“Now then! We will begin. When the story is done you shall know a great deal more than you do know. He was a terribly bad hobgoblin, a goblin of the very wickedest sort and, in fact, he was the devil himself.”
Hans Christian Andersen “The Snow Queen”
So begins Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Snow Queen, leading into the tale of one of the devil’s inventions – a mirror that distorts everything it reflects, turning the world upside down. And mirrors, as discussed in the article Images of Light, are something quite special – they are the medium through which Divine creation unfolds. From religion and mythology, we know the devil is also part of that creation. The Tree of Knowledge in Eden is God’s creation; the serpent who tempts Adam and Eve is likewise part of it. In other words, the Fall from grace is part of the Divine plan – and so is the devil.
So, listen closely to what this story reveals about the part of our inner mirror that lies under the devil’s control, and the role he plays in this grand design:
“One day the devil was in a very good humour because he had just finished a mirror which had this peculiar power: everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it seemed to dwindle to almost nothing at all, while everything that was worthless and ugly became most conspicuous and even uglier than ever. In this mirror the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the very best people became hideous, or stood on their heads and had no stomachs. Their faces were distorted beyond any recognition, and if a person had a freckle, it was sure to spread until it covered both nose and mouth.
“That’s very funny!” said the devil. If a good, pious thought passed through anyone’s mind, it showed in the mirror as a carnal grin, and the devil laughed aloud at his ingenious invention.
All those who went to the hobgoblin’s school-for he had a school of his own-told everyone that a miracle had come to pass. Now, they asserted, for the very first time you could see how the world and its people really looked. They scurried about with the mirror until there was not a person alive nor a land on earth that had not been distorted.
Then they wanted to fly up to heaven itself, to scoff at the angels, and our Lord. The higher they flew with the mirror, the wider it grinned. They could hardly manage to hold it. Higher they flew, and higher still, nearer to heaven and the angels. Then the grinning mirror trembled with such violence that it slipped from their hands and fell to the earth, where it shattered into hundreds of millions of billions of bits, or perhaps even more. And now it caused more trouble than it did before it was broken, because some of the fragments were smaller than a grain of sand and these went flying throughout the wide world. Once they got in people’s eyes they would stay there. These bits of glass distorted everything the people saw and made them see only the bad side of things, for every little bit of glass kept the same power that the whole mirror had possessed.
A few people even got a glass splinter in their hearts, and that was a terrible thing, for it turned their hearts into lumps of ice. Some of the fragments were so large that they were used as windowpanes – but not the kind of window through which you should look at your friends. Other pieces were made into spectacles, and evil things came to pass when people put them on to see clearly and to see justice done. The fiend was so tickled by it all that he laughed till his sides were sore.”
Hans Christian Andersen “The Snow Queen”
This tale is ultimately about the devil’s presence in human perception – that part within us that distorts reality so severely that it turns the world upside down. The devil lives in crooked mirrors; more accurately, he is their master craftsman. And if I may borrow the same metaphor, I’d say it was the devil himself who had placed a fragment of his warped mirror into the eye of a client of mine – a young woman who saw her own hands as blood-red, a sight that filled her with self-loathing. In the eyes of her friends and loved ones, her hands were perfectly normal. But through her own eyes, they became grotesque, triggering severe emotional distress.
Though I frequently encounter various forms of distorted perception in my work, I find myself particularly drawn to the extreme ones. Like metaphors in literature, they exaggerate reality so that we can finally see it. And when the archetype of the Self is activated, the angels within us draw dangerously close to the demons – for the nearer we come to the light, the darker the shadows grow.
I recall a client who, early in our sessions, would look at me with eyes full of fear. This fear starkly contrasted with the kindness and care I extended toward him. It was, in fact, what had brought him to seek my help. As our work deepened, he shared that in moments of trust, he could connect with something inside him, a kind of internal switch that could alter his perception. He demonstrated this for me: a few seconds after activating this “switch,” his gaze transformed – cold and detached replaced the frightened look. He had shifted from terror to a chilling fearlessness, using a mysterious inner mechanism. I watched, astonished.
Another client once told me about a period in her life before beginning therapy. She had been deeply disconnected from herself and surrounded by people who abused her, even physically, yet she didn’t realize it. On the contrary, she felt she was soaring, climbing life’s ladder. Each morning, she looked in the mirror and marvelled at how beautiful her eyes were. This illusion persisted until a man who truly cared for her shared what he saw. His words pierced her, and suddenly the truth shattered the illusion: she noticed the bruises all over her body – wounds inflicted by someone who claimed to love her.
“Little Kay was blue, yes, almost black, with the cold. But he did not feel it, because the Snow Queen had kissed away his icy tremblings, and his heart itself had almost turned to ice.”
Hans Christian Andersen “The Snow Queen”
Such is the power of the crooked mirrors in our eyes – they blind us to truths that are glaringly obvious to those around us. Under their spell, we may remain in toxic relationships, unaware of how profoundly wrong and distorted they truly are. And though not always as dramatic as the examples above, fragments of the devil’s mirror are embedded in all of us.
Our perception is never free of distortion, it is always coloured, always bent by that mysterious “thing behind our eyes.” And under its spell, we appear as if bewitched.
“A human being in a neurotic state might very well be compared to a bewitched person, for people caught in a neurosis are apt to behave in a manner uncongenial and destructive towards themselves as well as others. They are forced onto too low a level of behaviour and act in an unconscious, driven way. Fairytales which describe such beings do not dwell much on the problem of the curse, but on the method of redemption, and here there is much to learn that is relevant to therapeutic procedures and the healing process.”
