Podcast | The Forester’s bedtime stories.
And other archetypes manifesting as real people in Disinfolklore
The origins of my insight were at the bridge, with the bridge troll — the chief bridge troll, who told me he was a forester until the Russians came, and then he decided to fight for the liberation of the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. He was a woodsman, a forester. Probably in reality, he was FSB or SVR or secret service, playing a former forester. His job was to tell me bedtime stories. It took me some time. Every day I would go there and meet him, and he would have these stories to tell me about what the Ukrainians had allegedly done the night before and the heroic exploits of his men.
It was seeing the pattern in the way he was telling these stories to me, and treating me when I crossed the bridge into occupied Ukraine, that gradually I realised this was — he was telling me bedtime stories. I became very circumspect about what I put in my reports because of this. This was also going on in Luhansk at the level of the regional capital of the occupation…
In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale is the deepest Indo-European fear.
Unlike Carl Jung, who did not have access to the same information we have, I do not make claims about universality any more. I can only make claims about the Indo-European mind — that is to say, minds whose first language is an Indo-European language, from India to Ireland.
The deepest fear: that those you love can be hollowed out and reoccupied while you are making the tea.
Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk is a changeling factory. From 2014 onwards, I watched it operate at scale. Ukrainians who had queued for European Cup football tickets in Donetsk in 2012, who had raised their children in Ukrainian kindergartens, watched Ukrainian television, voted in Ukrainian elections — they were gradually swapped, not physically, but archetypally…
Continued as a podcast linked-to below, or available wherever you get your podcasts:
