weep no more, for your child has been raised on high and angels are his playmates." With that he disappeared and his mother wept no more tears so as not to disturb her child's rest in the grave or his joy in heaven.
If we take the motive here in "The Little Tear Jug" and in the Japanese story of "The Nun of the Temple of Armida" which appears as magic, in its psychological significance, so we have a teleological structure that is equivalent in its psychic healing tendency to the other wish structures. This fairy tale might just as well be the true narrative of a dream experienced by a person in the circumstances described which led to the stilling of their sorrow and to rest.
Now it is not only in regard to single events, but this healing agent has come to be a general, psychic purposeful belief that the dead as a result of excessive grief are disturbed in their rest. That is not a therapy for the dead but for the living. The same belief is expressed in the words of the spirit of the dead child who by autosuggestion has entered the Japanese priest and attains in the good O-Toyo the wished-for object. And does not the Christian belief, that the dead children all go to heaven, work quite the same way?
The same motive in a somewhat different setting is treated in another fairy tale, "The Shroud" (Grimm).
The mother wept after the death of her little boy. Soon after the child appeared at night in the place where it had eaten and played during life; the mother cried and so did the child and then disappeared at morning. As the mother would not cease weeping it came in the night in its little white shroud, sat at the foot of her bed and said: "O mother, stop crying or I cannot rest in my grave for my shroud is wet with the tears which fall on it." As she heard this the mother was frightened and cried no more. The next night the child came again holding a little light in his hand and showed that now as his shroud was dry he could rest in his grave. Then the mother commended herself to God in her grief and bore it quietly and patiently[1] and the child did not return but slept in his bed under the ground.
The hallucinations whose sudden appearance, for example,
- ↑ For further literature see Rittershaus, "Neuisländische Volksmärchen," pp. 14 and 15.
