The Center Cannot Hold: the Swallow Cycle, Tom Thumb, King Arthur, and Ursa Major
An Astrological Analysis
A Zodiacal Swallow Cycle
Tom Thumb’s adventures in being eaten up by beasts, baked into puddings, and snatched up by various beings is best understood as an astrological narrative, like most religions. (This school is generally called Astrotheology or Astrolatry)
Tom Thumb is the Sun going through the signs, just like the 12 Labors of Hercules,
or the solar god Harpocrates enduring his own swallow cycle.
After all this struggle, where does our Hero rest?
His Court Was My Home
Tom Thumb became a Favourite of King Arthur, who himself had a round table of twelve knights. Here is where the vital astrological connection is to be made:
When Rimbaud evokes Tom Thumb, he declares his inn to be Ursa Major, the central axis around which the zodiac spins, the slowest part of the sky.
Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse.
And where is King Arthur’s court?
“King Arthur, the renowned hero of the Mabinogion, typified the Great Bear; as his name, — Arth, bear, and Uthyr, wonderful, — implies in the Welsh language; and the constellation, visibly describing a circle in the North Polar regions of the sky, may possibly have been the true origin of the Son of Pendragon’s famous Round Table, the earliest institution of a military order of knighthood.”
-William Henry Smyth
The Tom Thumb of old legend and Rimbaud’s poetic imagination align perfectly with an astrological analysis of this fairy tale.
Tom Thumb is the “Sol Invictus”, the Sun being swallowed night after night, and rising again day after day, in an endless swallow cycle.
He can only rest where the cycles ceases, at the center, where things are still, at Ursa Major.
God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.
The Dipper stove.