Sleeping Beauty
The Sleeping Beauty tells of a king and queen who yearned for a child. Eventually, a baby daughter was born:
Her parents celebrated with a feast, to which the Wise Women were invited. There were thirteen of these in the kingdom, but since the King possessed only twelve golden plates, one guest would have to be refused.
The feast was held in splendour, and the Wise Women bestowed their blessings on the child. The youngest ensured that she would grow up to be the most beautiful woman in the world, the next promised that she would have the spirit of an angel, the third gave her grace, the fourth decreed that she would dance perfectly, the fifth that she should sing like a nightingale. And so the blessings went on. But after the eleventh fairy had bestowed her gift, the doors of the banqueting hall suddenly flew open and the thirteenth fairy burst in. Seeing that no place had been laid for her, she turned her blessing into a curse. ‘The King’s daughter’, she declared, shall in her fifteenth year prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead.’
Having uttered her terrible curse, the thirteenth fairy disappeared. The king and queen were distraught, and everyone was crying. But the twelfth Wise Woman, whose blessing had yet to be given, came forward to offer help. She had not enough power to undo the evil spell, but she could soften it. Instead of dying when she pricked her finger, the girl would now only sleep for a hundred years.
The good fairy cast her benign spell, but the King was still not satisfied. He determined to evade the consequences of the curse: every spindle in the whole kingdom was to be burnt; on no account was his daughter to bleed.
When the girl came of age, however, the inevitable duly occurred. On her fifteenth birthday, when the King and Queen were not at home, Beauty was exploring the great palace. She came to an old tower. She climbed up the spiral stairway and at the top reached a little door. Pushing this open, she found herself in a little room; and there inside was an old woman with a spindle, busily spinning her flax. Fascinated by the spindle merrily rattling round, the young girl reached out to grasp it – and pricked her finger. She began to bleed, and fell into a deep sleep.
The curious thing was, however, that the dreadful event did not simply send the girl herself into the world of dreams. It affected the entire palace and the entire kingdom. All normal life was suddenly terminated. The King and Queen, who had just come home, fell into a deep sleep along with the whole of the court. The horses slept in the stable, the dogs in the yard, the flies on the wall – all stopped where they were. Even the fire that was flaming in the hearth went still, and the cook, who was just going to hit the scullery boy, let him be and went to sleep. Everyone joined the princess in her magical trance. It was as if time itself stood still.
For a hundred years, all were frozen in their positions. And as the years passed, an immense forest surrounded by an impenetrable hedge of thorns grew around the palace. In the surrounding neighbourhood, people almost forgot about the existence of the mysterious palace deep in the woods.
Yet legend maintained that behind the hedge of thorns was a palace in which lay a sleeping princess. From time to time, young men on hearing the legend would attempt to cut their way through the hedge in order to win the reputedly-lovely sleeping bride. But each would- be suitor was caught in the thorns, which clutched together as if they were alive. As the years passed, more and more suitors were trapped and died.
At long last, when a hundred years had passed, a suitor who had heard the legend decided to try his luck. This time, as he approached the hedge, large and beautiful flowers replaced the thorns, and the branches parted of their own accord to let him through, closing again as he passed. He found the palace, entered inside, stepped over sleeping bodies and eventually found Beauty herself. He kissed her, she awoke from her sleep, the entire palace woke up with her, the two were married and the couple lived happily ever after.
Blood, time and ‘the curse’
This narrative is entirely and consistently menstrual. Like Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and countless others of its kind, it is about ‘this world’ – the world of ordinary marital and domestic life – about ‘the other world’, and about the transition between the two. ‘The other world’ is a strange place of enchantment in which marital sex is impossible. It is a kind of death. All fairy tales involve a journey between life and death. Something triggers this movement, and this ‘something’ – as we’ll see – is most often a flow of blood.
