Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (55 page)

religions. The young woman bathes, dresses in white, draws a chalk circle around herself. It is an old Goddess ritual to bathe— purify—to don the white gown—the garb of descent to the land of the dead—and to draw a circle of magic protection—sacred thought—around oneself. All these the maiden does in a rather trancelike state, as though she is drawing instruction from far away in time.

There is a crisis point for us when we are waiting for what we are sure will be our destruction, our ending. This causes us, like the maiden, to cock our ears toward a faraway voice coming from ancestral time, a voice that tells us how to stay strong, how to keep spirit simple and pure. Once in my own despair I dreamt a voice that said, “Touch sun.” After the dream, every day, wherever I went, I put my back, or the sole of my foot, or my palm on the sun- cats—the rectangles of sunlight—on walls, floors, and doors. I leaned and rested on those golden shapes. They acted as a turbine to my spirit, I cannot say how, only that it was so.

If we listen to dream voices, to images, to stories—especially those from our own lives, and to our art, to those who have gone before, and to each other, something will be handed out to us, even several somethings that are ritual, personal psychological rites, these serving to steady this stage of the process.
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The bones of this tale are from the time when it is said that Goddesses combed the hair of mortal women and loved them so. In this sense then, we understand that the descents in this tale are those that draw a woman to the ancient past, to her ancestral motherlines in the underworld. This is the task, to return through the mists of time to the place of
La Que Sabe,
who is expecting us. She has extensive underworld teachings for us that will be of great value to our spirits and to us in the outer world.

In the old religions, dressing oneself in purity and preparing for one’s death makes one immune, inaccessible to evil. Placing the old protection of the Wild Mother about oneself—the chalk circle of prayer, highest thought, or concern for an outcome beneficial for the soul’s sake—these enable our psychological descent to continue without swerving off course, without our vitality being extinguished by the devilish opposing force of the psyche.

Here we are, all dressed up and as protected as we can be,

awaiting our fate. But the maiden weeps, cries on her hands. At first when the psyche cries unconsciously, we are unable to hear it except for a feeling of helplessness that comes over us. The maiden continues to weep. Her tears are a germination of that which preserves her, that which purifies the wound she has received.

C. S. Lewis wrote about the bottle of child’s tears that heals any wound with just one drop. Tears, in mythos, melt the icy heart. In “The Stone Child.”
¹⁰
a story I've amplified from a song- poem given to me years ago by my beloved Inuit
madrina.
Mary Uukalat, a boy’s hot tears cause a cold stone to break open, releasing a protective spirit. In the tale "Mary Culhane," the demon who has seized Mary cannot enter any house where tears have been cried by a true heart; these the demon considers “holy water.” All through history, tears have done three works: called the spirits to one’s side, repelled those who would muffle and bind the simple soul, and healed the injuries of poor bargains made by humans.

There are times in a woman’s life when she cries and cries and cries, and even though she has the succor and support of her loved ones, still and yet she cries. Something in this crying keeps the predator away, keeps away unhealthy desire or gain that will ruin her. Tears are part of the mending of rips in the psyche where energy has leaked and leaked away. The matter is serious, but the worst does not occur—our light is not stolen—for tears make us conscious. There is no chance to go back to sleep when one is weeping. Whatever sleep comes then is only rest for the physical body.

Sometimes a woman says, “I am sick of crying, I am tired of it,

I want it to stop.” But it is her soul that is making tears, and they are her protection. So she must keep on till the time of need is over. Some women marvel at all the water their bodies can produce when they weep. This will not last forever, only till the soul is done with its wise expression.

The Devil tries to approach the daughter and cannot, for she has both bathed and cried. He admits his power is weakened by such holy water and demands she no longer bathe. But rather than this debasing her, it has the opposite effect
¹¹
She begins to resemble

an animal then, infused with the powers of the underlying wildish nature, and this, too, is protection. It may be at this stage that a woman takes less or a different sort of interest in her appearance. She may go about dressed more like a tangle of twigs than a person. As she contemplates her plight, many former preoccupations recede.

