Why These Old Tales?

Storehouses of Wisdom

A big part of the dream of this blog is to share some of the wisdom found in old stories.

I believe that it’s a very personal preference; which stories flirt with you, grab your attention and draw you in. Some are pulled towards Native American myths, others to the Vedic tales or Celtic folklore. For me, at least for now, the stories that hold my attention most intensely are the Greek myths and the Grimm Brothers’ collection of fairy tales; or as they called them, ‘Zaubermärchen’ (magic tales).

These old stories have been bullied and pushed around over the more recent centuries. We have given birth to strange ideas like ‘official interpretation’; such a cold and clinical idea that I can feel the stories recoil backwards and hide. When a story hides, it’s no longer possible to interact with it, meaning it will withhold its gold and make itself appear as foolish, childish or dull.

My intention is to play around with the stories, to inhabit them, and to report back to the blog of the interesting things I find. But in no way do I want to reduce the stories to one meaning or interpretation. Every piece of analysis that comes forth is just one of multiple possibilities; much in the same way that a sphere has infinite tangents.

To bring a sense of the psychological framework to the stories, one way to work with them is as though it was a dream. Using active imagination, try to see yourself not just as the protagonist, but as all of the characters in the story. This gives the psyche the opportunity to expand its sense of self, explore the multitude and be with the shadow material (that’s not me!) with a sense of lightness and exploration.

Greek Mythology

The cosmology of the Greeks (and Romans) has given us an incredibly rich realm of psychological material to work with. Even Freud, who was attempting to make psychology a medical discipline and therefore rational and sensible, gave us terms like Narcissism and the Oedipal (and Electra) complex. I’ve found an almost endless reservoir of life lessons when I rest in these old tales written by the great early poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Ovid.

We know when we see a story entitled, ‘Psyche and Eros (aka Cupid aka Amore)’ that we’re reading about more than just a love story. What do we make of Psyche not being allowed to see Eros? Or that their relationship has to happen in the cover of night? When the split happens between the two characters, it’s easy to feel our own psyche’s longing for this deep and profound connection to love, closeness, embodiment and eroticism. And what of the first challenge that Aphrodite gives to Psyche: to separate out a small mountain of seeds into their individual piles. An impossible task, but one that our own psyche’s are often trying to do as we approach the complexity of life with only our logical and rational minds. Even the way that task is carried out - by ants who come to the rescue and do the task as psyche sleeps - gives us a hint as to how our connection to the animal kingdom (and for that matter one of the smallest animals) can come through in our times of greatest confusion and desperation.

When we read of Daedalus, the master architect, who builds a labyrinth of such complexity that even he can’t find his way out of it, we know we’re not just talking about a physical place. Much like Psyche’s nine seeds, the conscious self often finds itself in impossible dilemmas with no idea of how to find its way to freedom. When our hero, Theseus, is about to enter the labyrinth, he is stopped by the princess, Ariadne. It turns out that this muscular hero, in this challenge, requires the softest thing in the kingdom: cotton. By keeping a hold of Ariadne’s thread he is able to enter the maze, kill the minotaur, and find his way out again. What a perfect description of what it’s like to work within one’s psyche, to confront our demons, and to make our way back out again safely.

Each of these stories, and so many more from the collection that has made its way into the modern day, speaks to the human condition. It’s hard to know what challenges will come in a human lifetime, but having these characters to refer back to helps us to not make their same mistakes. They arm us with the wisdom to make the right move, so long as we can locate ourselves in these stories. Gods, demi-gods, godesses, nymphs, giants, Kings and Queens have as much trouble with their predicaments as we do as humans. This, at least for me, is a great relief. If Zeus, the ruler of the gods, has a freedom-closeness dilemma, then I feel much more relaxed about my own complexes.

The Brothers Grimm

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were collectors of folklore in the early 19th century. They invited German storytellers (mostly women) to come and tell them a tale, and they recorded them for their collection. In this way they weren’t just collecting stories, they were gathering snapshots of vectors that reached back deep into the history of western consciousness. Nobody ‘wrote’ these stories, rather they were passed back and forth between people connected to the land for centuries, perhaps even connecting back to the Roman/Greek myths mentioned above.

