The featured picture of the cotton reels in a shoe is a still I grabbed from Disney’s Cinderella, dated 1950, which is the only version worth watching.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you’re looking for a fairy tale movie to show your children or grandchildren, don’t bother with anything on the Disney Channel made much after the Sixties, and especially more modern ones which are really just vehicles for some quite strange ideologies. I have no doubt that the most recent versions of Sleeping Beauty will have her awoken after her hundred-year sleep with a kiss from a disabled lesbian who had to fight her way through a forest overgrown because of climate change.
No, it’s clear to those who have the eyes to see that there was someone influential in the Disney studios, in the decades following World War 2, who knew about, and felt it was their role, to transmit the fairy lore through these silver screen vehicles by way of symbols, metaphors and archetypes.
If you’re so far unaware of the meaning of the symbolism of the cotton reels in the shoe, you will need to read Yes, you will go to the ball, my article about the love magic found in the tale of Cinderella, and then read Yarn winders and niddy noddies, which explains the rest. Suffice to say, there is a very good reason why the old folk tales and myths are peopled with fairy cobblers, going right back to the Golden Shoemakers of Britain, Gwyddion and Manawyddan, who I brought to life in my trilogy of The Glastonbury Chronicles.
In Sleeping Beauty, produced at Disney in the Fifties, there is a hypnotically-enchanting song, set to a waltz, in which the heroine sings that she has already met her Prince in the dream state. This is surely a reference to his Higher Self that she met in the waking dream, the shamanic journey, which is an integral part of the process of sacred love magic.
You may be wondering: what is the point of showing children symbols or archetypes when they don’t yet have the wisdom to understand them? But the surface story is just the container, to entertain the conscious mind. The subconscious mind that steers the passage of our destiny, however, does understand that subterranean metaphorical language, and uses its messaging to stay on course.
Another good old Disney animation for magical symbolism is the 1940s classic animation of Pinocchio, in which it’s clear the director knew that it was an old Tuscany tale about the mythological hero’s journey around the zodiac at a time when no-one, not even Joseph Campbell who wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces, knew that the path of the hero was around the stars.
I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but no-one else has enough knowledge about this subject to do it for me. I was the first to publish about the mythological hero being actually a zodiac hero, and that Pinocchio was as much one of these zodiac heroes as was Hercules.
I devoted a whole chapter in my book Stories in the Stars to breaking down Pinocchio’s heroic trials through the astrological Sun signs and a series of alchemical initiations, to evolve from a puppet into a real boy. In there, you will find this diagram, in which I compare the narrative in the Disney version to the original Tuscan tale told by Carlos Collodi.
For some reason, possibly time constraints, the Disney version jumps from Cancer to Scorpio, but otherwise, it’s clear that the scriptwriter at Disney knew this old Tuscan folktale and knew that the course of Pinocchio’s adventures described a zodiac.
On top of all that, this very clever and lush animation is full of sacred geometry and Tarot nods and allusions to what’s really going on. There is even a classic Redemption of the Father scene, from the belly of Monstro the whale at Sagittarius, sometimes deemed the scariest moment in all cinema history! (I can vividly remember my younger sister hiding under the seats and refusing to come out until it was all over!).
Anyway, I’m having lots of fun, revisiting these old movies from my childhood and rediscovering them in the light of the wisdom that comes from working with my ancestral spirits. I’ll let you know if and when more is revealed to me, so do Subscribe if you’d like to be emailed whenever I post here.
CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE 