Speaker 1: Hello everyone.
Speaker 2: It's the Halloween season, and I've talked about Halloween several times.
I've talked about monsters several times, and so I was
wondering what I could talk about this year, and I
figured I could connect this with a surprise that we're
going to tell everyone is that on October thirty first,
on the day of Halloween, we are going to launch
a new fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, And so
we decided to launch it on Halloween because.
Speaker 3: There is a very strange connection between Little.
Speaker 2: Red Riding Hood and Halloween, and so I thought that
would be a good subject for the video.
Speaker 1: Today, this is Jonathan Pehel, Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 2: We have been teasing it for a while, but now
is the official announcements. We are publishing a version of
Little Red Writing Hood, Little Red Writing Hood and the
Big Bad Wolf, written by me, of course, and illustrated
beautifully by Chris Weaver. It is a very important tale
to tell right now and deals with a lot of
the issues that we're seeing in our culture. And so
we've also added the symbolism of in the book. So
the fairy tale and the symbolism of is contained in
the same book.
Speaker 3: We're starting the pre orders.
Speaker 2: Today on Halloween, and all people that pre order it
will get an audiobook version of the book that I've
recorded myself, and the first one thousand people to order
the book will be invited to a special Q and
A which we will discuss and have fun and talk
about all of the questions surrounding liter ret or ridinghood
and whatever else you want to talk about. And so
go to store dow thesymbolic world dot com and.
Speaker 3: Order your book today.
Speaker 2: One of the things that characterizes Halloween, of course, is
the trick or treating. This is the aspect that we
have preserved the most, that we know the most, and
so intricate treating. What you have is someone who comes
in a disguise to your house to ask for a treat,
to ask for something to eat, and if you don't
give them something to eat, then you get a trick.
And so in some ways you have to propitiate the monster, right.
It really is, as I've mentioned in my other videos,
it is a little moment where you kind of understand
the problem or the issue of when these little monsters
come to you, and so you give them a little something,
a little something to eat.
Speaker 3: Then they go away.
Speaker 2: They will come back, but they will go away for
a little while. Now, what is the connection between Little
Red Riding Hood. Now, of course you probably guess it
already as I'm telling you what Halloween is about. But
what is the difference between it. Of course, in the
story of Little Red Ridinghood, you have a monster, you
have a wolf, you have something that will devour you, right,
and that is very important to understand in some ways
what a monster is, especially in the case of Halloween.
It is something that comes from death. It is something
that is there to hurt you, to destroy you, a
vampire or were a wolf, all these different things. And
so this monster comes to the house of the grandmother.
And so now the sequence of the events is different
from Halloween. But this is of course how symbolism works.
Once you kind of understand you can notice that you
have to be able to lay out the land and
understand things how they relate to each other. And sometimes
the sequence of the way they come together is not
the same, but it will still point to the same
kind of symbolism. And so the wolf comes to the
house of the grandmother in a disguise. He pretends to
be Little Red riding Hood, and so you have already
a kind of opposite of what happens at Halloween. In Halloween,
you have little children that are innocent that come dressed
as monsters. So you have this kind of strange situation
where in some ways it is the opposite of Halloween.
In the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf
plays the trick at the outset and so asks the grandmother,
you know, if he can come in as Little Red
riding Hood. And once the grandmother lets the wolf in,
then he eats the grandmother. And so you can see
that the elements are kind of there, all there, but
they're not in the same order.
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 2: In Halloween, it is children dressed as monsters. They come
to the house and they ask for a treat, and
if they don't, then they trick you. Here, the wolf
comes to the house dressed as a little girl. It
doesn't ask for a treat, tricks you and then eats you.
All right, And so what's important to understand is to
really kind of understand it as a basic structure. The
best way often to think about this in terms of space.
So you have your home, you have your house, and
your house is the place where you are safe. It's
the place where you find your identity, it's the place
where you find your origin. And then on the outside
of that house are strangers. There are different levels of strangers.
Of course, there are your neighbors, and those neighbors usually
are not dangerous. But then there are strangers that are
farther away from you that you don't know what their
intentions are. And then they're strangers that are in some
ways so far from you that they don't have your
good in mind, right, because they don't identify with you,
and for that reason, they don't feel like they necessarily
have your good in mind.
Speaker 3: And therefore this is of course, you know what a
war is.