Marie-Louise von Franz, “The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales”
In Jungian psychology, fairy tales are metaphors for inner psychological processes. That’s why the motif of redemption is so crucial; it holds the key to freeing us from the neurotic complexes that torment us. And the message of redemption in The Snow Queen is this:
“Gerda shed hot tears, and when they fell upon him they went straight to his heart. They melted the lump of ice and burned away the splinter of glass in it. He looked up at her, and she sang:
“Where roses bloom so sweetly in the vale,
There shall you find the Christ Child, without fail.”
Kay burst into tears. He cried so freely that the little piece of glass in his eye was washed right out. “Gerda!” He knew her, and cried out in his happiness, “My sweet little Gerda, where have you been so long? And where have I been?” He looked around him and said, “How cold it is here! How enormous and empty!”
Hans Christian Andersen “The Snow Queen”
The spell is broken by Gerda’s warm tears, which melt the ice in Kay’s heart. Then his own tears cleanse the fragment from his eye. The force that breaks enchantment is pain, pain so deep it moves us to tears. When the tears come, it is a sign that the thaw has begun, that the long captivity in the Snow Queen’s realm, where reason rules and the heart is frozen, is ending.
“Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
Once freed from enchantment, Kay is able to arrange the pieces of ice into the word “Eternity” – the very word the Snow Queen had promised would win him the world and a pair of skates. But why would the devil desire those under his spell to solve this particular puzzle? After all, “Eternity” is the ultimate goal of the spiritual seeker, the word that points to what does not perish. The story itself offers the answer: the encounter with the Snow Queen of reasoning brings a gift – the gift of becoming masters of ourselves. The gift of maturity, of growth. This growth is what happens to Kay and Gerda at the end of the story. When they return home, they find that the little chairs they once sat on are now too small. They have grown up (this is why this tale is considered as a story of initiation – a passage from childhood to adulthood).
“No sentient being in this world is allowed to remain innocent forever. In order for us to thrive, our own instinctive nature drives us to face the fact that things are not as they first seem… Loss and betrayal are the first slippery steps of a long initiatory process that pitches us into la selva subterranea, the underground forest.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
Things are not what they seem. And in this initiatory journey, there is room for both the demonic forces and the helping ones. The former led my client to trust a man who abused her under the guise of love; the latter made sure she heard the truth from someone who never said, “I love you,” but proved it through care.
After that breakthrough, her descent into the underworld – into the realm of Ereshkigal, where we lose everything, including our illusions and innocence – had begun. But this descent was also her ascent. For in that mythic descent lies the climb up the ladder of Spirit. Down is up and up is down. And this is the role of the devil’s mirror in the Divine plan – it makes the game of duality possible, where the indivisible becomes divided. The necessary condition for consciousness to be born.
The Snow Queen also reminds us that misfortunes do not come because we have sinned. The devil’s mirror shattered not because of human failing, but by the Sun itself, and its shards scattered randomly across the world. Kay did nothing to deserve his fate. This perspective frees us from blame and invites us instead to seek the lesson within the pain, betrayal, and disappointment we endure.
If your life contains suffering and confusion, chances are there are still shards of the devil’s mirror in your eyes. And sometimes, when I speak to a client in deep confusion, I’m tempted to say: “If you want your thoughts to fall into place, try changing their order. And their names.” More often than not, this happens in the love relationships – when we are inclined to see love in things that are, in fact, anti-love. For that is precisely what the devil’s mirror does: it turns everything upside down. It convinces us, for example, that intense passion is deep love, when in truth it is quite the opposite – a selfish desire that refuses to accept its limitations.
I constantly come across examples of the age-old trick where “the thief cries out “Stop, thief!” and misdirects our gaze entirely. The most typical instance is projection – when one person accuses another of faults that are, in fact, their own. One of the most disturbing examples I encountered came while researching the theme of the “devil” in Christianity. I stumbled upon a book offering advice on how to battle the devil. And I must say, I had never read a more devilish piece of writing! The tone was overtly threatening, striking fear into the poor reader’s heart, warning that if they wished to save their soul, they must do only what the author prescribed.
And what did this prescription boil down to? “Do not trust yourself. Trust the Holy Bible, and more precisely, my interpretation of It.” In other words, “the devil says: beware of the devil.”
We can fall victim to such writings and messages only if we are detached from ourselves – if our mind runs wild and is completely severed from our heart. If we are disconnected from our instincts and our authentic self, we will not be able to tell the real from the false. We won’t know when the words “I love you” are genuine or deceptive.
Once the spell cast by the Snow Queen had begun to lift for my client, she wrote a poem:
“The Puppeteer
The puppeteer’s no expert hand –
a hollow doll, by strings unmanned.
His strings are pulled by something deep,
and he pulls yours while you’re asleep.
His eyes are blurred, his senses numb,
a false messiah yet to come.
Of all the actors in the show,
in time, the worst of them will show.
Dolls: “Oh puppeteer, puppeteer,
you’ve given us a life unclear.”
I’m deeply grateful that she allowed me to share this poem. To me, it is a beautifully crafted and sharply accurate metaphor for the forces moving through our unconscious. While we are asleep (meaning, while we remain unconscious) the devilish will pulls our strings. Until we reconnect with the deeper parts of ourselves, we will look upon the world with clouded eyes, and through distorted mirrors, we’ll see in others what we are meant to recognize in ourselves. When we are climbing, we’ll believe we’re falling; when we are falling, we’ll think we’re ascending.
Life is a strange thing. Every day, I’m amazed by how little I truly know of it and of its hidden side… But on the other hand, since “we’ve come to the end of the tale, we know a great deal more now than we did at the beginning. And that is because we have spoken of a wicked sorcerer – the worst of all, for he is the devil himself.”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
