Fairy Tales & Mythology

The stories we read as children have so much more to tell us.

You may not have picked up a fairytale for 30 years or so but they are some of the most important reading material we will ever consume. 

Fairytales fan the flame of a young child’s imagination – which is already bursting at the seams. Do you remember that? How’s the old imagination doing these days?

Perhaps you’re a creative who relies heavily on this aspect of yourself. Drawing upon it and finding that it never dries up — like a well that is always full to the brim.

Or maybe you feel a dullness inside. Your days are lacklustre, you can’t remember the last time you were excited about anything. Life is just a groundhog day of the same boring routines. 

This article goes through the form and function of fairytales – the first stories we hear as children – the images that filled our minds before we were tucked into bed and dreamt the night away. Fairytales are vastly important for a healthy subconscious mind – giving it a sort of map to follow.  

I hope this information brings you back to something in yourself that you can use in your everyday life to draw you forward by going back to those very first, captivating experiences – fairytales. 

As Old as Time

Fairytales go right back to our roots, in this lifetime as children as well as our humanities earliest days. “The Story of the Two Brothers” is the earliest recorded fairytale that we have, coming out of Egypt around 1250 BCE, but unrecorded transmissions of a fairy tale type story could potentially go back further even than the evolution of verbal language. 

Whether their purpose to start with was as simple as forming bonds with one another (a vital part of survival), fairy tales aid in transmitting an incredible amount of information regarding history and heritage, procedures and moral code, instill warnings and motivations.

Across Culture

Common themes have emerged in fairy tales across the world that each culture paints with their unique brush and in their own style of telling.

African traditions would see the tribe sitting around a fire while an elder chanted rhythmically in a call-and-response style of storytelling. 

Ancient Eastern and Asian families would sometimes use puppets to give form to their stories. 

Current fairytales in Western culture have been reimagined through the beautiful minds of the animators at Disney. 

Rewatching ‘The Sword and the Stone’ as an adult is quite an intriguing experience — not only is it quite humorous and entertaining to watch, it brought a tear or two to my eye.

A Preview to the Experiential World

In the fresh, imaginative mind of a child, fairy tales are a first step into the experiential world of adulthood. The world out there has extreme physical and emotional consequences. A mother couldn’t bear to see her child encounter all of that without some solid preparation beforehand – mother nature wouldn’t allow for that either.  

I find it interesting that fairytales are just that, tales of fairies, rather than just a very important list of things to watch out for. 

An imagination that comes alive through metaphorical narrative has proved itself as the ideal modality for memorisation. There’s just no way to ever know what kind of trouble a little terror like an exuberant child will get into when they grow up. The fairy tale carries information that goes beyond the events and figures of what it is upon utterance. 

Just as metaphor is so brilliant at adapting itself to an entire world of potential, an emotive fairy tale is a most powerful metaphor.

Fairy tales: Base code for life

We relate to story on a fundamental level.

It begins as fairytales and then the container through which we consume narrative evolves as we age. 

You grow up with your parents reading fairytale books and then Disney movies open up a whole new world. Our first cinema experience usually leaves a mark and our favourite novels teach us what our parents can’t. 

Now we wake up everyday and watch ‘stories’ on Instagram but more importantly, we are out there in life creating our own stories. 

The very bones of what story is will tell you what it means to be a conscious being. The connections between characters in a story are like the interplay of notes in a symphony. More than just enjoyable to listen to or watch. There is symbolic meaning in those stories that generates a kind of intelligence, a connection that carries meaning to carry forward. 

This has been the function of myth through the ages.

Myth in the Modern Age

Mythology is a system of story that uses symbolic image to relate us to the divine & connect us to the network of our shared society.

“Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be.” 

― Carl Jung

Those very first fairy tales that we read are very condensed, concentrated mythological stories. 

Joseph Campbell, author of The Power of Myth and The Hero With A Thousand Faces, wrote and lectured on the four functions of myth.

• The Mystical function inspires awe and wonder at the dimension of mystery.

