“I am Sir Vivor, on a quest in search of the Holy Cauldron. Who might you be, sir?”
“I am Sir Valance, guardian of the Holy Cauldron. You can’t pass unless you fight me.”
Vivor was weaving in his saddle, squinting because he saw two or three figures of the opposing knight, sliding in and out of one another. “The famous Sir Valance?” he cried. “Your name is known everywhere. You have become a legend, sir.”
Sir Valance lowered his lance. “Are you going to defend yourself, or not?”
Sir Vivor picked up his lance but was too weak with hunger to hold it steady. The point described wobbly circles in the air for a minute or two. Then Sir Vivor toppled slowly sideways, fell off his horse with a great metallic crash, and lay still.
When he next regained consciousness, Sir Vivor found himself lying alone on a narrow cot in a narrow room illuminated by one candle and a dim square of daylight from the single window. As he was looking around this celllike chamber, the door opened and a white-gowned lady entered, bearing a bowl of soup. The smell of it made his mouth water. “You’re looking better,” she remarked.
“What is this place?” Vivor asked.
“You are in the castle of the Holy Cauldron, the most sacred place in the world, the center of the earth. Now eat.” She sat down on the edge of the cot and began spooning soup into his mouth, which embarrassed him. He tried to take the bowl from her, but his hands trembled so that he gave up and let her feed him. With each swallow, the soup seemed to restore a little more strength to his limbs.
“The knight said I couldn’t pass until I fought him,” Vivor said. “Did that happen?”
“No. Sir Valance is not a brute like many other knights. When he saw how weak you were, he brought you through the gate. He too once came here starving.”
“I’m grateful,” said Vivor.
“Rest now. I’ll bring you more food later.” She went away, locking the door behind her.
“I am being taken care of,” Vivor thought, “but it seems I am also a prisoner. I must find a way to escape, but later. Much later.” He fell asleep again.
Over the next few days several different white-gowned ladies brought him nourishment. Several different white-robed male servants brought him basins and towels for washing and removed his waste pail. All were uncommunicative. When he became strong enough to walk around the room and exercise his arms, he thought of shoving the next visitor aside and getting out while the door was unlocked. However, his next visitor was a great personage, whom he knew could not be shoved. He saw that she was a great personage because she wore a silver crown set with diamonds and a robe of white velvet embroidered with silver crescent moons.
“I am the high priestess of the Holy Cauldron,” the personage said. “I have come to offer you a choice of futures.”
“What choice would that be?” he asked.
“In the past, outsiders who found their way to this place were put to death, and their blood was added to…a secret something. Recent years have brought a more humane policy. The first choice open to you is this: We will let you go back where you came from, provided you first submit to a procedure that will obliterate your memory. You will believe that your journey to this place was nothing but a fever dream or a random vision. You will never be inclined to repeat it. The second choice open to you is to remain here and become like Sir Valance and a few others, a guardian of the Cauldron in perpetuity.”
“If I choose the second, will I be allowed to see the cauldron?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I so choose,” said Vivor. During his recent days of solitude he had thought back on his past and had decided that it didn’t amount to much. He had no family. The knightly life of hanging around the king’s castle, engaging in trivial pastimes like Sir Render’s, while waiting for the next battle, with its risk of severe injury or death, seemed not so attractive anymore. Sir Vivor had come close to death and had found it inglorious.
The high priestess nodded, touched his forehead once, and left the room. The place between his eyebrows where her finger touched him tingled strangely for hours afterward.
The next day Sir Valance himself appeared, bringing a white robe for Vivor to wear. “I’m here to begin your initiation,” he said.
He led Vivor out of the room and through a maze of corridors to a dim, vaulted chamber whose walls were broken by a series of niches, each containing shelves of books, statuary, crystals, and other mysterious objects. In this chamber Vivor met an aged woman who was introduced as his teacher. For weeks he spent many hours each day with her, learning the lore of the olden time and mastering various techniques and disciplines too secret to be divulged.
