The hidden meaning of fairy tales

Its for children!

For children, you say. We’ll see about that.

We have most of our adventures for children from sources in the early 1800s. In particular, the Brothers Grimm, who were not only children’s book authors but competent historians, linguists, and folklore collectors. Next, we have adventures from Hans Christian Andersen. Some of his adventures are his own stories and others are paraphrases from older sources. No author lives in a vacuum. From these and many other sources we have the adventurers with a very long-lasting appeal. Why this longevity?

First, fairy tales have been preserved and used by people from generation to generation. People do not give up their traditions unless someone steals their tradition and gives them a substitute. Second, the kids have always loved them. Fairy tales combine everything that children get exited about: the dangerous and seductive, the grotesque and humorous, the fantastic and the true tragedy or comedy with ample opportunity for identification and empathy. Add to that the hero’s story, which is a model story about everything the children will encounter in their own lives. They are tales of good and evil and how to understand and deal with it. Magic is dealing with reality.

Next, the fairy tales are loaded with archetypes just like the hero’s story. Carl Gustav Jung has provided the key to that layer in the fairy tales. They are the eternal stories told to people and children, for the good fairy tales are not only for children and childish souls, otherwise the adults would not endure reading them aloud so many times.

But then there is the hidden meaning. There are hidden – or occult if you will – analogies and symbolism hidden in the fairy tales. They thus become containers for knowledge of the universe and the human soul sneaking in through the back door. Without there being anything odious in it, it just makes it even more exciting. They are message in a sealed bottle for stored knowledge from distant times who like archaic stone monuments will stand there until someone comes along and decodes them.

Let us first look at them in the form of some examples.

Snowwhite

It’s a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. The story of the envious queen, the fair-skinned princess, the seven dwarves and the prince who rescues the princess from her coma. So what do we have here?

The Queen is the Queen of Heaven or the Queen of the Night. The composer Mozart and the theater man Schikaneder wrote an entire opera in 1791 called The Magic Flute, in which this frightening figure plays a role. In the opera, however, she is just scary but not malicious, for she sends the prince out to save her daughter, who has been kidnapped by the cult leader, the high priest Sarastro. The opera contains obvious Masonic elements and is an inauguration story. It is said that the Freemasons became enraged at Mozart for revealing too much, and if one is to be really conspiratorial, then they might have taken his life for that.

The queen of the sky is Nuut, the Milky Way, who stretches her wings across the sky at night. She is envious of the Moon, Snow White, who shines brighter in the Sky than her. She sits and looks in her magical mirror, the Mediterranean, and gets angry. The Egyptians saw the sky as a sea, and the Sun Ra sailed in his boat across the sea.

The seven dwarfs in Snow White are the seven planets from antiquity (planet means wanderer). There were only seven planets, for Uranus and Pluto were not observable, and hence we have the names of the seven days of the week: Sunday (Sun), Monday (Moon), Tuesday (Mars), Wednesday (Mercury), Thursday (Jupiter), Friday (Venus), Saturday (Saturn). But listen, the moon is also a planet then, and so it was according to antiquity, but then there is a planet missing. It is Neptune that has not been given a day of the week. But is the sun a planet, is it not a star? This is not how the ancients saw it, because in ancient times they only talked about celestial figures or objects. But in the 19th century, when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story, the seven real planets were well known, and it was well known that the Earth was a planet, for only Pluto was missing and was only discovered as late as 1930. Some astronomers are looking for a 9th planet, as they can not make the forces of physics make total sense in the solar system. In Indian astrology, one operates with two invisible planets, Ketu and Rahu. The solar system may have phantom pain, because there is a huge distributed mass in the form of the asteroid belt. Is it the missing planet that jumped to pieces once in a distant past? And did someone helped it with blowing up? Planets don’t blow up like that.

The seven planets follow Snow White as she dances across the sky. The queen becomes envious of the luminous beauty of the Moon and gives her a corset that she tightens more and more. From full moon to new moon, the moon gets thinner and thinner and eventually it dies. Until the prince, Helios, the sun prince comes and kisses the princess. How does he do it?

