Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (57 page)

about everything in a woman's life. In this sense the king represents renewal of the ruling attitudes and laws in a woman’s psyche.

THE MAGE

The mage, or magician,
²⁶
whom the king brings with him to interpret what he sees, represents the direct magic of a woman’s power. Such things as the split-second recall, the thousand-league vision, the hearing over miles, the empathic ability to see from behind anyone’s eyes—human or animal—all these belong to the instinctual feminine. It is the magician who shares in these and also, traditionally, helps to maintain them and enact them in the outer world. Though the mage can be of either gender, here it is a powerful male figure similar to the stalwart brother in fairy tales who so loves his sister that he will do all to help her. The mage always has crossover potential. In dreams and in tales, he appears as a man as often as he shows up as a woman. He can be male, female, animal, or mineral, just as the crone, his female counterpart, can also effect her guises with ease. In conscious life, the mage assists a woman’s ability to become whatever she wishes and to portray herself as she wishes at any given moment.

THE QUEEN MOTHER/CRONE

The queen mother/crone in this tale is the king’s mother. This figure represents many things, among them fecundity, the vast authority to see into the tricks of the predator, and the ability to soften curses. The word
fecundity
, which sounds like drum talk when said aloud, means more than fertile, it means pregnable, the way soil is pregnable. She is that black soil glittering with mica, black hairy roots, and all life that has gone before, broken down into a fragrant sludge of humus. The word
fertility
has behind it the sense of seeds, eggs, beings, ideas. Fecundity is the basal matter in which seeds are laid, prepared, wanned, incubated, saved. This is why the old mother is often called by her oldest names—Mother Dust, Mother Earth, Mam, and Ma—for she is the muck that makes ideas happen.

THE DEVIL

In this story the dual nature of the woman’s soul, which both badgers

and heals her, has been replaced by a single figure, the Devil. As we have noted before, this devil figure represents the natural predator of a woman’s psyche, a
contra naturam
, an “against nature” aspect that opposes the development of psyche and attempts to kill off all soul. It is a force that is split off from its life- giving aspect It is a force that must be overcome and contained. The devil figure is not the same as another natural source of badgering and baiting that also goes on in the female psyche, the force
that I call the alter-soul. The alter-soul is oppositional and positive. It often shows up in women’s dreams and in fairy tales and mythos as a cronish shape-changing figure that magnetizes and harasses the woman into a descent that ideally ends in a reunion with her deepest resources.

So, here in this underworld orchard awaits the gathering together of those powerful parts of the psyche, both male and female. They form a
conjunctio.
This word is from alchemy and means a higher transformative union of unlike substances. When these opposites are rubbed together they result in the activation of certain intra-psychic processes. They act like flint struck against rock in order to make fire. It is through the conjunction and pressure of dissimilar elements inhabiting the same psychic space that soulful energy, insight, and knowing are made.

The presence of the sort of
conjunctio
we have in this story signals an activation of a verdant Life/Death/Life cycle. When we see this rare and precious gathering, we know that a spiritual death will take place, that a spiritual marriage is imminent,
also that a new life will be born
. These factors predict what is to come.
Conjunctio
is not something one goes out and gets. It is something that occurs because hard, hard work is being done.

So, here we are, in our mud clothes, walking down a road we’ve never seen, and with the mark of the wild nature glowing through us more and more. It is fair to say that this
conjunctio
is insisting on a striking revision of the old you. If you are here in the orchard, and there are these identifiable psychic aspects with you, there is no turning back—we are going forward.

Now what more about these pears? They are there for those who hunger on their long underworld journey. Several fruits are

used traditionally to represent the female womb, most often pears, apples, figs, and peaches, although generally any objects that have outer and inner forms, and at their center a seed that can grow into a living thing—eggs, for instance—can connote this “life within life” quality of the feminine. Here pears, archetypally, represent a burst of new life, a seed of new selfhood.

In much of myth and fairy tale, the fruit trees are under the dominion of the Great Mother, the old Wild Mother, and the king and his men are her stewards. The pears in the orchard are numbered, for in this transformative process all things are attended to. It is not a haphazard design. All is recorded and tallied. The old Wild Mother knows how much she has of these transformative substances. The king comes to count the pears, not in jealous ownership, but to discover if anyone new has arrived in the underworld to begin a deep initiation. The soul world always awaits the novice and the wanderer.

The pear bending to feed the maiden is like a bell pealing throughout the underworld orchard, calling forth the sources and forces—the king, the mage, the gardener, and presently the old mother; all of these rush forward to greet, sustain, and assist the novitiate.

Holy figures throughout the ages assure and reassure us that on the transformative open road there is already “a place set for us.” And to this place, by scent, by intuition, we are dragged or spirited by destiny. We all arrive in the king’s orchard eventually. It is only right and proper.

In this episode, the three masculine attributes of a woman’s psyche—the gardener, king, and magician—are the watchers, questioners, and helpers in the underworld journey, where nothing is as it first seems. As the kingly aspect of a woman’s underground psyche learns that there has been a change in the order of the orchard, he comes with the mage of the psyche, who can understand matters of the human
and
spirit worlds, who delves into the distinctions between the psychic this and that in the unconscious.

