Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (61 page)

of things we are learning over a lifetime, our hands return to us, the hands of womanhood. It is amusing sometimes to watch ourselves as we first enter a psychic stage of our own individuation by clumsily imitating the behavior we would like to master. Later as we go along, we grow into our own spiritual phrasing, into our own rightful and one-of-a-kind shapes.

Sometimes I
use my other literary version of this tale in performance and analysis. The young queen goes to the well. As she bends over to draw water, her child falls into the well. The young queen begins to shriek, and a spirit appears and asks why she does not rescue her child. “Because I have no hands!” she cries. “Try,” calls the spirit, and as the maiden puts her arms in the water, reaching toward her child, her hands regenerate then and there, and the child is saved.

This too is a powerful metaphor for the idea of saving the child- Self, the soul-Self, from being lost again in the unconscious, from forgetting who we are and what our work is. It is at this point in our lives that even very charming people, very enchanting ideas, very alluring calliope music can be turned away with ease, and especially if they do not nurture a woman’s union with the wild.

For many women the transformation from feeling onesel
f swept away or enslaved by ever
y idea or person who raps at her door to being a woman shining with
La Destina
, possessed of a deep sense of her own destiny, is a miraculous one. With eyes on straight, palms outward, with the hearing of the instinctual self intact, the woman goes into life in this new and powerful manner.

In this version the maiden has done the work so that when she needs the help of her hands to sense and guard her progression, they are there. They are regenerated through the fear of losing the childSelf. The regeneration of a woman’s grasp on her life and work sometimes causes a momentary hiatus in the work, for she may not be totally confident about her newfound strengths. She may have to try them out for a time to realize how great their reach is.

We often have to re-form our ideas of “once without power (hands), always without power.” After all our losses and sufferings we find that if we will reach we will be rewarded by grasping the child that is most precious to us. This is how a woman feels, that 488

at long last, she has grasped her life again. She has palms “to see with,” and to fashion life with once more. All through she has been helped by intra-psychic forces, and she has matured greatly
. She is truly “within herSelf
now.

So we are almost to the end of walking the vast land of this long story. There is but one more stretch of crescendo and completion ahead. Since this is an induction into the mystery/mastery of endurance, let us press forward on this last leg of the underworld journey.

The Seventh Stage—The Wild Bride and Bridegroom

Now th
e king returns and he and his mother comprehend that the Devil has sabotaged their messages. The king vows a purification—to go without eating or drinking and to travel as far as the sky is blue in order to find the maiden and their child. He searches for seven years. His hands become black, his beard moldy brown like moss, his eyes red-rimmed and parched. During this time he neither eats nor drinks, but a force greater than himself helps him live.

At last he comes to the inn kept by the woodspeople. There he is covered by a veil, sleeps, and wakens to find a lovely woman and a beautiful child gazing down at him. “I am your wife and this is your child,” says the young queen. The king is willing to believe but sees that the maiden has hands. “Through my travails and yet my good care, my hands have grown back,” she says. And the sprit-woman in white brings the silver hands from a trunk where they’d been treasured. There is a spiritual feast. The king, queen, and child return to the king’s mother, and hold a second wedding.

Here at the end, the woman who has made this sustained descent has melded together a sturdy quatemity of spiritual powers: the kingly animus, the childSelf, the old Wild Mother, and the initiated maiden. She has been washed and purified many times. Her ego’s desire for the safe life is no longer lead dog. Now this quatemity leads the psyche.

It is the suffering and wandering of the king that brought about the final reunion and remarriage. Why does he, who is king of the underworld, have to wander? Is he not the king? Well, the truth of

the matter is that kings too have to do psychic work, even archetypal kings. Within this tale is the old and extremely cryptic idea that when one force of the psyche changes, the others must shift as well. Here the maiden is no longer the woman he married, no longer the frail wandering soul. Now she is initiated, now she knows her woman’s ways in all matters. Now she is wizened with the stones and counsel of the old Wild Mother. She has hands.

So the king must suffer to develop himself. In some ways this king remains in the underworld, but as an animus figure, he represents a woman’s adaptation to collective life—he carries the dominant ideas she has learned in her journey to the topside, or outer society. Except he has not yet walked in her shoes, and this he must do in order to carry what she is and what she knows out into the world.

After the old Wild Mother informs him that he has been duped by the Devil, he himself is plunged into his own transformation through wandering and finding, just as the maiden had done before him. He has not lost his hands, but he has lost his queen and his offspring. So the animus follows a path quite similar to that of the maiden.

