Part I: The Sleeping Beauty Conspiracy

or

Waking Up to a Corrupted Reality

 

Kingdom awakens after 100 Years

(UPI)-Paris, Middle Ages - Today in the north of France, a small isolated kingdom awakened after 100 years. A handsome prince from a neighboring kingdom, on exploring the wild forests in the area, discovered an overgrown rose garden. He started chopping through the tangled weeds when magically it all fell easily away revealing a castle & a sleeping princess. While attempting to give the princess mouth-to mouth resuscitation, she awoke, as did the rest of the castle. The startled prince was then offered half the kingdom & the princess’ hand in marriage. The prince said he needed to think it over for a few days before making any final decision. “It’s all so sudden, I’m not sure I’m ready for such a big commitment.” In interviews with multitudes of reporters King Stefan, the ruler of the awakened castle, was asked what it was like to awaken after such a long sleep. He stated, “Nothing has changed; the world has remained the same since we went to sleep 100 years ago.” •

Misunderstanding leads to evil fairy's curse on princess?

Evidently this isolated kingdom had done very little trading with the neighboring kingdoms, considering they went to sleep for one hundred years and nobody missed them. As a consequence deviations were starting to show up in the royal strain due to inbreeding for so many centuries. Witness the king’s insanity in having all the spinning wheels destroyed to protect his daughter from the curse of an ‘evil’ fairy.

According to the official court records Maleficent, the ‘evil’ fairy, had not been invited to the christening of the princess - named Beauty by her doting parents. The excluded fairy had gotten her revenge by cursing Beauty with death from the prick of a spinning wheel when she turned 16 years of age.

These court records go on to state that the exclusion was accidental. They insist that she had been inadvertently left off the guest list. “This curse is based upon a misunderstanding. We intended to invite you, but forgot. After all you hadn’t been much part of the court scene recently anyway. We apologize for excluding you. Can’t you just call off this silly curse?” the Queen had argued at the christening.

Maleficent: “Right. You think you can wash off years of abuse with a few words? Besides even I cannot remove the curse once it has been cast.”

‘Good’ fairy: “She’s right, but I can change it into sleep rather than death.”

King Stefan: “To protect my daughter from harm, I order that all spinning wheels should be collected and burned. Furthermore all spinning wheels are banned in this kingdom from henceforth. Send out the decree.”

Maleficent: “Kingee, you have a lot to learn about the relative power of Kings & Fairies.” Although King Stefan was ruler of the material world he was an infant in the unseen realm of the Universe.

King’s decision to ban spinning wheels devastates local economy

Despite suggestions to the contrary from all of his advisors King Stefan went ahead with his plan to burn and ban all spinning wheels in his kingdom. What a blow to the local economy! From this point the inhabitants of the Sleeping kingdom, as it came to be called in later times, had to import all of their thread. Remembering the state of travel at this time – dangerous with poor unmarked roads – this was quite a hardship. While the nobility was still able to afford to import the manufactured clothes from the neighboring kingdoms, the lower classes began making clothes out of wild animal skins, leather, and pigskin, as in days past.

But this insane decision to banish all the spinning wheels had vast ramifications – in that it led to what the king was trying to avoid – the death or supposed death of his daughter. The king’s decree banishing spinning wheels caused the emergence of the outlaw revolutionary group dedicated to the return of the spinning wheel. And this was the group that brought in the bootleg spinning wheel that led to Beauty’s demise. This spinning wheel was smuggled in from territories where the safety standards were not so high, leading to the contaminated needle, which helped fulfill the curse that Maleficent had placed on Beauty.

As such the prophecy could be called self-fulfilling. The King’s actions led inevitably to his downfall. As is many times the case when we attempt to banish the dark side to the hinterlands it comes back in a new and more extreme fashion. If the king could have faced his dark side with great courage, instead of trying to banish it altogether, then this whole ghastly affair could have been avoided altogether.

However perhaps our great and mighty king drew this experience upon himself to invigorate our kingdom. His missteps were orchestrated by the Collective Unconscious to revitalize his gene pool – moving on some subliminal level to pull in the neighboring prince’s fresh stock to preserve the royal line – to enrich and strengthen the decrepit genetic heritage of our sleeping kingdom. Rulers in a stagnant gene pool mutate and die. [This last paragraph seems to have been added as an after thought to mollify the royalty.]

Alcoholic Royal Family Manipulates Clothing Market for Personal Gain

While this is the account from the official records, a different version emerges from interviews with the locals. It seems that Maleficent, the daughter of a high-ranking court fairy, had been a problem for her mother from birth, as witnessed by her choice of name. Evidently her mother was a fairy socialite and really didn’t have the time to give Maleficent the attention she deserved. Under these circumstances Maleficent rebelled against her ‘insider’ mother by becoming an ‘outsider’. From very early in her childhood she caused trouble for her mother by thumbing her nose at tradition. As a teenager she began dressing in black to set herself apart from to the pastels of the other fairies. Further she hung out with unsavory members of the lower classes rather than the royal court. Therefore it is no surprise that she had been ‘inadvertently left off the guest list’. Actually it would have been more surprising, if she had been included.

As a young adult she had become downright accusatory in her conversations with the royalty, accusing them of neglecting the welfare of the peasantry in their obsession with partying. They had accused her of being Communist/Socialist, or some such thing that was associated with evil. They snickered that she had a ‘drug problem’. It seems that the real reason Maleficent wasn’t invited to the christening was that she was a social revolutionary. In fact there is evidence long-suppressed by the popular press showing that the court hadn’t really forgotten the evil fairy, but had deliberately misplaced her invitation because they felt her kind was a bad influence on the children.

