“Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.”

— Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, III, 4.

For us modern folk, there’s a generally unquestioned assumption that folk tales, fairy stories and myths can only be properly understood by viewing them through a psychological lens, “unpacking” and “dissecting” the images in search of the “deeper meaning” these “symbols” must surely contain.

We can all agree that folk tales must contain, or be something valuable, otherwise they wouldn’t have been preserved for so many generations, through repeated tellings and re-tellings, long before the advent of books and literacy.

So why are folk tales so weird? Why not simply codify the life lessons and warnings they contain and pass them on in a straightforward, didactic way? Why must they be code-ified and their meaning obscured?

The psychological theory claims that it’s because our ancestors were unconscious, that these images are spontaneous products of the primitive psyche. Another theory is that the stories were deliberately coded as a matter of survival.

*Witches feasting, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720)*

Since its beginnings in the early centuries of the previous millennium, the Christian church has perceived any non-Christian folk practices as anti-Christian, labelling them “pagan”, “heathen”, “heretical” and “demonic.”

And so, as Christians sought to convert non-Christians, anything useful to the church’s globalizing mission was appropriated into the doctrine, its pagan origins erased, such as the clearly Dionysian sacrament of body/bread and blood/wine. Anything directly contradictory or challenging to the doctrine was either destroyed or survived by going underground, thereby occulting itself.

*Head of Aphrodite, 1st century AD copy of an original by Praxiteles. The Christian cross on the chin and forehead was intended to "deconsecrate" a holy pagan artifact. Found in the Agora of Athens.*

If they were to survive censorship by Christian colonizers, the pagan wisdom contained in old European folk tales had to be cleverly coded. This is one way of explaining the abundance of strange images, scenes and characters. The stories needed to appear weird and whimsical enough that they’d be dismissed by the church as harmless tales for children’s entertainment and avoid erasure, but not so bizarre that the pagan people couldn’t recognize important themes and characters.

So how then did our ancestors decode the stories to reveal the hidden heathen wisdom, rituals, warnings and instructions without the tools of modern psychological interpretation? The answer is simple, but not easy for us to grasp because the modern mind has been colonized by empirical psychology for so long that we’ve lost touch with the naturally mythological mind of our ancestors.

“The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. The Greeks knew this so well, and so they had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as such — instead, depth psychology and psychopathology.”
— James Hillman

Re-Wilding the Imagination

Psychology emerged out of the Victorian era, and its approach to working with dreams and stories reflects the Victorian attitude toward natural science and the practice of studying creatures by catching them, killing them, mounting them on walls, preserving them under bell jars, and identifying them with a category name.

In a similar way, modern psychology tends to pin down the figures in dreams and stories by interpreting and treating them as symbols, rather than respecting the living quality and eachness of the image.

“Fairy-tale motifs are not neurotic symptoms, something one is better off understanding rationally so that one can rid oneself of them. Such motifs are experienced as wondrous because the child feels understood and appreciated deep down in his feelings, hopes, and anxieties, without these all having to be dragged up and investigated in the harsh light of a rationality that is still beyond him. Fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.”
— Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

The old way of learning about nature was through a process of careful and prolonged observation and engagement. If you wanted to truly understand an animal and its ways, you had to live with it for a long time, through the changing of seasons and cycles of birth and death.

Dreams, visions and folk tales are similar. They’re wild things. They don’t conform to our ideas of morality or etiquette. They have a life of their own, and it takes time for them to reveal their wisdom. You have to immerse yourself in their landscapes and live with the characters for a while in order to get a feeling for their unconventional logic. Ironically, the intellectual and objective distance required to perform a symbolic interpretation of dreams and stories is what keeps you from unlocking their true secrets.

Post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman often criticized psychology’s tendency to translate every dream image into a psychological concept, even going so far as seeing it as an assault on living creatures.

