Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
Among that cumulative tribe of masculine figures in a woman’s psyche whom Jungians call
animus
, there is also a Manawee-like attitude, which finds and claims a woman’s duality, finding it valuable, courtable, and desirable, instead of devilish, ugly, and to be disdained.
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Manawee, whether as an internal or external figure, represents a fresh but faith-filled lover whose central desire is to name and understand the mysterious and numinous double in women's nature.
The Power of Name
Naming a force, creature, person, or thing has several connotations. In cultures where names are chosen carefully for their magical or auspicious meanings, to know a person’s true name means to know the life path and the soul attributes of that person. And the reason the true name is often kept secret is to protect the owner of the name so that he or she might grow into the power of the name, to shelter it so that no one will either denigrate it or distract from it, and so that one’s spiritual authority can develop to its full proportions.
In fairy tales and folktales there are several additional aspects to the name, and these are at work in the tale of Manawee. Although there are some tales wherein the protagonist searches for the name of a malevolent force in order to have power over it, more so the questing after the name is in order to be able to summon that force or person, to call that person close to oneself, and to have relationship with that person.
The latter is the case in the Manawee story. He travels back and forth, back and forth, in sincere efforts to draw the power of “the Two” close to him. He is interested in naming them,
not
in order to seize their power but instead to gain self-power
equal
to theirs.
To know the names means to gain and retain consciousness about the dual nature. Wish as one may, and even with the use of one’s might, one cannot have a relationship of depth without knowing the names.
The guessing of the names of the dual nature, of the two sisters, is as difficult a task initially for women as it is for men. But there need not be extensive angst about it. If we are interested to find the names, then we are already on the right path.
And what are the exact names of these two symbolic sisters in a woman’s psyche? The names of the dualities of course vary from person to person, but they tend to be opposites of some sort. Like much of the natural world, they at first may seem so vast as to be without pattern or repetition. But close observation of the dual nature, asking after it and hearing its answers will soon reveal a pattern to it all, a pattern that is vast, it is true, but that has a stability like waves ebbing and flowing; its high and low tides are predictable, its deeper currents are mappable.
In the matter of guessing the names, to say a person’s name is to make a wish or a blessing over them each time their name is called. We name these dual temperaments in ourselves in order to many—ego to spirit. This naming and marrying is called, in human words, self-love. When it occurs between two individual persons, it is called loving another.
Manawee guesses and guesses, but cannot guess the names of the twins with his mundane nature alone. The dog, as representative of the intuitive, acts in Manawee’s service. Women often crave a mate who has this kind of endurance and the wit to continue trying to understand her deep nature. When she finds a mate of that substance, she will give lifelong loyalty and love.
In the tale, the twins’ father acts as the guardian of the mystical pair. He is symbolic of an actual intra-psychic feature which insures the integrity of things “staying together” and riot being split apart. It is he who tests the worthiness, the “rightness,” of the suitor. It is good for women to have such a watcher.
In this sense it could be said that a healthy psyche tests new elements which apply to it for inclusion; that the psyche has an integrity about it, a screening process. A healthy psyche containing a fatherly watchman does not just admit any old thought, attitude, or person, only those which are sentient or striving to become so.
The father of the two sisters says, “Wait. Until you convince me you are interested in really knowing about the true essence—the true names—you may not have my daughters.” The father is saying, You can’t have understanding of women’s mysteries just for the asking. You must do the work first. You must endure in pursuing this matter. You must divine yourself ever closer to the real truth of this female soul puzzle, this endeavor which is both descent and riddle.
The Tenacious Dog Nature
The little dog in the story shows exactly how psychic tenacity works. Dogs are the magicians of the universe. By their presence alone, they transform grumpy people into grinning people, sad people into less sad people; they engender relationship. As in the ancient Babylonian epic “Gilgamesh,” wherein Inkadu, the hairy animal/man, counterbalances Gilgamesh, the too-rational king, the dog is one entire side of man’s dualistic nature. He is the woods nature, the one who can track, who knows by sensing what is what.
