Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
“sweet” in these instances only makes the predator smile. When the
soulful
life is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required. When a woman does this, her life cannot be interfered with for long, for she knows immediately
what is wrong and can push the
predator back where it belongs. She is no longer naive. She is no longer a mark or a target. And this is the medicine that causes the key—the little one with the scrollwork on top—to finally, cease its bleeding.
CHAPTER 3
Nosing Out the Facts:
The Retrieval of
Intuition as Initiation
The Doll in Her Pocket: Vasalisa the Wise
Intuition is the treasure of a woman’s psyche. It is like a divining instrument and like a crystal through
which one can see with uncanny interior vision. It is like a wise old woman who is with you always, who tells you exactly what the matter is, tells you exactly whether you need to go left or right. If is a form of The One Who Knows, old
La Que Sabe
, the Wild Woman.
In the traditions I was raised in, dedicated
storytellers were always off under some psychic hill, up to their knees in story dust, brushing away centuries of dirt, digging under overlays of culture and conquests, numbering every frieze and fresco of story they could find. Sometimes a story has been reduced to powder, sometimes portions and details are missing or rubbed out, often the form is intact but the coloring is destroyed. But even so, every dig holds hope for finding an entire body of story intact and unbroken. The following tale is just such an incredible treasure.
To my mind, the old Russian tale “Vasalisa”
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is a woman’s initiation story with few essential bones astray. It is about the realization that most things are not as they seem. As women we call upon our intuition and instincts in order to sniff things out. We use all our senses to wring the truth from things, to extract nourishment from our own ideas, to see what there is to see, to know what there is to know, to be the keepers of our own creative fires, and to
Nosing Out the Facts: The Retrieval of Intuition as Initiation
77
have
intímate
knowing about the Life/Death/Life cycles of all nature—this is an initiated woman.
Stones with Vasalisa as a central character are told in Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and throughout all the Baltic countries. In some instances, the tale is commonly called “Wassilissa the Wise.” I find evidence of its archetypal roots dating back at least to the old horse-Goddess cults which predate classical Greek culture. This tale carries ages-old psychic mapping about induction into the underworld of the wild female God. It is about infusing human women with Wild Woman's primary instinctual power, intuition.
The pattern for my literary version of the Vasalisa tale spun here was given to me by my aunt
Kathé.
It begins with one of the oldest storytelling devices, “Once there was, and once there was not ...
"
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This paradoxical phrase is meant to alert the soul of the listener that this story takes place in the world between worlds where nothing is as it first seems. So let us begin.
=====
Vasalisa
Once there was,
and once there was not,
a
young mother who lay on her deathbed, her face pale as the white wax roses in the sacristy of the church nearby. Her young daughter and her husband sat at the end of her old wooden bed and prayed that God would guide her safely into the next world.
The dying mother called to Vasalisa, and the little child in red boots and white apron knelt at her mother’s side.
“Here is a doll for you, my love,” the mother whispered, and from the hairy coverlet she pulled a tiny doll which like Vasalisa herself was dressed in red boots, white apron, black skirt, and vest embroidered all over with colored thread.
“Here are my last words, Beloved,” said the mother. “Should you lose your way or be in need of help, ask this doll what to do. You will be assisted. Keep the doll with you always. Do not tell anyone about her. Feed her when she is hungry. This is my mother’s promise to you, my blessing on you, dear daughter.”
And with that, the mother’s breath fell into the depths of her body where it gathered up her soul and rushed out from between her lips, and the mother was dead.
The child and her father mourned for a very long time. But, like the field cruelly plowed under by war, the father’s life rose green from the furrows again, and he married a widow with two daughters. Although the new stepmother and her daughters spoke in polite tones and always smiled like ladies, there was something of the rodent behind their smiles which Vasalisa’s father did not perceive.
Sure enough, when the three women were alone with Vasalisa, they tormented her, forced her to wait on them, sent her to chop wood so her lovely skin would become blemished. They hated her because she had a sweetness about her that was otherworldly. She was also very beautiful. Her breasts were bounding while theirs dwindled from meanness. She was helpful and uncomplaining while the stepmother and stepsisters were, among themselves, like rats in the offal pile at night.
