Helena Tužinská (Comenius) and Chris Knight (UCL) decode the fairytale ‘The three enchanted princes’, a very widespread ‘animal suitor’ story, in a unique Slovakian version.
The fairy tale ‘The Three Enchanted Princes’ starkly contrasts a picture of nature as barren wilderness against an idealised image of fertility in the form of cultivated gardens and landscapes. The version we examine, first published in Slovakia in 1881, specifies fourteen days as the interval between spells, like several other recorded variants. What distinguishes these Slovak versions from the other widely distributed European variants is the stress on monthly periodicity of the enchantment and the references to hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Both the heroine’s (time-bound) and the hero’s (space-bound) adventures are discussed in light of the overthrow of the moon’s former centrality in favour of a new reliance on seasonality and hence on the sun.
Helena Tužinská, PhD. is an Associate Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her research focuses on ritual, communicative space, court interpreting, and cultural expertise.
Good evening everybody. This is the third in the series this term we’ve had on myth and fairytale, and it always draws a good audience, which is, really nice to know and today I was advertising this as three enchanted princes, ritual syntax and the interpretation of fairytales.
The, speakers, exalted speakers, Helena Ska from Caius University and our own Chris Knight and the author, partial author of this paper is also Edward Hurst, who’s been a long-term researcher on myth and fairytale as well.
So I’m handing over to Helena and Chris.
Thank you much. Make sure you keep in the, in the frame when you’re Talking. Yes. And sometimes I’ll stop he helenka if I think her pronunciation made it completely incomprehensible and repeat and sometimes I’ll just keep in with my Slovak.
For those who understand Slavic languages, they might enjoy the original.
You can hear the sound of our language a little bit, but not all.
So, how did this all happen is, so let’s say, 21 years ago, during my doctoral degrees, I happened to be in London reading Blood Relations and attending some of the Chris’s lessons as a student.
I also read First Gender, Wrong Sex, an article by Camilla Power and Ian Watts.
I recommended it to all students. My students love it as now I teach in at the Communities University, at the Department of Archeology and Cultural Anthropology.
So the story we are going to be discussing tonight is one of which I discovered by reading bedtime stories for my children.
Right now, our co-author Edward Hurst, is reading bedtime stories to his own children.
So the real he is not clear is because he is reading bedtime structure.
Hello Ed, let me acknowledge the influence of my own father who kept reading the three big volumes of the Hinky collection of Slovak fairytales for the first 14 years of my life.
So I was first introduced to the study of mythology by Slovak scholars who are direct students and of the founders of the Prague School of Linguistics.
So let me here express my gratitude to Professor Milan Lecha.
Professor Alek do luva specialists in Slovak and Slavic folklore.
So of course there are many ways of interpreting myths here.
I will just mention the union approach, the, the Union union Approach, the, his history of geographical school, the romantics who founded the mythological school, Vladimir props, formalist, morphological analysis and then there are many literary approaches, the ecology of folklore and so on.
Chris: So people have long wondered how it is that fairytales from all over the world, widely separate regions and continents, even separate times and places, how all these diverse fairytales can display such striking formal characteristics.
It’s as if you’re hearing the same story, maybe rearranged, but you just recognize, ah, this is a version of the same basic story and people have just wondered how can this be? How can this be?
Okay so, I’m primarily influenced by the great French structuralist, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who inaugurated what I consider the science of mythology with four immense volumes, on a thousand North and South American myths.
And in terms of their underlying syntax, that’s kind of the cognitive engine driving, producing these stories.
He came to the astounding conclusion of the last, at the end of the last volume.
All the stories right around the world are one myth only.
It’s if the entire planet is embraced by a single myth in all its variance, it’s not at all that they’re the same.
They’re not the same, but you could just, you tell that they’re coming from the same place.
And, so on the one hand it would seem that anything can happen.
The myth, it’s just a myth. You can die and you can come alive Again, you can define gravity, you could turn into a total or something.
So it seems as if anything can happen and yet as LeRose noted, this apparent arbitrariness where kind of anything can happen, this is a quote from LeRose, is belied by the astounding similarity between miss collected in different widely different regions.
and he concluded that the invariant underlying syntax, a kind of universal grammar of world mythology, must stem from certain innate properties of the human brain.
He, he considered perhaps the, the, the, the almost biological architecture of the human brain forces storytellers to keep within these, constraints.
a marvelous idea and one of the things is that, I mean this is my PhD really on Claude Levi’s myth mythology.
One of the problems really is that he never quite specifies what this one myth is in sufficient detail for us to make tests.
I mean, are there some things which you should never find in a fairytale? and so what I’ve tried to do was to find a way of making more concrete, more specific this underlying, syntax.
This this one myth.
only, so, okay, look, taking this four volume work, he comes to his final myth, and it’s a myth from the Ojibwe Indians of North America.
and it’s called, the Two Moons.
and in this narrative as an all this, countless variance and echoes, life’s swings like a pendulum between two contrasting categories of time.
Two opposite kinds of male partner or husband.
There’s like two categories of men, we might say husband versus brother, two opposite kinds of female partner or wife, and indigenous, but in indigenous belief systems across the Americas.
We actually had a talk by Jerome Lewis here, just a quite recently, dis discussing his own experience with the Benni people of the Conga.
These are forest people sometimes called Pygmys, and they have a belief.
Woman’s biggest husband is the moon.
and, and, and that what that means is that a man may have a wife, kind of wife, wife is quite the right word, really.
cause they don’t have weddings and marriages and con man doesn’t ever has conjugate rights.
But you can’t have a wife, have a wife.
but you can’t keep her because if she Ben straight, she’s moves away and she’s with her as other husband because she’s menstruating and the proof that she is with the other husband, the moon is the fact that she’s bleeding the is from the moon.
If, if the moon is not in the sky, he must be down on earth, giving women that, blood.
So while, and that this is the, this coincides really with the idea of the tricks that hunter gatherers don’t really have almighty God, sort of supreme being like a king or something.
They have this trickster who moves between heaven and earth, life and death, web, female, constantly playing tricks, constantly moving.
But while that woman is in that other place, that other world, and I would say when she’s in seclusion, because she’s menstruating, she won’t be cooking, cleaning or getting intimate with her earthly spouse and often in the midst, this is pictured as her rebellion.
She’s kind of in a kind of rebellion against order.
and when she returns from that other world, her apparent change of heart is many of these rather patriarchal myth maybe interpreted, oh, last, she’s settled down.
She’s realized what she was supposed to do.
She’s supposed to be a nice beautiful wife, cooking for her husband, giving him sex, donning his socks and stuff.
So she, she’s moved from being in, in rebellion with the, her moon husband while she’s menstruating and then she comes back from that other world, often linked to the, to, to, to to the world in the dead.
She’s dead for a while.
Menstruation is just a temporary death that she comes alive again and all this is reflected in myths which depict human relationships as in constant motion according to the comings and goings of the moon.
: So in 1991, following an exhaustive reanalysis of Le Trois four wheel work, Chris Knight suggested that this same pendulum could be treated by IES as a transformational template, sufficiently detailed to provide a hypothesis whose predictions could be tested.
Knight’s model subsequently fleshed out by the Portuguese ris Isabel Cargos Camila power and Okay, so, I, I would say if you want, if you want a book with the myths and fairytales of a whole country, really made sense of, Isabel Cargas is the, is the book to choose in and out of Enchantment Blood, symbolism and Gender in Portuguese fairytales is a marvelous, marvelous, book.
So although I discovered this book in London when I came back to Ti lava, I picked it up from my own shelf in my own library, finding out that this is actually what my professor was talking about too, while I had to come here to discover the book I’ve had at home.
So shall we explain the rest of this here? The two Okay.
From the otherwise we’ll not finish the story.
these categories devoid of concrete meaning or content, not philoso abstractions along the lines of being where nothing.
