The Sky is Falling!

         In my last post I mentioned the story of Chicken Little - as we call it in the USA.  In England the tale often begins with Henny Penny, who’s the second character in most American versions.  In fact, the names of all the characters involved are highly variable, although they’re usually rhyming or alliterative, such as Chicken Licken, Hen Pen, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, or Ducky Daddles.  But the basic outline of the story is relatively constant: a bird gets hit by some little falling thing (acorn or leaf) and concludes that the sky is falling.  As they run along in a panic, they tell all the other birds they meet, who join the mass hysteria until they all meet a fox.  The wily fox sees that he can manipulate the panicking crowd, and tricks them all into entering his den to be eaten.  The moral of the story is: don’t panic over stupid little things.  The name “Chicken Little” and the cry “The sky is falling” have both become idiomatic in English, signifying people who leap to catastrophic pessimism over nothing and their hysterical, fear-mongering cries.

        Versions of the fable appear in European literature by the early nineteenth century, but were presumably circulating orally long before being seen in print.  Stories with similar patterns and morals also appear many centuries earlier in Buddhist texts.  These fables involve a hare convinced by the sound of a falling fruit that the earth is breaking up.  These versions generally have a happier ending, in which some more benevolent animal (who may even be the Bodhisattva in another form, in some versions) stops the stampede of hysterical animals, finds out the truth about the source of the panic, calms everyone down, and sends them safely home.  Aesop has a fable which doesn’t include the threatened end of the world, but does feature mass hysteria.  In his version panicking hares cause a panic among frogs, which leads another animal to remind the hares that everyone’s life is full of fear and trouble, so you may as well just chill out and bear it.

        The one thing all these stories have in common is that the sky is not, in fact, falling and the world is not breaking up.  The morals point out how foolish it is to leap to overly pessimistic conclusions, how irresponsible it is to incite panic, and how doubly foolish it is to believe the fear-mongering of others without evidence.  The Chicken Little stories also raise the moral of how easily bad actors can manipulate fearful people, so that such foxes can more easily prey on such foolish, helpless fowl.  That’s the moral I think we’re seeing lived out in this time: bad-faith foxes doing their best to keep foolish fowl whipped up into hysterical fear over irrelevances and scapegoats, the better to distract them from real issues, and thus devour them.

        There is another twist to the story that I want to raise up now, though: what about fears that really are justified?  What if the sky really is in danger of falling?  In that case it’s surely reasonable to be afraid, but Chicken Little still gives us a moral about how not to behave.  Even when fear is justified, dashing around in a panic is still not going to help anyone.  Rather than playing right into the greedy hands of the foxes who would manipulate us, instead, how about gathering all the other fowl (and hares, and frogs) and trying to figure out how we can all actually help solve the problem.

        My musings on this traditional story highlight one more point I want to make.  The reason these tales stick around for centuries is that they continue to have relevance to the work of being human.  The reason they have so many variants is that they continue to be adapted to the particular situations in which we find ourselves.  These stories carry universal threads while simultaneously allowing constant tweaking and changing.  That’s their magic and their power, and that’s why storytellers, authors, and artists have continued to revisit them generation after generation.  And that’s why I, too, have been exploring them through art, poetry, and stories for my upcoming book Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns!

[Pictures: first and third, anonymous illustrations from Chicken Little by Mara L. Pratt-Chadwick, ca. 1905 (Images from University of California Libraries Internet Archive);

second, wood engraving by William Roberts from The Wonderful History of Henny-Penny, ca. 1855 (Images from University of California Libraries Internet Archive).]