“Well,” says the Devil, “if I peel away your civilized layer maybe I can steal your life forever.” The predator wishes to degrade her, weaken her by his proscriptions. The Devil thinks that if the maiden became unbathed and dirty, then he would be able to rob her of herself. But just the opposite occurs,.for the sooty woman, the mud woman, is beloved by the Wild Woman and protected by her unequivocally.
¹²
It would appear that the predator does not understand that his proscriptions only put her closer to her powerful wild nature.

The Devil cannot come close to the wildish self. Being thus has a purity that eventually repels thoughtless or destructive energy. The combination of this and her pure tears prevents access to the vile thing that wishes her doom so it can live more fully.

Next, the Devil instructs the father to mutilate his daughter by chopping off her hands. If the father does not comply, the demon threatens to kill off the entire psyche: “Everything here will die, including you, your wife, and all the fields for as far as you can see.” The Devil’s goal is to cause the daughter to lose her hands— that is, her psychic ability to grasp, to hold, to help herself or others.

The fathering element of the psyche is not mature, cannot hold its power against this intense predator, and so chops off his daughter’s hands. He attempts to plead for his daughter, but the price—destruction of the entire creative force of the psyche—is too high. The daughter submits to the desecration, and the blood sacrifice is completed, that which in ancient times denoted a full descent to the underworld.

In the act of losing her hands, the woman makes her way into
la selva
subterránea,
the underworld initiation ground. If this were a Greek play, the tragic chorus would now cry out and weep, for even though the act causes her to leam immense power, at this

tíme
a woman’s innocence has been slain and will never return in the same way again.

The silver-lipped ax comes from another archeological layer of the old wild feminine in which silver is the special color of the spirit world and of the moon. The silver-lipped ax is so called for in olden times it was made of forge-blackened steel, and its blade was sharpened by whetstone till it turned a bright silverish color. In the old Minoan religion, the ax of the Goddess was used to mark the ritual path of the initiate and to mark t
he places designated as holy. I
have heard from two old Croatian “talers” that in the old women’s religions, a small ritual ax was used to sever the umbilical cord of the newborn, freeing the child from the underworld so it could live in this world.
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The silver of the ax is related to the silver hands that will even tually belong to the maiden. Here is a tricky passage, for it presents the idea that the removal of psychic hands may be ritual. In old women’s healing rites in Eastern and Northern Europe, there was the concept of the young sapling being pruned with an ax in order to grow more full.
¹⁴
Long ago there was a deep devotion to living trees. They were valued, for they symbolized the ability to die and return back to life. They were esteemed for all the life- giving things they provided people, such as firewood for warmth and cooking, wands for cradles, staffs for walking, walls for shelter, medicine for fever, and also as places to climb to see far and, if necessary, to hide from the enemy. The tree was truly a great wild mother.

In ancient women’s religion, this sort of ax innately belongs to the Goddess, not to the father. This sequence in the fairy tale strongly suggests that the father’s ownership of the ax comes about in the story as a result of the scrambling together of the old and the newer religions, the older one itself having been dismembered, certainly dis-remembered. Yet, regardless of the mists of time and/or the overlays covering these old ideas about women’s initiation, by following a tale such as this one we can extract what we need from the tangle; we can re-piece the map that shows the path of descent and the way back up again.

We can understand the removal of psychic hands in much the same way the symbol was understood by the ancients. In Asia,

the celestial ax was used to cut one away from the unillumined self. This motif of cutting as initiation is central to our story. If, in our modem societies, the hands of the ego must be sundered in order to regain our wild office, our feminine senses, then go they must in order to take us away from all seductions of meaningless things within our reach, whatever it is that we can hold on to in order not to grow. If it is so that the hands must go for a while, then so be it. Let them go.

The father wields the silver cutting tool, and though he has a sense of terrible regret, he holds more dear his own life and that of the psyche all around, although some storytellers in our family clearly emphasize that the life he most fears losing is his own. If we understand the father as an organizing principle, a sort of ruler of the external or worldly psyche, then we can see that a woman’s overt self, her mundane, ruling ego-self, does not want to die.