The stories were always evolving and, I’m sure, if they had their way they would continue to do so. They can be dreamed and re-dreamed and refuse to have a definitive edition. Even in the Grimm’s several editions of the stories they continued to change and morph. We can see that in the story of The Frog King where the princess, in the first edition, gathers up the courage to throw the sleazy and disgusting frog against the wall. As Christian values such as forgiveness and non-violence enter the story it slowly morphs. Today, if you ask someone about the story of the frog prince (another morphing from king to prince) you’ll likely get the version of the transformational kiss. (Think about which version you’d rather have your daughter know about and the implications of how that story could work in her psyche).

Many of these tales we know today as Disney classics; Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel to name a few. In this form they have been restored and sanitised to appeal to children (or our idea of what children would like to see). In fact, Walt Disney is just one of many storytellers over the centuries who has taken the tales and adapted them to his time; the only differences being his use of cartoon imagery to convey the message rather than the suggestion and aliveness of telling a story around a campfire. The stories came to life on the screen, but the work of imagining was done for us. What impact that’s had on our collective ability to imagine can hardly be overstated.

Let’s take, for an example of story sanitisation, Cinderella (or Ashenputtel). In the Grimm version, the story begins with the death of a little girl’s mother. Her father wastes no time in finding a new wife; a woman who already has two daughters of her own. These three give the girl the name Cinderella, as they see her as only good for cleaning up the cinders (ashes). 

Cinderella accepts her role and does the chores for her step-mothers and step-sisters without complaint. Then a three day festival comes to town and the word is out that the prince is looking for a princess. Many blockages are put in her way, but Cinderella overcomes them; not by some kind of heroic force, but through trust in something greater than herself to come through. She receives this help from a variety of birds, and then the spirit at her mother’s grave. Yet, despite all of this magical help, she still runs from the ball… three times. It’s as though she is split – one part believing that she is born for something special, the other part believing what she’s always been told by the faux family at home.

The prince devises a way to find her by painting the step with resin to capture her shoe and then comes looking for her. The dynamic has shifted. The wicked step-sisters, under the guidance of the evil step-mother, cut off parts of their feet to fit into the shoe. Gruesome, but not unnecessarily so. The story is able to use dark imagery to make an impact on the psyche. Maybe then, when we find a shadow part of ourselves trying to squeeze into a shape, we’ll recognise it and address it intelligently, restoring inner authority back to the true self.

Many of these details were seen as unnecessary, complex, and perhaps even gruesome by Disney; himself a representation of American values in the early 20th century of innocence and simplicity. Leaning into that simplicity, the complexity of the inner world is lost, the message becomes something like, ‘a prince will rescue you one day’ rather than ‘life is full of incinerated dreams, hardships and death, but there is also something golden in you. It’s waiting to be incubated in the ashes. However, when your gold is ready to be shared, the experience is likely to be so terrifying that you’ll run from it ‘three times’, then send your ‘step sisters’ out to claim it instead of yourself.’

By tracing the stories that still fascinate the modern world back to their origin, we can get a sense of what has been lost and how to repair the thread. These tales are a link back to the basic structures of our psyche, gifted to us from the collective unconscious rather than ‘written’ by a person with all their individual preferences and projections. Disney shows us the face in the reflection, but the Grimms connect us back to the soulful water underneath. My suggestion is that we connect ourselves back to these Zaubermärchen, lest we suffer Narcissus’ same fate.

When I share stories on the Zaubermärchen or Myths pages on this blog they will be unaltered as I have received them. Only stories that I’ve had some experience working with, or inhabiting, will be on the blog. When I take a dive into them in an article I’ll link back to the story so you can have your own experience of it and it can live you in its own way.

One more thing: I’m not a ‘Jungian’, though I do think C.G. Jung was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and read him avidly. My interpretations of the stories are just what occur to me, and what have been helpful to my clients over the years. It’s possible that I will stumble, like the fool, into Jungian territory, using ideas like anima/animus, archetype, collective unconscious and participation mystique. I’ll use these terms only as I understand them in the current moment. If I’m wrong in my application of these ideas, so be it. I just hope it sparks a lively discussion of learning rather than another academic lockout from the world of exploration and intellectual wanderings.

* taken from Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Influence and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling