Long before I knew anything about Pacts, and Lucifer, I learned about the Devil’s Bride’s fate from old fairy tales as a child.
It usually goes like this…
A young girl who is either very ambitious about her worldly aspirations, or quite naive and romantic, speaks a wish. She wants to marry a Baron, or better yet, a Duke. Not just an ordinary Joe Schmo. Her aspirations are higher! Or at least, her romantic dreams. Silly nonsense girl would say.
Some supernatural power hears her.
She is soon approached by a suspicious suitor of alleged fame and fortune. The Devil is usually described as tall, dark and handsome, and foreign. Nobody knows him around here, but sure the he must be a landlord of some wealthy place, being dressed like that with slick manners… a place where he promises to take her with him, should she take up his proposal.
Of course, she always does, and this is where the fairy tales vary considerably about what happens next.
In many tales, the girl has a sister who is nothing like her. Where one is ambitious and too worldly, the other one is modest and humble. Where one of them is romantic and naive, the other is down-to-earth and wastes no time in silly fantasies. Whatever the case, when the wish is spoken, it is her sister who gets the right suitor, whereas the girl who didn’t have her wits about her ends up falling for a con that the Devil pulls. She ends up miserably, sometimes literally driven into hell in a black carriage by Lucifer himself, never to be seen again.
For that is the rich place where the Duke resides – in Hell, and it’s a place nobody has returned from. So, unless you want to go, and see for yourself, the folk wisdom exhorts you to know your place in life, and not ask for too much out of naivete or greed.
Or should you.
Another tale speaks of three sisters who engage in silly banter, swearing oaths and making wishes about the kind of prospects they wish for themselves. It spirals into a betting game, where each tries to outdo her sister’s folly. So when the oldest asks for the cook, who would bring her sweet pies every day, her sister asks for the gardener who would give her flowers, and they both laugh until the youngest one shocks them both by saying she’d marry the Duke himself. They shoo her into silence, suddenly afraid that somebody might have overheard their daring speech.
Somebody has overheard them indeed, and it was the Duke who was watching the girls in secret. The next day the three sisters are summoned to the court, and they are quite afraid. The Duke presents the older two sisters with his royal cook and his gardener, and they accept, knowing that to say otherwise would carry dire consequences for them. Then he confronts the youngest one, who expects to be punished for her audacity, but to the astonishment of everyone, she also gets a proposal. This shocks her sisters to the bone, as well as the royals. They don’t like it, this bold and daring breach of social rules. For it is daring on his part as well, to choose a woman of his liking rather than for her noble status.
His family does not take lightly this offense, and plots to get rid of the new bride. When she is about to give birth to her love child, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law exchange the baby for a wolfling and accuse the bride of abominable acts and witchcraft. As much as he loves her, the Duke cannot bear this and agrees to banish her, sparing her life. In some stories, she is nearly executed for witchcraft, but the supernatural forces that are with her who never intended for this to go bad save her at the last minute, and the truth is revealed, and wrongdoers are punished.
This fairy tale has a more epic version tho, where the disgraced bride is banished, with just one object that she takes with her to remind her of her former glory, a gift that she was allowed to take. She wanders the land experiencing many trials, where supernatural force tests her wits and resolve, sometimes in fairly cruel grotesque ways. She faces all the trials, and ultimately gains everything back, actually saving her husband from some peril that befell him as a punishment for his evil deed. In the grimmest retelling of this story, she must go to beg for him to be released from Hell and nearly doesn’t make it. The supernatural force is always vigilant and makes sure everybody gets what they want plus what they deserve.
In this tale the focus shifts from making deals with the Devil to the human drama of ambition, love, and trust. The supernatural force, for the most part, just watches and lets it all unfold. The story begs many questions. Why would you banish someone you love, for whom you have taken a great deal of risk by standing up for them in the first place? Why would you undergo pain and peril for somebody who betrayed you at your weakest, and sided with your enemies? Does one deserve forgiveness when they have realized the error of their ways, but it is perhaps too late? Can it work out when we overstep the boundaries of our birthright by daring, or is it always bound to end in tragedy for all?
The answer is, of course, love, and yes, it can work. But the path will be long and hard and fraught with peril. They have to first found way to each other, trust, and realize that it’s not about one gesture. There’s forces out there, that we call the Lords of Opposition, who are always embodied, when one is attempting to manifest something out of the ordinary and they will test our resolve.
My personal favorite angle of this story is the jealous stare that the heroine’s sisters give her when they realize that she will get her Duke. How quickly fear spirals into envy, the most human emotion!
Never mind that it was their youngest sister’s innocent audacity that got them the granting of their wish, and elevation on the social ladder, such that they would never pursue on their own. To them, it was all just folly, stuff that you fantasize about but never pursue.
But, as we know, the supernatural force, that is embodied here as a powerful man, is always listening. And perhaps quite literally, the Duke is flawed, and not always just. He can make extraordinary things happen, miracles, but he is still just human. This fairy tale tells us that extraordinary fortunes do happen but when they do they must be balanced out by extraordinary deeds. Most don’t have what it takes and would be wise to stay in their line. It also tells that the real infernal forces that ruin lives are perhaps not so much supernatural, as they are society itself with its self-imposed rules and restrictions.
Also the whole ‘Be careful what you wish for’ element bears further notice. I have had a recurring dream as an adult where I am summoned, formally addressed by the Duke of Hell in a very tense setting, sometimes brought before H.I.M. in chains, as a captive, expecting fully to be punished, and that I can’t escape. As the years went by, the dream changed where I gained more sovereignty in the confrontation with the Prince of This World, but it was still overbearing. It always felt like, ‘I am done. I am finished. He’s gonna kill me now. I should have never done X or Y. Should have never asked for X or Y. This is my end.’
This summoned by the court scene embodies the exact moment where everybody expects that nothing good can happen from here on, but it does. It turns from a near-death adrenaline rush to all your wishes granted. Practitioners of Demonic Magic will feel familiar.
