Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (35 page)

Among ethnic groups throughout the world, including many in the circumpolar region and West Africa, it is said that humans are not truly animated until the soul gives birth to the spirit, tenders and nurses it, filling it up with strength. Eventually the soul is believed to retreat to a farther home while the spirit begins its independent life in the world.
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The symbol of seal as a representation of soul is all the more compelling because there is a “docility” about seals, an accessibility well known to those who live near them. Seals have a sort of dogness about them; they are naturally affectionate. A kind of purity radiates from them. But they can also be very quick to react, retreat, or retort if threatened. The soul is like that too. It hovers near. It nurses the spirit It does not run away when it perceives something new or unusual or difficult.

But sometimes, especially when a seal is not used to humans and just lies about in one of those blissful states that seals seem to enter from time to time, she does not anticipate human ways. Like the seal woman in the story, and like the souls of young and/or inexperienced women, she is unaware of the intentions of others and potential harm. And that is always when the sealskin is stolen.

I have come to the sense over the years of working with “capture” and “theft of treasure” motifs, and from analyzing many men and women, that there is in the individuation processes of almost everyone at least a one-time and significant theft Some people characterize it as a theft of their “great opportunity” in life. Others define it as a larceny of love, or a robbing of one’s spirit, a weakening of the sense of self. Some describe it as a distraction, a

break, an interference or interruption of something vital to them: their art, their love, their dream, their hope, their belief in goodness, their development, their honor, their strivings.

Most of the time this major theft creeps up on the person from their blind side. It comes upon women for the same reasons it occurs in this story: because of
naíveté,
poor insight into the motives of others, inexperience in projecting what might happen in the future, not paying attention to all the clues in the environment, and because fate is always weaving lessons into the weft.

People who have been thusly robbed are not bad. They are not wrong. They are not stupid. But they are, in some significant way, inexperienced, or in a kind of psychic slumber. It would be a mistake to attribute such states only to the young. They can exist in anyone, regardless of age, ethnic affiliation, years of schooling, or even good intentions. It is clear that being stolen from most definitely evolves into a mysterious archetypal initiation
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opportunity for those who are caught up in
it...
which is almost everyone.

The process of retrieving the treasure and figuring out how to replenish oneself develops four vital constructs in the psyche. When this dilemma is met head-on, and the descent to the
Rio
Abajo Río
, river beneath the river, is made, it fiercely strengthens our resolve to strive for conscious reclamation. It clarifies, over time, what it is that is most important to us. It fills us up with the need to have a plan for freeing ourselves psychically or otherwise and to enact our newly found wisdom. Finally, and most importantly, it develops our medial nature, that wild and knowing part of psyche that can also traverse the world of soul and the world of humans.

The archetypal core of the “Sealskin, Soulskin” story is extremely valuable, for it gives clear and pithy directions for the exact steps we must take in order to develop and find our way through these tasks. One of the central and most potentially destructive issues women face is that of beginning various psychological initiation processes with initiators who have not completed the process themselves. They have no seasoned persons who know how to proceed. When initiators are incompletely initiated themselves, they omit important aspects of the process without realizing it, and sometimes visit great abuse on the initiate,

for they are working with a fragmentary idea of initiation, one that is often tainted in one way or another.
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At the other end of the spectrum is the woman who has experienced theft, and who is striving for knowledge and mastery of the situation, but who has run out of directions and does not know there is more to practice in order to complete the learning, and so repeats the first stage, that of being stolen from, over and over again. Through whatever circumstances, she has gotten tangled in the reins. Essentially, she is without instruction. Instead of discovering the requirements of a healthy wildish soul, she becomes a casualty of an uncompleted initiation.

Because matrilineal lines of initiation—older women teaching younger women certain psychic facts and procedures of the wild feminine—have been fragmented and broken for so many women and over so many years, it is a blessing to have the archeology of the fairy tale to learn from. What can be derived from those deep templates echoes the innate patterns of women’s most integral psychological processes. In this sense, fairy tales and mythos are initiators; they are the wise ones who teach those who have come after.

So, it is the incompletely initiated or half-initiated women for whom the dynamics in “Sealskin, Soulskin” are most valuable. By knowing all the steps to take to complete the cyclical return to home, even a botched initiation can be untangled, reset, and completed properly. Let us see how this story instructs us to proceed.

