I envy people who grew up with a strong affinity for fairytales. I feel like it’s a boat I missed. Fairytales are ancient and magical and mythological, and that seems like something that would have drawn me in. Of course, I watched all of the Disney movies, and probably read a book here and there. I never dove deep, though, into those archetypal waters of human culture and psyche.

Something I do find utterly fascinating about fairytales as an adult, though, is that similar stories parallel each other around the world. For instance, our modern Cinderella can be traced back to ancient Greece and to China. Similarly, cultures around the world have always told stories of the mischievous, magical nature spirits that we know as fairies.

How did generations of humanity, thousands of years ago, come up with the same stories?

Carl Jung said that these dreams emerged from a common psychic soup of characters, narrative arcs, and universal human experiences. For me, the universality of these tropes speak to their reality. If cultures around the world have always told the same stories, then those stories must be true. The only question is on what level do we receive those truths?

While I seem to have missed the boat on deep diving with fairytales, I do have a lot of experience with tarot and oracle cards. While not as primal human storytelling, using cards for insight and divination has been around for generations. In fact, the cards draw on many of the same archetypal energies that are found in the ancient tales.

Light/dark, growth/decay, victory/defeat, love/heartbreak, wealth/poverty. These universal experiences express themselves through the cards to illuminate our place in the stories that humans have conjured throughout time.

Lately, one of the cards that keeps coming up for me is “Fairytale.”

At first, assuming our modern context for the word, I thought, “Lovely! Who doesn’t want to live in a fairytale? Everything is magical, pretty, and has a happy ending.” Although, honestly, that interpretation seemed odd. Things aren’t very fairytale-like these days, are they?

My intuition quickly stepped in and put up its hand, “Nope. That’s not the message, girlie.” I sensed that the card was expressing something heavier and more consequential - more reflective of the moment we are living in - than my initial wishful thinking.

Fairytales, as they existed for most of recorded history (and some of them go waaaay back), were expressions of our ancestors’ understanding of life and death, and they bore little resemblance to the Disney vision of hetero-romance and pretty dresses that we have today.

Those original stories spoke of darkness, violence, suffering, and loss. They traced heroines' journeys through dismemberment and abandonment, into the cold depths of terror, before eventually finding their way out into the warm sunshine of wholeness and connection once again.

If we move past our modern denial of death (because isn’t that what every story is about - death?) we see that fairytales were never meant to promote fantasies of rescue, romance, and happy endings. Our ancestors knew that life was wrought through with destruction and decay.

Survival, joy, love, and abundance may indeed be the outcome of many stories (if not all). But we cannot get there - to an ending with some relief - if there are no dragons to conquer. If there are no lessons of sadness, isolation, or poverty, our heroes have no reason to work for their treasures. There is no need for the welcoming celebration of home if we never left there in the first place.

And we have left home, haven’t we? At least, the home we thought we had. Maybe we really did have it. Or maybe it left us. In any case, it’s gone. We are on the journey now. Our own heroine’s journey. We find ourselves on an empty path that seems untrodden by other decent living souls, its end nowhere in sight.

Maybe that’s not really true, though. These ancient stories - fairytales, mythologies, those told over and over by our ancestors - they assure us that there is no desolate road. They have all been traversed for eons by those who passed this way before, who encountered the dragons we now face, and worse.

The current and real fairytale that we are living is not that of the Disney princesses. It is of the grit and the grime of lessons that teach us how to live and die as everyone has all along. We aren’t special. We will die, too. Maybe sooner, maybe later.

Nations die, too. They always have.

But what our modern culture has forgotten is that companioning the truth of death is the reality of rebirth. The ancient stories never really ended, because our forebears knew that ending itself was a myth. There is only change, only new form. There is only the spiraling of birth into destruction and rebirth, life forever unfolding unto itself.

So now we wonder, lost in the land of fairytales. Not the animated kind, but the original, true versions - the scary, violent versions. The way forward is full of dragons, but it is also lit by the love of our ancestors. There will be sustenance to nourish us as we go. We will encounter helpful companions in the trees, the frogs, and the birds that have something to say. We need only listen.

We are our own heroines now. A new world is ready to be reborn. But only if we are ready to birth it.