• The Cosmological function connects the individual and their knowledge and experience to that mystery dimension.

• The Sociological function imprints the norms of society onto the individual.

• The Psychological function to guide us through the stages of our own individual lives within the context of our culture.

“These are the functions of the mythology, and, if they are successful, you get a sense of everything—yourself, your society, the universe, and the mystery beyond—as one great unit.”

— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

We are disconnected from myth today. 

Just like we are disconnected from the old traditions of elders, community and divinity. Mythological stories and fairytales were that connecting thread. Myth would connect us to states like awe and wonder, hope and goodness. 

Myths most vital function is that it would construct in us a sense of a great journey to be had, both within and without. 

The Hero’s Journey

Each of us are on a hero’s journey — which doesn’t mean we need to go looking for literal swords to pull out of stones, remember it’s a metaphor — but there are tools of representative value and meaning to be found.  

Joseph Campbell, who termed the Hero’s Journey after his extensive research in comparative mythology, sums it up best.

“So then, what are we really questing for? And here is the answer: It is the fulfilment of what is potential in ourselves, our true selves. It is not an ego trip. You are not your ego. You experience your ego. You are not your thoughts. You experience your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You experience your feelings. And you are not your body. You behold your body. This recognition awakens a heritage within us that exists before all these mythologies, religions and Beliefs shape how you interpret the world and come from culture, family, experiences etc.">belief systems came into being and into our traditions. It’s an awakening of our own pre-ego, pre-Hindu, pre-Jewish, pre-Buddhist, pre-Muslim, pre-Christian hearts.”

—Joseph Campbell

Your hero’s journey will take you to places inside as well as outside yourself that feel scary and dangerous to go. But as Campbell advised often to his students, when you follow that bright shining fairy light of bliss ahead of you — it motivates you & helps you to summon the courage to take on the scary, uncomfortable moments. 

Predator, Prey or Princess?

Story is our intermediary to the big wide unknown.

My horse, Molly, and my dog, Jackson, have two very different reactions to something unknown coming into their field of vision. Although both their heart rates will rise, Molly, the prey animal, will use that higher amount of oxygen in her system to bolt away. Jackson’s body, on the other hand, is preparing to pounce towards. 

What am I, the human, doing during this situation? I’m racking my brain for any previous associations and sustaining a broad, open and vigilant attention — a right hemisphere mediated attention. When that thing becomes known, I’ll step towards it and grab it — a left hemisphere meditated attention. 

“The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends; and it is involved in bonding social animals.”

— Dr. Iain McGilchrist

Just like our mammal friends, we are able to experience an embodied reality, but due to our developed pre frontal cortexes, we can also stand outside of it. Rather than responding immediately to a stimulus, either to bolt or pounce, humans are able to take a minute and think about it. 

“The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from ourselves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes.”

— Dr. Iain McGilchrist

Stories give us a map without a determined pathway. 

To have a predetermined path would be boring. We not only want, but it is necessary for us, to go our own way. The mysterious unknown, as much fear as we project onto it, is exciting. It prompts us into a type of attention that reveals meaning as we tentatively step towards it.

“Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can’t be changed but, it can be challenged.”

— Martin Heidegger

Conclusion

If you have memories of your grandmother or grandfather reading you bedtime stories, that’s a rare and beautiful thing. Elders no longer dwell with the rest of the families like they used to. Maybe that’s good in some aspects but there’s also a loss of wisdom being passed onto children. Most often it was our parents, mum or dad, reading us a fairytale, pouring symbolic image into our imaginations before we slept and dreamt. 

Where does this all leave us in our adult lives? 

Well, like Carl Jung says, ‘without playing with fantasy, no work of creation has ever yet come to birth’. A vibrant, full to the brim imagination is essential to create anything — and even if you don’t do a ‘creative’ job, or you think you aren’t a creative personality type — you are still creating your life. 

So have a go – dip your toes into that internal well of magical experience.

“The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” 

― Carl Gustav Jung