Another meaning of salt is "common sense, earthiness" (Webster's Third), and in fact to insist on salt, as the princess does, is to insist on recognizing a down-to-earth aspect of oneself. This earthiness is implicit in the phrase "salt of the earth," which I take to recognize a second kind of enlightenment. It does not descend from above but arises from the experience recorded in the body and is not necessarily pleasant, just as body fluids are not always so easy to deal with. Still, such experience is hard to avoid because the body sends its messages whether we like it or not. And the wisdom of the elect is simply the knowledge of the salty aspect of experience.

The King asks his question when his youngest daughter is fifteen, the age of puberty. The beginning of her mature sexuality provokes a crisis in his mind that he attempts to avoid by asking her symbolically to deny this aspect of herself. Her refusal to do so provokes his rage. On one level, then, the fairy tale is a paradigm of the psychology of the father who cannot deal with his daughter's emerging sexuality and either turns upon her and castigates her for it or simply refuses to see it and continues to pretend that the daughter is still a sweet little girl.

But because he is a king, his refusal to acknowledge this sexual aspect of womanhood represents a state of mind that afflicts the society in general. There is a destructive effect on women's own attitude toward themselves in an environment where a considerable part of their psychological and physical reality is devalued and denied. As a result, the part of reality represented by the feminine vanishes from the general awareness, and the entire society is psychologically maimed.