Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (54 page)

There appears to be a natural slumber that
comes
upon humans at certain times in their lives. From raising my own, and from my work with the same group of gifted children over a period of years, 1 saw that this sleep seems to descend upon children at age eleven or thereabouts. That is when they begin to take acute measurements about how they compare with others. During this time their eyes go from clear to hooded, and though they are always in motion like Mexican jumping beans, they are often dying of terminal cool. Whether they are being too cool or too well-behaved, in neither state are they responsive to what goes on deep inside, and a sleep gradually covers over their bright-eyed, responsive natures.

Let us further imagine that during this time we are offered something for nothing. That somehow we have twisted ourselves around to believe that if we will remain asleep something will accrue to us. Women know what this means.

When a woman surrenders her instincts that tell her the right time to say yes and when to say no, when she gives up her insight, intuition, and other wildish traits, then.she finds herself in situations that promised gold but ultimately give grief. Some women relinquish their art for a grotesque financial marriage, or give up their life’s dream in order to be a “too-good” wife, daughter, or girl, or surrender their true calling in order to lead what they hope will be a more acceptable, fulfilling, and especially, more sanitary life.

In these ways, and others, we lose our instincts. Instead of our lives being filled with the possibility of enlightenment, we are covered over with a kind of “endarkenment” instead. Our outer ability to see into the nature of things and our inner seeing are both snoring away so that when the Devil comes a-knocking, we sleepwalk over to the door and let him in.

The Devil symbolizes the dark force of the psyche, the predator, who in this tale is not recognized for what he is. This Devil is an archetypal bandit who needs, wants, sucks up light. Theoretically, if he were given light—that is, a life with the possibility of love and creativity—then the Devil would no longer be the Devil.

In this tale, the Devil is present because the young girl’s sweet light has attracted him. Her light is not just any light but the light of a maiden soul trapped in a somnambulistic state. Oh, what a tasty morsel. Her light glows with heartbreaking beauty, but she is unaware of her value. Such a light, whether it be the glow of a woman’s creative life, her wild soul, her physical beauty, her intelligence, or her generosity, always attracts the predator. Such a light that is also unaware and unprotected is always a target.

I worked with a woman who was quite taken advantage of by others, be they spouse, children, mother, father, or stranger. She was forty years old, and still at this bargain/betrayal stage of inner development. By her sweetness, her warm and welcoming voice, her lovely manner, she not only attracted those who took away an ember from her, but so large a crowd gathered before her soulful fire that they blocked her from receiving any of its warmth herself.

The poor bargain she had made was to never say no in order to be consistently loved. The predator of her own psyche offered her the gold of being loved if she would give up her instincts that said “Enough is enough.’’ She realized fully what she was doing to herself when she had a dream that she was on her hands and knees in a crowd, trying to reach through the forest of legs for a precious crown someone had thrown into a comer.

The instinctual layer of her psyche was pointing out that she had lost her sovereignty over her own life, and that it was going to be hands-and-knees work to get it back. To retrieve her crown, this woman had to reevaluate her time, her giving, her attentions to others.

The flowering apple tree in the tale symbolizes a beauteous aspect of women, the side of our nature that has its roots sunk into the world of the Wild Mother, where it is nurtured from below. The tree is the archetypal symbol of individuation; it is considered immortal, for its seeds will live on, its root system shelters and revivifies, it is home to an entire food chain of life. Like a woman, a tree also has its seasons and its stages of growth; it has its winter, it has its spring.

In the Northwoods apple orchards, farmers call their mares and their dogs “Girl,” and their flowering fruit trees “Lady.” The orchard trees are the young naked women of spring—the “first nose,” as we used to say. Of all the things that most meant spring, the fragrance of clustered fruit blossoms outranked the crazed robins jumping around doing triple-gainers in the side yard, and outscored the new crops coming in like tiny flames of green fire in black dirt.

Also, there was a saying about apple trees: “Young in spring, bitter fruit: other side, sweet as ice.” This meant the apple had a dual nature. In the late spring it looked lovely and round and as though drizzled with sunrise. Yet it was too tart to eat; it would make all your nerves stand up and go awk! But, later in the season, to bite into the apple was like breaking open sweet candy running with juice.

