In the essays contained in “What the Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story ", recently published in Italian by LiberiLibri, Pamela Lyndon Travers witnessed the timeless antiquity of myths and fairy tales, and consequently their perennial reality, interpreting the Gaelic" memory of the blood "that flowed in her veneers, starting from the title of the work: in the Scottish Highlands, in fact, it is recommended to "ask the bees what the Druids once knew».
di Marco Maculotti
Originally published on Limina; Cover: Portrait of PL Travers as a young man, 1924
«Who, at least once, hasn't had the fleeting sensation that long ago, in a very distant time, was there a story told that now perpetually eludes us? What was that story? Who told it? Why did we know it and now ignore it? Where should I look to find what I have lost? " [1]
- Pamela Lyndon Travers, What the Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story
To many readers the name of Pamela Lyndon Traver, born Helen Lyndon Goff, will say nothing; yet the literary character she invented in the thirties, Mary Poppins, accompanied the childhood of many children of the last century. Coming into the world in the last summer of the XNUMXth century in Australia by two Irish settlers, Travers was living proof of the existence of what we might call the blood memory, atavistic essence that flows in the veins and that draws from the deepest abysses of the collective unconscious of genius of the race - in this case, the Gaelic one - a knowledge that concerns much more the field of Myth than that of psychology stricto sensu.
Right at the underwater world of Myth and Folklore Travers devoted herself throughout her life, with a passion rarely found even in the most competent "experts in the field" - anthropologists and historians of religions -: to remember her is the collection of essays What the Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story, published for the first time in 1989 and finally arrived in Italian bookstores thanks to the types of Liberalibri, with the title The secret wisdom of bees (2019)
Since her childhood in Australia, the impression that there is a hidden world behind the visible and experimentable one with the use of the five ordinary senses has broken into the heart of the young Helen / Pamela; this intuition that she allowed hers daimon - or his acornJames Hillman would say [2] - to manifest itself in all its Gaelicity right from the start, even before becoming an established literary author:
"Nothing was safer, in my heart" - confesses in first person [3] - «of the fact that trees had their own frenetic and communicative life, which stopped - after a very specific signal - when I appeared. I have always carried with me this sense of secret life of the woods, a life that withdraws at the slightest sound of a human step ».
It is precisely this innate vision, contained in the blood memory of the young Travers, to lead her very young in Ireland (that "place of the soul" that "the ancient songs call Inis Fail, or Island of Destiny ") [4] and then in England, where he will personally know and establish relationships of sincere friendship and mutual admiration with some of the standard bearers of the so-called Celtic Revival ("Celtic Renaissance"), William Butler Yeats and especially George William "AE" Russell. It was the latter who "formed" her as a writer, awakening in her the deepest soul that he was waiting to blossom, with teachings that he well knew that she would be able to intuitively understand:
«We only love what is intimate, and what is intimate cannot be lost. […] In order for the adult to be able to restructure himself through a story, it is necessary to put in place a certain process in which he must intentionally revive what originally came to life in the flow of his blood ». [5]
"What is yours will come to you." [6]
Hence, the ontological difference between "primary world" and "secondary world", Myth and Logos, atemporal - and, therefore, perennial - reality and cultural artifice:
«The primary world is the one that was never invented, but came to be together with the flow of our blood, the legacy of those authors who, according to Blake, are […] in eternity. All the rest is human artifice or […] “sub-creation”, secondary world. […] But the primary world […] will never get used to an artificial climate, made by man. To exist, it needs what man is not allowed to create - the earth with all the dead as its fertilizer, the rain that falls every day, the seasons, the evening, the silence - and an ear that hears nothing else beating than that of his own blood. What matters is that we [these stories] have been told - to us wounded as the vault of heaven is, and therefore with the same need for comfort.». [7]
The archaic wisdom of myth and fairy tales - which the author defined the "secret wisdom of bees", as "in the Scottish Highlands, it is handed down ask the bees what the Druids once knew» [8] - seems to actually spring instinctively from Travers' soul, as if, in the "exploratory journey that the writer makes in her own psyche and, through it, in the collective psyche" [9], we can glimpse the clues of the soul reincarnation of aancient Celtic priestess:
"THE secrets of the runes, megalithic stones, that mysterious process that we define language »- he writes [10] - «they run in our blood, witnessed, enigmatically but authentically, by those oracles which are myths, symbols, traditions, parables, fairy tales, rituals, legends. [...] Nature, if it is nature to the end, conceals the supernatural within itself and every perception could be said to be extrasensory, in a certain sense. […] As a bee could tell you if she knew how to speak, all this perhaps tells us that nothing is really known until it is known organically ».
