Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
To give birth is the psychic equivalent of becoming oneself, one self, meaning an undivided psyche. Before this birth of new life in
the underworld, a woman is likely to think all parts and personalities within her are rather like a hodgepodge of vagrants who wander in and out of her life. In the underworld birth, a woman learns that anything that brushes by her
is
a part of her. Sometimes this differentiation of all the aspects of psyche is hard to do, especially with the tendencies and urges we find repulsive. The challenge of loving unappealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any heroine has ever undertaken.
Sometimes we are afraid that to identify more than one self within the psyche might mean that we are psychotic. While it is true that people with a psychotic disorder also experience many selves, identifying with or against them quite vividly, a person with no psychotic disorder holds all the inner selves in an orderly and rational manner. They are put to good use; the person grows and thrives. For the majority of women, mothering and raising the internal selves is a creative work, a way of knowledge, not a reason for becoming unnerved.
So, the handless maiden is waiting to have a child, a new little wild self. The body in pregnancy does what it wants and knows to do. The new life latches on, divides, swells. A woman at this stage of the psychic process may enter another
enantiodromia,
the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable anymore, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings for odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavors.
For instance, for some women, to be married was once the end-all and be-all. But in an
enantiodromia
, they want to be cut loose: marriage is bad, marriage is blah, marriage is unecstatic
scheisse
, shit. Exchange the word
marriage
for the words
lover, job, body, art, life,
and
choices
and you see the exact mind-set of this time.
And then there are the cravings. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling that wild smell. She may have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, weed something, pull things out of the ground, or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock
trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she does not dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.
A new self is on the way. Our inner lives, as we have known them, are about to change. While this does not mean we should throw away the decent and especially the supportive aspects of our lives in some kind of demented housecleaning, it does mean that in the descent the topside world and ideals pale, and for a time we shall be restless and unsatisfied, for the satisfaction, the fulfillment
, is in the process of being born
in the inner reality.
What it is we are hungering for can never be fulfilled by a mate, a job, money, a new this or that. What we hunger for is of the other world, the world that sustains our lives as women. And this child- Self we are awaiting is brought forth by just this means—by waiting. As time passes in our lives and our work in the underworld, th
e child develops and will be born
. In most cases, a woman’s nightdreams will presage the birth; women literally dream of a new baby, a new home, a new life.
Now the king’s mother and the young queen stay with each other. The king’s mother is—guess who?—old
La
Que Sabe.
She knows th
e ways of it all. The queen mother represents both a Demeter-like mothering and a Hekate-like
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cronation in the unconscious of women.
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This womanly alchemy of maiden, mother, and
la curandera
, healer crone, is echoed in the relationship between the handless maiden and the king’s mother. They are a similar psychic equation. Though in this tale the king’s mother is a little sketchy, like the maiden at the beginning of the tale with her rite of the white gown and the chalk circle, the old mother knows her ancient rites also, as we shall see.
Once the childSelf is born
, the old queen mother sends a message about the young queen’s infant to the king. The messenger seems normal enough, but as he nears a stream of water, he becomes more and more sleepy, falls asleep, and the Devil jumps out. This is a clue that tells us there will again be a challenge to the ps
yche during its next labor in th
e underworld.
In Greek mythos, in the underworld there is a river called Lethe, and to drink of its waters causes one to forget all things said and done. Psychologically this means to fall asleep to one’s actual life. The runner who is supposed to enable communication between these two main components of the new psyche cannot yet hold its own against the destructive/seductive force in the psyche. The communicating function of the psyche becomes sleepy, lies down, falls asleep, and forgets.
So, guess who is always out and about? Why, the old tracker of maidens, the hungry Devil. By the word
Devil
in the story, we see how this story was overlaid by more recent religious material. In the story, the messenger, stream, and the sleep that causes forgetfulness reveal that the old religion is right underneath the story line, just the next layer down.