The apple tree and the maiden are interchangeable symbols of the feminine Self, and the fruit is a symbol of nourishment and maturation of our knowledge of that Self. If our knowledge about the ways of our own soul is immature, we cannot be nourished from it, for the knowing is not yet ripe. As with apples, it takes time for maturation, and the roots must find their ground and at least a season must pass, sometimes several. If the maiden soul sense remains untested, nothing more can occur in our lives. But if we can gain underworld roots, we can become mature, nourishing to soul, Self, and psyche.

The flowering apple tree is a metaphor for fecundity, yes. But more so it signifies the densely sensual creative urge and the ripening of ideas. All these are the work of
las curanderas
, the root women, who live deep in the crags and
montañas
, mountains, of the unconscious. They mine the deep unconscious there, and deliver up the work to us. We work the work they give to us, and as a result a potent fire, shrewd instincts, and deep knowing springs to life, and we develop and grow in depth in both inner and outer worlds.

Here we have a tree symbolizing the abundance of wild and free nature in a woman's psyche and yet the value of this is not understood by the psyche. One could say the entire psyche is asleep to the vast possibilities in the feminine nature. When we

speak of a woman's life in relationship to the symbol of the tree, we mean the feminine blossoming energy that belongs to us and that comes to us in cycles, ebbing and returning to us on a regular basis as psychic spring follows psychic winter. Without the renewal of this flowering impulse in our lives, hope is covered over, and the earth of our minds and hearts remains in an unmoving state. The flowering apple tree is our deep life.

We see the psyche’s devastating underestimation of the value of the young elemental feminine—when the father says of the apple tree, “Surely we can plant another.” The psyche does not recognize its own creator-Goddess in her flowering tree embodiment The young seif is traded off without realizing her dearness or her role as root messenger for the Wild Mother. Yet, it is this breach of knowing that causes the initiation of endurance to begin.

The unemployed miller, down on his luck, had begun to chop wood. It is hard work to chop wood, is it not? There is much heaving and hauling. Yet this chopping of wood symbolizes vast psychic resources, the ability to provide energy for one’s tasks, to develop one’s ideas, to bring the dream, whatever it be, within reach. So when the miller begins to chop away, we could say the psyche has begun to do the very hard work of bringing light and warmth to itself.

But, the poor ego is always looking for an easy way out When the Devil suggests he will relieve the miller of hard work in exchange for the light of the deep feminine, the ignorant miller agrees. We seal our own fates in this way. Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we are hardy stock and know there is no such thing as a work-free transformation. We know that we will have to bum to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.

But, another side of our natures, a part more desirous of languor, hopes it won’t be so, hopes the hard work can cease so slumber can resume. When the predator comes along, we are already set up for him; we are relieved to imagine that maybe there is an easier way.

When we shun the chopping of wood, the hands of the psyche will be chopped off instead ... for without the psychic work, the psychic hands wither. But this desire for a bargain over hard work

is so human and so common that it is amazing to find a person alive who has not made the compact. The choice is so usual that if we were to give example after example of women (or men) wanting to quit the chopping of wood and have a more easy life, thus losing their hands—that is, their grasp on their own lives— well, we would be here a long time.

For instance, a woman marries for wrong reasons and cuts off her creative life. A woman has one sexual preference, and forces herself to another. A woman wants to be, go, do a big something, and stays home and counts paper clips instead. A woman wants to live life, but saves little shreds of life as though they are string. A woman is her own person, yet gives an arm, a leg, or an eyeball away to every lover who comes down the pike. A woman flows with radiant creativity, and invites her vampirish friends to a group siphon. A woman needs to go on with her life and something in her says, “No, being snared is being safe.” This is the Devil’s “I’ll give you this, if you’ll give me that,” the bargain without knowing.

So what was meant to be the nutritive and flowering tree of the psyche loses power, loses its blossoms, loses energy, is sold out, is forced into forfeiting its potential, not understanding the bargain it has made. The entire drama almost always begins and establishes its strong hold outside a woman’s consciousness.