This is completely understandable. Such is always the case in a descent. Some of what we are is drawn to the descent as though it is something lovely, dark, and bittersweet. At the same time we are repelled by it, crossing psychic streets, highways, and even continents to avoid it. Yet here we are shown that the flowering tree must suffer the amputation. The only way we can stand the thought of this is by the promise that someone, somewhere in the underside of the psyche, waits for us, waits to help us, heal us. And this is so. A great Someone waits to restore us, to transform what has deteriorated, and to bind up the limbs that have been hurt.

In the farmlands out where I grew up, lightning and hail storms were called “cutting storms,” sometimes also “reaper storms,” as in Grim Reaper, for they cut down the living beings all around: livestock and sometimes also humans, but mostly bearing-plants and trees. After a great storm, entire families crept from their root cellars and bent over the land, seeing what help the crops, the flowers, the trees might need. The littlest children picked up the strewn boughs full of leaves and fruit. The older children propped up plants still living but slashed. They bound them up with wooden dowels, kindling splints, and white rag bandages. The adults dismantled and buried that which had been struck down irrevocably:

There is a loving family like this waiting for the maiden in the

underworld, as we shall see. In this metaphor of cutting off the hands, we see that something will come of it. In the underworld, whenever a thing is not able to live, it is taken down and cut apart to be used in another way. This woman of the story is not old, not sick, yet she must be dismantled for she cannot be the way she has been anymore. Yet forces are waiting for her to help her heal.

By cutting off her hands, the father deepens the descent, hastens the
disolutio,
the difficult loss of all one’s dearest values, which mean everything, the loss of vantage point, the loss of horizon lines, the loss of one's bearings about what one believes and for what reasons. In aboriginal rites worldwide, the idea is definitely to confuse the ordinary mind so that the mystical can be easily introduced to the initiates.
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With the cutting off of the hands, the importance of the rest of the psychic body and its attributes is emphasized and we know that the foolish ruling father of the psyche has not long to live, for the deep and dismembered woman is going to do her work, with or without his assistance and protection. And as gruesome as it may seem at first, this new version of her body is going to help.

So it is in this descent that we lose our psychic hands, those parts of our bodies that are like two small human beings in and of themselves. In olden times, the fingers were likened to legs and arms, and the wrist joint was likened to the head. Those beings can dance, they can sing. I once clapped cadence with
Reneé
Heredia, a great flamenco guitarist. In flamenco, the palms of the hands speak, they make sounds that are words, like “Faster, oh beautiful one, soar now, be deeper, ah, feel me, feel this music, feel this and
dás
and this.” The hands are beings in their own right.

If you study
crèche
scenes from the Mediterranean, more often than not you see that the hands of the shepherds and the Wise Men, or of Mary and Joseph, are all extended with palms facing the Divine Child, as though the child were a light that could be received up through the skin of the palms. In Mexico, you see this also in statues of the great Goddess Guadalupe showering her healing light down upon us by showing us the palms of her hands. The power of the hands is recorded throughout history. At Kayenta on the
Diñé
(Navajo) reservation there is a certain hogan

with an
ancient red handprint beside the door. It means, “We are safe here.”

As women, we touch many people. We know our palm is a kind of sensor. Whether in a hug or a pat or just a touch on the shoulder, we take a reading of the persons we touch. If we are connected in any way to
La Que Sabe
, we know what another human feels by sensing them with our palms. For some, information in the form of images and sometimes even words comes to them, informing them of the feeling state of others. One might say there is a form of radar in the hands.

Hands are not only receivers but transmitters. When one shakes a person’s hand, one can send a message, and often unconsciously does so by pressure, intensity, duration, and skin temperature. Persons who consciously or unconsciously intend meanness have touches that feel as though they are poking holes in the psychic soul-body of the other. At the other psychological pole, hands laid upon a person can soothe, comfort, remove pain, and heal. This is woman’s knowledge through the centuries, handed down mother to daughter.
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The predator of the psyche knows all about the deep mystery associated with hands. In too many parts of the world, an egregiously pathological way of demonstrating inhumanity is to kidnap an innocent person and cut off their hands; to dismember the human feeling, seeing, and healing function. The killer does not feel, so he does not wish for his victim to feel either. This is exactly the intention of the Devil, for the unredeemed aspect of the psyche does not feel, and in its insane envy of those who do, it is driven to a cutting hatred. To murder a woman by cutting is a theme of many tales. But this Devil is more than a murderer, he is a mutilator. He requires mutilation, not decorative or simple initiatory scarification, but the kind that intends to disable a woman forever.

