“Noting these tokens and examples some have said
that a share of divine intelligence is in bees,
and a draught of (a)ether: since there is a god in everything…”
—Virgil, The “Georgics,” 29 BCE
Stories from contemporary indigenous cultures convey an ecological consciousness of balance and symbiosis that is foreign to the way many people live today.
Are there stories in the European tradition that can help those of us in that cultural mindset reconnect with our nature and the earth, and refashion this relationship? How does a myth or story become a source of guidance and wisdom?
Transcript of Ecological Consciousness and “The Queen Bee” fairy tale
Hello and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and what myth can offer us today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Are there stories in the European tradition that can help those of us in that cultural mindset reconnect with our nature and the earth, and refashion this relationship? How does a myth or story become a source of guidance and wisdom?
I brought these questions to a gathering of mythologists recently, the Fates and Graces mythologium. Our theme was “myth and the ecological imagination.” Today I want to explore this theme and these questions with you.
Let’s begin with a story, a fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm called “The Queen Bee.” I invite you to relax and listen to the story. Notice the detail or moment that catches your attention, as it can be an opening into the meaning this story holds for you right now.
“The Queen Bee”
Once upon a time there were three brothers, sons of a king. The two eldest sons left home to seek adventure but they fell into a reckless way of living, and soon gave up all thoughts of going home again. The youngest brother, who was called Witling, went off to look for them. When he found them, they jeered at his simplicity and told him that he was a total fool for thinking that he could make his way in the world. They were much more clever and had been unsuccessful.
Reunited, the three brothers went on together. After a time, they came to an ant-hill. The two eldest brothers picked up sticks. They wanted to stir up the ant-hill so they could watch the little ants hurry about in fear, carrying off their eggs. But Witling said, “Leave the little creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be disturbed.”
The three brothers went on a little further, until they came to a lake. A number of ducks were swimming about and the two eldest brothers wanted to catch a couple of them and cook them. But Witling said, “Leave the creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be killed.”
Then the three of them came to a bees nest in a tree. There was so much honey that it ran down the trunk in a sticky golden stream. The two eldest brothers wanted to make a fire under the tree to stifle the bees with the smoke. Then they could steal the honey. But Witling said “Leave the little creatures alone. I will not suffer them to be stifled.”
The two eldest brothers were not happy with all of this, but the three of them continued on until they came to a castle. All was deathly quiet. Everything and everyone in this palace was like stone. The brothers went through the quiet rooms. At last they came to a door at the end of a long hallway, secured with three locks. In the middle of the door was a small opening. They peered into the room and saw a little grey-haired man sitting at a table. He was alive!
They called out “Come let us in.” But he didn’t hear them. They called out to him again and he still sat at his table unaware. But the third time they called out to him he got up, undid the locks, and came out. He didn’t say a word. He led them to a table loaded with all sorts of good things. They also found three beds.
The next morning the little grey-haired man beckoned the eldest brother over to a table of stone. Carved into the table were instructions for releasing the castle from its enchantment. There were three tasks to be completed. The first task was to go into the surrounding woods and search under the moss for a thousand pearls scattered there. Whoever undertook this task had to find all thousand by sunset. If even one pearl was missing, he would be turned to stone.
The eldest brother went out and searched all day and only found one hundred pearls. He turned into stone. The second brother undertook this adventure the next day. He did find two hundred pearls, but only two hundred, and he was also turned into stone.
Now it was Witling’s turn. He began to search in the moss but it was very tedious and he was very slow and clumsy at it. Before long he was in despair and frightened at the prospect of failure. He sat down on a stone and began to weep. He was sitting there with his hands over his face, when up from the ground came the ant-king with five thousand ants. It didn’t take the ants long to collect all of the one thousand pearls and put them in a heap at Witling’s feet.
The second task was to get the key to the princess’s sleeping-chamber out of the lake. Witling went to the shore of the lake without any idea of how to begin, but the ducks whose lives he had saved, came swimming. They dived below the surface and before long they found the key and brought it up from the muddy bottom. of the lake.
The third task was the most difficult. In one of the rooms there lay three princesses, all deep asleep in an enchanted sleep. Wilting had to choose the youngest of the three. But they all looked the same. Each bore a perfect resemblance to the others.
There was one difference between them. Before they went to sleep each one had eaten a different sweetmeat. The eldest had eaten a piece of sugar. The second had eaten a little syrup. The youngest had eaten a spoonful of honey.
Witling gazed hopelessly at the three still faces. He was standing there by the three beds when the Queen Bee flew into the room. She was the queen of the bees that Witling had protected from the fire. One by one, the queen tasted the lips of each princess and settled on those of the one that had eaten honey. Now the king’s son knew which princess to choose.
The spell was broken. Every one awoke from their stony sleep and took their right form again. Witling married the youngest and loveliest princess, and when her father died, Witling became king.
This story initially came to me after conversation with a group of American women of European descent, who were despairing a lack of story heritage from their culture, that brought them into the world and communion with other critters. And yet, as we’ve discussed in other episodes, there are many fairy and folk tales that are about other critters, or depend on their presence as helpers or guides.