Let’s look again at The Sleeping Beauty. In approaching the symbolism, we may begin with a passage by Bruno Bettelheim:
‘The thirteen fairies in the Brothers Grimm story are reminiscent of the thirteen lunar months into which the year was once, in ancient times, divided… the number of twelve good fairies plus a thirteenth evil one indicates symbolically that the fatal ‘curse’ refers to menstruation.’(1)
The background is the perennial problem of how to fit a fixed number of lunar months into the 365¼-day solar year. ‘The earliest calendar year’, writes Emily Lyle, ‘was not the solar year of 365 days, but the lunar year consisting of twelve lunar cycles, to which an intercalary month was generally added every two or three years to keep the months in line with the natural seasons’.(2) The number of days in a lunar cycle varies between twenty-nine and thirty – on average 29½ – so that a year was either 354 days (twelve lunar months) or 383½ days (thirteen lunar months). In other words, for as long as the year was divided up into observational lunar months – a sequence of directly-observed ‘moons’ – there was no way in which the number ‘13’ could be avoided. At the end of each twelve moons, a part of the thirteenth always made its presence felt, and some place for it in the calendar had to be found. The only way to establish the solar year as fixedly consisting of twelve month-like periods was to divide it into schematic ‘months’, arbitrarily adjusting the length of each to ensure that twelve of them totalled just 365 days. This, of course, is a feature of the modern Christian (Gregorian) calendar. The thirteenth month has been effectively suppressed. In folklore, however – at least in Europe – the suppressed month, and with it the number thirteen, remains associated with those older pagan traditions which took account not only of the sun but of the moon as well. This liminal, half-excluded thirteenth month finds reflection in ‘the persistence of the number thirteen’ as the standard number of ‘witches’ (‘Wise Women’ or ‘Fairies’ as Grimm’s tale puts it) in a Coven in pre-Christian European traditions of ritualism.
A dispute also exists as to whether menstruation should be considered a blessing or a curse. We may assume the existence of an early tradition according to which menstrual bleeding was associated with the moon – and therefore with the number thirteen – and was considered a manifestation of women’s ritual power. Menstruation was, in other words, included among all the other blessings a young woman could receive. Since it promised fertility, it may even have been the ultimate blessing. The newer custom – and certainly the Christian one – has been to attempt to suppress menstrual bleeding, just as the thirteenth month has been suppressed. In both respects, lunar time is being denied.
This, then, is the background to the story. The story itself tells of how a king and queen attempted to reject the ‘blessing’ of menstrual bleeding altogether. All they wanted – or rather, all the king wanted (for we are not told of the queen’s attitude in all of this) – was for the baby daughter to grow up to become a perfect wife. The blessings given by the ‘good’ fairies are all ‘marital’ ones: they are the attributes which any would-be suitor would look for in a bride – good looks, grace, dancing skills, a melodious voice etc. etc. No husband would be attracted by the menstrual condition of his bride, and so the thirteenth fairy with her own peculiar gift is spurned. The king, we are told, has only twelve places laid. His ‘twelve golden plates’ bring to mind twelve suns – twelve man-made, solar-defined months – as opposed to womankind’s thirteen silver plates or ‘moons’.
But the menstrual blessing cannot be ignored. If suppressed, it simply makes its presence felt in malevolent form. It takes on the nature of a curse. Menstruation in its normal or traditional form is a periodic but purely temporary ‘death’ to marital and domestic life. The injured and angered thirteenth fairy utters her curse: when the girl comes of age, no force on earth will prevent her from bleeding. But in this case, she will bleed until she dies.
The commutation of this death sentence determines for the princess a fate somewhere between normal monthly seclusion and permanent death. Her seclusion will last for a hundred years. And the penalty to be paid by the king and queen is to be subjected to the full rigours of the traditional menstrual spell – in exaggeratedly prolonged form. The traditional logic was for menstruation (particularly, we might suppose, a royal person’s first menstruation) to cast its spell widely over society, the ban on marital sex lasting for several days (or at most a fortnight). If lunarchist theory is correct, the sex-strike launched society each month into a profound process of metamorphosis, as profound as the switch between waking life and sleep. But this certainly didn’t last for a hundred years. The century-long seclusion featured in The Sleeping Beauty is a community’s punishment for its attempt to escape seclusion altogether.
