You can read the first three tales every witch should know here.
This is one of the most complex and important fairy tales so far as Irish shamanism is concerned. In general it tells the story of three girls, each hired one at a time to watch over a corpse which rises up and causes trouble. The youngest of the girls is the only one able to survive through the night, but she does far more than this. She follows the corpse into the "Other World" the realm of the dead and brings it back to life (one of the most important jobs of early shamans was to cure illness by entering the realm of the dead and retrieving the sick persons soul).
This story has a number of important moral magico-religious points including;
1-Be Kind - It's through kindness that the protagonist gets her fairy familiar who helps her in the realm of the dead.
2-Blessings and curses have a magic of their own
In this story the older two girls refuse to take their mother's blessing which is a clear sign that they aren't prepared to enter the world of magic. After all a mothers blessing has power, as shown most clearly by the Scottish Fairy Tale "Maol a Chliobain" in which one girl gets tied up while she's out seeking her fortune "but her mother's blessing came and freed her."
There are a number of European stories in which the mothers blessing seems to take the form of a familiar spirit including one of the "Baba Yaga" stories from Russia in which the Mother's spirit/blessing lives on in the form of a doll given to the protagonist.
3-When you encounter the other world have a response.
The first thing the corpse dose when he gets up is ask the girl watching him if they are alone. Failing to respond to this ends with his curse. The youngest daughter, the protagonist is quick to respond with a Celtic rhyme to gain protection from the fairy realm;
"All alone I am not, I've little dog Dog and Pussy, my cat; I've apples to roast, and nuts to crack, And all alone I am not."
The Tale of St. Demetra
This story is interesting because the first part mirrors almost perfectly the story of "The Rape of Persephone." Except the Greek Goddess is called a saint, and Hades the Lord of the dead is replaced by a Turkish magician. What's more the story shifts from a myth about a deity to the story of a shamans journey and finally that of a heroes saga. What we see than is that three ancient myths are stitched together to make a new fairy tale. This story is worth reading because it shows how old myths and folk religious ideas were morphed into fairy tales.
A few of the rules this, among other fairy tales, gives us for understanding folk religion are;
1-Many of the ancient gods and folk religious ideas survived in fairy tales. Indeed, many fairy tales might tell bits and pieces of stories that pre-date the Ancient Greek religion. It should, for example, be of interest to note that Hermes's original fairy tales make him more like a fairy then a Greek deity. What's more Hermes and Dōsojin of Japan are both represented by Phallic symbols and are deities of the journey, as is Odin. While one could write this off as coincidence there aren't actually that many deities represented so by a phallic symbol, so the fact that all three which are are so similar to each could indicate that they all have a common origin thousands of years before on the steppes.
Japan's earliest deities also appear to have been water women who took the form of snakes, a motif which is also present in the Alps and other isolated parts of Europe. So it may be that these ideas existed in the common ancestor of the Joman of Japan and the European Hunter Gatherers 10,000 years ago. Of course it's difficult to say this for certain, but regardless these stories are very, very old.
2-Many, if not most, fairy tales are really multiple stories and ideas which have been stitched together. So instead of a single idea or story they have multiple ideas and stories and the same character can originally have been multiple characters from different tales. This means we must at times try to understand pieces of fairy tales to get to their root.
“The Bear and the Peasant”
Once upon a
time a certain peasant lost his family and was left alone with no one to help
him in his home or his fields. So he went to the Bear and said, "Look
here, bear, let's keep house and plant our garden and sow our corn
together."
And bear
asked, “But how shall we divide it afterwards?"
“How shall
we divide it?" said the peasant, “Well, you take all the tops and let me
have all the roots."
“All
right," answered bear.
So they
sowed some turnips, and they grew beautifully. And bear worked hard, and
gathered in all the turnips, and then they began to divide them.
And the
peasant said, “The tops are yours, aren't they, bear?"
“Yes," he answered.
So the
peasant cut off all the turnip tops and gave them to bear, and then sat down to
count the roots. And bear saw that the peasant had done him down. And he got
huffy, lay down in his den, and started sucking his paws.
The next
spring the peasant again came to see him, and said, " Look here, bear,
let's work together again, shall we?"
And bear
answered, “Right-ho! Only this time mind! You can have the tops, but I'm going
to have the roots!"
“Very,
well,” said the peasant.
And they
sowed some wheat, and when the ears grew up and ripened, you never saw such a
sight. Then they began to divide it, and the peasant took all the tops with the
grain, and gave bear the straw and the roots. So he didn't get anything that time
either.
And bear
said to the peasant, “Well, good-bye! I'm not going to work with you any more,
you're too crafty!"
And with
that he went off into the forest.
The bear in Northern Russia could be said to be the lord of the forest, the lord of the land, a form of deity who in the early days likely helped the farmer. However, because the farmer was greedy and tricked the bear he was left alone at the end of the story, with no one to help him.
You can read the first three tales every witch should know here.
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