REVISITING ALICE

Exploring the stories of ‘women and descent’ I find myself also revisiting Alice, making the time to time to read Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass again recently.

I had read these books in several edited childish versions between the ages of five and ten, only getting to the real Lewis Carroll versions after sixteen. I think I was interested in different aspects of the stories in the second round of reading, such as the clever use of language and the subtler messages coming through about people and places; the influences of both magic and believability has shifted in the adolescent angst I was then experiencing.

The third recent reading brought back memories of my responses from both, my childhood and teenage years. And oddly I see that my connection – earlier in the form of likes and dislikes, later in the form of questions and judgments (Why did she say that? What did he mean?; or, That was so dumb! She could have said/done this instead), remained pretty much the same.

A lot of people have not read the books, only seen the Disney movie. Lewis Carol wrote the book in 1865 and 1872, and Disney produced its own animated version of Alice in Wonderland I think maybe in the 60s. The Disney production aimed at a very young audience, shows Wonderland as a colorful place, full of flowers, trees and an impressive garden, but did not show other layered aspects of the story, aspects that give the books a complexity richness. Perhaps it’s because it was meant for a younger audience; but Disney sanitized and prettified this one and many others it made movies of, rather more than any of the stories deserve.

Much of what I recall from my readings first had to do with identity, then with finding answers or meanings.

I know there have been many interpretations about not just the books but of the author’s life and philosophy and tendencies, but from a personal perspective, identity and the confusions about the process of finding out about yourself stands out.

There were a whole lot of really delicious lines to rediscover in this connection:

Very early on when she had shrunk after drinking the contents of the bottle, we read : for this very curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one …”

And:
‘Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar. … Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

And:
‘I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--Be what you would seem to be - or if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'

Alice In Wonderland is not really a fairytale. There are no castles, or fairies or giants, though there are far more strange characters. Rather than about once upon a time, far far away , it is about now, in Alice’s garden. We know where we are – or so we think; yet that familiar place opens into the strange.

I think most people have at some point read these books, so I make a quick recap of some features and a few main (for me) characters.

Alice is based on Lewis Carroll's real-life friend, the young Alice Liddell. Alice, in the novel, is a girl growing up, displaying the mix of sureness and unsureness that marks this in-between stage on the way to adulthood. Throughout, Alice is "trying on" her adult self. She speaks in a learned manner, even when she isn't quite sure what she is speaking about, and she often creates in her own mind an adult personality to check her childish impulses. This comes through in her ‘falling’ to a place like none she has ever known. Descent, in fact, for Alice comes through her curiosity. She follows the White Rabbit down his rabbit hole, but loses him almost immediately.

The White Rabbit is the character that reappears to get things moving again when things need to take a new turn. He is a sort of guide, or more a device for indicating the changes Alice comes to, as he is too preoccupied with his own stuff to really be directly guiding her.

The Cheshire Cat, a smiling cat who can disappears and reappears at will, reveals to Alice how, after you have mastered the rules, then rules can start to master you. He propels her to the Mad Hatter and then to the Queen showing what happens when the rules get out of hand: illogical madness, a sort of childhood for adults.

The crazy tyrant who rules Wonderland, The Queen of Hearts, is best seen as an older person, an adult, who uses her rank and position arbitrarily, and has become full of impulsive and contradictory commands and unintelligible responses. In a sense, she is really an overgrown child who just happens to be old. The story highlights this by the changes in both Alice and the Queen -- as Alice grows stronger and more reasonable, the Queen degenerates into frailty and madness.

… And of course there’s The Mad Hatter, The Caterpillar, The March Hare, The Doormouse and other characters whom we meet later in many other allusions and books by other writers and references in all kinds of writings of all kinds of people.
Change is all around; change from form to form, from moment to moment. Alice changes shape and sizes, but there are also all these talking creatures, like the caterpillar smoking on his mushroom, Humpty Dumpty, and the Walrus and the Carpenter, halfway between creatures and people, yet quite believable.

