Tales for our Times

Wisdom from unexpected sources

Since the times became so trying my mind sometimes turns to fairy tales in search of the solace that comes from real wisdom.

Fairy and folk tales, myths and fables – these kinds of stories have a combination of magic and message offered by no other medium. If we can listen, that is, and let their magic work on us.

Such tales depict archetypal human struggles and the difficult universal truths we have to face over the course of a lifetime. Snow White and Cinderella help us to deal with the reality of envy. The countless kings who throw countless queens out of the castle, condemning them to a likely death, are a lesson in injustice. The ugly duckling and the frog prince remind us of the inevitability of change and the possibility of transformation. Often, these are tales of initiation in which the trial or tragedy is transcended because the characters have learnt something important. The queen returns to king and castle – something I never used to understand – how could she forgive him? Now I do: it's a story that functions on the level of the symbolic and has nothing to do with accepting mistreatment.

Two tales in particular recur in my mind as the challenges of the times mount.

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Little Red Riding Hood is one of those multi-faceted stories whose meaning depends on the teller and audience. As a story in the oral tradition, its origins go back so far, possibly to Ancient Greece and – who knows? even earlier – that no single author can claim to have created it until it was first published by Charles Perrault in 1697. So it's not surprising that the tale has multiple endings, from the gruesome to the happy.

As a children's story in which the girl and her grandmother are rescued or come back to life, it tells of Danger Overcome. The bedtime lesson it imparts is that the child – let's call her Red Hood – didn't heed her mother's warnings about not talking to strangers. The young, especially if they are female, must behave if they want to survive.

At the other end of the spectrum is Angela Carter's feminist version in the collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber. In the “The Company of Wolves”, a lascivious Red Hood ends up in bed with the wolf: "See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf." Female sexuality gets its way, liberated in the woods from the constraints of home, village and mother.

As an archetypal story, Little Red Riding Hood is essentially about the loss of innocence and growing up: a necessary part of the human experience. Red Hood is barely old enough to run the errand in the woods, the wolf is a natural predator and the girl's vivid garb makes her obvious prey. The encounter with the wolf demonstrates that not all those you meet in life wish you well.

Much of the tension of the story derives from the obviousness of the wolf’s intentions in contrast to Red Hood's gullibility. The reader feels a frisson of frustration as she takes the wolf's implausible explanations at face value, meeting each with a polite exclamation. What big eyes you have! What big eyes you have! Even the fangs fail to elicit a healthy reaction. Like the pantomime audience trying to help the heroine, we want to shout: CAN’T YOU SEE?

Stephen Sondheim's musical rendition of the tale in “Into the Woods” captures the process of maturation that occurs when the girl emerges from her experience not only alive, but wiser. Red Hood is a fast learner. In “I Know Things Now”, she immediately reflects on her experience:

And I know things now, many valuable things, that I hadn’t know before

Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood

They will not protect you the way that they should

And take extra care with strangers

Even flowers have their dangers

What Red Hood has learnt extends beyond personal development. She's gained an acute insight into the workings of society and now understands that conformity is not the same as virtue:

And though scary is exciting

“Nice” is different than “Good”

But the version of Little Red Riding Hood that returns to me in these times is very different. It was a darkly comic reenactment at the Crick Crack Club with an actress soliloquising her thoughts as she is repeatedly preyed upon. Soon after she sets off on her journey, she's asked by a passing stranger if he can have her arm – of course he can! He's hungry – as a nice girl, it's the least she can do. The passer-by bites off her arm and Red Hood resumes her journey, remarking cheerfully that she's still got one arm left.

Sure enough, further down the path, she gives away her other arm to another passing predator, followed by a leg. But all is well – Red Hood can manage! Grinning sappily, she hops along the path until, yes, she yields up her fourth limb too.

Here the dramatic irony is different. The audience is wondering with a depth of feeling that includes alarm: surely she must be realising now? But no, Red Hood is bouncing along, just a torso and a head, still chuntering away that everything is fine.

This version of Little Red Riding Hood illustrates the kind of wilful naivety that is born of denial. It's a refusal to see reality because the illusion is so much more comfortable, or appears to be in the short term.

This, according to therapist Steven Kalas, is a common modern condition. Little Red Riding Hood Syndrome goes beyond innocence, raising a deeper question to do with psychology and survival instincts. “Hey Red!” he asks: “What is it in you that keeps overriding your own senses! Keeps overriding your own experience?”

Kala reports that he and most therapists “encounter a higher number of women than men who consistently don’t and won’t believe their own eyes, their own ears, and their own felt experience.”

Sondheim's version and the Crick Crack Club performance depict two types of innocence – the natural kind born of youth, which is teachable, and the wilful kind, which is dangerous and self-destructive.

If Little Red Riding Hood is about the failure to see, The Little Match Girl is about the failure to act.

As a child, I was fascinated by the story by Hans Christian Andersen. It's a much later creation than Little Red Riding Hood, one rooted in the concerns of the nineteenth century. The family bookshelves had a beautifully illustrated edition of Andersen's work and the simplicity of the plate accompanying the story – it's the one above – appealed to my youthful tastes. I would often take the book off the shelf and revel in the feelings the story inspired.

On a freezing December night, ill-fed and ill-clothed, the Match Girl gives into the temptation of lighting the matches she’s trying to sell for some short-lived warmth. The flames generate a series of comforting visions: a warm stove, a roast goose, a brightly-lit Christmas tree and, finally, the image of her late grandmother, the only person who loved her. To keep the vision alive, she burns the entire bundle of matches and goes to sleep in the snow.