The sun kisses the moon, or the moon kisses the sun during an eclipse. Solar eclipses are one form of eclipse, lunar eclipses are the other, and each new moon is a lunar-earth eclipse, with the earth shadowing the moon. A solar eclipse is a rare though recurring coincidence of these two eclipses, for it can only happen at the new moon. Strange by the way? That is, the earth’s shadow fitting so perfectly in circumference to the moon’s light. But then the prince and princess get married and one cannot get married without a diamond ring. The ring is the halo, the ring of taillights that the sun behind the moon creates, and the diamond is seen as soon as the princess wakes up to life, and the first glimmer of sunshine protrudes from the shadow. Then the Snow White Moon comes to life and begins to grow and grow – she is pregnant!
You naughty prince, you!

Santa Claus

Today’s perception of Santa Claus dates back to the same time as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen collected and wrote their fairy tales. He rides across the sky in his sleigh pulled by four reindeer. The picture does not come out of thin air, for Odin, the king of the Germanic and Norse gods, rides with his hunting party across the sky on his horse Sleipnir, and the children place boots with hay on the charging stops so that the horse can eat of it. Thor does the same in his chariot pulled by goats. He even slaughters the goats to feed those who are his host on the journey and throws the bones in a pile – after which they come alive the next day. They have been reborn.

But is it not the same as Helios, the Sun Chariot, the god who runs across the sky wearing his red cloak? In the Egyptian version, Ra is is sailing in a boat across the sea = the sky. The golden sun chariot was also found in Denmark. It is also a story of the rebirth of light. When does Santa run across the sky? At winter solstice, where the sun dies and rises again like the moon in the Snow White story. Isn’t the Christian version of the story about birth and death – admittedly divided into Christmas and Easter? We say birth at Christmas, we could have said rebirth, but reincarnation was abolished in the ecclesiastical doctrines of the third century, so one could not talk about it. The Church Fathers Origen and Clemens of Alexandria had no problem with it. Did it disappear then completely? Is not Jesus dead for three days, after which he is resurrected from the dead and becomes Christ, the sun-god Helios? What more do you want?

When the sun rises again, we move towards spring, the new cornucopia. The ancient cults were about two things: 1. heaven and eternal, enduring, universal life, the great cycles, the return of everything, and 2. the fertility of the earth. Santa has his own cornucopia, his sack and the socks. In Anglo-Saxon countries, they have the old custom of hanging out a sock that is filled with gifts. Is not that the horn of plenty?

Rapunzel

There is a huge story hidden in this adventure. We settle for the elevator version and the abbreviated hints.

Rapunzel is the missing princess locked inside a tower. She throws her long blonde – actually red hair out the window so the prince can come and save her. Or is it her who really saves the prince 😉 But who is the princess in the tower?

She is Maria Magdalene, the princess with the long red hair and the alabaster jar. She always wears orange-and-green dress as opposed to the Virgin Mary, who wears blue and who later becomes the Queen of Heaven. It is with the alabaster jar that she anoints Jesus in Simon’s house. In the Talmud, she is called Miriam Magdalem Nessayam, which means something like ‘lady hairdresser’. But since the Talmud always plays on words, it does not mean Nessayam but Nazariam. She was consecrated a priestess in the 4th Jewish sect, the Nazarene , the Persian-Egyptian sect represented by Jesus. Incidentally, both were red-haired like several of the Egyptian pharaohs. In addition, Mary Magdalene was the most wealthy woman in Syria and Judea.

The Nazarene did not cut their hair, and therefore Jesus was always depicted with a long beard and hair. They were not allowed to cut their hair except as a victim on special occasions. Mary is not a name, it is a title, for mar means priestess. Magdal in both Aramaic and Egyptian means tower. The tower has two meanings: It is a phallic symbol. She is a priestess in a phallus cult, a fertility cult. The tower is also the pyramid. The Jews are the expelled tribe (Exodus) of the Hyksos people who lost access to the towers = the pyramids at the expulsion from Egypt. In return, they settled in several places in the Mediterranean, where they built their towers. The towers are also the obelisks. After all, there is a pyramid on top of an obelisk. Mount Sinai, which Moses – who was actually Akhenaten – ascends, was not in the Sinai Desert. It was the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Little Mermaid

