Mythic U
Join us to explore practices for discovering the stories that animate each of us. By understanding the meaningful stories that are your personal mythology you can choreograph your own unique way of attending to the needs of your soul. Hosted by Karen Foglesong and Erin Branham
Mythic U
Fairy Tales
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Join hosts Karen Foglesong and Erin Branham as we discuss the enduring significance of fairy tales. We explore how fairy tales differ from myths, and delve into their dream-like quality and non-linear narrative. As always, we take a Jungian look, especially through the work of Maria von Franz who emphasized fairy tales as a path of individuation, representing archetypes and the unconscious. The conversation examines Beauty and the Beast as an allegory for individuation. We also take a look at the evolving nature of fairy tales, from traditional stories to modern adaptations that remix and reverse traditional roles. Finally, we explore how much change has occurred by contrasting Snow White and Moana, and remind our listeners to revisit powerful stories from their childhood.
SHOW NOTES
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales by Maria von Franz - Dr. von Franz begins with a history of the study of fairy tales and the various theories of interpretation. By way of illustration, she presents a detailed examination of a simple Grimm’s tale, The Three Feathers, followed by a comprehensive discussion of motifs related to Jung’s concept of the shadow, the anima, and the animus.
How to be Eaten by Maria Adelmann - This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma.
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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Mythic You. I'm Karen Foglesong,
Erin Branham:and I'm Erin Branham. This episode, we are going to be talking about fairy tales. You certainly know fairy tales. Fairy tales are everywhere. We have them in our books, we're raised on them, we hear them in stories from people just telling them to us. They're on TV, Once Upon a Time, if you ever saw that show, comics, movies, Disney's built an empire on Tangled and Maleficent, and I was even researching some music that I thought was really great. Today was a Fairy Tale by Taylor Swift, Cinderella Man by Eminem, Prince Charming - here's for you, Gen Xers - Adam and the Ants.
Karen Foglesong:Adam and the Ants.
Erin Branham:So we decided to talk a little bit about fairy tales and where they sit, because they certainly have mythic dimensions, and yet they are not myths in terms, like in literary analysis you can make some differences between them.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah.
Erin Branham:What do you think of when you think of fairy tales?
Karen Foglesong:I think they still are chock with symbols and things, but I don't think that they talk about the origins of the universe, or the origins of an animal, or you know, they're not on this cosmic scale, they're on this like everyday scale. That's what I think of fairy tales.
Erin Branham:Yeah, I think that's really one of the definitions that you'll see, that they have to do with everyday things. That's why your heroes are, you know, a downtrodden girl who's being forced to work as a servant in her stepmother's house, you know, not a god, not hero who's slaying monsters, but sort of an everyday person.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah, they're not even princess or princesses, usually.
Erin Branham:Not always. Yeah, not always at the start, sometimes at the end, sometimes there's... we certainly think of fairy tale princesses, I think, but that's probably just because of Disney.
Karen Foglesong:That's true. Even the.. what was it.. the Frog Princess? The Frog Princess, is that right? In the Bayou.
Erin Branham:right? Right, yeah. But that's, that's an old fairy,
Karen Foglesong:yeah.
Erin Branham:The princess and the frog, it's definitely a fairy tale. I get very lost as we started doing this, and just like, what exactly counts as a fairy tale in my nerdy kind of obsessive way.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, if you just scratch the surface in fairy tales, it gets really convoluted really quickly, because I think it shows how important stories are to humans, basically, is what it is, and we can't help but dissecting information. We like to dissect and categorize and classify, so fairy tales are hard to fit in the boxes.
Erin Branham:That's very true. That's very true. They, they are, they're slippery. They have a dream-like quality, you know. I think that's something you know, how, when you have a dream, you wake up, and you can't quite hold on to it. I always feel like fairy tales have some of that quality to them, but they're definitely, like, is it about marriage or work or family, not the creation of the universe, or why things are the way they are, as you were saying earlier, which is, which we think of more as the realm of myth.
