Children love stories. Stories awaken the imagination and give young people a chance to envision a range of responses to the world. They teach values and shape expectations. They provide a way for even young children to enter into the complex transformational symbolism or our festivals and celebrations. We want our children to grow up with knowledge of the myths and tales that can serve as the ground of a rich inner landscape. But we are not a text-based tradition. The earliest Goddess cultures left no written records of their beliefs and rituals. The stores that have come down to us have been changed and altered with time. Much of the wisdom and values of the earliest Goddess traditions are still preserved in faery tales and folktales, but they are coated with the values and beliefs of the patriarchal cultures that followed. So to look at traditional tales requires us to decode them, to extract the symbols that are meaningful and transform the rest.
However, whenever we tamper with traditional stories, we run the risk of diminishing their power. If we simply eliminate the elements that seem counter to our politics or our philosophy, we may discard some of the encrypted information most vital to our inner being. For myths derive their transformative power from the very things that make us most uncomfortable - death, loss, jealousy, fear, sacrifice. If we try to pretty them up and make them nice, we end up with insipid, sugary tales that provide no real sustenance for the soul.
On the other hand, if we tell the tales unchanged from the versions popularized by the Brothers Grimm or by Disney, we risk perpetuating the stereotypes that we have sound destructive in our own lives: the negative images of women, the association of light hair and skin with good and of dark with evil, the assumption that heterosexual marriage is the ultimate happiness ever after.
In Reclaiming's work of teaching ritual to adults, we often use faery tales and myths as a theme to take us on a transformative journey. We look for the symbols, colors, animals and characters that we can recognize as carrying historical or ritual references to the ancient Goddess traditions. For instance, in the story of Vasalisa (click on the link if you want to read the story), we find the significance in the red, white and black that she and her doll wear, which are the colors of the Goddess. They tell us that this story has something to do with the passage from Maiden to Mother to Crone, and help us interpret it as an initiation tale.
The inner work each story represents is revealed to us through the challenges the characters face. For example, Vasalisa's challenge is to bring fire from the house of death. When we consider that challenge with all its resonances, we find that the tale takes us into the heart of mystery, where the life fire, the creative energy of the universe, can be found only by encountering death.
Many of the stories are initiation tales. They record a character's passage through a set of challenges that leads to an encounter with the great forces of life and death. Initiation often takes place through an encounter with the Otherworld.
In the Goddess tradition, the world of form and substance, of day and night, is seen as only the visible part of a vast realm of energies and forces that suffuse ordinary reality. The Otherworld, the spirit counterpart of this one, is just on the other side of the mirror, down the well, at the back of the north wind, and has a geography and ecology of its own. Its lands have many names: Faery, Avalon, Annwn, Tir n'a Nog, the land of Sidhe, the land of the ancestors, the Land of Youth, the land of the dead, the realm of the unborn, House of Donn, land of promise. Only when this world and the Otherworld infuse and inform each other can life thrive.
Many stories are about those who journey to the Otherworld to face its dangers and recieves its gifts. They are stories about gathering personal power - the power that allows us to use our best abilities, to express the gifts that only we can bring.
Gathering power requires certain personal qualities, the traits rewarded over and over again in faery tales, what we might call traditional Pagan values. The stories tell us to be generous, be courteous, be helpful, be brave, persist when difficulties arise, take help where it is offered. Again and again we are warned against jealousy, spite, and envy. In a highly competitive culture, we get ahead by being better, brighter, richer, or more successful than someone else, But traditional cultures value much more highly the harmony of the community as a whole, and that value is reflected in faery tales.
We are sensitive to issues of culture appropriation, yet we do not believe that they should be resolved by limiting ourselves to European tales, thereby implying that Europe alone is the font of spiritual wisdom. Our community includes many different heritages and ancestries, and our children must live in a multicultural world of great diversity. Our young people need to know and respect many earth-based traditions. Somewhere between the pitfalls of ignorance and appropriation lies the path of cultural education.
In making our choices, we have looked for tales that illuminate the theme of each holiday, or that offer a perspective that expands the vision; for example, the Amaterasu story for Winter Solstice in which the sun is a Goddess. Ask for people in your community for stories that reflect their heritages. I strongly encourage families to delve deeper into the rich treasure of traditional myths and folktales from many lands.
So let's try something new. Read some of the myths out there and pick one you think that would inspire the whole family. Remember that story by reading it over and over again. Once you feel you know it enough to repeat, at the dinner table or family talk time, tell the story in your own way. Give the characters your voice and hear what they have to say. The story may change in ways that surprise you which will offer new insights and revelations. And so may these old tales come alive again.
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