And so, how do you punish a rational creature? By making him animal, by making him as bad as a woman. Well, I make of it the idea that way, way back from ancient Greek philosophy onwards, women have been associated with nature and men have been associated with the rational world and the intellectual world, and that has been seen as being superior. And the stories in which the animal becomes human are almost always women.
Generally speaking, those situations in which the human is punished by being turned into an animal, they're almost always men. So, the princess kisses the frog, and lo and behold is a prince or the beast is freed by beauty.
And then there are others in which being turned from an animal into a human is a form of rescue. So, when I think of old mystery tales involving people being transformed into animals, the first ones that come to my mind are the ones where it's kind of a form of punishment for the human. She ate her husband effectively, and then she vanished into the forest and it's like, "Yeah, now that's a consequence I can live with." Once she had regained her skin, didn't just vanish off into the forest. And so, if you look back at the very older stories, there are consequences.Īnd so, I rewrote that story so that the wolf woman didn't just.
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Although I love the stories, I always felt really irritated at the end of the selkie stories that the guy who'd stolen her skin just got off scot-free. Well, I always felt very irritated, to be honest. Luckily, Sharon Blackie says, "They can also show you the way back." For example, in her most recent collection called Foxfire, Wolfskin, she gives us a fiercer version of the selkie story, about a woman who's part Wolf. That's one lesson you can take from shapeshifting, myths and fairy tales. And when people lose their relationship with the more than human world, bad things happen. The result of living over busy, over civilized lives, safe in our houses and offices, it's easy to forget that we're part of a larger living community, the natural world. What is that sense of longing? What do we feel that we've lost? As a psychologist, Sharon Blackie believes many of us suffer from a kind of inner emptiness. And I think these shapeshifting stories tap into a longing that we often don't even know we have, and we feel that very deeply as sorrow. Our mythology here in the British Isles and Island is full of women who switch between human and animal form. And then the mother goes down to the beach, puts it on, and slips back into the sea, leaving her children and her husband behind. And in most of the stories, it is her daughter who finds the skin and gives it to the mother. At the end of seven years, she's desiccated, she's not meant to be on land. She's forced to stay with him for seven years. He steals the skin of one of the selkies. They slip off their skins, they dance on the beach, but the story goes that there is a fisherman, a very lonely fisherman hiding behind a rock watching this going on. So, they come to a beautiful beach under the full moon. Sharon Blackie is a writer, psychologist, and mythologist.Ī selkie is a seal who in certain circumstances, usually once a month, under the light of the full moon is capable of shedding her seal skin and transforming into a human woman. I think my favorite stories of all, if I had a totem story would probably be the selkie story. And there is a lesson for our time in those stories, if we listen. There are stories and legends as old as time of people who can become animals, animals who can become people, shapeshifters, border crossers, skin-walkers. I'm Anne Strainchamps and this is To the Best of Our Knowledge.
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