https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iobn7oJGicM
As you know, we are currently crowdfunding a beautiful storybook written by myself and illustrated by Heather Polington called Snow White and the Widow Queen. It really is a desire to recapture storytelling, to dive back into the old stories. And I thought that as we’re thinking about fairy tales, it might be a good idea to put out some old patron-only videos that I’ve done over the years which interpret fairy tales. It’ll give you a good idea of what those videos look like, what it means to subscribe to the symbolic world. But it’ll also be a good time to celebrate these fairy tales. We’ll start with Sleeping Beauty and look at why she pricks herself on a spindle. But then we will move on to Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, and maybe a few more. So if you haven’t yet, please back Snow White and the Widow Queen. And in the meantime, enjoy. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So as many of you know, I am working on some fairy tales, working in part now, right now I’m working on a version of Sleeping Beauty. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Sleeping Beauty, I guess, for years. And there’s one thing that really kind of bothered me, I guess, it was the question of the spindle. Like, why does she prick her finger on a spindle? And so I looked into it and I tried to figure out why that would be. So I thought that maybe bringing you through my process of figuring out what I think at least the spindle seems to manifest could be helpful. I mean, helpful if you’re interested in the question of Sleeping Beauty, but also helpful in order to see the process that I usually go through to figure out what these things are about. And so the first thing that I looked at was whether or not there are other traditions. And so this is important. A way to do that in the Bible is to often look at what you would call midrash or legends or things that surround the biblical text. In order to notice if there are differences, if some details are different, sometimes even in scripture. So for example, if you look at stories in the book of Samuel and then you look at stories in the book of Kings, for example, you can try to see what’s the same, what’s different. And sometimes seeing that something is preserved or something has changed can actually help you understand what is going on. And so when I looked at the traditions, there were two traditions, it seems. And one was that Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, pricked her finger on a spindle. For those who don’t know what a spindle is, a spindle is either on a spinning wheel or sometimes it can be a hand spindle. And so what it does is that you take flax or usually it was flax at the time, but you could probably have it with wool as well. You would take flax and then you would pass the, you would attach the, I don’t know how they started it, they would attach the flax to the spindle. And then as the wheel turned, the spindle would spin like this and it would spin the flax together. And then with your hand, you would kind of just let it go and it would rotate around the spindle and then it would create a bundle around the spindle. So that’s why the spindle has a kind of vertical shape. It’s a rod, but sometimes it’s a little pointy because you want the thread to neatly, let’s say, get gathered around the spindle. And so now the problem with that, let’s start with the spindle, the problem with that is that spindles aren’t pointy. They’re not pointy in a way that you can prick your finger on. And so that’s something that people, the same kind of person that, the same kind of 14 year old atheist, but for fairy tales would be like, oh, it’s ridiculous, spindles aren’t pointy, this is a silly story, this is nonsense or whatever. But usually when something doesn’t make sense in a story, at least especially a story that’s lasted a very long time, it’s actually not a, how can I say this? It’s not a sign that the story doesn’t make sense. It’s a sign that the story makes so much sense that the people who are remembering it are willing to accept a disjunct between the meaning of the story and actual manifestation in the world. If you look at even the idea, say, Maximus and, you know, Origen and all these early church fathers, they talked about how in the text, in the biblical text, what they called the idea of ambiguous problems in the text, like when there’s contradiction even between the different tellings of the text, and when there’s something which is very obscure and very strange, often it’s actually a sign that there’s a lot of meaning there. Because why would you tolerate, kind of, why would you tolerate for a very long time to preserve a story that is just complete gibberish or meaningless? It doesn’t mean that that’s the case all the time. I mean, obviously sometimes there can be gibberish and meaninglessness and stories. But the idea is that you don’t necessarily just discount it, especially if it’s an important part of the story, like the spindle in the Sleeping Beauty story. So that’s one. So the other tradition was that she pricked her finger on a strand of flax. So now it’s not the spindle where the flax gets transformed and turned around and coiled around this axis. But now it’s actually the thing, like the wild early part of the process where it’s just like a piece of straw, basically, a piece of flax, and then she pricks her finger on that. And so interestingly enough, it seems like those are actually opposite from each other. When you start to kind of understand what’s going on, they seem like they’re opposite from each other. So the fact of them being opposite from each other, this is another thing about symbolism, is that sometimes that can help you understand the meaning. Because opposites are bound by a category. That’s why they’re opposites. And so you see that sometimes when people also mock stories, they’ll say, well, it’s not what you said, it’s the opposite of that. Well, if it’s the opposite, it’s still bound by a higher category, or