The spiritual Message of German Fairy tales

The Fox and the Geese

Tale of the Brothers Grimm translated by M. Hunt [1884]
Interpretation by Undine & Jens in green [2024]

The fox once came to a meadow in which was a flock of fine fat geese, on which he smiled and said, “I come at the nick of time, you are sitting together quite beautifully, so that I can eat you up one after the other.” The geese cackled with terror, sprang up, and began to wail and beg piteously for their lives. But the fox would listen to nothing, and said, “There is no mercy to be had! You must die.” At length one of them took heart and said, “If we poor geese are to yield up our vigorous young lives, show us the only possible favour and allow us one more prayer, that we may not die in our sins, and then we will place ourselves in a row, so that you can always pick yourself out the fattest.” “Yes,” said the fox, “that is reasonable, and a pious request. Pray away, I will wait till you are done.” Then the first began a good long prayer, for ever saying, “Ga! Ga!” and as she would make no end, the second did not wait until her turn came, but began also, “Ga! Ga!” The third and fourth followed her, and soon they were all cackling together.

When they have done praying, the story shall be continued further, but at present they are still praying without stopping.

When children hear this fairy tale, they will probably first think of stupid animals, and we may laugh at the simplicity of the geese and the stupidity of the fox, who is now bound to his promise and has to wait, even though he does not understand what the geese are praying. Looking deeper, from a spiritual perspective, we can think of the geese again as our senses and thoughts, which like to “cackle and wail in terror”. The supposedly clever fox would then be our conceptual ego-mind, hungry and eager, who wants to feed on the senses and thoughts, but in doing so also kills them. From this point of view, this short fairy tale also fits well into our “geese series”, and we now want to think about how we can save the senses and thoughts from their death at the hands of the conceptual ego-mind, so that they remain fresh and alive and their wholeness is preserved.

Why does the mind kill? Well, the German word for mind is “Verstand”, which contains “to stand”. That already suggests the killing, because anything that stands in the flow of life and can no longer move is considered dead. And that too is just an idea, like all of our concepts that we put up in front of and around us, so that they increasingly obscure our vision. That is why, in the fairy tale of the drummer on the glass mountain, we should cut down this dark forest of ideas, fell the trees, chop up their wood and finally burn everything. Only then can consciousness become big, wide and whole again.

“Since I gave the bird a name, I have never seen the bird again.”

And how can our senses and thoughts be saved from the conceptual mind and its greedy hunger? The solution offered by our fairy tale is ingenious and simple: as long as our senses and thoughts pray to God, that is, “do not want to die in sin”, that is, in separation from God, but are directed towards the whole, the conceptual mind can never grasp them, because the whole or divine has no form that can be grasped. So, what do the geese love more than their wholeness? Because only in this they can remain fresh and alive as pure white geese. And that is also their eternal prayer in an endless fairy tale.

Nevertheless, it seems to be our human destiny to have to develop this conceptual mind at an early stage of life. Yes, we spin ourselves into our ideas like the voracious silkworm caterpillar in a dense cocoon. And it would be good if we did not die in it, but could transform ourselves into a light butterfly that breaks through the cocoon and lives only on the nectar of the flowers, without eating the plants. One should not think that the butterfly is safer the thicker and firmer the cocoon becomes, but rather that it becomes more and more difficult to escape from it, and many therefore give up on it altogether.

The caterpillar and the butterfly
(Johann Gottfried Herder)

Friend, the difference between earthly things
Seems great and is often so small;
Age and shape and space and time
Are only a dream image of reality.

Sluggish and weary on stripped bushes
A butterfly saw the caterpillar creeping,
And rose happily, without suspicion
That it had been the caterpillar itself.

Sadly, the aged crept to the grave:
“Oh, that I have lived in vain!
I will die childless and how insignificant!
And there flies the beautiful butterfly.”

Fearfully it wrapped itself in its cover,
Slept, and when Mother’s fullness of life
Awoke it, it thought itself anew,
Not knowing what it had been.

Friend, the earthly realm is a dream realm.
What we were, what we will be one day,
Nobody knows; we are happy when we are blind;
So, let us all know what we are.

We can also find a symbolic parable for such a conceptual “building of the mind” in the famous Tower of Babel in the Bible. This building was supposed to reach heaven, but ultimately ended in great confusion. Jacob Boehme wrote about it:
So understand what Babel and the Tower of Babel indicate: The city of Babel is the Ham-man who builds this city on earth. The tower is his own chosen god and worship. And all intellectual scholars from the school of this world are the builders of this tower. For all those who act as teachers without God’s spirit and are called to do so by people become the master craftsmen of this tower and idol from the world, and no one else. They all just carve stones and wood for this tower... So, the tower was an image of the dark world, because people wanted to see God in the dark egoity. This indicates the earthly man who stands before God like this tower and is an image of divine contemplation of good and evil, like a painted life. (Mysterium Magnum, Chapter 36)

On the subject of foxes and geese, the old children’s song is of course a must:

Fox, you stole the goose
Give it back, give it back,
Otherwise the hunter will come for you with his rifle...

His big, long gun
Shoots the shot at you, shoots the shot at you,
So that you are coloured in red ink and then you are dead...

Dear little fox, let me give you some advice,
Don’t be a thief, don’t be a thief,
Take the mouse, you don’t need roast goose...

“Translated” it would mean: Mind, you stole the whole thing, give it back! Otherwise, you will become a separate being that will be overtaken by time as by a hunter with a shotgun and you will have to suffer painful loss and death in your own blood in the hail of bullets of conceptual ideas. Let me give you some advice and be aware that you only live on small, grey mice. You will never grasp and understand the pure white wholeness as an intellect!

Finally, in the notes to this fairy tale we find the old proverb: “If the wolf teaches the geese to pray, he eats them as a lesson.” (see also Wander-Sprichwoerter-Lexikon, Wolf 387, mentioned as early as 1497) This practically refers to the opposite, when the senses and thoughts are motivated and taught by desire and pray and ask accordingly. Of course, then they are also eaten up by desire bit by bit, and everyone has probably experienced what that feels like. In doing so, we pay the price for the lesson and live in time and transience, while God lives in eternity and prayer to him never ends, so that this fairy tale too will have no end that our minds could ever understand, as the last sentence so beautifully puts it.


... Table of contents of all fairy tale interpretations ...
Hans Stupid - (topic: realize wishes)
The Drummer - (topic: Mind and path to salvation)
Swan Prince - (topic: soul, spirit and salvation)
The Six Swans - (topic: senses, thoughts and expansion)
The poor Girl and the Star-Money - (topic: poverty in spirit)
Death and the Goose Herder - (topic: geese and wholeness)
The Fox and the Geese (topic: mind and wholeness)
The Goose-Girl at the Well - (topic: spirit, soul and nature)
The Golden Goose - (topic: recognize true wholeness)
The Goose-Girl and Falada - (topic: unity and diversity)
King Thrushbeard - (topic: holy and healthy marriage)

[1884] Grimm's Household Tales. Translated from the German and edited by Margaret Hunt. With an introduction by Andrew Lang, 1884, Vol. 1/2, London: George Bell and Sons
[2024] Text and Pictures by Undine & Jens / www.pushpak.de