Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (11 page)

And since the dreaming psyche compensates for, among other things, that which the ego will not or cannot acknowledge, a woman’s dreams during such a struggle will be filled, compensatorily, with chases, dead ends, cars that will not start, incomplete pregnancies, and other symbols which image life not going forward, In her guts a woman knows there is a deadliness in being the too-sweet self for too long.

So loosening our hold on the glowing archetype of the ever- sweet and too-good mother of the psyche is the first step. We are off the teat and learning to hunt. There is a wild mother waiting to teach us. But in the meantime the second task is to hold on to the doll while we learn its uses.

The Second Task—Exposing the Crude Shadow

In this part of the tale, the “bad-rotten” stepfamily
⁵
marches into Vasalisa’s world and begins to make her life miserable. The tasks of this time are:
Learning even more mindfully to let go of the overly positive mother
.
Finding that being good, being sweet, being nice will not cause life to sing. (Vasalisa becomes a slave,
but it does not help.) Experiencing directly one's own shadow nature, particularly the exclusionary, jealous, and exploitative aspects of self (the stepmother and stepsisters). Acknowledging these unequivocally. Making the best relationship one can with the worst parts of oneself. Letting the pressure build between who one is taught to be and who one really is. Ultimately working toward letting the old self die and the new intuitive self be born.

The stepmother and stepsisters represent the undeveloped but provocatively cruel elements of the psyche. They are shadow elements, meaning aspects of oneself which are considered by the ego to be undesirable or not useful and are therefore relegated to the dark. On one hand, shadow material can be quite positive, for often a woman's gifts are pushed into the dark, hidden there and waiting to be discovered. On the other hand, negative shadow material—that which busily kills off or detains all new life—can also be turned to one’s use, as we shall see. When it erupts, and we finally identify its aspects and sources, we are made all the stronger and wiser.
In this stage of initiation, a woman is harassed by the petty demands of her psyche which exhort her to comply with whatever anyone wishes. Compliance causes a shocking realization that must be registered by all women. That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.
Vasalisa is disenfranchised, for she inherits and is inherited by a family that cannot understand or appreciate her. As far as they’re concerned, she is unnecessary. They hate and revile her. They treat her as The Stranger, the untrustworthy one. In fairy tales, the role of the stranger or the outcast is usually played by the one who is most deeply connected to the knowing nature.

The stepmother and stepsisters can be understood as creatures set into a woman's psyche by the culture to which a woman belongs. The stepfamily in the psyche is different from the “soul family,” for it is of the superego, that aspect of psyche which is structured according to each particular society’s expectations—healthy or not—for women. These cultural—that is, superego-overlays and injunctions, are not experienced by women

emanating
from
the soul-Sell
psyche, but are felt as
if
they come
from
“out there,"
from some other
source which is not innate. The
cultural/superego overlays can be
very positive or they can be very
detrimental.

Vasalisa’s stepfamily is an intra-psychic ganglia which pinches off the nerve to life's vitality. They enter as a chorus of unredeemed hags who taunt, “You can’t do it. You’re not good enough. You’re not bold enough. You’re stupid, insipid, vacant. You don’t have time. You're only good for simple things. You’re only allowed to do this much and no more. Give up while you’re ahead.” As Vasalisa is not yet fully conscious of her powers, she allows this evil crimp in her lifeline. In order for her to regain her life, something different, something life-giving must occur.

The same is true for us. We can see in the story that Vasalisa’s intuition into what is happening around her is quite flimsy, and that the father of the psyche doesn’t notice the hostile environment either, he is also too-good and has no intuitive development himself. It is interesting to note that daughters who have naive fathers often take far longer to awaken.

We too are pinched off when the stepfamily within us and/or surrounding us tells us we are not much to begin with and insists we focus on our shortcomings, rather than perceiving the cruelty whirling around us—be it emanating from within our psyches or from without in the culture. However, to see into or through something requires intuition and also the strength to stand upon what one sees. Like Vasalisa we may try to be nice when we ought to be knowing. We may have been taught to set aside acute insight in order to get along. However, the reward for simply being nice
⁶
in oppressive circumstances is to be mistreated all the more. Although a woman feels that if she is herself she will alienate others, it is just this psychic tension that is needed in order to make soul and to create change.

