Little Red Riding Hood Symbolism: Part 2
We left off where LRRH and her Mom shook hands on the maid’s promise to tread the path with mindfulness.
Now the grandmother lived away in the wood, half an hour’s walk from the village, and when Little Red Riding Hood had reached the wood, she met the wolf; but as she did not know what bad sort of animal he was, she did not feel frightened.
The forest or “wood” usually symbolizes our inner landscape; it signals that inner work is being done, such as self enquiry or another therapeutic modality. It’s some exploration of the unconscious, the hidden, the untamed, a deeper dive. It’s where our human conditioning, “civilization”, holds little to no sway. And right away the grandmother, the one doing the self inquiry here, discovers something that doesn’t conform to human conditioning, something “bad”, in the form of the wolf. The wolf represents an unwanted experience or behavior. The wolf is going to be our Devil.
As LRRH is an unsuspecting innocent, this bit in the forest is an exposition on how our relationship with love and passion might move from the natural naivete of the child, into the Devil zone as we mature. This loss of innocence often happens through painful experiences. The wolf’s behaviors stand in for some natural mammalian behaviors, we could say. The difficulties attendant on behaviors associated with desire and passion, were learned as Grandma/Mom/the maid developed beyond childhood. That’s why LRRH doesn’t recognize the “badness” the pitfalls. By the end of the tale, LRRH and Grandma both are aware of how natural desire and attraction can go awry.
Thus using the standpoint of Grandma’s self inquiry, the story now proceeds to describe a few things she uncovers during her personal reflections on past experiences. I realize that switching back and forth between the different life stages is challenging for some in my audience, but that’s the way these stories are constructed. Stories always have this limitation, that only one aspect, one view, of the events can be told at a time.
“Good day, Little Red Riding Hood,”, said he. “Thank you kindly, wolf,” answered she. “Where are you going so early, Little Red Riding Hood?” “To my grandmother’s.” “What are you carrying under your apron?” “Cakes and wine; we baked yesterday; and my grandmother is very weak and ill, so they will do her good, and strengthen her.”
“Where does your grandmother live, Little Red Riding Hood?” “A quarter of an hour’s walk from here; her house stands beneath the three oak trees, and you may know it by the hazel bushes,” said Little Red Riding Hood.
The wolf thought to himself, “That tender young thing would be a delicious morsel, and would taste better than the old one; I must manage somehow to get both of them.”
Symbolically speaking, wolves famously represent an aspect of our animal nature; that of greed (he wants to eat both) and voraciousness: a sort of insatiability (not Wolf’s only attributes, of course). Our animal nature is governed by our primitive brain, dedicated to survival behaviors. Wild animals such as the wolf were vilified in Christian religion in general, because our human survival mode can be just as selfish, greedy, and savage as any “bad” wolf- or worse. When we pair that tendency with the idea of passion, we see that one of the glitches humans can discover along the wisdom road is the tendency for our attraction to what we love, our passion, to slip into unmindful behaviors, the “autopilot” below.
We may get greedy, want it NOW, then want MORE. We may not care who we step on, or harm on the way- including ourselves. From this realm of behaviors war is born.
Along the path of life we may lose our higher ideals and ethics, those attributed to the heart chakra and the chakras above, such as respect and compassion. We may indeed sell our souls out of fear- (read: survival) driven greed, and many a film or story depicts this common bargain with the Devil, one well known example being A Christmas Carol by Dickens. Material rewards always have this glitch attached to them, that they feel so good to the sensory-based personality that we get all stressed out and nervous about trying to get more of what feels good, and run away from any unwanted outcomes. We get focused on our hunger.
Then the person who (seemingly innocently) wants to lose weight, for example, starts fear-based behaviors such as obsessively weighing themselves and checking calories, over exercising, beating themselves up when they wander from the long term goal track. When we deem our short term measurements as failure rather than remembering the long game, we experience more fear. Fear triggers insecurity, powerlessness, and we react with comfort eating.
The desire or passion to lose weight isn’t so innocent after all, then- we fear not accomplishing our goal, perhaps for a number of reasons. Just an easy example. Once we are caught in the reptilian brain, it’s easy to slip into fear that our goals will not be realized, that our effort and time will amount to no reward at all, and we will be one more disappointing experience racked up to create added anxiety for the next time we try. We fight, flee, or freeze, and mindfulness goes out the window. We are in a trauma response, on some level.