One day the stepmother and stepsisters simply could not stand Vasalisa any longer. “Let... us ... conspire to make the fire go out, and then let us send Vasalisa into the forest to Baba Yaga, the witch, to beg fire for our hearth. And when she reaches Baba Yaga, well, old Baba Yaga will kill her and eat her.” Oh, they all clapped and squeaked like things that live in the dark.
So that evening, when Vasalisa came home from gathering wood, the entire house was dark. She was very concerned and inquired of her stepmother, “What has happened; what will we have to cook with? What will we do to light the darkness?”
The stepmother admonished, “You stupid child. Obviously we have no fire. And I can’t go out into the woods because I am old. My daughters can’t go because they are afraid. So you are the only one who can go out into the forest to find Baba Yaga and get a coal to start our fire again.”
Vasalisa replied innocently, “Well all right, yes, I’ll do that,” and so she set out. The woods became darker and darker, and sticks cracked under her feet, frightening her. She reached down in the long deep pocket of her apron and there was the doll her
dying mother had given her. And Vasalisa patted the doll in her pocket and said, “Just touching this doll,
yes,
I feel better.”
And at every fork in the road, Vasalisa reached into her pocket and consulted the doll. “Well, should I go to the left or should I go to the right?” The doll indicated “Yes,” or “No,” or “This way,” or “That way.” And Vasalisa fed the doll some of her bread as she walked and followed what she felt was emanating from the doll.
Suddenly a man in white on a white horse galloped by and it became daylight. Farther on, a man in red sauntered by on a red horse, and the sun rose. Vasalisa walked and walked and just as she came to the hovel of Baba Yaga, a rider dressed in black came trotting on a black horse, and rode right into Baba Yaga’s hut. Swiftly it became night. The fence made of skulls and bones surrounding the hut began to blaze with an inner tire so the clearing there in the forest glowed with an eerie light.
Now the Baba Yaga was a very fearsome creature. She traveled, not in a chariot, not in a coach, but in a cauldron shaped like a mortar which flew along all by itself. She rowed this vehicle with an oar shaped like a pestle, and all the while she swept out the tracks of where she’d been with a broom made from the hair of a person long dead.
And the cauldron flew through the sky with Baba Yaga’s own greasy hair flying behind. Her long chin curved up and her long nose curved down, and they met in the middle. She had a tiny white goatee and warts on her skin from her trade in toads. Her brown-stained fingernails were thick and ridged like roofs, and so curled over she could not make a fist
Even more strange was the Baba Yaga’s house. It sat atop huge, scaly yellow chicken legs, and walked about all by itself and sometimes twirled around and around like an ecstatic dancer. The bolts on the doors and shutters were made of human fingers and toes and the lock on the front door was a snout with many pointed teeth.
Vasalisa consulted her doll and asked, “Is this the house we seek?” and the doll, in its own way, answered, “Yes, this is what you seek.” And before she could take another step, Baba Yaga in her cauldron descended on Vasalisa and shouted down at her, “What do
you
want?”
And the girl trembled. “Grandmother» I come for fire. My house is cold ... my people will die... I need fire."
Baba Yaga snapped,
“Oh
yesssss, I know you, and your people. Well, you useless child ... you let the fire go out. That’s an ill- advised thing to do. And besides, what makes you think I should give you the flame?”
Vasalisa consulted her doll and quickly replied, “Because I ask.”
Baba Yaga purred, “You’re lucky. That is the right answer.” And Vasalisa felt very lucky she had given the right answer. Baba Yaga threatened, “I cannot possibly give you fire, until you’ve done work for me. If you perform these tasks for me, you shall have the fire. If not.. .’’ And here Vasalisa saw Baba Yaga’s eyes turn suddenly to red cinders. “If not, my child, you shall die.” So Baba Yaga rumbled into the hovel and laid down upon her bed and ordered Vasalisa to bring her what was cooking in the oven. In the oven was enough food for ten people and the Yaga ate it all, leaving just a tiny crust and a thimble of soup for Vasalisa.
