Myths, Fables and Fairy Tales, are the blueprints to Life?

I grew up reading all types of myths from around the world, along with Aesop's Fables and Fairy tales.  I'm not talking the fairy tales of Walt Disney, I'm talking the original Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson tales.

Listening to a talk this week about the role the more religious tales play in various cultures bases of morality, it made me think what if the various myths, fables and fairy tales from around the world where in fact how our ancestors laid out the rules of life?

 Each antagonist and protagonist in each tale follows along certain archetypes that make up our personalities, and as each story has a moral to tell than its not that much of a stretch to read between the lines of these stories to see they are telling us what is morally wrong and right.

Take the Greek  tale of Psyche, who is a princess so beautiful that the goddess Aphrodite becomes jealous. In revenge, she instructs her son Eros to make her fall in love with a hideous monster; but instead he falls in love with her himself. He becomes her unseen husband, visiting her only at night. Psyche disobeys his orders not to attempt to look at him, and in doing so she loses him. In her search for him she undertakes a series of cruel and difficult tasks set by Aphrodite in the hope of winning him back.  The last seeing her enter the underworld and ask the Goddess Persephone to fill a box with her beauty ointment for Aphrodite.  With help Psyche enters the underworld and is told upon her return out to not look into the box.  Unfortunately temptation overcomes Psyche and she looks inside, and falls into a deep sleep.   Eros can eventually no longer bear to witness her suffering or to be apart from her and pleads their cause to the gods. Psyche becomes an immortal and the lovers are married in heaven.

The Tale of Psyche is a two fold tale, the first is a coming of age tale of the maid, who becomes the lover, than the mother.  She is innocent and sheltered when we first meet her and falls in love, however her love is rejected by her lover and she goes through the trials to become a woman.

The second meaning of this tale very much revolves around her trip to the underworld.  Any trip to the underworld has to do with letting go of your power and ego and facing yourself, integrating both sides of your psyche or soul into one whole being.  A person who is able to integrate both sides of self is a truly powerful, beautiful, compassionate person, for they have undergone the trails and survived.  This is a person no longer ruled by ego and survival skills but has been been able to combine that side with their higher self.

The tale of Snow White is also very much a tale of the underworld itself, she faces many trials and falls into a deep sleep upon eating the poisoned apple, upon awakening she has survived her trials and grown into womanhood.

Sleeping beauty also is a coming of age story, sheltered all her life from the cruel parts of life, until she pricks her finger on the spindle needle where upon she learns the dark side of human nature and thus moves from innocent maid into that of the Mother.

These are just three of many tales from around the world, but you can apply the same process to any of them.  Take a tale what archetype does the antagonist and protagonist take - Hero, Warrior, Sage, Father, Princess, Mother, Queen, Crone -  and what is the journey that they take, than figure out the moral to each story.

Our ancestors where wise people to leave us these maps so that we may better understand our own nature.