Shiitake Blog: Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales

Welcome to my first post on the new blog Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales. In Shiitake Blog I would like to explore the ways in which dreams, myths and the old stories, or fairy tales, interconnect with each one another as well as within our own psyches.

Carl Jung, from whom most of these ideas arise, will be my guide and guru on the journey. For it was Jung along with the great Joseph Campbell who first lay the groundwork for our new understanding about myths and fairy tales and in so doing the globe on which we take up residence begins to feel more like a family interconnected by the stories they share rather than divided by the politics that keep.

What Makes Them Universal

The first question to address in this stepping out is what makes these stories universal and why over the centuries do we keep returning to them. It is these stories, after all, that many of us were lucky enough to hear read aloud as we fell asleep in our little beds. And after all these years, we return to them. Why is that? What about them still clings to us? What spark was lit within us then that is alive all these many years later? For don’t we still thrill to hear the stories of childhood and can hardly wait to read them to our own children?

For myself, although I can remember the heroine of each story I now seek the reason why I may have identified with her. I remember the pictures more than all the details about the story. I remember pictures of yellow hair mountain maidens who leapt from mountain top to mountain top, with so much grace and lightness of foot that for weeks I tried to run this same way. I practiced being the girl in the painting and imagined myself as swift and nimble as a mountain goat darting like the wind across the high meadows. Was I seeking agility and speed; was I seeking beauty and perfection; was I seeking escape? Perhaps the answers lie within the archetypes these stories awakened in me.

Archetypes in Fairy Tales

Carl Jung would say that the fairy tales carried within themselves the archetypes of the primordial mind. This is why on hearing these stories whatever had not yet found its form inside is now marked with that archetype. Whether it be maiden, trickster, witch or prince, among hundreds of others, these archetypes became awakened within us. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist of our times, related how the ancient stories that passed from generation to generation were duplicated all over the globe. To take just one such famous story as an example, what we called the story of Cinderella can be found first in France called Cendrillon, in Germany as Aschenputel, in China as Lin Lan, in Vietnam as Tam and Cam, as well as a nameless Native American version. And there are more, to be sure.

Travelling Stories

Did these stories get spread across the globe by travelling story tellers, as some might claim? Certainly, we are indebted the Grimms brothers who journeyed across Europe in the late 19th century writing down the stories for the first time as they were told to them by the local story tellers of the village. But is there something else that accounts for this universality across the globe whether it be the story of the maiden locked up in her father’s house with a despicable step-mother and badgering step-sisters or the story of the two children who wander off and get lost in the woods only to arrive at the witch’s house. I think there is more to it than reason might at first allow. In Shiitake Blog I would like to address some of these possibilities, because after all, to us, Shiitake has that mystical feeling!

The Collective Unconscious

The unconscious is a strange and deep place, the container for all our dreams as well as all our stories. Fairy tales, myths, dreams — these arise from the same container or what Jung called the collective unconscious. Essays and books have been written explicating the particular archetype within specific fairy tales. Much has been written in the past few years about the most ancient of stories Little Red Riding Hood, for instance. Little Hood has been analyzed, scrutinized, dissected and essentially eaten by the big bad wolf. Each time, by hook or by crook, she gets rescued from her fate, and we are glad and relieved all over again.

All of these understandings contribute to a rich and complex tapestry of ideas about the condition of the human soul and the development of the psyche. In Shiitake Blog I would like to address some of these stories and the various readings different people have brought to each. We may never get to the end of this journey, but in our wanderings we may uncover more treasures than we ever could imagine.

A Few Books to Get You Started:

Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment, Classic French Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes
Folk Tales from Around the World, edited by Jane Yolen
The Complete Grimm Fairy Tales, edited by Brothers Grimm
The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar
The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Maria Tatar (essays)
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettleheim (essays)