“Wash my clothes, sweep the yard and clean my house, prepare my food, and separate the mildewed com from the good com and see that everything is in order. I will be back to inspect your work later. If it is not done,
you
will be my feast.” And with that Baba Yaga flew off in her cauldron with her nose as the windsock and her hair as the sail. And it became night again.
Vasalisa turned to her doll as soon as the Yaga had gone. “What shall I do? Gan I complete these tasks in time?’ The doll assured her she could, and to eat a little and go to sleep. Vasalisa fed the doll a little too, then she slept.
In the morning, the doll had done all the work and all that remained was the meal to be cooked. In the evening the Yaga returned and found nothing undone. Pleased, in a way, but not pleased because she could find no fault, Baba Yaga sneered, “You are a very lucky girl.” She then called on her faithful servants to grind the com and three pairs of hands appeared in midair and began to rasp and crush the com. The chaff flew in the house like a golden snow. Finally it was done and Baba Yaga sat down to eat. She ate for hours and ordered Vasalisa on the morrow to again clean the house, sweep the yard, and launder her clothes.
The Yaga pointed to a great mound of dirt in the yard. “In that pile of dirt are many poppy seeds, millions of poppy seeds. And I want, in the morning, to have one pile of poppy seeds and one pile of dirt, all separated out from each other. Do you understand?”
Vasalisa almost fainted. “Oh my, how am I going to do that?” She reached into her pocket and the doll whispered, “Don’t worry, I will take care of it.” That night Baba Yaga snored off to sleep and Vasalisa tried... to pick... the... poppy seeds... out... of... the ... dirt. After a time, the doll said to her, “Sleep now. All will be well.”
Again the doll accomplished these tasks, and when the old woman returned home, all was done. Baba Yaga spoke sarcastically through her nose. “Welllll! Lucky for you that you were able to do these things.” She called for her faithful servants to press the oil from the poppy seeds, and again three pairs of hands appeared, and did so.
While the Yaga was smearing her lips with grease from her stew, Vasalisa stood nearby. “What are you staring at?” barked Baba Yaga.
“May I ask you some questions, Grandmother?” asked Vasalisa.
“Ask,” ordered the Yaga, “but remember, too much knowledge can make a person old too soon.”
Vasalisa asked about the white man on a white horse.
“Aha,” said the Yaga fondly, “that first is my Day.”
“And the red man on the red horse?”
“Ah, that is my Rising Sun.”
“And the black man on the black horse?”
“Ah yes, that is the third and he is my Night.”
“I see,” said Vasalisa.
“Come, come child. Wouldn’t you like to ask more questions?” wheedled the Yaga.
Vasalisa was about to ask about the pairs of hands that appeared and disappeared, but the doll began to jump up and down in her pocket, so instead Vasalisa said, “No, Grandmother. As you yourself say, to know too much can make one old too soon ”
“Ah,” said the Yaga, cocking her head like a bud, “you are
wiser than your years, my girl. And how did you come to be this way?"
“By the blessing of my mother,” smiled Vasalisa.
“Blessing?!” screeched Baba Yaga. “Blessing?! We need no blessings around this house. You’d best be on your way, daughter.” She pushed Vasalisa out into the night.
“I’ll tell you what, child. Here!” Baba Yaga took a skull with fiery eyes from her fence and put it on a stick. “Here! Take this skull on a stick home with you. There! There’s your fire. Don’t say another word. Just be on your way.”
Vasalisa began to thank the Yaga, but the little doll in her pocket began to jump up and down, and Vasalisa realized she must just take the fire and go. She ran for home through the dark forest, following the turns and twists in the road as the doll told her which way to go. Vasalisa came through the forest carrying the skull, with fire blazing from its ear, eye, nose, and mouth holes. Suddenly, she became frightened of its weight and its eerie light and thought to throw it away. But the skull spoke to her and urged her to calm herself and to continue toward the home of her stepmother and stepsisters. And this she did.
As Vasalisa came nearer and nearer to her house, her stepmother and stepsisters looked out the window and saw a strange glow dancing through the woods. Closer and closer it came. They could not imagine what it could be. They had decided that Vasalisa’s long , absence meant she was dead by now and her bones dragged away by animals and good riddance.