Carroll sees to it that Alice starts out a child, but comes out of Wonderland now prepared to be an adult. She has learned that to be an adult is to honor rules, but not blindly. That there must be rules for a game to mean something, but the rules must be interpreted with a sense of justice and mercy, or they are as meaningless as no rules at all.

Most importantly, Alice has learned that to be old, or big, is not necessarily to be an adult.

In his other book, Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll gives us an Alice who imagines going into the Looking-glass House behind the mirror - an engaging tale of a child's journey into a world unlike any other.

It is my lesser liked book of the two; I found it more ‘childish’ before, and now I see why – unlike in the first book where you accept all the strange happenings naturally, here I feel you are more led or encouraged to do it, and it gets irritating at times.
It is told that the writer asked the ‘real’ Alice to his home where she saw a tall mirror standing in one corner. He put an orange in her right hand, asked her to look into the mirror, and then asked her which hand held the orange. She replied "The left hand." Baffled she said "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?" Carroll laughed, saying “That's the best answer I've had yet."

So the ‘reversals’ of a mirror give space for all kinds of other reversals. Carroll's imagination takes readers with Alice into Looking-glass House, with situations from the ordinary to the extraordinary, the staid to the silly, using the game of chess as the setting. Carroll juggles a heady mix of fantasy and reality to create a believable looking-glass world. He does it with such craft and skill that none of it seems incongruous.

In this mirror-image chess world, we encounter nonsense verse, nonsense words and writings, and meet other memorables - Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, (of the famous: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to means; neither more nor less.") and the White Knight and Red Knight.

In both books, Carroll juggles with linguistic conventions, making use of puns and playing on multiple meanings of words , even inventing words and expressions and developing new meanings for words. Anything is possible in Wonderland, and Carroll’s manipulation of language reflects this sense of unlimited possibility. In the second book his playing with language gets more intense. In Looking Glass, he uses his expertise in nonsense verse, rhymes, humor, and puns to create songs, jokes, and stories throughout.

I remember that the silly words games, the quite terrible schoolgirl level jokes were aspects of the book I enjoyed. Which young girl who had a love for words wouldn’t laugh like crazy at the silliness of the talking flowers?

Alice goes: “Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?”
"There's the tree in the middle," said the Rose. "What else is it good for?"
"But what could it do, if any danger came?" Alice asked.
"It could bark," said the Rose.
"It says 'Bough-wough!'" cried a Daisy. "That’s why its branches are called boughs."

Carroll explores the conflicts and tensions inherent in a child's world. Humpty Dumpty's severe tone, as well as the Queens' judging attitudes, reflect common ‘adult’ responses, requiring Alice to stand up for herself and believe in herself. The White Knight aids Alice in feeling protected and confident. Tweedledum and Tweedledee's kindness and compassion support her and teach her the same. As Alice deals with loneliness, awkwardness, and other interpersonal conflicts, she evolves and matures.

Alice moves along a make-believe, magical chess board. Successfully completing of her journey, she celebrates with the Red and White Queen as she becomes “Queen Alice”.

Overall, if the books teach a meaningful lesson, I think it is this: that meanings can change in changed contexts, certainty will be challenged, that we must expect the unexpected – not just in bookland but in everyday life.

The certainty and security a young person longs for even as she or he longs for change are brought out here perhaps better than any other story. In Wonderland, Alice finds that her lessons no longer mean what she thought, as she botches her multiplication tables and incorrectly recites poems she had memorized while in Wonderland. Even Alice’s physical dimensions become warped as she grows and shrinks erratically throughout the story. Wonderland frustrates Alice’s desires to fit her experiences in a logical framework where she can make sense of the relationship between cause and effect.

In both books, Alice encounters a series of puzzles that seem to have no clear solutions, which imitates the ways that life frustrates expectations. Alice expects that the situations she encounters will make a certain kind of sense, but they repeatedly frustrate her ability to figure out Wonderland. Alice tries to understand the Caucus race, solve the Mad Hatter’s riddle, and understand the Queen’s ridiculous croquet game, but to no avail. In every instance, the riddles and challenges presented to Alice seem to have no purpose or answer.

