Victim or Heroine? Women in Myth, Fairy Tale and the Archetypes That Shape Our Lives

There comes a moment in a spiritual woman’s life when she begins to realise that she is not only living her personal story, but also living inside ancient patterns, archetypal forces and inherited images of the feminine that have been moving through women for centuries.

She may think she is simply struggling with love, with her body, with confidence, with money, with visibility, with motherhood, creativity, sexuality, the fear of being seen, the exhaustion of being needed, or with the strange ache of knowing there is something more inside her than the life she is currently living; but beneath these personal experiences there is often a deeper symbolic pattern at work, an old story that has taken hold of the psyche, an archetype that is shaping her choices, her reactions, her desires, her silences and her sense of what is possible.

This is why myth and fairy tale is essential for us on a deepening path.

They are psychic maps, symbolic languages of the deep psyche, ancient containers of feminine experience that show us the woman in the tower, the maiden in the forest, the bride in the forbidden room, the goddess descending into the underworld, the princess asleep behind the thorns, the girl without hands, the woman dancing herself to exhaustion in red shoes, the mother who devours, the witch who initiates, the old woman who knows, the lover who awakens, the king who may or may not be conscious, and the heroine who must learn to find her own way through the story. So, so many archetypes each with something to teach us.

C. G. Jung wrote that “myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes,” and this is exactly why myth reaches us in a way ordinary explanation often cannot, because the psyche does not only think in concepts, it thinks in images, symbols, dreams, sensations, patterns and stories that are older than the conscious mind.

A woman can read a psychology book and understand the word “projection,” but when she meets Psyche holding the lamp over Eros, suddenly the whole drama of love, curiosity, betrayal, longing, soul-maturation and the dangerous innocence of unconscious desire becomes alive inside her; a woman can understand the idea of intuition intellectually, but when she meets Vasilisa carrying the little doll in her pocket as she enters Baba Yaga’s forest, she begins to feel what inner guidance actually means in the body; a woman can talk about boundaries, but when she sees Bluebeard’s forbidden room, the key stained with blood, and the terrible cost of not listening to instinct, she understands something that advice alone could never give her. Teaching these in my containers, book clubs, Druidess training, Womb Alchemy .. the stories hit women hard and give them all an OH MY GODDDDESS moment!

Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s great interpreters of fairy tales, wrote that fairy tales are “the simplest and purest expressions of the collective unconscious,” because in them we see the archetypal patterns stripped down to their essential forms, and this is why they are so powerful for women who are trying to understand their lives not only personally, but symbolically.

When a woman enters myth, she often begins to ask a different kind of question, rather than “What is wrong with me?” she begins to ask, “What story am I inside?” This is a radical shift, because the first question often leads to shame, self-improvement, comparison and the endless attempt to fix oneself, while the second question opens the symbolic imagination and allows the woman to see that her suffering may not be random, her patterns are NOT meaningless, and her wound may be part of an initiation she has not yet understood.

The woman who feels trapped may begin to now feel her tower.

The woman who feels numb may begin to recognise that shes been asleep.

The woman who keeps ignoring her own knowing may begin to recognise that there is a forbidden room she can go in.

The woman who has lost orunable to use her voice may begin to recognise the sacrificed maiden.

The woman who cannot stop performing may begin to recognise that she is wearing the red shoes.

The woman who feels stripped of everything she once was may begin to recognise the journey of Inanna at the gates of the underworld.

And when she recognises the story, she begins to loosen its unconscious grip and this is where the question of victim or heroine becomes soooo important. Both may have be wounded, betrayed, abandoned, silenced, exiled, cursed, sleeping, lost, frightened, trapped, hungry for love, or standing at the edge of a forest without knowing what will happen next.

The victim is the woman who remains unconsciously possessed by the story, who repeats the pattern without seeing it, who waits for rescue without understanding the inner forces that keep her waiting, who feels life is happening to her but cannot yet see the archetype that has taken hold of her; the heroine is the woman who begins to see the pattern, name the archetype, listen to the symbol, ask what the wound is teaching her, and retrieve the medicine hidden in the very place she once felt powerless.

This is not about blaming women for their suffering, nor is it about pretending that women have not been deeply harmed by personal, ancestral and collective forces; it is about restoring symbolic agency, the ability to see that even within the wound there may be a path, a threshold, a task, a descent, a chamber, a key, a helper, a shadow, a medicine and a way through. There is always something....

The victim is stuck in her old patterns and beliefs, she is projecting all her own unconscious stuff onto others and unaware of the archetypal forces that run through her.

In Jungian language, the archetype is not simply a personality type or a poetic label; it is a living pattern of the psyche, a force that shapes perception, emotion, instinct and behaviour, often before we are conscious of it, and when archetypes are unconscious they can possess us, but when we begin to recognise them, we can enter into relationship with them.

This is why women need to know the archetypes that are moving through them.

The abandoned child, the devouring mother, the wounded maiden, the seductress, the nun, the witch, the good girl, the sacred prostitute, the queen, the crone, the priestess, the heroine, the victim, the rescuer, the waiting woman, the sleeping beauty, the handless maiden, the wild woman, the inner king, the prince, the animus, the negative masculine voice, the wise old woman; they are inner powers that can quietly govern our choices,relationships, longing, shame, desirea, capacity to receive and our ability to stand in life.

