Whether it is a giant beanstalk, benevolent flowers, wise herbs, sacred birch goddesses or mossy coats, many ancient folktales remind us how our ancestors lived in harmony with plants, relying on them not only for sustenance but also for healing, protection, wisdom, empowerment and inspiration. Ancient plant folktales encapsulate wisdom and teachings passed down through generations, reflecting the roles that flora and fauna have played for our survival, cultural identity and in the mythic imagination, often intersecting all three.
Read MoreFox Woman: The Shapeshifting Woman at the Threshold Between Worlds
Fox Woman, also known as Kitsune in Japanese folklore, is a shapeshifting trickster character who resembles the elusive, clever fox from the wild. Although this folktale comes in many different variations and her story is told in many tongues, what they all have in common is a trickster character who shifts between human and fox, sometimes androgynous, living in multiple worlds, questioning the order of things through her mischief, playfulness, wit, deception, magic and defiance of authority. The tale of Fox Woman is almost always makes visible the tension between the need for order, and its reinvention.
Read MoreThe Goddess Isis: Shedding and Becoming
In the beloved Egyptian myth of Isis, Isis searches for the scattered parts of her murdered husband’s body, resembles him, and breathes life back into him, and makes love to him, which then gives birth to Horus who becomes the next Pharaoh of Egypt. Isis shows us that taking the aerial point of view, or birds-eye-view, gives us the power to hold the tension between what is dissolving and what is emerging, to see the whole instead of only the parts, and to recognize our own agency in the potential for transformation.
Read MoreReassembling Rites: Piecing Together the Ancestral Bones
There is an archetype that weaves its way through many ancient myths and folktales that centers around the sacred work of recovering and reassembling what has been disassembled. This ritual of singing over the ancestral bones, honoring, mourning over, and reclaiming what has been buried or lost, is a devotional act. In these stories, grieving takes center stage and plays a transformative role allowing the folk-heroine or mythological heroine to reach a place of wholeness, aliveness, and joy again.
Read MoreAntler Bone Necklace: The Mythic Cartography of Kinship Redrawing Borders of the North
Reindeer folktales can be found in Finland, Russia, Greenland and Canada, and the United States (specifically Alaska) circling the arctic like a wide necklace made of woven strands of interconnected stories and antler bones that tell of a time when humans and reindeer lived together as one family. These folktales transport us back to an ancient magical world where humans lived in fidelity to the migration of reindeer rather than confined to national or political borderlines encouraging us to rethink people, place and belonging.
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Polar Bear Son, an Inuit folktale about an elderly childless woman who finds a lost polar bear cub and raises him as her own. When he grows up and the elderly woman finds herself unable to look after herself, he brings her food.
Wild Kin: Folktales & Fellowship with the Wild
Befriending the “monster”, or overcoming one’s fear of the “other”, is a common theme in many folktales where the relationship between the two main characters, one human and the other a wild animal, shifts from one of hunter and prey, to one of parent and child, ancestor and descendant, brother and sister, or lovers. It is a voice from the past that shows up again and again in stories from around the world suggesting that planetary ecological restoration may depend not only on conservation efforts but is, at its heart, a relational job calling for us to re-story ourselves into belonging with the wild.
Read MoreShe Wore The Forest: Moss, Magic and the Making of a Sovereign Self
Mossy Coat is an Old English fairytale about the ingenuity and creativity of a wild forager and weaver who sews her daughter a coat of wild mosses so she can disguise herself, escape poverty, avoid an unwanted marriage and determine her own destiny. It is how even a small diminutive plant like moss can be protective, nurturing, empowering and magical, and how a coat of moss gives the heroine a sense of wildness, freedom, and sovereignty over her own life. An enduring folktale that lives on like wild moss, wielding its quiet power. . .
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