When we say a woman’s hands are cut off, we mean she is bound away from self-comfort, from immediate self-healing, so very helpless to do anything except follow the age-old path. So it is proper that we continue to weep during this time. It is our simple and powerful protection against a demon so hurtful that none of us can fully comprehend its motive or raison
d’étre.

In fairy tales there is the leitmotif called the “thrown object.” The heroine who is being pursued takes a magical comb from her hair and throws it down behind her, where it grows into a forest of trees so thick you couldn't poke a pitchfork between them. Or the heroine has a little vial of water, which she uncorks, sprinkling its contents behind her as she runs. The droplets turn into a flood, effectively slowing down her pursuer.

In the story, the young woman cries and cries all over her stumps and the Devil is repelled by some sort of force field around her. He cannot seize her as he had intended. Here, tears are the “thrown object,” the watery wall that keeps out the Devil, not because the Devil is moved or made soft by them—he is not— but because there is something about the purity of true tears that causes the Devil’s power to be broken. And we find this to be true when we cry for the love of God that nothing, nothing, is on the horizon but the most bleak, the most dark and unredeemed possibilities, and yet the tears save us from-being burnt to the ground for no useful end.
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The daughter must grieve. I am amazed how little women cry nowadays, and then apologetically. I worry when shame or disuse begins to steal away such a natural function. To be a flowering tree and to be moist is essential, otherwise you will break. Crying is good, it is right. It does not cure the dilemma, but it enables the process to continue instead of collapsing. And now, the maiden’s life as she has known it, her understanding of life to this point, is over, and she goes down to another level of the underworld. And we continue in her footsteps. We go onward, even though we are vulnerable and so peeled of ego-protection, like a tree skinned of its bark. Yet we are powerful, for we have learned to sling the Devil across the yard.

At this time, we see in our lives that no matter what we do, our ego-plans slip from our grasp. There will be a change in our lives, a big one, no matter what nice plans the little temperamental conductor-ego has for the next movement. Our own powerful destiny begins to rule our lives—not the mill, not the sweeping, not the sleeping. Our lives as we once knew them are over. We are desirous of being alone, perhaps being left alone. We can no

longer rely on the fatherly dominant culture; we are indie midst of learning our real lives for the first time. We go on.

It is a time when all that we value loses its lilt. Jung reminds us of the term used by Heraclitus,
enantiodromia
—meaning to flow backward. But this flowing backward can be more than a regression into the personal unconscious, it can be a heartfelt return to workable ancient values, more deeply held ideas.
¹⁸
If we understand this stage of the initiation of endurance as a step backward, it must also be considered a step ten leagues down and back into the realm of Wild Woman.

All this causes the Devil to throw his rump over his shoulder and stomp off. In this sense, when a woman feels she has lost her touch, lost her usual way with the world, she is powerful still in her pureness of soul, she is strong in her insistence on her sorrow, and this causes the thing that wishes to destroy her to withdraw.

The psychic body has lost its precious hands, it is true. But the rest of the psyche will compensate for the loss. We still have feet that know the way, a soul-mind with which to see far, breasts and belly to sense with, just like the exotic and enigmatic belly Goddess, Baubo, who represents the deep instinctual nature of women... and who also has no hands.

With this incorporeal and uncanny body we go forward. We are about to make the next descent.

The Third Stage—The Wandering

In the third stage of the story, the father offers to keep his daughter in riches for life, but the daughter says she will go forth and depend upon fate. At daybreak, with her arms bound in clean gauze, she walks away from her life as she has known it.