Even though Lewis Carroll was a logician and mathematician, he deftly plays around with riddles and games of logic that have no logic! Alice learns that she cannot expect to find logic or meaning in the situations that she encounters, even when they appear to be problems, riddles, or games that would normally have solutions that Alice would be able to figure out. Carroll makes a broader point about the ways that life frustrates expectations and resists interpretation, even when problems seem familiar or solvable.

Alice’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass world are really what she – and we – will encounter, not in falling through a long tunnel, but stumbling along our everyday lives wherever we are.

May you learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and learn to expect the unexpected! Marguerite Theophil

“Of course it’s true,
but it may not have happened.”

(~ a wise grandmother storyteller)

THE POWER OF DESCENT

Studying the myths of various cultures leads to a better understanding of their social and religious underpinnings. By turning the myths inwards, inviting them into our lives and learning their language of imagery and symbolism, we learn more about ourselves.

In almost every culture, the metaphor of descent serves as a powerful, sacred and mythic image for women.

One of the earliest such accounts is the story of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess and Queen of the Upper World. She was worshipped in Sumer from the third millennium BCE (before the common era) to the first millennium BCE. The myth chronicles her descent to the Underworld, the abode of the dead. On her journey she passes through the seven gates which lead to the inner throne chamber. At each of the seven gates she is required to shed a part of her costume. The items she discards are symbolic representations of her powers in the Upper World. By the time she gets to the innermost gate, she is completely naked; shorn of all the familiar trappings of identity and power.

This myth operates at many levels. Inanna symbolises fertility. Her descent and return are the natural cycles of destruction and regeneration. At the psycho-spiritual level, the story represents the move away from comfortable everyday reality, the ‘stripping’ away of familiar forms of identification, a recognition of the denied shadow side — in an effort to find our real selves.

The rules of the ‘above’ do not hold good for the psychological territory ‘below’. Inanna’s descent brings her into conflict with her ‘dark’ sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. Inanna realises that this power, too, has its own place. In fact, Ereshkigal is another face of Inanna, who has to be acknowledged, accepted and integrated. Inanna, therefore, expresses a complete and encompassing identity, an amalgam of the human traits. She finds completeness in an understanding of both these worlds. She has to enter the unknown darkness without her previous “I am” definitions. In that darkness she dies and is reborn.

Another feminine descent journey that we are perhaps more familiar with is that of Persephone, who was snatched and borne off to the Underworld by Hades, Lord of that domain. Demeter, her mother, undertakes a long and arduous journey to rescue her daughter. Jungian writer Helen Luke analyses the story through the idiom of separation and reintegration. She points out that the descent, and in particular Persephone’s swallowing of the pomegranate seeds which ensures her return to Hades for a part of each year, marks a turning point. She will not regress to dependent daughterhood. She is different, more ‘herself’ for having made the descent and experiencing what she did.

In the story of Savitri, when Satyavan is carried off to the Underworld by Yama, his wife Savitri pursues him unrelentingly. Nothing Yama says or does dissuades her. Desperate to make her go back, Yama grants her a boon, that she may have children. She then demands that Satyavan be resurrected so that he can father those promised offspring. In this manner she recovers that ‘lost’ part of herself.

Another Jungian teacher and writer, Marie Louise von Franz, in her studies on fairy tales, shows how frequently the journey of the goddess involves descent, a long sleep, or withdrawal from the world. This is the metaphor of introspection; sometimes still and calm, at other times turbulent. It always involves an unfamiliar place or way of being. In this place, new meanings shape new behaviour.

Descent implies the courage to access ‘another world’, whether by choice or through being flung in protesting! In every case, the ‘return’ has us wiser. The knowledge gained on this journey through mythic imagery, when carried into everyday world, equips us to deal with existing issues and conflicts with wisdom, clarity and understanding.

