The Origin: Mother and Maiden in the Woods

Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” Working in that Steppe-land Locus Amoenus, I had already realised that I perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered my mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction, using an artificial-seeming set-up, in protective males who would undergo any ordeal to rescue from an ogre such damsels in distress stirred my suspicion; triggering what I now call my “Incoming Troll Radar.” The first tool, then, in our arsenal is Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy — Tool 1.

Source: Disinfolklore

This is the moment of detection in eastern Ukraine. A Russian MGB troll about a “common law wife and underage daughter” being “cut into pieces” activated the Mother/Maiden archetype — and in that activation, the author perceived the machinery behind the manipulation.

Deep dive: Mother and the Maiden archetype analysis.

← Back to Tool 1: Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy | Next: “Like It Or Not, Take It, My Beauty” →