“Once you’ve translated the dream into your Oedipal situation or your omnipotence fantasy or your penis-envy or you’ve translated the big black snake into the mother, the Great Mother, you no longer need the image, and you let the image only say one thing, one word: Great Mother. Then it disappears. You don’t want that black snake really any more. You want to work on your mother complex, change your personality and so on. Now this still leaves the soul unanimated. That is, unalive. The images are not walking around on their own legs. They’ve been turned into meanings.”
— James Hillman, Inter Views, 1998

Susan Sontag, in her influential 1966 essay Against Interpretation echoes Hillman’s assessment that interpretation is a defensive reaction against something wild and untamed:

“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1966

Hillman agrees with Sontag that interpretation is a violation, only his main concern is with dreams, the soul’s primary artistic medium. He was fond of quoting Jung’s statement “Image is psyche.” A violation of psyche’s images is a violation of the soul. In response, he developed an alternative approach to typical Jungian and Freudian dream analysis that he compared to being a “naturalist of the psyche, watching the way it produces what it produces.” Towards the end of his life Hillman stated that his whole mission was to “get the psyche free from psychology.”

Experiments in Story Tending

After encountering the same interpretive and symbologizing tendencies in storytelling circles, I began to wonder if some of the principles that Hillman and other archetypal psychologists developed to work with dreams might help us approach folk tales and myths in a way that respects the living quality of the story, and is more akin to how our ancestors engaged with stories. And because these old tales are a sort of ancestral dream, it makes sense to work with them in a similar way to how we work with our dreams.

“Particularly after the work of psychoanalysts, there can be little doubt, either, that myths are of the nature of dream…”
— Joseph Campbell

I began to think of this alternative approach as Story Tending, inspired by Stephen Aizenstat’s Dream Tending model. Steve studied with James Hillman and is co-founder of Pacifica Graduate Institute, a post-grad school founded on the teachings of Hillman and other archetypal psychologists. I did some training with Steve a couple years ago, and saw the value in applying his Dream Tending principles to the work I was doing with psychedelic integration and shamanic journeying. Maybe it was time to rethink the way we engage with other kinds of narratives as well.

Recently I tried an experiment in Story Tending, engaging in what I called a “slow read” of a well-known folk tale. Over the course of 8 weeks, a group of 20 men got together to read and reflect on the old German story Iron Hans, aka Iron John. We roughly followed the outline of Robert Bly’s famous book where he uses the story to talk about men’s issues, but we didn’t limit ourselves to his interpretation and reflections.

“Fairy tales are unique, not only as a form of literature, but as works of art which are fully comprehensible to the child, as no other form of art is.
As with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life. The child will extract different meaning from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment.
When given the chance, he will return to the same tale when he is ready to enlarge on old meanings, or replace them with new ones.”
— Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

Each week I began to introduce some of the principles I’d been developing into the group, and gently pushing back when someone fell into the symbologizing trap. One instance that comes to mind is when we were going over a part of the story that mentions a golden fish and snake swimming in a sacred spring. As we reflected on this strange image, one of the guys remarked, “the snake is the feminine!” I pointed out that when we use the word “is,” we are performing a kind of colonization of the story by making a claim on it, turning it into something it’s not for our benefit, whether that’s our personal development or ego gratification.

I could see that he was a bit upset I didn’t accept or praise his interpretation, but at times like this I feel it’s important to speak up for the characters in a story. Like Hillman, I experience it as an assault, a kind of violence. I’ve witnessed stories get absolutely ripped apart by well-intentioned storytellers and mythology circles.

“Lives without meaning hunger for meanings, and psychologists feed the hungry with the living presences of animals. Patients as carnivores, devouring the flesh of their dream animals to satisfy their gluttony for knowledge. Or, have we psychologists become taxidermists, disemboweling the [dream] snake, stuffing it with concepts, and preserving it as a carefully fixed meaning?”
— James Hillman, Animal Presences

Everybody comes so starved for meaning that one person’s interpretation can set off a frenzy amongst the group to symbologize everything in the story and relativize it to their personal journey. The session ends when there’s nothing left that hasn’t been analyzed and interpreted, and the participants can walk away full of self-satisfaction, ready to add the story to their trophy wall.

Our minds and imaginations have been so colonized by monotheism, rational materialism and European psychology — “modernity” — that we don’t even realize that we tend to approach an ancestral story as a resource that exists solely for the extraction of meaning in service to personal growth or ego aggrandizement. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to see that the way we approach stories reflects the way we approach anything we see as “other” — whether it’s other species, or other cultures and traditions.

