https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=73Olkr2y45Y
As you know, we are currently crowdfunding Snow White and the Widow Queen, and I thought that in this context, it would be a great idea to put out some old patron only videos that interpret fairy tales. It gives you an idea of what it is that you can find when you support the symbolic world. But this one in particular is the strangest of all. It is the story of Rumpelstiltskin. And I interpret it in relationship to understanding how credit works. You know, it sounds very strange, but it’ll help you kind of understand what it means to borrow from the future, what it means to borrow from the strange, and what costs that has and what opportunities that brings. So this will be the last video that we’re gonna put out in this series, Interpreting Fairy Tales. If you haven’t backed Snow White and the Widow Queen, please do it now because the time is getting short, and enjoy. [“Snow White and the Widow Queen”] This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. [“Snow White and the Widow Queen”] Hello, everybody. I am currently in Charleston, South Carolina. I come here every year to do some work with my collaborator and good friend Andrew Gould, who’s an architect. I have an interview with him on my channel if you want to check that out. But I thought I would take some time to make this video that I’ve been planning for a while, and it’s a video on Rumpelstiltskin, the symbolism of Rumpelstiltskin. You will see that I’m gonna take you guys, I’m taking you guys to expert level symbolic interpretation here. And so hopefully I’ll be able to pull it all together, and hopefully you’ll be able to get something from it. Now, one of the things I like about the story of Rumpelstiltskin is just how strange it is. I really love the strange fairy tales because, and also the strange verses and the strange parts of the Bible, because that’s the place where you can surprise people the most and show them that no, actually, despite the fact that it looks completely off the wall and weird, the structure of the story is actually quite coherent. Now, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, I’ll tell you the basics of the story as I usually do, and then we’ll go into the interpretation. So the story starts with the idea that some poor man is brought before the king. He is presented for the king for some reason, I forget what it is, I don’t think it’s very important in the story, and while he’s speaking to the king, he makes this boast, which is that his daughter can thread straw into gold. And so he kind of does this boasting, and the king, when he hears this, he says, okay, well then you have to bring your daughter to me so that you can do that for me. And now the poor man is caught in his boasting and has to put up, of course, he knows this is not possible, it’s impossible for you to thread straw into gold, but nonetheless, he’s forced because it’s the king, because he has no choice, he brings his daughter to the king, and he presents her to her. So the poor man’s daughter is caught in this situation, despite herself, and so the king tells her, he’s going to put her in a room, a room full of straw, and she has to thread this straw into gold before the end of the night, or else he’s going to kill her. And so, yeah, of course, so this young lady is there at night alone in this room, and she starts to cry, and she starts to weep that she can’t do this, and then that’s when this small, strange bearded man appears, Rumpelstiltskin, who he doesn’t say his name, of course, he appears and he makes a deal with the lady, he says, you have to give me something, if you give me something, then I will be able to change this straw into gold, and so she has a necklace or a bracelet, and so she gives this to Rumpelstiltskin, and Rumpelstiltskin works all night threading this straw, changing it into gold. Of course, the next day, when the king discovers this, the king is extremely happy, but as most people, he just sees that he could get more, and so he brings her to a second room that is even bigger and has more straw, and he tells her that she has to do it again, and if she doesn’t, he’s going to kill her. So once again, she cries and cries, Rumpelstiltskin appears, same deal, make a deal, exchange something for him to change straw into gold, she exchanges another piece of jewelry, and then finally, he works all night, and once again, he is successful. And once again, the king sees this, and just like all fairy tales, the rule of three, it has to happen three times, the third time, the princess goes in, and she’s crying, she’s crying, but now she has nothing left, she has no jewelry, she has nothing to give Rumpelstiltskin. And so the king also says that this time, if you don’t succeed, of course I’m going to kill you, if you do succeed, I will marry you. And so there she is in this room, desperate, and Rumpelstiltskin appears again, but she has nothing to offer, and so Rumpelstiltskin tells her that she has to give him her firstborn, when her firstborn comes to be in the future, of course. For those of you who follow my videos, you probably know what this is about, you probably don’t know what’s going on here, but try to figure it out as I’m telling the story, hopefully you’ll get some hints. And so the princess is desperate, she has no solution, and so despite herself, she agrees to this deal, and Rumpelstiltskin does it, here you go, there’s the gold, and the king marries her, very strange situation, the king marries the woman that he wanted to kill, nonetheless, the princess marries the king, and they live their life, and of course, as per the usual ways, she gets pregnant, and she has a child, when she has a child, what do