[Lush]

Originally Posted by davem

I was going further back than that. Aristotle & Plato certainly are 'modern thinkers' (though we do know Plato was an initiate of the Mysteries). What we do know is that all our ancestors saw the world differently to the way we see it. They may have had their equivalent of politics & philosophy, but these were aspects of a magical worldview. They weren't detatched from the natural world as we are.

We are? Like, totally?

Any reading of Jung for instance will confirm that the same stories, reflecting the same worldview, were common among them.

Jung's my boy, but I don't think he's the end-all be-all, if you know what I mean,

Come on, I'm not accusing you of anything. I was attacking a certain modernist (or post modernist, or whatever it is, or whatever all those particular definitions actually mean) approach to myth & fairystory, which attempts to tell us what they mean. Whatever they might mean to us we can in no way say that's what they meant to our ancestors. Or what they will mean to our decendents. Its like the way people talk about the 'ignorant past', implying that we know more than our ancestors, that we've 'sussed them out' & know better. As Bob Stewart has pointed out, we are living in what our decendents will very probably call their ignorant past.

And who in this thread is talking about an ignorant past? Not me.

I don't think I actually accused Atkinson of of making theory bigger than fairy tale is. I was referring to the reductionist approach in general. If I could be accused of generalising about 'our' ancestors, I think any modernist (or post modernist, or post post modernist) theory which attempts to provide little boxes into which all fairy stories, folksongs & modern novels can be neatly fitted is bound to be, in the end, an abject failure.

It's got its merits and its drawbacks.

We can analyse as much as we like - it exercises the brain - but the experience of the stories is the only really important thing, & the only thing we will actually learn from.

I think the experience is not necessarily detached from analysis.

Direct experience will, of course, lead us, if we are thoughtful beings, to attempt to explain & analyse that experience. What I'm saying is that the experience should come first, not the analysis. When you've had the experience you can then go on & construct your own 'theory' if you want. Going in already armed with someone else's theory, which tells you, before you've had the experience, what it all means, what's important, will very likely leave you unaffected by the whole thing, or worse, affected in the wrong way. Your story of the monk & the woman, if viewed through the eyes of feminist theory, is likely to be reduced to no more than yet another male attack on women. Yet myths & legends from all over the world have this 'ambiguous' figure of a woman who is either beautiful & becomes ugly (cf the Fairy Queen in the Romance of Thomas the Rhymer) or ugly & becomes beautiful (the figure of Sovereignty in Irish myth, or the Loathly Lady in the Gawain story).

LOL! All feminists are that simple then, are they?

And finally, although I'm really enjoying this discussion, & I hope you're not feeling too embattled, I have to go along with Alatar.

Embattled? Sir davem flatters himself. I think Lalaith summed it up best above.