This has been the archetypal pattern of descent since the beginning of time, and we too follow this timeless system. Likewise, we have a history of terrible chores behind us. We have seen Death’s steamy breath. We have braved the clutching forests, the marching trees, the roots that trip, the fog that blinds. We are psychic heroines with a valise full of medals. And who can blame us now? We want to rest. We deserve to rest for we have been through a lot And so we lie down. Next to a lovely stream. The sacred process is not forgotten, just ... just ... well, we would like to take a break, just for a while you know, just going to close our eyes for a minute...
And before we know it, the Devil hops in on all four feet and changes the message meant to convey love and celebration into one meant to disgust. The Devil represents the psychic aggravation that bedevils us as it sneers, “Have you gone back to your old ways of innocence and
naíveté
now that you are loved? Now that you gave birth? Do you think being tested is all over, you foolish woman?”
And because we are near Lethe, we snore on. This is the error all women make—not once, but many times. We forget to remember the Devil. The message is changed from a triumph, “The queen has given birth to a beautiful child,” to a slur, “The queen has given birth to a half dog.” In a similar version of the story, the changed message is eve
n more explicit: “The queen has
given birth to a half dog for she has copulated with the beasts in the forest.”
This half-dog image in the story is not an accident, but in fact a glorious fragment of the old Goddess-centered religions of Europe across to Asia. During those times people worshipped a tripleheaded Goddess. The triple-headed Goddesses are represented in various systems by Hekate, the Baba Yaga, Mother
Hollé,
Berchta, Artemis, and others. Each appeared as or had close association with these animals.
In the older religions, these and other powerful and wild female deities carried the female initiation traditions and taught women aH the stages of a woman’s life, from maiden through mother through crone. Giving birth to a half dog is a skewed degradation of the ancient wild Goddesses whose instinctual natures were considered holy. The newer religion attempted to pollute the sacred meanings of the triple Goddesses by insisting that the holy ones bred with animals and encouraged their followers to do likewise.
It was at this point that the archetype of the Wild Woman was pushed down and entombed far, far underground, and the wildish in women began to not only dwindle but had to be spoken about in whispers and in secret places. In many cases, women who loved the old Wild Mother had to-guard their lives carefully. Finally, the knowing came through only in fairy tales, folklore, trance states, and nightdreams. And thank The Goodness for that.
While in “Bluebeard” we learned about the natural predator as one who cut
o
ff women’s ideas, feelings, and actions, here in “The Handless Maiden,” we study a far more subtle but immensely powerful aspect of the predator, one we must face in our psyches, and more and more on a daily basis in our own outer society.
“The Handless Maiden” reveals how the predator has the ability to twist human perceptions and the vital comprehensions we need to develop moral dignity, visionary scope, and responsive action in our lives and in the world. In “Bluebeard,” the predator lets no one live. In “The Handless Maiden,” the Devil allows life, but attempts to prevent a woman’s reconnection with the deep knowledge of the instinctual nature that contains an automatic
rightness of perception and acti
on.
So when the Devil changes the message in the tale, it can be
considered in one sense a true record of an actual historical event, one that is particularly relevant to modem women in their psychic work of descent and awareness. Remarkably, many aspects of culture (meaning the collective and dominant belief system of a group of persons living close enough to influence one another) still act as the Devil regarding women’s inner work, personal lives, and psychic processes. By carving away this, and blotting out that, and severing a root here, and sealing up an opening there, the “devil” in the culture, and the intra-psychic predator, cause generations of women to feel fearful yet wander about with not the simplest clues about the causes, or about their own loss of the wild nature, which could reveal all to them.
While it is true that the predator has a taste for prey that is in some way soul-hungry, soul-lonely, or in some other way disempowered, fairy tales show us that the predator is drawn also to consciousness, reform, release, and new freedom. As soon as it becomes aware of such, it is on the spot.
Myriad story lines point out the predator, those in this work as well as fairy tales such as “Cap of Rushes” and “All Fur,” and continuing with the mythos about the Greek Andromeda and the
Azteca
Malinche. The devices used are denigration of the protagonist’s purpose, disparaging language used to describe the prey, blind judgments, proscriptions, and unwarranted punishments. These are the means by which the predator changes the life-giving messages between soul and spirit into death-dealing messages that cut our hearts, cause shame, and even more importantly inhibit us from taking rightful action.
