Eh, not feeling super inspired. Hate to break the streak, though, so here goes. I was feeling somewhat inspired over the weekend when I finished this journal page, partly inspired by an Effy Wild Moonshine painting and partly inspired by reading Jungian interpretations of fairytales.

My recent fairytale reading has primarily been through The Water of Life: Russian Tales in Jungian Perspective by Nathalie Baratoff. (One nice feature is that she discusses the cover painting in her preface). The book includes seven Russian fairytales, as collected by Alexandar Afanas'yev, each followed by Baratoff's analysis where she explores how the figures of the tale represent aspects of the psyche and their relationships to each other. There is definitely something a little different about the Russian fairytales, although the analyses often hit the same beats as von Franz's or Neumann's analysis of Greco-Roman myth. There's a lot of Baba Yaga. In some ways, women seem more present in these tales,

although most of the them do follow the coming-of-age adventures of male youth (the exception is "The Feather of Finist, the Bright Falcon." And, while "Mar'ya Morevna" actually focuses on Ivan Tsarevich, Mar'ya still has a compelling presence, casually slaying an army off-screen). Surprisingly, there's one fairytale that ends with the two heroes eaten by lions (and this is the tale that, to me, had echoes of Arthurian romance, particularly Gawain's quests). Sometimes we're just not ready/able to integrate some of the unconscious elements may be the moral of that one--don't worry, most end with some version of a hieros gamos.