The menstrual spell is a cyclical occurrence, just as is seasonal change. Time, in the traditional view, is itself cyclical. The king, in attempting to destroy all spindles, is attempting to suppress the spinning by women of the threads of time – threads which wind like yarn around a spool. We may also infer that he is hostile to ‘spinsterhood’. A traditional occupation for unmarried or secluded women may have been spinning, so that a woman who never married became seen as permanently a ‘spinster’. Be that as it may, when the princess explores the unfamiliar stairway and discovers the old witch spinning flax in her turret in the sky, she is contacting the other world and discovering for herself the ancient matriarchal governess of lunar time. Like the thirteenth fairy, this old woman brings menstruation as a gift – or, when rejected, as a curse.
The girl ‘pricks her finger.’ She bleeds, as any girl of her age eventually must. The King was foolish to try to banish the spinning-wheels or spindles. Time cannot be suppressed – every girl will come of age and bleed, her cycle itself being among the most ancient of all clocks. And as the princess bleeds, the ancient power of the blood strikes out with a vengeance against all who had believed they could defy it. The whole palace, the whole kingdom is plunged into another realm beyond waking life. All normal domestic activities cease. It is as if time stood still. Those who believed that they could alter the ancient calendar, they could abolish the thirteenth month, they could suppress the hallowed logic of menstrual time are now put firmly in their place. They will be excluded from time’s flow for a hundred years.
As the princess sleeps on, it is as if her blood had erected around her an impenetrable barrier to her ever getting married. Would-be suitors are kept at bay by a deadly hedge of thorns. She herself is now in menstrual seclusion of a particularly rigorous and enduring kind, with the whole palace in seclusion with her.
But every period of seclusion – even a hundred-year one – must eventually expire. And when the time has come, lovers are free once more to embrace. The spell breaks, the thorns turn into flowers. The hedge parts, allowing the young hero to enter and deliver his kiss. The general strike is over; the servants resume their domestic chores. Marriage is celebrated with a royal wedding and feast.
Notes:
1.Bruno Bettelheim, 1978. The Uses of Enchantment. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 232.
2.Emily Lyle, 1986. Archaic calendar structure approached through the
principle of isomorphism. Semiotica 61, 3/4: 243-57.
Her parents celebrated with a feast, to which the Wise Women were invited. There were thirteen of these in the kingdom, but since the King possessed only twelve golden plates, one guest would have to be refused.
The feast was held in splendour, and the Wise Women bestowed their blessings on the child. The youngest ensured that she would grow up to be the most beautiful woman in the world, the next promised that she would have the spirit of an angel, the third gave her grace, the fourth decreed that she would dance perfectly, the fifth that she should sing like a nightingale. And so the blessings went on. But after the eleventh fairy had bestowed her gift, the doors of the banqueting hall suddenly flew open and the thirteenth fairy burst in. Seeing that no place had been laid for her, she turned her blessing into a curse. ‘The King’s daughter’, she declared, shall in her fifteenth year prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead.’
Having uttered her terrible curse, the thirteenth fairy disappeared. The king and queen were distraught, and everyone was crying. But the twelfth Wise Woman, whose blessing had yet to be given, came forward to offer help. She had not enough power to undo the evil spell, but she could soften it. Instead of dying when she pricked her finger, the girl would now only sleep for a hundred years.
The good fairy cast her benign spell, but the King was still not satisfied. He determined to evade the consequences of the curse: every spindle in the whole kingdom was to be burnt; on no account was his daughter to bleed.
When the girl came of age, however, the inevitable duly occurred. On her fifteenth birthday, when the King and Queen were not at home, Beauty was exploring the great palace. She came to an old tower. She climbed up the spiral stairway and at the top reached a little door. Pushing this open, she found herself in a little room; and there inside was an old woman with a spindle, busily spinning her flax. Fascinated by the spindle merrily rattling round, the young girl reached out to grasp it – and pricked her finger. She began to bleed, and fell into a deep sleep.