At the cultural level, we can give many examples of how the predator shapes ideas and feelings in order to steal women’s light Ore of the most striking examples of loss of natural perception is in the generations of women
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whose mothers broke the tradition of teaching, preparing, and welcoming their daughters into the most basic and physical aspect of being women, menstruation. In our culture, but also in many others, the Devil changed the message so that first blood and all subsequent cycles of blood became surrounded with humiliation rather than wonder. This caused millions of young women to lose their inheritance of the miraculous body and instead to fear that they were dying, diseased, or being
punished by God. The culture and the individuals within the culture picked up the Devil’s twisted message without examining it, and passed it on with much affect, thus turning a woman’s time of heightened sensation, emotionally and sexually, into a time of shame and punishment.
As we can see from the story, when the predator invades a culture, be it a psyche or a society, the various aspects or individuals of that culture have to use cunning insight, read between the lines, hold their own place, so as not to be swept away by the outrageous but exciting claims of the predator.
When there is too much predator and not enough wild soul, the economic, social, emotional, and religious structures of culture gradually begin to distort the most soulful resources, both in spirit and in the outer world. Natural cycles are starved into unnatural shapes, lacerated with unwise uses, or else put to death. The value of what is wild and visionary is denigrated, and dark
speculations
are made about how dangerous the instinctual nature really is. Thus stripped of authentic sanctity and meaning, destructive and painful means and methods are rationalized as superior.
However, no matter how much the Devil lies and tries to change the beautiful messages about a woman’s real life to mean- spirited, jealous, and life-draining ones, the king’s mother truly sees what is occurring and refuses to sacrifice her daughter. In modem terms, she would not muffle her daughter, would not warn her against speaking her truth, would not encourage her to pretend to be less in order to manipulate more. This wild mother figure from the underworld risks retribution to follow what she knows to be the wisest course. She outsmarts the predator instead of colluding. She does not give in. She knows what is integral, knows what will help a woman thrive, knows a predator when she sees one, knows what to do about it. Even when pressured by the most distorted cultural or psychic messages, even with a predator loose in the culture or in the personal psyche, we can all still hear her original wild instructions, and follow them.
This is what women learn when they dig down to the wild and instinctive nature, when they do the work of deep initiation and development of consciousness. They take on a massive enabling through the development of uninterrupted sight, hearing, being,
and doing. Women learn to look for the predator instead of trying to shoo it away, ignore it, or be nice to it. They learn the tricks, disguises, and the ways the predator thinks. They learn to “read between the lines” in messages, injunctions, expectations, or customs that have been perverted from the truthful into the manipulative. Then, whether the predator is emanating from within one's own psychic milieu or from the culture outside oneself, or both, we are shrewd and able to meet
it head-on and do what needs be done.
The Devil in the tale symbolizes anything that corrupts understanding of the deep feminine processes. You know, it does not take a Torquemada
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to hound the souls of women. They can be also hounded simply by the goodwill of new but unnatural ways, which when taken too far rob a woman of her nourishing wildish nature and her ability to make soul. A woman need
not live as though she were born
in 1000 B.C.
Nevertheless, the old knowing is universal knowing, eternal and immortal learning, which will be as relevant five thousand years from now as it is today, and as it was five thousand years ago. It is archetypal knowing, and that kind of knowledge is timeless. It is a good idea to remember that the predator is timeless also.
In another sense entirely, the switcher of messages, being an innate and contrary force that exists in the psyche and in the world, naturally opposes the new childSelf. Yet, paradoxically, because we must respond to fight it or balance it, the battle itself strengthens us immeasurably. In our personal psychic work, we receive switched messages from the Devil constantly—“I am good; I am not so good. My work is deep work; my work is silly. I am making a difference; I am not getting anywhere. I am brave;
I am a coward. I am knowing; I ought to be ashamed of myself.” These are confusing to say the least.