else you wouldn’t recognize it as an opposite. The opposite of high is low, the opposite of orange isn’t a bowling ball. It’s like if it’s an orange and a duck, and those two things, like orange and duck, how do they fit together? You struggle to understand why one would be switched for another, but if it’s like the spindle that gathers the thread around it, and then the flax, which hasn’t been gathered yet and hasn’t been brought together, then you’re like, interesting. This at least seems to be in the same category. So that is something to pay attention to when you’re interpreting the text. And so the next thing to do is to not interpret the idea of what the spindle is apart from the story, and not interpret elements that you’re trying to understand apart from the story. You always have to try to stay inside the story as long as possible. And so you have to look at the events. What are the events? So there’s an evil fairy that is not invited to the chrismation of the king’s daughter, and because she’s not invited, she gets annoyed. And then when the other fairies, they give her a blessing, and those blessings are usually virtues, she’ll be beautiful, she’ll be good, she’ll be truthful, she’ll be graceful. It’s all these goods that they are giving to Snow White as their blessing. And then the last fairy that wasn’t invited to the party will come up, and so obviously she’s going to prefer her curse. Now, what’s interesting now about the curse is that the curse doesn’t actually follow, at least in appearance, doesn’t follow the other blessings. It seems to not fit. So the fairies will say, she’ll be graceful as this, she’ll be beautiful as that, whatever, she’ll dance, she’ll be a great dancer, I don’t know, like giving her qualities. And then the evil fairy says, this is going to happen to her, and she will die. So she’ll prick her finger on a spindle, or she’ll prick her finger on a piece of flax, and she will die. So why does that go together? So this is where I’ve been meditating for quite a while, and trying to figure out what was going on. And so the idea then, this is kind of like what my brother talked about with Jordan Peterson, the idea is like, well, let’s understand what a spindle is, what it does, what it looks like, and so it takes some time, the watching YouTube videos about people spinning flax, it’s like, what’s going on? You don’t even understand, because they’re not trying to explain to you what you want to understand. And also because these spinning wheels have changed quite a bit, as you look at the spinning wheels, there isn’t even what seems to be the spindle on it, where is it, what’s going on? In the Disney version, interestingly enough, she doesn’t even prick her finger on the spindle. She pricks her finger on something called the distaff, which is not the place where the thread gets wound up, but it’s actually this big rod that people put on spinning wheels to tie the flax before it’s processed. So they’ll tie this flax before it’s processed, so it’s kind of holding somewhere, and then they’ll pull it into the process so that it gets spun around the spinning wheel. And so it seems like the people who made the Disney movie didn’t take the time to understand what a spinning wheel is. But I understand their intuition, because they ended up making the spindle, which is a spindle, they joined it with the most vertical kind of phallic, masculine thing that was on the spinning wheel, which ultimately, if you haven’t guessed yet, that’s definitely part of what the symbolism even of the spindle is. So what’s going on in the story? There are several things that are kind of brought together. The first thing to notice, this is where it really started. The easiest one to notice is the idea of looking at other fairy tales and noticing the idea of someone falling asleep around the time that they’re teenagers. And that when they fall asleep, it has to do with beauty, it has to do with, at least in this case, it has to do with blood. In the case of Snow White, there’s also, before she eats the apple, there’s also a pricking with blood where she falls. And so it’s like, what’s going on? And it does seem to have to do, and then she’s of course woken up by a kiss. And so this is something I mentioned before, I think, in some of these videos. It necessarily has to do with puberty and with the transformation of the body at the time that a woman becomes a teenager. And that the effusion of blood can either be the menstrual cycle itself, and that would have something to do with the wheel, or it can also be the loss of virginity, which would have something to do with the distaff or with the vertical part. And so those two effusions of blood, which can happen after a woman enters into adulthood, seems to be what is referenced here, what is played around, you could say, in terms of imagery. So you can imagine that you could read it in two ways. You can read it as a young woman who enters into the menstrual cycle, and then she kind of loses, you could say she loses herself in the sense that she’s caught in this cycle, and she doesn’t know what it’s for. And that also has to do with this weird curiosity about the spinning wheel. No one’s told her what the spinning wheel is for, right? We’ve kept it away from her all this time. And so it’s like she gets there, and it’s a surprise. She starts her cycle, and it’s like, what the hell is this? What is this blood? What is going on? And so you can imagine that it throws her into a loop, and she doesn’t know what the reason for that is. And that is something like a kind of dying. And you see that, of course, if you compare the Sleeping Beauty to Jairus’ daughter, which I’ve done here, you can see how all of this is connected, right? Jairus’ daughter dies at her puberty. It has to do with the fusion of blood of the woman that Christ heals on the way there. So it’s all kind of connected together. But then there’s also the idea of the actual prick of the spindle, which would have something also to do, let’s say, with the idea of a young woman who, let’s say, loses her virginity