The wolf walks with LRRH a bit and has an idea concerning his goal to eat the two. He decides to distract her, so her promise of mindfulness will be broken.
“…look at all the pretty flowers that are growing all around you; and I don’t think you are listening to the song of the birds; you are posting along just as if you were going to school, and it is so delightful out here in the wood.”
And so, as we all know, LRRH loses focus and becomes enchanted by the beauty around her. She makes a rationalization; she imagines her grandmother would love a bouquet, and proceeds to indulge herself by chasing after flowers for Grandma. So, note to self- if you want to stay in the personal development long game, figure out how to prioritize your project. Women in particular often abandon their promises of self development by considering others first, so here is a wee tip for the ladies.
Not that men in my society don’t often learn to sacrifice self relationship for the sake of others, typically financially supporting a family, part of my society’s expectations, though that’s less important than it once was. When such men are put out to pasture, many have no idea what to do with themselves; they are in a state of arrested development. The way of the crone, of wisdom, of entering a third way to do and be, is at least as important to men as to women. However, as Gaia governs development on this planet, women are often more naturally connected to the whole circle of life thing. Humans are meant to return to and love themselves one day, to travel the full circle of birth and death, if they live long enough.
And so she ran about in the wood, looking for flowers. And as she picked one she saw a still prettier one a little farther off, and so she went farther and farther into the wood.
Now this bit about the flower picking showcases another behavior that we might best leave behind on the wisdom path. It’s part of passionate behavior; chasing one material thing after another. We could equate her running after the flowers to a shopping addiction. The world is full of wonderful things, and when we are young and innocent, it’s natural to want to just gather it all up and enjoy it. That attitude may serve some of us for some years. However, this is a story about wisdom development. While LRRH is straying from her commitment, the wolf is quite literally at the door.
LRRH’s behavior could refer to chasing after anything- lovers, long to-do lists, excessive screen entertainment, chalking up travel destinations, career accomplishments, meditation hours logged. LRRH, Gram’s inner child, gathers flowers until she has “as many as she could hold”; she doesn’t stop until she literally can’t hold anymore, and that is greed, in the strict sense of the word. I know we don’t want to think of a cute little girl running around and gathering flowers for Granny as greedy, but this is a symbolic story, not to be taken literally. In truth, such unbridled behavior is fine for a little girl; it just doesn’t work for a crone. LRRH/Grandma is distracted by short term goals halfway to the long term goal of wisdom, of a more mindful way of being in the world and of being with oneself.
Adults don’t usually escape the challenges and traumas attendant in the “real world”. What may have seemed fun in our adolescence, such as driving drunk or shoplifting or shaming someone on Facebook or maxxing out credit cards, becomes tinged with anxiety due to a collection of negative outcomes. Falling in love, the most innocent adult thing of all in the passion department, can end in trauma, and we are left with devastating emotional baggage.
We pick ourselves up from the floor and usually self medicate to keep the symbolic wolf of fear at bay- fear of future harm. Most people have to wait until elderhood to realize that the baseline anxiety we learned to live with, though it can help us to motivate, isn’t necessary. We realize that somewhere along the line we lost the ability to stop and smell the roses, to feel truly safe, and that it’s harming our health- physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual.
Though the world is full of wonderful things, human life is not as simple as it looks to the youth, to the maid. The wisdom path very much involves figuring out where following our desires led us into disaster; where what seemed innocent and free in our youth stopped working in our adulthood. The crone is no longer a child, a maid, nor a mother, and is here advised to behave thus.
The bit about the trees in LRRH’s directions to the wolf is symbolically informative, for she claims that Grandma’s house “stands beneath the three oak trees”.
Oak trees are traditionally revered in many traditions for a number of qualities, including strength and longevity. They are a wisdom tree, in it for the long game for sure. Three is an ubiquitous sacred number, and in this case, refers to the triune goddess or the three life stages. All are equal, all are sacred, all have their own powers.
To accent again our theme of wisdom development Grandma also lives by hazel bushes, and hazel is the tree of wisdom, very much so in the Celtic tradition.
Back to the wolf, who is going to eat the grandmother now.