Karen Foglesong:Right. Yeah,
Erin Branham:I did find a definition.
Karen Foglesong:Okay,
Erin Branham:it is. This is from interesting. It's just a website I found called Eternalize, which is a writer out of Madrid, Spain, who never gives their name on this website, but they have just pages and pages of excellent sort of Jungian analysis of stuff. The quote is "The term fairy tale was first used by French author Madame D'Alnoy. I'm no good at doing French pronunciation, sorry to everybody. In the late 17th century, it belongs to the folklore genre, representing mythology, folk wisdom, moral lessons, and entertainment. Fairy tales contain a liminal space. They represent both the ordinary and the sacred realms, the hero or heroine leaves the mundane world and steps into the magical world, where he or she encounters the presence of magic, treasures, talking animals or objects, and mythical beings, such as fairies, dragons, dwarfs, giants, elves, mermaids, witches, etc."
Karen Foglesong:That's a good definition.
Erin Branham:I know. I thought it was.
Karen Foglesong:True. Yeah, and this is where our literature people have trouble, because they try to categorize, like this is a magic tale, this is a treasure tale, this is an animal... talking animal tale, this is, this one has mythical notes, and I don't know that it's, it's connected, like you said earlier, to the dream world, like there's that relationship between the two, and folks like Jung and Von Franz have recognized that and correlated that too. So, like, here's an example. I spent a long time following down this road of deciphering the symbol of the toad in fairy tales, and they got into this. My source got into this very distinctive, like the toad represents the masculine and the frog represents the feminine, and and then at the very end of it, they flip. I was like, well, I guess they're interchangeable, right, but if we don't try to categorize them in these specifics, like this is a treasure tail, this is a talking animal tale. If we let them sit as a body of folk knowledge and let them correlate with our dreams, then we can learn from them.
Erin Branham:That's very true.
Karen Foglesong:In a personal way, we can learn.
Erin Branham:Definitely. And I think that's what you're, as you're saying, watching somebody write about them. And I was thinking about this as we were reading about fairy tales and thinking about the people who thought about them and who write about them. They're not linear. Fairy tales are not linear, and the people who write about them then can't write about them in a really linear fashion, you end up in this kind of twisted, paradoxical sort of a space, just as you were saying, frog and the toad, and then the toad is the frog, and which also is that dreamlike quality, it's beyond the rational, and you do have to just like sort of soak in it to absorb what's happening, and that's part of why I think we tell them to children they have that quality of them, is you know, they're accessible to children, and they really seem to, I don't know, we believe in them so strongly, we pass them instinctively on to our kids, like I just, when I had children, I just was immediately, well, when you're putting them to bed, you have to read them the bedtime stories. It's what you do.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, it is.
Erin Branham:Would never - I would never dream of not like having my kids grow up with those stories. It's like this - these are important, they... and I'm not even sure why. I'm just... I just know they're important. We've been telling them for hundreds of years, we must tell them.
Karen Foglesong:Right? It's a kind of collected knowledge, even if you can't decipher it immediately. Your psyche does. Your psyche knows what it means.
Erin Branham:Definitely, which is, you know, because we are a depth psychology for the rest of us podcast. Jungians really read, you know, Carl Jung and his followers, especially Maria von Franz read fairy tales as stories about an individual psyche. They are stories that map out for all of us how to individuate, how to absorb the contradictory and paradoxical parts of ourselves to be a more whole human.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, I have a quote, actually from Von Franz here about the interpretation of fairy tales.
Erin Branham:Oh yeah!
Karen Foglesong:She says,"Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore, their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material." That's a hefty statement.
Erin Branham:That really is.
Karen Foglesong:"They represent archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. In myth or legends, or any other elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material, but in fairy tales, there's much less specific conscious cultural material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly." And this is from her book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Right? It's some hefty stuff. I think it's interesting.
Erin Branham:I was just thinking about that quote, looking at it. They represent archetypes in their simplest, which is, I think, part of that childlike quality we were talking about, barest and most concise form.