Speaker 2: A war is strangers that don't have your good in mind,
that are willing to put your you know, your good
to the service of theirs, right, And that is or
is the danger with strangers is that sometimes strangers, because
they're not aligned with our purposes, we don't know what
they want, we don't know what their allegiance is to
and of course sometimes this can turn into danger. Right.
That's why you tell children don't talk to strangers. Of course,
we used to tell children don't talk to strangers, not
because strangers are immediately bad, but because strangers are unknown,
and because we don't know what their allegiance is and
we don't know what good they're pursuing. And so you
have this stranger that is on the outside, and the
stranger or the strange, right can be represented of course
as a predator. If the stranger is there to it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Have your good in mind.
Speaker 2: If like in a war, the stranger sees you as
food for them. They want to take your land, take
your you know, make you a vassal state or whatever
that is. And in that sense they see you as
food for their for their sake. And then there's also
the sense that they are a monster. That is, they
are unknown, they are they they are a mixture, they're chaos.
And in the story of Little Red Writinghood, we often
don't realize that the wolf, of course, the talking wolf
is already in that world. That is, a talking wolf
is something like, you know, the speaking serpent in the
garden is not a usual animal. It is in some
ways an animal that is replying, right. It is an
animal that is not, let's say, subject subdued by the human,
but is rather speaking back. You could say and answering,
or you know, trying to impose their meaning on you.
And that in some ways is what it means for
a monster to eat you, right, is that in general
animals are subdued to us, that as we rule over
the animals. But once in a while the animals come
and they can devour us, the wild animals. And then
you can represent that, of course as a monster. You
can represent it as a speaking wolf or a speaking
serpent that wants to impose their rule on you. And
so you can see that this is what's happening in
Little Red Riding Hood, and in Halloween you also have
the same structure, that is the On the night of Halloween,
we kind of put on a little play or a
little game where we experiment the question of monsters and
the questions of the strains, the question of that which
is dead to us, which comes out and now roams
the streets and comes up to our house and knocks
on the door. So when they knock on the door,
they are in some ways coming to your identity and
asking to be let in. You could say, now, you know,
when you deal with something that is from the outside,
you also have to be careful to realize that what
extent do you let it in?
Speaker 3: You know, and this is of course something that you
do every time.
Speaker 2: You know, if a mailman comes to your house, you
won't let them into your bedroom. You might maybe let
them into the entrance door, you know, to get the
letter or whatever. If a salesman comes to your house,
you won't completely let them in.
Speaker 3: But if your friend comes, you let them in.
Speaker 2: Right. We've talked about this several times on this channel before.
And the stranger or the monster then appears as this
unknown thing that might want to hurt you, and of course,
in the case of Halloween, what you do is you
give them a little something so that they don't eat you, right,
you could say, so that they don't trick you, so
that they don't eat you.
Speaker 3: It is really a version of propitiation.
Speaker 2: And as I've said on several occasions, of course we
think that that's weird, you know, it's kind of pagan,
and maybe in some ways it is. But we have
to understand that doing it as a game is a
way to understand that.
Speaker 3: We do it all the time.
Speaker 2: Right, where we propitiate things that are outside from us.
Speaker 3: We propitiate that.
Speaker 2: Say, our desires that are there to that are trying
to devour us, will give them a little something in
order to keep them for a while. And this is
of course what we do right all the time. So
you know, you can see this happening in some ways
right now in North America, where let's say, you could say,
in order to keep people calm, you know, for a
very long time. How can I explain this, in order
to keep people calm, or in order to keep people
from kind of bubbling up. Then in certain states, for
example California, they've made shoplifting legal, like or not legal,
they at least decided not to prosecute it up to
a certain amount of money. And that is in some
ways a way to propitiate, right It is in some
ways you have these people that are hungry, you could say,
and that are threatening.
Speaker 3: And you give them a little something so that they
don't so that they.
Speaker 2: Go away, They go away for a while, but then,
of course, like I said, the problem is that they
come back. Now, this isn't in some ways neither can
say neither positive nor negative. Uh. You know, when when someone,
let's say, a homeless person comes up to you and
asks you for money, in some ways, that's what you're doing.
You have someone who's strange, whose intentions you don't know,
someone who is roaming right, like the they could say,
like the roaming spirits on Halloween. And that person asks
you for something, and you give them something in order
to to of course help them, but also in some
ways to keep them calm right, so that they don't
they don't like lose control and start to to rob people,
because if they receive a little bit of something continuously
in some ways, that can maintain their their peacefulness, you
could say, in the world. And so, like I said,
it's actually it's not a it's not a really a
moral question most of the time.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it can be a more question. But in the
case of literary.