Where did he get it from, Hans Christian Andersen? The Mermaid is lo and behold another representation of Mary Magdalene. It is almost as these writers of the early 1800s are members of a network of secret knowledge that they inscribe in their adventures. In the Disney version, she has long red hair, and you easily forget the hair color when you look at the green-patinated figure at Langelinje in the harbor of Copenhagen. Disney also calls her Ariel, which in Hebrew means Lion of God. It is, of course, her hair, the lion mane, but it is also Judah’s lion and the symbolism of David’s house and lineage, the Lion of Zion. The little mermaid is unhappily in love with the prince and disappears into the wave foam of the sea.

Who is also associated with sea foam? It is Aphrodite, the foam-born, the real mermaid, who is depicted with long red hair. She is also Venus, Astarte, Isis, for all gods and goddesses have many names. As in the Snow White story, she is linked to Nuut, the foam in the sea, which is the Milky Way, the Queen of Heaven who stretches her bow across the heavenly sea, the Cosmos. The Catholic Church calls itself the Holy Sea, and they portray their ‘goddess’, the Virgin Mary, as the Queen of Heaven. Isis is the birth attendant in a rebirth of her husband, Osiris. Again in the Disney version there is a hint. Who does Ariel have a picture of hanging on her wall? Maria Magdalene with the smoking candle in George de la Tours version.

After all, Mary Magdalene is an extremely central historical figure. She also appears in the King Arthur legends under the name Lady Guinevere. After the crucifixion of her husband, she settled in Provence in the south of France. Her orange robes are due to her ancestry called Orenia, her mother’s lineage and kingdom in Syria after her arrival from Persia. That is why the dynasty in Provence is called Oranje.

Centuries later, the family moved to the Netherlands, and from here they were imported as a British royal family. The mother, Theramusa of Orenia, was a descendant of Queen Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. The same was therefore Jesus, whose real name is Isas Manu of Edessa. So he married his sister according to good royal Egyptian custom! And in addition his second sister Martha. The Talmud clearly states that the high priest in the Temple in Jerusalem was required to have two wives, and that is exactly what he was. It was he who started the Jewish revolt against the Romans, for he was self-ascribed according to his lineage as the next Roman emperor. But he lost the battle to rival Vespassian and his general, Titus. Vespassian became the next emperor after defeating the Jewish uprising, destroying Jerusalem and the temple. That is why Jesus and Mary Magdalene are vilified in the Talmudic texts, because the rabbis hated him for destroying Jerusalem and the temple and for the diaspora to start for them. This is also why neither the Roman Empire nor later their heir, the Catholic Church could tell the true story.

AND – this is also why the church persecuted people who through secret tradition knew the story, so therefore it appears in Europe as the Grail Legends and the Legend of King Arthur and the 12 knights of the round table (12 apostles) who meet about the round table (the zodiac) and which guards the Holy Grail. And what kind of thing is that? They say it clearly in the Grail legends: it is a stone that was given to them once in the morning of time (in Egypt) by … aliens. It says so!

Jesus disappeared from the history books. And yet – he did not, because otherwise the story could not be reconstructed. Do not look for it in either historians or theologians.

Dan Brown wrote his own novel fairy tale, The DaVinci Code, which in its own pop version picked up the Maria Magdalene legend. He has ‘borrowed’ his plot from a historical research project in the form of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln). There they call the Grail the bloodline, that is, the family and blood of Mary Magdalene, which is both right and wrong. First came the stone that they guard, and then came the guardians who pass it on from generation to generation. It is the stone that is brought out in the Ark of the Covenant with Akhenaten = Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. It has since spent its ‘life’ in various places, but always on top of a conical mountain, ie a kind of pyramid. And where is it then today? Well …

We could find many, many examples of these hidden analogies and meanings in fairy tales. If we expand the fairy tale genre from being a 19th century type of children’s story to include the fantasy genre based on J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, legends and myths from antiquity, folk songs and poems from the Old Norse and the Middle Ages + the whole universe of mythical circles from all times and places as well as various fantastic stories from religious literature, so we end up with these narrative forms with their many layers and secrets being the norm and not the exception . It is a special language that was understood because people’s perception of reality was far more soulful and magical than we realize. Fairy tales are a form of alchemy, as Jung called it, a language of figures from the collective unconscious. It is also a language of mystery intended for the initiates, for there are incomprehensibilities which we do not understand right away but have to grow in order to understand. It’s called initiation, and a human life is such an initiation. Hence conceptual demystification.

