Magic and escapism with a touch of Disney schmaltz throw sparkle and glitter over Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood. While there has always been an undercurrent of darkness in modern versions of fairytales, the reality of Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales was a good deal bleaker. The original version of 1812 was not translated until recently making it clear how much the Grimm brothers had watered down their lurid tales for subsequent editions.
Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince and the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child. Dropped altogether in later editions is How the Children Played at Slaughtering, where children playing at being a butcher and a pig. A boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned. Unable to be cheered up by the neighbours, she hangs herself; when her husband gets home, “he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter”. The cruel stepmother who abandoned Hansel and Gretel was originally their mother.
Jacob Grimm, 4 January 1785 19.30 pm Hanau, Germany and Wilhelm Grimm 24 February 1786 Hanau, Germany, were inseparable the whole of their lives, becoming university librarians and a professor. Their extraordinary work found international acclaim with later abridged stories translated into more than 170 languages.
Their project was less about entertaining (and terrifying children) and more about the protection and promotion of Germanic culture. Their nationalistic fervour was troubling. “The popularity of the Grimms’ collection during the Nazi years later led Allied occupation forces to ban the Grimms’ fairy tales for a time after the war, believing that they had contributed to the Nazification of Germany”.
What is intriguing is that both Grimm bothers were born during the last Pluto in Aquarius and it is an integral part of their charts. Jacob has a 4th house Capricorn Sun opposition Uranus square Neptune – certainly inventive, creative, though also veering to the fanatical. His Libra Moon was in a bleak square to Saturn and and affectionate trine to Venus. His attitude to his mother and women would be conflicted.
His creative and attention-demanding 5th house Pluto in Aquarius was trine Neptune, sextile Mars in Sagittarius in his 3rd house – which would give him a cruel streak.
His brother Wilhelm had a creative, attention-grabbing 5th house Sun Venus in Pisces with a bleak, hard-edged 4th house Saturn Pluto in Aquarius trine Neptune trine Mars in Gemini, formed into a Kite by Neptune opposition Jupiter which in turn was part of a Cardinal Grand Cross square Uranus opposition a Capricorn Moon.
Both had strong, creative charts with a dark streak. Both had North Node in Aquarius which would focus their attention on a cause to which to devote their lives, in their case to promoting Germanic language and culture.
The two brothers spent their entire lives close together. In their school days, they had one bed and one table in common; as students, they had two beds and two tables in the same room. They always lived under one roof and had their books and property in common, even after Wilhelm married. A visitor observed, “they both live in the same house, and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property.”
Pluto in Aquarius has many facets – nationalism in their case being one, as well as misogyny plus a bloodthirsty streak evident in their tales and even more so in the French Revolution’s bloody Reign of Terror.
ADD ON: Wilhelm married Henriette and had four children. His Sun/Moon midpoint, the marriage significator, was conjunct his 4th house Saturn Pluto which makes it sound a bleak affair. Jacob’s Sun/Moon midpoint (he never married) fell in his 3rd house of siblings.
Their relationship chart was not all sunshine and roses despite their apparently seamless partnership. There was a composite Sun, Saturn, Mercury, Pluto conjunction hinting at a chained-together bond with underlying resentment; and an irritable composite Moon square Mars.
But the synastry had important positives with Jacob’s Capricorn Sun conjunct his brother’s Moon; and Jacob’s Jupiter conjunct Wilhelm’s Sun.
I’m thankful for Marjorie’s last sentence, just before the add-on, about the negative side of Pluto in Aquarius.
Like every sign, it has both a positive and negative side to it.
But from the way some commentators were talking about Pluto in Aquarius earlier (when it was still in Capricorn), it sounded like it would be heaven on earth, nirvana, the second Coming.
Honestly, the moving of Pluto (and other planets) through the signs just means that the nature of problems changes, but we will still face problems, including those arising from our solutions to earlier problems.
Wilhelm’s Sun/Moon midpoint falls on his Saturn/Pluto midpoint in Aquarius 4th house and trine his Mars in Gemini 8th house. His Uranus is also opposite his Moon with Uranus midpoint on Lilith conjunct Neptune in the 12th house. I get the feeling looking at his chart that his marriage may he been a shared interest with his brother?
“May have been a shared interest”. Perhaps it is wrong to speculate! Yet Uranus rules Aquarius the house of group and shared interests. Its midpoint on Lilith – the dark side of femininity , hidden in the 12th with sensual Neptune – could have been boundaries blurred? It just struck me that Mars in Gemini in the 8th house with its ruler Pluto / Saturn conjunction could have grounded an alternative share? Especially with an extreme closeness to his brother, it may have been a natural thing?
Aquarius always give me a feeling of it being cold and grey. Not black and sexy like scorpio, not fanatic like Sag and not all about the money like capricorn. My gut feeling when Pluto First went into Aquarius last year was what once was will be again. Nostalgia, old school chic and money and budget air trav just might become a thing of the past. Hope time prove me wrong.
How fascinating, Marjorie! Thank-you for this.
I discovered Grimm’s fairy tales as a very young girl and became utterly and completely obsessed with them. Every Saturday morning I was at the library and I repeatedly borrowed these books… I would say it was almost a “hunger”.
My natal Pluto in the 8th trine (thank goodness) my Moon (squished between S. Node and IC) needed these books to help me sort out my conflict between how good, sweet and nice I was and how full of rage I was on the inside. Like you, Virgoflake, my heritage is part German but from Ukraine.. and Dutch, so the wounds run deep in our family. The rawness and darkness of the stories soothed something in me…. made me begin to accept ALL parts of me. I certainly didn’t know that at the time.