So the stepmother and stepsisters scheme to send Vasalisa away. They secretly plot, “Go into the forest, Vasalisa, go to Baba Yaga, and if you survive, ha ha—which you won’t—then we might accept you ” This is a very critical idea because many women are stuck halfway through this initiation process—sort of hanging half in and half out of the hoop. Although there is a

natural predator in the psyche, one who says, “Die!” and “Bah!” and “Why don’t you give up?” on a rather automatic basis, the culture in which a woman lives, and the family in which she was raised, can painfully exacerbate that natural but moderate naysaying aspect in the psyche.

For instance, women who are raised in families that are not accepting of their gifts often set off on tremendously big quests— over and over, and they do not know why. They feel they must have three Ph.D,s or that they have to hang upside down from Mount Everest, or that they must execute all manner of dangerous, time-consuming, and money-eating endeavors to try to prove to their families that they have worth. “Now will you accept me? No? Okay (sigh), watch this.” The stepfamily ganglia of course belongs to us by whichever means we received it, and it is our work to deal with it in an empowered manner. However, we can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one’s worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless, and as we shall see, in fact impedes the initiation.

Vasalisa does the everyday chores without complaint. To submit without complaint is heroic-seeming, but in fact causes more and more pressure and conflict between the two oppositional natures, one too-good and the other too-demanding. Like the conflict between being overadaptive and being oneself, this pressure builds to a good end. A woman who is tom between these two is in a good way, but she must take the next steps.

In the story, the stepwomen so squeeze the burgeoning psyche that through their machinations the fire goes out. At this point a woman begins to lose her psychic bearings. She may feel cold, alone, and willing to do anything to bring back the light again. This is just the jolt the too-nice woman needs in order to continue her induction into her own power. One might say that Vasalisa has to meet the Great Wild Hag because she needs a good scare. We have to leave the chorus of detractors and plunge into the woods. There is no way to both stay and go.

Vasalisa, like us, needs some guiding light that will differentiate for her what is good for her and what is not She cannot develop by standing around being everyone’s bootjack. Women who try to make their deeper feelings invisible are deadening

themselves. The fire goes out. It is a painful form of suspended animation.

Conversely, and perhaps somewhat perversely, when the fire is put out, it helps to snap Vasalisa out of her submission. It causes her to die to an old way of life and to step with shivers into a new life, one which is based on an older, wiser kind of inner knowing.

The Third Task—Navigating in the Dark

In this part of the tale, the dead mother’s legacy—the doll- guides Vasalisa through the dark to the house of Baba Yaga. These are the psychic tasks of this time:
Consenting to venture into the locus of deep initiation (entering the forest), and beginning to experience the new and dangerous-feeling
numen
of being in one’s intuitive power. Learning to develop sensitivity as regards direction to the mysterious unconscious and relying solely on one’s inner senses. Learning the way back home to the Wild Mother (heeding the doll’s directions). Learning to feed intuition (feeding the doll). Letting the frail know-nothing maiden die even more. Shifting power to the doll, i.e., intuition.

Vasalisa’s doll is from the provisions of the Old Wild Mother. Dolls are one of the symbolic treasures of the instinctual nature. In Vasalisa’s case, the doll represents
la vidacita
, the little instinctual life force that is both fierce and enduring. No matter what mess we are in, it lives out a life hidden within us.

For centuries humans have felt that dolls emanate both a holiness and
mana
¹
—an awesome and compelling presence which acts upon persons, changing them spiritually. For instance, among rustic healers, the mandrake root is praised for its resemblance to the human body, with arms and legs of root, and a gnarl for a head.

It is said to be charged with great spiritual power. Dolls are believed to be infused with life by their makers. Some are used in rites, ritual, hoodoo, love spells, and general mischief. When I lived among the
Cuna
in the isles off Panama, their small wooden figures were used as markers of authority to remind one of one’s own power.

