Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (52 page)

Women Who Run With the Wolves

who can listen with a full heart and can wince, shiver, and feel a ray of pain cross his or her own heart and not collapse. Part of healing from a secret is to tell it so that others are moved by it. In this way a woman begins to recover from shame by receiving the succor and tending she missed during the original trauma.

In small and confidential groups of women, I bring about this exchange by asking the women to gather together and to bring photographs of their mothers, aunts, sisters, mates, grandmothers, and other women who are significant to them. We line up all the pictures. Some are cracked, some peeling, some damaged by water or coffee cup rings; some have been tom in two and taped back together, some are wrapped in glassine tissue. Many have beautiful archaic writing on the back saying “Oh, you kid!” or “Love forever” or “This is me with Joe at Atlantic City” or “Here I am with my groovy roommate” or “These are the girls from the factory.”

I suggest each woman begin by saying, “These are the women of my bloodline” or “These are the women from whom I inherited.” Women look at these pictures of their female family and friends, and with a deep compassion, begin to tell the stories and secrets of each as they know them: the big joy, the big hurt, the big travail, the big triumph in each woman's life. Throughout the time we spend together there are many moments when we can go no further, for many, many tears lift many, many boats out of dry dock and off we all sail away together for a while.
⁴

What is valuable here is a true cleaning of the feminine laundry once and for all. The common proscription against washing the family laundry in public is ironic because usually the “dirty laundry” does not ever get washed within the family either. Down in the darkest comer of the cellar, the family “dirty laundry” just lies there stiff with its secret forever. The insistence on keeping a thing private is poison. In reality, it means that a woman has no support around her to deal with the issues that cause her pain.

Many of the personal secret stories of women are the kind that family and friends are inadequate to discuss; they disbelieve or attempt to make light of or bypass them, and they truly have understandable reason to do so. If they do discuss them, candle them, work with them, they would have to share the grief with the

woman. No standing about composed. No “Ohhh, wellll...” and then silence. No “We must try to keep busy and not dwell on such things.” Instead, were a woman’s mate, family, community to share the grief over the death of the golden-haired woman, they would all have to take their place in the cortege. They would all have to weep at the grave. No one could wriggle out of it, and it would be very hard on them.

When women give more thought to the matter of their own secret shame than other members of their family or community, they alone consciously suffer.
⁵
The psychological purpose of family—to pull together—never occurs. Yet the wild nature demands that one’s environ be cleansed of irritants and threats, that matters which oppress be reduced as much as possible. So, it is usually a matter of time before a woman calls up her courage from the soul bones, cuts herself a golden reed, and plays the secret in her own strong voice.

But here is what to do about shame-filled secrets, based on study of archetypal advice extrapolated from dozens of fairy tales such as “Bluebeard,” “Mr. Fox,” “Robber Bridegroom,” “Mary Culhane,”
⁶
and others, where the heroine refuses to keep the secret in one way or another, and so is finally freed to live fully alive.

See what you see. Say it to someone. It is never too late. If you feel you cannot say it aloud, write it down for them. Choose a person whom you instinctively believe to be trustworthy. The can of worms you are worried about opening is far better off being out there than festering inside yourself. If you prefer, seek a therapist who knows how to deal with secrets. This will be a person of mercy, with no particular dram to bang about right and wrong, who knows the difference between guilt and remorse and about the nature of grieving and resurrection of spirit.

Whatever the secret is, we understand that it is now part of our work for life. Redemption heals a once-open wound. But there will be a scar nevertheless. With changes of weather the scar can and will ache again. That is the nature of a true grief.

For years, classical psychology of all types erroneously thought that grief was a process that you did once, preferably over a year’s period of time, and then it was done with, and anyone who was unable or unwilling to complete this over the prescribed time

period had something rather wrong with them. But we know now what humans have known instinctively for centuries: that certain hurts and harms and shames can never be done being grieved; the loss of a child through death or relinquishment being one of the most, if not
the
most, enduring.