May you recognize and use ‘up here’ the gifts from the journey you end up making ‘below’. Marguerite Theophil

The purpose of a life is to make an unconscious mythology

a conscious autobiography.

~ Sam Keen

BACK TO HOW THINGS WERE

Living in the now is a lesson from many spiritual traditions. It is simple but not easy!

For many of us, wanting things to be to be not-as-they-are-now – either through a going back to how they have earlier been, the ‘good old days’ syndrome, or wanting things to conform to a wished for future occupies a lot of our living.

The Story World has many stories that poke fun at the futility of this, gently nudging us through the laughter to learning to accept, live in, even enjoy our ‘now’.

Many stories in the “Three Wishes” category from all over the world offer this insight.

A teaching story from India, A Couple of Misers, in the collection by A. K. Ramanujan, in “The Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India”, while at one level teaching about sharing and generosity, also teaches about enjoying what we have in the present moment.

A miserly man married a miserly woman and they had a little son. They were such misers that they wouldn’t eat a betel nut; they would carefully suck on one and wipe it and put it away. They ate meals only because they needed to eat to keep alive. Still they complained and asked God why he had to make a stomach that they had to fill every day so many times.

They had a secret grain pit in the gods’ room, and their life’s ambition was to fill it with money by the time their little son grew up. The wife complained about the size of the cucumbers in their backyard: if only they could have been twice the size, the family could have dined on them for two more days. When her husband asked her to wear the one or two pieces of jewelry she had received at her wedding, she would say, “Are you crazy? If I wear them, I’ll wear them out. Who’s the loser then? You and me!” The husband would beam at his wife’s wisdom.

For years, no guest had ever entered their house for a drink of water or a morsel of food. One rainy season, the couple had shut all the doors when suddenly they heard someone banging on their door. The husband opened it and in came a holy man, grumbling, “What a terrible rain, what a terrible rain!” As soon as he came in, he shut the door behind him and praised them.
“You are such good people. I’d have caught cold in that rain and died. You took me in and saved my life.”

As he had come in like a wet dog, he wet the whole house with his drippings. The wife said, “That’s all very well. You’ve dripped water all over the house.”

The husband chimed in, “What shall we do if the house gets too damp and the walls crumble?”

The holy man was not worried. He said, “No such thing will happen. After all, a holy man like me is in this house. Why don’t you bring some cow dung and wipe the floor with all this water and make it clean and nice?”

The husband couldn’t bear this man’s intrusion. “We don’t yet know why Your Holiness is here,” he said, quite bluntly.

The man said, “What does a holy man do in his devotees’ house? It’s very hard these days to find real devotees like yourselves. You’re two in a thousand. Because of the likes of you, holy men survive in this world. Well, anyway it’s time for dinner. You could give me some dinner. Then you can spread a mat. I’ll lie on it and be gone in the morning. Anyway, good generous people like you are very rare. I’d rather get a glimpse of your sweet faces than go on a pilgrimage to Kashi.”

He didn’t seem to wait for any yes or no from them. The couple stood there with their mouths open. He didn’t notice them at all. He took off most of his wet clothes, wrung them out then and there, and hung them up to dry on the peg. He even took the dry shirt and dhoti of the host from the clothesline, put them on, and sat on a chair without a word of apology. He asked the bewildered host to sit down on the other chair, and asked the woman, “Will you finish cooking soon?” The husband sat down where he stood, his mouth still open. His wife went in to cook.

She had some leftover rice from the afternoon. She felt that wouldn’t be enough and made some more. She meant to serve the leftovers to the guest and the fresh hot rice to her husband. But she was too flustered to do so, and actually served her husband the leftovers and the guest the fresh rice. The holy man relished everything he ate and asked for more chutney and more ghee and more everything. She couldn’t help serving him whatever he asked for, to the great astonishment of her husband, who knew her very well. The guest talked ceaselessly through the meal and even afterwards as he relaxed in his chair and praised her cooking fulsomely.

