SIMBOLISMOS NOS CONTOS DE FADAS - 1/2 - Introdução - Lúcia Helena Galvão da Nova Acrópole

Hello, welcome once again to my house, in which you are already familiar. Today we will talk again, in fact it was a request from you, we will talk again about an old theme, which is the symbolism of fairy tales. This lecture, which was perhaps one of the first ones I recorded in New Acropolis, it had technical problems, it had a series of limitations.

It's worth you going there to see how I was young when I did this lecture. Time passed, but I was also gathering other reflections, other conclusions. So it was time to update it.

The lecture is simple, but it brings an interesting reflection on the wisdom of fairy tales. Many times in our days we started to think that it is even useless or even bad to tell this to children. Not only is it useful, pedagogically very wise, but it is also good for adults.

There is a whole structure, what Marie-Louise von Franz talked about the essential skeleton, symbolism, the psychoanalysis. A whole set of symbols and highly useful structures. So that at a certain moment, even though we don't know what to do with it, but at the moment of need we can resort to it and then take some references.

So we're going to tell a little bit, show what it is. It is a subject that is addressed to a multidisciplinary team. There are many specialists who turn to the subject of fairy tales.

Ours will be a philosophical approach, an applied philosophy. The way we study in New Acropolis. So I'm not here wanting to eliminate or devalue any other approach.

I'm just adding my work. So we're going to start talking about myths, tales, fables. There is a whole discussion about it.

Did the fables and fairy tales come from myths or the opposite? Honestly, I don't think it's a very relevant discussion there. It looks a bit like the story of the chicken and the egg.

Who came first or who came after? I think it's a process that probably both answers are correct. The myth at a certain moment compiles a number of archetypes, of very powerful ideas and intertwined in a very intelligent way, consciously built.

While fairy tales are a dilution of these ideas, in what Jung called collective unconscious, that overflow here and there. I do believe that both fairy tales and fables have been a simplification of myths in many cases. We talked about this in my mythical first lecture on the subject, where I said that a mythical structure, you can cut it into several pieces and recognize these pieces as the main plot of a hundred stories.

So the myth as a whole, in a historical moment, where humanity is losing its symbolic mentality, Plato already talked about it, they can become negative. They are complex. They involve a very sophisticated thought structure.

Now they, cut and placed, skillfully in the bosom of several fairy tales, become much more palatable, much easier to understand. You will realize that within fairy tales and fables, there is an insertion of the explicit moral element, in an increasingly decisive way. As for the myth, no.

The myth is absolutely symbolic. No one will worry about explaining to you why Cronus devoured all your children. Understand what you want.

In fact, Cronus is not a god who devoured little children. Cronus is time. But you, who will have to reach your conclusions, the myth is not concerned with giving a moral facade to anything.

So much so that the tale, you realize that it has a very strong symbolic core, but it already has a moral context. For example, in the case of Snow White, which is that old story of when your mother was a child, when your mother pierced her finger in the window and wanted to have a daughter, and that the birds were red like your blood, and white skin like snow, and black hair like the ebony of the window. You can simply find this cute and interesting, or you can choose to realize that there you have the work in black, the work in white, the work in red.

It has an announcement of a very interesting human consciousness trajectory, which is very associated, for example, with alchemical stages. Now, if you didn't understand any of this, what do you understand in Snow White? That good little children are happy in the end.

Good little girls, goodness is rewarded by happiness. This is morally interesting. And the symbolic face is hidden and penetrates anyone who has the ability to penetrate.

And the fable, which comes a little more to the surface, it doesn't have much of this symbolic anymore. It is entirely moral. In that story of the fox who despises the grapes, because they are too high, it's just that.

There is no symbolism for being grapes and not another fruit. It's just the story of a being who despises what he can't have. So it's a very superficial facade already.

Valid, yes, but already entirely in the field of morality. Now, the fact that not all fairy tales necessarily come from myths, this is also an element that can be considered. Marie-Louise von Franz talks a lot about the fact that, the origin of fairy tales linked to certain local events associated with extraordinary events.

That is, a person lives an extraordinary event in a village. That becomes a local story. Until three, four generations later, you realize that this story is getting richer.

Symbolic elements that were not at the origin are being added. And in a little while, no one remembers the name of the person who lived it. But the story becomes a model, that spreads to other villages, no one ever knows where it happened.

And it takes a universality character from a particular fact. Yes, it may be that too. But the fact is that we realize, within this recurrence of symbolic themes in fairy tales, the presence of many mythical arguments cut into pieces.

This is very common. Two things that intrigue those who study fairy tales. First, the presence of mythical arguments.

And the second place, which is impressive, as there are half a dozen ideas, half a dozen arguments, that appear everywhere in the world. That is, you will see a Finnish myth, a Tibetan myth, and you realize certain elements, such as the good brother, the lazy brother, the helpful brother, an argument like Cinderella, the orphan daughter who is mistreated by the stepmother. This is everywhere.

And then there is all that discussion. The discussions are not very interesting, but it is important that you know that they exist. If it was born in a place and spread all over the place, there was already someone who said that.

It was born in India and spread. I know there is a lot that was born in India and spread. Even mythical arguments, like the one of Balarama, very much associated with the story of Hercules.

However, it is not very logical for us to think that every fairy tale was born in India. Today there is a school, in fact, there has been for many decades, which is the Finnish school, which claims the idea that these arguments were present in every place in the world, including in certain civilizations here in pre-Columbian America. So you will find arguments of fairy tales, in pre-Columbian stories, in Tibetan stories, in Egyptian stories, in the stories of several European, African, etc.

peoples. Probably what is there, of course, nobody is the owner of the truth in this subject, but there is probably a psychological structure of the human being. Some image that expresses a deep anguish of the human being, a deep need of the human being.

And that's it. There are images that are very suitable to express certain feelings, certain thoughts, they are automatically attached to these thoughts, they become symbols. This can flourish in the imagination of a man, here and now, or on the other side of time, on the other side of the world.

So it wasn't necessarily born in one place. This belongs to what Jung called the collective unconscious, archetypes of the collective unconscious, the skeletons of the human psyche that Marie-Louise von Franz spoke of. But we will work on this slowly.

Of course, I am a philosopher, my interest here is to reinforce the philosophical aspect. That is, how these symbols can be a manual of instructions for human evolution. Once again, within Jung's followers, very markedly, von Franz, she said that fairy tales were more or less the philosophy of the wheel of fiar.

Philosophy of the wheel of fiar, where in the villages everyone would meet to tell these stories. Maybe there is, you know, some little town in the countryside where there is still that. People who put the chair on the sidewalk and tell stories.

And these stories are useful, not only for children. They are useful and are interpreted in a different way according to the human group that listens to them. But they transmit a message to everyone.

It was great fun to meet around the elderly people and hear stories. And the children were in that anxiety, and the adults were there, muttering, extracting their reflections. And that was an important element.

It was almost a stratum of timeless teachings, which was revived within these groups, these small urban groups, these family groups. That is, fairy tales were not exclusively for children. It was pedagogy for all ages.

There was a certain moment, around the 17th century to the 19th century, when the great compilers emerged. Especially the Green brothers, first of all. Not that they are the oldest in history, as we have here, Perrault came before them.

But they are the ones who recognize that there is wisdom within fairy tales. In such a way that they do not adulterate. When they decide to touch on some detail, because imagine you, it's like you imagine a painting that was made centuries ago.

Over time it was dismantled, there is a piece missing here, there is a piece missing there, there is a reconstruction done. They sometimes did reconstitutions of fairy tales, in those lost pieces. But they were careful to put a note on the page, informing, from here to there we move.

Previously it was like this. Because they started from something that was very original, and is still today. But in its time it was rare.

Which was the idea that fairy tales have something sacred, and should not be moved without much criterion. They should not be adulterated. So they were very critical.

They traveled to several places in Europe. It is very famous the story that says that they found an old woman in the interior of Germany, who agreed to tell them a story per day, while they had tea with her. And at the expense of that she had company for months of tea.

And they patiently collected this rural tradition. This was the time of the great compilers. In addition to them, we have the Perrot, of the tales of Mamãe Gança, and we also have Hans Christian Andersen.

The detail is that the others move in the stories with more freedom than the Green brothers did. This is important that we consider. This is serious.