Karen Foglesong:It's beautiful to think about the psyche being projected forward like a human psyche that is like a collaborative effort being projected forward. I love that idea. Von Franz says, like you were saying earlier, it's hard to classify the fairy tale, and there's all these intellectual methods to try to classify the fairy tale, but Von Fran says at some point every, like, so, whatever you pick, whatever motive, say you pick the sun. This is a solar tale. This is a solar indicated tale. This is solar symbology. She says, at some point in an intellectual pursuit, all of the symbols will point back to whatever it is you've decided you're looking for, because all of the symbols are interrelated, because they're all from the human psyche, right? So the only way to differentiate interpretation is through an individual soulful perspective. So then it becomes only about individuation, like this kind of dream interpretation is the only thing that shifts the flavor. So yes, it's an intellectually categorized solar story, but because I am the dreamer, I am the one interpreting the story, what it means to me. Then it takes on a specific flavor through my soul work, my psyche work.
Erin Branham:That is a lot.
Karen Foglesong:Right?
Erin Branham:There's so much knowledge held within fairy tales that it goes that far, that there's this much to say about how they possibly work inside of ourselves, outside of ourselves. What you can get from contemplating them, how to pay attention to them for these reasons. Is there a character, a story, something that really resonates with you, that you have had dreams about, that you know, sort of pings in your psyche, that's stuff to pay attention to, that's stuff to really lean into. For these reasons, you're discovering a kind of archetype, a kind of dream image that can really lead you to a lot of knowledge about yourself. And as we talk about here at Mythic U, that like creating and cultivating these personal symbols for yourself, figuring out what that is, and, and exploring it is a, I don't know, it's really fun. We think it leads to a healthier life.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, right. I think so too. I mean, because some of these stories, so here's the scary thing about fairy tales, is that you can tell them to your children, and if you haven't paid attention to them, you can be passing on information that you don't necessarily want your children to know, right? Or they don't have a strong interpretive space for that, right? Like, and I don't know, maybe I'm just sensitive to this, because in a new and I's lifetime we had this whole backlash against Barbie and princesses, and you know, so that's why I know Disney's sometimes lambasted, but what's the one with the ice princess? Yes, thank you, Frozen Ice Princess, I should have gotten that one, but finally the shift is different. It's not a female waiting to be saved by a male, it's a female saving themselves and also their sibling. You know, it's about a love between sisters, which is so different from the historical stories that we've been handed down from Hera and say, like Sleeping Beauty, right, where the female can't be trusted with one another. It's a total shift in our interaction with the symbols. It's amazing.
Erin Branham:In some ways, because it's something that the Disney versions of those stories, even, are very far from the like original Grimms fairy tales, and those kinds of things. The there's been a process of sanitizing them and turning them into something that was really, you know, palatable in a huge pop culture sort of way, and also I think some ways they don't blame them, you know, the early, those early filmmakers for Snow White and things like that, because they were animators and they were really interested in what beautiful images can we make when you go and you watch those things, the stories are really very bare.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah, it's true.
Erin Branham:But the animation is incredibly lush, so sometimes I'm not sure they really intended much at all, other than-
Karen Foglesong:True.
Erin Branham:Sort of letting their own archetypal images come forward and land on the page, and they were almost all men, and so yeah, we got a very particular version of those things, that's what you know, just what Von Franz and what you were saying, the version of a fairy tale can be made very personal.
Karen Foglesong:Yes.
Erin Branham:And usually is, and that's why there's a million versions of them. That's one of the things that I think is really interesting about them, is that in our culture that so values originality, and have you seen the latest thing, and I don't know, I feel a real shift in at least narrative art form in the last 10 or 20 years, kind of away from what's the newest
Karen Foglesong:Yeah.
Erin Branham:Which is an old form of storytelling, if you go thing, what's the what have we never seen before to a kind of let's make another version of an old story. back to like the year 1000 that was how everything was done, there was like a set of stories, and what you did was you told one of them in your way.
Karen Foglesong:Right.
