Dirty Dark Secrets Behind Ancient Fairy Tales

The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World, painted by Pieter Breugel the elder (1559) Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. (Public Domain)

Presumed innocent, yet dirty dark secrets are imbedded in the bedtime stories told to children. Fairy tales are magical narratives that pervade the young minds of children so deeply, leaving imprints on their subconscious that can mold their every-day lives. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the 20th century child psychologist and author on autism, ancient cultures had no hard lines: “separating myths from folklore and fairy tales; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies.”

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (1916) (Public Domain)

Fairy tales contain well refined messages of a spiritual nature which not only emulate truths about how to live life, but they hold watered-down versions of some pretty dark historical occurrences. Involving social crimes such as incest, rape, cannibalism and bestiality the original fairy tales were a lot darker and so much is this the case that many would be way too terrifying for today’s snowflake millennials to consume.