Vasalisa advanced closer and closer to home. And as the stepmother and the stepsisters saw it was her, they ran to her, saying they had been without fire since she’d left, and no matter how hard they had tried to start one, it always went out.
Vasalisa entered the house feeling triumphant, for she had survived her dangerous journey and brought fire back to her home. But the skull on the stick watched the stepsisters’ and the stepmother’s every move and burnt into them, and by morning it had burnt the wicked trio to cinders.
And there we have it, an abrupt ending to kick people out of the fairy tale and back into reality again. There are many endings of this sort in fairy tales. They are the equivalent of saying Boo! to bring listeners back to mundane reality.
Vasalisa is a story of handing down the blessing on women’s power of intuition from mother to daughter, from one generation to the next This great power, intuition, is composed of lightning- fast inner seeing, inner hearing, inner sensing, and inner knowing.
Over generations, these intuitive powers became as buried streams within women, buried by disuse and unfounded charges of disrepute. However, Jung once remarked that nothing was ever lost in the psyche. I think we can be confident that things lost in the psyche are all still there. So too, this well of women’s instinctual intuition has never been lost, and whatever is covered over can be brought back out again.
To grasp the import of such a tale, we understand that all its components represent characterizations of a single woman’s psyche. So all aspects of the story belong to and elucidate an individual psyche undergoing an initiatory process. Initiation is enacted by completing certain tasks. In this tale there are nine tasks for the psyche to complete. They focus on learning something of the ways of the Old Wild Mother.
Through completion of these tasks, a woman’s intuition—that knowing being who walks wherever women walk, looking at all things in their lives and commenting on the truth of it all with swift accuracy—is re-set into woman’s psyche. The goal is a loving and trusting relationship with this being whom we have come to call “the knowing woman,” the essence of the Wild Woman archetype.
In the rite of the old wild female Goddess, Baba Yaga, these are the tasks of initiation:
The First Task—Allowing the Too-Good Mother to Die
In the opening of the tale, the mother is dying and bequeaths to her daughter an important legacy.
The psychic tasks of this stage in a woman’s life are these:
Accepting that the ever-watchful, hovering, protective psychic
mother is not adequate as a central guide for one’s future instinctual life (the too-good mother dies). Taking on the task of being on one's own, developing one's own consciousness about danger, intrigue, politic. Becoming alert by oneself, for oneself. Letting die what must die. As the too-good mother dies, the new woman is born.
In the tale, the initiatory process begins when the dear and good mother dies. She is not there to touch Vasalisa’s hair anymore. In all our lives as daughters, there is a time when the good mother of the psyche—the one which served us appropriately and well in earlier times—turns into a too-good mother, one which by virtue of her overly safeguarding values—begins to prevent us from responding to new challenges and thereby to deeper development.
In the natural process of our maturing, the too-good mother must become thinner and thinner, must dwindle away until we are left to cine for ourselves in a new way. While we always retain a core of her warmth, this natural psychic transition leaves us on our own in a world that is not motherly to us. But wait. This too-good mother is not all she at first seems. Under the blanket, she has a tiny doll to give her daughter.
Ah, there is something of the Wild Mothe
r underneath this figure. But th
e too-good mother cannot completely live this out, for she is the milk-teeth mother, the blessed one every baby needs in order to gain a toehold in the psychic world of love. So even though this too-good mother cannot live and influence beyond a certain point in a girl’s life, she does right by her offspring here. She blesses Vasalisa with the doll, and this, as we see, is a great blessing indeed.
This dramatic psychological dwindling of the over-arching mother occurs as a girl moves from the fur-lined nest of preadolescence to the jolting jungle of adolescence. For some girls, however, the process of developing a new, more shrewd, inner mother—the mother called intuition—was only half completed then, and women so inducted have wandered for years wishing for and wanting the complete initiatory experience, and patching themselves up as best they could.
The arresting of a woman’s initiation process occurs for various reasons, such as when there has been too much psychological hardship early in one’s life—especially when there has been no consistent “good-enough" mother in the early years.