The dog likes the sisters because they feed him and smile at him. The mystical feminine readily understands and accepts the instinctual nature of the dog. Dogs represent, among other things, he (or she) who loves from the heart easily and long, who forgives effortlessly, who can run long, and fight, if necessary, to the death. The dog nature
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gives concrete clues to how a mate will win the heart of the dual sisters... and the wildish woman—the main clue being, “keep returning.”
Manawee fails to guess the names again and trudges home. But the little dog runs back to the hut of the young women and listens till he hears their names. In the world of archetypes, the dog nature is both psychopomp—messenger between the topside world and the dark-lit world—and chthonic—that of the darker or farther back regions of the psyche, that which has been called the underworld for eons. It is this sensibility that a mate reaches into in order to understand duality.
The dog is similar to the wolf, only a little more civilized, although as we see in the rest of the story, not by much. This little dog as psychopomp represents the instinctive psyche. It hears and sees differently than a human. It travels to levels the ego would never think of by itself. It hears words and instructions that the ego cannot hear. And it follows what it hears.
Once; at a science museum in San Francisco, I entered a chamber filled with microphones and speakers that simulated a dog’s hearing. When a palm tree waved in the wind, it sounded like Armageddon; when footsteps approached from far off, it was like a million sacks of cornflakes being crunched right in my ear. The world of the dog is filled with constant cataclysmic sound... sound that we, as humans, do not register at all. But the little dog does.
The canid hears outside the range of “human” hearing. This mediumistic—as in medial—aspect of the instinctual psyche intuitively hears the deep work, the deep music, the deep mysteries of the feminine psyche. It is this nature that is able to know the wild nature in women.
Creeping Seductive Appetite
It is not by accident that men and women struggle to find deeper sides of their natures and yet become distracted for any number of reasons, mostly pleasures of various sorts. Some become addicted to those pleasures and stay forever entangled there and never continue with their work.
The little dog is also at first distracted by its appetites. Appetites are often charming little
forajidos
, robbers, dedicated to the theft of time and libido. Yours. Jung remarked that some control must be placed on human appetite. Otherwise, as you can see, one will stop for every bonehock in the road, every pie on a log.
Mates who seek to name the dualities may, like the dog, lose their resolve as they are tempted off the path. This may especially occur if they are feral or starved creatures themselves. Too, they may lose their memory of what they were about.
They may be tempted/attacked by something from their own unconscious which wishes to force itself upon women for exploitative gain or wishes to entice women for its own pleasure, or in an effort to banish a hunter's emptiness.
On the way back to his master, the dog is distracted by a luscious bone, and in the process, forgets the young women’s names. This episode embodies a very common occurrence in deep psychic work: the distractions of appetite interfere with the primary process. Not a month goes by that I do not hear an analysand saying, “Well, I became distracted from my deep work because I became hot sexually and it took seven days to quench the blaze” or “... because I decided this week was just the right time to give all my five hundred housep
lants a haircut” or .. because I
began seven new creative ventures, had a great time at it, and then decided that none of them truly showed real promise and dropped them all.”
So you see, the bone on the road is waiting for all of us. It has the luscious stink a dog can hardly refuse. At worst it is likely a favorite addiction, one which already has cost us and cost us. But even if we have failed time and again, we must try again, till we can pass it by and get on with the primary work.
The momentum of deep work is similar to sexual arousal in that it begins from ground zero, accelerates in plateaus, becomes sustained and intense. If the plateaus are interrupted harshly (imagine a loud and unexpected noise), one must begin all over again. There is a similar arousal tension in working with the archetypal layer of the psyche. If the tension is interrupted, one has to start nearly from scratch. So, there are many bones on the road, juicy, nice, interesting, savagely exciting bones. But somehow they cause us to be carried off into an amnesia, to not only forget where we are in the work but to forget what the work was to begin with.
