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Hello everyone. In this video I’m going to talk about the symbolism of hair in the story of Rapunzel. It is in a way a continuation of the last video I did directly on the symbolism of hair in the Bible, but I also wanted to use a story that is from another source, so here a fairy tale, to talk about the coherence of the symbolism of hair. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. And so most of us will know the story of Rapunzel. I’ll give the details of it just to give you to start. Basically the story starts with the idea of a couple who’s pregnant and very poor, and a man goes and steals some cabbages for his wife in this witch’s garden. And the witch catches him and he promises, either they make a very disturbing trade where he promises to give their firstborn in exchange for the cabbage, or else she tells the man that she is going to take their first child when it’s born. And so when the child is born, the witch takes the child and then raises her up in a tower and raises her there with no entrance to the tower. When the young woman becomes a teenager, she has this long, you know, flowing hair, and the witch, when she wants to engage with the young lady, she goes up to the tower and says, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. And then the witch can climb up and can engage with the lady, with Rapunzel. The idea is that the witch will not let Rapunzel go. And often the story is interpreted in relating to this notion of an overbearing mother, of a devouring mother that will not let her daughter grow up and enter into a relationship, but she wants to protect her. And so I think that that’s a fair interpretation. What I want to look at is especially how the symbolism of hair plays into this story. And so of course she has this kind of long, unnatural hair, and in the story, later on the prince will come and will see the witch saying, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. And the prince will climb up, will go up, and then when the witch is no longer there, he will himself call up to Rapunzel to let down her hair, climbs up her hair, and then they meet, they fall in love, et cetera, et cetera. In the very early versions of the story, after the prince’s several visits, Rapunzel actually gets pregnant and they plan on how to get her to escape the witch’s grasp. And so as they’re planning to help her escape, the story usually has it that Rapunzel will make a mistake when she’s speaking to the witch, will let it be known that the prince is coming to see her. In the very, very early versions, she says something like that her dress is becoming a little too tight around the belly, suggesting of course that she’s pregnant. In other versions, she makes the mistake of saying as the witch is climbing up, how, you know, it’s funny that the prince, when he climbs up her hair, it doesn’t hurt her as much as the witch. And so because of that, the witch then cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, usually tosses Rapunzel out, you know, out into the wilderness. And when the prince climbs up the hair this time, he calls Rapunzel, Rapunzel sees this hair come down, he climbs up, but when he arrives, he finds the witch who is behind the hair now and she pushes him off the tower. He falls into a thorn bush which blinds him and then he wanders through the wilderness blind for quite a while until one day he hears the voice of Rapunzel in the forest once again. Rapunzel has been living in the forest and raising his children basically, raising often its twins, a boy and a girl. And so he hears the voice, he calls to her, Rapunzel comes and she takes him in his arm, she cries and her tears will heal the prince and there you go, now they’re back together again. And some virgins, in touching her hair, then her hair will grow out again and she’ll be back to how she was before. And so of course, you can obviously see the whole, like I said, devouring mother and also allusions to relationship, allusion to the relationship between the man and the woman, but we really need to look at it in our case, it’s a very deep story, it has a lot going for it, but we need to look at it especially in relationship to hair. And so the way you have to kind of understand it, first of all, is we have to understand first of all this notion that the woman who is up in the tower is of course related to the man and the woman coming together, so it is related to the notion of the couple. But you also have to understand it kind of in the medieval idea of the chivalrous romance, where the woman up in the tower represents not only let’s say the relationship that he can have with the woman, but represents also we could say the mysterious spiritual aspect of the feminine. We see of course this vision of the world in Dante, where it is Beatrice who leads him up the mountain up to the top of the mountain, where she even at some point is traded and then it’s the holy virgin who kind of guides him up towards God. And so in the chivalrous idea, dedicating yourself to a lady could be a manner in which we could enter into the mystery of God. We can encounter God through our dedication to a woman, to a dedication to a lady. So this woman up in the tower is not only a woman in the strict sense, but it also represents you could say this almost the spiritual mystery that this prince can come to encounter. And so the hair as I’ve talked about in the symbolism in my movie, my video about the symbolism of hair, the hair represents these externals. The hair in this sense represents this external thing which reaches from the woman out into the outside. And so when the prince comes, that’s what he sees first. What he sees first of Rapunzel is her hair. Just like what we see of anybody when we first encounter them is this kind of outer showing that they have. In the case of hair, it goes very far because hair is just like we talked about also in the video about the Lord of the Rings and the Ring of Power. Hair is you could say the first ornament. It is this first ornamentation, the closest to us because it actually comes out of us, but it can be molded, it can be changed color, it can be quaffed in a way that acts very much as an ornament. And everybody knows that. Everybody knows especially women who will spend an enormous amount of time on their hair, dyeing their hair, doing all kinds of things in order to use their hair as a form of ornamentation like makeup or wearing a nice outfit. The hair becomes the first outfit you could call it, the first garment. And so in that sense, the prince encounters this garment, encounters this ornament and uses the ornament and the ornament becomes a way for him to access the princess. In that case, the ornament, her hair becomes the glory of this princess that is too far from him, that is too removed from him and by climbing up this external, by using these external signs of her, he is able to come into contact with her. And that of course is true of everything. That is true of let’s say religious structures, let’s say art, the church building is an external manifestation of something which can help us bring us closer to God, bring us closer to that mystery. All the externals, all the