Wisdom grows out of a fairy tale
By Dave
July 15th, 2008 | Leave a comment
By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
Ever heard of a fairy tale called The White Snake?
I hadn’t, until hearing a lecture on it recently during the 2008 summer programming at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York.
The classes on myths and fairy tales are among my favorites each year at Chautauqua. A lot has to do with the teacher, Kaye Lindauer, recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University. Lindauer, who is in her 21st summer season at Chautauqua, teaches from the late psychiatrist Carl Jung’s perspective that fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche.
Now to the story. The crux of it is this: A wise king has a servant bring him a covered dish every day after dinner, but no one, including the servant, knows what’s on the plate, because the king waits until the servant leaves before lifting the cover. Each day the king eats a piece of the white snake.
You can guess what happens next: The servant gets curious, and one day lifts the cover unbeknownst to the king. The servant, too, takes a bite of the white snake, and immediately gains the ability to understand the language of animals.
On the very same day, the queen loses her ring. The servant becomes a suspect and faces execution unless he can find the ring. Turns out a duck had swallowed the ring, and because the servant understands the language of animals, he overhears the ducks talking, learns what had happened and retrieves the ring – saving himself but not the duck.
The servant then asks the king for a horse and a little money to travel. The king agrees and the servant sets out. End of story.
For Kaye Lindauer, the symbolic meanings of even this short story took up two days of 75-minute lectures.
A couple points, to give you an idea:
• Fairy tales show how a new cycle of growth evolves in a person. Change is the goal, which is huge, because it means that a new dominant voice within you must replace the voice that has you locked in your comfort zone and trying to please others, even to your own detriment. If you opt for change, expect conflict in your life, because the price of growth is that you must fight resistance. In this story, the snake represents renewal, because a snake sheds its skin. As Lindauer pointed out: Jung believed that we are constantly pushed toward growth, and if we try to repress such growth, it comes out in the form of sickness or maybe an accident. Status quo is not an option. We either grow or we digress.
• Once the servant tasted the snake, he gained new insight, and once that happened, he couldn’t go back to being the person he was before. Lindauer: In real life, the process can take years. Once you know what you know today, you can’t go back to where you were before. Your own knowing keeps you from going back to the place of not knowing. It’s the Garden of Eden metaphor: Once Adam and Eve tasted the fruit, they couldn’t go back to their prior innocence. And the white snake? Given that we, too, are constantly shedding old skin, the challenge becomes that of saying yes to a life that over and over will never be the same.