you think happens? Rumpelstiltskin shows up and demands the child, so the woman cries and cries and weeps, and says, please, please don’t take my child away, what can I do, there must be something, give me a chance, or whatever, and then Rumpelstiltskin proposes that if she is able, in three days, to discover his name, then he will leave her with her child, if she is not able to discover his name, then that’s it, the end of the deal, he keeps the baby. And so Rumpelstiltskin goes away and says, he’ll come back once every day, and she has three chances, three days to find his name, so of course, the princess goes to work, by this time she’s the queen, I guess, this queen goes to work and tries to gather in all the names that she can imagine, all the names she can find, she asks her servants to gather all the names in the kingdom, to figure out what name, and so when Rumpelstiltskin arrives, she has this list of all these names that she was able to find, so she starts to say, is it Robert, is it George, is it Patrick, and she goes on and on, she goes down the list, and every time Rumpelstiltskin says, nope, nope, nope, that’s not it, nope, that’s not it, goes through all the names, and of course, she doesn’t succeed, Rumpelstiltskin of course, finds this extremely amusing, is overjoyed by this, and says, well, I’ll be back tomorrow, we’ll see if you can do it tomorrow, so he leaves, she sends now her servants to all the adjoining kingdoms, so all the kingdoms nearby, to try to figure out all the different names that she didn’t account for in her own list, though they go out, they go a little further out, and the names are becoming a little stranger, little different names, they write them down, make lists, bring them back to the princess, and once again, the princess starts the naming process when Rumpelstiltskin arrives, is it, I don’t know, is it Vladimir, is it, she starts finding the stranger names that are from further away, you know, and Rumpelstiltskin says, nope, that’s not it, no, that’s not it, no, that’s not it, and of course, once again, on the third day now, she sends them out to the furthest regions of the world, to the furthest areas of all the kingdoms that are far away that nobody knows much about, to gather all the names, and to bring them back to the princess, so she has all these names, and she’s afraid, because she’s wondering, is she gonna be able to do it, is she gonna find Rumpelstiltskin’s name, and then her last servant arrives just before Rumpelstiltskin does, and says that he got lost, and he wandered, and he got lost in this forest, and then, in this dark forest, he heard this little imp that was running around a fire, and was singing to himself that he was going to have the queen’s child, and that he was going to have a baby for himself, and he says something like, you know, and she wouldn’t be able to fool Rumpelstiltskin, something like that, but he says his name, that’s the point, is that he’s boasting to himself, as he’s kind of boasting of his success, he says his name, and so the servant says, maybe that’s it, that must be his name, so of course the queen now, she’s got her tool, and Rumpelstiltskin comes in, and she says, this is it, this is your last chance, and she starts, she gives a few names at the beginning, to get him on his way, to say, no, that’s not it, no, that’s not it, and then finally, she says, is it Rumpelstiltskin, and then the imp, at first, is just gonna say no, but then he realizes that no, she got it, she got his name, and so there’s different versions, like he becomes really furious, sometimes he vanishes in a puff of smoke, or he leaves and makes a hole in the floor as he goes away, but finally, the queen succeeds and is able to keep her child. All right. So what is this about? Ha ha ha ha! I imagine some of you might have gotten to the fact that this has something to do with this discussion about credit that I’ve been talking about. And so Rumpelstiltskin, it all starts with the proposition of something which is impossible. The boasting of the possibility of something which is not possible, okay? Now, you have to think of that in terms of what borrowing means, right, what credit means, because that’s something, that’s pretty much why we borrow in the first place, it’s like, I want to buy a car, that’s not possible, I don’t have the money, so what do I do in order to have access to that car, is I’m going to borrow, right, I’m gonna borrow from the future in order to be able to have the car now. So that’s the beginning of the problem, he proposes something impossible. So you can understand in terms of this credit, but you can also understand it in terms of a scientist who imagines something impossible, like, let’s go to the moon, I can go to the moon, something like that, and so that possibility doesn’t exist within the world right now, and so the only way to get that possibility is to increase your reach, you could say, to reach out into the future, to reach out into the outside, to reach out further than what you are, and to be able to gather that to yourself in order to accomplish this boasting that you’ve done, this proposition, this imagination, or whatever, but, so on the one hand, the image of turning straw into gold is an image of something impossible, but on the other hand, it’s actually an image of, it’s an image of the purpose of everything, now what do I mean by that? The idea of changing straw into gold is the same as the idea of changing lead into gold that we find in ancient sciences, and it’s also the idea, if you want to understand why, how this notion of changing straw into gold, it can help you understand, for example, why is it that Christ was put into a manger? Why is it that Christ was put into the