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World Tales : The Extraordinary Coincidence of Stories Told in All Times, in All Places

by Idries Shah

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Reading for the 4th time

read in February 2018

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Ita said: " An ancient Inca tale is mentioned in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, provides the title of a poem by Robert Browning and the plot of Milton’s ‘Comus’. Christian missionaries to Polynesia are astounded when told a story with a striking resemblance to the O An ancient Inca tale is mentioned in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, provides the title of a poem by Robert Browning and the plot of Milton’s ‘Comus’. Christian missionaries to Polynesia are astounded when told a story with a striking resemblance to the Old Testament’s ‘Joseph and his Brothers’. Variants of this story are also found among the Maoris, the Zulus and Inuit peoples, and in Sudan. A spiritual romance written in the seventh century by a monk named John of Damascus turns out to be related to the life of the Buddha. The Talmudic parable of the ‘Desolate Island’ is found in the same book, but scholars believe it was composed in pre-Islamic Egypt. It looks as if stories form an invisible web, begun thousands of years ago, if not longer, and linking humans all over the Earth regardless of culture and status.

The insights or revelations we gained during past ages live on in World Tales. We associate the discovery of the specialisation and complementarity of our two brain hemispheres with the twentieth century, but the ‘Mastermaid’ from Norse mythology suggests a much earlier awareness. There is a strong female presence throughout World Tales. Shah mentions in his introduction to ‘The Maiden Wiser than the Tsar’ how this story may be regarded as an example of the feminine use of non-linear thinking in problem solving.

But World Tales goes beyond the discoveries of present day psychology. ‘The content of folklore is metaphysics’, Shah quotes A K Coomaraswamy as saying. Elsewhere in the book he writes, ‘If I were to be asked, “What are World tales actually about?” the answer would have to be, “They are about fate or destiny”. It’s interesting that, in a blog he wrote for the Idries Shah Foundation website, Richard Hamilton, collector of Moroccan tales, states that stories allowed him to see a ‘golden thread’ running through his life. In his book ‘In Arabian Nights’ Tahir Shah describes one of the stories from this book, ‘The Happiest Man in the World’, as the story in his heart.

There is at least one other aspect to World Tales. As well as being a collection of entertaining, enchanting, sometimes deeply moving stories, this is a teaching book. From it you can learn how to recognise the essence of a story, and how its presentation can maintain or diminish the vital force within. Seeing World Tales as a guide in no way lessens the pleasure of reading the stories. Which moves me more deeply – the Cinderella of the Brothers Grimm, or the Cinderella of the Algonquin Americans? I have no hesitation in answering, ‘The latter’. ...more "

Feb 23, 2018 01:59AM · see review

Ita’s Quotes

“Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.”
― Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself

tags: moving, tourist, travel

30 likes

“Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.”
― Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams

tags: culture, moving

70 likes

“He came to the conclusion that humans confused the content with the container.

They would gorge themselves on great plates of inferior food, imagining it to be delicious because there was simply so much of it. Or, they would make half wits their leaders, merely because they were pleasing to the eye, or because their words were spoken in honeyed voices.

And when it came to information, they would champion weighty tomes that contained almost no real content, while shunning small books that imparted real truth.”
― Tahir Shah, Scorpion Soup

5 likes

“The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.”
― Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca

tags: travel-writing

17 likes

“People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge.”
― Idries Shah

tags: civilization, knowledge, psychology

2 likes

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