So, the king's mother sacrifices a doe instead of the young queen. In the psyche, as in the culture at large, there is an odd psychic quirk. Not only when people are hungry and deprived does the Devil show up but also sometimes where there has been an event pf great beauty, in this case the birth of the beautiful new baby. Again, the predator is always attracted to light, and what is more light than new life?
However, there are other dissemblers within the psyche that also attempt to demean or tarnish the new. In women’s process of learning the underworld, it is a psychic fact that when one has given birth to a beautiful thing something mean will also even if only momentarily, something that is jealous, lacks understanding,, or shows disdain. The new child will be called down, called ugly, and condemned by one or more persistent antagonists. The birth of the new causes complexes, both negative mother and negative father, and other negating creatures to rise from the psychic landfill and attempt, at the very least, to sharply criticize the new order, and at the very most to attempt to dispirit the woman and her new offspring, idea, life, or dream.
This is the same scenario of the ancient fathers, Kronos and
Uranos
and Zeus as well, who always attempted to eat or banish their offspring out of some dark fear that the children would gain succession over them. In Jungian terms, this destructive force would be called a complex, an organized set of feelings and ideas m the psyche that is unconscious to the ego and therefore more or less can have its way with us. In the psychoanalytic milieu the anbdote is consciousness of one’s foibles and gifts, so that the complex is unable to act on its own.
In Freudian terms, this destructive force would be said to emanate from the id, a dark, indefinite, hut infinite psychic land where, scattered like wreckage and made blind from lack of light, live all forgotten, repressed, and revulsive ideas, urges, wishes, and actions. In this psychoanalytic milieu, resolution is brought about by remembering base thoughts and urges, bringing them to consciousness, describing, naming, and cataloging them, in order to kadi their potency.
According
to some stories from Iceland, this magical destructive force in the psyche is sometimes
Brak,
the ice man. There is an ancient story in which the perfect murder is committed.
Brak
the ice man kills a human woman who will not return his affections. He kills her with an icicle shaped like a dagger. The icicle, as well as the
man,
melts away in the next day’s sun, and there is no weapon left to indict the killer. And there is nothing left.of the tiller either.
The dark ice man figure from the world of mythos has the same
uncanny appearance/disappearance mystique as complexes in the human psyche, as well as the same modus operandi as the Devil in this tale of the handless maiden. That is why the Devil's appearance is so disorienting to the initiate. Like the ice man, he comes out of nowhere, does his killing work, then disappears, dissolves into nowhere, leaving no trail.
This story, however, leaves us an excellent clue: if you feel you have lost your mission, your oomph, if you feel confused, slightly off, then look for the Devil, the ambusher of the soul within your own psyche. If you cannot see, hear, catch it in the act, assume it is at work, and above all stay awake—no matter how tired you become, no matter how sleepy, no matter how much you want to shut your eyes to your true work.
In reality when a woman has a devil complex, it occurs exactly like this. She is walking along, doing well, minding her own business, and all of a sudden—boom! the Devil jumps out, and all her good work loses energy, begins to limp, coughs, coughs some more, and finally falls over. What we might call the demon complex, uses the voice of the ego, attacks one's creativity, one's ideas and dreams. In the tale, it appears as a ridicule or cheapening of a woman's experience of the world and the underworld, trying to split apart the natural
conjunctio
of the rational and the mysterious. The Devil lies, and says a woman’s time in the underworld has produced a brute, when in fact it has produced a beautiful child.
When various saints wrote that they wrestled to keep faith with their chosen God, that they were all night assailed by the Devil, who burnt their ears with words meant to weaken their resolve, shook their eyeballs loose with horrible apparitions, and in general dragged their souls over broken glass, they were speaking of this very phenomenon, the Devil jumping out. This psychic ambush is meant to loosen your faith not only in yourself but in the very careful and delicate work you are doing in the unconscious.
It takes goodly amounts of faith to continue at this time, but we must and we do. The king, the queen, and the king's mother, all elements of the psyche are pulling in one direction, in our direction, and so must we persevere with them. At this point it is a work