food trough for animals, because straw, that’s all that it’s useful for. It’s not useful for our food, it’s lower than us, right? It’s like, it’s the remainder, it’s the grass of the field, you know, it’s like this dust or whatever, it’s not that which we can integrate, but it’s lower than us, and you can see it as this notion that it’s something that animals can integrate, and so this image of Christ in the manger is the same idea of taking that which is the lowest and turning it into the highest. I’ve been telling you guys about this for months now, that changing death into glory, that is the purpose of everything, right? And so, and you find it in images like that. So here’s this useless thing, this straw, this kind of the lowest thing, and so the question is, can you change that into gold? Can you change the lowest into the highest, the last into the first? And that’s the transition spot, that’s the place where something ends, something begins, there’s a mysterious thing that happens, you know, the sun sets, the sun rises, the solstice, where the sun is the lowest and flips into the highest, the seed which falls into the ground and dies, but then becomes a tree, it’s like all those images, like how is it that something that’s the lowest can flip, can turn into that which is the highest? How can the ornament, you know, become the crown? All of this, this is one of the biggest mysteries in the world, really, and so the story of Rumpelstiltskin is dealing with this mystery. And so what imagery does it propose? First of all, it’s important to understand that the transformation happens at night. That’s all, that’s very important. So you can imagine the transformation happening in the bottom of the ocean, where Jonah is in the whale and then he repents, he flips, and then he comes back out. You can imagine it as Christ in the tomb who mysteriously something flips and then he resurrects. Now, it has to happen at night, just like the sun is gone at night, but then it’s out of night that the sun comes back up again. And so it happens at night, at the time when we’re supposed to rest, at the time where we’re not supposed to work. So there’s this upside down thing going on where the imp is working at night. And that is the opposite of what should happen. You see that in several other stories like the shoemaker and the elves, where, you know, while you’re resting or while the world is supposed to rest, there’s a secret work that’s happening, okay? That is one. Two is the very image of the wheel, this very image of the threading wheel that changes the straw into gold. That is also this image of the change, right? It’s an image of, you could call it an image of change itself. And it is related also, this change is of course related to death. And what I’m trying to suggest to you is that it’s related to death, but also to resurrection. You see that in, of course, this idea of the relationship between the threading wheel and death. You see it in the story of Sleeping Beauty, but you see it in this situation as well. The life of the princess is in the balance. It’s kind of up in the air, right? It’s uncertain. We don’t know if she’s going to come out of the box alive or dead. So in this moment of uncertainty, that’s when this transformation is going to happen. Now, then we have the question of borrowing from the future. So this is how it presents itself in this story. So there’s this idea. She makes, in the problem of the impossibility, the only way she can do it is to go and take from, to take from the future, but also at the same time to take from this monster or to take from this foreign agent, this agent of the unknown. She has to be able to go in there and get something from that. It’s dangerous. It has a price. You can see it in terms of the problem of borrowing, right? We talked about it in the video on credit. The problem of borrowing is that you run the risk that your fruit is going to go to that foreign agent, that outside thing. There’s some proverbs that talk about that, this idea that you should not go to the strange woman. You should not go to this kind of foreign woman because the risk is that if you unite yourself with the strange, then you run the risk that your seed, your fruit, is going to profit the outside. And that’s exactly the situation here because Rumpelstiltskin, she’s borrowing from Rumpelstiltskin, but she’s running the risk of making herself subservient to Rumpelstiltskin. She’s running the risk of putting herself, of yoking herself to Rumpelstiltskin. And that will then, the possibility that her future fruit is going to go to him. It’s not crazy to imagine, to think of when you borrow money from the bank, what are you doing? You’re borrowing money from the bank and it means that as you’re paying the bank back and you’re paying back interest, your future work, the future fruit of your labor is going to the bank. And more than what you borrowed. And so, although it can be useful sometimes, it’s dangerous because you don’t realize that the money that you’re making in the future, that you’re actually making less because you’re paying interest on your loan. You’re constantly giving some of your value, some of your fruit to this outside, this outside element from which you borrowed, the future from the bank, whatever. And so this is the situation that is being set up in the story of Rumpelstiltskin. It’s really showing us, let’s say, this structure of the problem of increasing your possibility. How does this happen? How does it shift? And what’s the danger in this kind of transformation of straw into gold? Because it’s not, it’s like I said, I keep trying to be, saying to people to be careful. Like it’s neither positive or negative. You have to just understand the