Modern research has unearthed new evidence that casts some disturbing shadows on King Stefan’s indignant banning of spinning wheels. Analyzing the economic records of the court, it seems that King Stefan had enormous holdings in the textile business which he had been systematically divesting himself of in the months prior to the christening. Simultaneous with this divestiture came the acquisition of leather goods concerns, cow pastures, pigsties, & other businesses related to the production of leather apparel. Curiously enough, there is an enormous check made out to the mysterious Black Forest Enterprises from King Stefan’s Castle Group. Under popular thinking the Black Forest Enterprises was merely a front for the underground group, who was making enormous profits by smuggling the banned spinning wheels into the country.

Before the christening, financial difficulties related to cash flow had plagued the Black Forest Enterprises. After the christening, the fortunes of BFE took off – creating enormous fortunes for its stockholders – primary of which was the Castle Group, headed by King Stefan & Courtly Concerns. We don’t know much about this company CC except that the members were good friends of the King who regularly contributed heavily to the Queen’s castle remodeling projects – which had taken a heavy toll upon the good King’s finances. In addition the court of King Stefan had run up some extravagant bills on lavish entertaining (heavy duty partying). Then with the birth of their daughter, Beauty, and the financial demands of the impending christening, King Stefan or more probably the Queen, who was the real brains behind the throne anyway, came up with this ingenious plan to provide King Stefan & his court with the revenue they needed to continue partying in the way they were accustomed.

This was also behind the scheme to send Sleeping Beauty to the forest to be raised by peasants. “A child is really such a drag upon these grand affairs,” the Queen was heard to say. The teary eyed King & Queen bidding a fond farewell to the tiny princess as she is escorted into the forest by the good fairies is a myth perpetrated by the Disney factory to obscure the real facts. In truth it should have shown the bleary eyed King & Queen toasting the infant’s departure – as they partied into the early morning hours the night of the christening. Disney also did a good job portraying the indignant King Stefan ordering the burning of all the spinning wheels to protect his tiny daughter. What a distortion of reality. Instead realistically the movie should have shown a gloating King Stefan shouting in exultation “All Right!!” – drooling over the upcoming profits.

The Queen, the real brains behind the throne, and its savior

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The preceding account insinuates that many of the king’s misguided decisions were due to the Queen’s excessive castle remodeling. Even in recent times the communist-socialist factions aligned with Maleficent have maligned her as exploiting the masses in order to achieve her massive construction projects. According to feminist scholarship this version is sexist. To the Queen’s credit she single-handedly saved the family castle from disintegration. It was virtually crumbling when she married into this family of alcoholics. Her actions were in response to the alcoholic environment of the castle.

Disney was correct when it portrays the two kings getting drunk together. But in their normal euphemistic way, it shows two benign, happy drunks. There were actually three, including the nefarious jester-minstrel - who in the typical Disney fashion is portrayed as the happy-go-lucky drunk – when some sources point to him as the sinister force behind the throne – supplying exotic drugs from far away places. These historians write that the kingdom’s sleep was merely symbolic – that in actuality it was a drug-induced stupor– and that the waking up was also symbolic – representing the banishment from the kingdom of this malignant character by, again, the Queen.

Disney shows us a happy picture of intoxication[1] in the Sleeping Kingdom. In reality King Stefan was a stumbling drunk – frequently passing into a comatose state, while the neighboring king, his brother, was a violent drunk – flying into rages after a few drinks. Some writers even state that the prince's drive to leave his country and mate with peasant girls, fulfilled a subconscious need to rebel from his father’s manipulative chains – to break free from his alcoholic environment. Further they suggest the Prince’s difficulty committing to Beauty had to do with the turbulence of his family background.

Some feminist scholars believe that Princess Beauty (Sleeping Beauty in popular terminology) was whisked away from the castle because of the Queen’s fear of this neighboring king, her brother, who was also known for his penchant for little girls. This king actually suggested that his castle be used as the hideaway for the little princess, until she turned sweet sixteen. In correspondence exchanged between the two castles, the Queen vehemently rejects the suggestion with the cryptic comment, “I won’t let you do to her what you did to me, dear Brother.” The italics are hers.

In retrospect the Queen deserves the credit, not the blame. In addition to saving the castle from decay and disrepair with her remodeling projects, she was also responsible for ridding the court of the drug-crazed jester, & rescuing the princess from molestation by her alcoholic uncle, king of the neighboring state. Thus it seems that we cannot blame the queen too much for spending between one to three million drachmas per annum on the castle. This was roughly equivalent to 1/3 of the gross national product. I’m sure she felt she deserved it for dealing with such a difficult situation.

So this ingenious scheme that she probably devised, because the King in his alcoholic stupor was really incapable of such an idea, to rid the kingdom of spinning wheels and to simultaneously spirit her daughter away to safety has come down to us in simplified form as:

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPING BEAUTY

 

Of course some things aren’t quite so silly.

Take the implicit culture of fairy tales –

The rigid class structure of feudalism,

The political system of the Middle Ages,

Based in militarism and exploitation

Of the working classes, as well as foreign cultures,

Which has led to global devastation.

Read on to deconstruct some illusions.



[1] The same pattern is found in Dumbo, the movie. Dumbo & Timothy, the mouse, two drinking buddies, discover Dumbo’s ability to fly while heavily intoxicated. Is this just a reflection of our alcoholic culture, or something more? Perhaps the Dionysian possession by the Spirit of the Vine for inspiration?

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