Recently, I received a message from a someone who read Puzzling People and they asked me this question: "Why are ALL fairy tales about psychopaths and psychopathic behavior?"

Mythology and folklore are really an early form of psychology. In a pre-scientific era - it was the only means by which average people could anchor their frustration and warnings to others regarding the Consciousness Parasites and other pathological predators within the material world - without having to rely exclusively on supernatural-religious concepts such as demons, succubi and so on. This was probably to avoid charges of witchcraft and blasphemy. So rather than deal with purely religious motifs - from around the Middle Ages on - the psychopath entered into the world of children's fairy tale.

Just about all European fairy tales from this period on are about psychopaths and psychopathic behaviour. How to recognise their traits, and deal with them. This is not by accident - a collective folk memory was generated in the guise of children's stories of wicked stepmothers, wolves disguised as kindly and familiar people turning out to be killers. This repository of pathological awareness was essentially the only option available to a mainly illiterate population of the time. A powerful method to warn others in such a way that would be passed on and without risking ridicule and censure - by application of a linguistic folk art to develop changes in the collective consciousness. Ultimately, this is what these fairy tales were attempting to achieve going forward - a warning of sorts. While also serving the function of an allegorical collective therapy session to heal past trauma within a community caused by psychopaths in the past.

An oral tradition retained within the tribal consciousness to keep the community's "spirits up". Their need to go to the trouble of creating a vast and complex canon of fairy tales - shows how people of the past knew they were dealing with something that wasn't fully human. These "uneducated" pre-Freudian folk were acutely aware that the mind contained different levels of awareness. Trauma was not always retained within the ego - but in "another mind" behind it. This also, in a collective senses, was linked to the overall emotional health and safety of the community at large.

Anyone who has ever been personally damaged by a psychopath - in a psychological sense - will freely admit that there is something unearthly about the experience. I myself have spoken to hardcore atheists who used terms such as "demonic" to describe the effects it had on them and how they rationalised the experience. They used terms such as demonic not because they were ignorant, superstitious, or lacked any erudite skills - but because it was all they had left in their intellect to deal with the psychological effects in terms of expressing what had been done to them.

The proliferation of the psychopath in European fairy tales just goes to show how serious the psychopath was taken by our ancestors. More tellingly, in terms of the written word and popular literature - not until the arrival of Bram Stoker's Dracula was the metaphor of the psychopath brought back into the popular consciousness. There wasn't much else in between in this regard.

Increasing levels of literacy among the population as a whole, then became a means whereby the Psychopathic Control Grid could essentially deny their own existence to the mass of the population. Filling their minds and expectations with impossible and doomed love stories and flowery epics. Were heroes unquestioningly sacrifice themselves willingly for the nobility and nation, and the toxic relationship was deemed "romantic".

Even today, Robert Hare spending 30 years studying this issue still came up with the term "Intra-Species" predator. If that does not conjure up a folklore image then I don't know what does.