Every culture has many stories about animals, birds, fish, and others in the world, no matter how far removed that culture may be today, from its indigenous roots. I’m not saying that every story that has been handed down is useful, and sometimes you have to dig deep to find the old roots. And yet even in places like my country, the United States, people are searching for, elaborating, advocating, and living in rhythm with the earth. Awareness that we are in nature, that we come from the earth as apples come from a tree, as the poet Gary Snyder put it, has never been completely erased.
This has me thinking about the stories that we choose to tell, and about our relationship to story. How it is that some stories are seen as purely entertainment, some become ideologies, and some teaching stories. How does a story become a catalyst for ethical action and accountability. How can a story foster ecological consciousness? The answers to these questions have much to do with us, the tellers and listeners and crafters and holders of story.
So, what type of information or insight do we expect to find in a story like “The Queen Bee?” Some folks might say “none,” or at least, nothing that is useful to adults. In this view, the old stories are for kids or for light entertainment. In some quarters, myths, and fairy and folk tales are artifacts of past cultures that have lasting value, although that value may be purely cultural or artistic.
Depth psychologists and mythologists like Joseph Campbell demonstrated the power of myth in contemporary culture and in our inner lives, as a form of psychology. This understanding supports a growing number of valuable forms of story work as well as analysis of culture and collective psychology. My work obviously, is part of this depth psychological tradition.
But I wonder, has this approach to myth become its own kind of reductionism, with its own blind spots? Are we too quick to map the world and our stories, to our contemporary psychological ideas and concepts? To offer an example from a recent Myth Matters episode, is the Greek myth of Narcissus ONLY an illustration of our modern notion of narcissism? Is it ONLY about death through self-absorption and self-love, or does the story offer us more possibilities?
And if we see myth and story as a repository for a kind of poetic truth that is ONLY important to our personal, inner lives are we perhaps, unwittingly perpetuating the divide between the world out there, and the one in here, that we long to collapse.
In his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, Paul Shepard observes that “Myths may indeed illuminate unconscious processes, but the context in which that inner world came into being is ecological.”
Our consciousness evolved alongside the other critters in the material world. This is obvious when you stop to think about it, but as a 21st century American, I have to make a conscious effort to remember that the world we inhabit — our bodies, physical environment, the other critters and our things- all of this is the origin of our thought as well as our material life. We’ve constructed our inner world and the symbols and stories that describe our inner life, based on what we have observed and learned and experienced in the outer material world, among the other critters.
Our factual knowledge of them precedes our stories and our subsequent symbolic elaboration. Which leads me to consider how little I know about the observable life of other critters, like the ants, ducks, and honey bees in this story. I don’t think my relative ignorance is unique.
The imaginative, emotional, and intellectual limitations of a generic awareness, of seeing every tree as simply a “tree,” for example, are staggering. This is life in a cardboard cutout kind of world, isn’t it? And yet, for many folks–and I’m speaking of myself until the past decade or so, knowing the facts meant moving into a scientific perspective, and I actively resisted that because I thought it was reductive. Nature as a machine that could be completely understood and so controlled, blah, blah, blah. If we had enough observable, measurable data accumulated we. could understand it all. Yikes! This did not reflect my experience of the world.
But of course, what I’m describing isn’t science but rather “scientism,” a materialist ideology. You can usefully gather scientific information about the world without draining it of consciousness, feeling, or soul. A growing number of scientists are demonstrating this quite capably. And maybe the insistence that science and poetry are radically different approaches to the world, should be questioned?
This world view includes many dualistic tensions and judgements. The split between reason and emotion, for example, that have been woven into the European Enlightenment, Christian, industrial cultural matrix (that’s a mouthful) as absolute truth, as the true nature of human nature and world. But these are ideological or philosophical positions that can be revised or abandoned.
In her book The Orphic Voice, Elizabeth Sewell deconstructs the longstanding belief that scientific and poetic thinking are fundamentally different. And she examines the assumed opposition between the scientific and the poetic that has shaped the now dominant culture, since the Enlightenment.
Science cannot be set against poetry Sewell explains, because they are structurally similar activities. Both of them require close observation and discernment, and an imaginative leap via the use of analogy. All thought–we’re speaking of the human here- all human thought, involves a person with a body, a mind with its varied capacities, and language. The real difference between science and poetry is the acceptable stance, the subjectivity.
A scientist is supposed to pretend that he/she/they isn’t involved. This is the fantasy of objectivity. In poetry, the existence of the poet is central to the work and the experience. Today, more and more exciting science is emerging, especially in the field of biology, as the fantasy of objectivity is recognized as such.
Back to the realm of story. For most of our time on earth, humans lived in close intimate contact with animals and the other-than-human beings. Our ancestors knew a lot about them, they were important. How could these relationships not inform the stories that have passed down?
In the case of Witling and the Queen Bee, a young man with little expectation of success becomes king after he helps some ants, ducks, and honeybees, and they help him. There are so many possibilities in this story. I will touch on only one, the Queen Bee.