liturgies, everything that, even the Bible itself, all these externals are there to act as a kind of ladder to bring us closer to the mystery, to something which is beyond the external, something which is hidden in that secret place. And so here it is, the prince who goes up and encounters the princess. So now when, let’s say the problem happens, the witch cuts off her hair and then the witch uses her hair, but now the witch is using the hair in the negative aspect of ornamentation, in the negative aspect of externals. She’s using this beautiful long hair to hide herself, to hide the fact that she’s actually an ugly, horrible witch. And so the prince sees the hair and he is, in this case now, he is actually duped by the hair. These externals are actually leading him into error because he’s trusting only the externals and isn’t looking further than the ornamentation. And so that is true, once again, about anything that is external. And that’s why we always have this conflict within religion, within Christianity, to say, how important are these external things? Are they idols? Are they, do they actually lead us astray rather than lead us towards God? And the truth is that they’re both, they both lead you to, because without them you would not have access to the mystery, but if you trust only on the externals and you don’t use them as a way to get closer to that mystery, then those externals can lead you astray. And so in this case, the prince trusts the hair, you know, and then when he climbs the hair he finds that the hair was actually hiding this horrible witch. So what does it cause? His mistake, his error in trusting only the externals makes him fall and falls into a thorn bush. Now, for anybody who knows anything about biblical symbolism, you will see that this relationship between the hair and the thorn bush is extremely important, because of course the thorn bush is that first sign in the Bible of the fall. And so when Adam and Eve fall, God says that the world will now produce thorns, and in order to protect yourself from those thorns, God gives them these garments of skin, which are represented of course by these hairy garments. And so you have the hair to protect you from the thorns, now the prince is led astray by the hair, he’s been tricked by externals, and because of that, then he loses the protection of the externals, and smack, he goes into the thorn and he becomes blind. Of course, the blindness is exactly what he already had gone through. He was already a form of blindness which led him to trust only the hair, Rapunzel’s hair, instead of being attentive to what the hair is connected to, which had caught him to fall in the first place. So he falls, he becomes blind. That’s of course a perfect image of this forgetfulness or this incapacity to actually see things for what they are, and is a consequence of the trick in which he’s let himself fall, that he didn’t have the strength to see beyond the hair, let’s say. And so the prince then wanders, of course we all wandering in the wilderness, just like the Israelites wandered in the wilderness when they didn’t trust God, just like Cain wandered in the wilderness when he slew his brother. This notion of wandering in the wilderness is really this idea of being lost, having lost meaning, having lost the capacity to see the world for what it is and to be led astray, to be, he could have been on water, he could have been, you know, basically it is this loss of a capacity to see, capacity to see meaning is being lost in the wilderness. For those who have more questions about that, I would say read Mathieu Pagiot’s book, my brother’s book, The Language of Creation. In that book he talks about wilderness as well as this falling away from meaning and this incapacity to see the meaning in the world. So the prince wanders off and then finally he hears the voice. And hearing the voice of Rapunzel is once again then being reconnected to his first goal, being reconnected to the meaning which he had lost, which he had not been able to see beyond the externals and now he hears the voice. And of course hearing the voice is in symbolism, it really is this kind of inner relationship. To hear someone’s voice is to encounter that person in a very intimate way. In the Old Testament for example, we don’t see God but we hear God and this hearing is really this intimate relationship. The world is created by word, it is that link to word and so by hearing the princess he recognizes her. He’s not seduced by her outer beauty anymore, he can’t even access it but he then finds her again through herself, through her deeper self you could say, by hearing her voice and connecting to her voice. And then of course the princess in her feminine guise you could say, she washes away his disease, she washes away his incapacity to see and there you go, the prince recovers his sight, recovers his goal and recovers of course the princess and not only that but he also discovers the fruit of his purpose, of his goal in the two children, the twin children which represent having a boy and a girl twins will also represent this kind of you could say totality of his union with Rapunzel. So you have this new wholeness which is created by this reconnecting with Rapunzel at the end. And so we can see now, once we see it, how hair functions perfectly in that story, functions perfectly in the way that it is really this double bind where there is this external thing that is there to act as a kind of ladder in order to bring you closer to the mystery but if you only trust the ladder and you are not trying to see what is beyond it then it can become a form of hiding and a form of artifice that can get you lost, that can make you lost and it can make you lose sight and lose the deeper meaning. And so I think that is really important especially for this whole discussion in Christianity that we have had these extremes in Christianity where in certain branches of Christianity people have fought so much the external forms and in other times, in other places people have relied so much on outer forms but it really is only those two things coming together, the outer and the inner, the external manifesting the internal and the internal being the final goal, the final purpose of what all those externals are for, that is how the world can exist and it is really the only way that the world can exist properly. So I hope that you enjoyed this video about hair. This week I am going to answer, a lot of people in my last video have been asking questions about all the art that I have put up in my office and so this week, I think it is this week or next week I am going to do the Q&A live and in the Q&A I am going to describe a little bit of the art, why I have it up, some people ask what is God’s dog, other people ask what is this man sitting on a lion and so I will deal with all that in the Q&A. The Q&A is available live and the questions are available for supporters but I think this month I will put out the Q&A once it is finished, I will put it out publicly so that everybody can get that information if that is something that you are interested in. So everybody again, once again, thanks for sharing all this, thanks for being part of this discussion and I will see you soon.