“What a wonderful cook you are! It was like ambrosia. The spices, the proportions! Others may bring the whole spice bazaar to the kitchen but can’t cook one good curry.”

The wife ate the small scraps of food left over from this hearty meal, and came out of the kitchen, somewhat exhausted. The holy man addressed them both with great satisfaction.

“Look, as I said, we don’t get devotees like you every day. I’m very pleased with your hospitality. I’ll give you three wishes. Ask what you want.”

Now the faces of the miser and his wife blossomed. The man came and fell at the guest’s feet and said, “Sir, please, may whatever I touch turn into a heap of silver rupees.”

The holy man asked him first to let go of his legs, and when he had done so, said, “Done.”

The husband put his hands out and touched a couple of things around him, and they fell down in a clanging heap of rupees. His joy knew no bounds. He jumped up and down, touching everything he could see, turning things into heaps of rupees.
The wife now fell at the holy man’s feet, and thinking of the cucumbers in her backyard, said, “Swami, may whatever I touch grow one yard long.”

The holy man quickly said, “Let go of the legs first,” released himself, then said, “So be it.”

Whatever she touched grew at once as long as a yard. She went into the kitchen and touched the hot chilies. They became a yard long. She touched the cucumbers. They too grew a yard long. She touched whatever she fancied and made them all long.
Right at that moment, her little son was wakened by all this noise and began to cry. The mother ran in happily and touched his nose, saying, “My rajah!” And his nose at once grew long, a yard long. She screamed, horrified by her son’s bizarre looks. When the husband ran in, the child was howling, unable to bear the weight of his nose on his face. “O my poor son,” said the man and picked up the child, who at once crumbled into a heap of rupees. Then the husband and wife realized their blunder. They ran weeping to the holy man, who carefully kept his distance, and they begged of him, “Please, give us the third wish at once.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“We want everything to be as it was. Please see to it that our first two wishes are cancelled.”

The holy man said, “So be it.”

The child began to play in the cradle as before. The chilies and cucumbers shrank back to their normal size. The heaps of rupees vanished, and things returned to their original shapes. When the man and the woman turned around, the holy man was nowhere to be seen. They said, “Look, that was God himself, come down to teach us a lesson.”
From that day on, they gave up their miserly ways and lived happily.


I particularly enjoy this following short Three Wishes story, that adds another dimension to the usual ones we find in this genre; it highlights our ignorance of the fact that knowing oneself is hard and often painful work:


A man woke up one morning with no memory of himself. He looked around him, and saw that he was sitting by the side of a deserted road. He waited but no-one came. Finally, at dusk, a beautiful woman appeared. She was young, yet with an air of wisdom beyond her years. She approached the man.
"And now for your third and final wish. What is it to be?" she said.
"How can it be my third wish?" the man asked, "I don't remember even having the first two."
"Your second wish was to have everything go back to the way it was before your first. That is why you remember nothing, not even me. I am a Djinn. I have granted you two of your three wishes. You have one left."
The man thought a moment. "Very well," he said, "I don't believe you, but there's no harm in making a wish. I wish to know who I am."
"How strange," said the woman. "That was your first wish."


As a Personal Growth Coach, I like to tell this story to clients on their personal healing journey. It is a journey that often involves knowing ourselves more deeply than we might like to. I tell it to caution (but not to frighten!) them that surfacing things to work with can seem to make things harder and more complicated in the early stages, though the benefits down the line are tremendous.

This trick is not to make a second wish like the man in the story, for going back to the stage of ignorance of self, which is a place of stuckness, and of repeating unhelpful or harmful patterns - but for the courage and endurance to move ahead.