Speaker 2: Writing hood, then you can really see the structure play
out really in the sense of you have a strange
monster that is pretending to be something that it is
not right.
Speaker 3: It is a wolfman.
Speaker 2: Dressed as a little girl, or parading as a little
girl in order to come in and eat the grandmother,
and then parading as the grandmother in order to eat
little red riding Hood, etc.
Speaker 3: Etc.
Speaker 2: So you can kind of see a good example of
what happens if you're not careful of what it is
that you let in to the house, and why we
say that you have to you tell your children to
be careful around people whose intents you don't know, to
be careful around strangers. And so in our version of
Little Red Riding Hood, we in some ways are really
you could say, hitting the nail right now, because it
feels like some of these questions of a a hybrid,
you know, creature that wears women's clothing, you could say
that you know, is impersonating grandmother in order to eat
your children. It seems strangely relevant in or at least
has been strangely relevant in the last few years. So
we thought it'd be important to, you know, publish a
version of that story in order to help our children
to know that, you know, to be able to distinguish
or to be able to recognize the wolves, the wolves
that are dressed in your grandmother's clothing, so that so
that they don't get devoured. So in our version of
the book, what we've done is, of course, I've added
some sections. I think you will enjoy them. I've made
the story a little longer, I've added a whole extra
little bit at the end, which I think kind of
helps you understand what the story is about. And in
this particular version, we've also put the symbolism of Little
Red writing hood at the end of the book. And
so in one volume you get at the beautifully illustrated
fairy tale by Chris Weaver, and at the end you
also get a kind of symbolism of Little Red riding hood.
So one of the aspects of Halloween that makes it
so relevant is that in some ways it is the moment,
you could say, where we start to notice, of course
that the days are getting shorter, right, that the sun
is going away, and so there is a relationship between
the feast of the dead, between the idea of death
and the sun getting lower in the sky, the days
getting shorter moving towards the solstice. Now you know, symbolism.
The way it crosses over, and these are techniques that
can help you kind of interpret stories, is that there's
a relationship of course between the idea that this happened,
that the monster comes out and you know, comes out
when the day is getting shorter, right with the idea
of the midnight hour, right in the darkness, this is
where the monster kind of comes out out and in
Little Red Writing Hood the idea of going off the path.
Speaker 3: Now, going off the path can be understood.
Speaker 2: You can imagine the sun has a path, and then
the sun is kind of disappearing into the darkness, right,
is disappearing in the sky and going into the forest
is related of course to night, and it is related
to the idea.
Speaker 3: Of losing your way. You know, if you lose your
way when it's.
Speaker 2: Dark, things are not clear, and there is a kind
of ominous sense of not being in the place of life,
you could say, right, And that is of course what
happens when the sun goes down, especially in the lands
where Halloween would have been developed, in the lands where
we have fall and we have winter, and we watch
things die, and we notice that the days are getting shorter.
Things the world is getting colder, and there is death.
That is that is happening, and that is of course
connected to Little Red Riding Hood. When she moves off
the path, one of the things she's doing is that she's.
Speaker 3: Moving away from her identity.
Speaker 2: Now, this is harder to understand, but if you meditate
on the story of Little Red Writing Hood, you will
understand that one of the main issues of Little Red
writing Hood is about the idea of maintaining lineage, right.
And so what you have is you have a mother,
and you have this young girl who is usually twelve
years old, who's usually right at the moment of puberty.
And this young girl at the moment of puberty is
sent to her grandmother's house, right, And so the mother
gives her food and then sends her alone to her
grandmother's house. So what you have in the case of
Little Red writing Hood is a young woman, a young
girl who is in between, right, is in between stages
and is on the verge of kind of becoming a
mother herself or becoming a wife herself. And so there
is a sense in which this connection in the woods,
you could say, of a path that connects the grandmother
with the mother and then ultimately to her, is an
image of identity and an image of lineage. And so
when she and of course in the story is very
particular because you know, her mother gives her a purpose, right,
and the purpose is to serve her grandmother, right. So
in some ways it is that's why it's so connected
to identity. It's like, here's your lineage, and now you
will bring food to your lineage. So you can maintain
your lineage by helping your grandmother survive, but also by
following the purpose that I'm giving you. So you can
see in the story how purpose and lineage are connected.
