You have the forgotten power to solve an age-old magical mystery. This is how to wield it.

This is how to tell the type of healing stories the world truly needs

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For a very long time now, the stories circulated in our culture have been controlling the way we live our lives, the choices we make, our prejudices and biases, even the way we see and value ourselves.

Now, in a modern world, shaped by the iron grip of patriarchal narrative, there's one particular imbalance – a problem that comes up time and time again in myth after myth, fairy tale after fairy tale. In other words, story itself seems to be begging us to fix this problem. This is how to understand and respond to that call. 

Pick a story, any story

Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, the myth of Persephone or King Arthur's knights, or the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 

It doesn't matter which you pick, because these stories all fit the same archetypal blueprint – they're all powerful echoes of the collective unconscious, crying out for the retrieval of the lost feminine. 

In each story, a princess, "damsel in distress" or other symbol of femininity, like the Holy Grail, is sought, rescued, or recovered from some distant place: Rapunzel is liberated from her tower; Sleeping Beauty awakened from her enchanted sleep; Persephone, delivered from the Underworld; the Holy Grail, quested for by King Arthur's knights or good old Indiana Jones (a modern-day knight).

This story gets told and retold ad infinitum. But why? Why is this particular trope so enduring? And why does it resonate so deeply within us?

The great patriarchal imbalance

We are very familiar with the idea of men being in power, but it hasn't always been that way. Archeologist James Mellaart's excavations at Çatal Hüyük (chatt-all hoo-eck), which is a prehistoric site in Anatolia, reveal evidence of not just an ancient matriarchal society, but a utopian matriarchal society where peace and equality reigned.

"There had been no wars for a thousand years. There was an ordered pattern to society. There were no human or animal sacrifices. Vegetarianism prevailed, for domestic animals were kept for milk and wool – not for meat. There is no evidence of violent deaths... Above all, the supreme deity in all the temples was a goddess."

– James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, p.70

Now, apparently, some still dispute that Çatal Hüyük was a matriarchal society, but even the naysayers still consider it an example of a gender-equal civilisation, where men and women enjoyed the same status.

Either way, it sounds great. And Çatal Hüyük surely wasn't a one-off. Before the Old Testament was compiled, and the vibrant pantheon of mixed-gender polytheism was replaced by a single Father-god, mythology celebrated both gods and goddesses who came in any number of different forms. But many of these narratives were all but erased by Hebrew scribes, at first, and then their later Christian counterparts as they curated a selection of religious stories designed to bolster the supremacy of a singular patriarchal God. This paved the way for millennia of female persecution and servitude, so… thanks for that. 

The sacred androgyne

But it wasn't just the feminine that had to be done away with. In her fascinating book Androgyny, June Singer argues that the archetype of the Sacred Androgyne suffered the same fate as those demoted and forgotten ancient goddesses – that, before patriarchal monotheism swept through the world like a devouring virus, a kind of godly androgyny (that is, god figures that embodied both the masculine and feminine) was seen as the pinnacle of divinity, which makes sense, really, when you think about it. The ultimate god would surely be not either/or, but both/and. Yet, in our patriarchal modern world, this wisdom, of course, has been lost.

Today, while we are increasingly aware of our biases, the roots of these biases run so deep that it will take generations, if not more millennia, to fully heal the rift. But I find it fascinating that we've known about this for literal ages, which is why myths, fairy tales and modern stories alike continually dramatise the search for the lost feminine. The collective unconscious is shouting at us, trying to get us to listen. We, as a species, have lost something so vital that, just like the wounded Fisher King, has left us chronically injured and in desperate need of healing.

Stories of rebalance

So, I reckon we need to start thinking of stories like Rapunzel and Indiana Jones as urgent calls to action. It was stories – specifically, their curation, twisting and deletion – that tore open this divide in the first place. And it's through storytelling that we can and must remedy this age-old problem.

In other words, we need to start telling and sharing more stories from diverse authors, about diverse characters. The world has had enough of the Hero's Journey. It's time for something different. 

So, to get this started, I am inviting you to share the name of a book or movie or any other story that breaks the patriarchal mould below, along with where we can find it. I can't wait to see what you come up with.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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