In a study
⁷
of diaries written over many years’ time, Paul C. Rosenblatt, Ph.D., found that people may recover from the worst of their soul-grief in the first year or two after a tragedy, depending on a person’s support systems and so forth. But afterward, the person continues to experience periods of active grieving. Although the episodes become farther and farther apart in time and shorter in duration, each recurrence carries close to the same intensity of gut-staggering grief as the first occasion.

This data helps us to understand the normalcy of long-term grief. When a secret is not told, grieving goes on anyway, and for life. The keeping of secrets interferes with the natural self-healing hygiene of psyche and spirit. This is one more reason to say our secrets. Telling and grieving resurrect us from the dead zone. They allow us to leave the death cult of secrets behind. We can grieve and grieve hard, and come out of it tear-stained, rather than shame-stained. We can come out deepened, fully acknowledged, and filled with new life.

Wild Woman will hold us while we grieve. She is the instinctual Self. She can bear our screaming, our wailing, our wishing to die without dying. She will put the best medicine in the worst places. She will whisper and murmur in our ears. She will feel pain for our pain. She will bear it. She will not run away. Although there will be scars and plenty of them, it is good to remember that in tensile strength and ability to absorb pressure, a scar is stronger than skin.

The Scapecoat

Sometimes in my work with women I show them how to make a full-length
scapecoat
from cloth or some other material. A scapecoat is a coat that details in painting, writing, and with all manner of things pinned and stitched to it all the name-calling a woman has endured in her life, all the insults, all the slurs, all the

traumas, all the wounds, all the scars. It is her statement of her experience of being scapegoated. Sometimes it takes only a day or two to make such a coat, other times it takes months. It is exceedingly helpful in detailing all the hurts and slams and slashes of a woman’s life.

At first, I made a scapecoat for myself. It soon became so heavy it needed a chorus of Muses to carry the train. I had in mind that I would make this scapecoat and then, having put all this psychic refuse together in one psychic object, I would disperse some of my old woundedness by burning the scapecoat. But you know, I kept the coat hung from the ceiling in the hallway and every time I walked near it, instead of feeling bad, I felt good. I found myself admiring the
ovarios
of the woman who could wear such a coat and still be walking .foursquare, singing, creating, and wagging her tail.

I found this also to be true of the women I worked with. They never want to destroy their scapecoats once they have made them. They want to keep them forever, the nastier and the gorier, the better. Sometimes we also call them battlecoats, for they are proof of the endurance, the failures, and the victories of individual women and their kinswomen.

It is also a good idea for women to count their ages, not by years, but by battle scars. “How old are you?” people sometimes ask me. “I am seventeen battle scars old,” I say. Usually people don’t flinch, and rather happily begin to count up their own battle scar ages accordingly.

As the Lakota painted glyphs on animal hides to record the events of winter, and the Nahuatl, the Maya, and the Egyptians had their codices recording the great events of the tribe, the wars, the triumphs, women have their scapecoats, their battlecoats. I wonder what our granddaughters and great-granddaughters will think of our lives recorded thusly. I hope it will all have to be explained to them.

Let there be no mistake about it, for you have earned it by the hard choices of your life. If you are asked your nationality, ethnic origin, or blood line, smile enigmatically. Say, “Scar Clan.”

CHAPTER 14

La Selva
Subterránea:
Initiation in the Underground Forest

The Handless Maiden

If a story is seed, then we are its soil. Just hearing the story allows us to experience it as though we ourselves were the heroine who either falters or wins out in the end. If we hear a story about a wolf, then afterward we rove about and know like a wolf for a time. If we hear a story about a dove finding her young at last, then for a time after, something moves behind our own feathered breasts. If it be a story of wresting the sacred pearl from beneath the claw of the ninth dragon, we feel exhausted afterward, and satisfied. In a very real way, we are imprinted with knowing just by listening to the tale.

