The world of myth, fairytale, folkore and the supernatural is seemingly infinite. Attempting to learn all there is to learn of this immense subject makes one feel like the young hero or heroine who enters the enchanted forest – the further they travel, the larger the forest seems to be and the thicker the trees.

 

I scrambled for years through this dense territory picking up stories as I went, but as soon as I added them to my memory, they just as quickly faded as new ones were added. So I read and re-read and read again… every year I would find myself revisiting the same places and characters until, one day… the  countless  denizens that inhabited my imagination began to speak to each other. After years of wading through the chaos, patterns began to emerge. I began to see the connections and the world of fairy revealed itself to me.

Just as the athlete must repeatedly perform the same excercises to train his muscles or the craftsperson must carry out the same tasks over and over in order to master his particular skill so must the storyteller immerse themselves time and again into the great ocean of stories in order to train his imagination until the art of myth becomes part of their muscle memory. Gradually, the themes and motifs of fantasy become part of his being and he or she begins to see the interconnectedness of the world in which he operates.

 

For many people, the world of folk stories is that of light entertainment, childish things that seem unimportant in modern life. But look closer and you will find that this is a subject taken seriously all over the world. Universities are peopled with scholars, professors and intellectuals who have devoted their lives to a deeper understanding of this subject. Psychologists pay special attention to the material that may given answers to the inner workings of the human psyche and historians painstakingly piece together random clues that may help unlock the secrets of the real historic past.

 

 

These stories of vampires, water spirits and dragons are more than just entertainment – they are the ancient crucible of all human culture. Before the industrialisation of storytelling through print and film there was only the spoken word… passed on from mouth to mouth, spreading like migratory birds along the trade routes of the ancient world. This method was pure storytelling, it came from straight from the imagination of the storyteller – and as such, the motifs and themes that we see endlessly repeated across the globe are direct from the birthplace of the  human imagination. Is it any wonder that the psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung looked to myth to understand the true nature of the human mind ? Is it any surprise that the same stories are re-told and modernised, fitting neatly into any age or any culture ?

 

Despite the vast amount of information we have about ancient civilisations and cultures there is still a great deal of knowledge that has been lost – the evidence that remains of pre Greek, Egyptian and Asian cultures becomes increasingly more fragmented as we travel back in time so it is hard for Historians to understand the beliefs of these lost civilisations –  were monsters and Gods just stories or did they really believe in these beings ? We just don’t know.

 

One thing we do know however is that the Ancient Greeks believed in the existence of the ‘shadow soul’ – the writings of Plato tell us how every person had a personal ‘daimon’ who accompanied them through life and this ‘spirit’ or shadow soul was the link between humans and all the denizens of the supernatural that inhabited their world. To the Greeks, satyrs, fauns, centaurs and spirits were all as much a part of the real world as giraffes and hippopotami.

 

 

Centuries later, the Church council of 869AD decreed that man was made up of body and spirit and the third part, the soul, was subsumed under the body. Suddenly, there was no room anymore for Daimons to exist in both our minds AND the outside world. So, what was to be done with all the creatures of the supernatural, the fairies, elves and monsters ? The church simply classified them all as ‘demons’ and put them together with the angels who had been cast out of heaven along with Satan.

 

And so, there the story might have ended but in the 1200 years that have passed since then mankind has continued to remain fascinated with the ethereal world of the supernatural, despite religious classification. Folk stories continued to abound and evolve around the world and artists, writers, musicians, philosophers and thinkers continued to use the repository of myth to inspire their imaginations. By the nineteenth century highly influential thinkers were continuously re-interpreting mythology for their work: the composer Wagner was using Germanic myth for his epic Ring cycle, the Pre Raphaelite painters (followed by the Symbolists) were interpreting any number of magical and monstrous subjects for their work which was reaching wide audiences and the research of Andersen and the Grimm Brothers was proving to be immensely popular with adults and children alike.

 

The arrival of the 20^th century and the modern age of industrialisation was expected to chase away the last vestiges of fairy folk and spirit people from the isolated forests and mountains of Europe but even the modernists and surrealists were drawn to the subject: Picasso painted Minotaurs and Dali explored the Arabian Nights. All over the world people continued to believe in the powers of the elemental spirits that they still witnessed around them and still propitiated them with gifts, songs, stories and rituals in a strange, unspoken  complicity with organised religion.

 

Even Freud and Jung, the major exponents of that most modern of sciences - Psychology, looked to folk belief to explain and identify their theories – explanations of the human psyche that went on to be a major influence on contemporary culture and thinking.

Such is the influence of Jungs teachings that every modern culture on Earth is underpinned by his belief in the power of dreams and imagination. Jung did not patronise those who dreamed of fairies or claimed to see UFO’s – he supported their beliefs and strived to explain it in his work. Carl Jung was first able to identify the subconscious as a repository of ‘mythical beings’ and later in life he defined a deeper level of the psyche which contained the past experience not just of our personal lives but of our entire race. He called it the collective unconscious and it is from that place that the mass sightings of UFO’s,  angels and rampaging ghostly hordes emerge into the real world.

 

And so to the modern day where our fascination with the supernatural has reached an historical high. Despite the depredations of the mechanised world, the global media juggernaut of film and games has proved to be the perfect vehicle for the ongoing survival of the ancient stories and all around the world the future rings with the sounds of tales of magic and mystery being told and re-told. The stories may change over time and people might witness UFO’s instead of fairies… but, if Jung and Plato are to be believed, they are all one and the same and there will forever be some secret part of the human psyche, some lost corner of the human memory, that will always be the domain of monsters.

THE ROLE OF STORIES

Fables and stories, and the images we create from them, are the raw undiluted form of fears, desires and our most basic needs. They underpin the driving forces that make us human – our immense capabilities and our capacity for both great good and great evil.

These are the raw, untouched, primal utterings of a dozen races, the unrefined street speech of the centuries…these are the stories that emerge direct from the pulsing bloodlines of humanity.

 

The immense global repository of tales of dragons, ghosts, mermaids and fairies are evidence; not of what is ‘out there’ but what is inside us.

 

INSPIRATION

When searching for idea and inspiration, be prepared to pursue what interests you, take notice of the things that grab your attention and pursue them further. Follow leads, search out more information, you’ll find dead ends but other hunches may pay off with inspiration and ignite your imagination.

 

Don’t be afraid to indulge yourself. Take your time. Read… a lot. Treat your creativity as though it were a garden that needs to be cared for and nurtured. Give it time to grow, you have a whole lifetime to get good at this.