A big thank you to all my readers. I have decided to discontinue this blog. What would have been future posts about my thoughts and research on stories and how they shape us and our world will now be included in my other blog Healing scribbles. Healing Scribbles currently deals with my icon writing, painting ceramics and art therapy activities. I now want to expand it's content to include my other interests, including my learnings on the environment.
I took this decision for a number of reasons, the most important one being the fact that I find it difficult to maintain multiple blogs. I also feel that consolidating all my interests together in one blog, makes for greater clarity and richness. I hope you will join me there...
Friday, November 15, 2013
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Story craft
By: Gillian Valladares Castellino
The craft of fashioning stories that resonate with the deep self would be as old as humankind and perhaps pre-dates language. The craft of story telling was birthed when our caveman ancestors, huddled around smouldering fires. When the flames and darkness had worked their magic, they gestured and yodelled out the first tunes which later perhaps evolved into the first pantomimes.
Pre-literate people of every ethnicity distilled their wisdom in ways we take for granted and disregard. Using jokes, songs, dances, camp-fire anecdotes, toasts at weddings and other ceremonies and eulogies, ie in simple familial and tribal settings, they disseminated the values and mores of their culture, the intellectual, spiritual, physical, group and integral aspects of their experience. Specific ways of being were transmitted, absorbed, refashioned and updated through these stories.
In time, story-telling became a craft for the skilled. There were specific times and seasons for stories, tales were carefully chosen, to be told in exact words, particular tones of voice, with precise imagery, settings, facial expressions and gestures. The plots - every beginning, unfolding and ending was calculated to convey a meaning or experience which could be enjoyed as it was being understood.
Fig 1: Traditional Story tellers from different African cultures
Fig 2: Wampanoag Story teller, Annawon Weedon
Fig 3: Traditional Chinese Story teller
How stories are used as medicine
The ancients knew that the craft of story telling could not be studied using just the rational mind. It had to be assimilated by living with those who knew, breathed and taught the craft, but more importantly it had to be internalised through long apprenticeship and personal experience. This is crucial, as it is in the mundane everyday world that we come to know and use the wisdom that stories can give us.
A master storyteller takes a lifetime to learn his craft, to build it's nuances and gifts into his being. The story he tells must be part of his psyche, integrated into the ethos of his culture and the woof and weft of his soul. It must come from the inside.
Though a master story teller is a consummate performer, mastery, glibness, working the audience and other stage tricks are not enough. They are stunts that enhance, set the tone and mood, but they are just that - gimmicks. The best story tellers speak not for money or fame or to please, but because the story possesses them in some way and demands to be 'told' at this time, in this place, to these people, in this way.
When he gets into the spirit of the story, he becomes a conjurer, adept at the rites of showmanship and stage craft but he is also able to bend movement, diction, language and plot, to weave a spell, call up an image, to progress a plot, to plant a seed, to evoke wonder and the beginnings of change and wisdom in the hearts of his audience.
A true story teller can "read" his audience, delve into his voluminous repertoire and select stories that are just right for that situation. To be able to make this choice requires a vast cache of tales, each different in range and quality, but each internalised and deeply loved. This type of repertoire is more diverse and complex than mere story collections and compilations, for it involves knowing not just the story details, the bare bones, but the ancestry of the story, the changes in its trajectory over time, its potential to heal or perhaps even harm and a finely honed capacity to use it judiciously.
Fig 4: Traditional Indian story teller - Geeta Ramanujam, founder of Kathalaya
Pre-literate societies knew that not everyone was equipped to acquire the story teller legacy. Elders would agree on who the initiate should be and then protect and guide them through the long years of apprenticeship to ensure that the tales did not become trivialised, modified, misused, fall into the wrong hands or be appropriated by the well meaning but ignorant, so that the potency and charge inherent in the tales, was correctly transmitted. Then, after a long period of training, the 'chosen' one, would learn not just the structure and mechanics of the craft, but the ethics, preparations, attitudes, blessings, pecussions, insights and healing knowledge which were to accompany the telling of each tale. Finally, but most importantly, the initiate would be schooled in the art of listening.