Museums throughout the world are filled to overflowing with idols and figurines made of clay, wood, and metals. The figurines

from Paleolithic and Neolithic times are dolls. Art galleries are filled with dolls. In modem art, Segal’s life-size gauze-wrapped mummies are dolls. Ethnic dolls fill railway gift shops and the gas stations on major interstates. Among royalty, dolls have been given as gifts since ancient times as tokens of goodwill. In rustic churches throughout the world there are saint-dolls. The saint-dolls are not only bathed on a regular basis and dressed in handmade clothing, but also “taken for walks” so that they might see the conditions of the fields and of the people, and therefore intercede with heaven in the humans
⁵
behalf.

The
doll is the symbolic
homunculi
, little life.
⁸
It is the symbol
of
what lies buried in humans that is numinous. It is a small and
glowing
facsimile of the original Self. Superficially, it is just a
doll. But
inversely, it represents a little piece of soul that carries all
the
knowledge of the larger soul-Self . In the doll is the voice, in
diminutive,
of old
La Que Sabe
, The One Who Knows.

The doll is related to the symbols of leprechaun, elf, pixie, fairy, and dwarf. In fairy tales these represent a deep throb of wis
dom
within the culture of the psyche. They are those creatures which
go
on with the canny and interior work, who are tireless. The psyche works even when we sleep, most especially when we
sleep,
even when we are not fully conscious of what we are
enacting.

In
this way the doll represents the inner spirit of us as women;
the voice of inner
reason, inner knowing, and inner consciousness.
The
doll is like the little bird in fairy tales who appears and whis
pers in
the heroine’s ear, the one who reveals the hidden enemy
and what to
do about it all. This is the wisdom of the
homunculus
,
the small being
within. It is our helper which is not seeable, per se,
but which is
always accessible.

There is no greater blessing a mother can give her daughter than a reliable sense of the veracity of her own intuition. Intuition is handed from parent to child in the simplest ways: “You have good judgment. What do you think lies hidden behind all this?” Rather than defining intuition as some unreasoned faulty quirk, it is defined as truly the soul-voice speaking. Intuition senses the directions to go in for most benefit. It is self-preserving, has a grasp of

underlying motive and intention, and it chooses what will cause the least amount of fragmenting in the psyche.

The process is similar in the fairy tale. Vasalisa’s mother has set an enormous boon on her daughter by binding the doll and Vasalisa to one another. Being bound to one’s intuition promotes a confident reliance on it, no matter what. It changes a woman’s guiding attitude from “what will be, will be” to “let me see all there is to see.”

What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can see through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even pre- cognitive animal
'
¹
consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.

So now Vasalisa is on her way to gain an ember to rekindle the fire. She is in the dark, in the wilds, and can do nothing
but
listen to the inner voice coming from the doll. She is learning to rely on that relationship, and she is learning yet one
more thing—she learns to feed th
e doll.

What does one feed intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environs? One feeds it life—one feeds it life by listening to it. What good is a voice without an ear to receive it? What good is a woman in the wilds of megatropolis or daily life unless she can hear and depend upon the voice of
La
Que
Sabe
, The One Who Knows?

I’ve heard women say it, if not a hundred times, then a thousand times: “I knew I should have listened to my intuition. I sensed that I should/should not have done such and such, but I didn’t listen.” We feed the deep intuitive self by listening to it and acting upon its advice. It is a personage in its own right, a magical dollish-sized being which inhabits the psychic land of the interior woman. In this way it is like the muscles in the body. If a muscle is not used, eventually it withers. Intuition is exactly like that: without food, without employment, it atrophies.

