Also from "The Five Stages of the Soul"
As the story opens, the King is marching off with great pomp to play the manly game of war, attempting, perhaps, to revive a lost spirit of youthful adventure and to make his mark before all opportunities for glory fade. He is following a call; but it is the wrong call, the call of the ego rather than the soul. Not until the entire cycle of his folly, fall, awakening, and rebirth have run their course will he realize that his feminine side was both his Call and his salvation.
Despite his initial success - in the beginning we sometimes fool ourselves when we attempt to relive our past - the King learns that recapturing the glories of youth is a foolish dream. Conquest eludes him, and his attempts to recapture these fragments of time gone by bring humiliation and imprisonment. The King is then rescued by the force of the feminine, which up till now he has denied. Intelligence and subtle wisdom are personified in the form of the Queen, who comes to help him in his darkest hour, offering a second Call, this time to true freedom.
For the Queen, on the other hand, the King's defeat serves as a wake-up Call. Resisting the stereotypes of helplessness and passivity, our heroine responds by ignoring her husband's orders and adopting the masculine role of rescuer and champion. She even wears masculine clothes andcuts her hair. (In many traditional stories the act of cutting one's hair is a sign of emasculation for men - think of Samson - while it is an act of defiance and independence for women.)
When the Queen finally confronts her husband's captor, she does not attempt to beat him into surrender as a younger champion might do. Instead she calls on the more mature power of cunning - just like the fisherman. She then proceeds to make friends with her dangerous adversay through the hypnotic power of story and song, outsmarting the same might enemy her husband was unable to subdue with all his manly powers.
The brave Queen, what's more, though a man in outward appearance, accomplishes these deeds by womanly means: song, intuition, gentleness, all of which prove far more potent weapons than brute strength. Though the Queen wears a manly costume and walks the warrior's way, she remains true to her feminine self and to the wisdom of maturity, so different in its styles from the heroic gestures of youth.
The rescued King, meanwhile, does not yet have the insight to recognize the true identity of his deliverer, or to see that she is bearing him the Call to freedom. In the fires of defeat he has been purified but not enlightened. For this further enlightenment, his wife, symbol of the anima or soul, is necessary.
Like Dante's Beatrice, the Queen leads her husband out of his inferno-like dungeon back to his homeland, his balance point, his center. Here the King at last comes to know the truth: in a flash of self-insight he realizes it was his Queen, his own feminine half, who has been calling him all this time. While in prison and even after his return, the King believed that he had been deserted by his feminine counterpart; that he was alone in his struggle. Now he learns the turth. His soul has always been at his side the entire time, he discovers, guiding him through the wilderness, nursing him back to health, leading him from hell to heaven. This shock of recognition causes the King to experience a Breakthrough and to undergo a moment of enlightenment. Seeing into his illusions and into himself, he is changed forever. Understanding the extent of his blindness, he begs his wife's forgiveness. Together they merge into completeness, raised to a higher place than before by each answering their own Call, and by enlisting in equal measure the male and female energies within them. In this way both King and Queen, masculine and feminine, the two sides of our own consciousness, are united, completed - and redeemed.
