The Seba library treats Bean in 7 passages, across 2 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Burkert, Walter).
In the Greco-Roman world, the bean belonged to Hades, the realm of the dead. It was the food of the dead. In the Pythagorean communities, the eating of beans was strictly forbidden; beans were taboo because they belonged to the ancestral spirits.
Von Franz establishes the bean’s primary symbolic register as chthonic and funerary, drawing on Greco-Roman and Pythagorean traditions to ground its underworld significance in the fairy-tale context.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
beans were associated with human flesh and male semen, the female womb and a child’s head; eating beans was considered cannibalism. But beans belonged to the world of the dead as well.
Burkert documents the archaic Greek bean-complex as encompassing sexuality, generation, cannibalism, and death — making it an antithesis to Demeter’s grain at Eleusis and a node of Orphic and Pythagorean taboo.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
an underworldly triad assembling at the hearth of the old lady. All things which belong to the underworld realm — death, the unconscious, the gods of sexuality and Rabelaisian wildness — that triad of straw, bean and coal assembles at her hearth.
Von Franz identifies the bean as part of a symbolic triad representing the vegetative, chthonic layer of the psyche — the stratum below animal consciousness where the body simply exists.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
The bean forgot; she went too far and became dissociated. But in the end it didn’t matter because there was a friendly, warm-hearted tailor to sew her back together.
Von Franz reads the bean’s splitting through laughter as a psychological allegory of inflation and dissociation, with the mercurial tailor providing the compensating, healing function.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
You couldn’t eat bean soup on a certain day. You could only eat bean soup on another certain day. Even such absolutely banal facts were all ordered.
Von Franz cites the calendrical regulation of bean consumption in imperial Chinese civilization as evidence for the universal archaic pattern of taboo governing the bean’s ritual appropriateness.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
This Schwank story from the Brothers Grimm kept teasing me to find a meaning. I was unable to decipher it at first, but after I had made a great effort to
Von Franz reflects on her interpretive struggle with the Grimm tale that features the bean, situating the story within the genre of nonsense-humor that nonetheless carries unconscious symbolic depth.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside
charcoal, 173 child, divine/magical, 148-153, 161
The index entry confirms the structural co-location of bean, coal, and related chthonic symbols within von Franz’s thematic organization of the fairy-tale material.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside