What Fairy Tales Tell Us About Love
Look out Sleeping Beauty, that kiss means more than you know
Once upon a time, in a kingdom that existed not so very long ago — but before the advent of technology, gadgetry and gaming all-nighters — there lived the fairy tale.
Looking back, especially if you’re a snarky teen, the fairy tale could seem like a rather pointless, perhaps lame affair of dungeons and dragons, handsome princes and women prone to fainting then sleeping for a thousand years.
They were the sort of books your mother read to you in bed after a hot drink and an overwrought tucking in which, if she’d had a particularly stressful day, left you feeling like your legs had been stapled to a cross.
However, fairy tales were supposedly exciting things filled with conquering heroes and jaunty damsels, wicked step parents and vile in-laws.
No-one really understood why they read them to their offspring, as like many things, they had been passed down the generations without question.
The fact that you may terrify your child with depictions of child-snatching and occasionally child-eating, just before bedtime, didn’t seem to impinge on the consciousness of mum and dad.
They would read you those stories anyway and then complain when you insisted on leaping into their bed in the middle of the night because something was under yours.
But as with so many things in life, there was a deeper, more hidden purpose to the reading of the old tales, the most famous of which, from the Brothers Grimm, were published in 1812.
It is an interesting footnote that Hitler seized upon these German tales as emblematic of racial purity, many believing they were both peculiar to and representative of their culture.
But I digress. For the real importance of fairy tales is that they fall under the broad church of mythology and it is through myth that we connect with the great archetypal themes of life:
Birth, death, abandonment, betrayal, good and evil, youth and ageing — those experiences that are universal, that will happen to us all. And, of course, love.
In their peculiar fashion, those old fairy tales were instruction books for life.
It is said that a myth is the dream of a culture at a particular point in history and that myth is something that never happened yet always is.
Try getting your head around that one! Myth never happened yet always is.
That’s why we love the story of the Holy Grail, why John Steinbeck came to England in late middle age in search of a King Arthur his mother read to him as a boy.
We love what we can never quite reach, and no more so when it comes to love itself. Don’t we just love to dream of a Shangri-La where all our problems disappear and where we spend our days basking in a beatific bliss?
But if our dream became reality, wouldn’t we be just a little bored? Only until we are ready.
Fairy tales are like that: they hint at something beyond our grasp yet which seems utterly essential.
Sleeping Beauty done wrong and dead in a glass case, Cinderella down in the basement being kicked around by her step sisters.
The implication here is that prince and princess have a long way to go before becoming king and queen, and it is only by becoming truly sovereign that they get to serve the wider community and become true leaders.
We just know there’s a hero or heroine about to appear or be birthed through their dread trials, and their struggles resonate deeply with our own journey.
What is needed of course is love. It is love, the tales say, that will wake us up and heal, yet it is not necessarily the romantic human love these stories point up and the language of which is used by the Sufi poets like Rumi and Hafiz.
In fact, like individual dreams and mystical poetry, these collective cultural dreams, contain messages from our souls and speak to us in the soul’s language of imagery.
Prince Charming is the divine masculine spark whose kiss wakes up Sleeping Beauty’s slumbering soul. This is the divine marriage that Christ spoke of as bride and bridegroom.
And the endings of these tales represent the beginning of another chapter in love. They are all honeymoon and no power struggle.
In truth, as we all know, the lovers despite finding each other and that cosmic kiss, will have to go through their own dark night to become the truly mature lovers life intends.
The implication here is that prince and princess have a long way to go before becoming king and queen, and it is only by becoming truly sovereign that they get to serve the wider community and become true leaders.
In one of the earliest myths about love, Tristan and Isolde, we are given all we need to know about the illusory nature of romantic love and the dangers of drinking the love potion.
As in all myths, it contains lessons of great import: the need to balance both masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche; to understand the whole of western culture has drunk the love potion (the lovers drink it on the high seas) and is under its spell; how the masculine’s ruthless drive for power has all but destroyed the feminine values of feeling and relatedness; how we need to withdraw our fantastical projections from the other and see them as they are; but how we also need to honour our projections by putting them into an inner, spiritual life; and how some cultures, happier than our own, don’t worry about romance at all.
It’s a myth written for men and the women who love them and it urges men to stop putting their anima, or inner image of women, on to their actual woman.
For, as wonderful as it feels, and although falling in love is necessary to glue us together to propagate the species, projections, being unreal, can never last.
And to hold on to them can prove fatal. Tristan and Isolde show us that, as do Romeo and Juliet and countless mythical lovers.
We can also see it in horrific true stories of those love addicted, desperate males who cannot bear for their wife and children to move on and commit the final desperate act.
Love addiction is culturally sanctioned — a phenomenon that flies under the radar just as alcoholism did a generation earlier.
And it has been sanctioned for a thousand years beginning with Tristan and his beloved Irish princess.
In his ground-breaking book, We — Understanding The Psychology of Romantic Love, Jungian therapist Robert A Johnson, shows that after all the inflations and tragedies of romance, there is a human love.
It involves finding relatedness and beauty in the ordinary and the everyday and he suggests we save our cosmic dramas for our imaginative world.
Should those old fairy tales come with a health warning? Well, maybe, but if we understand what is really being relayed we can understand a great deal about ourselves and the love that makes the world go round.
©simon heathcote