This empathic replay reorganizes a woman’s way of being in the world. To reorient the animus in this manner is to initiate and integrate it into a woman’s personal work. This may be how there came to be male initiates at the essentially feminine initiation at Eleusis; these men took on the tasks and travails of female learning in order to find their psychic queens and psychic offspring. The animus enters its own seven-year initiation. In this manner that which a woman has learned will be reflected not only in her inner soul but will also be written upon her and acted upon outwardly as well.

The king wanders also in the forest of initiation, and here again we have the sense that there are seven more episodes missing— the seven stages of animus initiation. But again, we have fragments to extrapolate from, we have our ways and means. One of the clues is that the king does not eat for seven years and yet is sustained. To not be nourished has to do with reaching under our urges and appetites to some deeper meaning that stands behind and down. The king’s initiation has to do with learning a kind of deepening with regard to understanding appetites, sexual
³⁴
and otherwise. It has to do with learning the value and balance of cycles that sustain human hope and happiness.

Additionally, since he is animus, his seeking has also to do with finding the fully initiated feminine in the psyche and keeping that as his main goal, regardless of whatever else crosses his path. Thirdly, his initiation into the wild self, as he becomes animal in nature for seven years, and does not bathe for seven years, in order to peel away whatever layers of over-civilizing chitin he has learned. This animus is doing the real work in preparation for showing and acting true to the soul-Self of the newly initiated woman in day-to-day life.

The story line that refers to the veil being placed over the king’s face while he sleeps is most likely another fragment from the old mystery rites. There is a beautiful sculpture in Greece of just this: a male initiate veiled with his head bowed as though resting or waiting or asleep.
³⁵
Now we see that the animus cannot be acting beneath her level of knowing, or she will become split again between what she feels and knows inwardly and how she, through her animus, behaves outwardly. So the animus must wander about in nature, in its own masculine nature, in the forest also.

It is no wonder that both the maiden and king are caused to walk psychic lands where such processes take place. They can be learned only in the wildish nature, only next to the skin of Wild Woman. It is usual that a woman so initiated should find her underworld love of the wild nature surfacing in her topside-world life. Psychically she has the fragrance of wood fire about her. It is usual that she begins to act here what she has learned there.

One of the most amazing things about this long initiation is that the woman undergoing this process continues to do all the regular living of topside life: loving lovers; birthing babies; chasing children; chasing art; chasing words; carrying food, paints, skeins; fighting for this and the other, burying the dead; doing all the workaday tasks as well as this deep, faraway journey.

A woman, at this time, is often tom in two directions, for there comes over her an urge to wade into the forest as though it is a river and to swim in the green, to climb to the top of a crag and sit face into the wind. It is a time when an inner clock strikes an hour

that forces a woman to have sudden need of a sky to call her own, a tree to throw her arms about, a rock to press her cheek against. Yet she must live her topside life as well.

It is to her extreme credit that even though she many times wishes to, she does not drive her car into the sunset. At least not permanently. For it is this outer life that exerts the right amount of pressure to take on the underworld tasking. It is better to stay in the world during this time rather than leave it, for the tension is better and tension makes a precious and deeply turned life that can be made no other way.

So we see the animus in its own transformation, readying to be an equal partner to the maiden and childSelf. At last they are reunited and there is a return to the old mother, the wise mother, the mother who can bear it all, who helps with her wit and wisdom ... and they are all united and have love of one another.

The attempt of the demonic to overtake the soul has failed irrevocably. The endurance of soul has been tested and met. A woman goes through this cycle once every seven years, the first time very faintly, and usually, one time at least, very hard, and thereafter in a rather memorial or renewing sort of manner. Here at the last, let us rest now and look over this lush panorama of women’s initiation and its tasks. Once we have been through the cycle, we can choose any or all tasks to renew our lives at any time and for any reason. Here are some:

The fact that both the handless maiden and the king suffer through the same seven-years-long initiation is the common ground between feminine and masculine. It gives us a strong idea that instead of antagonism between these two forces, there can be profound love, especially if it is rooted in the seeking of one’s own self.

“The Handless Maiden” is a real-life story about us as real women. It is not about one part of our lives, but about the phases of an entire lifetime. It teaches, in essence, that for women the work is to wander into the forest over and over again. Our psyches and souls are specifically suited to this so that we can traverse the psychic underland, stopping here and here and here, listening to the voice of the old Wild Mother, being fed by the fruits of spirit, and being reunited with everything and everyone beloved by us.

The time with Wild Woman is hard at first. To repair injured instinct, banish
naíveté,
and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand
for...
all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.