Having celebrated my fiftieth birthday, I have been welcomed into the company of The Wise Women, who believe that at this age, if we are grateful for the lessons these years have taught us, and find ways to creatively move on, supporting ourselves, those around us, and the environment in ways that are wholesome and nurturing - we automatically qualify for this honor-giving title!In recent years, I find I am choosing more stories with witches in them, and I think this is related to a fresher understanding that those unlikely wise-women characters like Baba Yaga, and the witch in Hansel and Gretel surprisingly point to the culmination of a lifetime of feminine knowledge and wisdom.
In many traditions, Wise Women and Witches were Healers of different kinds, and equally wise and equally dangerous – they were usually burnt at the stake not for their wickedness, but for their power, and for daring to using the gifts of knowledge and wisdom.
Baba Yaga, of many Russian tales, is often represented in images as comic as they are scary – which is why children both laugh and shudder at her description. When you read between the lines (in learning from story we have another term: “learning from after the lines”; going past the words into reflection and images and insights), we find that she is not evil, but she is frightening. A witch figure had better be, or Vassilisa, Hansel and Gretel and all the other characters would hang around her and not go on to complete their own growth.
In our remembering, the witch dies in Hansel and Gretel, right? Well, she does and doesn’t. Most versions of the story, except for some very-tampered-with ones which have little sense of the symbolic anyway, don’t say ‘she died’. She is pushed into the oven where she no longer threatens the children. Some versions tell us that that the ashes or sparks fly up the chimney – may be just going on to the next story, as one Teller laughingly suggested! An older version tells us that the children find pearls and gems in the oven when the witch burns. They fill their pockets and go home with the "pearls of knowledge and gems of wisdom", left for them by the encounter with the witch. Vassilisa, after being scared silly at first, also receives light in the form of fire from Baba Yaga. She uses it to defeat her stepmother and stepsisters. Light is certainly a symbol for knowledge and wisdom.
Witches and such characters in Traditional stories teach us of a both/and reality. They often do this by allowing us to distance or ‘externalize’ that which is actually within us, so that by holding them out (or before us, so as to ‘see’ them better) we can lose or fear, stop denying their existence, befriend them, and then integrate them into ourselves with fuller, deeper and more compassionate acceptance and understanding.
To give ourselves the gift of unhurried listening to a Teaching story is to get to know better those fundamental configurations of our own timeless and vast human nature. We meet these in stories that are peopled with, of course, people -man, woman, or child, prince, pauper or mermaid; aspects of nature - mountains, rivers, animals, the great earth; abstractions or concepts –evil, good, impermanence, cowardice, honor, good humor, greed, nobility, wisdom.
Often these are personified, and sometimes the ‘personifications’ are easily identified, often they are not.
While both are useful, I often find the second type – the not so easily identifiable – are often the keys to our transformation. Their vagueness makes the somehow more outside-yet-inside, less easily plastered with hasty ‘oh-yes-we-understand-it’ labels. In this liminal, not here- not there place, we relax into acceptance – even if temporary - of meanings other than the ones we assign, and then, usually freeze.
Storytelling is a gateway through which our fundamental, inclusive, wholeness - beyond separate, black and white ‘realities’ of good or evil, beautiful or ugly - can return to us. In listening and in telling, “We let what we have been searching for finally find us.” The tales set us free to roam within the complex and truthful and healing patterns of essential and universal human nature. For a moment, or for longer if we so choose, we are set free from our anxious existence within everyday, divisive ‘consensus reality’, and blessed to find ourselves integrated - once again at Home.
May Story guide you to wisdom and wholeness,
Marguerite Theophil
What stories do
Stories tell us
of what we already knew and forgot,
and remind us
of what we haven’t yet imagined.
~ Anne Watson
