Full moon in Aries
a fairytale about care and miserliness, a tarot spread, help with interpretation
There’s an old fairytale about a cobbler and a tailor who set out together on a long journey through a gnarled and fearsome wood. They are both hoping to reach a faraway kingdom to try their hand at making shoes and clothes for the king and his court, improving their own impoverished fortunes in the process. As the story goes (and as is retold by Marie Louise von Franz), the two men couldn’t be more perfect opposites of each other. Where the tailor is jovial, impulsive, and bumbling through life on careless joy and good faith, the cobbler remains a sullen and meticulous planner who strategizes his every move, grumbling as he keeps a close eye on the scales of risk and benefit.
The cobbler prepares for the woodland trek by weighing down his pack with food and water aplenty. The tailor travels much more lightly—perhaps foolishly so—deciding he’ll bring only enough so that he feels unhindered in his happy amble towards their joint destination. The journey through the forest will take seven days; during the first two days, the two walk alongside each other amicably enough. The tailor chatters happily and makes jokes, perhaps about the money and luck that awaits them in the king’s city. The cobbler bites his tongue and rolls his eyes, being careful to ration his bread each day.
Because this is a fairytale, it doesn’t take too long for the plot to arrive at the “rule of three”—the three events that befall, bewitch, or otherwise change the fates of the story’s characters. On the third day, the two travelers find themselves deep in the woods and yes, as you might have suspected, the tailor has run out of food. The first of the three events comes to pass: “Please, friend, would you share your portion with me?” the tailor asks the cobbler, who at first takes no pity on his companion. But after a moment of calculating realization, he agrees: “Yes, on second thought, I will give you some of my bread,” the cobbler says. “But only if you allow me to cut out one of your eyes.”
Horrified at such a price but foresighted enough to know he will die without food, the cobbler mulls over his terrible predicament for two more days, finally accepting the painful bargain on the fifth day. The tailor receives the bread, the cobbler skewers the tailor’s eye like a bit of meat, and the tailor weeps briefly over his misfortune. Still, as the two begin again on the path through the woods, the tailor’s inherent trust in the nature of his journey helps to reassure him about his future: I may have lost my eye, but my belly is full, and I only need one good one, after all, to see my stitches well enough to make beautiful clothes at court.
But by the seventh day, the tailor finds himself out of bread again, fatigue and pain rendering him unable to walk. The second of three events passes much like the first: The tailor begs the cobbler to spare more of his provisions, and the cobbler replies, “Only if you give me your other eye.” By this point, I suppose, the cobbler’s scheming mind has realized that if the tailor shows up to the kingdom blind—or better yet dies before he can arrive at all—the cobbler will be the sole maker to seek the king’s riches and attention, with no competition for services at all. The envious cobbler thinks perhaps this is his chance to to surpass his jovial friend in luck and wealth, and that all his years of careful plotting and hoarding have brought him to this precipitous moment. The tailor weeps again at the cobbler’s request, knowing what it will mean to lose both eyes, and yet he acquiesces. His embrace of any chance at life outweighs the fear of losing his sight.
The deed is done, and the cobbler leads the blind tailor to a rock at the foot of a forest gallows.1 Two rotting bodies sway upside down in the breeze as the cobbler helps the tailor to sit upon the rock, handing him the bit of bread and a lone walking stick. After ensuring his companion well and truly cannot follow him, the cobbler hastily departs for the king’s city alone, fully expecting his companion to die in the woods, much like the corpses hanging above the spot where the poor tailor now sits.
Watching from their perch on the gallows, some crows consider the sorry state of the tailor below them, and it is through their magical intervention that the third of “the rule of three” comes to pass. Deciding to help our tailor, the crows2 begin to talk amongst themselves, knowing the naturally curious man is listening. Anyone who allows the night’s dew to drip from the gallows onto their eyes, washing them, will have their sight restored, one crow tells the other. Trusting the birds, the tailor follows their direction, rubbing the evening moistness into his wounds. At morning’s first light, his eyes reassemble themselves, human organs as weird, blessed, fast-growing fruit! He can see! As he makes his way through the forest’s final pits and brambles, he find animals to eat, but each begs him to have mercy and spare their lives instead.
