12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

The Terrible Mother appears in many fairy tales, and in many stories for
adults. In the Sleeping Beauty, she is the Evil Queen, dark nature herself—
Maleficent, in the Disney version. The royal parents of Princess Aurora fail
to invite this force of the night to their baby daughter’s christening. Thus,
they shelter her too much from the destructive and dangerous side of reality,
preferring that she grow up untroubled by such things. Their reward? At
puberty, she is still unconscious. The masculine spirit, her prince, is both a
man who could save her, by tearing her from her parents, and her own
consciousness, trapped in a dungeon by the machinations of the dark side of
femininity. When that prince escapes, and presses the Evil Queen too hard,
she turns into the Dragon of Chaos itself. The symbolic masculine defeats her
with truth and faith, and finds the princess, whose eyes he opens with a kiss.
It might be objected (as it was, with Disney’s more recent and deeply
propagandistic Frozen) that a woman does not need a man to rescue her. That
may be true, and it may not. It may be that only the woman who wants (or
has) a child needs a man to rescue her—or at least to support and aid her. In
any case, it is certain that a woman needs consciousness be rescued, and, as
noted above, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the
beginning of time (in the guise both of order and of the Logos, the mediating
principle). The Prince could be a lover, but could also be a woman’s own
attentive wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence.
Those are masculine traits—in actuality, as well as symbolically, as men are
actually less tender-minded and agreeable than women, on average, and are
less susceptible to anxiety and emotional pain. And, to say it again: (1) this is
most true in those Scandinavian nations where the most steps towards gender
equality have been taken—and (2) the differences are not small by the
standards whereby such things are measured.
The relationship between the masculine and consciousness is also
portrayed, symbolically, in the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Ariel, the
heroine, is quite feminine, but she also has a strong spirit of independence.
For this reason, she is her father’s favourite, although she also causes him the
most trouble. Her father Triton is the king, representing the known, culture
and order (with a hint of the oppressive rule-giver and tyrant). Because order
is always opposed by chaos, Triton has an adversary, Ursula, a tentacled
octopus—a serpent, a gorgon, a hydra. Thus, Ursula is in the same archetypal
category as the dragon/queen Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (or the jealous