And so they watch as the spirit again drains the moat As we mentioned before, this moat carries a symbolic meaning similar to that of the Styx, which was a poisonous river on which the souls

of the dead were ferried from the land of the living to the land of the dead. It was not poisonous to the dead, but only to the living. Beware then the sensation of repose and accomplishment that can seduce humans into feeling that a spiritual deed or completion of a spiritual cycle is a point where one may stop and rest on her laurels forevermore. The moat is a resting place for the dead, a completion at the end of life, but the living woman cannot stay too long near it, else she becomes lethargic in the cycles of soul-making.
²⁷

Through this circular river symbol, the moat, the tale warns us that this water is not just any water but a certain kind. It is a boundary water, much like the circle the maiden drew around herself to keep the Devil away. When one crosses into or through a circle, one is entering into or passing through to another state of being, another state of awareness, or lack of one.

Here, the maiden is passing through the state of unconsciousness reserved for the dead. She is not to drink of this water or wade through it, but rather pass through its dry bed. Because a woman must pass through the land of the dead in a descent, sometimes she becomes confused and thinks she must die forever. But this is not so. The task is to pass through the land of the dead as a living creature, for that is how consciousness is made.

So this moat is a very important symbol, and the fact that the spirit in the tale drains it helps us to understand what we must do on our own journey. We must not lie down and go to happy sleep over what has been thus far attained in our work. Neither should we jump into the river in a crazy attempt to hasten the process. There is death with a lowercase
d
and there is Death with a capital D. The one the psyche seeks in this process of Life/Death/Life cycles is
la muerte por un instante
,
death for now, not
La Muerte Eterna
, Death For a Long Time.

The magician comes close, but not too close, to the spirit and the young woman. He asks, “Are you of this world
or
not of this world?’ And the maiden, dressed in the unkempt and wild attire of
a
criatura
stripped of ego and accompanied by the glowing white body of a spirit, tells the mage she is in the land of the dead even though she is one of the living. “I was once of
the
world, and yet I am not of
this
world.” When the king asks the magician, “Is she

human or spirit?” the magician answers that she is both human and spirit.

The maiden’s cryptic reply acknowledges that she belongs to the land of the living and yet is stepping to the Life/Death/Life cadence, and that because of this she is a human being in descent as well as a shade of her former self. She may live in the topside world days, but the work of transformation occurs in the underworld, and she is able to live in both, like
La Que Sabe
, “she who knows.” All this is in order to learn her way, in order to clear her way, to the true and wild self.

To delve the meaning of the Handless Maiden material, here are a few questions to help women begin to clarify their journeys in the underworld. The questions are phrased so they can be answered both individually and collectively. The asking of questions creates a luminous net that is woven as women talk among themselves, and they drop this net into their collective mind and raise it filled with the glimmering, the streaming, the inert, the strangled, and the breathing forms of the inner lives of women for all to see and work with.

In answering one question, other questions come, and to leam more we answer those too. Here are some of the questions: How does one live in the topside world and the underworld at the same time and on a day-to-day basis? What does one have to do to come down into the underworld on one’s own? What circumstances in life help women with the descent? Do we have a choice about going or staying? What spontaneous help have you received from the instinctive nature during such a time?

When women (or men) are in this state of dual citizenship, they sometimes make the mistake of thinking that to go away from the world, to leave the mundane life, with its chores, its duties that not only beckon but irritate beyond reason, that this is a sterling idea. But this is not the best way, for the outer world at these times is the only rope left around the ankle of the woman who is wandering, working, hanging upside down in the underworld. It is an excruciatingly important time, when the mundane must play its proper role in exerting an “otherworldly” tension and balance that helps lead to a good end.

And so we wander on our way asking ourselves—if truth be

known,
muttering to ourselves really—“
Am I of this world or the other?” and answering “I am of both.” And we remind ourselves of this as we go along. A woman in such a process must be of both worlds. It is the wandering in such a manner that helps to wring out every last bit of resistance, every last possibility of hubris, to flatten every last objection we might think up, for wandering this way is tiring. But this special kind of fatigue causes us to finally surrender ego fears and
ambitions and just follow what comes. As a result, our understanding of our time in the underground forests will be deep and complete.

In the tale, the second pear bends to feed the maiden, and since this king is the son of the old Wild Mother, and since this orchard belongs to her, the young maiden in fact tastes the fruit of the secrets of life and death. As the fruit is a primal image of cycles of flowering, growing, ripening, and receding, eating it internalizes in the initiate a psychic clock or timepiece that knows the Life/Death/Life patterns and that forever after chimes when it is time to let one thing die and then turn to the birthing of another.

In what manner do we find this pear? We immerse ourselves in the mysteries of the feminine, the cycles of the earth, of insects, animals, birds, trees, flowers, the seasons, the flow of rivers and their water levels, the shagging and thinning coats of animals as they live through the seasons, the cycles of opacity and sheerness in our own individuation processes, our cycles of need and waning in sexuality, religiosity, ascent, and descent.

To eat the pear means to feed our deep creative hunger to write, paint, sculpt, weave, to say our piece, to stand up for, put forward hopes and ideas and creations the likes of which the world has never seen before. It is immensely nourishing to reintegrate into our modem lives whichever ancient feminine patterns and principles of innate sensibility and cycles that enrich our lives now.

This is the true nature of the psychic tree: it grows, it gives, it is used up, it leaves its seed for new; it loves us. Such is the Life/Death/Life mystery. It is a pattern, an ancient one from before water, before light, an unwavering one. Once we leant these cycles and their symbolic representations, be they of pear, of tree, of orchard, of stages and ages of a woman's life, we can count on