When you move with a lot of freedom in something, it means that you think that it didn't make sense, and that you are improving. That for the Greens would be a profanation. That it was made sense.

And they were careful not to break these structures. You don't move in a language, that you don't speak very well. Because soon you run the risk of it not meaning anything anymore.

You have to master a language very well, to venture to make changes in your linguistic structures. If not, no. And we still live this sin a little.

Even today we make many changes in the structure of the original tales. Or we make bizarre interpretations. That is, we move in a language that we do not speak.

Because today we are very weak in symbolic language. Don't tell me that today technology has advanced a lot from the 19th century to today. Yes, technology, the things that man builds.

Man himself, not so much. And the symbolic vision of reality, the ability to deeply know oneself, not so much. Perhaps some of these great compilers had more of this quality, this perception, than we have today, two, three centuries past.

So this era of the great compilers was almost a milestone. It was the beginning of a more methodical and serious investigation about fairy tales. And several researchers have done this over time.

Soon we will talk a little about it. There is a common structure in these tales. Of course, I could talk here about themes for you.

The theme of orphan children, the theme of confrontation with the animal, what Jung called confrontation with the shadow, the theme of the loss in the forest, there are several themes. But in general, Campbell puts something very useful in his hero's journey. There is a certain linearity, even if it changes a little bit from tale to tale.

But there is a certain linearity, which is the process of the hero, pure originally, only willing to perform great deeds, with purity and good intention, but without any preparation. Then you have the tests, which are represented by animals, by witches, whatever it is. The victory over itself and the harmony between all the factors that were integrated there.

What he conquered, the princess who was freed. That is, they were happy forever. All the factors harmonize in the end.

And this shows the trajectory of a human being, stretching his leg to step on the next step of the ladder. At first, as he is scared of it, he is not prepared, but he disposes himself to the difficulties to overcome it, and the balance on the next step. Deep down, it is talking about the advancement of the human being in the conquest of himself, in the knowledge of himself, in the conquest of a greater meaning for his life.

All of them, without exception. We will see certain common elements that occur, in many accounts, not to say almost all. It was once.

It was once, Mircea Eliade herself uses this a lot, he uses the Latin term in Nilo Tempore, it was once, means a time that has no time. Once upon a time, a prince, you will not see a child saying, wait a minute, what day was that? How come it was once, when did this happen?

Do you realize something interesting? Because the child has this symbolic structure. She knows that what happens in a fairy tale is timeless.

It doesn't matter when it was, or where it was. It's like it was always. That's what the expression in Nilo Tempore means.

That is, a parallel of time. A parallel where, while there is a human being beating his tests, this time will be happening. That is, it is eternally valid.

This time will only have become past when the entire human species has passed its tests. I always quote at this moment, because for me it was a very vivid memory, my little daughter. That every time we passed, we passed by a place that had tall trees, she would say, mom, is the hat in there now, going after the grandmother's house?

That is, at any time, it was passing the year, entering the year, leaving the year, it was always at that moment that the hat was going to the grandmother's house, and about to find the wolf. That is, inside her head, the parallel of time, this eternal time, this recurring time, it was a perfectly understandable thing. We go little by little in what we call maturing, in quotes, canceling this symbolic dimension of the human being, this imaginative dimension, where suddenly this eternal parallel time, which never comes, stops making sense.

It was once, what day, when, where, how it was. This makes no sense in a fairy tale. It is always.

As long as the last human being has not overcome the test of the last evil wolf, it will always be now. The story of the red hat. An eternal present.

So this is the story of the once-of-a-time, of the parallel time, of the eternal time, of the eternal dimension, where consciousness transits from ignorance to wisdom. Another interesting element are the so-called logical paradoxes. Very interesting this, people.

Because the fairy tale requires a symbolic, imaginative mentality. When you enter very rationally, you only see absurdities and get distracted. It is not to enter with a mechanical reason, a concrete reason.

She thinks that there is absurd. Fairy tales are to be entangled through imagination, the symbolic mentality, the suggestion of intuition, as Jung himself would say. The intuitive mentality, the intuitive approach.

So they put a rock right at the beginning of the story. For reason to trip. So you imagine, returning to our little red hat, a forest infested with wolves.