Losing One’s Pelt

The development of knowing, as in versions of “Bluebeard,” “Rapunzel,” “Devil’s Midwife,” and “Briar Rose” and others, begins with suffering. This progresses from first being unaware, then tricked in one way or another, and thence finding one’s way to power again, and more so, to depth. The theme of a fateful catching that tests consciousness and ends in a deep knowing is a timeless one in fairy tales with female protagonists. Such tales cany dense instruction to all of us about what our work is if and when we are captured, and how to come back from it with the

ability
pasar
atravez del basque
como una loba
, to slip through the forest like a wolf,
con un ojo agudo
, with a shrewd eye.

“Sealskin, Soulskin” contains a retrograde motif. Sometimes we call such tales “backward stories.” In many fairy tales, a human is enchanted and turned into an animal. But here we have the opposite: a creature led into a human life. The story produces an insight into the structure of the female psyche. The seal maiden, like the wildish nature in women’s psyches, is a mystical combination that is creatural and at the same time able to live among humans in a resourceful manner.

The pelt in this story is not so much an article as the representation of a feeling state and a state of being—one that is cohesive, soulful, and of the wildish female nature. When a woman is in this state, she feels entirely in and of herself instead of out of herself and wondering if she is doing right, acting right, thinking well. Though this state of being “in one’s self’ is one she occasionally loses touch with, the time she has previously spent there sustains her while she is about her work in the world. The return to the wildish state periodically is what replenishes her psychic reserves for her projects, family, relationships, and creative life in the topside world.

Eventually every woman who stays away from her soul-home for too long, tires. This is as it should be. Then she seeks her skin again in order to revive her sense of self and soul, in order to restore her deep-eyed and oceanic knowing. This great cycle of going and returning, going and returning, is reflexive within the instinctual nature of women and is innate to all women for all their lives, from throughout girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, through being a lover, through motherhood, through being a craftswoman, a wisdom-holder, an elderwoman, and beyond. These phases are not necessarily chronological, for mid-age women are often newborn, old women are intense lovers, and little girls know a good deal about cronish enchantment.

Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at risk. The soul- skin vanishes when we fail to pay attention to what we are really doing, and particularly its cost to us.

We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic,
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or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied—about self, family, community, culture, world—and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soulskin as there are women in the world.

The only way to hold on to this essential soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses. But, since no one can consistently maintain acute consciousness, no one can keep the soulskin absolutely
every
moment day and night. But we can keep the theft of it to a bare minimum. We can develop that
ojo agudo
, the shrewd eye that watches the conditions all around and guards our psychic territory accordingly. The “Sealskin, Soulskin” story, however, is about an instance of what we might call aggravated theft. This big theft can, with consciousness, be mediated in the future if we will pay attention to our cycles and the call to take leave and return home.

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creature. We fervently point out how other creatures’ natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not surrounded by the same, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free.

We traditionally compensate for loss of a more serene habitat by taking a vacation or a holiday, which is supposed to be the giving of pleasure to oneself, except a vacation is often anything but We can compensate our workaday dissonance by cutting down on the things we do that cause us to tense our deltoids and trapezii into painful knots. And all this is very good, but for the soul-self-psyche, vacation is not the same as refuge. “Time out” or “time off” is not the same as returning to home. Calmness is not the same as solitude.

We can contain this loss of soul by keeping close to the pelt to begin with. For instance, I see in the talented women in my practice that soulskin theft can come through relationships that are not in their rightful skins themselves, and some relationships are downright poisonous. It takes will and force to overcome these relationships, but it can be done, especially if, as in the story, one will awaken to the voice calling from home, calling one back to the core self where one’s immediate wisdom is whole and accessible. From there, a woman can decide with clear-seeing what it is she must have, and what it is she wants to do.

The aggravated theft of the sealskin also occurs far more subtly through the theft of a woman’s resources and of her time. The world is lonely for comfort, and for the hips and breasts of women. It calls out in a thousand-handed, million-voiced way, waving to us, plucking and pulling at us, asking for our attention. Sometimes it seems that everywhere we turn there is a someone or a some- tiling of the world that needs, wants, wishes. Some of the people, issues, and things of the world are appealing and charming; others may be demanding and angry; an
d yet others seem so heartrendingly
helpless that, against our wills, our empathy overflows, our milk runs down our bellies. But unless it is a life-and-death matter, take the time, make the time, to “put on the brass brassiere.”
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Stop running the milk train. Do the work of turning toward home.

