The Devil and the talking eggs
I usually start my mornings with a daily Tarot card pull. Today I pulled The Devil.
[Note: Almost all of my understanding of the cards started with Lindsay Mack’s work. Please check her out]
The Devil is about releasing ourselves from old stories that keep us bound up in old paradigms.
For me, this card is about that, and, specifically, my conservative Christian upbringing. The stories I was told about who I was from that oppressive and constricting belief structure. I won’t go into specifics here, but I was told that I was less-than in just about every way possible. That all of my instincts and passions were bad and not to be trusted.
Nowadays, when I pull this card, I ask the questions:
Who do you believe? And how do you act based on what you believe?
Asking myself these questions led me to remember a fairytale I learned about this past weekend in a Jungian seminar; “The Talking Eggs”.
I read the version of the story told by Robert D. San Souci and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.
Here is an online pdf I found.
Content Advisement: From what I could glean, San Souci is not of Creole descent. I attempted to find a version told by a Creole person, but I wasn’t successful. So we’ll take with a large grain of salt that this version is filtered through a white American lens.
Why does that matter? Well, first and foremost, stories should be told by the cultural members where it emanated. Us white folx have taken, told, and profited from a lot of stories that don’t belong to us. Especially when our ancestors were the direct cause of the death and cultural annihilation of the storytellers (especially Black and Indigneous Americans).
This is all that matters, full stop.
But I’ll add a second consideration: the meaning, symbolism, structure, and themes of stories are best understood in context. When we impose one cultural lens on another, we risk losing meaning and, possibly, the whole point.
But now, let’s look at the story and how I see it relating to The Devil.
We start our story with a poor Black family in the post-Civil War South (though this story is likely much, much older than that) .
We start in abject poverty “The tail end of bad luck”. We start with almost nothing.
The family consists of a mother and two daughters. Rose, the eldest, is mean and “doesn’t know beans from bird’s eggs”. This phrase implies ignorance, but I think we’re noting a lack of discernment: she doesn’t know things that she should, she’s not connected to nature and the resources it provides.
The youngest, Blanche, is kind and “sharp as 40 crickets”. Crickets are shrill and unignorable (if you’ve ever had one get into your house, you’ll know. Yet, Blanche is largely ignored. But some kinds of crickets can be used to gauge the temperature, and all crickets are in tune with the seasons. Blanche is wise, discerning, and connected to the earth, maybe to the point where it annoys others.
In any case, the mother prefers Rose because they are alike; mean, impulsive, and delusional. She makes Blanche do all the work while they fantasize; they dream of changing their situation but don’t put in any work, they rely on the labor of just one child in the hopes of becoming rich.
One day, while fetching water from a well, Blanche encounters an elder woman in “a raggedy black shawl”, who asks for a sip. Blanche immediately respects and cares for her, and offers more than what is asked for.
The elder woman assures a blessing for her “do-right” spirit; in taking action and sharing the resources she gathers from the earth.
When she gets home she’s punished by mother and sister for “taking too long”, and is blamed for the temperature of the water being too hot. Which, if it’s the South in the summer, she may have no control over. Potentially another sign of how out-of-touch they are.
They abuse Blanche until she runs away to the woods, to nature, the Otherworld. She weeps, and the elder woman responds to her tears. This time it’s the elder who offers to meet her needs on the condition she doesn’t laugh at what she sees (e.g. judge or make assumptions about things beyond her understanding).
Blanche agrees, they join hands, and the forest shifts and opens around them, Blanche joins with the Otherworldly figure and ventures deeper and deeper into the unknown. Walking “the narrow path”.
It’s worth noting that we don’t know whether or not Blanche was afraid of what’s ahead, we only know she was afraid to return what she already knew.
At the elder woman’s homestead, she encounters all kinds of nourishing female animals, but the kind that literally couldn’t exist in the known world. Two headed cows and rainbow chickens with varying numbers of legs that lay eggs that talk.
When they’re in the elder woman’s house, more magic happens, but some of it is much more unsettling; the woman removes her head to braid her hair.
Given that this a Creole story, and the illustrated characters are Black, I’m thinking about the cultural value and necessity of hair care, specifically braiding and other protective hairstyle. This woman who is not of the known world, does a very earthly task in a mystical way.
The girl, while a bit scared, just continues to act: she builds a fire for warmth and food.