When his teacher declared him ready, he was directed to prepare himself for the revelation of the Holy Cauldron. Preparation involved the performance of certain rituals, a night of vigil, and fasting. At last the appointed day arrived.
Filled with anticipation, Sir Vivor met the high priestess and a small entourage, who conducted him through many levels of the castle, downward through basements and subbasements, to the very foundations of living rock that lay at the bottom of the dark gorge. Here they entered a vast cavern, deep beneath the castle walls, dark and filled with the sound of rushing waters.
“What you are about to see,” the high priestess said, “is the world’s holiest symbol, the Cauldron, which encompasses the endless cycles of life and death on Earth. All that lives must die and be reabsorbed into the churning mass from which all forms arise. This philosophical principle of the Cauldron teaches us that no entity can be immortal. Only the Cauldron is immortal, redistributing every part of everything in a mixing that goes on forever. Therefore as the eternal giver of birth and taker of life, the Cauldron is not an it, but a she.”
Her assistants lighted torches around the periphery of the great cavern. Then Vivor saw that the whole floor was shaped, partly by nature and partly by artifice, like a huge woman lying on her back, facing up to the high, dim, arched ceiling. The woman’s body was perhaps two hundred yards long, with a clearly carved face, rippled mounds of hair, upthrust breasts, and long limbs touching the cavern’s walls. The most remarkable feature was her belly mound, which rose to the rim of a huge, round, natural well sunk into the floor. From within this shaft rose the sound of ceaseless, restless waters sloshing and churning.
“That is the Holy Cauldron,” said the high priestess. “Its waters are as salty as blood, and they rise and fall with the tides of the northern sea. The cauldron illustrates the fact that all life proceeds from the female principle, not from any god. The Cauldron was revered by the ancients, time out of mind. It is revered today by those of us who hold this place in sacred trust.”
Sir Vivor fell on his knees and clasped his hands in wonder.
He became a convert to the philosophy of the Holy Cauldron. He remained at the castle for the rest of his life, learning and meditating. In time, he became a great adept. Sir Valance became his close friend. He married one of the priestesses and lived happily ever after. In the country of the king, he was never seen again and so became a legend.
Eventually, in view of the outer world’s increasing violence, the high priestess decreed that the castle of the Holy Cauldron should be even less accessible to random adventurers. She cast magical spells to enclose it forever in dense mists and to provide in its place the illusion of an uninviting, uninhabited seacoast. All paths leading to it were enchanted to twist back on themselves and leave travelers lost in confusion.
Stories about the Cauldron were altered as they were repeated over centuries. At last the symbol was changed from a natural vessel of seawater representing the female principle to an artificial vessel of a holy man’s blood. Knights sometimes went in quest of it, but it was never found.
ELEVEN
Feminizing Aladdin puts a surprising twist on the old Arabian tale. When I began, I didn’t know what Ala Dean would require of her genie. She took over the story on her own, so to speak,
and followed a feminist route to her happy-ever-after, which entailed happiness not only for herself but for others too. There’s much to be said for her approach, as opposed to the personal fortune, rank, and power demanded by the typically selfish heroes of traditional stories. The social changes that she brought about represent one of the wish-fulfillment fantasies commonly expressed in feminist groups.
All at once a thick mist poured out of the lamp…
Once upon a time, in an old-fashioned feudal kingdom, there lived a poor widow named Ganga Dean, otherwise known as Mistress Dean the dressmaker. Day and night she toiled with her needle to eke out a living for herself and her daughter, Ala. They lived in a tiny, mean hovel in an alley behind the king’s palace. Ganga Dean looked up at the high walls of the royal domicile with considerable distaste. She complained constantly to her daughter about the king’s exorbitant taxes, which took bread from the mouths of poor women and children to help finance his foreign wars, fought to bring more riches to the king and his courtiers. “War is a game that rulers play,” she told Ala bitterly, “at the expense of the ruled, who are killed or ruined so the game can go on.”