Okay, so, so lemme says, ultimately all reduced to being or, and nothingness to be or not to be and I felt it’s a little bit abstract and actually it’s not so much to be or not to be as enchantment on.
We need that last picture, please. Which one? Make sure that people can This One. This one? No, the last picture. This one. This one.
Okay, that one. So this is a simple version of the one myth only.
Right across the world you have life, death, life, death, life, death, life, death, life.
So you’re just dead for a while.
Come alive, life for a while, cut. Dead. So it’s this.
Well, the other world, this, well, the other, well, it’s a constant movement like a pendulum and then it, but it, this is just circular.
It’s just cyclical time.
But most of them is kind of patriarchal actually.
cause the world is mostly patriarchal and so the end is the end of the, this is life and death separate.
The problem being that now when you’re dead, you stay dead, you can’t get back from the dead to new life and you get stuck, huh? I no get stuck. And So you’ve got stuck. So now when, when we, I we’re all gonna die.
The trouble is when we die, unlike what the moon does, it comes alive again.
When we die, we’re stuck. Having the earth accelerated.
You’re, you’re stuck, you’re dead. That’s it. End of story.
Okay, so here we go.
many of you might have read it or heard it elsewhere in the text of cam law, power and Vos in their text to increases model.
I’m not sure we need to read it.
The, it’ll be here for sufficient time.
But in this effect, the first column amount simply to signal on and the second to signal off.
No storyteller wants to lose a signal, which would happen where on and off to be carelessly, blended or confused.
Maximum clarity is achieved by distinguishing off from on.
So the model would therefore be falsified if we found, say, a traditional magical tale describing a dragon as eating, cooked food or getting married.
Have you ever heard of a dragon getting married? Have you ever heard of a dragon eating cooked food? So the critical thing is this is like a digital signal, rather like computer language naught and one naught and one naught, and one, you either switch the magic on or you switch it off and all these aren’t different signals, they’re just waxing.
Moon, dark moon is, they’re different versions you can signal magic is on both seclusion.
Moving to the other world night, any of these things will get you into the world beyond, into magic and any of these will rescue you from that temporary other world back into ordinary life.
So these are all alternatives of the same signal and these are the, the other basic signal and what we don’t expect is that a storyteller will just mix up the off and the on mix up enchantment with disenchantment, which would happen if we had an, an incident where what, one of these things coincides with or merges with one of these things.
So this model, unlike I think unlikely associates, is saying what you won’t find in a story, which means if you do find it in a story, the whole theory is wrong.
I wonder for people who are on zoom, until which line, you can see it thunder’s noise in comparison or in contrast to conversational speech, what is below is kinship versus affinity, gender inversion versus hetero sexual polarity and last is carnivalesque laughter. Various.
Can you see that you guys versus serious management? Serious management. We can See it. They can see it. Okay. You got the idea? Yeah. Okay. So The reason we’re putting this up here before telling you the story is to sort of give you the key to the code.
So with with that, you should be able to make sense, much more simple intellectual sense of the story and realize what genius is in these stories that if you don’t have that, this basic structure. Okay.
So, of course storytellers are free to invent whatever narrative details come to mind that only certain variants that we made will echo previous versions or related stories and so be remembered and transmitted to future generations.
Should a storyteller conflate signals of enchantment conflate them with signals of disenchantment, the opposites would just cancel out, right? Mixing a plus with a minus, you just you’ve got nothing there.
So the narrators error would simply break the swing of the pendulum leaving any traditional audience confused.
The simple rule is that a good is that a good storyteller would not want to mix up or blur enchantment with disenchantment.
So we’ll not want to mix, say talking animals, animals with talk or, or language with human conversation.
which with or the successful cooking of meat, waiting, move, cooking.
Cooking with cooking means is here, okay, this is blood raw, this is cooking is here.
Sorry. And chop off. This is cooking off. Okay, thank you.
The model would predict then that no one who has morphed into an animal will get legitimately married to a human spouse while still in that condition.
Or again, it would predict that no heroin will be cooking or feasting during a thunderstorm or when blood of any kind is flowing.
So to this, Isabel Cardus as that masculinist, I’m, I’m, I’m in the wrong place.
I’m sorry. It’s okay. So Cardus in the book we mentioned earlier, in and Out Enchantment, as that masculinist ideology tends to value, to quote, Isabel, one side of the female cycle alone, the ovular fertile and male responsive aspect of woman.
The menstrual phase is labeled as negative and alien, but it is also powerfully magical and corresponds to the sphere of enchantment in which the adventure in fairytales takes place.
So the magic is to do with bleeding, like the way animals bleed in the hunt, but also it’s, it’s, you are secluded from this everyday world and in another world altogether.
So the motive of the animal groom is a well known across the world.
In the Anna Thompson Index, it is numbered. That’s The On Tops index, that’s an index Of all index And fairytales 552, the Animal Brothers-in-Law.
The version we reproduced here was first published in Slovakia in 1881.
Like the other Slovak versions, it specifies 14 days as the interval interval between spells, Sorry, very clear.
So these, these Slovak versions specify 14 days is the interval between magic or evil spells.
You have a spell and there’s 14 days till the next round.
The earliest version of our, our story entitled The King Son was recorded in 1844 by Samuel Royce in his code Ky.
He has studied in Vienna, sorry, in Vienna, and has been a student of herder and gte herder, herder and gte.
When he came back to Slovakia, heavily influenced by these thinkers, he started and collected several fairytales and published, manuscripts then pa options ski, with his sons and him.
It also continued to print first versions of Slovak fairytales, and he called them, it’s as nourishing for a nation as mother’s milk.
So everybody should read it and let’s provide people with their story.
As you can imagine, this was a time of Austria ag and Hungarian empire where all the nations in Southern Empire needed some kind of foundation in their own folklore and years later, Yui Paul Luca, the famous, Czech, professor of linguistics, has published an inventory of Slovak fairytales, in which he refers to all kinds of collections, all of the versions, all of the possible versions of the same stories, including the versions of, minor ethnic minorities living in Slovakia and elsewhere around.
So in this, in this comprehensive, comprehensive collection, usually poca categorizes this detail and its variance under the title, the Brothers-in-Law, who became enchanted into animals.
So the brothers-in-Law who became animals under a, under a spell. Yeah.
Distinguishing these versions from the European counterparts is their precision in identifying the moons vaccine and waning as the purity governing pre civilized life.
The three enchanted princess tells of a king who abandon hunting and gathering in favor of civilization and the orderly management of property civilization is a blissful state of sunshine, patriarchal order and conjugal security.
Pre civilized surgery, by contrast, is relentlessly periodic swinging like a pendulum between normality and enchantment.
Under a demon spell, Under demons spell.
So a gre kink kills far more animals than he needs.
As he hands on the land, in the air, in the sea, each time he’s stopped by the guardian spirits of these different game animals.
First a bear, then an eagle, and finally a fish.
The eagle enchanted princess are in fact bridegrooms, whose periodic misfortune is to be transferred by magic into guardian spirits who are also blood thirsty beasts.
Each of these creatures is the protective spirit of king or king of his particular rhythm, the mountains, the sky, and the oceans.
In other versions, it might be a raven and a wolf, but basically it doesn’t matter.
Raven. Raven, thank you.
The spell is broken by the king’s sun who reaches to the sky, where he seizes the golden key to unlock the demon secrets, invading his hidden sanctuary and casting him down into the underworld for all eternity. So, So these, so these animals in a way, they’re not really animals, although they really, they really are animals, but they’re princes who have come under a spell and been turned into these animals, which are very blood thirsty, but they’re also, there’s a huge moral elementary because these are the guardian spirits of the game animals.
They’re, they’re the protectors of the wild, these animals.
So each one is the king of the, the, the bear is the king of the animals of the forest.