Yet, it must be emphasized that this is where everyone begins. In this tale the father represents the outer world point of view, the collective ideal that pressures women to be wilted rather than wildish. Even so, there is no shame and no blame if you have given away the flowering boughs. Yes, you have suffered for it, no doubt. And you may have given it away for years, even for decades. But there is hope.

The mother in the fairy tale announces to the entire psyche what has occurred. She says, “Wake up! See what you have done!” And everybody wakes up so fast, it hurts.
⁶
But still it is good news, for the wishy-washy mother of the psyche, the one that once helped to dilute and dull feeling function, has just awakened to the horrible meaning of the bargain. Now a woman’s pain becomes conscious. When it is conscious, she can do something
with it. She can use it to learn
with, to grow strong with, to become a knowing woman.

Over the long term, there will be even better news yet. That which has been given away can be reclaimed. It can be restored to its proper place in the psyche. You will see.

The Second Stage—
The
Dismemberment

In the second stage of the story, the parents stumble home, weeping tears on all their finery. Three years to the day the Devil comes to fetch the daughter. She has bathed and put on a white gown. She stands inside a chalk circle she's drawn around herself. When the Devil reaches out to seize her, an unseen force throws him across the yard. He orders her not to bathe. She devolves to an animal-like condition. But she weeps on her hands, and again the Devil cannot touch her. He orders the father to cut off her hands so she cannot weep on them. This is done, and thus her life as she has known it is ended. But she cri
es
on the stumps of her arms and the Devil again cannot overwhelm her, and he gives up.

The daughter has done remarkably well considering the circumstances. Yet we are numb once we have passed through this stage and realize what has been done to us, how we surrendered to the will of the predator and the frightened father so that we wound up being made handless.

After this, spirit reacts by moving when we move, by reaching when we reach, by walking when we walk, but it has no feeling to it. We are numb when we realize what has come to pass. We are horrified to fulfill our barter. We think our internal parental constructs are supposed to always be alert, responsive, and protective of the flowering psyche. Now we see what happens when they are not

Three years pass between the making of the bargain and the Devil’s return. These three years represent a time when a woman does not have clear consciousness about the fact that she herself is the sacrifice. She is the burnt offering that has been made for some poor bargain. In mythology the three-year period is the time of mounting momentum, as in the three years of winter that precede
Ragnarok,
the Twilight of the Gods, in Scandinavian mythology. In myths like these, three years of something occurs, then comes a destruc
tion, then from that ruin is born
a new world of peace.
⁷

This number of years is symbolic of the time when a woman wonders what will happen to her now, wonders if what she fears most—being totally carried off by a destructive force—is really going to occur. The fairy-tale symbol of three follows this pattern: The first try is no good. The second try, still no good. The third turn, ah, now something will happen.

Soon enough energy will be stirred at last, enough soul-wind has been raised to cause the psychic vessel to sail far and away. Lao-tzu
⁸
says, “Of the one comes two, and of the two, three. And from the three come ten thousand.” By the time we come to the “three” power of anything, that is, to the transformative moment, the atoms leap, and where there was once lassitude there is now locomotion.

Remaining without husband for three years can be understood as the psyche in an incubation, one in which it would be too difficult and distracting to have another relationship. The work of these three years is to strengthen oneself as much as one can, to use all one's psychic resource for oneself, to become as conscious as possible. That means stepping outside our suffering and seeing what it means, how it goes, what pattern it is following, studying others with the same pattern who have come through it all, and imitating what makes sense to us.

It is this kind of observation of predicaments and solutions that bids a woman to stay to herself, and this is right, for as we find further in the story, the maiden’s task is to find the bridegroom in the underworld, not in the topside world. In hindsight, women see the preparation for their initiatory descent mounting over a long period of time, sometimes years, till finally and suddenly over the edge and into the rapids they go, most often pushed over, but occasionally entering by a graceful dive from the cliffs ... but rarely.

This period of time is sometimes characterized by an ennui. Women will often say their mood is such that they cannot quite put their finger on what it is they want, whether it be work, lover, time, creative work. It is hard to concentrate. It is hard to be productive. This nerve-restlessness is typical of this spiritual developmental stage. Time alone, and not very far down the road, will take us to the edge we need fall, step, or dive over.

At this point in the tale, we see a fragment of the old night