“…both Freud and Jung made a move that we no longer want to repeat. They both translated the images of animals into crystallized symbolic meanings. They didn’t let what appeared express itself enough, but moved toward satisfying the rationalizing – and often frightened – day-world mind. “This means that.”
— James Hillman, Animal Presences

I believe that the Story Tending approach to working with old folk tales and myths has the potential to radically shift our view of the other, by decolonizing our minds and repairing the bridge to our own ancestors and the pre-colonial worldview, imagination and wisdom that these stories reflect.

Some Principles of Story Tending

A few simple principles can help us re-orient our approach to stories and, by allowing the stories to work on us, rather than us working on them, have the effect of decolonizing our inner world and restoring our imaginative faculties and mythic perspective.

These principles have been inspired by Hillman and the archetypal psychologists, and the term I’ve used for this approach, “Story Tending,” is inspired by Steve Aizenstat and his Dream Tending work, which developed out of his years of study with the likes of James Hillman, Marion Woodman and other “naturalists of the psyche.” “Tending” to a story is different than telling it or analysing it. It treats the tale as a living thing, like a fruit tree that when tended to and kept alive will continue to feed us for generations to come.

“The hearth and fairy stories have passed, as water through fifty feet of soil, through generations of men and women, and we can trust their images more than, say, those invented by Hans Christian Andersen. The images the old stories give… are meant to be taken slowly into the body. They continue to unfold, once taken in.”
— Robert Bly, Preface to Iron John

Be a naturalist.

Approach the story as you would an ecosystem you want to study in its natural state. Tread lightly: approach with sensitivity, curiosity, humility and respect. Leave no trace: observe but don’t disturb.

Free associate.

Allow the story to activate your imagination. What does it remind you of? What archetypes, classical myths or personal memories does this story resonate with? Play with associations, but keep it loose and friendly. Don’t lock the figures of the story into one interpretation. Let them be free from your associations.

Stay close to the story.

Similar to Hillman’s primary motto, “stick to the image,” a key principle of story tending is “stay close to the story.” Feel free to free associate, but never get too far from the actual story you’re tending. Allow for flights of fancy, but always come back to the characters in the tale and what they’re actually doing. Return again and again to pick up on details you missed because something else captured your attention. I’m continually amazed at the amount of significant detail these short and seemingly simple stories contain.

Live with the characters.

When you’re working with a new story (or an old story you’re revisiting with a new attitude) stick with it for a few weeks. Give the characters time and space to roam around your inner world. You might be surprised by the old memories they kick up, or what secrets they will reveal once you’ve earned their trust, whispered in your ear at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Stories Are Messengers

One of the more unexpected things that happened during my recent experiment in Story Tending was when the titular wild man Iron John woke me in the middle of a full moon night and began prodding me with questions, some of which I couldn’t begin to answer without doing some research.

As I worked through his questions, it became clear to me that they were keys that unlocked hidden messages in Iron Hans, a Germanic tale that was first recorded in the 1800s by folklorists. It was revealed that this was not, as Robert Bly speculates, an ancient pre-Christian tale, but rather a direct response to the Christian colonization of Europe in the Middle Ages. Once you have the keys, you can see that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming “civilized” by Christianity and losing contact with the nature spirits and so-called “pagan” rites and rituals.

I’m now able to imagine that this story and others like it are messages from our ancestors, hidden in plain sight and kept alive over centuries of migration, forced conversion and massive social and cultural change, all so that we could benefit from their wisdom and warnings at a time when they’re perhaps needed most urgently.

Tending to these folk stories then becomes an act of preserving something precious with the understanding that the message in the story might not be for us, but for some unknown descendent in some unimaginable future.

To paraphrase an old proverb, “Blessed is she who tends the trees whose fruit she will never eat.”

“The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating dance—all of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the bird’s instinctual brain. But human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories. Stories, then—fairy stories, legends, myths, hearth stories—amount to a reservoir where we keep new ways of responding that we can adopt when the conventional and current ways wear out.”
— Robert Bly, Preface to Iron John