The curious thing was, however, that the dreadful event did not simply send the girl herself into the world of dreams. It affected the entire palace and the entire kingdom. All normal life was suddenly terminated. The King and Queen, who had just come home, fell into a deep sleep along with the whole of the court. The horses slept in the stable, the dogs in the yard, the flies on the wall – all stopped where they were. Even the fire that was flaming in the hearth went still, and the cook, who was just going to hit the scullery boy, let him be and went to sleep. Everyone joined the princess in her magical trance. It was as if time itself stood still.
For a hundred years, all were frozen in their positions. And as the years passed, an immense forest surrounded by an impenetrable hedge of thorns grew around the palace. In the surrounding neighbourhood, people almost forgot about the existence of the mysterious palace deep in the woods.
Yet legend maintained that behind the hedge of thorns was a palace in which lay a sleeping princess. From time to time, young men on hearing the legend would attempt to cut their way through the hedge in order to win the reputedly-lovely sleeping bride. But each would- be suitor was caught in the thorns, which clutched together as if they were alive. As the years passed, more and more suitors were trapped and died.
At long last, when a hundred years had passed, a suitor who had heard the legend decided to try his luck. This time, as he approached the hedge, large and beautiful flowers replaced the thorns, and the branches parted of their own accord to let him through, closing again as he passed. He found the palace, entered inside, stepped over sleeping bodies and eventually found Beauty herself. He kissed her, she awoke from her sleep, the entire palace woke up with her, the two were married and the couple lived happily ever after.
Blood, time and ‘the curse’
This narrative is entirely and consistently menstrual. Like Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and countless others of its kind, it is about ‘this world’ – the world of ordinary marital and domestic life – about ‘the other world’, and about the transition between the two. ‘The other world’ is a strange place of enchantment in which marital sex is impossible. It is a kind of death. All fairy tales involve a journey between life and death. Something triggers this movement, and this ‘something’ – as we’ll see – is most often a flow of blood.
Let’s look again at The Sleeping Beauty. In approaching the symbolism, we may begin with a passage by Bruno Bettelheim:
‘The thirteen fairies in the Brothers Grimm story are reminiscent of the thirteen lunar months into which the year was once, in ancient times, divided… the number of twelve good fairies plus a thirteenth evil one indicates symbolically that the fatal ‘curse’ refers to menstruation.’(1)
The background is the perennial problem of how to fit a fixed number of lunar months into the 365¼-day solar year. ‘The earliest calendar year’, writes Emily Lyle, ‘was not the solar year of 365 days, but the lunar year consisting of twelve lunar cycles, to which an intercalary month was generally added every two or three years to keep the months in line with the natural seasons’.(2) The number of days in a lunar cycle varies between twenty-nine and thirty – on average 29½ – so that a year was either 354 days (twelve lunar months) or 383½ days (thirteen lunar months). In other words, for as long as the year was divided up into observational lunar months – a sequence of directly-observed ‘moons’ – there was no way in which the number ‘13’ could be avoided. At the end of each twelve moons, a part of the thirteenth always made its presence felt, and some place for it in the calendar had to be found. The only way to establish the solar year as fixedly consisting of twelve month-like periods was to divide it into schematic ‘months’, arbitrarily adjusting the length of each to ensure that twelve of them totalled just 365 days. This, of course, is a feature of the modern Christian (Gregorian) calendar. The thirteenth month has been effectively suppressed. In folklore, however – at least in Europe – the suppressed month, and with it the number thirteen, remains associated with those older pagan traditions which took account not only of the sun but of the moon as well. This liminal, half-excluded thirteenth month finds reflection in ‘the persistence of the number thirteen’ as the standard number of ‘witches’ (‘Wise Women’ or ‘Fairies’ as Grimm’s tale puts it) in a Coven in pre-Christian European traditions of ritualism.
A dispute also exists as to whether menstruation should be considered a blessing or a curse. We may assume the existence of an early tradition according to which menstrual bleeding was associated with the moon – and therefore with the number thirteen – and was considered a manifestation of women’s ritual power. Menstruation was, in other words, included among all the other blessings a young woman could receive. Since it promised fertility, it may even have been the ultimate blessing. The newer custom – and certainly the Christian one – has been to attempt to suppress menstrual bleeding, just as the thirteenth month has been suppressed. In both respects, lunar time is being denied.