Erin Branham:And that's how we got the Arthurian tales, and you know, and that's why there's 4000 versions of them.
Karen Foglesong:Right? Yes.
Erin Branham:And so I see some of that.
Karen Foglesong:These stories are coming out of a time when there is no television, right? There's no radio, the teller from the voice from the mouth of this person at the campfire, or the bar room, or the dinner table, or bedtime, are the only place where you're getting this kind of entertainment, right? So they live in your, the pictures live in your brain, not visible for everyone.
Erin Branham:I think that's right, you, you have your own picture of them, and that's interesting. Like, what version of something did you see as a child? I've had people have really strong reactions when they have come across the particular storybook of, say, Rapunzel or Beauty and the Beast that they read as a kid, and the way that those images get really stuck in your head. I see Karen laugh, because it's so true that, like, whatever that was, there will be some image or something in that that just, you know, that's what I'm saying. Find that thing that that resonates, because it's not hard to find that thing. Yeah, you probably remember it already.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, stories were powerful for me, but I was in a small town in Mississippi, so I almost didn't have television either.
Erin Branham:It was bare, it was bare back in the 70s, y'all.
Karen Foglesong:It was, but I was also rebellious too, because I would read a princess story, and I am not. I feel like I have redefined feminine for myself, because I am not a traditionally feminine person, and so those kind of stories, there was a part of it that wasn't resonating for me. I was more like, I guess, if we're gonna use like Disney icons, I was more like the Brave little girl, like I don't want to wear the crown, leave it alone, I'm running in the woods!
Erin Branham:Definitely.
Karen Foglesong:My image is my the thing that I chased like that was a particular book of Greek myths that I found at the library, and I love them, and I think it's. I can't. It's a French name, and I can never remember it, but I finally..
Erin Branham:D'Aulaire's.
Karen Foglesong:There you go. I finally found it.
Erin Branham:Yes. Book of Greek Myths. We have two copies in my house.
Karen Foglesong:That's awesome. The way they depicted Father Sky and Mother Earth has lived in my memory like it was a very strong root image for me that supported, I think, lots of things are built on top of that image, so that's the best correlation I have with what you're saying.
Erin Branham:So one of the things we wanted to do, because we had introduced that idea of the Jungian concept of fairy tales as a path of individuation. We're going to do a little interpretation of a classic fairy tale that everybody knows, Beauty and the Beast, and how that demonstrates a story of individuation.
Karen Foglesong:Right, there are versions of Beauty and the Beast all around the world. This is not something unusual, right, and there's a very surface interpretation about not accepting the cover, you know, not don't judge a book by its cover, kind of idea. And we talked about this link with an early mythic story, Eros and Psyche, which, if you have never found a version of Eros and Psyche, and you love fairy tale romances, I highly recommend that you find a version of Eros and Psyche, because this is where most of the elements from all of your fairy tale stories come from, right? You'll find Sleeping Beauty, you'll find these ideas of trust, like who can you trust, animated household objects, all these things come from Psyche and Eros, and Eros demands trust of Psyche, and even here's a clue, just in the title, you guys, is love and your psyche, your brain, your soul, your, your essence, right? So, love and essence, basically. So, when you say beauty and the beast, you're saying this again. Can you, if we're looking at ourselves, can you fall in love with the part of yourself that is this uncouth beast, your ego? Can you love yourself?