A human life – unless it goes off the rails – is a natural initiation. That is why the ruling class is not appreciative of old people, traditions and wisdom among peoples. They are afraid of being matched and seen through. They have monopolized and encrypted the initiation so that they can manipulate the initiation.

We know that, for example, the Disney Group has all sorts of ulterior motives with their twist on the stories. Personally, I am very unenthusiastic about the self-absorbed teenage bitch of a mermaid they have created. They have raped H.C. Andersen’s delicate and tragic fairy tale character – while they still have built-in hints about: yes-yes – we know it well, while we fuck with the children’s brains and sexuality. The middle finger for that and for the whole corporations involvement in everything from pedophilia to corruption. In particular, corruption of the all the entertainment and news media they have acquired, with which they, like Hollywood, are destroying people’s morals and perceptions of reality. They have a mentally and culturally unhealthy agenda. Everything in their hands gets perverted beneath the surface with a slapsticky and lying facade. Fairy tales under their direction turn into illusion magic, a form of black magic. They commit a betrayal of the possibility of empowerment found in the fairy tale and transform the genre into a weapon against humans. The fairy tale has become an addictive drug where it should have been a magic vitamin bomb.

Disney’s edition of the Jungle Book is very cleverly put together. They have amazing cartoonists and animators. But they have ruined the story and turned Mowgli into a jerk, the snake Kaa into a lazy idiot, and the tiger into a mafioso who runs howling into the jungle with fire in his tail. Add to that hordes of monkeys dancing to jazz music. In the original story, Kipling’s Jungle Book, the jungle boy ends up in an abandoned, overgrown temple, where he is about to be skinned to death by a herd of monkeys, until he falls into a pit and meets the snake Kaa – who also wants to suffocate and eat him. But he makes a pact with the serpent that he is willing to sit outside in the moonlight and lures the monkeys so that the serpent can eat them instead. There wasn’t much meat on the boy anyway. When the jungle boy later moves into the village and discovers himself as a human, they set him to guard a herd of buffalos. Here he meets the tiger, who is far more dangerous than at Disney. On the back of the big bull, he drives the herd down through the gorge, where they chase Shere Khan and trample him to death. See, THIS is for children!

Dangerous adventure – adventurous danger

We find the same cruelty in the folk tales. They are full of killings and mutilations. Even at H.C. Andersen there is mega cruelty. What about Big Klaus and Little Klaus? After being bullied, Little Klaus takes revenge and throws his brother in a sack, so he drowns in the river. Way to go! The Story of a Mother is a story of death – and the atonement. The Ice Queen is a grim story of blindness. The little girl with the matchsticks is a piece of grim social realism about poverty and death. In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf eats fucking grandmother, but then it is also bounced up by the hunter. Mahabarata, which all Indian children know, is one great tale of war and destruction. The heros butcher the evil demons, yes yes, and they probably deserved it, because we identify with the heroes. But there are armies of people who get lost in the same battle.

Tutt nutty and cuteness does not belong in the fairy tales at all, it’s something that the entertainment industry has invented, and Disney is in the leading position here. Well, is it all about scaring the living hell of children, is it? No your spade, that’s exactly why the fairy tale was invented. The children learn to handle the dangerous stuff in a harmless medium, because everything can be dangerous in life, and you can not run from it or pull the duvet up over your nose.

Notice how children – unless they are really traumatized-scared or seriously afflicted for some reason – always curiously seek out the dangerous. They have to try it, they have to investigate it. Just tell a healthy lad that he must not, and she must not, and just see if that is not EXACTLY what they do. So until they burn their fingers on the gas burner, of course. When the generation of curling parents brooming away the smallest bump in the lane and the nanny state in wonderful union want to prevent and ban all danger and thus actual experience, they create generations of frustrated weaklings. The care imperialists will tyrannically decide what we experience – it could be that we experienced something other than what was on their wish list. Can’t have that!

