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(2) a true harmonious state of order has emerged out of chaos;

(3) things obscured, hidden or not recognised have come to light;

(4) human beings are joined together in a joyful community of reconciliation, friendship and love.

In other words, what we see emerging at the end of such a story is a transformation from darkness to light, from negative to positive, on all four of the counts which go to make up a state of perfect balance: power, order, awareness and feeling. And in terms of the wider community, the `world' of the story, this means that:

(1) either the existing ruler has once again been enabled to exercise his power properly; or a new ruler has emerged to do so in his place - as when the hero `succeeds to the kingdom';

(2) the framework of order which had either become oppressive or had disintegrated has again knit together in a living, all-embracing way, so that all members of the community are in proper relationship with one another; families are reunited; everything out of place or lost has been restored to where it should be;

(3) everyone can at last see clearly and whole because nothing important any longer remains hidden; people have discovered everything they need to know, including their own true identities;

(4) the egotism and division which lay at the root of everyone's problem has at last been transcended, in a spirit of universal harmony and love.

If a story can reach the point where all these things have happened together (and they are so interdependent that they can only happen more or less together), we are given a momentary glimpse of a community of human beings entirely at one, liberated from every trace of shadow. And at the heart of this transition from incompleteness to wholeness has lain the transformation of just one individual, the central figure of the story. It has been around his or her working towards a state of individual balance and self-realisation that everything else has centred: so that nothing more completely symbolises the extraordinary thing that has happened to the wider world than the bringing together of a man and a woman to make a new and perfect whole, the microcosm of some infinite state of union, shining with life, light and hope for the future.

Such is the most completely positive ending that stories can aspire to. What does it mean that the human imagination has down the ages so consistently shaped stories in this way? To begin to answer this we must look again at those great shadowy presences who appear between the hero or heroine and their goal in so many stories, and who somehow have to be transcended if the goal is to be reached. We are now in a position to examine what these figures - the Dark Father, the Dark Mother, the Dark Rivals, the Dark Other Half - really stand for; how they fit together; and how they actually relate to the hero or the heroine's transformation during the story. In fact we can now see the real function and purpose which the dark figures serve in storytelling.

`The light needs the dark to become articulate.' Laurence Whistler, Scenes and Signs on Glass

A striking feature of the myths and folk tales of the world is how often their central figure is an orphan. In particular, at the beginning of a story, we often meet a little hero without a father or a heroine without a mother. Aladdin, Perseus, Theseus, the hero of jack and the Beanstalk are all familiar examples of heroes with dead or absent fathers, who begin their story living alone with mother. Cinderella and Snow White are instances of heroines who lose their mothers, shortly before or after the story begins.

We thus begin the story with a family scene in which one major figure is conspicuously absent: in all these examples, the parents of the same sex as the central figure. What happens next?

In Aladdin a mysterious older man appears, the Sorcerer, who claims to be the dead father's long-lost brother, and who seems initially to be a replacement for the hero's lost father. He says he will look after