Fairy Tales: On the Wing 3 🧚 Western Canada

The Grim Brothers

The Brothers from Göttingen

Slowly, subtly, Antonio realized that he wanted to become the Prince of Darkness. He was taught by his English professors that this Prince was a myth, a human construction. But he found the myth irresistible. Perhaps it wasn’t a myth at all. And perhaps he was the Prince, in a new body but with the same old Rebel deep down inside. He would find out.

Antonio did know, however, that it would be easy to pass for a character from an ancient religious story. Humans were so mesmerized by these stories that they believed almost anything people said in relation to them. They didn’t understand the most basic infractions, yet they believed Moses parted a sea, Elijah raised the dead, and Jesus walked on water. The only way any of that was likely to have happened was if some Vicinese messed with their Ancient World. Yet the Vicinese had sworn not to interfere on Earth before the humans had reached their Age of Science, which the Intergalactic Council set at 1500 AD. The only aliens who would have happily interfered were the Frozen Skiffers, but the last thing they would have done is talk about God or raise people from the dead. If the man called Jesus was in fact a rebel Vicinese, the creature who offered him the world must have been Fallarian.

Two things suggested to Antonio that humans would believe him to be a great Magus, perhaps even the Devil himself: 1. humans were spellbound by the supernatural, and 2. humans were so technologically backward that even the simplest of Fallarian infractions would seem like Black Magic to them.

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Antonio first needed to establish his credentials. He did this by completing an M.A. at the University of Calgary, a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, and then publishing a book on German fairy tales. The book was a joy to write, since no other human story captured the Fallarian ethos of anarchy and natural selection better than the stories of the Grimm Brothers from Göttingen.

In his book Antonio argued that while Disney made everything turn out happily ever after, the Grimm Brothers didn’t indulge in this sugary Vicinese type of ending. Antonio mocked the storybook morality of what humans called philanthropy and altruism. In a highly satirical style, which nevertheless contained all the scholarly paraphernalia and four-line sentences academia required, he argued that the Grimm Brothers had made an invaluable contribution to world culture: they had unleashed the metaphysical terrors hidden beneath the hypocrisy of manners, philanthropy, and anti-trust laws.

Antonio began by noting that previous to the Grimm Era (which Antonio placed after the Age of Collapsing Reason and during the Age of Deep Romantic Chasms) life was a simple affair. The human ego was not yet unacquainted with the full power of the id. In this early period, women were forced to wear iron chastity belts, and boys and girls still slept soundly with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. This was a precarious situation, for it left the women without a key to their own depravity, and it left the little ones vulnerable to the marauding spirits drifting in the subatomic wasteland around them. In this perilous world, djinns from The Frozen Skiff could rise up from the earth in a swirl of icy dust. As quickly as it took for the mothers to be distracted by the biceps of a construction worker, the frozen djinns could sweep the children off their teeter-totters and into a white van.

Antonio argued that the Grimm Brothers were merely warning the youth of the nation to be streetwise about these things. At the very least, they ought to carry some sort of weapon (at least a taser) into the dark and dangerous forest of the playground. As for the mothers, Antonio suggested that they buy a pair of metal cutters and plead the Fifth Amendment.

Antonio also argued that the Grimm Brothers were the happy products of their environment: their native town of Göttingen was less than 50 miles north of Frankfurt, where in 1587 the first Faustus legend was published. As a result, the Brothers were influenced by the finest strain of philosophy that Germany had to offer: the bargaining of one’s worthless soul (that didn’t weigh so much as a pea) for all sorts of power and glory.

The Germans were to be admired because they weren’t constrained by conventional notions of morality. They were more than willing to strike bargains with the Devil. Faust, Nietzsche, Hitler — such masters of negotiation! The Grimm Brothers merely put all this abstruse German theology into a form that the wunderkind could use.

The Grimm parables also instilled in the little ones a deep and abiding respect for what Antonio called The Ten Sacred Principles of Terror: 1) Fear is not a psychological state, but a real thing; don’t fool yourself, it’s out there; 2) Horror starts with the suspicion that your parents are feeding you exact laboratory doses of pablum; 3) Increments of terror are all the more effective when they can neither be felt nor measured by forensic experts; 4) Psychotic episodes are twice as unnerving when alternated with moments when your parents seem to exhibit genuine affection; 5) The impact of a ghost story is magnified by campfire or the sulphurous glow of a burning Barbie; 6) The ghost of an evil grandmother can be invoked without the help of vampire bats or Ouija boards; 7) All nightmares correspond to real dimensions to be experienced after death; 8) God and the Devil are in a dual that isn’t just happening in the fifth dimension; 9) The universe is a big game of dice; 10) The Devil has them loaded.

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By the time Antonio was hired as a full professor at The University of Calgary he had figured out a way to get back at the old man in the apple orchard. The same tyrant who bit into the apple and then forbade everybody else to take a bite.

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Next: 🧚 On the Wing 4: Quest

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