The Beauty Tales as Bible Stories
We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes,
and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. ~Tom Robbins
In fairy tale the king and queen are invariably equal. They go together. In both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty the king and queen long for a child together. They rejoice together at her birth. And together they form one spiritual whole and social authority that prospers the land and its people. This spiritual configuration is Hermetic; where equal and opposite pillars hold up the tree of life together. If they are not together the kingdom, and its daughter, suffers.
Therefore said I, Look away from me; I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me,
because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people. ~Isaiah 22:4
When the king and queen do not exist together we have, as a basic condition, the orphaned state of the Beauty tales. Specifically, a motherless daughter. The queen as nurturing mother is absent. In her place the Step Mother appears. Both Snow White and Cinderella show her as a wicked and resentful adversary, who would kill or utterly subjugate the daughter of our story. The Church has been such a mother to Beauty.
Beauty, who was at the absolute center of the spiritual life of our ancestors became, by the time of Pope Gregory, a mere prostitute… as part of the campaign to cut Her completely out of the picture. The Church, as such a malevolent mother, is depicted in the Beauty tales as the Step Mother. In Da Vinci’s Last Supper Peter, as the so called rock of the church, represents Step Mother Church. Peters actions in the painting show the actions of Church dogma: He holds one hand to John’s throat. The other hand, behind his back, holds a knife.
The rock in Bible speak is itself a feminine archetype that, through the course of the old testament story, is masculinized. When power is concentrated in the masculine, the archetype of the Sacred Feminine as nurturing mother, is duly masculinized:
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you;
and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. ~Isaiah 66:13
In the quote above the speaker does not claim to be a mother, but steps in only as a mother.
Like the patriarchal Church Yahweh, as a bachelor father, exerts the full force of the runaway masculine, and removes the Mother in Jerusalem. He refuses responsibility for the act. Instead, Yahweh blames the children for the divorce, and for the absence of their mother:
Thus saith the LORD, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away. ~Isaiah 50:1
The peculiar result of replacing the divine mother with a male version is depicted in an odd portrait, painted during the Renaissance period. The name given to the painting below is simply a Jewish Couple. The image of two bearded men, as a couple, is perhaps not so peculiar, but the fact that one is holding a perplexed infant up to his uni-breast seems, at the very least, strange.
Is this not the spiritual situation in western culture? Our fairy tales suggest that we are orphaned of our heavenly mother. The exclusively male mother church offers a single breast. At one point in the play Faust asks Mephistopheles ; Is this such food as fails to feed? Could such a singular parent provide true balanced nutrition?