fairy tale astrology: cinderella

But before we get into this (long!) essay-story, a quick announcement:

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And now, for Cinderella —

It is precisely because of Cinderella’s popularity, of the instantly recognizable storyline and iconography, that I chose it for our first installment in the Fairy Tale Astrology series. Is Cinderella my personal favorite? No. Was it my favorite as a child? Also no — since the age of three, my fairy tale obsession has largely centered around Snow White. In the early ‘90s, I begged to dress up in homemade Sleeping Beauty and Alice [in Wonderland] Halloween costumes, but never the silently-suffering heroine whose rags-to-riches tale has been the template for many an American Dream.

But since the purpose of this series is to better understand the nature and role of the planets in our everyday lives, I wanted to start with a story most (if not all) of you would already know — and probably know quite well, if only through cultural osmosis.

In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, Cinderella is classified as Type 510A, or “The Persecuted Heroine.” (Spot the Saturn keyword in that title.) There are numerous versions of this story worldwide1 but since I’m American and was raised on Western variants, I’ll be using the ones I know best.

In exploring the astrological themes of this story, you’ll find beats specific to the 1950 Disney film, itself based on French folklorist Charles Perrault’s 1697 tale, as well as the 1997 adaptation of the Rodger's and Hammerstein musical2 (starring Brandy, above) and the 1998 film Ever After. Because it is so starkly different from the popularized Perrault/Disney version, I will also be incorporating the Grimms’ German folk tale “Aschenputtel,” published in their 1812 story collection. I wanted to include more variants (Gail Carson Levine’s YA classic Ella Enchanted, Malinda Lo’s queer re-imagining Ash, the Grimms-inspired Cinderella storyline from Sondheim’s Into the Woods), but at a certain point, there are diminishing returns.

As we move through the story, bear in mind that, as an animistically-informed, relationship-oriented astrologer, I understand the planets as living, embodied beings whose themes are all around us. We get to collaborate and co-create with their domains and themes, which genuinely cover every area of a life — something I hope is evident as we break down this most familiar and beloved tale.

Those familiar with astrology will note that these are also the planets involved in two of the summer-winter zodiacal pairs: the sun rules Leo, opposite Aquarius (Saturn), and the moon rules Cancer, which is opposite Capricorn (also Saturn). Keep this in mind as we explore this tale.

Let’s start with our heroine’s name: “Cinderella,” so-called because she lays by the fire on a servant’s bedroll at night. The Grimms version of this tale, “Aschenputtel,” translates to “Little Ash Girl.” A hearthfire, to me, is very much emblematic of the sun (which rules Leo, the sign of fixed, which is to say steady and unmoving, fire). This young woman who lies by the fire in a degraded state suffers a solar deficit; we know that she has been demoted in her own house to the rank of a servant (an economic class ruled by Saturn), and has the ashes or soot (also Saturn) on her face to show for it.

The sun tells us about the condition of a person’s vitality and disposition, and so it is noteworthy that Cinderella is typically portrayed as content, or accepting, rather than bitter. Cinderella’s most central, most famous trait is obedience (again, see the influence of Saturn, the master of all things discipline and punish). She is mistreated, but doesn’t complain about her mistreatment, nor seek to rebel against it. She may wish to have her own little corner, but she doesn’t actively try to disrupt her station. Even Drew Barrymore’s spunky Cinder-heroine Danielle in Ever After does not break break rules for her own gain, but rather to protect her fellow servants from her stepmother’s greed and cruelty.

It is worth noting that Ever After is particularly loud among contemporary Cinderella retellings in reminding us that our heroine is protective of her home, the land, and the people who work it precisely because she is the true heir. There is a nobility of spirit beneath the soot and circumstance that mirrors her inherited-by-birth station as a gentleman’s daughter. And it is telling that the pseudonym Danielle gives in court, and in her accidental courtship with the prince, is actually her noble-born mother’s name; in this, the mother’s heritage shields the daughter.

The sun and the moon (aka the luminaries) are the two planets that have most to do with vitality and overall wellbeing, with emotional security, with a sense of selfhood. In Hellenistic astrology, these planets are also associated with our parents: the sun as father, the moon as mother (or birthing parent). Astrologically speaking, Cinderella is a character with a lack of access to light: she has lost her mother, and her father is either dead or painfully absent. In modern retellings, Cinderella is an orphan: the Disney film, Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, and Ever After all either show or reference the father’s death.