Fig 5 - Hip-hop improvisation fused with cinematic story telling
Among many traditions across the world, story telling was a part of the healers medicine kit. This fact was known to the griots of West Africa, the bards of Avalon, the Curanderas and cantadoras of Latin America, the mesmemondoks of Hungary and story tellers across the world. So how did the process work? In every healing tradition that valued the art and craft of storytelling, the essential realisation to master was that stories dredge up the psychic contents of both the personal and collective unconscious. Learning the art of story telling is an expensive process - intellectually, spiritually and in terms of time consumed. The gatekeepers of stories in traditional cultures, would exact from their initiates, adherence to a particular way of life; a specific set of disciplines and attitudes and many years of study, engaging not just the rational mind, but circuitpous, spiral layerings of knowing from the unconscious. Why? Because when two people come together to exchange the gift of story, they also exchange the gift or relationship and are handling a very potent force - archetypal energy. This energy changes us and transmits to us a recognizable integrity, endurance and responsibility.
Fig 6 - Bards - ancient and modern
Fig 7 - A Cantadora in action
Stories are studded with instructions which when correctly mined and loved, guide us through the complexities of life. To put it another way, they help us raise the "submerged archetype" and set the inner life into motion.
Today, stories are used as healing agents by psychologists and psychoanalysts. In the Jungian tradition, the patient uses dream material to discover the plots and themes that underpin their lives. They learn to read their physical and body sensations, looking for clues to their own unacknowledged stories and knowings. In doing so, they establish contact with the unconscious.
If appropriate, they may extend their work to interactive trancing and the use of active imagination, both tools to help map their psychic journey. They learn to investigate their personal storylines, enquiring deeply into the mythic substratum of tales that inform their lives. On identifying their guiding myths, their personal mythology, they then excavate the instructions they need for their current psychic development.
Among other methods in their support tool kit, they could use 'crafting' or craft making to assist them. Craft making involves the use of the eye, the hand and the imagination (which is inspired by or informed by the unconscious). The craft object fashioned could be a talisman - a ribbon stick, an altar, a personal sculpture, a mask, a doll, a dream catcher, a memory box, the possibilities are dictated by the lesson to be mastered and the materials at hand. Craft and art making commemorates the seasons of the soul - special significant milestones in one's journey through life, which if unnoticed, lie as sleepers in the psyche, waiting for the opportune moment to erupt and disrupt. When examined and and acknowledged, they unleash power and strength and help us live authentic lives.
In a world, where objects may be bought and sold in the market at a fraction of the real cost involved in making them, the process of craft making may seem like a selfish indulgence and a waste of time. To adopt this view is to sell oneself short. Craft, art and story making are sequences which acts as a marker of one's own understanding and as a map for those who come after us. They are ways of feeding the soul in a manner which guarantees restoration, re-envisioning and above all - healing.
References:
URLS: (photo references)
1. 'Keeping the oral traditions alive in Minnesota: Black Master Storytellers Festival', Eliana Gramer and Larisa Peifer
2. Wampanoag Storyteller, Annawon Weedon
3. Storytelling across the Diaspora, Mmofra foundation
4. 'SuperEverything* merges hip-hop improvisation with cinematic storytelling', Kevin Holmes
5. 'In the tradition of live storytelling', Deepika Arwind, The Hindu
6. Traditional story teller images in the 'Gallery' of TimSheppard.co.uk
The craft of fashioning stories that resonate with the deep self would be as old as humankind and perhaps pre-dates language. The craft of story telling was birthed when our caveman ancestors, huddled around smouldering fires. When the flames and darkness had worked their magic, they gestured and yodelled out the first tunes which later perhaps evolved into the first pantomimes.
Pre-literate people of every ethnicity distilled their wisdom in ways we take for granted and disregard. Using jokes, songs, dances, camp-fire anecdotes, toasts at weddings and other ceremonies and eulogies, ie in simple familial and tribal settings, they disseminated the values and mores of their culture, the intellectual, spiritual, physical, group and integral aspects of their experience. Specific ways of being were transmitted, absorbed, refashioned and updated through these stories.