Speaker 3: And so when little Red riding Hood.
Speaker 2: Leaves the path, she is of course going out into darkness.
She is forgetting her purpose, She's forgetting the reason why
she's on the path bringing food to her mother. She
gets distracted, you could say, by the things on the
edge of the path and the things that could tempt her.
And of course that is when she encounters the wolf. Now,
of course, in this particular story, in the story of
literle Red writing Hood, there is also a kind of
sexual element, you could say, related to this, because of
course literle Red Writing Hood is reaching puberty, and so
that is the moment when she will, of course become
someone who can perpetuate the lineage of her family, perpetuate
the limit of her grandmother and her mother. And so
you can kind of understand that transition between these two
places also as the transition of her becoming a woman. Now,
in that transition there are all kinds of dangers, right,
she can get distracted, she can become the prey of
a predator, the prey of a sexual predator, the prey
of someone who would trick her into all kinds of
things and that would devour her lineage. Now you know
this is sometimes people think that this is weird, but
they're they're literally in some versions of the early Little
Red writing Hood where the wolf when Little Red writing
Hood arrives in the in the house of the grandmother
and discovers her grandmother that has been replaced by the wolf.
Speaker 3: The wolf will offer her food.
Speaker 2: Which turns out to be of course her grandmother, right,
So you can see that in the whole thrust of
the story, there's this whole idea of this notion of
destroying your lineage by something like cannibalism, which is a
which I've talked about before. Cannibalism is of course a
breakdown in normal causality, right, where you devour your your elder, right,
and so you are made out of your elder, right,
so your elder makes you and then and then you
eat them, and so you kind of break You kill
your own parents, but you also do them, and so
all causality kind of breaks down. There's no you know,
it's like who are you at that point if you
eat their body and it becomes your body, everything becomes confused.
So cannibalism is often an image of that type of transgression,
but of course the transgression is there, you know, also
in the way in which little Red Ridinghood is the
prey of all kinds of predators that would prevent her
from participating properly in the lineage right becoming a mother,
becoming a grandmother, et cetera, et cetera, And so like
the person that goes through puberty, and it's a kind
of transition from one state to the other, it is
represented as a little dying. Right. Of course, that little
dying can be represented in all kinds of way in
terms of the beginning of the menstrual cycle. All of
these images and fairy tales are they're kind of there
floating around you see that.
Speaker 3: Of course, in.
Speaker 2: The the story of Gyrus's Daughter, which is this twelve
year old girl that dies, you know, the relationship between
the issue of blood, all of this is integrated, of
course in this story. So you can understand, and this
is going to be a bit of a stretch for
all of you, hopefully you can understand. You can also
understand that when the sun goes down into the sky, right,
when the days become darker and darker, there is less
fertility in the land, right, so the land will not
produce fruit. And so that transition is also related, you
could say, to the fallow part of the fertility cycle,
the normal fertility cycle of a human. So there's a
connection between the idea of this aspect, right, a notion
of death and of transition, and also of you could say.
Speaker 3: Missed humans, right, or the idea of a residue.
Speaker 2: Right, So the monsters they are in some ways residues.
There's a connection of course between between the idea of
not incompletely formed children and monsters. You know, if you
know a little bit about stillbirth and you know a
little bit about what happens sometimes, that many of the
legendary monsters seem to have a connection, at least in
terms of phenomenology, with the way that people saw stillbirths,
and how certain stillbirths would have characteristics that would be
similar to monstrosity.
Speaker 3: And so this.
Speaker 2: Idea of a failure of fertility is of course there
in the notion of the moment of Halloween when the
monsters come out, right, and then everything is kind of
upside down. Instead of you know, the sun acting on
the world and causing things to grow, now it's death
that's coming out, and it looks like death is going
to eat the cycle. It looks like darkness is going
to take over. Of course, because we know the story,
we know that it will return, that for utility will return,
and that the sun will also return. But this is
all related to the symbolism of course with literad writing hood,
but also the symbolism of Halloween, you know, and so
a lot to think about.
Speaker 3: I hope that this makes sense to you.
Speaker 2: This in some ways is a little more esoteric than
what I usually talk about, but a lot of this
symbolism is going to be there in the symbolism of
liter red writing a book that is accompanying the fairy tales.
So thanks everyone for your attention and talk to you
suit bye bye. If you enjoy these videos and podcasts,
please go to the Symbolic World dot com website and
see how you can support what we're doing.
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