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August 1, 2023

This week we conservatives are worried about moms taking their daughters to see the fairy tale of Barbie as a wokey feminist. Why, they’ll learn to hate the patriarchy for the rest of their lives! Maybe. But wasn’t the original Barbie doll a teenage fairy tale of clothes and makeup and boys, instead of baby dolls as a preparation for motherhood?

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And if they like Woke Barbie there’s always Disney’s Woke Snow White next spring.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, first. Retelling myths and fairy tales to bring them up to date is nothing new. Scholars agree that the Catholic saints were created in an effort to make Christianity more relatable to the illiterate peasants and farmers and slaves of Christendom.

And scholars were mad as hell when Wagner destroyed the Nordic myths in his Ring cycle. The experts reckoned that Wagner had completely lost the plot, as the Brits like to say.

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Serious people like you and me are a bit hesitant to re-stage the myths and fairy tales in modern dress, because we believe that understanding the minds and the culture and the beliefs of our ancestors in the olden time helps us understand ourselves. And we know that something always gets lost in translation.

Still, I’ll bet that the experts were all over the Brothers Grimm back in the day when the brothers collected and retold a bunch of traditional folk tales from Aschenputtel to Schneewittchen (that’s Cinderella and Snow White for you Disney fans). Romantics like the Grimms wanted to reconnect with the old folk tales as a reaction against the logic and reason of the Enlightenment. I wonder what the experts thought when Disney started cartooning the Grimms’ fairy tales? Today, of course, they wouldn’t dare complain about Woke Snow White.

Wouldn’t you know, I’ve been reading all about it in recent weeks. And just the other night we streamed CS Lewis: the Most Reluctant Convert. What was the axial moment in Lewis’s life? Picking up Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald in a railway station used book store. Reading that book is what converted him from an Enlightenment materialist into a religious believer. And it made Lewis into a myth teller, as in retelling Christianity in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe children’s book series.

Meanwhile, I’m nearly at the end of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. It’s about the tales that humans have told down the ages about the founding of the world, and the attempt of modern scholars that live in a profane world to understand and to recapture the experience of living in a “sacralized cosmos” in the olden time. And then a couple weeks ago I read Alain de Benoist and On Being a Pagan. The endnotes say: “Benoist contrasts the heroic pagan worldview with Christianity’s attempts to hobble everything that is beautiful and strong.”

Hmm. But aren’t our wokey friends busy trying to hobble everything that is male and strong, and condemning Nietzsche as “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual“?

And wasn’t Rousseau retailing an Enlightenment myth in his Discourse on Inequality, with the following origin myth in Part Two?