Cronnie Wisdom
Crone is "a phase in which you can be more authentic, more capable of making a difference in your family and in the greater world. Life gives you experience, and when you draw from it, that's true wisdom. By the time a woman is in her crone years, she is in an amazing position to be an influence. To change things for the better, to bring what she knows into a situation, to be able to say, 'Enough is enough.' You don't have to just go along with things, which is often a part of the middle years. You're often something of a loose cannon."
Jean Shinoda Bolen
The Crone as the Storyteller
I’ve been reading Marina Warner’s book Once
Upon a Time. Naturally, I start by checking out any
references to the crone, and guess what I discovered? The telling and retelling
of the early folktales and fairy tales was primarily the purview of women. In fact the first book that was written by
Frenchman, Charles Perrault (in the
1600s) was written under a pseudonym.
Using his son’s name as author he claimed the stories were initially
told to him by old women and nurses.
This belief, that women primarily told the tales, was why these were
initially called “old wives tales.” Later
his use of the subtitle, Tales of Mother
Goose, signaled this rich tradition of grandmothers and crones as
storytellers. We see this theme
continuing in the work of Giambattista Basile. In Il Pentamerone, the tale is structured with ten crone storytellers
telling 50 tales over five days. So perhaps one of the key roles of the crone
is to share the rich tradition of our ancestors’ wisdom through story. As we remember
and share this wisdom we become the wise woman!
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