Breaking the Mother Goose
Code: How a Fairy-Tale Character Fooled the
World for 300 Years by Jeri Studebaker (Moon Books 2015), trade paperback, 319
pages. Also available as an e-book.
Breaking the Mother Goose
Code is written with
a scholarly approach, yet in a style and language that is easy to understand.
The book seemed to me to be, in parts, like a mystery novel as Jeri Studebaker tracks down the
connection between goddesses and Mother Goose traditions, tales, and poems and
songs, as well as, in the second part of the book, other fairy tales.
In the Introduction she
poses several questions that people have asked about Mother Goose and then
writes,
“The answer to all these questions is, we don’t know for certain.
Mother Goose is an enigma lost in the mists of time. But she did leave a few
telltale clues to her identity. . . .”
Studebaker goes on to
summarize the best know of these “telltale clues.” Then, in chapter 1,
“Beginning My Search for Mother Goose,” she adds to them some of her exciting
research whose results surprised even her. The beginning phase of the research
climaxed on a day in 2012 on which she was able to bring together information
from items she found on eBay with material from her previous readings. This led
her to conclude that Mother Goose represented a melding of several different goddesses
from different cultures. Yet, she writes, questions remained:
“How was the
knowledge of the connection lost? Was it simply the result of a loss of
interest through time? Was the creation of Mother Goose an intentional plot to
disguise and best serve this goddess during a time when it was dangerous – and
frequently lethal – even to mention her name? Did Mother Goose fairy tales
carry coded messages left for us by our pre-Christian ancestors during a time
when non-Christians were routinely rounded up, roped to stakes, and roasted
alive? If so, what exactly were our ancestors trying to tell us?. . . If Mother
Goose was code, what was the point of dressing her as a witch?”
In the next chapters of
Part I, she explores a number of these clues including the only nursery rhyme about Mother Goose; goddesses Mother
Goose resembles; the connections among Harlequinn, Hellequinn, Helle, and
Holda; representation of Mother Goose in art; other evidence that Mother Goose
was a goddess; whether Mother Goose was a pre-patriarchal goddess; and secrets
hidden in nursery rhymes.
Studebaker has a rare gift
for turning complex concepts into colloquial and entertaining explanations. She
uses this gift sparingly, yet effectively, in this book. For example, in
chapter 4 when explaining the relationship between Aphrodite and Mother Goose,
she writes:
“… some writers think Aphrodite began as a powerful goddess who was
gradually besmirched by the Greeks and Romans. … we’ve been told Aphrodite was
a somewhat empty-headed physical knockout. Also though, according to the
Greeks, she was a vamp. Her vampiness might have been the result of Zeus
forcing her to marry the god Hephaistos, who was lame, misshapen and mean.
Since she had nothing in common with Hephaistos, and also didn’t take kindly to
being forced to marry anyone, Aphrodite began going out with other guys….”
In a more scholarly tone,
she writes that
“Jane Harrison thinks that before the Greeks demoted her into a
sex goddess, Aphrodite was a goddess who just never married, a parthenogenetic
deity who could create life without mating… – which of course suggests that
originally she was a great goddess, the uncreated source that created
everything.…”
She goes on to discuss the goddesses Holda and Perchta, which in
relation to Mother Goose she calls Holda-Perchta, and explains that they both
had many other names depending on the time and location. She describes how
these goddesses were “degraded” by those who were trying to stop Europeans from
worshiping them, and then goes on to discuss the Grimms’ Fairytale, “Mother
Holla,” giving Heide Gottner-Abendroth’s opinion of the tale and Marija
Gimbutas’ opinion about Holda. Her exploration of the connections among
Harlequinn, Hellequinn, Helle, and Holda are focused on “early modern” theater
productions which show relationship among these and among Holda and what was
called
“The Wild Hunt, a supernatural group of mostly dead people that roamed
the medieval medieval countryside in the dead of night.”
Her investigation of
“Mother Goose and the Graphic Arts” is an extraordinary example of scholarship
that includes primary research. In the section on American portrayals of Mother
Goose, in which she takes a close look at 18 Mother Goose images, she tells of
trying to find the answer to the question of how Mother Goose came to be
portrayed as “witch-like.” She finds the answer to this in a description of an
1806 theater production of a play by Thomas Dibdin and tries to figure out how
to get a copy of the script. She discovers that such a copy is in the Harvard University library where
“Harvard librarians weren’t letting it out of their hands.” She describes the
way she finally got a copy of the document as a
“miracle of miracles” and how, through it, she found even more information than
the reason for the “witch-like” representation.
Part Two of the book
includes a close look at Mother Goose fairy tales including a list “of 12
characteristics that, taken together, set the fairytales apart from other
fiction”; a look at the implications of “Cinderella” and other fairy tales and
codes within them; and other fairy tales about “creation, cosmology and
theology” as well as those about “magic spells and incantations.” In “Fairy Tales
About Right and Wrong” she looks into the question of why there seems to be no
portrayal of war in fairy tales and whether the violence that does exist in
them “might be the result of patriarchal revisioning.” The last chapter of the
book is titled “Questions, Questions and more Questions.”
The back matter of the book
includes appendices with “Frequently Used Terms and Time Periods,” “Mother
Goose Timeline,” the text of “ Grimms Fairy Tale N0. 24, Mother Holle,”
“Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose: A
Synopsis of Each Tale,” “Fairy Tale Code Words and Their Meanings (From Heide
Gottner-Abendroth’s The Goddess and Her
Heroes),” “Discussion Questions”; and a 16.5-page bibliography and 19-page
index. The front matter of the book includes acknowledgments and notes about
illustrations, including an explanation of why they aren't
included in this book, along with information about a book and websites that
can provides the reader with such illustrations.
Breaking
the Mother Goose Code is
an important book, not only for its subject matter about Mother Goose, fairy
tales, and Goddess mythology, but also for the examples it sets of ways to trace
the history of Goddess suppression and of how to present this type of material
in a scholarly yet very accessible way. I recommend it with great enthusiasm.
Jeri
Studebaker has worked on several archaeological sites and has advanced degrees
in anthropology, archaeology, and education. She is also author of Switching to Goddess.
