Wise Women is a collection of retellings of ancient, traditional native European stories. It features an exuberant cast of powerful, elder female human – and other-than-human – beings. I see the author – Jungian psychologist and thinker, Sharon Blackie – at her desk under teetering piles of musty old fairy-tale collections; sifting through them for lost and hidden story gems of eldering women as forces of nature, and wise women, amid the many stories of weak, stupid, frightening and evil old women that have come down to us, misogynistically skewered through the 14th- to 17th-century lens of the European witch craze.
Angharad Wynne, Wise Women’s Welsh storyteller co-author, brings an oral style to the book. These stories, originating from Ireland to Siberia, are designed to be read aloud, or to be memorised for future “fireside” retellings. A mild dissatisfaction is that I yearned for a brief technical description of how the writers worked together; this I had to guess at.
Blackie and Wynne acknowledge their reverence for the hundreds of years of anonymous indigenous European storytellers who passed these spoken tales on from generation to generation, before medieval scribes began netting them into books. Holding this gorgeously produced hardback, I sense a repository of distilled wisdom in my hands. The invitation is to embody this wisdom, and to pass it on as a story-carrier yourself. The collection is precious, because it’s the first time that these rare, patriarchy-surviving remnants of powerful elder female folk stories have been deliberately anthologised.
The genius of Wise Women – and the reason it can be put to such practical and uplifting use in the lives of eldering women – is that the stories are partnered by illuminating essays of symbolic psychoanalysis: maps to personal life application that Jungians can generate for our culture, which has lost the ancient skills of dream, myth and folktale interpretation.
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Wise Women has a radically transformative agenda: to reawaken powerful elder female archetypes buried in our unconscious minds; to redress the imbalance created by millenniums of patriarchy, by bringing elder women into their agency as wise leaders. The confidence and clarity-boosting “Council of Grandmothers” – who’ve skirted the edgelands of my dreams since reading Wise Women – are testimony to the book’s liberating power.
Adrienne Murphy is a critic
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