“Yes, I will help you,” he says to each, a colt, a stork, a duck, performing the arduous task each sets out for him, though by this point he is surely starving to death. He is committed to helping them in a spirit of freely given generosity, something doubly bestowed upon the tailor himself—both through his own nature and through the gift of generosity passed on to him by the crows.
Perhaps you can guess the ending by now: These animals aid the tailor once he arrives at the kingdom, helping him to curry good favor with the king as well as reveal the cobbler’s betrayal. The tailor ends up a favorite of the court, betrothed to the king’s daughter. The cobbler ends up beheaded.
*
I’ve never much liked the ending of this fairytale, and sometimes I like to read it for its opposite meaning: The tailor is foolish and impulsive, after all, unable to see the truth of the cobbler’s disdainful regard for him. This inability to see what lies at the center of or beneath his relationship plays a role in bringing violence down upon both men, even if it is ultimately the cobbler’s hatred that actively doles out the destruction. When I first read the tale in von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairytales, I spent most of January 2021 committing it to memory and retelling it to myself as I learned how to care for post-mastectomy keloid scars, the new implants on my chest. I knew the tailor in myself. I knew the cobbler in me, too. I knew which man was singing his song more loudly on which day, based on how I rubbed the scar cream into my chest, before I even opened my mouth to interact with others.
On this Aries Full Moon, I am ruminating on the tailor, who seems to channel its energy well for me. The tailor’s impulsivity gets him into trouble, sure. But his careless good faith and inadvisable generosity also redeem him. They bestow him, in turn, with grace, luck, and an unimpeachable connection to the natural world. And, because this is a fairytale, these qualities also improve his fortune far beyond the lot of the mistrustful, scheming cobbler.
It’s a “moral of the story” antithetical to everything I learned about morality as a kid, which was always attached to hard work, careful plotting, and suspicious self-protection. These are the cobbler’s purview, and though they have their place in the world, they also have their place in its destruction. I have found these cobbler values useful; I have also found how they can sink their claws into me and cause me to sink my claws into everyone else. They show up in my barbed belief that my cancer diagnosis is attached, in a simple cause-and-effect kind of way, to some bad thing I did, or in the idea that good fortune only happens to those who’ve earned it. They show up in similar ways in our culture—in our doubt and dismissal of the Other, in the way we hold up cruel ideas about one-to-one reciprocity as the only foundation for care.
‘The Two Travelers,’ like all good tales, is not a neat story. The tailor suffers greatly for the wisdom of his foolishness, it’s true. But his orientation to the world as a place where we must both freely ask for help when in need as well as freely offer up our own gifts to (human and non-human) others, often at the same time, in the same moment, has had a profound effect on me over the last few years. I’ve come to think of this as the theme of “the good faith journey.” It’s connected to and expands upon the sentiment that writer Michelle Tea discusses in the Modern Tarot. vis-a-vis, her favorite stencil art mural by Seth Tobocman in San Francisco: “YOU DON’T HAVE TO FUCK PEOPLE OVER TO SURVIVE.”
I’d go further and say that survival, in the most robust sense, can’t truly happen without the opposite—caring for others as a gift without conditions, care as embodying a kind of folly, a carelessness about what our culture says an individual needs to succeed at all. Full moons, Aries people, the relationship between the Emperor and the Fool, cardinal fire and elemental air, all of these remind me of this way of being. We can use astrology3 to scare us, to inculcate ourselves into miserly rituals of esotericism, isolation, and suspicion. We can also use it to remind ourselves of mutual reception, as Jeanna Kadlec also did in her newsletter this week, which is less about tit for tat and more about “hey, can you help me with that?” all the while feeling inspired by the fire it takes to ask, the fire it takes to receive.