But in the 17th century Perrault and 18th century Grimms texts, the father is very much alive, but is an easily manipulated man lacking in both character and conviction, easily bent to the whims of his cruel new wife. In those classic texts, Cinderella’s fall in station from gentleman’s daughter to servant is not only Saturnian in the circumstance of death or loss, but also Saturnian in the way her father abdicates his parental responsibility. This is an archetypal story of parental loss or abandonment as well as the stepmother’s domestic abuse, which we will explore shortly.

The loss of the mother in contemporary tellings looms large; it is inferred that Cinderella mirrors her mother in beauty and kindness, and as such is the focus of the stepmother’s ire. But the mother figure, which is to say in astrological terms the moon, is particularly central in the Grimms story, where she is an active ancestor helping her daughter. In “Aschenputtel,” Cinderella visits her mother’s grave every day where she prays and weeps; here, we see the daily routine that the moon is linked to, as well as the moon’s more modern domain of emotional expression and grief. In the Grimms, the father brings Cinderella a gift of a hazel-bush when he brings home her new step-mother and step-sisters, which she plants at her mother’s grave. The hazel thrives, growing into a tree; hazel wood has a storied history in folklore, sometimes cited as the Tree of Life or Yggdrasil and allegedly used for Circe’s wand and Mercury’s caduceus.

On the one hand, the mother’s grave is a lunar site in Cinderella. But we need go-betweens, between the living and the dead: psychopompic allies who will help us communicate and facilitate the help of the dead to the living. Enter Mercury, that most skilled of travelers, who can easily traverse all realms. The hazel tree, as noted, has explicit mythological links to Mercury, which are made especially clear in this story by the fact that white (the color of the moon!) birds sit on the tree, listen to Cinderella’s prayers, and throw down whatever it is she has asked for.3

The moon-as-mother is protective. The step-mother is a stark contrast: not only is she not protective, but rather, she is the person Cinderella needs protection from. Antagonists or villains in stories are often represented through malefic archetype and theme — which is to say, the hot, wedge-driving anger of Mars or the cold domination of Saturn. While Cinderella’s stepmother is sometimes more Mars-coded, as in the played-for-laughs annoyance and agitation of Bernadette Peters’ portrayal in the 1997 Rodgers & Hammerstein, I think she more often belongs to the domain of Saturn. Mars is a slap across the face or tackling someone for a glass slipper; Saturn says, straight-faced and with no irony, “how can anyone love a pebble in their shoe?”

Saturn, who is cold and calculated. Saturn, who is all things Authority, which when weaponized land us in the therapist’s chair (or weeping at the grave, begging to go to the ball). Saturn, who can restrain and constrict and lock a daughter up in her room or banish her to sleep in the ashes. Saturn, who demands tasks and trials and responsibility — the stepmother’s famous edict, that if only Cinderella might complete her chores (which in the Grimms version especially are truly Sisyphean tasks), she can attend the ball.

Cinderella is a character desperately in need of light and warmth, vitality and emotional safety (which is to say: the luminaries) and Saturn presses on her again and again, denying.

Until a wish. A prayer. A spell spoken on the air that Mercury carries off into the aether, facilitating divine intervention. I wish I could go to the ball. I wish for a reprieve from the drudgery of my life.

The Saturnian has been used in such excess and with such abuse and cruelty that, hearing this mercurial plea, Jupiter must intervene to level the playing field.

Enter the fairy godmother of Perrault and Disney and Rodgers & Hammerstein, a wish-granting benevolent figure who is, of course, Jupiter. (See also the wise artist and scientist and cunning man that is Leonardo da Vinci in Ever After.) It’s notable that Jupiter exalts in the moon’s sign of Cancer, which intrinsically links the lunar and Jupiterian, given that in the Grimms, the tree at the mother’s grave bestows dresses and jewels on Cinderella. And the lunar and Jupiterian are linked in the stories even where the mother’s grave is not explicitly present, because guess what planet rules glass and pumpkins? The moon, of course.

