Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (8 page)

Bluebeard, upon discovering what he deems to be his wife’s deceit, seizes her by her hair and drags her down the stairs. “Now

it is your turn!” he roars. The killing element of the unconscious rise
s up and threatens to destroy th
e conscious woman.

Analysis, dream interpretation, self-knowing, exploration, all are undertaken because they are ways of backtracking and looping. They are ways of diving down and coming up behind the issue and seeing it from a different perspective. Without the ability to see, truly see, what is learned about ego-self and the numinous Self slips away.

In Bluebeard, the psyche now tries to avoid being killed. No longer naive, it has become cunning; it pleads for time to compose itself—in other words, time to strengthen itself for the final battle. In outer reality, we find women planning their escapes too, whether from an old destructive mode, a lover, or a job. She stalls for time, she bides her time, she plans her strategy and calls up her power internally, before she makes an external change. Sometimes it is just this kind of immense threat from the predator that causes a woman to change from being an adaptive dear to having the hooded eye of the watchful.

Ironically, both aspects of the psyche, the predator and the young potential, reach their boiling point. When a woman understands that she has been prey, both in the outer and inner worlds, she can hardly bear it. It strikes at the root of who she is at center, and she plans, as she must, to kill the predatory force.

Meanwhile her predatory complex is enraged that she has pried open the forbidden door, and is busily making its rounds, attempting to cut off all avenues of her escape. This destructive force becomes murderous, and says the woman has violated the holy of holies and now must die.

When opposing aspects of a woman’s psyche both reach their flash points, a woman may feel incredibly tired, for her libido is being drawn away in two opposite directions. But even if a woman is fatigued unto death with her miserable struggles, no matter what they might be, even though she be starved of soul, she must yet plan her escape; a woman must force herself forward anyway. At this critical time it is like being in subzero weather for a day and a night In order to survive, we must not give in to the fatigue. To go to sleep now is certain death.

This is the more profound initiation, a woman’s initiation into

her proper instinctive senses wherein the predator is identified and banished. This is the moment in which the captured woman moves from victim status into shrewd-minded, wily-eyed, sharpeared status instead. This is the time that almost superhuman effort manages to drive the so-tired psyche to its final work. The key questions continue to help, for the key continues to bleed its wise blood even as the predator forbids consciousness. His maniacal message is, “For consciousness—you die.” Her response is to trick him into thinking she is his willing victim while she plans his demise.

Among animals there is said to be a mysterious psychic dance between predator and prey. It is said, if the prey gives a certain kind of servile eye contact, and a certain kind of shiver that causes a faint rippling of the skin over its muscles, that the prey acknowledges its weakness to the predator and agrees to become the predator’s victim.

There are times to shiver and run, and there are times to not. At this critical time, a woman must not shiver, and must not grovel. Bluebeard’s young wife’s plea for time to gather herself together is not the signal of submission to the predator. It is her shrewd way of gathering her energy up into muscle. Like certain creatures of the forest, she is poised to make an all-out strike against the predator. She dives into the ground to escape the predator, then unexpectedly surfaces behind him.

Giving the Cry

When Bluebeard bellows for his wife and she stalls for dear time, she is trying to rouse energy to overwhelm the captor, whether that specifically or in combination be a destructive religion, husband, family, culture, or a woman’s negative complexes.

Bluebeard’s wife pleads for her life, but craftily. “Please,” she whispers, “allow me to prepare for my death.”

“Yes ” he snarls, “but be ready.”

The young woman summons her psychic brothers. What do these represent in a woman’s psyche? They are the more muscled, more naturally aggressive propellants of the psyche. They represent the force within a woman which can act when it is time to kill

off malignant impulses. Although this attribute is here portrayed by the male gender, it can be portrayed by either gender—and by other things which are genderless, such as the mountain which snaps shut on the intruder, the sun which descends for an instant to bum the marauder to a crisp.

The wife races up the stairs to her chamber and posts her sisters on the ramparts. She cries up to her sisters, “Do you see our brothers coming yet?” And her sisters call down that they see nothing yet. As Bluebeard roars for his wife to come to the cellar so he can behead her, again she cries, “Do you see bur brothers coming?” And her sisters call down that perhaps they see a little dust devil or a whirlwind off in the distance.

Here we have the entire scenario of a woman’s surge of intrapsychic power. Her sisters—the. wiser ones—take center stage in this last initiatory step; they become her eyes. The woman’s cry travels over a long intra-psychic distance to where her brothers live, to where those aspects of psyche that are trained to fight, to fight to the death if necessary, live. But initially, the defending aspects of psyche are not immediately as close by to consciousness as they ought to be. Many women’s alacrity and fighting natures are not as close to consciousness as is efficient.