The mother takes a child, puts a basket full of guloseimas and sends the child alone to this forest and still on top, dressed in red. Well, stop, stop, stop, that in these conditions I do not play. Rationaly, no.

Either this mother is crazy, or this story is absurd. It doesn't make any sense. Or you will give up the story.

Or you will continue with other tools that are not the reason. You will have to develop a symbolic vision. And if you do it, you will begin to understand a series of elements that the story offers and goes out of context.

Because do not forget, the story is happening inside you. Symbolic stories project out what is happening inside you. And you start to see yourself portrayed in that journey.

So the first thing you do in a classic tale, a rock at the beginning, right at the doorstep, so that the reason stumbles and stays there. A time without time and a sign that says the common reason of the day is not welcome. Another element, the antagonist.

You will realize that the goal of a classic tale has no morbid goals. It's not destroying someone, it's not killing someone. The introduction of morbid goals within children's stories is very modern and has been happening in a way that is even worrying.

The goal in a classic tale is to free someone, fulfill a mission. That is, the goal is always constructive and beneficial. The antagonist has to be taken out of the way.

With the least damage. If it is necessary to kill him, let's kill him. If it is necessary, if it is possible, just integrate him, let's integrate him.

You will see that some of the arguments of older fairy tales originate in Egypt, in the myth of Anubis and Bata, the myth of the two brothers. Anubis is a good example of this. Anubis, the Egyptian gods, Horus, for example.

Horus, when fighting with Seth, who was his father's murderer, does not kill him. He takes advantage of the impulse of Seth's claw and puts him to blow the candles of the thousand-year-old boat where all the gods traveled. The idea is to remove the antagonist from the path with the least damage.

If you can give him any usefulness, so much better. The classic tale had no objectives based on hatred, but on the result of some mission, endowed with value. An individual and also community value.

It was to save the princess of a kingdom. It was to save something valuable. Another important element.

Magic weapons. You will notice that when a tale begins, it is not only a story, but when a story begins, that hero or heroine that is very fragile, is a being destitute of great abilities. Let's say the prince entered that kingdom and the princess had been stolen by a dragon.

It is a prince, a young boy who sometimes gets drunk, almost a teenager, and it is a dragon. But from the moment he says I accept the mission, I go and I have to go back to the kingdom. Then the princess is taken away and the prince goes back to the kingdom.

In the middle of the way, what we call magic weapons, this reminds us of the Campion, for those who know, the magic weapons are the latent powers of the human being that begin to flourish. This is expressed symbolically. He's walking and an old man appears who gives him water, he gives a cape that makes him invisible.

He's walking, he finds a bird and he gives him a secret. That is, as he imposes himself with something noble, fair and good, latent powers that exist asleep inside him, they flourish. The courage, the ability, the argolysis flourish.

And when he comes before the dragon, he is adult and armed to the teeth and capable of defeating him. It is the development of human skills as he commits himself to a greater good. And this is present in the structure of almost all fairy tales.

The emergence of the latent powers of man. And another element is that there can be no personal causes. In a classic tale, selfishness is something that has to be banned.

That is, imagine you that you are going to tell a fairy tale to your children. The prince arrives in this city and the king says save my daughter who was imprisoned by a dragon. And the prince arrives, crosses his arms and says how much do you pay me for this?

To see if it is beneficial. Done, it's over. I bet your children will not want to hear this story anymore.

Ah, mom, change of story? It's bullshit, I've never seen a prince like that. It's useless.

That is, the cause has to be always altruistic. It is not worked for personal causes. See well, because this is integrated within a universal element of various traditions that say that the man who dedicates himself to overcoming the problem is the one who is the most responsible for the human condition.

The first price that is charged is the control of selfishness, the domain of selfishness. He can't work for personal causes because otherwise this is not a saga, it is merely an undertaking, a game of interests. The heroic saga, in small dimension in the tale, in great dimension in the myth, the heroic saga requires apprehension and altruism right at its initial threshold.

Otherwise it is not the saga. We clearly realize that it is not a hero at height, even the child realizes it and loses interest in history. So these elements give a magic touch to history.

A mission, something bigger that happens in a time that never passes, is happening now and will always happen that there is a human being who has not yet overcome his tests. And this magical dimension shows the man how to flourish his latent powers, how to act in an altruistic way, how not to have goals focused on hatred, but on good. Both individual and collective.