Jupiter is that which is expansive and lucky. Jupiter is not always inherently lucky, mind, but sudden windfalls and good fortune and unexpected opportunity all live in this realm. Remember that Jupiter is not unmitigated good — consider the Saturnian curfew of midnight the fairy godmother gives Cinderella (in the sense that it’s ~the terms of the deal~, Mercury is here, too). But still: Jupiter opens up that which did not seem possible.

The song “Impossible/It’s Possible” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical is one of the most deeply Jupiterian songs I’ve ever heard. It taps into those themes of possibility and belief and hope that are so quintessentially that big gas giant in the sky.

It’s no surprise that as this tale progresses, we move from the malefic oppression of the luminaries towards the possibility presented by the benefics, which is to say Venus and Jupiter (a journey facilitated by our pal Mercury).

For those who’ve been wondering when Venus would show up, it’s here as wish fulfillment towards the end of Act II: Cinderella goes to the ball. Venus is the ball itself: the glamour and the gown, the music and the dancing, the Disney “love at first sight.” Cinderella flies on Mercury’s wings and lands here in the room of all that she desires: a night of pleasure, a night free from constriction, which is to say, a night of Venus. Art and relationship and flirtation and joy. In the sense that the prince is an object of love or desire, he also belongs to the realm of Venus. This can be as saccharine as “Ten Minutes Ago” or as complicated as the Grimms’ three-day festival that Cinderella attends, in which the prince tries to ensnare the girl who runs away every night by spreading pitch on the stairs (hence: the shoe getting left behind).

But the arrival of the Venusian is not an automatic “happily ever after” — in Cinderella or in life. This tale is embedded in solar, lunar, and Saturnian themes, and so we must address the luminary deficit caused by malefic oppression before fully receiving Venus’s reward. There is, in many of these tales, a public humiliation of Cinderella’s hopes: in Disney, prior to the arrival of the fairy godmother, the stepsisters literally rip the ballgown she made off of her. Ever After’s treatment of this is especially devastating — the stepmother unmasks Danielle at the ball itself, in front of the King and Queen and courtiers and, of course, the prince, who, feeling betrayed, rejects her. Humiliation, rejection: both very Saturn.

Saturn’s oppression continues after the ball in nearly every tale. The prince comes looking for the woman with the glass slipper, but Disney’s Lady Tremaine locks Cinderella in her room: the literal confinement of a Saturn experience (in the sense that she is being hidden and unseen in a forgotten part of the house, this also has 12th house themes). In Ever After, Danielle is literally sold away as a slave to the cruel man who has been secretly buying up her family’s heirlooms.

All ends happily, eventually. The prince discovers that Cinderella is the woman he danced with and proposes immediately. In the case of Ever After, he comes to rescue Danielle from the barbaric con man only to find that she has already freed herself. tl;dr: they wed.

It would be easy to call the ending of the tale Venusian for the fact that it comes with a wedding, but that would be an oversimplification. Yes, weddings and romance are the domain of Venus, but importantly, this story ends with a restoration and elevation of Cinderella (or Danielle’s) title and station. Here, we see Saturn Restored as, through wedding royalty, our heroine now takes responsibility for so much more than her household chores. We see her treated with dignity and respect — two deeply Saturnian virtues.

And we also see Saturn dole out some punishment to the stepmother and stepsisters. While the OG Disney essentially has Cinderella forgive and forget, the direct-to-video Cinderella 3, like Ever After, shows them demoted to scullery maids, losing their title and station and living out the punishment they had once unjustly given. Mars joins in the punishment, too: not enough in the Grimms for the stepsisters to have maimed themselves, cutting off heels and toes to fit into a shoe that wasn’t theirs, but we also see birds peck the eyes out of the stepmother and stepsisters at the wedding. Pecking out, maiming: the slice and dice of Mars’s knives is also at work.

The old Cinderella stories come with a side of revenge and dare I say justice. Disney’s forgiveness-oriented “Happily Ever After” is the newest intervention in the modern fairy tale, and in eliding the malefic, we lose some of the depth.

In Cinderella, the lessons of Saturn come alongside the sun and moon; the punishments of Mars alongside the boons of Venus.

Stay tuned to the Fairy Tale Astrology series, which will have a new installment in December!