This, then, is the background to the story. The story itself tells of how a king and queen attempted to reject the ‘blessing’ of menstrual bleeding altogether. All they wanted – or rather, all the king wanted (for we are not told of the queen’s attitude in all of this) – was for the baby daughter to grow up to become a perfect wife. The blessings given by the ‘good’ fairies are all ‘marital’ ones: they are the attributes which any would-be suitor would look for in a bride – good looks, grace, dancing skills, a melodious voice etc. etc. No husband would be attracted by the menstrual condition of his bride, and so the thirteenth fairy with her own peculiar gift is spurned. The king, we are told, has only twelve places laid. His ‘twelve golden plates’ bring to mind twelve suns – twelve man-made, solar-defined months – as opposed to womankind’s thirteen silver plates or ‘moons’.
But the menstrual blessing cannot be ignored. If suppressed, it simply makes its presence felt in malevolent form. It takes on the nature of a curse. Menstruation in its normal or traditional form is a periodic but purely temporary ‘death’ to marital and domestic life. The injured and angered thirteenth fairy utters her curse: when the girl comes of age, no force on earth will prevent her from bleeding. But in this case, she will bleed until she dies.
The commutation of this death sentence determines for the princess a fate somewhere between normal monthly seclusion and permanent death. Her seclusion will last for a hundred years. And the penalty to be paid by the king and queen is to be subjected to the full rigours of the traditional menstrual spell – in exaggeratedly prolonged form. The traditional logic was for menstruation (particularly, we might suppose, a royal person’s first menstruation) to cast its spell widely over society, the ban on marital sex lasting for several days (or at most a fortnight). If lunarchist theory is correct, the sex-strike launched society each month into a profound process of metamorphosis, as profound as the switch between waking life and sleep. But this certainly didn’t last for a hundred years. The century-long seclusion featured in The Sleeping Beauty is a community’s punishment for its attempt to escape seclusion altogether.
The menstrual spell is a cyclical occurrence, just as is seasonal change. Time, in the traditional view, is itself cyclical. The king, in attempting to destroy all spindles, is attempting to suppress the spinning by women of the threads of time – threads which wind like yarn around a spool. We may also infer that he is hostile to ‘spinsterhood’. A traditional occupation for unmarried or secluded women may have been spinning, so that a woman who never married became seen as permanently a ‘spinster’. Be that as it may, when the princess explores the unfamiliar stairway and discovers the old witch spinning flax in her turret in the sky, she is contacting the other world and discovering for herself the ancient matriarchal governess of lunar time. Like the thirteenth fairy, this old woman brings menstruation as a gift – or, when rejected, as a curse.
The girl ‘pricks her finger.’ She bleeds, as any girl of her age eventually must. The King was foolish to try to banish the spinning-wheels or spindles. Time cannot be suppressed – every girl will come of age and bleed, her cycle itself being among the most ancient of all clocks. And as the princess bleeds, the ancient power of the blood strikes out with a vengeance against all who had believed they could defy it. The whole palace, the whole kingdom is plunged into another realm beyond waking life. All normal domestic activities cease. It is as if time stood still. Those who believed that they could alter the ancient calendar, they could abolish the thirteenth month, they could suppress the hallowed logic of menstrual time are now put firmly in their place. They will be excluded from time’s flow for a hundred years.
As the princess sleeps on, it is as if her blood had erected around her an impenetrable barrier to her ever getting married. Would-be suitors are kept at bay by a deadly hedge of thorns. She herself is now in menstrual seclusion of a particularly rigorous and enduring kind, with the whole palace in seclusion with her.
But every period of seclusion – even a hundred-year one – must eventually expire. And when the time has come, lovers are free once more to embrace. The spell breaks, the thorns turn into flowers. The hedge parts, allowing the young hero to enter and deliver his kiss. The general strike is over; the servants resume their domestic chores. Marriage is celebrated with a royal wedding and feast.
Notes:
1.Bruno Bettelheim, 1978. The Uses of Enchantment. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 232.
2.Emily Lyle, 1986. Archaic calendar structure approached through the
principle of isomorphism. Semiotica 61, 3/4: 243-57.