In time, story-telling became a craft for the skilled. There were specific times and seasons for stories, tales were carefully chosen, to be told in exact words, particular tones of voice, with precise imagery, settings, facial expressions and gestures. The plots - every beginning, unfolding and ending was calculated to convey a meaning or experience which could be enjoyed as it was being understood.
Fig 2: Wampanoag Story teller, Annawon Weedon
Fig 3: Traditional Chinese Story teller
How stories are used as medicine
The ancients knew that the craft of story telling could not be studied using just the rational mind. It had to be assimilated by living with those who knew, breathed and taught the craft, but more importantly it had to be internalised through long apprenticeship and personal experience. This is crucial, as it is in the mundane everyday world that we come to know and use the wisdom that stories can give us.
A master storyteller takes a lifetime to learn his craft, to build it's nuances and gifts into his being. The story he tells must be part of his psyche, integrated into the ethos of his culture and the woof and weft of his soul. It must come from the inside.
Though a master story teller is a consummate performer, mastery, glibness, working the audience and other stage tricks are not enough. They are stunts that enhance, set the tone and mood, but they are just that - gimmicks. The best story tellers speak not for money or fame or to please, but because the story possesses them in some way and demands to be 'told' at this time, in this place, to these people, in this way.
When he gets into the spirit of the story, he becomes a conjurer, adept at the rites of showmanship and stage craft but he is also able to bend movement, diction, language and plot, to weave a spell, call up an image, to progress a plot, to plant a seed, to evoke wonder and the beginnings of change and wisdom in the hearts of his audience.
A true story teller can "read" his audience, delve into his voluminous repertoire and select stories that are just right for that situation. To be able to make this choice requires a vast cache of tales, each different in range and quality, but each internalised and deeply loved. This type of repertoire is more diverse and complex than mere story collections and compilations, for it involves knowing not just the story details, the bare bones, but the ancestry of the story, the changes in its trajectory over time, its potential to heal or perhaps even harm and a finely honed capacity to use it judiciously.
Fig 4: Traditional Indian story teller - Geeta Ramanujam, founder of Kathalaya
Pre-literate societies knew that not everyone was equipped to acquire the story teller legacy. Elders would agree on who the initiate should be and then protect and guide them through the long years of apprenticeship to ensure that the tales did not become trivialised, modified, misused, fall into the wrong hands or be appropriated by the well meaning but ignorant, so that the potency and charge inherent in the tales, was correctly transmitted. Then, after a long period of training, the 'chosen' one, would learn not just the structure and mechanics of the craft, but the ethics, preparations, attitudes, blessings, pecussions, insights and healing knowledge which were to accompany the telling of each tale. Finally, but most importantly, the initiate would be schooled in the art of listening.
Fig 5 - Hip-hop improvisation fused with cinematic story telling
Among many traditions across the world, story telling was a part of the healers medicine kit. This fact was known to the griots of West Africa, the bards of Avalon, the Curanderas and cantadoras of Latin America, the mesmemondoks of Hungary and story tellers across the world. So how did the process work? In every healing tradition that valued the art and craft of storytelling, the essential realisation to master was that stories dredge up the psychic contents of both the personal and collective unconscious. Learning the art of story telling is an expensive process - intellectually, spiritually and in terms of time consumed. The gatekeepers of stories in traditional cultures, would exact from their initiates, adherence to a particular way of life; a specific set of disciplines and attitudes and many years of study, engaging not just the rational mind, but circuitpous, spiral layerings of knowing from the unconscious. Why? Because when two people come together to exchange the gift of story, they also exchange the gift or relationship and are handling a very potent force - archetypal energy. This energy changes us and transmits to us a recognizable integrity, endurance and responsibility.
