Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Travers: What The Bee Knows Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story
England: The Aquarian Press, 1989.
‘Ask the wild bee what the Druids knew’ (Old English adage)
Eileen Forrester Agar (1899 – 1991) was a British painter and photographer associated with the Surrealist
movement. She drew a picture of Travers.
In Ireland she met AE who published her work in his The Irish Statesman. She enhanced her study of myth
and folklore in the USA as a guest of the Navaho and Pueblo Indians, as a writer-in-residence at Radcliff
(Harvard), Claremont University (CA) and Smith College (MA) and received an honorary doctorate from
Chatham College, Pittsburgh. She was also awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire)1.
Most of the essays in this collection were written for Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition (today:
Parabola: The Search for Meaning), an American quarterly (1976–).
C.S. Lewis: There is only one Creator and we merely mix [shape, order and define] the elements He gives
us. (10)
How Travers is speaking about the collective unconscious is as follows: “The fact that the same stories
arise in India, the Middle East the Americas, as well as in China and Japan, is an intimation that their
proper soil and seeding-place is not in any geographical location but in man himself.” (13–14) So,
folk, the men “enact”, “sustain” and “keep them alive” (14). If the same seed dwells in all of us, then in
some way we are all connected to each other or as Travers stated, “everything is inevitably connected
with everything else” (14) The myths are true but not facts. (15) The cruelty of myth is difficult to accept
and thus might be the reason that we give them to children whose mind is yet unattained with knowledge
and so they are more likely to understand them. (15)
Travers’s interpretation of the word ‘understand’ and how children interpret myths: “understand is to
stand under…So, in order to understand, I come to something with my unknowing my nakedness…I stand
under it and let it teach me, rain down its truth upon me. That is [she thinks] children do; they let it make
room in them for a sense of justice, for the wicked fairy as well as the Sleeping Beauty, for dragons as well
as princes” (15)
1
rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences and public service
Travers’s thought is analogous to Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey and main task: “the hero is
seeking not for something new but for something old, a treasure that was lost and has to be found, his own
self, his identity. And by finding this, by achieving this, he takes part in the one task the essential mythical
requirement: the reinstatement of the fallen world” (16)
2
The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby,
including West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill.
Dame, the art-historian defines dance as follows: “It is the kinetic involvement of the individuals in a thing
greater than themselves, a pattern which can turn from solar orb into serpentine riverflow with an ordered
measure to it, the bringing of order into the random chaos of overwhelming experience” (48)
In his other book, Pagan's Progress Dame described the importance of the prefix 'Ge' in Geography, which
refers to Gaia, or the earth as a living being.
3
Although both maze and labyrinth depict a complex and confusing series of pathways, the two are different. A maze
is a complex, branching (multicursal) puzzle that includes choices of path and direction, while a labyrinth has only a
single, non-branching path, which leads to the center.
the meaning of ‘Happy Ever After,’ where all things that have been separate are made into a whole
and the fullness overflows to the general world” (154) – Campbell’s return, reinstatement, atonement
The Good and the Terrible Mother in fairy tales: “[N]o Wise Woman or Fairy is in herself either good
or bad; she takes on one aspect or the other according to the laws of the story and the necessity of
events…They change with the changing circumstances” (267)
Reconciliation of the opposites in terms of fairy tales: “Only the integration of good and evil and the stern
acceptance of opposites will change the situation and bring about the condition that is known as Happy
Ever After” (268)
She tells of how on one occasion she found herself near the island often described by Yeats in his poems,
Innisfree. Despite the stormy weather, she had a boatman row her to the island. Travers was struck by sorb
trees growing wild. She began gathering an armful of branches. She made her way back to the mainland
and jumped on the first train to Dublin. When she reached his house, both she and her gift were soaked.
She hoped Yeats might not be at home, but after a few moments the door opened Humiliated and
embarrassed, Travers was taken in by the maid who dried her off and gave her a seat by the fire. On
receiving her, Yeats acted as if nothing had happened, treating her as a kind visitor. Travers glanced down
at the poet’s desk, where she spotted a vase containing a twig from the sorb trees. She leaned from Yeats
that the secret of writing is “to say less than you need.” (293)
Travers writes about the rights and duties of humanity: We are like alchemists who mix the elements we
find waiting for that lightning flash of inspiration that will explain the connections between the elements.
We are neither author nor creator of this work, but an essential part of the process.