d mythology especially appear to invite us. I will depart as little as
possible, however, from the province chosen as an example, i.e., alchemy.
But in two fables I shall work out the problem of multiple interpretation.
In the choice of the fables I am influenced by the fact that a
psychoanalytic elaboration (Rank's) lies ready to hand, and that both are
subjected to an anagogic interpretation by Hitchcock, who wrote the book
on alchemy. This enables me to take the matter up briefly because I can
simply refer to the detailed treatment in the above mentioned books. The
two stories belong to Grimm's collection and are called the Six Swans, and
the Three Feathers. (K. H. M., Nos. 49 and 63.)

Rank (Lohenginsage) connects the story of the six swans and numerous
similar stories with the knight of the swan saga. It is shown that the
mythical contents of all these narratives have at bottom those elemental
forces of the impulse life that we have found in the parable, and that
they are specially founded on family conflicts, i.e., on those
uncontrolled love and hate motives that come out in their crassest form in
the neurotic as his (phantasied) "family romance." To this family romance
belongs, among others, incest in different forms, the illicit love for the
mother, the rescuing of the mother from peril, the rescuing of the father,
the wish to be the father, etc., phantasies whose meaning is explained in
the writings of Freud and Rank (Myth of the Birth of the Hero(3)).
According to Hitchcock, on the contrary, the same story tells of a man who
in the decline of life falls into error, takes the sin to his heart, but
then, counseled by his conscience, seeks his better self and completes the
(alchemic-creative) work of the six days. (Hitchcock, Red Book.)

It is incontestable that there is, besides the psychoanalytic and anagogic
interpretation of this tale (and almost all others), a nature mythological
and in the special sense, an astronomical interpretation. Significant
indications of this are the seven children and the seven years, the sewing
of clothes made of star flowers, the lack of an arm as in the case of
Marduk, and the corresponding heroes of astral myths, and many others. One
of the seven is particularly distinguished like the sun among the
so-called planets. The ethically indifferent meaning of the tale alongside
of the psychoanalytic and the anagogic corresponds to the chemical
contents of the hermetic writings. As obj