In mythic discourse, one could say everything, in its broadest sense, which is also to say each ambiguity comes in threes. Charles Peirce, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Asger Jorn are three moderns who re-claimed the excluded middle. Perhaps unaware of Baudelaire and Jarry, Charles Fort down-right expropriated it. Charles Fourier had to re-invent it, lassoing a gift from an honest giraffe and casting it into the future. In binary systems, the third is always attached to that which is ignored or excluded, as in the modern assessment, 'there's no way out'. Where acknowledged, the middle is average, derivative or unoriginal and mundane, undecided or wishy-washy. and in this sense, still excluded, even though it may be only a position of disinterest, it's often given a negative moral attachment such as "tasteless". It seems there are no unitary systems. Even democracy includes the good, true and beautiful and then there's everyone else, that is, "those kind of people". But in all eliptical thinking such as mythic discourse, there are three important points: two shifting centers and a recursive periphery. Avant garde thinking considers the periphery an obstacle or resource.
Myth-time proposes a space or an epoch from which we emerged, at least wherein times must have been better. In myth-time the mythic is grander than false. Without it, (and without a doubt), the justice delivered between the good and the evil is placed on any innocent bystander who happens your way. Excluding the middle or trimming it off (the dialectic of science, whether reductive or not) in the interest of the synthetic (which almost everyone deep down understands is artificial and overly complex) ensures a world we call "reality" of perpetual opposition (we call that progress). There are three ways to approach any mythic discourse: 1. literally; 2. the reversal or mirror, and 3. the leap or stretch which might lead anywhere.
For example, from the film "White Men Can't Jump", there is 1. the literal basketball reference; 2. the inversion represented by reverse racism; and 3. the actual leap, or idea that moderns, with their plodding feet ever on the ground in search of reality, can't make the leap to the third option which is sort of transcendental and certainly intuitive. Even when accepting the tripartite situation, we, like Freud dealing with Shakespearian choices, tried to pick the right choice, that is, the real meaning of the story, it's "truth" like an art critic who thinks the original intention of an artist can be revealed by dissection. Forgetting that the discourse comes from a "golden" age or Fourian reality and therefore unhinged from temporal inclinations (the point of triangulation actually circles around declinations) and it comes in the form of poetry, every interpretation is simultaneously and equally correct, it's just not euclidean so there's no contradiction, and even when there is, there's no either-or about it. As well, authorship is inconsequential except in its hollywood-esque revisions. Even so, and assuming they're just stupid or lying, something mythically grand and thematic survives and the periphery or audience or onlooker is revealed as the real art critic.
Every option or choice can be a mirror or telescope and Ravena may just have been Snowhite's sister or mother or grandmother assisting a ritual initiation becoming a maiden from childhood, including the coma or a ritual death. There's always an ambiguity in drawing the line between nursing and chemical assassination, with words or with looks. In the sequel, of course, Snowhite will become Ravena for somebody else. Woody Allen might have called it "In Love and Death" and we'd have a completely other rendition. The point is there are so many themes (Themis was goddess of social organisation) the fun in anthropology is not just observing but comparing them. Stories, on the other hand, invite one to jump in and if only for a moment, feel like you're in them – in the process, you've transformed, or become an other.
Freud's three "caskets" of course, all lead to the truth, which for the modern position is invariably death. But the first door is closed, the truth can't be known in the modern or biblical sense, that sense when considering, for example, marriage, in which the door would allude to the post menopausal grandmothers. The middle door slams behind you, your fate is sealed by total immersion, like suicide or foolhardiness. On the other hand the postpartum mother has delivered the future already, so your part is already inconsequential. The first door is for the morally righteous or curious but persistent. The second is for those without a backup plan, who may well come to know the proverb which advises "be careful what you wish for". The third door is taken as it will stay open, but mostly brings forth post menses maidens and that makes the suitor part of the future. Behind that door lies all manner of possibility, and that is authentic wealth. Still, one must beware of the past which surely will follow. Though Freud was right that death waits behind every door, so where's the choice? Mythic discourse is never straight forward. The choice is not between boxes, it only lives beyond the third door or out of that box. The third way the allusion is to the eternal return which lives amongst endless possibility. There is birth there as well, and that is the lesson myth-time will tell. Fate didn't used to mean doom and gloom, but sometimes alluded to good fortune. The other allusion is laid out as plain as can be in the Kalevala (the story, not what was on tv) and that was "At one time in the interest of grandkids, we didn't sell off our children, no matter the highest bids!"
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