Fig 6 - Bards - ancient and modern
Fig 7 - A Cantadora in action
Stories are studded with instructions which when correctly mined and loved, guide us through the complexities of life. To put it another way, they help us raise the "submerged archetype" and set the inner life into motion.
Today, stories are used as healing agents by psychologists and psychoanalysts. In the Jungian tradition, the patient uses dream material to discover the plots and themes that underpin their lives. They learn to read their physical and body sensations, looking for clues to their own unacknowledged stories and knowings. In doing so, they establish contact with the unconscious.
If appropriate, they may extend their work to interactive trancing and the use of active imagination, both tools to help map their psychic journey. They learn to investigate their personal storylines, enquiring deeply into the mythic substratum of tales that inform their lives. On identifying their guiding myths, their personal mythology, they then excavate the instructions they need for their current psychic development.
Among other methods in their support tool kit, they could use 'crafting' or craft making to assist them. Craft making involves the use of the eye, the hand and the imagination (which is inspired by or informed by the unconscious). The craft object fashioned could be a talisman - a ribbon stick, an altar, a personal sculpture, a mask, a doll, a dream catcher, a memory box, the possibilities are dictated by the lesson to be mastered and the materials at hand. Craft and art making commemorates the seasons of the soul - special significant milestones in one's journey through life, which if unnoticed, lie as sleepers in the psyche, waiting for the opportune moment to erupt and disrupt. When examined and and acknowledged, they unleash power and strength and help us live authentic lives.
In a world, where objects may be bought and sold in the market at a fraction of the real cost involved in making them, the process of craft making may seem like a selfish indulgence and a waste of time. To adopt this view is to sell oneself short. Craft, art and story making are sequences which acts as a marker of one's own understanding and as a map for those who come after us. They are ways of feeding the soul in a manner which guarantees restoration, re-envisioning and above all - healing.
References:
URLS: (photo references)
1. 'Keeping the oral traditions alive in Minnesota: Black Master Storytellers Festival', Eliana Gramer and Larisa Peifer
2. Wampanoag Storyteller, Annawon Weedon
3. Storytelling across the Diaspora, Mmofra foundation
4. 'SuperEverything* merges hip-hop improvisation with cinematic storytelling', Kevin Holmes
5. 'In the tradition of live storytelling', Deepika Arwind, The Hindu
6. Traditional story teller images in the 'Gallery' of TimSheppard.co.uk
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
The stories in an old photograph
By: Gillian Valladares Castellino
This post is not about extracting the medicine in a story. It is about helping us realise how we often unconsciously use objects - in this case a photograph - as a resource and a starting point for story-telling. It is about understanding the process and appreciating the fact that the stories we choose to 'read' from objects are never objective. They are coloured by our own personalities and histories as much as they are by the object's content. It is also about recognising that the stories that inform our lives are not just about what we hear, or read, or see, but the meaning we choose to give these sensory inputs. What follows below is a record of some of the processes by which interpretation could occur...
How often do we think about the stories a single photograph can suggest to us about the people in it and ourselves? I chanced upon the photograph below which made me stop and think about this.
This post is not about extracting the medicine in a story. It is about helping us realise how we often unconsciously use objects - in this case a photograph - as a resource and a starting point for story-telling. It is about understanding the process and appreciating the fact that the stories we choose to 'read' from objects are never objective. They are coloured by our own personalities and histories as much as they are by the object's content. It is also about recognising that the stories that inform our lives are not just about what we hear, or read, or see, but the meaning we choose to give these sensory inputs. What follows below is a record of some of the processes by which interpretation could occur...
How often do we think about the stories a single photograph can suggest to us about the people in it and ourselves? I chanced upon the photograph below which made me stop and think about this.
What can a faded photo in a time-mottled old book have to say? Well, let us start by examining the photo itself.
If I were to examine the photo with the idea of using it as a resource for planning a painting, I would focus on the different compositional elements, the interplay of lights and darks, the position of the different 'shapes' and their relationship to each other. The people in the photograph, the buildings, landscape and historical context would be irrelevant to my focus outside of these parameters and I would safely ignore them.