With these premises, in these short essays, Travers testifies "The timeless antiquity of myths and fairy tales" [11], since, like the same prophecy, "if it was true then, it will always be true: time cannot change what does not belong to time" [12]. It is precisely the timelessness of the imaginary world of the Myth, and consequently its perennial reality, to emerge from written to written, acting as trait d'union among the various essays contained in this precious collection. Speaking of the «Dream Time»(Dreamtime) of the Australian aborigines, the author frames it not as «a time in the strict sense, as [rather as] a time devoid of all time; a space without spatiality; matter, spirit, life and death, everything, always " [13]; to then underline that "il Dream it is an objective Now, the perennial non-existence, from which existence arises" is that,
“For this to happen, a dimension reserved for myth is necessary; for the myth to exist, a suspension space is necessary between one second and another. It is in this non-waking instant that man finds himself in an intimate relationship with the paradox. The past, irreparable and lost, can be repaired by the present; the harlot can be a virgin; Nirvana and Samsara are one; from the point of view of the farthest shore, this is the Other Shore. […] The rock is gold that does not know it is; and […], in the darkness of Kali Yuga, the fallen light is renewed ». [14]
It follows that the world of Myth, in which only it is possible to experience a sacred experience, as in the Eliadian conception of "sacred time» [15], is external to the world of becoming and to the space-time manifestation understood in a linear sense:
«The Unknown, being itself empty, can be approached only in moments of emptiness that the egoic mind confuses with boredom and is hastening to fill with ever greater knowledge. […] Only in this sense is it given to reach fullness, that fullness that the mind, with all its acuteness, cannot even imagine. So, the ego sacrifices itself to the ego, as Odin did on the tree of Yggdrasil, managing to know, without knowledge, everything it needed». [16]
Exactly as it is said in the myth of Odin who receives the sacred knowledge of the runes by sacrificing his ordinary sight at the source of Mímir - mythical initiator who not coincidentally has the name of "Memory" - "To remember, you must first forget"; "to ascend, one must fall"[17]; "To be found, you need to lose yourself" [18].
In the sacral conception of Travers - in full correspondence with what has been transmitted to us by the ancient Norse and Celtic tradition, as well as by the Platonic doctrine ofanamnesi — the heroes' exploits narrated in the myths "constitute not so much a journey of discovery, as of rediscovery":
"The hero is not looking for something new, but for something ancient, a lost treasure that must be found": "and, in rediscovering this identity, in reaching it, he attends to that single task which constitutes the goal essential of the mythological tale: the recomposition of the fallen world». [19]
At the beginning there is always a break, a wound, a tragic event that plunges the world - and man with it - into a sudden state of entropy.: «It wasn't like that […] in Heaven […]. But then an angel made a signal with his sword, instilling something unheard of in our breasts, and we began to move on to a different harmony " [20]. This is it original trauma, from which the "FallOf biblical memory, to make our path necessary backwards, which can lead us back to the source of light of the "Dream Time" from which we all come:
«We believe […] we are making the outward journey. But actually we are on the way back. And this return leads us to the place from which we started. If there are answers, they transcend us. We will find them there, arrived before us ». [21]
Nonetheless, this specular and contrary ascension to the fall into the dichotomous world of matter and becoming can only be achieved by operating what Jung and Eliade defined coincidence oppositorum, i.e. by means of the re-conjunction of opposites in their monolithic primeval perfection: although in the phenomenal world in which we live "opposites yearning for each other, perennially thrilled to merge into one another - each being part of the other - must forever remain separate" [22], it seems that "the Good [...] in life as in stories, must be pale and colorless", and that it "needs to be touched by what is dark to blush and know itself" [23].