The French composer Maurice Ravel (yes the guy that did Bolero) wrote 1914-15 three magnificent chansons for unaccompanied choir based on 17th century French folk tales. The third chanson is called Ronde and is about the old men in the village who admonish the young people not to go out into the woods.
It sounds translated from French like this:

The old women:
Do not go into Ormonde forest,
Young maidens, do not go into the forest: It is full of satyrs,
Of centaurs, of evil sorcerers,
Of sprites and incubuses,
Ogres, pixies,
Fauns, hobgoblins, spooks,
Devils, imps, and fiends,
Cloven-foot, gnomes,
Of demons,
Of werewolves, elves,
Warriors,
Enchanters and conjurers,
Of fairies, sylphs
Of surly hermits,
Cyclopes, Djinns,
Spirits, gremlins,
Necromancers, trolls …
Ah!
Do not go into Ormonde forest,
Do not go into the forest.

The old men:
Do not go into Ormonde forest,
Young men, do not go into the forest:
It is full of female fauns,
Of Bacchae and evil spirits,
Lads, do not go into the forests.

Of female satyrs,
Ogresses,
And Baba Yagas,
Of female centaurs and devils,
Ghouls emerging from sabbath,
Of sprites and demons,
Of larvae, of nymphs,
Of warriors,
It is full of demons,
Tree spirits and dryads,
Naiads,
Bacchantes, oreads,
Hobgoblins, ghosts,
Gnomes, succubuses,
Gorgons, monsters,
Do not go into Ormonde forest.

The maids / The lads:
We won’t to into Ormonde forest any more,
Alas! Never more we’ll go into the forest.

There are no more satyrs there,
No more nymphs or evil spirits.
… and then follows the whole list of glorious beasts from verse 1 AND the reason why not to go into the forest:

Because:
The misguided old women,
The misguided old men
Have chased them all away – Ah!

And then it can be just as much.
Children do not mind the adventure if it is not dangerous.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BMMmQjj3ipQ%3Ffeature%3Doembed

This is why government approved playgrounds are so boring, because you can no longer get hurt. That’s why there are horrors, splatter movies and computer games where you shoot the heads of zombies and drive old ladies over in cars. We can discuss whether this kind of thing helps to blunt the young people, but a bet is that the answer is only yes if they have been blunted in advance due to a lack of fixed role models and parents. If they are let down from home, if their family is weaklings, then they easily become prey for a cynical entertainment industry that has no moral set or responsibility.

Adventures is the safe way to explore the dangerous. We go on adventures in foreign landscapes of the unknown. Is it that dangerous now? It does not have to be deadly to be adventurous, but for extreme sports practitioners it has to be, of course. There are truly adventurers who put their lives on the line to feel life in full swing burning on their bodies. A ball-crazy man from Poland has rowed across the Atlantic in a kayak! A Dane in extreme shape has run around the world. Vim Hoff, the Iceman, has climbed Mount Everest barefoot and run a marathon in the Arctic. He has crawled with a finger at an altitude of 7 kilometers between two planes and swam naked for ten minutes under the ice. He has been injected with deadly poison immersed in a box of ice cubes. And survived. He did it to prove that man is capable of more than he thinks. Today, he teaches others to do the same through breathing and cold water, and science has to exclaim: IT WORKS – GODDAMN!

Could one be so daring as to call it the therapeutic adventure?
Or are all true adventures therapeutic in nature?

In a world where life and death have become so foreign, so wrapped in plastic, so unreal, there are, of course, quite a few young people who are attracted to extreme sports. They have been so removed from nature that they sometimes completely turn into compensation. The less intelligent seek out the dangerous and the illegal as an access card to the cool club. What about train surfing? Stupidity de luxe. At the risk of getting 380 volts through the body or being run across by 50 tons, they jump on a train from a bridge to prove their manhood to the tribe, the clique, the cult. The reason why it should absolutely be banned and punished is that they are not only putting their own lives at risk but also those of others. Should people be banned from racing on country roads on motorcycles for the same reason? Absolutely!

