Maleficent, with Anjelina Jolie, is a wonderful movie where the shadow of the light and the light in the shadow are cast in an unusual approach to fairy tales scripts (to the greater audiences). The redeeming quality/role of the “bad girl”, the witch, is to me linked to the daimonic aspect of the Myth of the Dark Mother: the great iniciatrix that takes us into the descent, so that we can die into new life.

As I read in Marie Louise Von Franz, most of the queens and/or princesses that are blond, represent the disembodied “feminine spirit”. Those who are dark haired (as Snow White) represent the embodied feminine soul. Maleficent is a telluric, ctonic fairy, invested with Earth symbolism: feared and desired, betrayed and finally revenged by… the power of love. The princess (her blond sick mother is dead, the old disembodied feminine)  is also blond: non initiated, disembodied soul…but she is the image of the new feminine rising in the kingdom of Eradigm – and her real mother, the one who cares and loves, is a dark horned and winged woman, body where roots and wings integrate into a new being, new possibilities.

This numinous character has power to restore balance and life to the kingdom–but not until the final battle with the patriarchal greedy wounded King.  

  The roles of the feminine are “switched”: the original matriarchal four-folded GODDESS (virgin, lover and mother, crone) is split into a 3-set-of-goofy-fairies plus the Dark Mother –dark only after the “fallen of paradise”. She is aided by a black crow (that shape shifts into a man) -, animal totem of Ceridween, dark crone celtic goddess. Darkness, the cosmic background upon which the Earth rises, seems to be the iniciatic uterine cauldron of the cycles of Life.

Good and evil are revisited here, and we are invited to enter the mythological time –from Cronos to Kairos, to fully understand their deepest meaning and mutual relationship. In that Kairos space-time, MALEFICENT is the MAGNIFICENT DARKNESS where the treasure hides –the treasure that reclaims both surrender and fight, both daimonic and angelic, both heaven and earth, to became fully real in our bodysouls.

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