These are very strong and very interesting elements. Let's see, as I told you at the beginning, that there is a multidisciplinary team today focused on this subject. So from etnologists, literary, sociological, pedagogical, psychological interpretation, there are many, many possibilities.

Within the psychological field, there are all those who are aligned with Jungian thought, those who follow more the technique of treatment through accounts, which is the Freudian line. That is, there are many, many lines. What we are going to explore is the philosophical line.

Within the type of philosophy that we do in New Acropolis, which is applied philosophy, philosophy in a practical way. I told you that the Finnish Folk Center, which is one of the interesting references on this subject, it deals with this diffuse origin. I find that interesting.

It means that within you there is the argument of the fairy tale, although you have never heard any. There are elements that are there longing to come to light in your consciousness. These elements can be represented, and are usually represented through symbols, when they flourish in the conscious, as it happens in dreams.

They do not come explicitly, except on very rare occasions. They are represented by symbols. And as human needs are more or less the same, there is a scope of needs that compose human nature, they sometimes flourish in a very similar way.

With symbols, when not the same, equivalent. It is what Jung called archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Campbell, and finally, closer to us, Clarice Píncolas, Théès and others, work with this line of archetypes.

Well, I'm not going to stick to this line. I'm not, let's say, a psychologist, I'm a philosopher. But there are references there that I will use.

Which are very interesting. Jung said, for example, that you can not interpret a fairy tale using only the classification of the type of thought. What is the idea that is there?

That is, the idea of ​​a eagle, which symbolizes such a thing. The idea of ​​a frog, which symbolizes such a thing. And you freeze this type of thought.

Jung died before he could see it. What happens in our days is that those who are followers of this type of thought have become a material, many times, of a booklet of how to interpret your dream of a newspaper. That is, this, taken to your maximum expression, generated something bizarre.

You dreamed of a snake? Ah, the snake is wisdom. Who is the snake of wisdom?

What it emotionally represents for me is not the same as what it represented for an Egyptian priest of Herapis or Anubis. There it could be a symbol of wisdom. For me, this is an animal that provokes me asco, rusting, it can be symbolizing my grosser instincts, something animalistic that I'm trying to overcome, but that still wants to intimidate me and arrest me.

That is, they are not just types of thoughts, they are also types of feelings. What does it mean to you? And that makes the symbols differentiate.

You can't make a little manual that such a dirty symbol means such a thing, it means such a thing for what and for whom, when, how? You will see that people sometimes like a fairy tale, each one for a different reason. And there is still the characteristic that I've seen happen several times, of having a preference for a story.

How many people have told me this is my favorite. I keep trying to understand, within the history of that person, within her psychological life, within her ideals, her philosophical life, what that fairy tale has so special about, and how much of it she has already brought to the conscious field. I, particularly, in my childhood and adolescence, there was nothing superior to the princess and the bees.

Those seven mattresses with those bees down there, they were enigmatic, but I knew there was something to tell me. Today I understand part of it. I will probably still look for the princess's bees in my life.

But this tale was special to me. For sure. So it's not just like thinking, things are not so square.

Each human being, through his affectivity, of the whole set of emotions that involve him, that tale acquires a special meaning for him. So the thing is not that simple. Diving into the structure of a tale means also diving into the psyche of that person who somehow identifies with him and recreates it in your life.

Just like myths, tales are recreated in the life of each person. I brought you an image. You will see that we often talk about this concept of Jungian archetype, of model, of the plane of ideas, Platonic, which is more suitable for a philosopher.

And we don't understand it very well, it seems like an abstraction. So I brought you an image that is quite symbolic. A seed breaking its shell and launching its first branches of life.

Look closely at this. Enjoy it. And realize that it is very difficult that an image like this does not bring a lot of psychological content to us.

What is a seed making a tremendous effort to launch its branch of life, to overcome the obstacle of its shell, to overcome the obstacle of the earth that is above it, and heroically to overcome these resistances until you find the light, until you launch your sign of life to the world, until you mark your presence as life in the world. You look at it and I will not give you a recipe. You will find a thousand meanings within you equivalent to that.

