Analysis of Azerbaijani fairy tales in the context of archetypal symbolism

Tales, distilled from the thousands of years of cumulative memory of the societies they belong to, with all the social, cultural, political and economic codes they contain, are narratives embellished with extraordinariness, in which human beings positioned today can see the future while they want to look at the past. Human beings, whose lives are shaped by their fears, take refuge in mythical narratives that they knead with their imagination in order to cope with their fears and transfer all the sociocultural codes they contain to the future, despite the existence of a great reality such as death. At this point, tales are early manifestos of human beings' efforts to maintain their existence by taking refuge in the privileges offered by the surreal despite the extinction in real life. Especially fairy tales are texts that can free readers and/or listeners from their concerns about their existence and offer hope that they can exist tomorrow, as they contain experiences beyond the limits of possibility in terms of their content and plot. For this reason, it is necessary to identify the incentives in fairy tales that take the protagonists out of their comfort zones and make them an instrument for the collective development of the societies they belong to through their personal development. In order to determine the incentives in question that drive the protagonists into action, archaic behavior patterns defined as archetypes by Carl Gustav Jung and expanded by Carol S. Pearson were used, and an interdisciplinary analysis was conducted on Azerbaijani fairy tales based on the identified archetypes. In the second part of a general evaluation on the tale, which is included in the first part of the introduction of our study, information is given about the basic concepts and bases contained in the archetypal symbolism, which constitutes the basis of the study. In the first part of our study, the selected Azerbaijani fairy tales were examined in accordance with the scientific bases stated in the theoretical framework and the archetypal elements they contain were determined. Given that protagonists being micro-scale reflections of the social development of the nations they belong to based on their personal development requires an analysis of the stages they have gone through, the tales analyzed in the context of archetypal symbolism have also been evaluated in terms of the stages of departure, initiation and return, called the monomyth cycle by Joseph Campbell. Thus, in the light of the findings to be obtained by examining the Azerbaijani fairy tales which are the subject of the study both in the context of archetypal symbolism and by taking into account the situations encountered by the protagonists at the stages of departure, initiation and return, the local cultural equivalents of the archetypal images in the collective unconscious of the Azerbaijani Turks will be revealed.