Among Jungians this is called “participation mystique”—a term borrowed from anthropologist Levy-Bruhl—and it is used to mean a relationship wherein “a person cannot distinguish themselves as separate from the object or thing they behold.” Among Freudians, it is called “projective identification.” Among anthropologists, it is sometimes called “sympathetic magic.” All these terms mean the ability of the mind to step away from its ego for a time and merge with another reality, that is, another way of comprehending, a different way of understanding. Among healers from my heritage, this means experiencing and learning ideas via a prayerful or non-ordinary state of mind and bringing the insights and knowledge one has gained in the circumstance back into consensual reality.
¹

“The Handless Maiden” is a remarkable story, one in which we find the toes of the
old night
religions
peeking
out
from under the
layers of the tale. The story
is
formed in such a way that listeners participate in the heroine's test
of
endurance, for the tale
has such amplitude
that it takes long to
tell it, and even longer to
absorb. Customarily, I teach this tale over seven nights' time, and sometimes,
depending on the listeners, over seven
weeks'
and
occasionally seven months’ time—spending one night, week, or month for each labor in the story—and there is a reason for
this.

The story pulls us into a world that lies far below the
roots of
trees. From that perspective we see that “The Handless Maiden” offers material for a woman’s entire life process. It
deals with
most of the key journeys of a woman’s psyche. Unlike other tales we have looked at in this work that speak to a specific task or a specific learning taking place over a few days’ or weeks’ time, “The Handle
ss Maiden” covers a many-years-l
ong journey—the journey of a woman’s entire lifetime. So this story is something special, and a good rhythm for assimilating it, is to read it and sit with your Muse, turning it part by part, over a generous period of time.

“The Handless Maiden” is about women’s initiation into the underground forest through the rite of endurance. The word
endurance
sounds as though it means “to continue without cessation,” and while this is an occasional part of the tasks underlying the tale, the word
endurance
also means “to harden, to make sturdy, to make robust, to strengthen,” and this is the principal thrust of the tale, and the generative feature of a woman’s long psychic life. We do not just go on to go on. Endurance means we are making something substantial.

The teaching of endurance occurs all throughout nature. The pads of wolf pups’ paws are so
ft as clay when the pups are born
.

It is only the ranging
, the roaming, the treks on which their parents take them that toughen them up. Then they can climb and bound over sharp gravel, over stinging nettle, even over broken glass, without being hurt.

I have seen wolf mothers plunge their pups into the coldest streams imaginable, run until a pup is splay-legged and can hardly keep up and then run some more. They are toughening up the

sweet little spirit, investing it with strength and resilience, in mythos, the teaching of endurance is one of the rites of the Great Wild Mother, the Wild Woman archetype. It is her timeless ritual to make her offspring strong. It is she who toughens us up, makes us potent and enduring.

And where does this learning take place, where are these attributes acquired?
La selva
subterránea
, the underground forest, the underworld of female knowing. It is a wild world that lives under this one, under the world perceived by ego. While there, we are infused with instinctive language and knowledge. From that vantage point we understand what cannot be so easily understood from the point of view of the topside world.

The maiden in this tale masters several descents. As she completes one round of descent and transformation, she plunges into
yet
another. These alchemical rounds are complete, each with a
nigredo
, loss,
rubedo
, sacrifice, and
albedo
, coming of light, following one upon the other. The king and the king’s mother each have a round themselves. All this descending and loss and finding and strengthening portrays women’s lifelong initiation into the renewal of the wild.

“The Handless Maiden” story is called, in different parts of the world, “Silver Hands,” “The Handless Bride,” and “The Orchard.” Folklorists number more than a hundred versions of the tale. The core of the literary version I’ve written here was given to me by my Aunt Magdalena, one of the great women farmer/field workers of my young life. Other variations are found throughout Eastern and Middle Europe. But truth be told, the deep womanly experience underlying the tale is found anywhere there is a yearning for the Wild Mother.