The wood, the, the eagle is the king of the birds, of the animals of the sky.
The great ferocious fish of the king of all the, fish and other animals and so to our story.
Okay, Chris, can you be in the, I’m gonna be in the screen.
Sorry. Okay. Once upon a time, there was a king, he had ceased to gather any wealth.
All he did was squander.
I want you to just realize this is a patriarchal pro civilization story.
kind of dismissing the whole hunter gatherer way of life.
It’s just yet, oh, they just scrounge. They just get food.
They don’t accumulate any property. They’re kind of savages.
Okay? So he had seized to gather any wealth.
All he did was squander and such a squander.
He was, he would’ve squandered all the treasures of the world if only he had them.
But far from it, even the clothes on his back were not his own.
Aha. He said there’s an easy remedy and what was not will be I’ll go after the game.
Animals. There are plenty of them still in the mountains, and no mortal man will stop me from hunting them.
One day while he was hunting, he shot a whole heap of game and he might have had enough with that.
But then one more hair lept out in front of him.
I won’t spare you either, he thought and instantly he took aim and shot him.
But there, and then the mountain began trembling.
He looked around and saw an enormous bear crashing through the bushes.
Whenever he stepped, he crushed everything to bits and he growled and roared to the mountain, shook the king was petrified with fright and he stood as still as a tree trunk.
But the bear reared up in front of him and placed his front paws on his shoulders and he bellowed Domi.
Probably most of you need that to be translated.
So here it is. Here I’ve got you.
I’ll shake you till you are a ball of thread.
How dare you slaughter my subjects? And now you’ve shot my most capable young follower, my hair right before my eyes.
For that you will either pay with your life or you’ll promise me your eldest daughter in marriage.
In 14 days, I will comfort her.
There was no escape for the king from the bear’s clutches.
So he promised his daughter in marriage and the bear released him at home.
He said nothing. He just went around like someone who hated the world since he wasn’t allowed to hunt the game animals anymore and he didn’t know what would become of the girl, but he didn’t want to surrender her to the bed just like that for nothing.
On the 14th day, he placed a heavy guard around the mansion with orders that any animal approaching however small should be shot and on that 14th day, everything was quiet until midday.
But at midday, a party of noblemen came thundering into the courtyard.
In 12 covered coaches, the young prince had lighted from the leading coach.
Gentlemen descended from the others, and behind them were used bringing riches to the mansion, saying that these were gifts for the pride for the bride and for the honored parents and the prince bowed before the king, the queen and the princesses and his proxy suitor came forward and requested the eldest daughter to be the wife of the prince.
Neither daughter nor parents had any objection to that.
But the tormented father declared her indeed a royal princess would be a worthy wife for the prince.
But how can it be? I’ve had to promise her to a horrible bear and this is the very hour when the monster is to come her Tamed video.
So, the, the suiter, the prince stepped outta the, the coach says, Hey, what could a bear expect? Surely you’re not going to give her to an an animal and even if the bear did come, you’ve got a heavy guard out there, which will easily get rid of him and so the king is deceived into losing his eldest daughter.
cause of course, this handsome prince, of course, as every kid will just laugh as this is the bear who’s at midday.
Of course that’s the time of the light has turned back into a human again and the tragedy is repeated with his next daughter, following his excessive hunting of aerial creatures and encounter with the enormous eagle and the trick is repeated a third time when he encounters a frightful fish three times, then the gullible king is fooled into surrendering his daughter to a beast who has temporarily assumed human form.
The king has military might at his disposal, but this counts as nothing when up against the forces of the moon.
It is exciting to find that the 1844 version differs in ways that add precision to the lunar calendar.
Inspiring the sale.
In this version, the bear who demands the king’s eldest daughter in marriage promises to come for her not in 14 days, but a full month later, by that stage, once again, be dark in the 1881 version, which is today’s, as we have seen, there is a celebration and wedding feast with gifts for the maiden’s parents.
The noble suit in this version comes in human form telling us that it must be full mood.
Dark one is not the correct time for feasting for or for a successful wedding.
So in the 1844 version, sure enough, there is no celebratory feast or wedding.
Instead, we learned that four weeks following the king’s encounter with the bear, a roll of black cloth suddenly rolls from a coach straight to the princess room.
It wraps her up and takes her away a roll of black cloth, which sizes hold of maidens, A roll of black cloth which cas hold, seizes, hold Seizes, hold of maidens is an ingenious metaphor for dark moon.
In this case, the king returns from the disastrous hunt to find his chambers filled with a bright price gold without encountering any human.
The same happens with the eagle and subsequently with the fish.
So you, you’ve got here a small scheme.
Yeah.
Seeing how these three daughters disappear in three different realms and how well realms, realms, how these breadcrumbs are Turning wild according to the moon.
Soon you will be told a secret.
Don’t tell it before.
So, alright, but let’s, let’s return to the version we’re starting with our original version.
Yeah. so the king’s third daughter has got into the coach with a fish king and the noble company thundered away.
and that leaving the royal mansion deserted except for the poor king and queen who’ve now lost all their daughters and they’re all on their own and now comes the turning point in the whole story, the movement from the king as a kind of useless hunter-gatherer to being a proper accumulator of property.
He has a dream, the king dreams of abandoning his hunter gatherer past and turning to orderly administration, the cultivation of plants and the effective accumulation and management of property and the, and the linguistic register in the story, changes as we move from this period of wilderness and, and, and periodicity in, into this now disenchanted world.
The disenchanted world.
The world without magic is the world we now, live in.
Still not.
So These are the words. So the actual text, which I’ve just sort of summarized us now, that night the king had a different kind of dream.
He was appalled by the constant squandering of his means, followed only by poverty and a life of aimless blundering.
When he rose next morning, he was no longer the man he had been till then and he truly committed himself to repentance, Having paid off his debts.
The king hired orderly servants, brought upright people into his council, and now began to administer the country properly as lord of his estate.
Soon he had someone to do all this for because the queen became pregnant and bought a handsome son.
Notice that while he was out to gatherer, poor man only had daughters.
Now we’re getting into civilization.
He has a son and, the king’s son is born and grows up into a young man and he discovers the flower bids.
So, and it’s in the introvert, it is in this image of a cultivated garden of flower bids nicely organized that the misspells out its central message and the message is that the wilderness is kind of barren and fertility now depends instead of on the moon, husband and menstrual blood, it now depends on cultivation.
So I’ll read this out. While playing in the Palace Gardens, the king’s young son wondered why three of its flowerbeds had been abandoned to the weeds.
He commanded the gardener to dig these flowerbeds neatly and plant something there.
Yet when he came to the garden next day and the day after, the flowerbeds were quite as neglected as before.
So he asked the gardener, why have my instructions been disobeyed? The garden explained that these had once been the flowerbeds of the, the princes dead sisters and the flowers themselves were stricken with grief.
In this way, the young prince learns for the first time that he once had sisters zaki, abandoned seabeds are patches of soil left, neglected, allowed to run wild.
Critically, the heroes, three sisters themselves, are in exactly the same situation.
Living not in mansions, but in a cave, in a nest or outta the waves.
That is the nature of enchantment, of seclusion in another world.
Have, have we got that lovely picture, that beautiful Yes.
Picture we just had with them, the one before. Yes.
I mean here we have these see the system themselves, all the, they’re in the wild, they’re bear cubs, the water.
So even this one.
So there, so in the, in the flower bed, there’s certain areas which just like weeds in the wild and, and because of the grief for the missing sisters, but the si themselves are in the same, are in the same condition.
They’re in the wild. It’s set up being where they should be, of course, in a wonderful, wonderful, palace.
So the palace. So, yes. So here we are.
Okay, so let’s continue with our story.
In search of his three sisters, the king’s son sets off in a beautiful covered coach and with an entire army of soldiers, they went straight to the mountain where the father, cause they’re trying to find the first of the sisters that was taken by the bear.