If I were to view the photograph from the point of view of examining it's historical context, I would look at it in quite another way.
In the foreground are 28 men and five women, in the best Victorian finery, on the grounds of what looks like a colonial bungalow under construction, in a landscape which could be anywhere on Earth, except, for the fact that:
(1) the information provided with the photo specifies that it was taken in 1892 in Lucknow, India. (A date which more-or-less coincides with the "high noon" of the Raj) and
(2) the background contains five figures who are in traditional Indian clothes of the time.
If one of the people in the foreground were a beloved ancestor I would have a very different perspective from if the beloved ancestor was one of the five figures "contained" behind two sets of "fences", in the background. I would have yet another approach if both the background and the foreground contained beloved ancestors.
If I were to attempt a 'content analysis' on the photograph I would have yet another approach.
Each standpoint would suggest different interpretations and consequently different stories.
To illustrate, I will launch into the 'content analysis' approach and allow the story which this focus suggests to unfold.
Let us start with the obvious - the group in the foreground, who are carefully positioned in rows, decked out in their Sunday best and positioned to show them off to the best advantage. All, save four men have luxuriant moustaches and every one of the women has a large, distinctive hat - fashion statements at the time. Hats, canes, suits and boots appear to be de rigueur for membership of this group, though all these items of clothing are obviously inappropriate and uncomfortable for the tropics. Yet why do they wear them? Clearly to mark their membership of the ruling group, the fact that they were "up-to-date" for the time, as the imagined audience for the photograph would have been their families and peers back in England and in other parts of the Empire who would read the implied message as intended. Would those who posed for the photo ever have imagined that their images would be analysed by the "eyes of the future" - ie those of us who would view them long after their 'world' was gone? Chances are their imaginations never went that far, or if they did, nothing in the photograph suggests that they would have thought they would be judged from the standpoint of a world view other than their own.
If I were to examine the photo with the idea of using it as a resource for planning a painting, I would focus on the different compositional elements, the interplay of lights and darks, the position of the different 'shapes' and their relationship to each other. The people in the photograph, the buildings, landscape and historical context would be irrelevant to my focus outside of these parameters and I would safely ignore them.
If I were to view the photograph from the point of view of examining it's historical context, I would look at it in quite another way.
In the foreground are 28 men and five women, in the best Victorian finery, on the grounds of what looks like a colonial bungalow under construction, in a landscape which could be anywhere on Earth, except, for the fact that:
(1) the information provided with the photo specifies that it was taken in 1892 in Lucknow, India. (A date which more-or-less coincides with the "high noon" of the Raj) and
(2) the background contains five figures who are in traditional Indian clothes of the time.
If one of the people in the foreground were a beloved ancestor I would have a very different perspective from if the beloved ancestor was one of the five figures "contained" behind two sets of "fences", in the background. I would have yet another approach if both the background and the foreground contained beloved ancestors.
If I were to attempt a 'content analysis' on the photograph I would have yet another approach.
Each standpoint would suggest different interpretations and consequently different stories.
To illustrate, I will launch into the 'content analysis' approach and allow the story which this focus suggests to unfold.
Let us start with the obvious - the group in the foreground, who are carefully positioned in rows, decked out in their Sunday best and positioned to show them off to the best advantage. All, save four men have luxuriant moustaches and every one of the women has a large, distinctive hat - fashion statements at the time. Hats, canes, suits and boots appear to be de rigueur for membership of this group, though all these items of clothing are obviously inappropriate and uncomfortable for the tropics. Yet why do they wear them? Clearly to mark their membership of the ruling group, the fact that they were "up-to-date" for the time, as the imagined audience for the photograph would have been their families and peers back in England and in other parts of the Empire who would read the implied message as intended. Would those who posed for the photo ever have imagined that their images would be analysed by the "eyes of the future" - ie those of us who would view them long after their 'world' was gone? Chances are their imaginations never went that far, or if they did, nothing in the photograph suggests that they would have thought they would be judged from the standpoint of a world view other than their own.