A woman must practice calling up or conjuring her contentious nature, her whirlwind, dust-devil-like attributes. The symbol of the whirling wind represents a central force of determination which, when focused rather than scattered, gives tremendous energy to a woman. With this more fierce attitude at the ready, she will not lose consciousness or be interred along with the rest. She will solve, for once and for all, the interior woman-killing, her loss of libido, the loss of her passion for life. While the key questions provide the opening and loosening required for her liberation, without the eyes of the sisters, without the muscle of the sword- wielding brothers, she cannot fully succeed.

Bluebeard shouts for his wife and begins to clomp up the stone steps. His wife cries to her sisters, “And now, do you see them now?” And ter sisters cry down, “Yes! We see them now, they are almost here.” Her brothers gallop down the hall. They charge into her room and drive Bluebeard out onto the parapet. There, with

swords, they kill him and leave what is left of him for the carrion eaters.

When women re-surface from their
naíveté,
they draw with them and to themselves something unexplored. In this case the now wiser woman draws an internal masculine energy to her aid.

In Jungian psychology, this element has been named
animus
; a partly mortal, partly instinctual, partly cultural element of a woman’s psyche that shows up in fairy tales and in dream symbols as her son, husband, stranger, and/or lover—possibly threatening depending on her psychic circumstances of the moment. This psychic figure is particularly valuable because it is invested with qualities which are traditionally bred out of women, aggression being one of the more common.

When this opposite-gender nature is healthy, as symbolized by the brothers in “Bluebeard,” it loves the woman it inhabits. It is the intra-psychic energy which helps her to accomplish anything she asks. He is the one who has psychic muscle where she may have differing gifts. He will aid and assist her in her bid for consciousness. For many women, this contra-sexual aspect bridges between the worlds of internal thought and feeling—the outer world.

The stronger and more integrally vast the animus (think of the animus as a bridge) the more able, easily, and with style the woman manifests her ideas and her creative work in the outer world in a concrete way. A woman with a poorly developed animus has lots of ideas and thoughts but is unable to manifest them in the outer world. She always stops short of the organization or implementation of her wonderful images.

The brothers represent the blessing of strength and action. With them, in the end, several things occur, one is that the vast and disabling ability of the predator is neutralized in a woman’s psyche. And second, the blueberry-eyed maiden is replaced by one with eyes awake, and third, a warrior to each side of her if she but calls for them.

left for the flesh-eaters—the cormorants, raptors, and buzzards— to cany away. Here we have a very strange and mystical ending. In ancient times there were souls called sin-eaters. These were personified by spirits, birds, or animals, sometimes humans, who somewhat like the scapegoat, took on the sins, that is, the psychic waste of the community, so people could be cleansed and redeemed from the detritus of difficult life or life not well lived.

We have seen how the wild nature is exemplified by the finder of the dead, the one who sings over the bones of the dead, bringing them back to life again. This Life/Death/Life nature is a central attribute of the instinctual nature of women. Likewise, indorse mythology, the sin-eaters are carrion eaters who devour the dead, incubate them in their bellies, and carry them to Hel, who is not a place but a person. Hel is the Goddess of life and death. She shows the dead how to live backward. They become younger and younger until they are ready to be reborn and re-released back into life.

This eating of sins and sinners, and the subsequent incubation of them, and their release back into life once more, constitutes an individuation process for the most base aspects of the psyche. In this sense it is right and proper that energy is drawn out of the predatory elements of the psyche, killing them so to speak, draining their powers. Then they may be returned to the compassionate Life/Death/Life Mother, to be transformed and re-issued, hopefully in a less contentious state.

Many scholars who have studied this tale think Bluebeard represents a force which is not redeemable.
⁵
But I sense additional ground for this aspect of the psyche—not a transformation from mass murderer into Mr. Chips, but more like a person who must be in an asylum, but a decent place with trees and sky and proper nourishment, and perhaps music to soothe, but not banished to a back ward in the psyche to be tortured and reviled.

On the other hand, I do not want to portray that there is no such thing as manifest and irredeemable evil, for that also exists. Throughout time there is the mystical sense that any individuation work done by humans also changes the darkness in the collective unconscious of all humans, that being the place where the predator resides. Jung once said that God became more conscious
⁶
as humans became more conscious. He postulated that humans cause the dark side of God to become struck with light when they rout their personal demons out into the light of day.

I
do not claim to know how it ail works, but following archetypal pattern, it would look and work something like this: Instead of reviling the predator of the psyche, or running away from it, we dismember it. We accomplish this by not allowing ourselves divisive thoughts about our soul-life and our worth in particular. We capture invidious thoughts before they become large enough to do any harm, and we dismantle them.

We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Predator: “You never finish anything you start.” Yourself: “I finish many things.” We dismantle the assaults of the natural predator by taking to heart and working with what is truthful in what the predator says and then discarding the rest.