They went straight to the mountain where the father had once encountered the bear and to whose slope the gentleman in the 12 covered coaches had carried off the princess for a while.
They made good progress until they came to a thicket.
Then however, an enormous bear leapt outta the thicket and made for them and while the prince was collecting his wits, his entire army had been scattered in all directions and the enraged bear was approaching the coach not wanting to wait there for his death.
He leap from the coach and beat his way through the thick as best he could.
He ranted, he found a cave and went in there like a shot, thinking it was a safe refuge.
But in that cave, remember the picture that cave at the start, there was something, something was in there.
A lovely princess was playing on dry brushwood with two little bear cubs.
As soon as she saw him, she leapt towards him crying.
Oh man, you’ve come at a bad time.
My husband will be grumpy coming home.
He’ll tear you to bits and he won’t spare you, whoever you may be.
Who should I be? I’m searching for a sister who’s married to a bear.
Save me if you are from God.
He said There wasn’t much time for talk.
The infuriated bear was already in front of the cave roaring until the rocks are shaking quickly.
She hit him under the brushwood, the bear shot into the cave like a ed thing.
His eyes flash fire and he sniffed to every side roaring wife.
There’s a stink of human here out with him just now I scatter the whole army and I won’t spare this last one either or else I devalue to my mind, knowing, of course, checking the beanstalk.
This is V five fo thumb.
I smell the blood of an English man.
It’s always blood that arouses these these, these monsters.
He wouldn’t be calmed down is the bear.
He just flung the brushwood about with his paws and snout already he had the crown prince by the lake and the young man was so frightened he didn’t even know where he went and what became of him.
In his terror, he fainted and later fatigued as he was, he fell asleep.
We may interpret this as his rite of his death to this world and the resurrection in the next.
In terms of the time resistance syntax we’ve seen in the beginning he has moved from the realm, realm of darkness, thunder sounds, and raw flesh into the very different world of sunlight, good manners and civilization.
So all these stories, by the way, I would say pretty much all fairy stories give you a a nice map of the experience of undergoing initiation from childhood into adulthood and you can’t be initiated.
You can’t be reborn without first dying.
So you have to die in order to come alive again and this is this, king’s son’s, experience of exactly that.
So now he wakes up. As he woke up, he rubbed his eyes and where did he find himself? In a magnificent palace and in a soft bed with a gilded frame, he leapt his feet and looked out the window there, the sun, not the moon.
The sun was shining beautifully and the mansion’s courtyard was full of vitality with people passing through and the servants of some prince running here and there to all appearances, they were at home.
He was warbly welcomed by the bear who had previously been bit his leg.
Now first back into human form, Welcome brother-in-law.
Welcome now that you’ve made your way to us.
Let nothing in the world surprise you yesterday as a bear I would’ve torn you to pieces.
Good day. I welcome you as man to man and we know you well, but what you don’t yet know is that we are all enchanted.
Know then that apart from your sister, all of us here are wire are here.
While the moon is bright, we become people just as you see us.
Now, yesterday when I had you in my pool, the hour struck and you were able to sleep with us like at home and now you’re also our beloved guest for a fortnight.
The oldest known Slovak version from the 1844 from the manuscript is no less precise about the number of days each spell lasts until full moon having been cast at a new moon.
It is at full moon that the animal brother-in-law resumes his human form.
So when the moon is full, they turn back into nobleman.
An oral Slovak version recorded a hundred years later revolves in 1934.
So revolves around the same periodicity.
The enraged bear referring to the king’s daughter says after 14 days, I’ll come to her.
The reason for our conviction that 14 days refers to lunar per periodicity to the waxing and wa moon, is that the narratives themselves are explicit On this point, each of the animal brothers explains to the puzzled hero that he alternate between animal and human form in synchronic with the moon.
The myth makes clear that this alternation applies not only to the these brothers-in-law, but to their human.
Each time the A is approaching on the 14th day, I’ve compared all the other versions, in our neighbor’s folklore.
Of course they have the animal bridegroom, but they do not mention the twist with the lunar periodicity.
Only the turning point.
So, so, so, so the other message should say, after a period he turned you to animal after another period he turned, he turned back into a Human. But several Slovak versions, it is very clear that it is connected with the moon.
Yeah. So, okay. And is this clear What’s going on? I mean, cast a magic spell.
It has to be dark moon forming doesn’t do that sort of thing.
Moon, in tune, romance, full moon, all that stuff and full moon just, just lifts all the sparrows for proper magic.
That has to be blood and menstrual blood is the most potent form of blood and that should happen that dark moon, because only a dark moon can.
Is it clear to everybody the moon is not in the sky? Where is it? Well, it’s down on earth and getting very intimate with all the world’s women and, and giving all the world’s women their, their blood.
13 days later, the bear warns the young prince that he must soon leave because the eye is approaching when he will turn back into a bear.
The young hero replies, I will not leave you before you tell me how to free you from this enchantment.
Tell me or I’ll die here with you. The bear replies.
So the heroism of this hero is that it gets rid of magic.
That’s a critical thing.
You want to get rid of enchantment because it’s evil.
So the bear replies, well then if you’ve committed yourself to that, go seek and you will find, take this tough to my own f fur, bear’s fur with you on your journey and whenever you are in difficulties, just cha it between your fingers and it will bring you help.
My subjects will take you as far as the sheep fold.
From there onwards, go seek on a tall tree, you will find an eagle’s nest.
Try to get to it to find the second sister and brother they will directly further.
So the hero goes off to look for, the second his, his the second daughter, his, his his sister.
They flew through the beautiful country until the next day.
But in the evening time when they came to a brook, our traveler found himself sitting on a board.
So instead of being a lovely coach, he’s just on a plunk of wood.
While the horses, the driver and the ews who were with him scurred off to all sides, like rats, squirrels, mice had, I dunno what other kinds of animals besides, he remained alone in the deserted night and didn’t know which way to move.
So clearly this, this prince, he’s completely lost.
when he is in the wilderness, the same happens when he departs from the kingdom of the birds.
Everything went dark before his eyes and when he came to himself in the morning, the wilderness and more wilderness was all he saw before him.
He wandered through these wastelands till eventually when he thought all this would never end.
He arrived at the shore of a lake.
The Salva world translates here Word As waste, plant or wilderness is postina implying abandonment, neglect.
CMS emptiness of culture of any kind.
Across this last boundary, the lake sho our hero enters the kingdom of the fish.
In this narrative, it’s the awesome bear himself who explains to the king’s son that it is from the darkest night in each month when the moon comes down to earth, that his subjects identified as the king’s in-laws turn into bears and other beasts of the wild.
the king meets an awesomely potent bear without hunting, telling us that he must have been shedding blood when the moon was dark.
By hunting at dark moon, the king is violating the rule that forbids hunting when women are likely to be menstruating something considered inauspicious.
Actually in virtually all hunter together traditions, you’ll find it’s, it’s called the ideology of blood right across the world.
A man must not hunt when his wife is menstruating.
It’s like he wants to shed blood, do not shed blood when your wife is shedding blood From now on. The landscape is upended so that evens and figures appear not horizontally like in the previous picture.
So, but vertically arranged. So First of all, all the, all the movements are along horizontal plane and now suddenly everything is twit up vertical and it’s in the, That both the old king and the his son, the new king, go in these all three realms with new emphasis on domination of the low by the high and interesting feature of this myth is how distance in time appears simultaneously as distance in space.
It is noticeable that events play out along a horizontal axis as the characters reach across territorial boundaries.
But this applies only to the male characters.
The female ones stay wherever they have been put changing only through time.
Isabelle Cargos view this as a general feature of the genre in fairytales.
