Faith in the Magical Animal


A friend sent me a couple of poems she wrote. One had a fairy tale motif (the princess and the horny toad) and both were very smart and well done. I sent her a couple of references on fairy tales, specifically The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, and the series of books by Marie Louise von Franz on the meanings in fairy tales. In the process of looking at these references it occurred to me that fairy tales are the true "old time religion." They reach back more than ten thousand years, as old as the Native American civilization of the Cherokee. Only true conservatives believe in fairy tales.

Today I saw in the news that the radical Islamists in Sudan want an English teacher to be executed for allowing the children in her class to name a teddy bear Mohammed. On the news I'm hearing Romney trying to damage control the religious issue because he's a Mormon, Huckabee trying to present himself as the darling of Christianity, because he's a Baptist, and Obama having to deal with fears that he'll be associated with Muslims because of his name.

My reasonable side says that the Muslims in Sudan are just extreme right wing fundamentalists, like we have in the deep South, but without the restraining influence of the legal right of the individual to think freely. Anybody who can think freely can name a teddy bear Mohammed or a stuffed giraffe Jesus. These are not capital offenses in civilized society. That suggests that we are not dealing with civilized societies, or at least are dealing with societies which abet uncivilized behavior.

That there is actually some consideration of jailing or whipping this woman for not making Mohammed the hood ornament over which she views the white line on the highway of life causes me to have second thoughts about restraining the dogs of war. It certainly makes me have some empathy for General Mathis' saying that it's fun to shoot some people. If there are people demanding the head of a schoolteacher for how she named a teddy bear, I don't emotionally relate to them. If the marines weed whack them I'd have to consider that Sudan is the home of, and sponsor of the Janjaweed.

It might be a good idea for radicals who want to kill everybody not like themselves to realize that they are going to be exterminated eventually if they don't evolve. This would be a motivational factor to lighten the fuck up on old English women without much savvy regarding religious insanity. We don't kill of Saudi women for naming a stuffed animal Jesus. This goes beyond cultural understanding and strays over into homicidal hysteria.

The name Mohammed is regularly given to humans who haven't got a fraction of the psychological nobility of bears. Should the mothers of every man named Mohammed, who didn't grow into a wise warrior, be held to judgment for insulting the prophet? Was Mohammed Ali guilty of insulting the prophet when he lost to Frazier?

Religions are trouble, at least at the conservative core, where there is no ability to integrate with other belief systems.

Fairy tales provide a much better psychological foundation for life, and there are none of the downsides of religion. First of all, there are no laws. Right off you know that's good news, because it suggests individual freedom. The more laws you come under the less free you are. The fewer laws, the more freedom.

In a fairly tales there is no law. There is no proscribed behavior. What will save you in one story will get you killed in another, and how do you know what to do? Well, there's one thing that always saves you in the fairy tale, and that is, following the advice of the magical animal.

There is no other law.

The foundation of a fairy tale has a mathematical structure, which is discussed by von Franz in her books. She was the first to realize that the human DNA is similar in structure to the I-Ching.

I was thinking about this today when I read the poems from my young friend. "It's all fairy tales to me," she wrote. And I realized that it's taken me a long time but I've finally realized where my true religious fidelity lies: it is in what is oldest, what reaches back furthest in time, and connects me with the longest history.

Fairy tales present a picture of the psyche, and of the ways in which patterns act out in it. As a foundation, they avoid morality, religious laws, submission to institutional authority, and mortification of the critical faculties.

So, which candidate is willing to stand up and profess that his or her religion is Fairy Tales? Anybody? Dennis?

Posted: Fri - November 30, 2007 at 05:20 PM