I see many women may believe she is being radically free and spiritual, while the wounded maiden is afraid to enter her body and her devouring mother wound still traps her in patterns of dependency. There are women may believe she is waiting for love, while the sleeping feminine is waiting for an outer prince because the inner masculine has not yet developed the strength, clarity and devotion to approach her with consciousness.

A woman may believe she is simply tired, while the soul is in a long sleep behind thorns because too much of her eros, beauty, instinct, voice and sacred sexual self has been exiled from her daily life because she is living in the wrong place

This is why Sleeping Beauty is such a potent first story for The Myth & Fairy Tale Temple.

On the surface, it can look like a story about a passive princess waiting to be rescued, but symbolically it is far more profound than that, because it shows us the feminine who has been blessed with beauty, grace, loveliness and protection, yet is kept away from the very spindle that would initiate her into blood, fate, sexuality, danger, instinct and the deeper mysteries of feminine knowing. The wound of Sleeping Beauty is the wound of the sleeping feminine.

It is the woman who is outwardly functioning but inwardly quiet, the woman who may be beautiful, capable, kind, spiritual, responsible, admired or pleasing, yet something in her body has gone still, something in her voice has softened itself into acceptability, something in her eros has withdrawn behind the thorns, something in her sacred sexual self has gone to sleep, something in her inner life is waiting for a presence that has not yet arrived.

Thethorns really matter in this story they are not only an obstacle; they are a living boundary around the sleeping place, a protection grown by the psyche around what was too tender, too sacred, too wounded or too undeveloped to be touched too soon. Many women judge their own thorns, guardedness, resistance, withdrawal, lack of desire, inability to receive, fear of intimacy, reluctance to be visible, silence around what they truly want; but seen symbolically, the thorns may have been the psyche’s way of protecting the part of the feminine that could not yet awaken safely.

We must ask ourselves: “What have the thorns been protecting?”

Shall we talke about the prince? He is the outer man who rescues ( dare we say?) the passive woman, but in a Jungian reading we can also understand him as the animus, the inner masculine principle within a woman’s psyche, the part of her that brings consciousness, discernment, direction, structure, courage, thought, voice, boundary, action and the capacity to move toward life. If the animus is undeveloped, he may appear inwardly as criticism, harsh judgement, absence, avoidance, fantasy, spiritual superiority, impossible standards, emotional coldness or the endless waiting for an outer man to bring the life that has not yet been awakened within.

If the animus begins to mature, he becomes the conscious masculine within: the part of the woman who can cross the thorns without violating the feminine, approach the sleeping chamber with reverence, hold structure without domination, bring clarity without cutting off feeling, protect the sacred sexual self rather than possess it.

When we feel as women the need to be rescued we need to address our inner animus.

Marion Woodman, whose Jungian work returned again and again to the feminine body, asked, “Where in my body do I feel the integrity that allows me to come from that place and speak from that place?” and this question is central to the way we will work with myth and fairy tale, because the story is not only something we analyse with the mind, it is something we locate in the body.

In the class i will teach we will ask ...Where does Sleeping Beauty live in the body? where are the thorns? where is my animus and what is he like ? Am I in my victim or Heroine?

When we ask these questions, the story becomes medicine rather than the rescue, because the symbol begins to rearrange the psyche from within, by giving us an image strong enough to hold the complexity of our inner life.

This is why a woman can feel changed by a fairy tale.

Not because the tale tells her what to do, but because it gives her a mirror in which her own soul can finally recognise itself.

Modern women need these wider images of the feminine because the culture has given us such narrow ones. We are told to be desirable but not too desiring, strong but not too difficult, spiritual but not too wild, independent but still pleasing, sexual but still acceptable, successful but not threatening, healed but not messy, beautiful but effortless, maternal but not consumed, powerful but not dangerous.

Myth and fairy tale break these narrow cages open.

They show us the feminine in her full symbolic range: devouring and nourishing, wounded and wise, sleeping and awakening, innocent and erotic, destructive and creative, lost and initiated, victim and heroine. And when a woman begins to see herself through this symbolic lens, she can stop reducing her life to symptoms and begin seeing it as a soul story with archetypal meaning.

This is the work of The Myth & Fairy Tale Temple.

Each month, we will take one myth or fairy tale and enter it as a living map of the feminine psyche, not as literary analysis, but as a psychospiritual exploration of the body, archetype, wound, initiation and medicine inside the story.

We will ask what feminine problem the tale reveals, what archetype is active, what part of us is living this story unconsciously, where the tale lives in the body, and how the woman inside the story moves from victim to heroine.

We begin on July 8th with Sleeping Beauty.

We begin with the sleeping feminine, the thorns, the spindle, the chamber, the waiting, the beauty that has been seen from the outside but not felt from within, the sacred sexual self that has withdrawn from life, and the prince or king as animus, the inner masculine who must learn how to approach the feminine with consciousness, reverence and love.

If something in you has been sleeping behind the thorns — your beauty, your voice, your eros, your creativity, your instinct, your sensuality, your sacred sexual self, your relationship with the inner masculine, or your belief that life can still awaken from within — this first class is a doorway.

The Myth & Fairy Tale Temple begins July 8th.

Enter the Temple here:

https://www.templedelarose.com/myth-and-fairy-tale-temple

In love and Fairy Tale Devotion

Collette