We can see how the hering is time bound, how her ultimate glory is achieved through a submission and understanding of the rules of the nature, whereas the hero’s adventure conquers space and masters nature.
So this, this is just Isabelle’s catechist idea.
It seems to be pretty pretty, well supported women’s power to go places is to stay in one place but move through time.
Whereas heroic men don’t do that.
They don’t just wait around and change in time.
They’ve gotta move around in space.
So now we get to the tall tree, which the fish, fish, was, was talking about.
and the animal helpers that this next, the la this is the last episode where the, the, the, the king’s son, is meeting these wild animals in order to rescue his sisters.
In this case, the last sister, his brother-in-law, the fish flapped about and flung himself here and there.
So his, this brother-in-law is turning into, back into this terrifying fish flying himself here and there as if he wanted to break wheels to that aquatic urge of his had passed.
Then he was transformed into a handsome young man and he embraced his, his warmly loved brother-in-law.
The lake now was not even a memory taking his brother-in-law by the arm.
His host led him through his beautiful palaces and around the pleasant gardens outside there was not so much a mention of enchantment or anything of the like, and neither of them even remembered it and so it might have gone on forever if that 13th day hadn’t come upon them as if fallen from a clear sky, then his brother-In-law, the fish began to be grumpy and fidgety and wouldn’t have accepted him in the family, even for three loaded wagons of goods.
So can you see the, the logic here? It’s like, the story is sort of emphasizing it’s very important to have lots of wealth and accumulate goods, but as soon as one of the prince turns into a fish or other animal it’s like we’re not interested in property of goods.
So the crown prince knew already how things must be.
In other words, what’s about to happen and he didn’t let go. His beloved brother-in-law, that’s a fish brother-in-law until he had told him everything and now this is very important in the story.
The fish, tells him everything As the, the hour is approaching, I suggest to skip the Slovak part and to have the English one.
Is that all right? Of course. Okay, Gone. So this is the fish speaking now.
and giving away the final secrets actually over there, right across the sea, there’s a tall tree, simple as fur, but bare and smooth right up to the crown.
At the very top there’s a single small branch and on the branch there’s a little leaf and from that leaf hangs a golden key.
You need to get to that, you need to get that down.
This is the key to open a rock in which there are six rooms.
The first is just a kind of cellar.
The second is freezing cold, the third is scorching fire and the fourth that are snakes that bite and in the, in the fifth against silence, whoever goes through those rooms will get to the sixth room there.
Now this is kind of talk about menstrual seclusion.
This is some form of it. Okay? There behind that door sleeps a sorcerer was put us and our sister under enchantment.
cause she did not want to be his this, this girl didn’t want her moon, didn’t want the moon husband.
She’s rebelling against the moon husband.
Our enchanted sister is lying in the middle of that room in an iron chest and she’s neither asleep nor awake, neither alive nor dead and from time to time, the sorcerer awakes pricks her with a short, sharp sword and ask, will he be mine now? Oh, well not she stomachs in pain.
The soer mumbles then, so then live and rot and everything is again as it was Now, if she were just to say, just once I’ll be yours now the saucer would rise and she would have to be his bride.
Or perhaps he would release us too from this enchantment.
But she, and we are wasting away in enchantment and we will continue to waste away until someone hears all this and steals up to the source of his bed and seizes the golden trumpet over his head to blow the trumpet blast that dissolves r spell.
By then the crown. Vince knew what he needed to know and he knew to what he had to do.
He took his leave of his brother-in-law and sister and hurried chose to be across the sea.
When the r struck for his brother-in-law, the fish just in time.
He still had one foot in enchantment when the are struck.
But he quickly withdrew it and the sea poured out behind his back and he was beyond it.
He now faced a tall tree growing right up into the clouds.
There were no footholds on it or anything.
He could grip, he spec on his hands and wrapped his legs around the trunk.
But even though he clambered up as a bit, then he would slip and shoot back down to the earth.
The golden key at the top of the tree seems impossible to reach and as a hero attempts to climb up, he slips and falls and hits the ground.
He’s cut by the sharp knife he was keeping in his pocket.
Of course, this reminds me again of the jack and the be storm.
You’ve gotta, any man in order to go into a magical place, he’s gotta bleed and one way or another man, can man can man can, can do this.
so the thrusting this knife into the tree, he leaves himself higher and higher.
Yet even now, the hero cannot reach the golden key without the help of wild beasts and so this is one of the messages of the myths, I think, which is that the civilized world can produce all sorts of things, but not magic.
So magic must be taken from the wild for use against the wild Fur is now set against fur feather against feather and so while the high up in the tree, the hiter was threatened from below and above by wild balls who attempt to fell the tree and then by hawks who try to pick, pick peck out his eyes instead of being trn to pieces.
However, it is the wild animals who suffer this faith.
This happens because the hero can now rub a tough to bear fur, to summon help from 12 bears who tear the wild boars to pieces and rub eagle feathers to summon eagles or scatter the haws.
You see what’s going on here. It’s like divide and rule.
He’s now got the magic and he can use bear bare fur against the wild beast and, and you and, and, and, and eagle feathers against the other, the haws.
But further the bear feathers, feathers of the eagle and finally, secret knowledge from the fish help the hero not only to survive, but to remain in touch with the wild, a source of potency.
So now you’ve kind of got the magic, but it’s under your control.
It’s it, no, it no longer the moon’s magic no longer controls you, you can control little bits of this magic that you’ve turned it against nature.
So although the overall message of the civilizing hero is that he can break the monthly spell, in truth, he can do it only with the help of animal brothers-in-law, who provide him with gifts consisting of parts of their own bodies.
Now the challenge is for our hero to find that golden key In the wilderness where our story starts.
Any notion of locks or keys would be observed, observed, Observed any notion in the wilderness, any notion of locks or keys would be observed because Hunter gatherers do not build fences or store grain in barns.
Since property is not accumulated, there is no need for locks.
But as we have switched over to civilization, valuables must be guarded under lock and key.
The lock and key Marriage follows the same rule.
It has now become bed lock Marriage has now become a welock.
This is in contrast to the hunter-gatherer tradition where a woman can separate from her partner whenever she likes.
The golden key in our story can be read as a necessary means to unlock property or open doors.
It is worth considering three features of this key.
First, it is very high, located in the row above as if dominating all below.
Secondly, it is made of gold, the color gold of sunlight.
Finally, it is a small object which only one individual at a time can possess.
A key can only work if there is a corresponding lock, A suitably shaped hole.
The forest with each rocks and caves offers no such opening.
There was a rock ing up above his head about how to gain entry.
Where could he open it up? He would have brought it on and never got anywhere.
But when the problem is solved, it is not through the heroes ingenuity, but only thanks to magic.
Unintentionally, he struck the key against the rock.
It opened the white immediately as soon as the golden key tinkled upon it.
So the hero now enters the rock to discover secret surf as predicted by the fish, as secret of rubs, taking him through the utmost extremes of hot and cold, terror and joy.
All these opposites. But he does, he runs through these periodicities quickly as if to sort of get rid of them, get, get rid of them all and in the final room lies the sper band sister of the three animal kings.
any other visitor might have endured each room for a period, but our hero is committed to instantly overcoming all ancient periodicities.
He will collapse, collapse them in one single leap.
So can you see what this method is doing? It’s, it’s ideologically depicting like communism and motion.
This life of pendulum movement between waxing a winning moon.
It’s depicting it, this kind of unpleasant, absurd extremes.
So he ran forward and made his way through the four rooms and a rush only haunting in the fifth.
One of his hips had frozen, the other was burning, and the snakes had bitten him everywhere back and front.
But in another room he has, he is healed.
But all of his ailments healed in that fifth room, which was so quiet and pleasant.
It was beyond all that anyone has ever reported. In this story, the hero prepares himself for the obliteration of periodicity by racing through four. The forums.
These are the four rooms Here.