May you learn from old stories to make the most of your ‘here and now’.
Marguerite Theophil

If I tell you a story and if you listen, even if the things in the story did not quite happen that way
… it will tell you something true about me. …
And if I tell you a story, and you listen. If you listen with your ears and your mind, with your heart and soul
… even if the things in the story did not quite happen that way
… it will tell you something true about yourself.
~ Rocci Hildum

WHAT WE WANT THE STORY TO REALLY SAY

Unlike the story on paper designed to be read and re-read as the same story, the oral tale is always on the move. An oral rendering of a story is a living experience that is transformed by the heart-and-soul and the world view/experience of each teller.
Each time a tale is told, each time it moves and changes - sometimes in accord with the mood or memory or personal perspective of the teller and sometimes to fit the needs and age of a particular audience.

As the story travels from place to place it may even pick up a different emphasis from the culture in which it is given expression or emerge with a whole new focus and disregard parts of the old.

In the telling, the storyteller can decide on what exactly she or he wants to convey; the very same story can be pitched to give a different mood, feel or lesson, or experience.

Reading these two versions of a popular story will show you how the very same story is used in two rather different ways.

In these two tellings, it is interesting how really small twists and turns of emphasis can tweak a story to emphasize character -- either that wisdom was greedily held on to by one selfish character, or that scattered wisdom was collected together by one concerned character. The ‘two’ characters are actually one - the same trickster Anansi, but shaped by different tellers!

And both stories are differently angled to convey two somewhat dirfferent messages -- “Why it is to this very day some people have a great deal of wisdom, some have little, and others have none at all,” or “Why no one person has all the wisdom in the world, and therefore we need each other.”

...One version goes ...

A long time ago, Anansi the spider, had all the wisdom in the world stored in a huge pot. Nyame, the sky god, had given it to him. Anansi had been instructed to share it with everyone.

Every day, Anansi looked in the pot, and learned different things. The pot was full of wonderful ideas and skills.

Anansi greedily thought, "I will not share the treasure of knowledge with everyone. I will keep all the wisdom for myself."

So, Anansi decided to hide the wisdom on top of a tall tree. He took some vines and made some strong string and tied it firmly around the pot, leaving one end free. He then tied the loose end around his waist so that the pot hung in front or him.

He then started to climb the tree. He struggled as he climbed because the pot of wisdom kepts getting in his way, bumping against his tummy.

Anansi's son watched in fascination as his father struggled up the tree. Finally, Anansi's son told him "If you tie the pot to your back, it will be easier to cling to the tree and climb."

Anansi tied the pot to his back instead, and continued to climb the tree, with much more ease than before.

When Anansi got to the top of the tree, he became angry. "A young one with some common sense knows more than I, and I have the pot of wisdom!"

In anger, Anansi threw down the pot of wisdom. The pot broke, and pieces of wisdom flew in every direction. People found the bits scattered everywhere, and if they wanted to, they could take some home to their families and friends.

That is why to this day, no one person has ALL the world's wisdom. People everywhere share small pieces of it whenever they exchange ideas.

... And another tells it this way ...

Once upon a time, many, many years ago, Ananse Kokrufu, the great spider, became concerned because people had become careless about the wisdom of the world and large pieces of it were getting lost. So he decided that he, Ananse, would collect the wisdom of the world, all of it, and store it in one place for safe-keeping.

The place he chose was the very top of the highest palm wine tree in the forest. Good as his word, Ananse with great effort collected all the wisdom of the world, placed it in a large gourd, tied the gourd to his chest, and began to climb. Now it was a hot day, the tree was very tall, and about halfway up Ananse began to have trouble.

Far below, at the foot of the tree stood Nkitea, Ananse's small son. Looking up, he shouted to Ananse, "Father, if you truly had all of the wisdom of the world up there with you, you would have tied that gourd on your back."

This was too much even for the great spider. In a fit of rage he unfastened the gourd and hurled it toward the ground. When it hit, the gourd shattered into hundreds of pieces, and the wisdom of the world scattered all over the earth.

By this time people had learned their lesson and they came - each with his or her own gourd -- to collect whatever bit of wisdom they could hold. And that is why it is to this very day some people have a great deal of wisdom, some have little, and others have none at all.