Why is one of the background figures on the 'outer' though he is appropriately dressed? The obvious fact of the matter is that he, like the other four background figures, is not white. He is what they would have viewed as a 'marginal man', caught between two widely different cultures and belonging in neither. Why that interpretation? His body language suggests that though he is grouped in the background, with other men of his 'race' (a loaded term which nonetheless formed the basis for society during the Raj) he clearly set himself apart from them and was facing in a different direction.
The positioning of all five background figures seems to suggest that they were sent to there to exclude them from the photo and failing that to ensure that their images would be small enough to be unrecognisable and blend in with the landscape. Unless this photo is magnified to its original size, two of these five figures are almost 'invisible'.
Well to repeat a cliche - a picture speaks a thousand words. Every figure in that photograph is a product of its time. Yet each represents a human being, whose legacy - whether it be attitudes or offspring or anything else, live on. If each of those people were to get a contemporary makeover and we were to meet them in the street, at work, or somewhere else in the course of our own lives, we would probably smile and say 'hello'.
So, having said all this, what is the purpose of this exercise, of spending so much time and effort examining an unremarkable scrap from the past? Well for me personally, it makes the past come 'alive' in ways that social history, novels, artefacts and written documents can never compare. It is a chance to 'see' and in a limited way, engage with the human face and stories of the past. It provides me with a mechanism for uncovering how stories may have crept into my subconscious and quietly nestled there affecting my emotional responses to people and situations. The exercise itself gave me an opportunity to uncover and examine my attitudes towards the past and how they inform my present.
It also affords me an opportunity to demonstrate how depending on our focus, we see different stories in the same situation or artefact. Being aware of the viewpoints and how they operate within us, allows me to develop a deeper understanding of what it meant and what it means to be human.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Bluebeard - the natural predator in us all
By: Gillian Valladares Castellino
The Bluebeard story is a frightening and fascinating tale. Believed to have been inspired by the 15th century Breton serial killer, Gilles de Rais, the story has been retold by Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and Henri Pourrat. Variations of the tale exist in the folklore France, Germany, Estonia, Tuscany and even the United States while comparable tales have been recorded in Indian and Pueblo cultures. Similar stories containing the central motif of a secret room which must not enter exist in Russian and Scandinavian folklore. In centuries past, the Bluebeard figure represented a thinly disguised racist stereotyping of 'unfamiliar' men, but for the tale to be meaningful today, it needs to been seen to have dimensions which address the challenges and understandings of our times.
Modern versions include the movie The Piano and comparable tales by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Anatole France and Eudora Welty among others. A feminist version of the story is Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebead's Egg', set in Canada and featured in Jack Zipes Don't bet on the Prince, it illustrates just how difficult it is for contemporary women to develop the consciousness they need. However, to focus on the fact that the protagonist in the story is female, is to lose an opportunity to benefit from its gifts. The story is about powerful forces at play in the psyche of all human beings.
An annotated version of the story can be read at SurLaLune Fairy Tales website. The purpose of this post is not to repeat the tale or variations of it, but to examine three interpretations of the tale and in doing so, distil out the 'medicine' it can offer to readers today.
So who and what does the "Bluebeard" leitmotif represent?
Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Penguin Books, p. 301, suggests that Bluebeard is a tale about sexual temptation, more specifically about the destructive aspects of sexuality. From his point of view, it is a cautionary tale introducing mainly child listeners to two related emotions, jealous love (on the part of Bluebeard) and "dangerous" sexual attraction (culminating in infidelity) on the part of his wife. The "weeping key" is seen as a metaphor for sexual indiscretion. In Bettleheim's view, there are two morals to this tale - the first, simply stated is "Women do not give in to sexual curiosity", the second, "Men, do not permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed." Reducing the tale to this kind of simplistic interpretation robs it of its real potency and polarises its audience.