Though we see that the skin can be lost through a devastating and wrong love, it may also be lost in a right and deepest love. It is not exactly the rightness of a person or thing or its wrongness that causes the theft of our soulskins, it is the cost of these things to us. It is what it costs us in time, energy, observation, attention, hovering, prompting, instructing, teaching, training. These motions of psyche are like cash withdrawals from the psychic savings account The issue is not about these energic cash withdrawals themselves, for these are an important part of life’s give and take. But it is being
overdrawn
that causes the loss of the skin, and the paling and dulling of one’s most acute instincts. It is lack of further deposits of energy, knowledge, acknowledgment ideas, and excitement that causes a woman to feel she is psychically dying.

In the story, when the young seal woman loses her pelt she is involved in a beautiful pursuit in the business of freedom. She

dances and dances, and does not pay attention to what is going on about her. When we are in our rightful wildish nature, we all feel this bright life. It is one of the signs that we are close to Wild Woman. We all enter the world in a dancing condition. We always begin with our own pelts intact.

Yet, at least till we become more conscious, we all go through this stage in individuation. We all swim up to the rock, dance, and don’t pay attention. It is then that the more tricksterish aspect of the psyche descends, and somewhere down the road we suddenly look for and can no longer find what belongs to us or to what we belong. Then our sense of soul is mysteriously missing, and more so, it is hidden away. And so we wander about partially dazed. It is not good to make choices when dazed, but we do.

We know poor choice occurs in various ways. One woman marries too early. Another becomes pregnant too young. Another goes with a bad mate. Another gives up her art to “have things.” Another is seduced by any number of illusions, another by promises, another by too much “being good” and not enough soul, yet another by too much airiness and not enough earthiness. And in cases where the woman goes with her soulskin half on and half gone, it is not necessarily because her choices are wrong so much as that she stays away from her soul-home too long and dries out
and is rather of little use to anyone, least of all herself. There are hundreds of ways to lose one’s soulskin.

If we delve into the symbol of animal hide, we find that in all animals, including ourselves, piloerection—hair standing on end—occurs in response to things seen as well as to things sensed. The rising hair of the pelt sends a “chill” through the creature and rouses suspicion, caution, and other protective traits. Among the Inuit it is said that both fur and feathers have the ability to see what goes on far off in the distance, and that is why an
angakok,
shaman, wears many furs, many feathers, so as to have hundreds of eyes to better see into the mysteries. The sealskin is a symbol of soul that not only provides warmth, but also provides an early warning system through its vision as well.

In hunting cultures, the pelt is equal to food as the most important product for survival. It is used to make boots, to line parkas, for waterproofing to keep ice hoar away from the face and wrists.

The pelt keeps little children safe and dry, protects and warms the vulnerable human belly, back, feet, hands, and head. To lose the pelt is to lose one’s protections, one’s warmth, one’s early warning system, one’s instinctive sight. Psychologically, to be without the pelt causes a woman to pursue what she thinks she should do, rather than what she truly wishes. It causes her to follow whoever or whatever impresses her as strongest—whether it is good for her or not. Then there is much leaping and little looking. She is jocular instead of incisive, laughs things off, puts things off. She pulls back from taking the next step, from making the necessary descent and holding herself there long enough for something to happen.

So you can see that in a world that values driven women who go, go, go, the stealing of soulskins is very easy, so much so that the first theft occurs somewhere between the ages of seven and eighteen. By then, most young women have begun to dance on the rock in the sea. By then most will have reached for the soulskin but not found it where they left it. And, though this initially seems meant to cause the development of a medial structure in the psyche—that is, an ability to learn to live in the world of spirit and in the outer reality as well—too often this progression is not accomplished, nor is any of the rest of the initiatory experience, and the woman wanders through life skinless.

Though we may have tried to prevent a recurrence of theft by practically sewing ourselves into our soulskins, very few women reach the age of majority with more than a few tufts of the original pelt intact. We lay aside our skins while we dance. We learn the world, but lose our skins. We find that without our skins we begin to slowly dry away. Because most women were raised to bear these things stoically, as their mothers did before them, no one notices there is a dying going on," until one
day...

When we are young and our soul-lives collide with the desires and requirements of culture and the world, indeed we feel stranded far from home. However, as adults we continue to drive ourselves even farther from home as a result of our own choices about who, what, where, and for how long. If we were never taught to return to the soul-home in childhood, we repeat the “theft and wandering around lost” pattern ad infinitum. But, even when it is our own