Should one then forbid a human being to try something that is dangerous to one’s own life without endangering others? If people want it, then they take responsibility for it, right? If they perish, then they have probably chosen it themselves – have they not? One can try to teach them that they are universally not allowed to take their own lives, because there is a reason why they are here in this life, and a suicide is a cowardly escape from this reason. One is not allowed by the universe to waste precious life, life is sacred. Nor is one allowed by the universe to take the life of a fetus. Then you should have thought about it before you banged, and then the reason was that you should learn to grow up by being a mother and a father and not live on like Peter Pan on the run from responsibility.

But then, if people are too stupid to understand what they are doing when they have to brag to the boys and die as a result, then they are recipients of the Darwin Prize – a medal for saving humanity from continuing bad genes and low intelligence. Thank you, we do not need neither you nor your descendants.

Make the prohibition policy goal oriented! Should people be banned from smoking the pipe? Absolutely not. But just grab the neck of 12-year-old who has started on piping before his brain is ready for it. He might wake up if he is lucky at a formal age of 22 and discover that mentally he is still 12 years old and has wasted the most important years of his life. On the other hand, prevent the dope dealers and the HA from pushing it by legalizing it so that it can be quality assured. Then tighten the grip on the dealers and the really hard dope. There is absolutely NOTHING heroic about their mafia cult. They are ridiculous, lowlife scammers who should be detained on a very deserted island, white-skinned and brown skinned all in droves, where in peace and tolerance from the rest of us they can … tamper with each other’s lives. Nor do we need them and their descendants.

Real extreme sport

Back to the therapeutic adventure. I have a suggestion for ‘extreme sports’ that really rocks. To quote Jordan Petersson: Ask yourself where you are really afraid to look. This is where you need to look.

He’s not talking about putting your life on the line at all. He talks about choosing the hero’s path and facing your inner enemies. All you are afraid of are free hints about what you owe yourself to learn to deal with. If you are afraid of spiders, confront them. The chance of you dying is extremely minimal – unless you tease a black widow or a similar creature. Yes, extremely deadly spiders are found in some parts of the world, but we do not have any of them in this country. I’ve never heard of anyone being bitten by a cross spider, which should be like getting a wasp sting. A cross spider will go to extremes so as not to have to sting other than its natural prey. In Denmark, the tick is said to be the most dangerous animal. The tick can be handled easily and efficiently by removing it before it digs into your skin. Even after it has done so. I was bitten by a dog as a boy, but it was not the dog’s fault, it was its neurotic owners’ fault that could not control it.

One of my colleagues murdered a black house spider because it allowed itself to crawl on the windowsill at the office. It’s just not OK to murder an animal just because you’re eight years old in the murder situation. Catch it with a glass and a piece of paper and help it find another place to hunt flies if you think it distracts. But do not act like a stupid child (euw, it’s disgusting!) when you’re an adult woman! And by the way: confront your phobia so you can grow up before you scratch off. All phobias can be handled with the right attitude. But you have to WANT it.

If you’re afraid of standing in front of an assembly, do so. As a child, I was exposed to performing for others, both as a dancer and as a musician. This meant that as a student and in my later work I had gotten the worst fears aside. The nervousness never completely disappears, but neither should it, because there must be something that nibbles you in the arm and makes you perform at your best. You know you won’t die from it and that it can be dealt with as long as you do not become overconfident and underestimate the situation. You need to be prepared to your teeth but be ready to let go once you have entered the lions den and there’s no way back. And what happens then? You only know it afterwards when the adrenaline slowly stops pumping. You forgot your stage fright and … performed.

Seek out your horror scenario. If you are afraid of heights, do so in small steps at a time. Teach yourself that you can turn around and go down the stairs at any time, and if you have to, do so. But come back again and go a few steps higher up. You know you can turn around and go back. Give yourself the chance of experiencing NOT to die.

The examples of scenarios are as numerous as there are people. But the rule and the cure are always the same. Do not run away. And again, we are not talking about going into the cage of a wild animal that is going to eat you. Or crawling around on the cornice on the 8th floor outside a house in the rain to overcome fear of falling down. It’s not about putting your life on the line. It’s about putting the fear of dying at stake in a safe environment and then taking it from there. It’s about boldness not about foolhardiness.