Another more intriguing interpretation is suggested by Marie Louise Von Franz, the doyenne of Jungian analysis who in her Anima and Animus in Fairy Tales, dismisses Bluebeard as "a wonderful image of the destructive, murderous animus." She elaborates on the symbolic meaning of the beard, explaining that hair on the head represents involuntary unconscious thoughts and fantasies which have a bewitching or numinous quality. As we can influence our environment much more by our unconscious assumptions than by our conscious thoughts, the symbol "hair" underlines the spiritual power of our unconscious thoughts. The beard, then represents the flow of unconscious talk that animus possessed women are given to. This talk contains both thrash and pearls. The way a woman can deal with the animus is not by killing it (as a man might), but escaping it. To state things more clearly, "If a woman hasn't gone through the experience of being trapped by a demon animus she has only unconscious thoughts. It is the demon who provides her with the ladder to escape" (to consciousness).
By far the most comprehensive, meaningful and poetic analysis of the Bluebeard story is suggested by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women who Run with the Wolves. She names Bluebeard as 'the natural predator' of the psyche - an inner entity in both men and women, that requires our awareness and containment. Though the story centres around a female character, it should be noted that this 'young woman' represents the inexperienced or immature natural aspect of everyone regardless of gender. The inner predatory force represented by Bluebeard, attempts to "turn all crossroads into closed roads" by severing our intuitive nature. It is a malignant force at odds with the instincts of the natural self.
Our task on the way to maturity is to recognise this predator and protect ourselves from it. The Bluebeard story tells us how to do this.
The youngest sister in the story represents the creative potential within the psyche which when 'naive' or 'undeveloped' can be captured by the inner predator. This occurs by surrendering to the whims of the ego rather than heeding the inner knowing that intuition gifts us. The price of "marrying" the predator is a life of living falsely.
There is a way our of this, but one must have the key. The key is "both permission and endorsement to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche". The door in the story is a psychic barrier, a kind of guard placed in front of a secret. Asking the 'key' question unlocks this barrier by causing a germination of consciousness. Asking it is "the central action of transformation" in fairy tales, analysis and in individuation.
Once the key unlocks the door, the young, untried aspect of the self sees the shocking carnage done to some part of our deep life. The next step is to stand and face it for what it is, without fear or denial or shame, to just see it for what it is, for in doing so, the innocent instinctual self regains its soul power. The step after that is to manouver to regain sovereignty over one's life and to do so one might have to stall, back-track and employ whatever coping strategies one needs to keep the predator at bay until one can escape. Pinkola Estes specifies that analysis, dream interpretation, self-knowledge and exploration of non-conventional ways of knowing can enable us to see a situation from widely different perspectives and these multiple views empower us.
To escape however, we have to call upon our psychic 'brothers', those aspects of our psyches which are more 'muscled' ie more naturally aggressive than our feminine consciousness. They provide us with focussed determination to act and represent the blessing of strength and action.
Ultimately, this interpretation of the Bluebeard story is about the regaining of consciousness, the heeding of intuition and the asking of key questions as a road-map to a meaning-filled life.
The Bluebeard story is a frightening and fascinating tale. Believed to have been inspired by the 15th century Breton serial killer, Gilles de Rais, the story has been retold by Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and Henri Pourrat. Variations of the tale exist in the folklore France, Germany, Estonia, Tuscany and even the United States while comparable tales have been recorded in Indian and Pueblo cultures. Similar stories containing the central motif of a secret room which must not enter exist in Russian and Scandinavian folklore. In centuries past, the Bluebeard figure represented a thinly disguised racist stereotyping of 'unfamiliar' men, but for the tale to be meaningful today, it needs to been seen to have dimensions which address the challenges and understandings of our times.
Modern versions include the movie The Piano and comparable tales by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Anatole France and Eudora Welty among others. A feminist version of the story is Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebead's Egg', set in Canada and featured in Jack Zipes Don't bet on the Prince, it illustrates just how difficult it is for contemporary women to develop the consciousness they need. However, to focus on the fact that the protagonist in the story is female, is to lose an opportunity to benefit from its gifts. The story is about powerful forces at play in the psyche of all human beings.
