A Feather from the Golden Firebird
And answering the call
The old Slavic tale of the Firebird and Princess Vasilisa begins on a resplendent summer’s morning with a young hunter, wending his way through the Tsar’s green woods, bow in hand, astride his Horse of Power.
A Horse of Power?
It is said that these legendary battle-horses were ridden by the great warriors of long ago. Broad of chest, with eyes of fire and hooves of steel, they are no longer found in the world today. The gnarled old storytellers that still wander the forests East of the Urals say that these fabled horses still abide deep within Moist Mother Earth and will return at the time of need to scatter the enemies of Russia to the four winds.
The hunter was one of the Tsar’s loyal gamekeepers - a prestigious job in those days. He was also an archer of renown, young though he was.
The Tsar of whom the tale speaks was a powerful and ruthless man, feared throughout the land.
Unusually for this time of year the Tsar’s woods had fallen silent, completely free of bird-song. As the hunter pondered this strange omen, his gaze fell upon a single golden feather on the forest path before him. It shone with a radiant, otherworldly glow as if it were a piece of the sun itself. The hunter knew instantly that this was no ordinary feather and the puzzle of the silent woods was resolved. The extremely rare and mysterious firebird had recently passed this way.
Dismounting, he reached for the feather but was interrupted by the earthy voice of his horse counselling him not to pick it up with the warning that if he were to do so he would come to know the real meaning of trouble.
The young hunter cast a sideways glance at his companion before allowing his gaze to return to the feather. Surely the Tsar would reward him greatly if he were to bring such an alluring gift. Thoughts of fame, fortune, promotion and adventure ran through his imagination.
The young hunter picked up the feather and put it in his hunting bag.
A while later, whether a short while or a long while, the hunter returned to the palace and presented the feather to the Tsar. The Tsar’s eyes widened at the sight of the magnificent feather but then narrowed again as he contemplated the hunter anew.
“Surely, a resourceful young man like you ought not to be satisfied with bringing his Tsar a single feather, when only the whole bird would suffice. See my sword, it has a keen blade and unless you bring me the whole bird before the sun sets tomorrow, your head will no longer reside between your shoulders.”
The hunter wept bitter tears at being set what seemed to him an impossible task on pain of death. He confided to his horse the extent of the trouble that he had brought upon himself.
“Well I did say that you ought not to have picked up that feather, but dry your tears as the real trouble still lies a way ahead. What you must do is return to the Tsar and ask for a hundred bags of corn seed which you will need to perform the task. Once you have the corn return here and I will tell you exactly how to catch the firebird.”
So begins this epic tale, a full version of which can be found here or here.
The firebird’s feather symbolises the alluring call to adventure for the young hunter. Notably, it comes with a warning - from a wise friend no less - that it is not safe to pick it up.
This hints at what seems to be an important psychological need for young people of a certain age: they need to go looking for trouble.
This embracing of the unknown, the stepping out of the everyday life of the village onto the dark forest path that is shrouded in mystery, seems to be something that young people need to do. It represents a reckoning with destiny; a ‘bring-it-on’ moment.
The need for a certain recklessness and an absence of safety, may be a necessary step in the journey from an adolescent to an adult. It is part of the initiatory process. The absence of safety brings a new, radical perspective on life.
Maybe all of our transition-stages in life are like this.
In this tale, the picking up of the feather sets in motion a chain of events that are beyond the young man’s control. They catapult him into the adventure that is his life.
In many cultures, the transition to adulthood is a community concern, in recognition that raising healthy adults to take on responsibility for the future well-being of the tribe is important. This transition has often been accompanied by a ritualised process where the ‘inviting in’ of the trouble, has been seen as something to be managed and a necessary part of life.
Unlike our sterilised safety-obsessed world, many traditional cultures performed rites of passage that carried inherent and serious risks of pain, suffering and even death. Perhaps this a recognition that society as a whole is better off with adults who have experienced the ordeal, and the resulting shift in perspective, of an initiatory experience with all its fear and doubt, adults who - in the words of this story - know the meaning of trouble.
