Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pincola Estes Page A
Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
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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
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
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