What do you want your story to really, really say? Marguerite Theophil

People have forgotten how to tell a story.
Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore.
They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
~Steven Spielberg

BEFRIENDING BEFANA

Though most of us know the genial red-suited Christmas gift-giver as Santa Claus or Father Christmas, in many countries there are traditions of gift-bringers known by other names.

In many East European countries, children wait for the Old Man of Christmas, Grandfather Christmas, or Grandfather Frost. A more common present-giving figure for Spain and several countries in South America would be Los Reyes Magos, or The Three Kings. Sweden has Jultomten or The Christmas Gnome, like Norway’s Julenissen, a small, elderly man. In Hungary it is the Angels who carry the Christmas gifts, or the child Jesus, who is also the gift-giver in places like in Italy, where he is known as Gesù bambino, as Austria has Christkind or Christ-Child.

Many of these bring gifts to children – and maybe to some adults! - not in December, but on January 6, celebrated in some places as the feast of the Three Wise Men.

Another interesting gift-bringer is La Befana, and several tender stories are attached to her presence.

She is a character in Italian folklore who delivers presents to children throughout Italy, on the eve of the 6th of January, filling their stockings with candy and presents if they are good or a lump of coal or dark candy if they are bad. With her reputation as a good housekeeper, many say she will sweep the floor before she leaves. The child's family typically leaves a small glass of wine and a plate with some food, often regional or local, for the Befana.

In depictions of her, she looks like the typical fairytale witch, hooked nose, black shawl, broomstick and all. But we story-lovers know, don’t we, how ‘witches’ were really wise women! [SEE 'THOSE UNLIKELY WISE WOMEN' ]

One story tells of the three Wise Men who were in search of the Christ child when they decided to stop at a small house to ask for directions. Upon knocking, an old woman holding a broom opened the door slightly ajar to see who was there. Standing at her doorstep were three tired men dressed in colorful robes. They asked for directions to where the baby Jesus might be found, but she did not know. Seeing how exhausted they were, she generously offered them shelter for the night, and the next morning before they left, they asked the old woman to join them on their sacred journey in thanks for her kindness to them.

She quickly declined their offer, saying she had way too much housework to do – sweeping and dusting, chopping wood and cooking for guests who might drop in – it really wasn’t possible. But after they left she felt as though she had made a terrible mistake, and packing a bag of gifts for the newborn, decided to go and catch up with the kind men. After many hours and days of searching she could not find them. Thinking of the opportunity she had missed the old woman stopped every child to give her or him a small treat from her bag.

Each year on the eve of the Epiphany she sets out, still looking for the baby Jesus. On her journey, she is said to leave all good children toys and candy, and in an attempt to get children to behave well, parents warn that naughty children get a chunk of coal or bags of ashes instead.

Another Christian legend takes on a sadder tone with La Befana being a woman with a child whom she greatly loved. However, her child died, and her resulting grief maddened her. Upon hearing news of Jesus being born, she set out to see him, delusional that he was her son. She eventually met Jesus and presented him with her gifts to make him happy. The infant Jesus was delighted, and he gave La Befana a gift in return - she would be the mother of every child in Italy.

I find it interesting that one take on her name is that it might be a mutation of Epifania , or Epiphany, which can be translated as ‘the display/appearance of divinity’; a flash of a revelation of a great, enduring truth. An epiphany then, is a deep understanding of the nature of the world that can change the way one looks at things

La Befana’s story, however it is told, invites us to stop and re-look at our own ‘reality’. What do we consider the ‘important’ things of our lives? What wonderful things might we be giving up while we continue to be trapped in the everyday? What new perspective can transform our grief, regret or sadness, bringing a new revelation, allowing us to reach out to others in caring and sharing?

May La Befana’s lessons be ours too as a new year begins! Marguerite Theophil

Stories can speak to us in several ways at once. The practical aspects of our personalities appreciate
the assistance they provide in prudent decision-making.
Our playful child-like energies find the stories to be great fun.
The quiet, spiritual side is grateful to have some time invested in reflection.  
~ Jonathan Young