It does seem to make sense that such adults would make far better future leaders than the immature, pampered, narcissists that seem to often end up running things in the modern world.
The Horse of Power is a central figure in this tale. It represents the wise mentor or the knowing-uncle. But also perhaps it symbolises internal or esoteric wisdom; the spirit-guide or the voice from the other world. This may be what some traditions might call the eternal self or the soul. It could also represent the teachings of a particular faith or spiritual path.
The warning the horse gives does seem almost ritualised, the obligatory setting-in-motion of the initiatory process. It says that an act of rebellion is what is needed to kickstart the whole process of becoming who we are meant to be. Maybe the forbidding was really permission to begin.
If you have lived with teenagers you probably get it.
Picking up the feather sets in motion a clash with the tyrant figure of the Tsar. The Tsar represents a stifling hegemonic force in the world, one of unaccountable power and unearned authority and quick to threaten with the sword.
Perhaps this is our young person’s inevitable confrontation with the powers of orthodoxy that control and shape our lives, ruthlessly extracting our life’s purpose from each of us in relentless pursuit of conformity.
This energy could symbolise the increasingly authoritarian surveillance states seen in the modern world bent on crushing dissent through censorship and propaganda even as their capacity to meet the basic needs of their citizens declines. Equally it could represent conformist social groups, the school system or law enforcement.
The adventure of becoming one’s true self, demands a reckoning with this power.
Tales like these can be a lens to look at the symbolic realms of the individual psyche but they can also provide gateways to the collective unconscious of a culture. I would suggest that they offer an opportunity for the radical shift in perspective that is needed for culture to grow and adapt.
And it should not be a surprise that such a tale comes from a place that looms particularly large in the European imagination. Russia is a vast land of forests, plains, mountains and rivers, full of untamed possibilities of - and for - wildness. Perhaps a primeval fear of invading horsemen from the Eurasian steppes lingers hauntingly in the European psyche.
Populated by a proud, stoic and loyal people, steeped in their nation’s history and culture and seemingly not prone to the sort of frivolous, boastful or narcissistic behaviour common in the cultures of the ‘West’ today, psychologically, Russia seems to represent everything that the West is not.
There is certainly no room for Russia in the Myth of Progress which has been a common theme of this project. This faith-based claim to truth that dominates thinking in the modern West centres on the idea of the linear march of history as continual technological, scientific and cultural advancement led by Europeans. The vast multi-cultural Kingdom, spanning the North of Eurasia, that is modern Russia is inconsistent with this worldview and is therefore a threat that needs to be cancelled.
As the lived experience of the citizenry exposes the Myth of Progress for what it is, the hold of this ideology on the collective imagination inevitably loosens. Those who depend for their power on this ideology become increasingly fanatical and ruthless with their opponents - they become the Tsar in our story.
The Myth of Progress, unsurprisingly, has an immense and unexamined shadow side. Like with individuals, this shadow side can often be observed through its projection onto others. And one of the big ‘Others’ onto which this shadow is projected is of course Russia.
Russia, as imagined in the collective West, is not the only example of a projection of the Western Shadow. Consider, for example, the visceral, irrational hatred of Islam within the American cultural sphere. Islamophobia seems so embedded in the psyche and the hatred so palpable that it can only be partially explained by past examples of Islamic terrorism. Reasonable propositions such as all lives are equal, genocide is unlawful or starving civilians is immoral, cannot seem to get intellectual engagement when dealing with the Islamic world.
I suspect that this hatred and fear towards Islam, which is centred in, but by no means limited to, the conservative-Christian political movement, is because it sees in Islam the things it hates most about itself: intolerant orthodoxy, slavish obedience to dogma and hateful-messianic impulses towards violence against the other. These characteristics should be hated as they have manifested in things that Christians have excelled at throughout history, like crusades, inquisitions and lynchings.
