Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (53 page)

sustenance. And so she had her arms bound in clean gauze, and at daybreak she walked away from her life as she had known it.

She walked and walked. High noon caused her sweat to streak the dirt on her face. The wind disheveled her hair until it was like a stork’s nest of twigs all tangled this way and that. In the midst of the night she came to a royal orchard where the moon had put a gleam oh all the fruits that hung from the trees.

She could not enter because the orchard was surrounded by a moat. But, she fell to her knees, for she was starved. A ghostly spirit in white appeared and shut one of the sluice gates so that the moat was emptied.

The maiden walked among the pear trees and somehow she knew that each perfect pear had been counted and numbered, and that they were guarded as well. Nevertheless, a bough bent itself low, its limb creaking, so she could reach the lovely fruit at its tip. She put her lips to the golden skin of the pear and ate while standing there in the moonlight, her arms bound in gauze, her hair afright, appearing like a mud woman, the handless maiden.

The gardener saw it all, but recognized the magic of the spirit who guarded the maiden, and did not interfere. After the girl finished eating the single pear, she withdrew across the moat and slept in the shelter of the wood.

The next morning the king came to count his pears. He found one missing, and looking high and looking low, he could not find the vanished fruit. The gardener explained: “Last night two spirits drained the moat, entered the garden at high moon, and one without hands ate the pear that offered itself to her.”

The king said he would keep watch that night. At dark he came with his gardener and his magician, who knew how to speak with spirits. The three sat beneath a tree and watched. At midnight, the maiden came floating through the forest, her clothes dirty rags, her hair awry, her face streaked, her arms without hands, and the spirit in white beside her.

They entered the orchard the same way as before. Again, a tree gracefully bent one of its boughs to within her reach and she supped on the pear at its tip.

The magician came close, but not too close, to them and asked, “Are you of this world or not of this world?” And the girl

answered, “I was once of
the
world, and yet I am not of
this
world.”

The king questioned the magician. “Is she human or spirit?” The magician answered that she was both. The king’s heart leapt and he rushed to her and cried, “I shall not forsake you. From this day forward, I shall care for you.” At his castle he had made for her a pair of silver hands, which were fastened to her arms. And so it was that the king married the
hàndless
maiden.

In time, the king had to wage war in a far-off kingdom, and he asked his mother to care for his young queen, for he loved her with all his heart. “If she gives birth to a child, send me a message right away.”

The young queen gave birth to a happy babe and the king's mother sent a messenger to the king telling him the good news. But on the way to the king the messenger tired, and coming to a river, felt sleepier and sleepier and finally fell entirely asleep by the river’s edge. The Devil came out from behind a tree and switched the message to say the queen had given birth to a child that was half dog.

The king was horrified at the message, yet sent back a message saying to love the queen and care for her in this terrible time. The lad who ran with the message again came to the river, and feeling heavy as though he had eaten a feast, soon fell asleep by the side of the water. Whereupon the Devil again stepped out and changed the message to say “Kill the queen and her child.”

The old mother was shaken by her son’s command and sent a messenger to confirm. Back and forth the messengers ran, each one falling asleep at the river and the Devil changing messages that became increasingly terrible, the last being “Keep the tongue and eyes of the queen to prove she has been killed.”

The old mother could not stand to kill the sweet young queen. Instead she sacrificed a doe, took its tongue and eyes, and hid them away. Then she helped the young queen bind her infant to her breast, and veiling her, said she must flee for her life. The women wept and kissed one another good-bye.

The young queen wandered till she came to the largest, wildest forest she had ever seen. She picked her way over and through and around trying to find a path. Near dark, the spirit in white, the

same one as before, appeared and guided her to a poor inn run by kindly woodspeople. Another maiden in a white gown took the queen inside and knew her by name. The child was laid down.

“How do you know I am a queen?” asked the maiden.

“We who are of the forest follow these matters, my queen. Rest now.”

So the queen stayed seven years at the inn and was happy with her child and her life. Her hands gradually grew back, first as little baby hands, pink as pearl, and then as little girl hands, and then finally as woman’s hands.

During this time the king returned from the war, and his old mother wept to him, “Why would you have me kill two innocents?” and displayed to him the eyes and the tongue.

Hearing the terrible story, the king staggered and wept inconsolably. His mother saw his grief and told him these were the eyes and tongue of a doe and that she had sent the queen and her child off into the forest.

The king vowed to go without eating or drinking and to travel as far as the sky is blue in order to find them. He searched for seven years. His hands became black, his beard moldy brown like moss, his eyes red-rimmed and parched. During this time he neither ate nor drank, but a force greater than he helped him live.

At last he came to the inn kept by the woodspeople. The woman in white bade him enter, and he laid down, so tired. The woman placed a veil over his face and he slept. As he breathed the breath of deepest sleep, the veil billowed and gradually slipped from his face. He awakened to find a lovely woman and a beautiful child gazing down at him.

“I am your wife and this is your child.” The king was willing to believe but saw that the maiden had hands. “Through my travails and yet my good care, my hands have grown back,” said the maiden. And the woman in white brought the silver hands from a trunk where they’d been treasured. The king rose and embraced his queen and his child and there was great joy in the forest that day.

All the spirits and the dwellers of the inn had a fine repast Afterward, the king and queen and baby returned to the old mother, held a second wedding, and had many more children, all of whom told this story to a hundred others, who told this story to

a hundred others, just as you are one of the hundred others l am telling it to.