“Who is there?” cried the grandmother. “Little Red Riding Hood”, he answered, “and I have brought you some cake and wine. Please open the door.” “Lift the latch,” cried the grandmother; “I am too feeble to get up.”
Again, we see that Grandma is weak, too weak to deal with the wolf. Since for symbolic purposes LRRH and Grandma are one person, this weakness is one and the same with LRRH’s. In other words, when she/they chase(d) after their short term goals/desires, it weakens the goal and commitment of mindfulness or wisdom development. The power to resist temptation that mindfulness confers, is currently lacking. Remember, it is the wolf and the greed he represents that is responsible for this weakness. Grandma/LRRH has lost her willpower, lost her desire to protect herself from the consequences of slipping into short term reward behaviors. She invites him in; greed has the power now. She will be quite literally enveloped, overtaken, by greed.
So the wolf lifted the latch, and the door flew open, and he fell on the grandmother and ate her up without saying one word. Then he drew on her clothes, put on her cap, lay down on her bed, and drew the curtains.
Thus the wolf’s mode of operation, which is the same as the 3D focused Devil’s, has completely subsumed conscious awareness, mindfulness.
When (LRRH) had gathered as many (flowers) as she could hold, she remembered her grandmother, and set off to go to her. She was surprised to find the door standing open, and when she came inside she felt very strange, and thought to herself, “Oh dear, how uncomfortable I feel, and I was so glad this morning to go to my grandmother!”
Now here’s a nice clue for the wisdom seekers; you can tell you’re heading off on the wrong track by how you feel. Feeling sense is archetypally feminine, a skill that helps us detect when things are rotten in Denmark. It’s a sixth sense and often gets named intuition. As it is archetypal, men can also own it; it’s just typically more common for women. Feeling sense is as LRRH describes, distinct perhaps but usually impossible to describe or name.
To simplify for the sake of my writing, we could say that she is anxious; that this feeling is akin to that which we might end up with after enough disasters and traumas in our youth and adulthood. However, feeling sense is usually more complex than the label of anxiety. The point is that she has realized that somehow, her experience of starting off in the cool morning and shaking hands with Mom on a long term goal, has been spoiled by the pursuit of flowers that distracted her. Something is indeed rotten.
LRRH gets no answer from her “Good morning”, so she goes into the bedroom:
…there lay the grandmother with her cap pulled over her eyes, so that she looked very odd.
“O grandmother, what large ears you have!” “The better to hear with.”
“O grandmother, what great eyes you have!” “The better to see with.”
“O grandmother, what large hands you have!” “The better to hold you with.”
“But grandmother, what a terrible large mouth you have!” “The better to devour you!” And no sooner had the wolf said it than he made one bound from the bed, and swallowed up poor Little Red Riding Hood.
This is a super fun passage for the symbolist to figure out. I decided it’s instruction on the nature of short term goals; they are sensory-based, or 3D as I have been saying. Thus the ears, eyes, hands and mouth. The distraction of the sensory experience is famously a big teaching point in the yogic tradition and beyond. As I said earlier, the wisdom game is ethereal in nature. It can’t be heard, touched, tasted, seen. The wolf/Devil and its fear-tinged greed “devours” LRRH’s mindfulness through the sensory aspect of experience, same as Grandma. She knows something is wrong, but her senses trick her.
Now enters some archetypally masculine powers, the Hunter archetype. A huntsman is walking by the house and hears the wolf snoring, and decides to check on the old lady. He sees the wolf lying on the bed and
“At last I find you, you old sinner!” said he; “I have been looking for you a long time.”
And he made up his mind that the wolf had swallowed the grandmother whole, and that she might yet be saved. So he did not fire, but took a pair of shears and began to slit the wolf’s body. When he made a few snips Little Red Riding Hood appeared, and after a few more snips she jumped out and cried, “Oh dear, how frightened I have been! It is so dark inside the wolf.”
The ability to focus is archetypally masculine; the feminine by contrast has the ability to diffuse attention, the proverbial multitasking. The Hunter archetype in particular holds the ability to focus on and pursue a goal for some long time; to be still, to watch and wait, all good qualities for mindfulness as well as wisdom development. A hunter should not be in a rush, or distractible, either. They must keep their eyes on the prize, right? And just so does the hunter say “I have been looking for you a long time.”