Exactly like children listening to fairy tales.

Case story

One of the best stories of self-conquest I have heard is a true story of a young man, who moves in from the country and to the provincial town to go to school. He is very withdrawn and ends up being isolated in his chamber in the city. He gets more and more weird and drops out of the school. At some point, he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The door closes behind him and he just sits there in the room and stares into the wall. He is getting fatter and fatter and is completely out of shape. He may also have suicidal thoughts, which far too many young people experience.

Some day, when he has hit rock bottom, he wonders if his fate is sealed. Is that just the rest of his days? Should he just take the ticket to beyond or accept a permanent shitty life? He does not know what to do, but then remembers, he has heard that it might help on depression and inner chaos to take a run. He manages to run a distance before losing his breath and returning. He did not die of it. It was hard, but there’s something about it that makes him do it again the next day. And next day and next again. He gets in better and better shape and loses weight significantly. More importantly, he feels much better.

At some point, he resumes to his school again. And then he sets up for his first marathon and completes. He starts touring around for marathons. One day he hears about Iron Man, so he has to try it too. At some point, he hears about Ultra Man, so he tries that too. It also happens that the fine chief physician at the psychiatry, who for years has given him the diagnosis schizophrenia, examines him again and to his great surprise has to state that he is in fact no longer schizophrenic. He has simply cured a mental illness that psychiatry says cannot be cured. By his own indomitable will, which he has built up in very small steps at a time, the young man has overcome the greatest enemy of his life and his inner demon.

BUT then he hits the wall, because now he wants a flight certificate. And he is not allowed to do that, because the law says that people who have once been given a mental diagnosis can never have it changed – even if it has been changed – and thus will never get a certificate. Precisely because psychiatry has established that schizophrenia is chronic, lifelong and incurable. Which it is not according to the young man’s story – but no, rules cannot be bent in the world of rules.

Adventure and reality: The Heros Tale

Has it not been clear from the above that there are many reasons to disregard the dividing line between adventure and reality? I simply regard it as nonsense if not exactly a false dichotomy. Fairy tales / adventure stories are about reality in a non-reduced form. Rationalism has chosen to see fairy tales in the same way as religion and mythology: as superstitious and infantile tales. They have mistakenly chosen to reduce. A fairy tale is neither. It is a special language and a special literary or pictorial style created to describe the inner reality of man and his outer projections.

All people encounter these adventurous characters in their lives. They are the archetypes that we invoke through our psychological composition. All people have their antagonists, their opponents. Everyone meets the gatekeeper, the wise old man, the witch / wizard and the helper. Whether we recognize them is the question. We all meet the dragon, the reptile that must be fought, for it is our reptile brain. Fighting that is – not denying. Everyone is the hero of their own lives, and whether one is the comic or tragic hero depends on whether one chooses to pursue one’s needs or one’s wants. Comedy does not mean ridiculous in Greek drama, it means fulfilled, happy ending. Tragiedy means unfulfilled, unredeemed ending. It is nowhere better described than by author and mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where the author says that the hero’s story is a mono myth. It is found in all cultures, but it has a thousand varieties.

The hero’s story is about becoming the best version of yourself.
The story always falls into three stages.

First there is the separation. We respond to the call to embark on a journey, a quest, after which we leave the familiar realm. Next, we receive an initiation. We learn who we are and what the world is like. Eventually we are rewarded and return. Every classic road movie has these three stages. That is why it is said that all good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Well yes, an earthworm has that too, it sounds banal. But the three stages that is what is meant by the three-part narrative. It is also part of in the discipline that is called narratology – that is, the doctrine of storytelling, academics must always make posh words for it – the fairy tale model or the narrator model.

Think of The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende. The boy Balthasar Bux loses his parents, ends up in a trauma and starts his inner journey into Fantasia. He meets the dragon who becomes his friend, he meets the princess who turns out to be a bitch, and he receives the initiation at the End of the World and meets the Nothingness. Then the journey begins back where his quest is ready: he must save the world, the Fantasia from being engulfed by the Nothingness. It is his own world that he saves. In the end, the hero transforms back with the blessing, the bonus package, the win, which the true hero always shares with others in gratitude.

