Details

The tales of the Thousand and One Nights aim at correcting, almost in therapeutic manner, the Sultan's misconceptions and his mistaken attitude towards the female principle

(edited draft about 94 pages)

Fabrice Olivier Dubosc
Psychology degree - Università di Torino
Postgraduate diploma in Analytical Psychology
Libera Scuola di Terapia Analitica - Milano

Fabrice Dubosc - via Ciro Menotti, 4
20129 Milan (Italy)
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phone 39/0270125543


Presentation: In Sheherazade's tales the imaginal eros of the feminine principle survives and triumphs over segregation and legal subordination. The 'Nights' as hidden storehouse of pre-Islamic mythological wealth preserving for future generations the imaginal treasure of the soul

Abstract

The tales of the Thousand and One Nights aim at correcting, almost in therapeutic manner, the Sultan's misconceptions and his mistaken attitude towards the female principle...

Marie-Louise von Franz - The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

Thus spoke Sheherazade!

The origin of the tales told by Sherazade is lost in the myst of times. A Persian collection which includes the theme of the royal slave/concubine who, every night, tells a story to save her life is mentioned for the first time by al-Masudi in 956 a.D. Except for rare exceptions, only in the last twenty years Western criticism has changed its attitude of considering the Nights as an exotic collection with no particular literary or psychological value. Arabic commentators have often tolerated them as childish literature, not quite recommendable, or have perceived them as dangerously alien to the rigid categorizations fostered by medieval Islamic clerks. In actual fact, these clerks had marked the tales as al-asmar wa l-Khuriyat, the 'delirious words of the night'.

According to Malek Cheleb, the authors of the Nights were indeed the women segregated in the harem, who succeeded in reinventing a world in which they played a primary role. In this respect, the Nights are an extraordinary initiation into women's plural mysteries where imaginal eros managed to preserve its deep value in unpropitious times, triumphing thus "over all mechanisms of segregation, abduction and legal subordination"

It is worth recalling that before Mohammed, Allah was the name of the male representative of a quaternity formed by Allah Himself and His three Daughters, the Banat Allah. The Arabian Goddess was therefore trinitarian and the three daughters of Allah were also called the three holy virgins. Mohammed's problems with the Meccans stemmed not so much from the reformation of Allah's cult but from the abolition of the goddesses' cult.

Though we deeply hope that the very suffering of women in Islamic countries may in the end generate new, unforseen cultural developments for the world, for the time being, the murder of brides at the hand of King Shahriyar in the 'Nights' prefigures almost prophetically the cruelties of contemporary regressive fundamentalism in some Islamic countries.

In the first 'framing' tale of the Nights the king has to deal with the Queen's betrayal and he reconstructs for himself a pseudo-identity, with accents of grandiose denial revealed by the compulsion to kill his own attempts at relationship (his new brides) as a sort of extreme defence against deepest despair. Sheherazade frees him from this very compulsion through a sort of reversed verbal therapy, in which the subject is neither the 'patient' nor the 'therapist'.

In fact, whereas during the day the king holds court, passes judgment and formulates laws, at night he turns wordless. With her 'delirious words of the night' Sheherazade holds the wisdom of tales, she speaks as dead and tells her tales to live and thus manages to free herself (and the king) from deathly repetition. But how does this word of woman work? She does not even need to ask 'What aileth thee', as Parsifal to the Fisher King. She does not judge the king, but narrates with a thousand variations the conflicts of passion and power, giving a voice back to Queens and Slaves, and eventually to the king himself.

As Isis recreates the lost phallus of Osiris after recomposing his dismembered body, the plural narration of Sheherazade uncannily restores what the king lacks, granting him access to a new living and ordering system of meaning.

The paradoxical courses and recourses of fortune, the unforseeable misadventures of the characters, the uncanny force of the female principle hidden in the tales, guide the king in a concentric pilgrimage about the themes of destiny and forgiveness, universal motifs which comprehend but trascend his own tale... In the end the complexual labirynth appears dated; the walls crumble or sink, leaving but a trace on the ground, a maze without walls.

In a strongly patriarchal society the erotic 'betraying' queens of the Nights lead the listener to an enchanted place where the wisdom of the feminine eros is preserved for the healing of future generations

"Thus spoke Sheherazade" traces some of the roots of the mythopoietic storehouse of the Nights, stressing the importance of the imaginal function of the soul, and the insight of some of its tales. Shehrazade prepares the Coniunctio ("The 1001th night was as bright as day") affirming and gradually unveiling the value of the female principle. Some of its insights are quasi-prophetic and can be read today as an appeal to re-acknowledge the importance of Sophianic wisdom for the healing of the unilateral, split and wounded contemporary Waste Lands.

The main tale interpreted int his work - "Hasib and the Queen of Snakes" - is an alchemical-initiatic adventure describing the difficulties of a young Parsiphal-like man who experiences male initation and separation from mother and also shamanic initiation into the feminine mysteries. This tale of individuation is full of insights on the difficult confrontation between genders (psychic personifications as well as partners in life) and is rich in alchemical imagery pointing to the difficult process of the evolution of individual and collective consciousness.

Index

  1. Introduction
  2. Arabic Goddesses
  3. The Tale of Shariyar and Sheherazade
  4. The redemption of Eros
  5. Symbolic order and discontinuity
  6. Hasib's tale
  7. The obscure experience of the male body
  8. Transmission between nature and culture
  9. The snake goes underground
  10. The Church Fathers' sin
  11. The Way of Initiation
  12. Waters above, waters below
  13. The Quest for the Anthropos
  14. The conflict between birds and snakes
  15. The fullness of time
  16. The Ages of Pisces and Aquarius
  17. The Waste Kingdom
  18. A new definition of gender principles

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