Farm Dairying (1911)

Fairy tales originated as adult entertainment and were used as teaching tools. The spiritual symbolism contained in them helped people of earlier ages to understand the conflicts of their everyday lives. When characters appeared to be dysfunctional, they were said to be bewitched. The stories described their quests for transformation. In Bewitchment and Beyond, a well-loved story from the author’s childhood becomes an interpretative guide for examining the malaise that many see in the current plight of institutional religion, Catholicism in particular. The characters in Snow-white and Rose-red –a widow, her two daughters, a bear/prince and a dwarf–all play their parts in illustrating a state of bewitchment fostered by a dogmatic belief system that does not resonate with sound psychological growth in spirituality. Patterns of human behavior that were encoded in the human psyche from primordial times appear in mythologies and folk tales from all cultures. Carl Jung referred to them as archetypes. In earlier centuries, ordinary folk named them and applied their attributes to their own life experiences. As the institutional Church gradually dogmatized archetypal patterns into articles of faith, they lost their connection to life and, therefore, their vitality. Preserved as doctrines to be simply believed, they became fossilized. Rediscovering their spiritual symbolism and applying it to individual experience could result in transformation. Strands of personal experience, church history, spirituality and psychology, woven together, illuminate the life-long quest of the author. The Jungian method of amplification unveils archetypal patterns that have hardened into dogma, offering clues fortheir rehabilitation.