There is no recipe, significance, or meaning. It means only that. Sometimes people ask me, tell me what it means.

Among many things, it can mean this. It is what it means to me. Something like this would mean to me this inner thirst to give my message to the world.

What does it mean to you? A feeling that has been repressed? An inability to realize your dreams?

An inability to extend your hand towards life and accept all the context it presents you? What? It could be anything.

But this is an archetypal image that will always find resonance in any human being who sees it. That is, a practical explanation. Today there is a lot of exploration.

In fact, it is a sad tone of our historical moment. It is the story of who always explores the worst of each thing. There is a tendency to put the fairy tale as full of historical of repressed instincts, phallic symbols, violence, brutality.

This is the roughest facet, the lower part and roughest, the facade. Probably worn and old from a fairy tale. But tales, like men, are made up of three worlds.

It's Mercury's case. You have this dense physical part, you have a psychic part and you have a spiritual part. Which is called within the Greek tradition of nous, psyche and soma.

For the philosopher, the soma is not so important. It has been talked about too much, this theme has been explored too much. There is no reason to lower and limit humanity so much.

And cut the branches of that little plant we saw recently. And summarize it to something obscure, hidden, underground, underground. For us, the highest branches of the plant are of interest.

Which are also part of the plant. So be careful, because today I put for you here a cover of a magazine. This is very explored by the media.

The morbid, instinctive and vulgar side of fairy tales. Which in some cases does not even exist. In other cases, yes, it is an aspect of them.

But the most basic, the lowest, is the only one that is considered. That is, it is a tremendously reductive vision. For us, it is the most basic, the lowest, the only one that is considered.

But for philosophers, the approach is psychic, noetic or spiritual. It is what interests us, what elevates us. To lower there is already a lot.

For philosophy, as I told you, the fairy tale are variations on the same theme. And what is the theme? What is the subject of the day of humanity, since the moment it launched its first branches?

Until the moment it gave its last fruits. What is the subject of the day of humanity? The subject of the day of humanity is to know yourself more and more.

To know yourself, to find your meaning of life as a human being. This is the subject. Everything else is ramification around it.

The subject of fairy tales is this. Fragmented, shown from the angle of several branches, several flowers. But the fundamental subject is this.

As in the myth, the fairy tale in general, represents within itself, in its images, all its internal elements. Be careful with this, because it also happens in dreams. We sometimes have that manic vision that there was a malevolent being within our dream.

And we do not realize that our dream is a window through which we look within ourselves. And the malevolent and the beneficial, the beautiful and the ugly, everything is within us. It is projected out so that we can see ourselves, since inside we are not able to.

Our inner life is not so cramped. It is a fairy tale. When we talk about male and female characters, we are talking about symbols, archetypes.

And many times they are related to the spirit and matter. Because otherwise, they will soon begin to say that fairy tales are sexist or feminist. They are not human beings who are there.

They are pieces of you, projected out, so that you can later find them inside. So this is an important element. The risk of making you susceptible.

We are not talking about something so shallow and explicit as that. And the fairy tale works, as well as the myth, as well as all symbolic language, as a manual, a life manual, which we should not neglect. Understand the language of life, understand what it is trying to tell us.

Understand these symbols as a form of communication, of important realities that we need to bring to our consciousness. We are here trying to build ourselves. And little by little we find pieces.

And these pieces have indication plates, which are symbols. There is your spiritual consciousness, there is your altruism. The symbols are these plates that indicate where you hid from yourself.

So that you go in this search and find. Little by little you are catching the pieces of yourself, hidden by life outside. As long as you have the disposition for this saga.

The hero who starts a fight. And a tale has the disposition to live a saga. The greatest of sagas.

The realization of human life. The way it deserves to be lived. Well, let's get into the stories.

Otherwise you will say, wow, she's been talking for a long time and hasn't gotten into the subject yet. But this preamble is very important. And now it will make all sense when we talk about these stories.

I brought just three for you. In the past, in my first lecture, I talked about Snow White, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty. Here I will enter into three different stories.

I didn't bring you my dear Princess and the Herb. That was also there in the old lecture. Which is also very rich.

We will deal with three. Some of them are tales. The ugly duck that we will work on is more for a fable than for a tale.

But there are still many symbolic elements.