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The initiation may also be stalled or uncompleted because there is not enough tension in the psyche—the too-good mother has the stamina of a formidable weed and lives on, waving her leaves and overprotecting her daughter even though the script says, “Exit stage left
now”
In this situation, women often feel too timid to proceed into the woods and resist it all they can.
For these, as well as other adult women for whom the rigors of life itself chip and distance them from their deeply intuitive lives, and whose plaint is often, “I am so tired of taking care o
f
myself,” there is a good and wise remedy. A re-affirming of, a re-tracing or re-initiation will re-set the deep intuition, regardless of a woman’s age. And it is the deep intuition that knows what is good for us, knows what we need next, and knows it with lightning speed ... if we will just take down its dictation.
Vasalisa’s initiation begins with learning to let die what must die. This means to let die the values and attitudes within the psyche which no longer sustain her. Especially to be examined are those long-held tenets which make life too safe, which overprotect, which make women walk with a scurry instead of a stride.
The time during which the childhood “positive mother” dwindles—and her attitudes die away as well—is always a time of great learning. Although there is a period in all our lives during which we rightfully remain close to the protective psychic mother (for instance, when we are actual children, or during recovery from an illness or psychological or spiritual trauma, or when our lives are in danger and being quiet will keep us safe), and even though we retain large stores of her succor for life, there also comes a time to change mothers, so to speak.
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If we stay overly long with the protective mother within our own psyches, we find ourselves impeding all challenges to ourselves and therefore blocking further development. While I do not in any way advise that a woman ought to throw herself into torturous or abusive situations, I do mean she must set for herself a something in life that she is willing to reach for and therefore take risks for. It is through this process that she sharpens her intuitive powers.
Among wolves, when a wolf mother nurses her pups, she and they spend much time lazing about. Everyone slumps over everyone else in a great puppy-pile; the outer world and the world of challenges are far away. However, when the wolf mother finally trains the pups to hunt and forage, she shows them her teeth more often than not, she snaps and demands they keep up, she shoves them down if they don’t do what she requires.
And so it is in order to pursue further development that we exchange the hovering internal mother which was so apt for us when we were young for another kind of mother, one who lives even deeper in the psychic wilderlands, one who is both escort and teacher. She is a loving mother, but also fierce and demanding.
Most of us will not let the too-good mother die just because it is time. Although this too-good mother may not allow our most vivid energies to surface, it is so nice to be with her, so comfortable, why leave? Often we hear voices within our minds which encourage us to hold back, to stay safe.
These voices say things like, “Oh, don’t say
that”
or “You can’t do
that”
or “Well you’re certainly not one of my children [friends, peers] if you do that,” or “It’s dangerous out there,” or “Who knows what will become of you if you insist on leaving this warm nest,” or “You’re just going to humiliate yourself you know,” or even more insidious still, “Pretend you are taking risks, but secretly stay here with me.”
These are all voices of the frightened and rather exasperated too-good mother within the psyche. She cannot help herself; she is what she is. Yet if we merge with the too-good mother for too long, our lives and our gifts for expression fall into the shadows, and we become scant instead of strong.
And worse, what occurs when one compresses a vivid energy and allows it no life? Like the magic porridge pot in the wrong hands, it grows, and grows, and
grrrrows
until it explodes! spilling all of its goodness onto the ground. So, we must be able to see that for the intuitive psyche to be invigorated, the nice hovering protector must recede. Or perhaps more accurately, we eventually find ourselves pushed out erf that nice cozy
tête-à-tête,
not because we planned it that way, not because we were completely ready—no one is ever completely ready—but because
there is something waiting for us at the edge of the woods, and it is our fate to meet it.
Guillaume Apollinaire wrote: “We took them to the edge and bade them fly. They held on. ‘Fly!' we said. They held on. We pushed them over the edge. And they flew.”
It is typical for women to be afraid to let the too-comfortable and too-safe life die. Sometimes a woman has reveled in the protection of the too-good mother, and so desires to continue ad infinitum. She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest.
Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next. It is the only thing which will retrieve her intuitive nature. Sometimes a woman is so bound up in being the too-good mother to other adults that they have latched onto her
tetas,
teats, and are not about to let her leave them. In this case a woman has to kick them off with her hind leg and go on anyway.