=====

The First Stage—The Bargain Without Knowing

In the first stage of the story, the susceptible and acquisitive miller makes a poor bargain with the Devil. He .thought to enrich himself, but too late realizes the price is going to be very, very high. He thought he was trading his apple tree for wealth, but instead he finds he has given his daughter to the Devil.

In archetypal psychology, we take all the elements of a fairy tale to be descriptions of the aspects in a single woman’s psyche. So, regarding this tale, as women, we must ask ourselves here at the
beginning,
“What poor bargain does every woman make?”

Though we might respond with different answers on different days, there is one answer that is constant to all women’s lives. Though we hate to admit it, over and over again the poorest bargain of our lives is the one we make when we forfeit our deep knowing life for one that is far more frail; when we give up our teeth, our claws, our sense, our scent; when we surrender our wilder natures for a promise of something that seems rich but turns out to be hollow instead. Like the father in the tale, we make this bargain without realizing the sorrow, the pain, and the dislocation it will cause us.

We can be smart in the ways of the world, and yet almost every mother’s daughter, if given half a chance, chooses the poor bargain at first Hie making of this awful bargain is a matter of enormous and meaningful paradox. Even though choosing poorly could be seen as a pathologically self-destructive act, it far more often turns into a watershed event that brings vast opportunity to redevelop the power of the instinctive nature. In this respect, though there is loss and sadness, the poor bargain, like birth and death, constitutes a rather utilitarian step off the cliff planned by the Self in order to bring a woman deep into her wildness.

A woman’s initiation begins with the poor bargain she made long ago while still slumbering. By choosing whatever appealed

to her as riches, she surrendered, in return, dominion over some and often every part of her passionate, creative, and instinctive life. That female psychic slumber is a state approximating somnambulism. During it, we walk, we talk, yet we are asleep. We love, we work, but our choices tell the truth about our condition; the voluptuous, the inquiring, the good and incendiary sides of our natures are not fully sentient.

This is the state of the daughter in the-tale. She is a lovely creature to behold, an innocent. Yet, she could forever sweep the yard behind the mill—back and forth, and back and forth—and never develop knowing. Her metamorphosis has no metabolism.

So, the tale begins with the unintended but acute betrayal of the young feminine, of the innocent.
²
It can be said that the father, who symbolizes the function of the psyche that is supposed to guide us in the outer world, is, in fact, very ignorant about how the outer world and the inner world work in tandem. When the fathering function of the psyche fails to have knowing about issues of soul, we are easily betrayed. The father does not realize one of the most basic things that mediates between the world of soul and the world of matter—that is, that many things that present themselves to us are not as they seem upon first contact.

The initiation into this kind of knowing is the initiation that none of us wants, even though it is the one all of us, sooner or later, receive. So many tales—“Beauty and the Beast,” “Bluebeard,” “Reynard the Fox”—begin with the father endangering the daughter.
³
But, in a woman’s psyche, even though the father bumbles into a lethal deal because he knows nothing of the dark side of the world or the unconscious, the horrible moment marks a dramatic beginning for her; a forthcoming consciousness and shrewdness.

No sentient being in this world is allowed to remain innocent forever. In order for us to thrive, our own instinctive nature drives us to face the fact that things are not as they first seem. The wild creative function pushes us to learn about the many states of being, perception, and knowing. These are the many conduits through which the Wild Woman speaks to us. Loss and betrayal are the first slippery steps of a long initiatory process that pitches us into
la selva
subterránea
,
the underground forest. There, sometimes

times for the first time in our lives, we have a chance to cease walking into walls of our own making and learn to pass through them instead.

While in modem society a women’s loss of innocence is often ignored, in the underground forest a woman who has lived through the demise of her innocence is seen as someone special, in part because she has been hurt, but much more so because she has gone on, because she is working hard to understand, to peel back the layers of her perceptions and her defenses to see what lies underneath. In that world, her loss of innocence is treated as a rite of passage.
⁴
That she can now see more clearly is applauded. That she has endured and continues to learn gives her both status and honor.

Making a poor bargain is not only representative of the psychology of young women, it holds true for women of any age who are without initiation or who are dangling in an incomplete initiation in these matters. How does any woman involve herself in such a bargain? The story opens with the symbol of the mill and the miller. Like them, the psyche is a grinder of ideas; it masticates concepts and breaks them down into usable nourishment. It takes in raw material, in the form of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, and breaks them open in a way that makes them usable for our nourishment.

This psychic ability is often called processing. When we process, we sort through all the raw material in the psyche, all the things we’ve learned, heard, longed for, and felt during a period of time. We break these down into parts, asking, “How shall I use this best?” We use these processed ideas and energies to implement our most soulful tasks and to fund our various creative endeavors. In this way a woman remains both sturdy and lively.

But in the story, the mill is not milling. The psyche’s miller is unemployed. This means nothing is being done with all the raw material that comes into our lives on a daily basis, and that no sense is being made of all the grains of knowing that blow into our faces from the world and from the underworld. If the miller
⁵
has no work, the psyche has stopped nourishing itself in critically important ways.

The milling of grain has to do with the creative urge. For whatever reason, the creative life of a woman’s psyche is at a standstill. A woman who feels thusly senses that she is no longer fragrant with ideas, that she is not fired with invention, that she is not grinding finely to find the pith of things. Her mill is silenced.