Erin Branham:That's the Jungian interpretation, which, as you say, the kind of text interpretation that most people get from it is don't judge a book by its cover. The beast has a redemption arc, yeah, which is be - don't be an arrogant dickhead. There's some other sort of minor things that roll along with that, and then, but they're very basic arcs, right? The Jungian interpretation is that beauty is basically only identified with that. If beauty is the ego, she is only identified with being the good girl, the totally self-sacrificing, the I will do anything martyr, I will give all, I exist only to love all of you and to serve all of you, and that what she desperately needs is to get in touch with, as Karen says, the uncouth, hungry, beastly selfish part of herself, and that she must learn to accept that and have union with it, and that, so the beast is her animus in Jungian terms that part of her, the male part of herself, which she has completely disowned and put into the shadow by being such a good little girl, right. And what she really needs is to let that wild back into herself. All right, this is a good spot to stop and remind you that if you enjoy what you're listening to, then
Karen Foglesong:you can email us at Your Mythic u@gmail.com so Y O U R M Y T H I C u@gmail.com
Erin Branham:Yes, because we would love to hear from you, any comments, suggestions, criticisms, and your stories definitely want to hear your stories, so like said, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or whatever your podcast of choice is, we'd love to hear from you, Your MythicU@gmail.com - and now back to our regular scheduled program. This is, I think, is actually why both Karen and I are doing a podcast that's basically about, you know, Jungian ideas, because that, to me, that makes, like, that to me, is a very whole way of looking at the human experience. It just really is a healthy and gratifying way to live your life, because you don't then blame yourself for every selfish impulse that you have. Also, you don't deny it so much that it can come and take over you, and you know, totally eat the rest of your life, and just the, you know, that cycle that's so common, right, in this kind of puritanical American culture of denial, denial, off the wagon, total degradation, back on the wagon, off the wagon, just,
Karen Foglesong:Yeah.
Erin Branham:Which has so much to do with not just being able to be in touch with your own impulses.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, I absolutely believe it is, and this is another place where I diverge from the traditional interpretation of the fairy tale. I don't want to slay the dragon, I want to be friends with the dragon.
Erin Branham:Well, you know, and that's where we get into how, as you were saying a little bit earlier, how these stories are starting to change. We have really seen that. We've seen this whole kind of revolution of let's look at the story from the monster or the villain's point of view with Wicked and Maleficent and Cruella, and not just that, those Disney things followed a whole thing on literature of exploring all of these things, and kind of, or recasting. I just ran across something that was a book that said, you know, like making the rounds right now, that is all the fairy tale characters, but they're like in an encounter group from, of rejected women in the 80s, and the friendships and the alliances that they form, and - I know!
Karen Foglesong:That sounds brilliant,
Erin Branham:Like in a group therapy session, and then it's about how they all like get out of that old mindset.
Karen Foglesong:Wow,
Erin Branham:so there's this whole thing of even, even that. Let's, let's be friends with dragons, let's see things from the monster's point of view. It's an interesting change.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah, because there's a puritanical interpretation or a perception being personified here, the slaying of the dragon or the rejection of the beast is this puritanical idea that we deny this kind of energy in us that can be selfish and can be grasping and more aggressive. We've talked about this before. This encompassing of duality is very important, like there's a place in the middle that you can kind of exist and dance with the universe, and there's a place of denial where you're just kind of being dragged along like you're tied to a wagon or something. You know, it's, it's not fun. It's there's no way that's easy, but at least if you're looking at your dreams and interpreting and choosing symbols for yourself, at least you have some comfort, some some hugs in the night, maybe, I don't know how to describe it.
Erin Branham:Not so lost in the woods.
Karen Foglesong:Not so lost in the woods.
Erin Branham:We are talking about this, is why we, we put it in, you know, we do talk a lot about Jung in here, and that kind of idea of psychology, but the truth is, is that, like, I think why we like mythology is that it is a way of not getting lost in the woods. Being a human, and just I was telling my kid the other day, who had had a kind of rough week, I was like, I was like, I don't know what to tell you, existence is messy and difficult. It just is, and you know, you can get really pissed about that, you can be bitter about that. You can, you can accept that, you like, you have all these choices about how you're going to, you know, respond to this basic thing, and despair is a real reaction to it, because it can be overwhelming, and sometimes it is, like, even I've certainly had periods in my life where I've just been absolutely in despair. And part of what helped me find my way out of it was was stories and mythologies and things that helped, like you said, that kept me from being lost in the woods, kept my psyche from from losing its grip on how to survive, on how to not only to how to survive, but how to survive, because I feel like I did a lot of that in my youth, where it's clinging on to stories like life rafts.
Karen Foglesong:Right.
