage, an individual (and perhaps in the future a group) is able to relate to the Self in the other; it is a return to the first stage but on a higher more conscious level.

    Jung described it as “a form of love but not transference, nor friendship in the usual sense, nor sympathy. The upper story is no longer you or I, it is the many of which you yourself is a part, and everyone is part of it whose heart you touch.” (3)  

    The current zeitgeist of one-sided rationality results in a loss of the sense of the divine, of the other world. By realizing our own poverty and bringing the right sacrifice to Self and other, life is affirmed for all.

    Image credit: artwork by Jacob van Oost, Mercury and Jupiter in the House of Philemon and Baucis

    References:

    1. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Shambhala. Kindle Edition, Location 1106
    2. Von Franz, Location 1091 – 1096
    3. Von Franz, Location 977 – 1006
  • Homecoming

    Homecoming

    The process of individuation draws one into a gradual homecoming. Listen to how Martin Prechtel describes his initial experience in Secrets of The Talking Jaguar, Memoirs from The Living Heart, p. 80 – 83.

    “Coming into the village of Santiago Atitlan as I did that day, after more than a year of roaming on my own, was not like reaching the promised land, but more like the homecoming of a spawning fish, or a migratory bird hatched elsewhere, following its nature, flying hard, not always sure of the way, but arriving at its true indigenous place of origin. I was coming back to a home I’d only glimpsed in my sleep.

    “Some say dreams come from people, from an individual’s personal life, and maybe they do. To others like myself, a dream was simply a bud on the Tree of Life, a small leak from the other world’s story, whose speech made life live. My life was a strange tale whose salient points had been broadcast to me in dreams long before I had to live them out.”

    “What for me seemed overpowering was … the quality of familiarity. Never once did I feel foreign or alien in this wild enormous Tzutujil village. It was a new feeling: after being an outsider my whole life, here I felt like I belonged. Not that I fit in, because I didn’t at first; not because I was welcomed by all, because I was not. But I felt good here, on account of I was actually from here in some way that I didn’t comprehend.”

    “I didn’t come to Atitlan to become a shaman or to study Mayan culture, or to learn how to be a better person, or to get enlightened. I came because I was called there, whether I knew it or not; because the spirits had carved a space for me in the matrix of my destiny and, fishing me out of the womb, had reeled me slowly but surely into this ancient citadel of Southern Quichean Mayans in a time when their own destiny was imperiled. The spirits had a job for me, and I would do my best for them.

    “I knew this place. I had smelled and tasted it hundreds of times as a child, thinking it a place found only in dreams. So when I drifted into Santiago, I recognized my own arrival home, welcoming myself into my own heart…”

    Image credit: Grief and Praise by Martin Prechtel.