Fairytales have an important role in grounding us into the soil beneath us. They can act as refiners of the ego, helping the ego find it’s place within the whole and imparting warnings and learnings that cannot be taught through words and books but only transmitted by images that belong to the depths of the collective unconscious.
Before Disney took hold of fairytale culture, these stories belonged to our ancestors, human and otherworldly. By reclaiming the old tradition of oral storytelling, we reconnect to these ancient riverbeds and weave it back into this world.
"Fairytales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious processes." - Marie Louise von Franz.
The Anima Mundi School opened her Fairytale Kitchen in 2020 and has worked with several themes over the years: the Cinderella motif, the theme of Longing, the Crone and more. Journey with us through a seasonal immersion in fairytales from around the world. This Spring our Kitchen opens for a 3-part storytelling journey. The recordings will also be available in case you won’t be able to join one of them.
Dates for our Spring Edition “The Daughter of the Moon and the Son of the Sun”: April 30th, May 14th and 28th
The Daughter of the Moon and the Son of the Sun
“Therefor the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e. the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature is to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad.
– Carl Jung, CW 5, para 176.
The Sun & the Moon - Sol & Luna - feed stories & creation myths through eternity. They dance through time as lovers, enemies, parents, children, siblings and many more mirrors of human relationships. In our dreaming landscape, they bring us power, majesty, nourishments, grace, beauty & shadows. They measure our lifespans & hold our hopes & fears. As elemental beings, the sun & moon are deeply entwined with our ecological landscapes. From the northern climes of the world, the sun is the being that brings life. Closer to the equator, the sun is a very different kind of elemental being. As the sun holds the axis mundi of life; the moon sculpts the textures of life; of the watery substance of life. As we move closer into summer, we celebrate the range of energies that these two cosmic beings bring forth to life on earth.
In the tradition of Alchemy, Sol and Luna are the opposite forces in nature and the psyche that need to be separated and united, over and over again until the Opus finds completion in the Philosopher’s Stone or the Elixir of Life. In our analysis of the stories, we will amplify with the lens of both psychological alchemy and laboratory alchemy as it represents the elemental beings in the natural world.
In these series, we look at 3 stories of these ancient beings from different parts of the world:
April 30th: Surya’s marriage (India): The story of the birth & marriage of Surya (Sun) and his wives. Is marriage to the sun such a blessing?
May 28th: The Story of the Son of the Dragon and the Son of the Sun (Armenia): What does it mean to live in the shadow of the Sun for the rest of your days? Is the majestic and revered deity of the Sun self-regeneratitve or does he also find nourishment elsewhere?
June 4th: Daughter of the Moon; Son of the Sun (Scandinavia): Can the children of Sol & Luna co-exist?
“Luna is really the mother of the Sun, which means, psychologically, that the unconscious is pregnant with consciousness and gives birth to it.”- Carl Gustav Jung
Your storytellers: Gauri Raje and Faranak Mirjalili.
Jungian story-analysis and discussion with Alexis Durgee.
Gauri Raje is a storyteller and anthropologist. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.
Faranak Mirjalili is a Jungian analytical therapist, storyteller, and the founder and teacher at the Anima Mundi School. She works with women around the world to help regenerate the feminine principle through weaving a personal experience of psyche in analysis with group-work in the imaginal realm. Her current work focuses on the importance of group engagement in myth, story and the imagination during the analytical process.
Alexis Durgee is a depth psychotherapist whose work emphasizes the importance of becoming embodied through soul work and meaning-making. She is currently in her dissertation process at Pacifica Graduate Institute focusing on the concept of Soul rape and the oppressed/repressed images of Soul as they present in dreams.
WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
Storytelling: at the Anima Mundi School we practice the ancient art of oral tellings, in this part of the workshop you just sit back and tune your ears to the images that speak to your imagination.
Weaving the Threads with Alexis Durgee: our special guest will reflect from a Jungian perspective on the theme of our workshop. We will then take this into a discussion from both a Jungian/psychological as well as an anthropological perspective with Gauri and Faranak.
Q&A: time to discuss, share and reflect with the entire group.
DETAILS
When: Sunday April 30th + Sunday May 28th and June 4th. All 8PM Amsterdam time. (CET) Recordings available within 2 days.
What: 3 part workshop of 2 hours each, including the live storytelling.
Fee: 149,- EUR for all 3 workshops or 50,- for a single session. For those that are in financial difficulty we offer a sliding scale 35 - 50 EUR per workshop session (please let us know in the message below and chose the amount according to your income).
How to register: fill in the form below, and after payment you will receive the Zoom link.
limited places available, register asap for a spot.