structure. But just as, okay, so she borrows from Rumpelstiltskin. She owes him something and she owes him her future son, which is an image of everything. It’s an image of all her future, all her future identity, you could call. She’s making herself subservient to Rumpelstiltskin because it’s not just her son that’s gonna go to Rumpelstiltskin, but the king’s son. So it’s like she’s giving the king’s son, the future king is becoming subservient to this outside dark forest, okay? And that’s because she was willing to borrow from him in order to meet this impossible requirement, right? To meet something that needed to happen, but that was impossible. All right, hope you guys are following me until here. So that’s the first part of the story. Now she’s in trouble because when she has the child, then she, how can I say this? Then she’d be subservient to him. But you also have to understand that this changing of the straw into gold is not just about the straw into gold. It’s also about her. It’s about how she, as this peasant girl, has also been transformed into the queen, right? It’s not just the straw into gold. Her trip is the same trip as the straw into gold. And so she’s able to become the queen by engaging in this dubious transaction, right? Transaction that is given her value now, but that is putting her in trouble for later. But now she has to solve the problem. So it’s like, you could call it a trap. That’s this whole flipping thing that’s going on, right? So it’s a strange situation. She’s the queen, she’s become the queen by making herself subservient to others. Now, this is not, don’t, this is very not, there’s nothing strange about this. This has happened all the time in history where someone who wants to become king or who thinks that they should be king, they ally themselves with a foreign power in order to be able to displace the king that’s there and replace the king, right? This is not, this is something which happens all the time in terms of politics, but it is also a transaction which you could operate on a smaller scale as well. But understanding it in terms of the king, you know, the king who, the person who wants to be king but can’t, allying themselves with a foreign power, replacing the king, but now once he’s gotten what he wants, he’s in trouble because he is also at the same time, he’s made himself subservient to that outer power, that foreign power, okay? You can understand it that way. Now, how does she solve the problem? Now, she solved the problem by learning the foreign names, learning names. Now, this idea of learning names really is this capacity to master things, to, in the traditional notion, to know something’s name, to know someone’s name is to somehow have, to be, not necessarily to have power over it, but to have some power over it, to have some capacity to engage with it, to commune with it, it’s no longer, see it this way, it’s no longer a dark, chaotic potential, right? If you know the name of something, now it has integrated into your world, and knowing the name of something can mean mastering a skill that you don’t have, it can mean all kinds of things, like you’re increasing your capacity to go further out into the world, and that’s how she has to do it. Now, the problem is that Rumpelstiltskin comes from the end of the world, you could say, he’s a monster from the end of the world, and so she wants to get to him, she wants to be able to master Rumpelstiltskin, but so to do that, she has to increase her capacity and conquer, you could call it conquering, she has to conquer all these names, right? She has to master these names, and so she moves out of her sphere of knowledge, and she starts to know the names of the things that are outside, so she grows her influence, her capacity to understand, and what her purpose is to get to Rumpelstiltskin. Now, that’s ultimately, right, that’s ultimately an image of the resurrection, right? That is what we, when we talk about Christ descending into Hades, right, going to the bottom of death, but he does it in a manner in which he becomes the master of death. By descending into death, it’s like bringing light into darkness, and so he illuminates the darkness all the way till the edge, and going all the way to the edge, you have to go all the way to the end, you have to go all the way to the end, and then that’s when the resurrection can occur, right? The sun has to go all the way down on the solstice to the bottom of the world, and then that’s when the mystery occurs and it comes back out, so she’s going all the way out, she’s moving out, trying to find Rumpelstiltskin’s name, trying to master all this potentiality around her, and so it takes three days, am I, do I, I don’t have to tell you why it takes three days, you know, of course three is a number in all fairy tales, but that’s also, the reason why three is a number in a lot of fairy tales is a similar reason to why Christ is three days in the tomb, so it takes three days, she reaches, going further and further out, and finally, in the dark forest, in this kind of surprise, this unexpected moment that the servant actually got lost, right, he keeps coming right to the edge, right to the end, that’s when he encounters the name of Rumpelstiltskin, and he brings it back to her so that she now can master Rumpelstiltskin, and that brings about the resurrection of the king, now, right, you have to understand it that the king was dying, that is, the son of the king was, his fruit was going to be cast away, cast out to the outside, and now by reaching, by her reaching out and reaching to the edge and finding Rumpelstiltskin’s name, she’s able to resurrect the seed of the king, and it happens also in the way that I’ve tried to explain it to you before, it