What is happening in Gaza is illustrative. Although support for violence against Palestinian civilians is not limited to the Christian right by any means, some quarters of the political left seem to be the places where you may occasionally find more rational, nuanced analyses of the situation. The hatred and fear seems less with the political left, perhaps because it doesn’t identify so closely with the troubling aspects of Christianity.
Compare these events with the West’s conflict with Russia, which after years of military and diplomatic provocations and broken agreements, has finally culminated in the proxy-war it sought in Ukraine. In this conflict, it seems that a nuanced and balanced analysis of the situation, generally speaking, is most likely to be found on the political right. On this issue, you may hear within some quarters of the conservative side of politics, a questioning of the wisdom of endless war and borrowing vast sums of tax-payer funds to pump weapons into a war that could easily have been avoided and will inevitably be lost and result in immense humanitarian suffering, mostly by Ukrainians.
Like Islam for the political right, the visceral hatred of Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, represents the political left’s projection of its shadow. It seems pretty obvious to me that what the left hates the most about its own government’s blatant and ideologically driven authoritarian, militaristic and imperial tendencies, is what it looks for and sees in Russia.
To put it another way if you wish to understand all the things that the evangelical Christian movement hates and fears about itself (its shadow), look at the image it has created of Islam. Similarly for the political left, if you want to understand what it hates about itself, look at the image of Russia it has created for itself.
Of course this method of seeing the world is practically useless for understanding the world of Islam or modern Russia. Responding to a situation by dealing with your own projections rather than the reality of the situation tends to be disastrous.
For example witness the recent unity of the Islamic world on 11 November 2023 at the joint summit of the 57 nations of the Organisation of Islamic Countries and the Arab League to discuss the Gaza conflict. It didn’t call for jihad against the West, military action or economy-destroying sanctions. It unanimously called for a diplomatic solution to the conflict through the UN along with the application of international law.
Although this will inevitably be rejected by the US and its allies (and the summit was barely mentioned by Western media), it demonstrates that these peaceful mechanisms of dispute resolution will need to be enforced on the West by the global majority through the UN General Assembly, at the urging of Islamic nations.
We could also take the full spectrum economic, military and information war waged by the West against Russia. We were told that Russia was weak, it would run out of weapons, its soldiers would flee and it would collapse economically under the sanctions. But the exact opposite has proven true.
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson recently dabbled into mythic realms in observing that what happened to Russia during the current conflict resembled the story of Theoden the troubled King of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings. Theoden had been living for years under the influence of Worm-tongue, the whispering servant of his enemy, who had convinced him that he was sick, weak and isolated while his kingdom decayed. But when the grip of the servant of the wizard Saruman was overthrown, the King came back into his power and realised that his nation was strong and had friends and allies.
Overthrowing the grip of the hegemonic power became a turning point for the Kingdom of Rohan, another great nation of the Steppe that knew a thing or two about Horses of Power and which had a mortal enemy whose main weapons were deceit and manipulation.
Overthrowing the Tsar requires a fundamental shift in perspective. It calls for the radical step of picking up the feather, stepping away from safe and stale counsel and confronting the powers keeping us thinking we are small, weak and isolated.
Even if the counsel towards safety comes from a trusted friend, we need to follow our own insights. It is an initiation that we all need to go through and it starts with an act of disobedience.
And ultimately, picking up the feather, finding our own unique paths and and re-imagining the world requires courage.
To finish on this theme, the great Australian speaker-of-truth-to-power John Pilger has once again raised his pen against the tyranny of the cruel and ruthless Tsar that haunts the Anglo-American political sphere regardless of who is in power.
Pilger’s latest call to adventure, “We are all Spartacus” is, in part, a tribute to the Australian hero David McBride, a whistle-blower currently on trial for exposing SAS war crimes in Afghanistan. Unlike for McBride’s heroic act of defiance, there have been no prosecutions of SAS soldiers for the murder and torture of Afghans, despite abundant evidence including video footage.
I don’t know if John Pilger knows much about Horses of Power or Firebird’s Feathers, but to further kindle the eternal flame of defiance that the likes of McBride and Pilger have kept alive for all of us. I stand with them.
“I am Spartacus”.