The Koran wisely advises that we will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life we did not enjoy while on earth. However, too much or even a little bit of a good thing at the wrong time can cause a gross loss of consciousness. Then, instead of a sudden rush of wisdom, we walk about like an absentminded professor muttering, “Now where was I?” It takes weeks, sometimes months, to recover from these distractions of ours.
In the story, the dog runs back to the sisters’ hut, again hears their names, and races off once more. This canid has the right instinct to try again and again. But, oh-oh, there’s a kumquat pie which distracts him, and he forgets the names again. Another aspect of appetite has assaulted the creature and again drawn him from his task, and although his gut is satisfied, the soul’s work is not.
We begin to understand that this process of remaining conscious, and particularly of not giving in to distracting appetites while trying to elicit psychic connection, is a long process, and one that is difficult to hold to. We see the wily little dog trying his damnedest. Yet it is a long way from the deep archetypal unconscious back to the conscious mind. It is
á
long way down to the names, and a long way back to the surface again. Holding knowledge in consciousness is hard when there are snares along the path.
The kumquat pie and the bone represent distracting seductions that are in their own ways delicious ... in other words, there are elements of everyone’s psyches that are devious, trickerish, and scrumptious. These elements are anti-consciousness; they thrive by keeping things dark and exciting. Sometimes it is hard to remind ourselves that we are holding out for the excitement of the light.
In this story, the dog is the light-bringer, he is trying to bring up conscious connection to the mystical twin nature. “Something” rhythmically attempts to prevent this, something that is unseen but most assuredly is the positioner of bones and the fixer of pies. No doubt this is the dark stranger, another version of the natural predator of the psyche that opposes consciousness. Because of this naturally occurring opposer in the psyche of all persons, even the most healthy psyche is susceptible to losing its place. Remembering the real task, and reminding ourselves over and over in practically mantra fashion, will bring us back to consciousness.
Achieving Fierceness
The little dog learns the names of the women one more time and races back to his master. He ignores the feast on the road and the enticing smells from the bush. Here we see the consciousness of
the psyche rising. The instinctive psyche has learned to curb itself, prioritize, and focus, it refuses to be diverted. It is now intent.
But from nowhere a dark thing suddenly jumps out at the little dog. The stranger shakes the dog, and shouts, “Tell me those names! What are the names of the young women so I may win them?!” The stranger does not care for duality or the finer points of the psyche. To him the feminine is a possession to be won and nothing more.
The stranger can be personified by an actual person in the outer world or by a negative complex within. It does not matter which, for the devastating effect is the same. This time the dog engages in unrestrained battle. Whether male or female, this occurs in outer life when an incident, a slip of words, an odd thing of some sort, jumps out and tries to make us forget who we are. There is always something in the psyche that tries to rob us of the names. There are many name robbers in the outer world also.
In the story, the little dog fights for its life. Sometimes the only way we learn to hold on to our deeper knowing is because a stranger jumps out. Then we are forced to fight for what we find dear—fight to be serious about what we are about, fight to develop past our superficial spiritual motives, which Robert Bly calls “the desire to feel groovy,”
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fight to hold on to the deeper knowledge, fight to finish what we have begun.
The little dog fights to keep the names and thusly conquers the repetitive slide into unconsciousness. Once the battle is fought, amazingly the dog has not lost the names, for that is what they were fighting over, knowledge about the wild feminine. Whoever possesses it has a power equal to that of the woman herself. The dog has fought to give this power to the worthy man, Manawee. He has fought to keep this power from an aspect of ancient human nature that would misuse it. The giving of power into the right hands is as important as the finding of the names.
The heroic dog gives the names to Manawee, who presents them to the young women’s father. The young women are ready to go away with Manawee. They have all along been waiting for Manawee to discover and retain conscious knowing of their intrinsic natures.
So we see that the two things which prevent progress in these