"My ancient question" - la Travers cryptically - «Always returns: is everything one in the coin which, at the same time, divides and connects? Somewhere in my childhood there is a place between North and South where all opposites come together, where the black and the white meet, where the white and the black sheep rest together, where St. George is not angry with the dragon, and the dragon agrees to be slaughtered ». [24]
Precisely from the recognition of the aforementioned doctrine of coincidence oppositorum derives the positive value, in the author's conception, of the "abyss of pain», Of violence and tragedy within traditional myths, and equally in modern fairy tales: as summed up by Cesare Catà in the introduction to this Italian edition of What the Bee Knows, «A story that does not go through nightmares is not a true story; a tale in which the abyss of evil does not show itself is not really educational, according to Travers. Terror must be fixed in the eyes: this is what fairy tales are for " [25] - hence the controversy that the author triggered with Walt Disney, guilty in his opinion of having purged his Mary Poppins from the darker sides and initiatory.
«Sweetening the hideous side of stories means depriving children of the knowledge of the Shadow and, with that, of the means to deal with the very horror of life.. For this reason Mary Poppins possesses something disturbing and sinister, melancholy and dark: in her there is the wisdom, marvelous and terrible, of the magical kingdom» [26]: what Travers defines from the title of this collection of essays, in order to highlight the ontological detachment from what is human, too human, who are "the secret wisdom of bees».
Note:
[1] PL Travers, “The secret wisdom of bees”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, Liberilibri, Macerata 2019, p. 9
[2] J. Hillman, The code of the soul, Adelphi, Milan 1997 (The Soul's Code, 1996)
[3] PL Travers, “The death of AE, hero and mystic of Ireland”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 149
[4] C. Catà, introduction to PL Travers, The secret wisdom of bees, p. XXII
[5] PL Travers, “Stories for children for adults”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 105
[6] PL Travers, “The death of AE, hero and mystic of Ireland”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 153
[7] PL Travers, “The primary world”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, p. 84-87
[8] PL Travers, “The secret wisdom of bees”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 5
[9] C. Catà, introduction to PL Travers, The secret wisdom of bees, p. XIII
[10] PL Travers, “The secret wisdom of bees”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, p. 8-9
[11] C. Catà, introduction to PL Travers, The secret wisdom of bees, p. XIV
[12] PL Travers, “Simply connect”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 55
[13] PL Travers, “The legacy of the ancestors”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 176
[14] Ibid, pp. 181-182
[15] M. Eliade, The sacred and the profane, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2013 (Sacrul and profane, 1957)
[16] PL Travers, “About the Unknown”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 187
[17] PL Travers, “The secret wisdom of bees”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 19
[18] Ibid, p. 20
[19] PL Travers, “The Hero's World”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 66
[20] PL Travers, “Out of Paradise”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 115
[21] PL Travers, “The way back”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 213
[22] PL Travers, “Lucifer”, ne The secret wisdom of bees, P. 118
[23] Ibid, p. 123
[24] Ibid, p. 130
[25] C. Catà, introduction to PL Travers, The secret wisdom of bees, p. XXXII
[26] Ibid, p. XXXIII. "In addition to that of mediator and that of nurse, there is a third function of Mary Poppins that is typical of traditional fairy tales, namely her soteriological power: the ability to save, with her transient passage, human beings from catastrophe , thanks to the restoration of a lost order, a ordo in the theological sense of the term, that is, a structure of the world "[Ibid., p. XXVI].
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