I did not invite the Thirteenth Faerie. And I hope you’ll forgive me.
Back in 2011, when Duane Elgin, Jeff Vander Clute, and I first created the Great Transition Stories Wiki, we brought together the largest meta-stories we could find from myth, history, and biology to help us understand the mechanisms of successful and transformational change. We focused on the great developmental stories of birth, growing up, initiation, and transformation—stories that give hope and guidance when we can’t see the future and it looks like things are collapsing around us.
But I refused to let the Thirteenth Faerie’s story of death and destruction be on that list. It wasn’t neglected or overlooked—it was actively rejected. In fact, trying to find alternatives to her story was my primary motivation for creating Great Transition Stories in the first place.
The Story We Know Too Well
In the tale of Sleeping Beauty, the King and Queen give birth to a beautiful princess whom they name Aurora—meaning light, like the northern lights, a radiating force of love energy. For her christening, they invite twelve beautiful faeries to bestow blessings of strength, courage, and good health upon the princess.
But they don’t invite the Thirteenth Faerie.
No force of nature or the psyche likes to be left out. As my good friend and mentor Hal Stone says of the Greek gods—symbols of the deep archetypal parts of ourselves: “You must honor all of them. You can have favorites, but don’t leave anyone out. If you do, that’s the one that will come out of the unconscious and get you.”
And so she did. The Thirteenth Faerie crashed the party and laid a curse on the princess that on her sixteenth birthday, she would prick her finger and die.
What I Refused to Accept
My passion for working with NewStories has been to offer another vision of how we could move through this Great Transition—to be on this planet in respectful relationship with each other and thrive in our communities. But I have been in denial of the Thirteenth Faerie, the one who brings the curse of death, slightly mitigated by the Twelfth Faerie to deep sleep or unconsciousness.
I have not wanted to accept Cataclysm, Apocalypse, or Disaster as viable models for Earth’s next step or for our evolution as humanity. I cringe at the images of those massive colliding armies so prevalent in everything from the Revelation of John, through the wars and revolutions of the past two centuries, to Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games. Even Narnia ends with an enormous battle of two opposing forces—one named good and the other evil—clashing together on an open field.
I was damned if I was going to let her story of death be the way that humanity transforms itself. I can hear myself ranting: “No! No! No! There must be a better story. Do we really have to annihilate each other in rivers of blood for a few of us to go to a Golden Land in another dimension that is disembodied and separate from our Earth? Or decimate the planet so a few rich guys can play king of the mountain at the expense of everything and everyone else? Really!?”
But She’s Here Anyway
For all my trying to avoid it, Cataclysm is here. Armageddon is ubiquitous. Disaster is all around us, looking all too often like the plagues of the Apocalypse. The forces are polarizing in the field of the world, arming for a mighty battle.
A friend of mine in Europe feels a Third World War is inevitable. Some feel we’ve already been attacked in a cyberwar that we are losing because it is mostly invisible to us.
And still I scream out “No! No! No! Surely there must be a better way.”
What if there’s not?
What if that’s the story we know best, have most deeply embedded in us through millennia, and have seen played out over and over again in our history, our myths of conquest, and our seemingly endless dystopian blockbuster movies?
I have to be able to see that I could die in this battle. That all my values may be frozen and despised. Cruelty and greed are rampant. Nuclear war is again on the table. Must we kill almost everyone else for our god of consumption?
Making Peace with What Is
However much I want us to find a way to go through change well—so that we survive, so that our species comes into right relationship with the planet—I have to face and accept that we may not choose a path of success. Or, perhaps, that success may not look like what I would wish from my perspective.
It’s possible, and it’s been said, that from the perspective of Gaia, our planet, the elimination of humans as a failed experiment may be a good option.
I can only wish and work to have it not be so, while finding a way, within myself and those I love, to be present with whatever the outcome is.
New growth springs from catastrophic fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. So, too, may the Thirteenth Faerie have a place in our evolution—a role in moving our collective story forward.
Up she rises, ostensibly to avenge an insult but in reality to thrust the story forward and keep the drama moving. She becomes the necessary antagonist, placed there to show that whatever is ‘other,’ opposite, and fearful, is as indispensable an instrument of creation as any force for good.Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Perhaps we need all to ask ourselves how the Thirteenth Faerie plays out in our own lives. How do we use disasters in our own lives for change?
One Response
Nature teaches us that death and decay are tomorrow’s nutrients. Most humans I know do believe that death is part of natures cycle. The thing is it needs to happen to someone else or something else or at some other time.
Time is another part of the story that is fascinating. There is time to a human that is generally considered our lifespan. Let’s average it to 100 years. If we only look at what’s happening today and only specifically what is happening to us in our immediate local it is easier for our animal brains to focus on death. But we do know that there was a time before humans and it is foolish to think there won’t be a time beyond humans. We can either be excited about that or fretful.
Birth is almost always invisible in its beginning stages. One has to really look hard to try and discover beginnings. It seems like the field goal is always moving backwards. The truth is birth is a miraculous concept. A word can hardly contain it. Perspective matters. Are you the one being born or are you watching another being born. Are you looking to the future or the past? Are you looking from a disembodied perspective or from a body? Is it an individual body or a group body? You get my drift.
At the heart of the matter often is just that we don’t want to believe what we are seeing. We identify death as a failure. I get it who wants to live during the death and transition into the birth of a whole other way of being. Who wants to know that the very things they hold dear will not be available to those around them and those who come after them. Uncertainty, a lack of knowing, triggers, our animal brain into fight or flight. Our human growth and wisdom have taught us that change is inevitable and sometimes wears the clue of catastrophe and dissipation.
Mr. Rogers always said look for the helpers. I say look for the birth. There are amazing organizations that are already undertaking the specific detailed pragmatic work of birthing. What’s next? Let us enter into their dreams as best we can and assist them for as long as we can. Delight in the need for suspended disbelief.