Like her neighbors, Ganga Dean hated the tax collectors and their escorts, the armed guards who often took even more than the collectors did. They would casually pick up the odd piglet, hen, family heirloom, young girl, or young boy, which would be taken away and never seen again. Any taxpayer who objected to the loss of a possession or a child would be hurt or killed, and the king’s men would walk away laughing. “They’re worse than vultures,” Ganga Dean would say in a fearful whisper. “They steal and rape and kill. We common people exist only to feed their greed, which is bottomless.” As Ala began to grow into handsome young womanhood, her mother always hid her from the tax collectors, lest she should be taken away to service the soldiers’ lusts.
Ala Dean was a carefree sort of girl, determined to enjoy life as much as her poverty would allow. She ran wild in the streets, played tricks on merchants, took part in ball games with the boys, and defied authority whenever she could. Her mother begged her to wear modest dresses and adopt ladylike airs and graces, so she might attract a rich husband and save them both from their life of want. But Ala refused to change her hoydenish ways. She didn’t mind concealing her beauty with a dirty face, tangled hair, and unkempt garments.
One day a street magician came to Ganga Dean’s house, slyly claiming to be the long-lost brother of the widow’s deceased husband. The widow hastened to entertain him as well as she could, opening her last bottle of cider and killing her last chicken for his dinner. As he ate, the magician studied Ala, remarked on her beauty, and said he could train her to become the richest courtesan in the land. Eventually, he declared, she could marry a lofty aristocrat, perhaps a duke or a prince.
Ganga Dean clasped her hands in delight. “My Ala, to become a duchess or a princess?” she cried. “Bless you, sir. Let her take up the useful trade of courtesan, for heaven knows she does nothing particularly useful now.”
“But Mother, I don’t want to become a courtesan,” Ala protested.
“We must be practical, dear,” her mother said. “Given our circumstances, it’s the best life you could make for yourself. It would put you in touch with the Right People as nothing else could. Remember, only courtesans can influence the heartless men who rule us. You could do much good. And here is your own uncle, offering to train you. It’s a golden opportunity, Ala.”
“I don’t think so,” Ala grumbled, instinctively mistrusting the visitor’s ingratiating manner.
“Just imagine,” her mother burbled on, lost in a dream of affluence, “someday we might even live in the palace, and look down from that balcony on our old hovel here. You’re a beautiful girl. Your looks could take you to the very heights of society.”
Ala Dean only hunched down in her chair and sulkily picked at a hangnail on her thumb.
“No more for tonight,” the magician said cheerily. “Tomorrow I’ll take her to a friend of mine, a very great lady, to begin her apprenticeship. For now, let us rest.”
He retired to Ganga Dean’s own bed, which she had freshly made up for him, while she slept on a straw pallet on the floor. Like most men of his time, the magician firmly believed that every woman should be happy to serve him and deprive herself for his benefit, especially if she was (or believed herself to be) his relative by marriage or by blood.
Ala sat up for a while, staring at the fire, wondering whether she should run away from home before the magician took her. Because she loved her poor naive mother and didn’t want her to worry, Ala decided to go along with the magician and wait for an opportunity to take advantage of the situation.
In the morning she set out with him, carrying her few possessions bound up in a sack. They walked far, toward the mountains. Ala Dean became very weary. She saw around her only a rocky wasteland, without a sign of habitation where a great lady might live. “How much farther, Uncle?” she asked.
“We’re almost there,” he assured her. She was not reassured.
Soon they entered a stony canyon. The magician took a shovel from his pack and began to dig in the gravel. Presently he uncovered an iron ring set in a granite block. “Pull that ring,” he ordered Ala. She did so. The granite block moved aside, groaning grittily, to reveal an open trapdoor with stone stairs leading down into the earth.
“You must go down those stairs and through the caves below,” the magician told her. “Touch nothing that you pass, for one touch could be deadly. At the end of the large cavern you will come to a niche containing a common brass lamp. Bring me the lamp. Remember to touch nothing else.” He gave her a lighted candle and pushed her toward the trapdoor.