Erin Branham:In the middle of a very, very stormy sea, but to then like be able to climb onto those and then to start to put together into a belief system that made sense. Now I've like built a raft, and then a whole ship. Now I've like sailed to an island where things are pretty good, and there's a continual, but it takes a kind of continual creation, because life throws you new challenges, right? So you have to, no matter what, no matter what you do, no matter how stress-free you make your life, you will age, and being in our 50s now,
Karen Foglesong:Right?
Erin Branham:This is a very real test of human existence, middle age, and when you really start to feel your body, and you're no longer just like, say, youth and growing, and everything is just working fine. When you really start to feel that, and you get in touch with your mortality, this is why people have midlife crises.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah.
Erin Branham:Because if you don't have a belief system, a story, a support system to fall back on, and to make some sense out of the finite quality of existence, you will fall into despair.
Karen Foglesong:Yes.
Erin Branham:This is why we have so many people, I mean, I don't mind the breaking down of the Abrahamic religions and Protestantism and all those in America at the moment, but it does leave a gap, and that's hard. We have to find a way to fill that gap, or really bad things are going to happen. That's part of what is happening. If you ask me, is there some people out there whose mythological systems are unraveling, and they're having a hard time with it.
Karen Foglesong:They're adrift, they're lost in the woods. Whatever imagery works for you. Yep, I do agree with that, and I think that's part of my personal motivation with doing mythic you, is that I'm hoping to toss life rafts out to folks. Not, I don't want you to believe what I believe, that's not going to work for you. I want you to believe what you believe, and figure out a system, like Erin said, where you're, you know, we all feel like we're drowning, but eventually you can build a raft, and then you know, once you have a surface to stand on, you can start to add to that and grow a little bit, and maybe you'll find an island too,
Erin Branham:maybe, and even so, I'm always prepared for the fact that sooner or later it is just an island, like I'm waiting for the hurricane, because it will happen, because it will happen.
Karen Foglesong:Yes,
Erin Branham:right, it's gonna come. Life is gonna change and throw you some really bitter pills. You gotta learn how to cope with it, and this is a really good way.
Karen Foglesong:Right? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and I did fall into a little bit of personal whining, and she said that she just read this article about this biosphere that they're trying to do these experiments in, and they, they put trees in the biosphere, and they kept falling over, and they couldn't figure out why the trees were falling over. And the conclusion that they've come up with is that if the tree does not get wind and rain and adversity, it never learns to be strong, so it just falls over. And she has made the analogy with this story, the connection with this story to her own childhood, where she suffered many, many adverse interactions with different characters in her life, and she's like, maybe I wouldn't have been the strong person I am if I hadn't have had that adversity, and I think she's hitting on something there, like life can't throw you bitter pills, but if you learn to interpret the symbols and have a story, you can grow into a nice strong tree.
Erin Branham:Absolutely.
Karen Foglesong:This story has been interpreted and rewritten over and over and over again. Erin brought in Griswold, right, explained what 24 events early in the story suggests that she has embraced an unreal and exaggerated life of virtue, and Beaumont certainly goes to great lengths to tell us of beauty's supernal goodness and her self-sacrificing ways, right, so you can see this kind of puritanical. Whole framework in the structure of this story as well. How's that? Does that bring us back around?
Erin Branham:Oh, absolutely. Just fine. So we were talking about the how fairy tale is a collective dream, a map of the cultural psyche, how it is changing, how we see things changing. If you look at in my own lifetime, one of the first movies I ever saw in theater was Snow White during one of the perennial Disney re-releases that were the only way that you saw those back in the day, in the 70s, to you know, my kids go in to see Moana, how far and how much that image, the gender image has changed. Which I think you were making reference to, Karen, that just from the completely I am just here to take care of things I am put upon and sacrificing, but somehow or another that makes me even more beautiful of Snow White, and also there's like the racial and conceptions of ideal beauty in those things that are completely white, everybody in the whole thing is white. There's no sense of the rest of the world other than European whiteness and all that stuff, too. Moana, that's like you said, Moana doesn't even have a love interest.
