Straw

Straw has that utterly negative connotation of being something that must be discarded. separating the wheat from the straw means to separate what is to be immortal, what is going to survive, from the unwanted portion which is to be burned away.

Von Franz establishes straw as the definitive symbol of psychic and spiritual dross—the futile superficiality that alchemical and biblical tradition alike demands be burned away in the process of transformation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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the transition doesn’t succeed because the boastful straw offers to become a bridge. Besides representing futile nonsense, straw is also something that essentially belongs to the unconscious. It represents what one

Von Franz interprets straw’s failed bridge-making as a symbol of inflated, self-deceiving ego-posturing: lacking self-knowledge, straw cannot sustain the transcendent function required to bridge psychic opposites.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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the straw stretches across the river to make a bridge and the coal attempts to cross. the straw doesn’t know how weak he is, and the coal doesn’t know how hot she is.

The straw’s collapse under the coal dramatizes the principle that psychic transition across opposites is impossible without genuine self-knowledge—straw’s structural weakness mirrors the ego’s inflation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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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 situates straw within a vegetative, underworldly triad associated with death and the deep unconscious, emphasizing its chthonic rather than merely pejorative symbolic valence.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting

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Thomas had an overwhelming experience that made him see that the scholastic, intellectual, theological way in which he exposed the Christian truth was only straw compared to what he had experienced inwardly.

Von Franz uses Aquinas’s deathbed declaration to ground straw as the archetypal symbol for the insufficiency of purely intellectual achievement when confronted with genuine numinous experience.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting

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they cling to their straw of life and mock that they are still clinging to a straw. Their wisdom runs: ‘He who goes on living is a fool, but we are such fools!’

Nietzsche deploys straw as an image of the last, self-aware yet inert grasp of nihilistic consciousness upon existence—a grip both desperate and self-ironizing.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883supporting

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they’ve ‘had it’ and ‘the last straw has broken the camel’s back’ and they’re ‘pissed off and pooped out.’ Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple.

Estés invokes the colloquial ‘last straw’ to mark the midlife psychic crisis point at which accumulated burdens force a woman’s decisive choice between bitterness and instinctual renewal.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside

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