The elder woman further demonstrates her ability to provide nourishment, an old bone and a grain of rice become a full meal. But Blanche has to keep demonstrating faith, without knowing how the bone and grain would be enough, she does what she’s told to prepare them. Her listening to the elder brings abundance.
Once everyone is fed and warm, the elder woman takes the girl outside for a magical moonlight performance. There’s rabbits wearing clothes doing partnered dances like the cakewalk (a dance with a complicated history, but once secretly functioned as a mockery of white dominant norms in the known world) and others that became popular in the US but have roots in the Eastern hemisphere. They dance at night, when the veil between worlds is thinnest, and the dances are both subversive and connective.
These are things that would probably delight a child, and maybe tempt her to laugh, but Blanche doesn’t. She watches in awe but keeps quiet, she withholds judgement and she eventually falls asleep.
In the morning, there’s one more task for her to complete: one that seems to have deep ancestral connections. She’s sent to milk the two-headed cow with horns “like corkscrews”; no cows have horns like this, these kinds of horns are seen in some species of antelopes. Specifically, a kind found in sub-Saharan Africa.
This cow produces the sweetest milk, and it’s noted that she and the elder woman drink it with their coffee. Coffee is also African.
Before returning to the known world, Blanche is fortified by her ancestors.
The elder woman tells Blanche that her life is going to be better from this point on, and then sends her to collect eggs with very simple instructions;
Believe things/people when they talk
Radically trust Spirit
Blanche should only take the eggs that say “take me” and then she’s supposed to throw them over her right shoulder and break them.
In the coop, there are two kinds of eggs;
Beautiful jewel covered ones that say “Don’t take me”
Plain looking eggs that say “Take me”.
Now remember, Blanche is very poor. She’s tempted by the beautiful eggs but she follows instructions and only takes the plain ones. Now there’s a second need to trust, the plain eggs could be food. They could mean survival when she goes back to the known world.
But she chooses to trust. She breaks them; and she’s rewarded beyond her wildest dreams. She’s given all the beautiful clothes, money, and jewels she could want, and she’s even provided a pony and carriage to help her carry them home.
Returning from the otherworld with riches, the family sees Blanche’s value and briefly treats her as she really is (a child), but it was a manipulation, and, of course, Blache falls for it…she just wants kindness from her mother. Blanche gets tricked into telling her mother everything about the elder woman.
It’s so easy to be seduced back into the familiar when it seems to promise it will be different this time.
While she’s asleep her mother and sister plot against her, despite the enormous amount Blanche has brought to share; they don’t feel like it’s enough. They want more. When they have what they want, they’ll abandon Blanche for good.
Rose is sent out to the woods and meets the elder, but only asks for something, she doesn’t offer anything in return. The elder woman is willing to show her the home on the same condition she offered to Blanche: just don’t laugh.
Rose agrees, and, interestingly, she does end up keeping it. Once the elder woman takes off her head to braid her hair, Rose grabs it and tries to blackmail her into getting the riches.
The elder actually tells Rose the exact same rules, but Rose believes it’s a trick - she doesn’t want to radically trust, she wants to listen to what the material world would value. She takes the beautiful eggs that say “Don’t take me” and she runs away (without assisting the elder in getting her head back).
When she breaks the eggs out come snakes, wasps, frogs, and a wolf. They chase and attack her. Rose runs home and her mother tries to help her, but they both get chased deep into the woods. Most of the things attacking are not inherently deadly, but the wolf could easily kill them, but it doesn’t.
When they go back home, Blanche and her riches are gone (but we’re assured she’s unchanged by them). It seems clear the punishment is fear and discomfort, but then having to live with what they chose.
They spend the rest of their lives trying to find the elder woman again, but they never succeed. Once you break the rules of Otherworld, you don’t get a second visit.
So back to the Devil, to me this story is about being attuned to something larger than ourselves and being willing to trust it and act in accordance with it, even if it doesn't make sense to us at the moment. There’s a particularly important part around the value of things; sometimes what we’ve been taught is important or “how the world works” is incorrect. Sometimes when we chase after the face value, we just get hurt.
But if we can listen to a different voice, a different story, and we follow it (faithfully) sometimes we encounter something completely unexpected but exactly what we need.
What voices are you willing to listen to? What if they conflict with your old stories about yourself and the world? How do you know what does and does not have value in your life?