With that, the story is over.

The pathos is deliciously dramatic: the reader understands that as each match burns out, the girl gets closer to extinction. The contrast between her slide into hypothermia and the life she envisions is stark: a warm home with food and Christmas cheer … the poor girl! The young corpse in the snow – what a tragic waste! But at least now she's with her loving grandmother! The scenario generates a generalised pity, a wringing of the hands, the boundary-less wave of emotion which swept me up as a child.

This response to The Little Match Girl sat unchanged in my psyche for decades until it was shattered by Women Who Run with the Wolves. Clarissa Pinkola Estés cuts through the sentimental veneer and gets to the core of what's going on: “when the Match Girl decides to burn the matches, she uses her resources to fantasise instead of to act”.

The Match Girl – like many women – has “injured instincts” and has lost touch with the more embodied, animal-like forces that connect her to the will-to-live. “If her instincts were intact, her choices would be many,” writes Estés. “Walk to another town, sneak into a wagon, stow away in a coal cellar. Wild Woman would know what to do next,” says Pinkola Estés. “But the Match Girl doesn't know Wild Woman any more. The little wild child is freezing, all that is left of her is a person who goes about in a trance.”

“The Little Match Girl has an internal grandmother who instead of barking: 'Wake up! Get up! No matter what it takes, find warmth!' takes her away into a fantasy life, takes her to “heaven”. These comforting fantasies are seductive and lethal distractions from the real work.”

In other words, the Match Girl failed on the initiation process. Unlike Red Hood, she doesn't survive and move onto another stage of life, much less take her pleasure with the wolf, because she failed to act.

This analysis focuses on the modern female psyche understood on an individual and cultural basis. But what if the lesson for our times were broader?

This is something the American psychologist James Hillman addresses in conversation with Michael Ventura in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, published in 1992. Why, he asks, is there so much passivity in late twentieth century America?

“There is a decline in political sense,’ he says in answer to his own question. “No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people—at least among the white middle class—so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy!”

Hillman, a Jungian therapist himself, blames psychotherapy. In focusing exclusively on the “inside” soul, it removes the patient’s attention from the outer world, treating what are clearly political problems as stemming from childhood or as the expression of a personal complex. In helping him to cope with a dysfunctional world, the therapist fosters the development of the child archetype, a disempowered human who is disconnected from the society in which he lives:

“By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job any more. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there … therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasising the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.”

Decades on, the same diagnosis could be applied to a society of people, while highly aware of the choices and possibilities for change in the arena of “personal development”, feel incapacitated when it comes to the social and political.

What can we do? cry the Match Children of the West.

Amid the rise of censorship and surveillance, the growing digitalisation and automation which erode freedom and human contact, the increasing regulation of daily life, the rising prices and taxes that are part of The Great Taking, people keep asking: what can we do?

These – things I've been highlighting since starting this Substack – testify to the need to see. A few saw before 2020, a lot started seeing after, and more are now seeing all the time. But seeing is only the first step: in 2025, the most pressing thing has to do with action.

There are myriad answers to the question “what can we do?”, varying according to the person, the situation, the issue and the moment. A book I'm going to get around to reading soon called Beautiful Trouble explores many of the different approaches and specific actions that could bring about change.

But they all depend on something more fundamental, akin to the kind of spirit which the successful Red Hood possessed and the Match Girl lacked.

The ancient Greek term 'thumos' roughly translates as spiritedness, an internal quality linked to life force which can manifest as righteous anger or a drive for truth. Without it, people are there for the taking, ripe for domination.

“Is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other animal?” asks Plato in The Republic. “Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is a spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?”

Healthy humans have the ability to both see and act. If, in Western society our instincts were intact, our choices would be many.

That word about gender. In this video, Kimberly Montgomery gives a personal account of a threat that urgently concerns us all and one brave woman's response to that threat. It's followed by a self-confessed rant – once you've heard her experience, you'll likely understand why – about why the task of standing up for humanity fell to a lone woman. “Where were the men?” asks Montgomery.

For me, the question, while valid, extends beyond gender. I would ask: where were the people? The threat was seen and understood by many in that community, and over a long period of time. Why didn't more people take some kind of action?

This – a true story, this time – is illustrative of the listlessness of the West in the face of the many threats to our freedom, health and way of life now playing out. Comments such as “we can't do anything” and “I'm only one person” express a sense of powerlessness and victimhood which could lead us down the path taken by the Match Girl.

This is not to say that people are keeping quiet: as the situation worsens in Britain, there are legion voices pointing out the corruption of the system and the stupidity of certain policies and their consequences for both particular groups and society as a whole. But much of the time, the owners of these voices don't do more than document and complain, staying stuck at the level of a child calling to be rescued by an adult.

At some point, some of the children who find themselves in the hands of adults who cannot or will not hear them stop petitioning and take action, however limited. They steal the bits of food or freedom they need to survive, run away or leave home. The world is full of true stories of those who suffered abuse or neglect when young and survived into successful adulthood.

Meanwhile, the protagonists of fairy tales consistently display a quality akin to agency and courage which is hard to characterise in a single word. It's related to a spirit of adventure and being up-for-life, something that enables them to go forth and try their luck, against the odds and without any guarantees.

Often, once they begin to do this and commit to the struggle of life, help comes from an external source: a genie, fairy godmother or other help in the form of an old man or woman. But even then, the humans have to be able to act on the advice they are given, or follow the instructions to use the magical object which is the key to their salvation.