We could say that on the psychological level, our story-persona (I have named it primarily the grandmother) has been exercising her inner masculine powers. She has been looking for what it is that keeps getting her distracted on the way, what keeps her from committing to her own wisdom path, to her personal development, what keeps her from being mindful. Perhaps she knew it was something the wolf represents- greed, fear, dissatisfaction, competitiveness- all the things that keep us from settling down and pursuing what we know is best for us in the long run. But she hadn’t caught the moment she slips, the way she is weakened, the fear that keeps her in thrall to old unhealthy behaviors. Until today.
The hunter’s use of blades (shears in this translation) is an archetypally masculine behavior that represents the ability to objectivity, to discernment, to “separating” and cutting out what’s causing the trouble. Mindfulness as it’s usually practiced in my culture involves observation, and observation means separating the watcher from the situation or action, from thoughts or the breath or the body, etc. Our inner workings are so close to us that we have trouble observing them, for the personality is composed of our thoughts and feelings and actions. But in order to deliberately change behaviors we recognize as unhealthy, we do well to watch, separate feelings and thoughts, and figure out why we are doing them.
LRRH points out that, when in the clutch of greed and grasping or whatever we want to call the behavior of excess chasing after 3D gain or solace (the wolf), she is frightened (“Oh, how frightened I have been!”). This is a huge revelation, actually; that we are excessively pursuing what seems like pleasure (the excessive flower gathering) because we are afraid of inevitable discomforts, afraid of the pain or suffering that a human life will naturally contain. A certain amount of grasping and avoiding is natural, part of life. Observing and thus dissipating excessive clinging to comfort and fleeing from pain is a basic philosophical tenet of major world religions.
After Grandma is freed from the wolf’s belly, LRRH fetches some large stones
…with which she filled the wolf’s body, so that when he waked up, and was going to rush away, the stones were so heavy that he sank down and fell dead.
Sometimes these wisdom tales use the demise of the adversary to stress the symbolism; for example, the stepmother’s red hot iron dancing shoes in Snow White. Obviously, the whole bit with the Grandma and LRRH in the stomach and the hunter’s slitting it are not to be taken literally. The stones are indeed symbolizing the material reality, that excessive 3D orientation that keeps us running from the Devil. That orientation kills the wolf in the end.
So all is well that ends well. The grandmother eats the goodies and “held up her head again”, the higher chakra food and drink dispelling weakness in regards to worldly temptation. The hunter gets the wolf’s skin, a sort of power trophy; properly used, our passion and desire are useful, after all. We must own them, not they, us. LRRH claims she will not stray in the wood and will mind what her mother says.
It’s not over yet, though. LRRH is taking cake to Granny again and another wolf meets her and LRRH is frightened by the look in his eye. She’s no longer innocent, right? The two shut the door, but the wolf stupidly knocks, claiming that he is LRRH with some cakes. But the two “remained still, and did not open the door”. They have learned a few things from the hunter. If they don’t want to be prey, they must think what is best (discrimination, the blade); they must use their will power (choosing behaviors), an archetypally masculine skill. The loss of will power is part of the weakness that formerly afflicted the two; the grandmother couldn’t get out of bed, LRRH could not resist chasing flowers in the wood.
After that the wolf slunk by the house, and got at last upon the roof to wait until Little Red riding Hood should return home in the evening; then he meant to spring down upon her, and devour her in the darkness. But the grandmother discovered his plot.
Grandma tells LRRH to take a bucket of water that she had boiled sausages in, and pour it into a stone trough under the eaves.
When the smell of the sausages reached the nose of the wolf he snuffed it up, and looked round, and stretched out his neck so far he lost his balance, and began to slip, and he slipped down off the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned.
This wolf’s demise is due to an inability to resist temptation; a lack of will power again. As with the first wolf, a behavior we are cautioning against is his undoing. Due to his obsession with food, he is no longer the hunter, but the prey. He was unmindful of consequences.
The child and grandmother, however, have effectively learned how to be mindful, to pay attention, and to resist the lure of short term gratification. If the wolf had resisted the close up scent of sausage (remember the lesson on sensory reality), he might have actually kept to the long game and hunted successfully. But he went for what seemed more “real”; his senses tricked him.
That’s a wrap! Thanks for reading. Peace out! And blessings on your wisdom journey.
