- Bluebeard (France, Charles Perrault).
- King Bluebeard (Germany).
- Don Firriulieddu (Italy).
- The Little Boy and His Dogs (African-American, Joel Chandler Harris).
- Blue-Beard (North Carolina, USA).
- The Brahman Girl That Married a Tiger (India)
These stories about Blue Beard are from several countries; France, Germany, Italy, the US and India. Basically the story starts with a failed magician who tries to woo some sisters. The older sisters based on intuition and gut don't trust him but the youngest who is the naive and innocent starts to say his beard isn't that blue. After a lavish outing the youngest agrees to marry him and goes off to live in a huge palace. Blue Beard leaves for a few days and tells his young bride to invite her sisters over to keep her company while he is away. He instructs her to take the keys to the hundreds of rooms in the palace all except one she is forbidden to go into. She tells her sisters that they can explore all the grand rooms of the palace except one, immediately her sisters seek to find the forbidden room. Upon finding it the youngest sister opens it with the key and is horrified to see the bloodied, butchered bodies of Blue Beards other wives. In shock she drops the key on the bloodied floor and discovers the key starts to bleed and won't stop, she then hides the key and pretends to have lost it. When Blue Beard returns he asks for his keys back and notices the key to the forbidden room is missing. In a rage he figures out that his young bride has discovered his secret so he tells her she is next. In an effort to buy some time she asks that she go to her room to say her prayers before he takes her life-no longer naieve she becomes cunning. He agrees and gives her thirty minutes. While in her room she calls out to her sisters if they see her brothers coming, they reply back that they see nothing, she asks again and they report that they now see a devils wind blowing in the dust, finally her brothers are in the courtyard and then they rush up the stairs just in time to plunge their swords into Blue Beard killing him.
These stories hundreds of years old are still applicable today. In society it is often young girls and boys who are prey. Intuition and curiosity was present in the older sisters they were her eyes, had they not been curious their youngest sister would have had a similar fate. Historically when men are curious the descriptive words used are much more positive like "insightful" when a woman is curious the words used to describe her tend to be demeaning such as "nosey". The youngest sister now wiser draws an internal masculine energy to her side in that of her brothers, who possess the tradition of "aggression and rage" normally bred out of women. Young girls are taught from an early stage to "be nice" causing them to override their intuition. The predator in the tale rather than empowering the light of the feminine force choses to extinguish it.
When familiar social customs can cloud ones judgement always listen to your gut, that voice or feeling in the stomach that tells you in your core that something is wrong, that this person is not whom they appear to be, listen and rage if you must.