His passage carries him from the extreme cold to extreme heat, extreme suffering to extreme healing, all in one go, as if on and off canceled each other out.
This loss of signal As if on and off canceled each other out.
It is then mered in the story by its counterpart.
The devil too is now pictured as preventing womankind from alternating between life and death.
She’s stuck in a space somewhere in between, neither married nor unmarried.
The life or death This depicted not simply as death, but as a fate.
Worse than death, an emptiness of all life or meaning or purpose and so it is that in the last room, the hero encounters the devil.
So now we encounter woman’s biggest husband, the moon.
But in this version, of course, this woman’s biggest husband, this rival to the patriarchal husband that wants to keep his wife forever.
This moon husband is now depicted as the devil, the demon and there indeed just inside the door, the sorcerer, the demon was lying, stretched out on a bed and over him hung the gold and trumpet the maiden was lying.
Pale is death in an iron coffin in the middle of the room and she was neither alive nor decaying.
So, what’s absolutely clear is that the demon is the source of menstrual bleeding, In our fairy tale.
Oh, here.
So the R of 12 struck the saucer rose and pricked her with the end of a sharp saw.
Can you see what’s happening? The woman’s biggest husband of the moon producing menstrual blood is depicted as an evil demon, kind of wanting sex with a woman and making a bleed by pricking her with his sword.
So the sorcerer arose and pricked her with the end of a sharp sword.
Will he be mine now? Ah, I would not have made them stomach so and mist across the world.
Women bleed because they’re mischievous trickster.
Their other husband visits them during their seclusion in a menstrual hut, in a cave or other dark cabin.
We’ve seen the pictures of a cave here and we’ve now got another very, very, very deep cave.
His monthly visits, in, in ethnography like Jerome Lewis, who’s been speaking earlier, talking about the Benji.
his monthly visits mean that the woman is temporarily separated or divorced because of the menstrual taboo from her husband.
It is this which makes him so threatening to any hero who wants to assert permanent rights in his wife.
Any man who wants to have a wife and keeper is threatened by the moon.
If the moon keeps making a bleed and therefore have to go into seclusion.
Even in modern Slovak, a woman who is menstruating may refer to is it is mess.
The little moons traditions across the world agree in attributing menstruation to moon.
Who makes laughter woman each dark moon.
I’m not going to read Slovak as the time is running.
So I mean, so, the, the, the, the heroic princes attacks the, the, the demon.
The sorcerer slashed him with his sharp saw trying to cut off his hand.
But the young man withdrew his arm and blew on the golden trumpet and left the spell as if a hundredth thunderbolt struck that hole.
Enormous rock wall burst to pieces and the sorcerer fell all the way down through it.
When the young man looked round to see what was happening near him, instead of the rock wall, there was now a huge mansion free of magic spells and instead of the surrounding wastelands and mountains, there was a city and handsome regions full of life and vigor and beside the young man.
Now, there was no other living soul in the palace except the arisen maiden delightful as an angel red cheek and blooming as a rose, sensitive as a dove, lovable as a dove and then, and then as her very first words, that lovable dive coup to a young man, oh, I’ll be yours only ‘cause you have set me free.
The sister of the animal kings is depicted as a rose in the full bloom, thriving already as a rose.
No metaphor could convey the glories of cultivation more powerfully.
Just as the weeds are replaced by these rose.
The bear is replaced by a doll, the eagle by a daf and the monstrous fish by an angel.
All in their different ways representing docility utility accessibility, and subordination to patriarchal control.
A positive gloss is put on getting stuck.
They all lived happily ever after.
Positive gloss is put on getting stuck.
They all lived happily ever after.
So we’re saying that the demon, and by extension really all other forms of this devilish trickster is actually the moon that provides blood for women.
Now, if we were right, this demon clearly would have to have somewhere inside him an awful lot of blood.
I mean, he’s gotta provide blood for all the women in the world as as they, as they, as they bleed and so in the 1844 version of our tail, the ogre is pictured as filled with vast quantities of blood and the king’s son defeats it by cutting off his head and chopping into pieces where upon the blood spurts out for five fathoms the bloodstreams out like a, like a book.
So we’re just saying that that detail confirms who the demon is.
He’s the source of women’s menstrual blood, and that’s why patriarchy treats him as as so evil.
okay. Now, when ancient hunter gatherer traditions began breaking down to scientists stood on the cusp of dramatic change.
Instead of en endorsing or finding strength in women’s comings and goings, men began to get anxious viewing each monthly separation from their wives as a violation of their conjugal, right? I’ve married this woman, she’s my wife.
She shouldn’t keep disappearing In response, they mounted ideological campaigns, turned marriage into a fixed contractual state, menstruation, and the moon became demonized and scorned storytelling was one of the methods used to explain and justify men’s efforts to override the former influence of women and the moon.
But of course, storytelling on its own could never have secured structural change on so massive a scale.
Patriarchy had economics on its side.
It was the development of cattle herding and farming described in, in this story as the domestication of these animals and the, and, and cultivation of, of, of, of plants.
which led to the adoption of seasonal periodicities.
Obviously, you can’t plant seeds and gather the crops within a month they have to wait a whole year.
So seasonal periodicities, seasonal periodicities became inevitable and these were ultimately incompatible with timekeeping by the moon.
in myths and fairytales, we find scattered imprints, such as in this one of the most momentous and disturbing transition of prehistoric times, the overthrow of the moon’s former centrality in favor of a new reliance on seasonality and therefore reliance on the sun and so the point we’re making, I’ll just summarize it all.
This story is not just patriarchal in the manner typical of the genre.
It is extravagantly, remorselessly, patriarchal.
and in, in this talk, helenka and I, we’ve highlighted this unusually extreme manifestation of patriarchy in the hope kind of that it might incriminate, incriminate itself by its absurdity.
Renting ourselves of menstrual sacredness of the forest and of the wilderness, clearly we think makes no sense.
Eternal patriarchy makes no more sense than eternal matriarchy.
Merely to attempt either extreme is to ensure defeat, because each presupposes its own opposite.
The source of the world’s fairytales is a pulse.
The hunter gathered a heartbeat of ritual and social life, even in demonizing it.
We might say, especially in demonizing it, this story does an excellent job in reminding us how we once were.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, oh, no, I, I forgot, forgotten the last I forgot.
Okay.
Demons Have a Good, yeah. Full screen.
There’s the, sorry.
So, so that these demons always hobble.
They’re laying though, They’re la As symmetrical. That’s all tricks of the la by the way.
They’re all because the moon’s lopsided sea.
So he’s got, and, and here his hoof has actually got a, an, an iron force you on it.
So, and of course they don’t look very pleasant, these creatures.
They’d rather, they look rather evil.
But these, this is nice version of women’s speaking up With lots of blood on.
Yeah. Yes. Okay. Wonderful. Okay.
Thank you very much. Got them for questions, please.
We can we shut this down now actually, because do we need to? You can, yeah.
cause then we can shut the whole who we need.
We can shut that down, can’t we? That’s shut it.
Yes. Okay. Just ‘cause then you don’t have the line. Mm-Hmm.
we’re not showing the guys on the same. Okay.
So, yeah, quite, questions in the room and questions on zoom.
Camilla: That was the most fantastic double act well done you guys with all the beautiful diagrams.
Chris: A guy called Max Buller said that all the world’s fairytales are about the sun.
They’re about the sun rising and setting and there’s a huge, reluctance to consider that we once live by the moon because of course the moon is moonshine and its lunacy and all these things which picked yucky uses to, Yeah. I mean it speaks up in Egyptian kind of they, they use the sun as, as well as the moon.
Audience member #1: Yeah. As elemental and as part of emotion.
It’s interesting that the patriarchal destroys.
So you think of the terror of the Catholic church against women in, .
Absolutely. And as acting as cross medical kind of Course.