Ala Dean went down the stairs willingly enough, for this felt like an adventure. Her candle showed her a dry cave filled with dusty wooden boxes and chests. Soft, powdery dust lay on the floor and swirled up around her feet as she walked. She touched nothing, although she was itching with curiosity to know what the chests contained.
The cave chamber led to a narrow passage, which in turn led to another chamber, much larger than the first. This one too was nearly filled with wooden boxes, one of which stood open. Ala Dean leaned over it with her candle. She was thrilled to see that it contained just what she expected: treasure. Golden beads, cups, and bracelets; jeweled tiaras and necklaces; rings, anklets, and breastplates all glittering with precious metals and gems.
The eye-level niche on the far wall of this cave contained nothing but a small, dirty, tarnished lamp of common brass. Ala couldn’t imagine why her purported uncle would want this article above all the other riches in the cave. Neither could she imagine why he didn’t come down and see for himself what was hidden here. Her suspicion of him grew apace.
As she returned with the lamp in her hand, she found the granite block drawn back again over the hole, nearly covering it, except for a gap of six inches at one side. Through the gap she saw the magician’s face.
“You took long enough about it,” he grumbled. “Hurry, girl, pass the lamp up to me. Then I’ll move the stone back and let you out.”
Ala Dean laughed. “What kind of a fool do you take me for, Uncle?” she said. “You let me out first, then you’ll get your lamp.”
The magician flew into a rage and demanded with many curses that Ala relinquish the lamp immediately—all of which made her refusal even firmer. The magician stuck his arm, then a stick, through the hole, trying to reach her. She took the lamp and retreated to the foot of the stairs. “Why don’t you come down yourself, Uncle?” she called. “What’s wrong with this place?”
Seeing that it was useless to try to persuade her, the magician shouted: “Stupid girl! Go ahead, then, and enjoy your treasure—forever!” With that, he closed the doorway completely. The heavy stone cut off all sound. Ala Dean was left alone in tomblike silence.
At first she went up the stairs and tried to move the granite block, but it weighed tons and couldn’t be budged without the aid
of the magic ring on the outside. For a while she tried to entertain herself by singing and talking, hoping that the magician would relent and release her from her underground prison. Time passed. She grew hungry and thirsty. Little by little her spirits fell, as she realized that in all probability her false uncle had left her to die.
She gave way to a fit of hopeless weeping. Her tears fell on the old lamp that she still clutched in her hand, smearing the dirt on its surface. Automatically she rubbed away the damp patch to expose the metal.
All at once a thick mist poured out of the lamp and coalesced into the shape of a huge genie with a bald head, pendulous earrings, and voluminous silk trousers. “What a relief!” cried the genie, to Ala’s astonishment. “I’ve been cooped up in that lamp for two hundred years. It’s about time somebody found me. Now, little mistress, you have the slave of the lamp at your command. What is your wish?”
“I wish to be out of this cave,” Ala said promptly.
“No sooner said than done, little mistress.” The genie picked her up in his arms, took several strides through a strangely thick, dark medium, and deposited her on the ground above the granite slab. She looked around. Dusk was falling. A chill wind whined among the rocks. There was no sign of the magician.
“Now I wish for some food and drink,” Ala said.
The genie snapped his fingers. At her feet appeared a beautiful rug spread with plates of fruit, flagons of water and wine, loaves of bread, cheeses, and sweet cakes. Ala ate until she was more than full. Then she ordered the genie to take her home.
“But what about the treasure?” he asked slyly. “Don’t you want to take some gold and jewels along, to buy yourself a new life?”
“I don’t think so,” said Ala, sensing a trap. “I’m not sure about that treasure. Maybe my false uncle was right to tell me it shouldn’t be touched.”
“Wise girl,” said the genie. “The fact is, that treasure was obtained at the price of much bloodshed and never gave any of its owners more than momentary satisfaction. Had you touched it, you would have been infected with the insatiability disease, which can be crippling or even fatal. Entering the cave is fatal to anyone other than a pure maiden, which is why your companion sent you down where he dared not go himself.”
Feminist Fairy Tales Page 9