We dismantle the predator by maintaining our intuitions and instincts and by resisting the predator’s seductions. If we were to list all our losses up to this point in our lives, remembering times when we were disappointed, when we were powerless against torment, when we had a fantasy filled with hosting and frou-frou, we would understand that those are vulnerable sites in our psyches. It is to those desirous and underprivileged parts that the predator appeals in order to hide the fact that its sole intention is to drag you to the cellar and leech your energy as a blood transfusion for himself.

In the finale of the Bluebeard story his bones and gristle are left for the buzzards. This gives us a strong insight into transformation of the predator. That is the last task for a woman in this Bluebeardian journey: to allow the Life/Death/Life nature to pick the predator apart and carry it off to be incubated, transformed, and released back into life.

When we refuse to entertain the predator, its strength is extracted and it is unable to act without us. We, in essence, drive it down into the layer of the psyche where all creation is as yet unformed, and let it bubble in that etheric soup till we can find a form, a better form for it to fill. When the predator’s psychic
energum
is rendered, it is formable to some other purpose. We are creators then; the raw substance reduced down becomes then the stuff of our own creation.

Women find that as they vanquish the predator, taking from it what is useful and leaving the rest, they are filled with intensity; vitality, and drive. They have rendered from the predator what has been stolen from them, vigor and substance. To render the predator’s energy and turn it to something useful can be understood in these ways: The predator’s rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator’s craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator’s killing nature can be used to kill off that which must properly die in a woman’s life, or what she must die to in her outer life, these being different things at different times. Usually, she knows exactly what they are.

To render the parts of Bluebeard is like taking the medicinal parts of the deadly nightshade, or the healing elements of the poisonous belladonna plant, and using these materials carefully and for healing and helping. What ash of the predator is left then will indeed rise up again, but in much smaller form, much more recognizably, and with much less power to deceive and destroy— for you have rendered many of its powers which it plied destructively, and you have turned these powers toward the useful and the relevant.

Bluebeard is one of several teaching tales that I believe are important for women who are young, not necessarily in years, but in some part of their minds. It is a tale of psychic
naiveté,
but also of powerfully breaching the injunction against “looking.” It is a tale about finally cutting down and rendering the natural predator of the psyche.

It is my belief that story is meant to set the inner life back into motion again. The Bluebeard story is a medicine which is particularly important to apply where the inner life of a woman has become frightened, or wedged or cornered. Story solutions lessen fear, elicit doses of adrenaline at just the right times, and most importantly for the captured naive self, cut doors into walls which were previously blank.

Perhaps most elementally, the Bluebeard story raises to consciousness the psychic key, the ability to ask any and all questions about oneself, about one's family, one's endeavors, and about life all around Then, like the wildish being who sniffs things out, snuffles into and under and around to discover what a thing is, a woman is free to find true answers to her deepest and darkest questions. She is free to wrest the powers from the thing which has assailed her and to turn those powers which were once used against her to her own well-suited and excellent uses. That, is a wildish woman.

The Dark Man in Women’s Dreams

Thé
natural predator of the psyche is not only found in fairy tales but also in dreams. There is a universal initiatoiy dream among women, one so common that it is remarkable if a woman has reached age twenty-five without having had such a dream. The dream usually causes women to jolt awake, striving and anxious.

This is the pattern of the dream: The dreamer is alone, often in her own home. There are one or more prowler-types outside in the dark. Frightened, she dials
⁷
the emergency phone number for help. Suddenly, she realizes, the prowler is inside the house with
her...
close to her ... perhaps she can feel his breath ... perhaps he is even touching
her...
and she cannot ring the emergency number. The dreamer awakens instantly, breathing gutturally, heart like a crazy drum.

There is a strong physical aspect to having a dream of the dark man. The dream is often accompanied by sweats, snuggles, hoarse breathing, heart pounding, and sometimes cries and moans of fear from the dreamer. We could say the dream-maker has dispensed with subtle messages to the dreamer and now sends images which shake the neurological and autonomic nervous system of the dreamer, thereby communicating the urgency of the matter.

The antagonist(s) of this “dark man” dream are usually, in women’s own words, “terrorists, rapists, thugs, concentration camp Nazis, marauders, murderers, criminals, creeps, bad men, thieves.” There are several levels to the interpretation of such a dream, depending on the life circumstances and interior dramas surrounding the dreamer.

For instance, often such a dream is a reliable indicator that a woman’s consciousness, as in the case of a very young woman, is just beginning to gain awareness of the innate psychic predator. In other instances, the dream is a harbinger; the woman dreamer has just discovered, or is about to discover and begin liberating, a forgotten and captive function of her psyche. Under yet other circumstances the dream is about an increasingly intolerable situation in the culture outside the dreamer’s personal life, one in which she is being called to either fight or flee.