During the witch hunts, of course women were accused by the witch hunters accused of horror or horrors having intercourse with the devil.
About the origin of why the week is seven days and I was thinking like, fortnight sounds like, well, like fort you been strong and it’s about fortnights.
14 days does that to do with the, the half moon and then it’s the week to do with the quarter moon.
I, I can’t think of any other possible explanation.
A month is a month. A month is what’s a moon? 29.5 days and yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
But There are also other versions of weeks.
Like African weeks can be four days and then you have seven of them.
But then, but It’ll still Be, but in Slovak, there is no distinction between moon and a month is the same word.
There is no distinction at all.
So there’s no word mess.
There’s no word for month. It doesn’t Mean moon. No, no. It’s only mess. And little moons mess means the period.
So like li I’m having little moons. That’s what, okay.
Of course the curse is, a word to which people use more often.
But in Slovak, in Slovak.
But Messi is a kind of older and nice version of telling each other.
But mess is just one word.
It took, it took all kinds of heresies, heretical, denunciations, all sorts of things to establish what an earth a month is.
Once patriarchy took over, if it wasn’t gonna be actual moons.
So it had all these Gregorian calendars, Julian calendars, all sorts.
I mean really and they, and they end up with this nonsense.
29, what is it, sorry, how is it? What it, how does that jing All nine days.
Yeah. But I was looking at also for some, for some other signals where the moon could be present in other fairytales differed from this one and I found two others where is explicitly mentioned that in two weeks time, after a prince princess is meeting sort of dragon type figure, in two weeks time a Noman arrives again.
So it’s the same principle and also, when princesses are taken, taken into the underworld, the hull is guarded by a very small man with a long bird, long beard, long beard, also governed by the moon.
So it’s Ty brother. Just gotta just check. Did everyone get the kind of falsification experiment that Helenka was discussing? Where supposing the story is a variant, which doesn’t say in 14 days.
It says actually in a month’s time, do you remember what happened in the months after 14 days when the, when the, the, the bear and the other animals come in human form? You have a lovely wedding and a feast.
Can everyone under see why, if you said right, not 14 days, but a moon whole month later, can you see how well it’s gonna be dark moon again, isn’t it? You don’t have weddings at dark moon.
You don’t have cooked food at dark Moon.
You don’t have all those things at dark. What do you get? You get a roll of black cloth Woo.
Seizing hold of the girl. So, so In that case, the animal suture doesn’t come outta the roll of the animal seas pains the menstrual Husband. Yeah. So I just thought there was a brilliant insight of which you found this alternative version.
It looks like it’s at first sight.
You might think, oh, oh, it’s not 40 days, it’s a whole month.
Oh, that’s kind of wrong then. No, it’s, it’s, it makes it, the Story respects the, So that’s an example of how we’re saying doesn’t this syntax, which remains in variant doesn’t mean all the stories are the same.
It means that through all the variations un under underlying rules are respected and those are the rules of the distinction between the two moons, the waxing moon and the waning moon enchantment off from dark wind onwards, on from dark wind onwards, switch it off from full moon downwards.
So you just have two moons switch off, switch on. That’s it.
Seasons. So the way Yeah, well we said that we can, Can you make sure that Zoom, sorry.
So quite rightly, somebody who knows a bit about all this, of course I’m sure we do, you pointing out you don’t lose the seasons and you don’t.
But we’re simply saying the ultimate magic comes from the, the monthly changes.
cause they’re the ones that bleed. And of course, as you switch over into more and more seasonality because of agriculture and so on, you’re gonna get the seasons as well and of course in the, in the transition period when the old hunter gathered away of life is beginning to disappear and you’re beginning to build Stonehenge and various things, you’re gonna get the sun and the moon and of course the problem is then how do you reconcile those two clocks? cause it’s quite difficult. Stonehenge was a brilliant solution, by the way, to reconciling those two clocks anymore.
Is there any clue in the stories on how to get back the enchantments? If, if you get stuck in a disenchanted world? There is a very similar question here.
How do we break the lock and get back to real life? Real life? Yeah. So you synchronized with Daniel.
That is the best question ever.
Actually, this is the one we’re racking our brains to solve.
How do we get back to something which can work? Camilla wrote a, I think a marvelous essay, on how to breathe actually in a, in a journal called The Journal of Global for Lines Global and she had, or in a kind of joke, she said, what we need is abolishing capitalism probably isn’t realistic.
But if you just divide up time into like, okay, we’ll get, we’ll give, we, we can still abolish capitalism, but then, then for two weeks and then let capitalism come back again for another two weeks, it probably won’t be able to develop a, a banking system and armies. And Let’s follow the recipe of this.
Got it. The story that, that it’s saying you respect the two weeks, you turn into, a human being for the full moon, and then at the dark moon, you turn into a wild beast that’s connected, that’s an advocate of nature.
and there can be no accumulation of property.
Everything kind of gets zeroed at the dark moon.
Everybody’s equalized with equal rides or access, zero, and capitalism kind of comes back at the full moon for as long as it can last until the dark moon.
You know, it’s, it’s, nobody’s gonna be able to accumulate very much.
The bankers can play it being bankers.
The, capitalists can play it being capitalists.
So I’m not sure if we wanna have arms, merchants magic To boot.
You know, they haven’t disappeared.
People still practice magic.
They do. But it’s very individualized.
It it’s very individualized magic, isn’t it? It’s not very societal moving social kind of organ organizing, societal action. Action.
So Peter, we haven’t got the last slide.
The lovely dragon, Oh, you forgot the dragon. Oh, sorry.
Okay. I mean, can I just, can I just say a little bit more tiny bit more than that? It’s just that, I mean, obviously it’s a complete fantasy.
Supposing we had a voluntary insurrection right across planet earth that we, we took power.
What we’re saying is what next? The best thing would be to surrender power to the capitalists, but don’t give them more than a fortnight.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no Fortnite on Fortnite on Fortnite, off Fortnite of Strike Fortnight, they’d never be able to accumulate property, develop armies, kill people.
I mean, it’d just be play play capitalism. Play capitalism and some people like playing big businessmen and customs officials, anti-immigrant policies and all that stuff.
Well let them play at that as long as it’s just a game.
A very important point actually made back. Yeah.
grabber and gro in their book, the Dawn of everything, they sort of wish we could all be getting back to joyful laughter and play, et cetera.
Yeah. Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Anyway, are there any more questions? Any more questions on Zoom people? There’s lots of Take it all back in two weeks as Daniel.
Yeah, we do that. We, but we’ve gotta get a rhythm going.
We’ve gotta go with the lunar rhythm.
It’s, it’s all, no one rules up the moon.
anybody else on Zoom? Anybody? Well, that was a fantastic question.
Do the fairy tales give us a clue of how to get back the magic? Great. It’s, and yeah, it’s a very hard one and times aren’t so good these days.
So things are looking not very, I think it’s not looking very good for the world.
how come? I mean, what we’ve been telling you today is actually quite controversial.
It’s not, not everyone would agree with all this.
So I mean, everyone’s got a a, a right to be pretty, skeptical about it all.
Is it true that every magical myth in the world follows that same syntax? I mean, I, I kind of invite you all to look for an exception because so far we haven’t found one. We haven’t found an But, but this story is extremely overt in, its in Luna Key.
It really is, is speaking. It is is very exact.
but what I do with students is that, I let them reach, selected 30 medical, fairytales, in which they’re invited to apply the ritual syntax and find for themselves how it works even without ity.
I think it’s a very playful way of doing it, but also this way of interpreting fairy tales, links all kinds of previous scholars views on it.
Yeah. Morphological. Yeah. You know, symbolical level That’s Right. This, this, All the traditions can Click.
Exactly. we, we feel that our version of this method of interpreting, which Levi introduced isn’t an alternative to do these different other ways of looking at fairy tales that I think you mentioned.