I genuinely believe that these books saved me.. gave me an instinctive understanding of my humanness. I, too, as an adult, dove into Marie von Franz’s take on these tales. Children DO struggle with big, dark and overwhelming archetypal emotions and I wonder if “protecting” children from these types of stories is the right thing! Everything for children now seems so soft, plush and inoffensive… ..
I think about the west coast Indigenous tribes here in Canada.. .like the Haida… whose rather dramatic and scary masks used in traditional dances… maybe in darkened rooms with only firelight… are deeply meaningful and educational for children and adults alike.
We need to have a way to express these hidden realms in a mythological way. There are instinctive answers to discover! I am SO grateful to have stumbled onto Grimm’s fairy tales rather than a purple plush Barney or a Mickey Mouse.
Of course, now? I will do some research on the other aspects of these tales that I was unaware of…. the racism, etc. Thank-you all for your comments!
I was an avid reader of Andrew Lang’s collections which included stories from a wide range of cultures and from all continents. The same themes tend to recur in, for example, indigenous American tales such as those of the Southern Utes who terrified their children with tales of the Siat, cannibalistic monsters with huge breasts dripping poison milk. The Seneca told their offspring tales of the Hagondes, a long-nosed cannibal clown, who would steal them away in his basket. The word “Wendigo” is an Algonquin or Cree word that literally means “evil that devours”, a mythical figure who may reflect the starvation experienced by Indigenous American societies during the winter months when food was scarce. Then of course there’s the figure of Saturn/Cronos himself, who fearful of being usurped by his own children, devours them soon after birth.
I think for a child growing up in a volatile or violent or repressed home with dysfunctional parents or siblings, these kinds of stories can help then to become acquainted with the dark or violent undercurrents in their own families, since they can identify with the tale’s outsider protagonist who, along with an animal or supernatural guide to help them, can overcome the most heinous circumstances.
thank-you!! 🙂
Absolutely true for me.
Fascinating stuff, thank you Marjorie
One could argue Germany did experience a spiritual rebirth in true Plutonian style, rising from the ashes after being nearly extinguished by its destructive desire for purity and domination.
I’m not one to wade too deeply into political/religious waters, but antisemitism existed for hundreds if not thousands of years before the Third Reich, in true German fashion, organized and mechanized the ugly business of rooting out the other and found a convenient scapegoat for the disastrous effects of the Versailles Treaty.
I’d be curious to hear about the composite of the Brothers Grimm, whose surname seems to augur some grim business.
If you visit Zehlendorf near Berlin you can see the Hansel and Gretel type houses built for members of the SS. In some ways Nazism was a Grimm’s Fairy Tale version of nationalism.
This from wiki says; ‘According to author Elizabeth Dalton, “Nazi ideologues enshrined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as virtually a sacred text”. The Nazi Party decreed that every household should own a copy of Kinder- und Hausmärchen; later, officials of Allied-occupied Germany banned the book for a period.’
Thank you, Marjorie for this interesting piece. Antisemitism is in Grimm too unfortunately. As someone with German heritage and as a child with Pluto Rising and Moon in Scorpio in the 3rd, I was certainly drawn to Grimm, due in part to the darkness that runs through these tales, the terrifying parental figures, the brutality and cruelty aimed at outsider protagonists and how the rejected child is sometimes aided by supernatural figures to overcome abuse and darkness. Jungian psychologist Marie Louise Von Franz explores these many themes in her ‘The Interpretation of Fairy Tales’, ‘The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales’ and ‘Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales’ to demonstrate her ideas about how these stories contain themes which are connected to the collective unconscious as well as individual human psychology. Bruno Bettelheim, likewise published ‘The Uses of Enchantment’.
My Scots/German father was brought up on German children’s books and would read them to us as children. We loved them because of their dark, twisted humour. Wilhelm Busch was a German children’s story writer, humorist, painter and illustrator who wrote ‘Max und Moritz’, a tale about two delinquent boys who played such awful tricks on the adults in their community, they eventually end up being put through a flour grinder by a miller and their remains eaten by geese. I’m not entirely sure it would be seen as appropriate for children today, but my father was eccentric and there is a strand to German humour which is gruesome and cruel. Having recently seen the Austrian film “The Devil’s Bath’ which is based on a true story, life was bleak for the average peasant in the 1750s and there is little compassion for those who for whatever reason, don’t fit in.
My favourite Grimms stories are two of the most shocking – ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘The Juniper Tree’. The first could easily be the script for a horror film and the second involves a stepmother who beheads her stepson, who in turn transforms into a bird who rewards the boy’s killer with a terrible punishment.
Good Write up. I read the Sanitized version of Grimm’s when I was 11, and even then thought it was a bit dark for a kid. I know the German’s have Krampus, and that is still going on, and that is sort of something. I know Jung started having big dreams at some point, and dreamt of a return of Wotan, with the ideal that the civilization was a veneer on top of something much deeper.
I am not antiGerman – there is some ancestry things going on with me. Reading the “Magic Mountain” now.
The Wotan Comment – a coincidence with the rise of the Nazi
I have always thought that the rise of Nazism in Germany was connected to the 8th house Pluto. Tr Uranus in Taurus was just into the Germany chart 8th as Jung wrote his “Wotan” essay, claiming that the German people were experiencing a collective confrontation with their inner divinity under National Socialism. He believed that this confrontation would lead to a national spiritual rebirth. Hmm kind of got that wrong in the sense of a positive rebirth but I think it did trigger a darkness in the German psyche which took over for a while.
Do you see any similar connection to the rise of neo-nazism and other far-right movements around the world? Thanks!
Thanks Marjorie.