What do you think of when you hear the words “queen bee?” Before I encountered this story, the phrase “queen bee” made me think of someone imperious and self-centered. I was surprised to discover that the queen bee is selected by the others in the colony and is created by the collective, who feed her special food called royal jelly. For her entire life, the queen bee is in service to the colony. She continually lays eggs, seeding the community with the possibility of new life.
Interesting that she brings the possibility of new life to Wilting and everyone in that stone castle.
As communities, honey bees bring life to us all. As pollinators, they play a vital role in the Earth’s food chain. One out of three bites that you put in your mouth depends on bees. And of course, they produce honey and other products like beeswax, which have household and medicinal uses.
Honey. Honey has been called the food of the gods. A land of milk and honey is an image of paradise. And honey has been part of our quest for relaxation, community, and states of altered consciousness, as mead or when added to wine, beer, soma, or balché, to mention only a few of the known beverages.
In times past, honey was used to preserve the body after death. I wonder about the priestess at Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, who was often referred to as “a bee” and how Persephone of the Elusinian Mysteries, came to be called “Melitoides,” the Honeyed One. About the symbols of bees found in ancient Egyptian tombs and burial chambers.
Our relationship with bees in Western or European derived culture, isn’t limited to the deep past. In many European countries and in New England into the 19th century, people told the bees about important events in their keeper’s lives. When someone took a long journey or returned home, when someone was born or died, the bees were invited to celebrate or mourn.
Today, we are learning a great deal about the state of our environment from bees and their dances. Many people are planting gardens for bees or tending bees. Reviving, in small yet essential ways, the human side of a crucial relationship.
I notice that the tasks in our story couldn’t be completed by a human, and that they were also beyond any one of the other helpers. The bees couldn’t get the key from the bottom of the pond, for example. Helping Witling was a communal effort, a collaborative effort. I also notice communities of the earth, water, and air in the ants, ducks, and honeybee, and the human community in the castle when it comes to life.
Themes of life and death, potential destruction and possible life, weave through this story. In my mind’s eye, I see the image of the 3 identical princesses in their stone beds, lined up like eggs in a honeycomb.
Who were Witling’s teachers, I wonder? Who modeled the power of kindness, empathy, and reciprocity for him? Not his two older brothers, or the king who isn’t really a part of the story. There is no mention of a mother, a queen. Did he learn how to behave through observation and empathetic connection with the other critters in the world?
We are part of a vast ecosystem, full of teachers like the ants, the ducks, and the honeybees, who model, as living beings, cooperation, service, community, reciprocity, and empathy. James Lovelock, who died on July 26th, his 103rd birthday, offered us the Gaia theory, an image of planet Earth as a dynamic living organism, composed of interdependent, self-regulating systems and symbiotic life. He developed the Gaia theory in collaboration with evolutionary biologist Lynn Marguilis. In the 1960s, a lot of people, including the majority of scientists, thought the Gaia theory was absurd. Not so today.
Is this a story then, about critters helping Witling solve his problems out of gratitude for being saved by him? Or is it, instead, or also, a story about what happens when every critter, including the human animal, behaves with respect for the other and for the reciprocal nature of our life-sustaining relationships? Is this a story about interdependent living communities with a shared ecological consciousness?
Maybe there are wisdom stories in the European tradition that can lead us to roots of relatedness and the knowledge of our indigenous ancestors, if we are willing to look for those teachings.
Before we part ways, I’m excited to share news of a new mythology podcast. The Podcast With A Thousand Faces, which is launching Sunday August 7th.
The Podcast With A Thousand Faces is an official podcast of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the MythMaker Podcast Network. The central thread is Campbell, his work, and myth in culture. Each episode will revolve around a conversation with a particular individual who has been impacted by Campbell’s work, or is working within culture in a mythic capacity, and a member or friend of the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
This will be a wonderful resource I expect, entertaining and informative, if you want to understand the influence of mythology and Campbell’s work on contemporary culture. I’ve posted a link to the JCF Mythmaker network and info about The Podcast With A Thousand Face, on my mythicmojo.com website.
I’ll also share a link to the Fates and Graces Mythologium. This is a conference for mythologists and the myth-curious and if that describes you, you may want to get on their mailing list for next year’s gathering. I had a very rich experience.
I want to give a big welcome to new email subscribers: Lissa, Morgan, Rosalyn, Carole, Karen, and David. If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website, where you can find a transcript of this episode, join my email list, and find information about the other work that I do with people to use stories to gain insight into life.
You will also find the link to Myth Matters on Patreon. I am very grateful for the financial support of the patrons and supporters of this podcast. For details about becoming a patron and the special benefits to patrons, click the link.
If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world.
I can’t resist sharing a few more words about bees. The Latin poet Virgil, in the “Georgics,” his long poem about the proper care of the land and agricultural practices called writes:
“Noting these tokens and examples some have said
that a share of divine intelligence is in bees,
and a draught of aether: since there is a god in everything,
earth and the expanse of sea and the sky’s depths:
from this source the flocks and herds, men, and every species
of creature, each derive their little life…”
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself, and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Link to Info about the JCF Mythmaker Network and The Podcast With A Thousand Faces