An annotated version of the story can be read at SurLaLune Fairy Tales website. The purpose of this post is not to repeat the tale or variations of it, but to examine three interpretations of the tale and in doing so, distil out the 'medicine' it can offer to readers today.
So who and what does the "Bluebeard" leitmotif represent?
Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Penguin Books, p. 301, suggests that Bluebeard is a tale about sexual temptation, more specifically about the destructive aspects of sexuality. From his point of view, it is a cautionary tale introducing mainly child listeners to two related emotions, jealous love (on the part of Bluebeard) and "dangerous" sexual attraction (culminating in infidelity) on the part of his wife. The "weeping key" is seen as a metaphor for sexual indiscretion. In Bettleheim's view, there are two morals to this tale - the first, simply stated is "Women do not give in to sexual curiosity", the second, "Men, do not permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed." Reducing the tale to this kind of simplistic interpretation robs it of its real potency and polarises its audience.
Another more intriguing interpretation is suggested by Marie Louise Von Franz, the doyenne of Jungian analysis who in her Anima and Animus in Fairy Tales, dismisses Bluebeard as "a wonderful image of the destructive, murderous animus." She elaborates on the symbolic meaning of the beard, explaining that hair on the head represents involuntary unconscious thoughts and fantasies which have a bewitching or numinous quality. As we can influence our environment much more by our unconscious assumptions than by our conscious thoughts, the symbol "hair" underlines the spiritual power of our unconscious thoughts. The beard, then represents the flow of unconscious talk that animus possessed women are given to. This talk contains both thrash and pearls. The way a woman can deal with the animus is not by killing it (as a man might), but escaping it. To state things more clearly, "If a woman hasn't gone through the experience of being trapped by a demon animus she has only unconscious thoughts. It is the demon who provides her with the ladder to escape" (to consciousness).
By far the most comprehensive, meaningful and poetic analysis of the Bluebeard story is suggested by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women who Run with the Wolves. She names Bluebeard as 'the natural predator' of the psyche - an inner entity in both men and women, that requires our awareness and containment. Though the story centres around a female character, it should be noted that this 'young woman' represents the inexperienced or immature natural aspect of everyone regardless of gender. The inner predatory force represented by Bluebeard, attempts to "turn all crossroads into closed roads" by severing our intuitive nature. It is a malignant force at odds with the instincts of the natural self.
Our task on the way to maturity is to recognise this predator and protect ourselves from it. The Bluebeard story tells us how to do this.
The youngest sister in the story represents the creative potential within the psyche which when 'naive' or 'undeveloped' can be captured by the inner predator. This occurs by surrendering to the whims of the ego rather than heeding the inner knowing that intuition gifts us. The price of "marrying" the predator is a life of living falsely.
There is a way our of this, but one must have the key. The key is "both permission and endorsement to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche". The door in the story is a psychic barrier, a kind of guard placed in front of a secret. Asking the 'key' question unlocks this barrier by causing a germination of consciousness. Asking it is "the central action of transformation" in fairy tales, analysis and in individuation.
Once the key unlocks the door, the young, untried aspect of the self sees the shocking carnage done to some part of our deep life. The next step is to stand and face it for what it is, without fear or denial or shame, to just see it for what it is, for in doing so, the innocent instinctual self regains its soul power. The step after that is to manouver to regain sovereignty over one's life and to do so one might have to stall, back-track and employ whatever coping strategies one needs to keep the predator at bay until one can escape. Pinkola Estes specifies that analysis, dream interpretation, self-knowledge and exploration of non-conventional ways of knowing can enable us to see a situation from widely different perspectives and these multiple views empower us.
To escape however, we have to call upon our psychic 'brothers', those aspects of our psyches which are more 'muscled' ie more naturally aggressive than our feminine consciousness. They provide us with focussed determination to act and represent the blessing of strength and action.
Ultimately, this interpretation of the Bluebeard story is about the regaining of consciousness, the heeding of intuition and the asking of key questions as a road-map to a meaning-filled life.
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