happens as tricking the trickster, right, it’s so satisfying to imagine that moment when she is talking to Rumpelstiltskin, and that last day where Rumpelstiltskin is so arrogant and thinks that he’s got it, and she’s naming these names, but he’s like, no, no, no, and then finally she says Rumpelstiltskin, and it’s like that moment where the trickster is tricked is so satisfying, but it’s so satisfying because it has that idea that that’s how the world starts again, like that’s the last trick, that’s Christ going into Hades, and Hades thinks that he’s won, and he thinks that, oh, I’ve finally done it, right, I’ve brought Christ into death, but then the trickster is tricked, and the death of Christ actually is, like I said, bringing light into darkness, and so when he thought he won, but by the very fact of winning, he’s lost, and so you see a little bit of that, of course Christ’s story is a million times more, but you see a little bit of that structure in the manner in which the Rumpelstiltskin narrative concludes, let’s say, and so I think that, I’m hoping that this has given you some food for thought. Like I said, this is really a, this is master level symbolism because it’s, like I said, it’s not about credit, it’s not about borrowing, it’s not about, but all those things like borrowing, like credit, like a kingdom which compromises itself by making itself subservient to a foreign power, all of these parallel structures, they’re, I’m bringing them up in order for you to be able to see the pattern, because the pattern is beyond all of these particulars, they manifest themselves in the different particulars, so it’s not that the story of Rumpelstiltskin is about credit or about this or about that, it’s more that it shares the pattern of these different elements of reality, and often because the story is so strange, we can’t see that pattern so well, but as we start to see the analogies between the different other stories, we’re able to understand how this is manifesting a common pattern, and how that pattern is in fact a pattern of reality, and ultimately maybe it is one of the ultimate patterns of reality, which is how does the bottom become the top? How does the end become the beginning? How does the lowest, how do we transform the, you know, it’s like, this is gonna sound, but how does a little seed planted in dung, planted in excrement, how does that become a tree, right? How does that happen, right? In terms of pattern, right? Not in terms of the chemical things that happen, but that pattern is the same as these other patterns of turning and of cycling and of flipping, all right? So guys, I hope you enjoyed this, and thank you all for your support. These videos are being put out for patrons only, and so I really appreciate your support. As you know, I’m still in kind of a chaotic situation. Our house has not yet been renovated, and so we’re still in transition. It’s been difficult for me to carve, so your support has been extremely helpful in helping me to keep going. So thanks again, guys, and I will see you soon. [“Snow White”] I’m Jonathan Peugeot, and I’m inviting you to participate with us in our retelling and our celebration of one of the most iconic fairy tales of all, Snow White. A beautifully illustrated storybook, Snow White and the Widow Queen places our iconic character at the beginning of eight upcoming fairy tales which will speak to each other and harmonize in surprising ways. Snow White and the Widow Queen rekindles an adventure which will make you remember, rediscover, but also marvel and wonder at our rich heritage of stories, a heritage that still has secrets to reveal even after centuries of being passed down to us. In the past few decades, we have watched many of our stories, our fairy tales, our myths, become completely exhausted by efforts to deconstruct them, to reinvent them, and sometimes to even invert their original meaning. It has come to a point where we’ve almost forgotten why we cared about these stories in the first place. I firmly believe that for this reason, it is now time to retell and redistribute our original fairy tales in the spirit of celebration, of admiration and unashamed joy. I’ve spent the past two decades meditating on the strange narrative elements of Snow White and other fairy tales. After much thinking, I’m now bringing this story to our common hearth we find in the fire of time, ready to present hidden treasures most of us have never noticed. To accomplish this, I have paired up with Heather Paulington, a world-class artist and designer who has worked on some of the most beloved film franchises of our time. Her work mirrors my writing in a collaboration that has produced a powerful synthesis of medieval style with the best of 19th and 20th century illustration. I love the Kickstarter model because we can make the book more and more beautiful with every stretchable. We can offer art prints, a limited edition drawing by Heather, and even a Snow White illustration of my own. Finally, we’re planning a super exclusive leather-bound edition which pulls out all the stops, a storybook mantelpiece for sure. The profits of this crowd-funder will be used to start a new publishing company, Symbolic World Press, whose christened publication will be this very fairy tale series. Each book illustrated by world-class artists, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, The Valiant Little Tailor, and several more are next in line for publication, all existing in the same world and all fitting together like a puzzle, moving towards the final, surprising resolution. After all that, there’s no limit to what we can do. It’s time to reset the clock to retell our stories. So please join us in this celebration and creative venture.