She becomes disheveled and animal-like again. Late at night, starving, she comes to an orchard in which all the pears are numbered.
¹⁹
A spirit drains the moat around the orchard, and while the mystified gardener watches, the young woman eats the pear that offers itself to her.

Initiation is the process by which we turn from our natural inclination to remain unconscious and decide that, whatever it takes— suffering, striving, enduring—we will pursue conscious union

with the deeper mind, the wild Self. In the tale, the mother and father attempt to draw the maiden back into an unconscious state: “Ah, stay h
ere
with us, you are injured, but we can make you forget.” Will she, now that she h
as defeated the Devil, rest on h
er laurels so to speak? Will she retire, handless, injured, to the recesses of the psyche where she can be
taken care of for the rest of h
er life by just drifting along and doing what she is told?

No, she will not withdraw like an acid-scarred beauty into a dim room forever. She will dress, psychically medicate herself as best she can, and descend another stone staircase to an even deeper realm of the psyche. The old dominant part of the psyche offers to keep her safe and hidden forever, but her instinctual nature says no to that, for it feels it must strive to live fully awake no matter what.

The maiden’s wounds are wrapped in white gauze. White is the color of the deathland, and also the color of the alchemical
albedo
, the resurrection of the soul from the underworld. The color is a harbinger of the cycle of descent and return. Here at the beginning, the maiden becomes a wanderer, and this in and of itself is a resurrection into a new life, and a death in the old. To wander is a very good choice.

Women in this stage often begin to feel both desperate and adamant to go on this inward journey, no matter what. And so they do, as they leave one life for another,
or
one stage of life for another, or sometimes even one lover for no other lover than themselves. Progressing from adolescence to young womanhood, or from married woman to spinster, or from mid-age to older, crossing over the crone line, setting out wounded but with one’s own new value system—that is death and resurgence. Leaving a relationship or the home of one’s parents, leaving behind outmoded values, becoming one’s own person, and sometimes, driving deep into the wildlands because one just
must,
all these are the fortune of the descent.

So off we go, down into a different world, under a different sky, with unfamiliar ground beneath our boots. And yet we go vulnerably, for we have no grasping, no holding on to, no clinging to, no knowing—for we have no hands.

The mother and father—the collective and egoistic aspects of the psyche—no longer have the power they once had. They have

been chastened by blood that has been spilt through their reckless disregard. Even though they make the offer to keep the maiden in comfort, they are helpless now to direct her life, for destiny draws her to live as a wanderer. In this sense, her mother and father die. Her new parents are the wind and the road.

The archetype of the wanderer constellates, that is, causes another to emerge: that of the lone wolf or the outsider. She is outside the seeming happy families of the villages, outside the warm room and out in the cold; that is her life now.
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This becomes the living metaphor for women on the journey. We begin somehow not to feel a part of the life that carnivals about us. The calliope seems far away, the barkers, the hucksters, the whole magnificent circus of outer life wobbles and then falls to dust as we descend farther into the underworld.

Here, the old night religion again comes up from the road to meet us. While the old tale of Hades grabbing off Persephone to the underworld is a fine drama, far older stories from the matria- centered religions, such as those about Ishtar and Inanna, point toward a definite “yearning to love” bond between the maiden and the king in the underworld.

In these old religious versions, the maiden need not be seized and dragged into the underworld by some dark God. The maiden knows she must go, knows it is part of divine rite. Although she may be fearful, she
wants
to go meet her king, her bridegroom in the underworld, from the beginning. Making her descent in her own way, she is transformed there, learns deep knowing there, and ascends again to the outer world.

Both the classical Persephone myth and the core of the fairy tale “The Handless Maiden” are fragmentary dramas which derive from the more cohesive ones portrayed in the older religions. What was once a longing to find the underworld Beloved became, somewhere in time, a lust and seizure in later myths.

In the time of the great matriarchies, it was understood that a woman would naturally be led to the underworld, guided there and therein by the powers of the deep feminine. It was considered part of her instruction, and an achievement of the highest order for her to gain this knowledge through firsthand experience. The nature of