Karen Foglesong:Right?
Erin Branham:Like, seriously, she wouldn't, like, just not even, no. And her major relationship is, she has parents, very new for Disney,
Karen Foglesong:right?
Erin Branham:Although she does lose her grandmother, so they've managed to get something in there. They did manage to lose an ancestor, and her other major relationship was with Maui, and that is completely, you know, not there's no romance, there's no nothing. They're just like pals who go and do things together, and it is a really amazing change in, in our idea of, of that for the stories that we tell to our kids.
Karen Foglesong:Well, there's also the other thing, is that her major relationship is with Maui, that means that she, she, she has a personal relationship with Godhead, that's a huge shift, also because the priest class demands that we go through the priest to get to God, which I find insufferable, but that's just me, guys. You do you.
Erin Branham:That's a really good point about Moana, because really, Maui is just like her introduction to the Godhead in the story, and I will never forget this as long as I live, because the resolution of the story being her bringing the heart back to the goddess.
Karen Foglesong:Right.
Erin Branham:Who has become angry from this theft that Maui- right? correcting the sin of the man, actually, and handing the heart back, and when the goddess changed and rose up. I cried, I cried.
Karen Foglesong:I did too. I did too
Erin Branham:Immediately, because that image of the Mother God get all teary now. That image of the Mother Goddess, and I'm sitting next to my daughter, who's very young at this time. I like it, was just, it was, I was like, I can't, I cannot believe, I cannot believe my daughter is being introduced this way to such an amazing image of the Godhead, and it's the Goddess,
Karen Foglesong:That's amazing, that is so beautiful. and it was, see, I'm getting verklempt.
Erin Branham:Oh, it really is, and that just like you said, to go from Snow White for me to that for them?
Karen Foglesong:So grateful, huh? So grateful for the shift.
Erin Branham:I know, and I know people could like.. Disney has a million problems, I get it. I know all of that stuff. There's no.. there's still no
Karen Foglesong:right
Erin Branham:denying the fact that, as far as image makers in our culture, they are it. So, for children's entertainment.
Karen Foglesong:That's true. It's very true. So, it's, it's very important that they're shifting with us. But the other aspect of Disney is that it is a commercial enterprise, and they will only sell to us what we will pay for, right. So we have evolved our commercial enterprise as consumers. You can evolve the commercial enterprise by what you consume, and we have chosen Moana's direction, which makes me very proud of our psyche development as a culture, right. Just especially like I was a very weird child, I will give you that, but it used to freak me out when I was a little girl, because I had lots of friends that were various shades of brown and black, and when I went to the store, there were no baby dolls that were for them. It still makes me really sad, so shifting the idea of beauty is so important to me. Also, all of that, some of you are going.. Moana was just a story about a kid on a boat, like, yes, that's
Erin Branham:It's true, that's that's the power of these true too. things, is that they are able to contain, as we we're saying - they are so rich, there's so much content, there's so much knowledge there, cultural knowledge, psychic knowledge, knowledge of beauty, and there's just so much contained within fairy tales and these kinds of stories that we class as children's stories, typically, and it's honestly, I think, part of their sort of mysterious power is because it does sneak in on you. We have such a tendency in our culture to think of children's things as superfluous, shallow, silly, you know, not complex, that we, you know, as adults, we may not pay a lot of attention to them when there is incredibly rich material to be found. I mean, I would really, if I had any advice. If you're listening to this, would after this would be to think about what was one that really mattered to you. Go back and read a version of it, or watch a version of it, or listen to it. There's all kinds of podcasts. Oh my god, when my youngest daughter was little, we listened to just called Stories Podcast, and it was wonderful little group of two or three people, and they did all kinds of really interesting versions. Sometimes they would rewrite their own version, they had a really interesting version of Snow White that she used to love to listen to, and then just all kinds of other stories. But we listened to that going back and forth to school and elementary school, and just that having stories told to you, you know, yeah, really interesting and powerful thing.
