I went to see Pan’s Labyrinth, the third saving-a-baby movie I’ve seen recently (after Children of Men and Bella). That in itself means something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe just that we are living in a dangerous ecosystem where future generations are threatened as never before.

A labyrinth is an intricate structure of interconnecting passages through which it is difficult to find one's way or, simply, a maze. This aptly describes the film in more ways than one. Despite its horrific, graphic violence, I thought Pan’s Labyrinth was a great film.

Be forewarned—this movie is NOT for children. When my daughter was very little, I used to tell her a Grimm’s fairy tale every night before she went to sleep. I had the book of the original Grimm’s tales and would read one to myself several times, then retell it to my daughter in my own words. I sometimes found myself self-censoring the violence. Oftentimes in folk tales, the punishment fits—or is in equal measure to—the crime. Somehow, I could not bring myself to narrate to my then-three year old daughter that a villainess—even though she deserved it—was boiled in hot oil and then dragged through the streets.

Pan’s Labyrinth does not censor the violence. It is extreme. But, perhaps, no more so than the real violence that is happening all around us in the world.

The movie conflates fairy tales, Greek mythology, archetypes, and Christian iconography to show that belief in a higher power—an alternate reality infusing this world—is what enables one to walk through fire and end up both redeemed and transformed. It also showed the connection between painful reality and the powerful world of imagination. Myth and fairy tales are timeless, showing up in our horoscopes as ancient planets and luminaries that connect, disconnect, progress, and tell us who we are, show us our cosmic destiny—although we still get to make choices.

Pan’s Labyrinth is framed as a fairy tale about a heavenly princess who is confined to an earthly body and needs to get back “home.” To succeed, she must pass several tests. The evil stepfather in this tale is a Spanish army captain who has essentially imprisoned his pregnant wife (so he can manage her birth) and stepdaughter. He is himself a prisoner of Saturnine time and reality, always checking his watch (which has a cracked glass). His first words in the movie are, “They are 15 minutes late.” He tries to beat the “truth” out of others, as though truth is something people need to be tortured to reveal.

The movie is a plea for a return to enchantment, imagination, and supernatural belief. It made me grateful for astrology, my own faith in an orderly cosmos with roots stretching back to people’s first contemplations of the planets and stars. The movie did not invoke astrology, but in its call to the power of imagination, it made me think of how astrology is criticized in much the same way the girl/princess in the movie was chastised for still believing in fairy tales (not that astrology is a fairy tale). Her belief, to which she stubbornly and bravely clung because she knew without question it was true, was her salvation.

The adult characters did not get it. They had completely succumbed to the mistaken notion that there was nothing beyond time, nothing timeless, no other reality but this. They were characters in a fairy tale, and did not even know it. They saw nothing luminous and magical and mythically heroic in their existence.

The adult characters in the movie were like stars without meaning—lost, glittering, cold, far away, and disconnected.

We live in an age of the exaltation of scientific reason. Astrology reawakens a sense of cosmic beauty, metaphysical acceptance, and recognition of—in Hamlet’s words—“a divinity that shapes our ends, roughhew them how we will.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, these supposedly inordinate beliefs were shown to be the literal truth.

There is an image near the end of the movie (the movie speaks in imagery): a full Moon coursing over the heavenly night sky, its luminous round beauty reflected in the rain puddles of a meditation labyrinth.

See also: Zodiac Movie and Scorpionic America; Ratatouille and Impossible Dreams