The feeding of the doll is an essential cycle of the Wild Woman archetype—she who is the keeper of hidden treasures. Vasalisa feeds the doll in two ways, first with a bit of bread—a bit of life for

this new psychic venture, and secondly by finding her way to the Old Wild Mother, the Baba Yaga. By listening to the doll—at every turn and every fork in the road—the doll indicates which way is “home/*

The relationship between the doll and Vasalisa symbolizes a form of empathic magic between a woman and her intuition. This is the thing that must be handed down from woman to woman, this blessed binding, testing, and feeding of intuition. We, like Vasalisa, strengthen our bond with our intuitive nature by listening inwardly at every turn in the road. “Should I go this way, or this way? Should I stay or go? Should I resist or be flexible? Should I run away or toward? Is this person, event, venture true or false?”

The breaking of the bond between a woman and her wildish intuition is often misunderstood as the intuition itself being broken. This is not the fact. It is not intuition which is broken, but rather the matrilineal blessing on intuition, the handing down of intuitive reliance between a woman and all females of her lines who have gone before her—it is that long river of women that has been dammed.
¹⁰
A woman’s grasp of her intuitive wisdom may be weak as a result,
but
with exercise it will come back and become fully manifested.
¹¹

The dolls serve as talismans. Talismans are reminders of what is felt but not seen, what is so, but is not immediately obvious. The talismanic
numen
of the image of the doll reminds us, tells us, sees ahead for us. This intuitive function belongs to all women. It is a massive and fundamental receptivity. Not receptivity as once touted in classical psychology, that is, as a passive vessel. But receptivity as in possessing immediate access to a profound wisdom that reaches down into women’s very bones.
¹²

The Fourth Task—Facing the Wild Hag

In this part of the tale, Vasalisa meets the Wild Hag face-to-face. The tasks of this meeting are these:
Being able to stand the face of the fearsome Wild Goddess without wavering; that is, facing the imago of the fierce mother (meeting up with the Baba Yaga). Familiarizing oneself with the arcane, the odd, the “otherness”
of the wild (residing at Baba Yaga's house for a while). Bringing some if her values into our lives
,
thereby becoming ourselves a little tkid in a goodly way (eating her food). Learning to face great power—in others
,
and subsequently one
^f
s
own power. Letting the frail and
too-sweet child die back even further.

Baba Yaga lives in a house squatting on chicken legs. It whirls and spins when it has a mind to. In dreams, the symbol of house comments on the organization of the psychic space a person inhabits, both consciously and unconsciously. Ironically, if this story were a compensatory dream, the eccentric house would infer that the subject, in this case Vasalisa, is too unremarkable, too middle-of-the-road, and needs to twirl and whirl in order to find out what it’s like to dance like a crazy chicken once in a while.

Now we can see that the Yaga’s house is of the instinctual world and that Vasalisa needs more of this element in her personality. This chicken-legged house walks about, twirls even, in some hippity-hop dance. This house is alive, bursting with enthusiasm, with joyous life. These attributes are the main fundaments of the archetypal psyche of Wild Woman; a joyous and wild life force, where houses dance, where inanimates such as mortars fly like birds, where the old woman can make magic, where nothing is what it seems, but for the most part, is far better than it seemed to begin with.

Vasalisa began with what we might call a flattened-out mundane personality. It is just this “hyper-normalcy” that creeps up on as till we have a routine life, and a lifeless life without our really meaning to. This encourages the neglect of intuition
¹³
which in turn produces lack of light in the psyche. We must do something then, we must set out into the woods, go find the scary woman, or else one day as we are nodding down the street a manhole cover will snap open and
whoosh
we will be snatched by some unconscious thing that will throw us about like a rag—joyously or otherwise, mostly otherwise, but for good outcome.
¹⁴

The giving of the intuitive doll by the original sweet mother is incomplete without the task-giving and testing done by the Old Wild One. Baba Yaga is the marrow of the instinctive and integrated psyche. We know this from her knowledge of all that has gone before. “Oh yes,” she says when Vasalisa arrives, “I know of you and your people.” Further, as in her other incarnations as the Mother of Days and
Mother Nyx
(Mother Night,
¹⁵
a Life/Death/ Life Goddess), old Baba Yaga is the keeper of the sky and earth beings: Day, Rising Sun, and Night. She calls them “my Day, my Night”