without totally understanding what is going on and what the consequences of that are. And then she kind of dies to the world. She dies in the sense that she doesn’t have love, you could say it that way. And so there’s a relationship with her body, with sexuality, with everything that hasn’t to do with love, which would be the purpose, or the joining with the male in the proper way through marriage and through that would bring her into womanhood. So it’s all these things that are kind of being suggested. Now, again, so why the piece of flax or the spindle, though? So why is it that in particular? Especially considering that the spindle isn’t sharp. You could kind of prick your finger on a piece of flax. That maybe makes, like on a straw, that kind of makes a little bit more sense. And I think it has to do with what happens to the fairy. So think about it this way. The spindle is what gathers the string around it. So the spindle is a vector of unity. And so it makes sense. And so it also makes sense in terms of the masculine aspect of the spindle, that it’s the origin of the name, the origin of the seed, the origin of the identity of the family. And so the witch is not invited to the party. And so because of that, she basically tells Sleeping Beauty, or tells the king, that his daughter is going to prick herself on this unity. And so you can imagine it exactly that way. That is, that the problem of excluding and including, and the problem also of unity, is that unity in its positive sense is the vector around which that you can gather things. But unity in its negative sense can be something like a sword, something like a prick, that can hurt, and that can appear, you could say. So it’s as if she’s saying she will live with the negative consequences of masculinity, with the negative consequences of unity, because you’ve excluded me from the kingdom. And so it’s the excluded one who then kind of calls back to the unity and uses it as a curse. So that is definitely, I think, the way to see it. Now if you see it the other way, then it also makes sense. It makes sense in the opposite way, which this can also help you understand how symbolism also works, is that she’s excluded and she doesn’t fit. And so she’s saying you are going to prick your finger, not on the final process, but on the raw, wild straw before it’s united. And so it’s like, I am this wild straw. I am this piece of straw which was not brought into the string, which was not bound and wound around the spindle, and that is what she’s going to prick her finger on. And so then it’s more related to the idea of the menstrual cycle, and the remainder and the residue, which is bound up in this story. Now of course it’s important to understand that this is why symbolism is so powerful, is that none of the elements of the story actually directly mean the analogies that I pointed to. So it’s not that the spindle represents a phallus or something silly like that, like the kind of modern interpreters would love to say. It’s that there are analogies between the imagery and the meanings, and those analogies point to something even higher, which would be something like the relationship between unity and multiplicity, the way in which things are gathered into one, the way in which things fray apart, the way in which things, and the relationship between fraying apart, falling, sleeping, dying, and then being awakened by love, by attention, by care from above. So there’s all these images, but it’s like you can still, if you see the analogies, it can help you. And so the idea is that now, as I’m writing the Sleeping Beauty story, I can just slowly pull in images and threads and things that will point you, or will help you have more insight into why it is that it’s something like a spinning wheel and a spindle. Because like I said, at the outset when you look at the story, it might seem arbitrary to us, although it’s clearly not because stories that are preserved and remembered and cared for for a long time, you have to remember too that a good way to understand this is that the Grimm brothers or Perrault or the people who gathered the fairy tales in the 17th, 18th century, they only gathered certain ones. They probably heard a lot of versions of all these fairy tales, like maybe hundreds of versions, but they gathered them in a certain way. There are certain ones that they brought out and they kind of, or they compress together in order to show them to you. But at the same in Grimm’s fairy tales, there are a lot of fairy tales that you’ve never heard of, that have been forgotten, that no one cares about. But somehow some of these fairy tales are kind of persevere and become touchstones for culture and becomes like the main, let’s say, fairy tale stories that we know. And if there’s an element in those that seems strange to us and we don’t totally understand, we should be careful not to discount it, but rather pay attention and try to see. If it’s so illogical and random and arbitrary, then I don’t think it would have been remembered this way. I don’t think people would care for it and would celebrate it in the way that they did. So I hope this is helpful to kind of help you see what my process is and how it is that I meditate on these things. Sometimes I meditate on these images for years. I just drop them in the intuition box. I don’t know what to say. And just leave them there. And as I move along, sometimes they’ll resurface and I’ll have a bit more insight. They go back down. They come back up until. And then sometimes there’s pressure. Like, let’s say I’m writing the story. Then there’s like a pressure where I really want to understand it. So I kind of keep it on the tip of my tongue or right on the tip of my mind all the time, even as I’m cooking or if I’m doing other things. And then it’s ruminating is the word Matzri likes to use. And then all of a sudden it clicks and I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s what it is. So, yeah, so I hope this was useful, everybody. And thanks for your support. And I’ll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.