Fairy tales speak the language of the soul

A portrait of Clarissa Horak, theologian and storyteller

Fairy tales use archetypal images that speak to our inner wisdom. Mythical creatures represent different aspects of the soul. The Viennese Clarissa Horak has looked into them closely and found that fairy tales are by no means only cruel.

According to C. G. Jung, fairy tales speak to the collective unconscious. You could also say that they reach archetypal primal principles within us. Dreams, myths and fairy tales are closely related and communicate in simple images and sequences that anyone can easily understand, regardless of age or education. In this way, fairy tales speak the language of the soul, so to speak. They carry more wisdom than one might suspect at first glance, and they sharpen intuition. Unfortunately, they have rather gone out of fashion and also struggle with a bad image. They are often dismissed as cruel.

Clarissa Horak’s concern is to make the world of fairy tales accessible to people again. She believes that fairy tales, precisely because they sharpen our inner perception, are a healthy counterweight to the spreading collectivism.

The hero’s journey

The American mythologist Joseph Campbell visited numerous indigenous peoples and found that they all told each other stories in order to learn from one another. Campbell also noticed that the structure and essence of the stories were almost identical, regardless of culture and region. The hero was born into circumstances that forced him to find his own way and thus to set out on the “hero’s journey”, that is, the journey to himself. We find this narrative thread in our own legends, fairy tales and myths too – from Mother Holle and Hans in Luck to The Fisherman and His Wife.

Clarissa’s hero’s journey

Clarissa Horak grew up in 1960s Vienna with a strictly Catholic mother, her three siblings and her father, a lawyer at the Supreme Court. Her parents’ views of the world could hardly have been more different. Her mother, very sensitive, almost clairvoyant, saw the divine in people and nature and, for example, encouraged the children to play in the woods on sunny days rather than sit in school.

Clarissa’s father, on the other hand, held that human beings are fundamentally bad and that the administration of justice is therefore indispensable to protect humanity from itself; otherwise the world would sink into anarchy and chaos.

After leaving school, Clarissa turned to theology, hoping to find in it answers to the questions about the meaning of life and spirituality that her mother had been unable to give her.

Despite her disappointment at the – in her own words – “mendacity” of the professors, she completed her degree successfully. She then taught for more than twenty years at a Viennese grammar school. As a religious education teacher at her school in Vienna’s 18th district, Clarissa was able to organise her lessons relatively freely until the introduction of the centralised school-leaving exam. Clarissa paid little attention to curricula and taught the young people always to look for their own truth within themselves and to stay true to their gut feeling, no matter what others said.

Spiritual education instead of dogmatic religious instruction

Clarissa Horak found that with fairy tales, meditations and guided sound journeys she won the children’s undivided attention. The classroom regularly became as quiet as a mouse; the children began to paint and rediscovered something within themselves that usually got short shrift in their everyday lives: the inner calm and wisdom of their own hearts.

As can also be read in the work of Eugen Drewermann (theologian and psychotherapist) and Verena Kast (psychologist, Jung Institute, University of Zurich), fairy tales have a real depth effect from a psychological point of view. They illustrate complex connections in simple images and thus offer lasting orientation for real life. For example, mythical creatures that can change their shape appear again and again – a hint that not everything is as it seems, that nothing is only black or white. If we meet someone in everyday life whom we cannot pigeonhole, we remember the mythical creatures from stories we once heard…

As mentioned at the beginning, several characters in a fairy tale can also stand for the sometimes conflicting aspects of the unconscious. Like the outer world, our inner world is full of opposites. In the fairy tale or the fable they become good and evil, light and dark figures, witches and fairies.

In this way we receive guidance on bringing all these aspects into consciousness, then integrating them and so becoming whole. The messages of fairy tales, legends and myths are timeless.

In her lessons it was particularly important to Horak to show the children that they are independent individuals. That “lumping everyone together” is not the same as fair distribution. That children usually have a clear sense of what suits them and what does not, and that they should keep this sense for as long as possible, ideally all their lives.

Two years ago Clarissa Horak turned her back first on the Catholic Church and then on the school system. Since then she has worked as a storyteller, among other things, for children and adults alike. She is also writing her memoirs and increasingly remembering ancient healing knowledge.

Further links:

Links: Joseph Campbell – The hero’s journey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWaNgsFvWxM Book review (German) Verena Kast – Mythos, Traum, Realität (Myth, dream, reality) https://literaturkritik.de/id/7000 Video (German) Eugen Drewermann – Märchen als Wegweiser der Seele (Fairy tales as signposts of the soul) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-b6-7AKOwI

Contact:

Clarissa Horak | Email: clarissa.horak@gmx.at | Phone: +43 (0) 676 44 89 786