It’s actually just a way of bringing them all together.
we had a student actually a long time ago, Jason Wilcox, who wrote a lovely little essay on how even if you’re making films these days, and we were doing, we were doing all this a Jurassic Park, wasn’t it? But all kinds kinds of catwoman.
If you, if you don’t follow this syntax, somehow the film won’t be a box off, box off his hip.
It just won’t cut it.
so I mean, just, just to take Jurassic Park, I mean you have these dinosaurs, huge female dinosaurs, all the ground shuddering.
Now if that had been happening in the dark in a lovely blue sky with little cotton wool clouds of the sun shining, that would’ve been wrong. You know, They, they only have the, her before ju dinosaurs in The sun when the dinosaurs are just about to really start eating people.
Woo. Huge thunderstorm and all goes dark and all the rain starts falling.
So darkness, wetness, blood, raw boo all go together and sunshine happiness and nice, nice quiet music and falling in laugh and all that stuff all go together, ? And if you mix up the two, you’ve lost it and this, it just won’t be a box office hit.
cause people will think, ah, I don’t feel that works very well.
I dunno, I’m getting very confused what is supposed to be going on.
So even with, even with modern drama and stuff, that sort of basic syntax still seems to work.
But I should just perhaps say when we talk about fairytales, they’re not quite, I mean all sorts of other, other forms of story tell us about what somebody did and a few hundred years ago or something to be a fairy tale.
It has to be magic. And if it hasn’t got dying and then coming alive again, it’s not proper magic.
I mean, proper magic is you die only pop up alive again.
That is real magic. And any other men can do that.
The Irish are quite a strong tradition.
They certainly do. Yeah.
Irish did you? No, you’re not, anymore Mark R Raver and we grow’s dawn of everything.
Will they suggest that human origins or years ago we sort of chose, sat around and decided what sort of lifestyle we’d like to live with X female years or whatever in reaction to our neighbors or whatever.
So incenting, whether we were hunter gatherers or agricultural was just a choice.
The tragedy is that now would’ve lost that, but to shoot more living and if that were the case, presumably there would be some evidence in the myth of the past that in some way people did choose one.
Or now my understanding of the, the way that the, or, whatever is these are not the choices that there very clear material factors to push people in this direction or that direction.
It’s not simply people sitting around.
But I don’t probably another question you to answer.
Can you even think of any myths where people are sitting around just choosing how greater than where suggests part? I mean the door of everything doesn’t mention myths.
All that’s fine.
So we, we, we reached, we renamed this, this talk, what it getting civilized is getting stuck.
So the, the dawn of everything, which is a lovely book which everyone should read.
It sort of says, we got stuck when a few, when King James the first and a few other kings mixed up paternal love with coercion and control and all that stuff quite recently and that’s what they think we got stuck and we’re trying to say, well actually we really got stuck a lot earlier, when we lost touch with the moon, to be honest and we, and so once you had patriarchy and, and so civilization, we were kind of stuck in let there be light and all that stuff.
Although the, obviously there’s memories of this, um periodicity and the and, and the longings for that periodicity and people don’t like being stuck in one.
I mean everyone would, all of us have, I think, yearning to be kind of somebody else for, for a while.
I mean, just being stuck in the same persona all the time and not able to move it to a different domain.
You know? Yes, it does get a bit boring, which is the point that the grape weger make.
But their explanation for, well how things happen is not very good because it just says, well, people can do what they like.
Everyone always did what they pleased, but for some bizarre reason, certain desperate started wanting to do kind of bad things like mix up devoted care with coercion and control.
But Mark, as I understood your question, regarding the choice, some of the choices we can’t make, of course we, we do sometimes mix up a day for night and night for day, but without respecting the heartbeat of the moon and it’s with cultivation that we have kind of legal time, isn’t There? Sorry, sorry, do, can you repeat that? Only with cultivation, do we get leisure Only with cultivation, but what Not only Through, not cultivation, You mean through farming, but that’s probably the opposite of the truth in terms of, I mean, there’s been a lot of discussion of the amount of hours a day that hunter gatherers have to work and initially with the original affluent society, Marshall Ss was arguing from Richard Lee’s data that they don’t have to work as hard as us in cap under capitalism or as farmers at all.
so they called immediate return hunter goat.
They work that day for what they’re going to eat, that day practically.
Well, it’s not easy to go out and hunt meat as one would like to think historically, what, what is read even the last Go out, but the actual but time budgets of hunter gatherers are certainly no more farmers are, and they’ve done work with farming populations among agta hunt gatherers and agta who have started farming and particularly the differences with women, actually women’s work goes up with farming, comparatively is really, whereas men’s doesn’t change that much.
so we See We have a question, we have a pressure in front.
Well this is also an important point, but because it, we can’t assume that cultivation means more leisure time far from it, Just wanted to tag on to the idea of choice within folk or bid and ask if that would even be possible given that, from what I understand of retailing, et cetera, they’re not counts of histories of things that have happened, but rather creations in order to give a moral or to tell of a change or something that’s already happened.
So could you have a choice in that if it’s more of a representation of society, of a movement rather than of how it happened? Does that make sense? But it’s, you’re saying it’s not a history.
Yes, it’s a representation so that you can obviously choose.
I don’t you, you guys, what do you wanna say? You can choose what you want to represent and what you want to validate.
Yeah, but the factors within them wouldn’t be sat around the fire.
No, I they would debating the choices, et cetera, because influence you towards Yeah, yeah.
The tales are designed to influence you towards something rather than to tell you how they reach that decision. Am I lost, Do you remember that detail that, that Helenka was emphasizing about the, the, the, the hero, the king’s son.
How when, even when he is got the key, he doesn’t, he doesn’t use it, he doesn’t load it.
He, oh, I’ve got the key now I’m gonna open the door.
Like it’s his choice. It’s a complete accident.
It’s just like he drops, he accidentally drops the key, it hits it against the rock and it opens the door.
So I think these stories are kind of emphasizing there are, there are mysterious powers out there which make things happen and it’s, it’s certainly not an easy thing for people just to choose how things, what’s gonna happen next.
Even, even when it, when the narrative would suggest that it should happen.
There’s certainly, there’s no indication in these stories that people just choose to live this way or that way.
So much more, much more powerful forces, at work.
making people sort of giving, giving people options and rather constrained options.
Actually.
I’m just thinking about the comparison with the, creation story with Adam and e remember reading it occasion ago, Ishmael, but they sort of talked about now the interpretation of that was that they left the Garden of Eden because then they would have to sort of farm and toil the land and everything like that and whether that was just a sort of a, a movement into like sort of having everything he wanted and then suddenly like the world turns and everything that’s magical in abundance suddenly turns into agricultural and obviously there is this sort of man and a woman thing, but I’m not sure if there’s a patriarchy. It’s like, Have you noticed if you see the pictures, it’s the man and a woman and a lovely tree of life and a wigwag was exact z exact z exact snake alternating to and fro to and fro, which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, light and dark.
So Adam and Eve story is telling us about a time when we were periodic and then we got expelled from the Garden of Eden and hasn’t been so good And there’s loads of them.
It’s not it’s like there’s lot of flood story there’s going back Years the flood story is Yeah, yeah.
I mean the flood story is another one about, it’s actually the tidal flood, which includes oceans, but also the flood inside women, the great flood of blood.
But yeah, I think the central message would, would be the pendulum for me.
That’s, that’s a central message of most of the stories keep to the pendulum.
The pendulum swinging this way and that way.
Andy Luna, we call it Luna rule by the moon Rule, by none, by the moon.
I don’t know if, if we could, yeah, I yeah, you didn’t wanna say anything Lex about him, about No, quite, we have a wonderful doist in the room actually.
But she wants to be, keep quiet and see things. Everyone’s right. Of course.