My Aunt Magdalena had a sly storytelling habit. She caught her listeners off guard by beginning a fairy tale with “This happened ten years ago,” and then proceeded to tell a tale from the medieval era, complete with knights, moats, and all. Or she’d say “Once upon a time, just last week
...”
and then she’d tell a tale about a time before humans wore clothing.

So, here is the modem-ancient “Handless Maiden.”

Once upon a time
a few days ago, the man down the road still owned a large stone that ground the villagers’ grain to flour. The miller had fallen on hard times and had nothing left but the great rough millstone in a shed, and the large flowering apple tree behind it.

One day, as he carried his silver-lipped ax into the forest to cut deadwood, a strange old man stepped from behind a tree. “There’s no need for you to torture yourself by cleaving wood,” wheedled the old man. “I shall dress you in riches if you will but give me what stands behind your mill.”

“What is there behind my mill but the flowering apple tree?” thought the miller, and agreed to the old man’s bargain.

“In three years’ time, I’ll come take what is mine,” chortled the stranger, and he limped away, disappearing between the staves of the trees.

The miller met his wife on the path. She had run from their house, apron flying, hair askew. “Husband, husband, at the stroke of the hour, into our house came a finer clock upon the wall, our rustic chairs were replaced by those hung in velvet, and the paltry cupboard abounds now with game, our trunks and boxes are overflowing. Pray tell, how has this happened?” And even at that moment, golden rings appeared on her fingers and her hair was drawn up into a golden circlet.

“Ah,” said the miller, looking in awe as his own doublet turned to satin. Before his eyes his wooden shoes with the heels worn to nothing so he walked tilted backward, they too turned into fine shoes. “Well, it is from a stranger,” he gasped. “I came upon an odd man in a dark frock coat in the forest and he promised great wealth if I gave him what is behind our mill. Surely, wife, we can plant another apple tree.”

“Oh, my husband!” wailed the woman, and she looked as though she had been struck dead. “The man in the black coat was the Devil, and what stands behind the mill is the tree, yes, but our daughter is also there sweeping the yard with a willow broom.”

And so the parents stumbled home, weeping tears on all their finery. Their daughter stayed without husband for three years and had a temperament like the first sweet apples of spring. The day the Devil came to fetch her she bathed and put on a white gown and stood in a circle of chalk she'd drawn around herself. When the Devil reached out to grab her, an unseen force threw him across the yard.

The Devil screamed, “She must not bathe any more else I cannot come near her." The parents and the girl were terrified. And so some weeks went by and the daughter did not bathe until her hair was matted, her fingernails like black crescents, her skin gray, her clothes darkened and stiff with dirt.

Then, with the maiden every day more and more resembling a beast, the Devil came again. But the girl wept and wept. Her tears ran through her fingers and down her arms—so much so that her dirty hands and arms became purest white and clean. The Devil was enraged. “Chop off her hands, otherwise I cannot come near her.” The father was horrified. “You want me to sever the hands of my own child?” The Devil bellowed, “Everything here will die, including you, your wife, and all the fields for as far as you can see.”

The father was so frightened he obeyed, and begging his daughter’s forgiveness he began to sharpen his silver-lipped ax. The daughter submitted, saying, “I am your child, do as you must.”

And this he did, and in the end no one could say who cried out in anguish the louder, the daughter or the father. Thus ended the girl’s life as she had known it.

When the Devil came again, the girl had cried so much the stumps that were left of her limbs were again clean, and the Devil was again thrown across the yard when he attempted to seize her. Cursing in words that set small fires in the forest, he disappeared forever, for he had lost all claim to her.

The father had aged one hundred years, and his wife also. Like true people of the forest, they continued as best they could. The old father offered to keep his daughter in a castle of great beauty and with riches for life, but the daughter said she felt it more fitting she become a beggar girl and depend on the goodness of others for