To start the quest at all, the hero must – in addition to answering the call – exceed the threshold. That’s why one of the characters on the road is the Guardian of the Threshold, The Gatekeeper. The hero in all of us has to cross the line between the comfort zone and the unknown, the dangerous.

When one has exceeded the threshold and has fulfilled his quest and received his initiation, then the gods say: congratulations! Here then, is yet another ordeal, for many choose the wrong reward. King Midas was a hero who performed heroic deeds. The gods said congratulations, what do you want as a reward? He said: I want everything I touch to turn to gold. He regretted it when he wanted to enjoy his gala dinner on his return and embrace his daughter. Bling! it all turned to gold, the food was ineatible and the daughter was a dead statue.

Campbell says that most creators of hero stories make the hero something special wearing special abilities. This is completely wrong, because the hero’s story is not about unusual people. The aforementioned Iceman, Vim Hoff, was met with suspicion from science because he exceeded the limit of what they had decided was physiologically and mentally possible. Well, you’re just the exception that confirms the rule, because you have an abnormal, mutated physiology, they said. So he opposed them once more by challenging them: Give me a group of people for three weeks and I will teach them to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts and t-shirts, while as a side benefit they cure themselves of blemishes and diseases. It’s all built into our physiology and brain, and anyone can learn it.

The idea that only specially selected people have it in them is a toxic idea. There is an equation for it, that is, the non-toxic version. It falls into two parts:

T x A = D .. it says Talent multiplied by Effort = Skill. But that is not enough. The more talent, the faster a person achieves skill through effort. But that just means others have to spend more time on it.

D x A = !! … thus the acquired skill multiplied by additional efforts gives excellence. It takes even more effort to create a championship. This means that the talent’s share in the overall accounts is further reduced, because it does not appear in the second part of the equation.

This is where the myth makers of culture, the illusion makers in Hollywood and the like, do us a disfavor. If only special people with talent and star quality + superheroes can do extraordinary things, and you decide or have been told by others that you are talentless, AND you are such a person who thinks that what others think is more important than what you think – then you may as well pack you stuff together. When myth-makers magnify the share of talent, as they always do, they create non-empowerment in the culture. It’s the romantic myth of genius over again. We make them demigods, their exploits are unattainable, and we sit back in the admiration of gravel and worship them for their semi-divinity.

Well Picasso then, was he not a genius, could he not do it all from the start? Answer: would it play a role that he created approx. 50,000 pieces of art over the course of his life, which means an average of two a day in a long life? Could it have anything to do with him being one of the best?

One researcher, Anders Ericsson, has studied the concept of greatness. He clearly states that he has never met a person who was great in his field without having put a gigantic pile of work into it. The biblical parable of the talents is therefore a true story with a deep psychological insight. The owner of a house goes on a journey and hands out talents (a unit of currency) to three of his servants. The first butties his one talent so that it is not lost. The other invests his two talents and earns an extra. The third uses his five talents, trades with them, invests them and earns two extra. Upon the return of the homeowner, the first servant gets a kick in the ass and the others a pat on the back.

And then comes the meanest verse in the New Testament:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath. And throw the incompetent servant out into the darkness. There must be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [Matt. 25,29-30]

What characterizes the hero is that he / she does not wait for the green light and acceptance from the surroundings but acts here-and-now. A vicious and oppressive world needs people who just move today and do not wait for the starting shot or the cheers. We know this from people who were inadvertently provoked to something that afterwards appears to be a heroic deed. A child falls into the harbor, a random ordinary man sees it, and without hesitation throws off his shoes and jumps into the water to save the kid. Afterwards he is proclaimed a hero, but that is not how he sees it himself, because he just did what the situation demanded of him. He did not think about it, he did not give a thought what others would think about it neither before, during nor after. If he had not done so, he might have been called a coward, but that thought did not occur to him either.

The adventure is to listen to the call, accept the challenge, cross the border – without getting lost – learn who you are and what life is like, and make the gain available to others.