Karen Foglesong:Yeah, that's wonderful. What a great way to turn drive time into sharing time, family, that's awesome.
Erin Branham:I part of what I'm an educator, and I do a lot of stuff with family and kids, so it's because of my career, but I chose a career specifically so that I could continue to be in contact with children's entertainment.
Karen Foglesong:Well, it's the root of our psyches. I mean, that's the thing. Like, as an adult, you might not think that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves has anything to do with you, but when you were a child, it was part of the building blocks of the foundation of your psyche, so it's in there, and if you, that's why Erin is saying that if you feel something from your past, like if you remember something that meant something to you, find, dig out that story and look at it.
Erin Branham:And you might find something really interesting just by revisiting it.
Karen Foglesong:Because it's in your psyche, whether you want to admit it or not. It is there.
Erin Branham:Letting it work on yourself. Give yourself a little suggestion before you go to sleep. Let's dream about that and see what comes up.
Karen Foglesong:Yep,
Erin Branham:Because there's really.. you have interesting work. You know, all of us contain universes. That's the other thing I think that we really encourage the revisiting of stories and mythologies, and thinking about this, and how they resonate in your soul, is because it lets you explore the universes inside your own soul.
Karen Foglesong:Yes, these are myriad, a myriad. And then I have this great quote here from it's this Von Franz again, Maria Von Franz, and someone asked her about her methods of interpreting dreams and fairy tales, and if she felt they were reliable, which I think is interesting, and she said, well, since we have no absolute criterion of proof, the best we can do is to say that the interpretation suits me and makes me happy and healthy.
Erin Branham:I love that. I feel like that I'm going to have to change our tagline on our website, like that should be our tagline.
Karen Foglesong:and if my unconscious has nothing more to say, then that's all I can do. I think that's great.
Erin Branham:I'm good, thanks a lot. That's beautiful.
Karen Foglesong:Right? My unconscious is happy and healthy, that's it. I'm done. I just want to add to that, through researching for this episode, you guys, we have evidence that fairy tales storytelling goes back 25,000 years or more, and this huge amount of knowledge, this knowledge base tells us how important stories are to us, to our psyche. We dream in these kind of abstract stories, you know, it's it's this kind of give and play between our consciousness and the universe, and so when we tell stories, they go out into the world, and then they come back. And they pick up flavors from regions and persons, and even they've some stories have been manipulated for a specific purpose for propaganda things like that, but basically it's a giant telephone game, you guys, like it's a whisper game from one person to the next, and then it comes back. If you've ever played this game, you know that what the origin is could be, you could say, I like chocolate chip cookies, and by the end of it, it's like pink lemonade and blue elephants are special, you know, like it's.. it could be totally different. So, what that says to me is that, like Von Franz says, if you look at the symbols and you pick out what works for you, that creates a healthy space for your own psyche. And the fact that nobody knows means that you can build your own.
Erin Branham:Absolutely.
Karen Foglesong:There's no nothing wrong with building your own, be brave, write your own story, pick the symbols that sing for you or resonate for you.
Erin Branham:That is so true, exactly, that's why we say, go look, it's the goal, listen to a fairy tale and see what comes up for you, draw a picture that comes from it. Lay down to sleep to dream about it tonight. Think a little bit about just that. That exploration of those symbols can lead to so much discovery for you.
Karen Foglesong:Don't be scared.
Erin Branham:So, I think that's all for this episode. Thank you so much for joining us.
Karen Foglesong:Thanks for joining us. Good luck.
Erin Branham:See you next time.
Karen Foglesong:Bye.
Erin Branham:Thank you for joining us at Mythic U. We want to hear from you. Please visit our website at Mythic u.buzzsprout.com that's M Y T H I C u.buzzsprout.com for more great information on choreographing your own spirituality. Leave us a comment and donate if you have the means and the interest. If you'd like to support our work more regularly, please visit our Patreon and become a member of Mythic You. Depending on the level at which you join, members receive early access to new episodes, bonus episodes, and free Mythic You gifts.
