Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
matters are the distractions of one’s appetites and the dark stranger— this sometimes being the innate oppressor within the psyche and sometimes a person or situation in the outer world. Regardless, each traveler knows innately how to defeat these looters and marauders. Keep hold of the names, the names are all.
The Interior Woman
Sometimes women become tired and cranky while waiting for their mates to understand them. The women say, “Why can’t they know what I think, what l want?” Women become fatigued with asking this question. Yet, there is a solution to this dilemma, a solution which is efficient and effective.
If a woman wants a mate who is responsive in this way, she will reveal to him the secret of women’s duality. She will tell him about the interior woman, that one who, added to herself, makes two. She does this by teaching her mate to ask her two deceptively simple questions that will cause her to feel seen, heard, and known.
The first question is this: “What do you want?” Almost everyone asks some version of this, just as a matter of course. But there is yet one more essential question, and that is: “What does your deeper self desire?”
If one overlooks a woman’s dual nature and takes a woman at face value, one is in for a big surprise, for when the woman’s wildish nature rises from her depths and begins to assert itself, she often has interests, feelings, and ideas which are quite different from those she expressed before.
To securely weave a relationship, a woman will also ask the same two questions of her mate. As women, we learn to poll both sides of our nature and that of others as well. From the information we receive reciprocally from both sides, we can very clearly determine what is valued most and how to respond accordingly.
When a woman consults her own dual nature, she is in the process of looking, canvassing, taking soundings of material that is beyond consciousness, and therefore often astonishing in content and process, and most often very valuable.
To love a woman, the mate must also love her untamed nature.
If she takes a mate who cannot or will not love this other side, she shall surely in some way be dismantled and be left to limp about unrepaired.
So men, as much as women, must name their dual natures. The most valued lover, the most valuable parent, the most valued friend, the most valuable “wilderman,” is the one who wishes to learn. Those who are not delighted by learning, those who cannot be enticed into new ideas or experiences, cannot develop past the road post they rest at now. If there is but one force which feeds the root of pain, it is the refusal to learn beyond this moment.
We know that the creature Wild Man is seeking his own earthy woman. Afeared or not, it is an act of deepest love to allow oneself to be stirred by the wildish soul of another. In a world where humans are so afraid of “losing,” there are far too many protective walls against being dissolved in the numinosity of another human soul.
The mate for the wildish woman is the one who has a soulful tenacity and endurance, one who can send his own instinctual nature to peek under the tent of a woman's soul-life and comprehend what he sees and hears there. The good match is the man who keeps returning to try to understand, who does not let himself be deterred by the sideshows on the road.
So, the wildish task of the man is to find her true names, and not to misuse that knowledge to seize power over her, but rather to apprehend and comprehend the numinous substance from which she is made, to let it wash over him, amaze him, shock him, even spook him. And to stay with it. And to sing out her names over her. It will make her eyes shine. It will make his eyes shine.
But, lest one rest too soon, there is yet another aspect to naming the dualities, a more fearsome one yet, but one essential to all lovers. While one side of a woman’s dual nature might be called Life, Life’s “twin” sister is a force named Death. The force called Death is one of the two magnetic forks of the wild nature. If one teams to name the dualities, one will eventually bump right up against the bald skull of the Death nature. They say only heroes can stand it. Certainly the wildish man can stand it. Absolutely, the wildish woman can stand it. They are in fact wholly transformed
by it.
So now please meet Skeleton Woman.
CHAPTER 5
Hunting:
When the Heart
Is a Lonely Hunter
Skeleton Woman:
Facing the Life/Death/Life Nature of Love
Wolves are good at relationships. Anyone who has observed wolves sees how deeply they bond. Mates are most often for life. Even though they clash, even though there is dissension, their bonds carry them over and through harsh winters, plentiful springs, long walks, new offspring, old predators, tribal dances, and group sings. The relational needs of humans are no different.
While the instinctual lives of wolves include loyalty and lifelong bonds of trust and devotion, humans sometimes have trouble with these matters. If we were to use archetypal terms to describe what determines the strong-bonds among wolves, we might surmise that the integrity of their relationships is derived from their synchronization with the ancient pattern of all nature—
whát
I call the Life/Death/Life cycle.
The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by re-animation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. Everything—the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and those of the tiniest creatures, cells and atoms alike—have this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again.
Unlike humans, wolves do not deem the ups and downs of life, energy, power, food, new opportunity as startling or punitive. The
peaks and valleys just are, and wolves ride them as efficiently, as fluidly, as possible. The instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to live through all positive boon, all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to others.
Among wolves, the cycles of nature and fate are met with grace and wit and the endurance to stay tight with one’s mate and to live long and as well as can be. But in order for humans to live and give loyalty in this most fit manner, in this way which is most wise, most preserving, and most feeling, one has to go up against the very tiling one fears most There is no way around it as we shall see. One must sleep with Lady Death.
In wise stories, love is seldom a romantic tryst between two lovers. For instance, some stories from the circumpolar regions describe love as a union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul- world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death.
The
story
I am about to relate to you is a hunting story about love. lt is set in the frozen north. To understand this story, we have to see that there, in one of the harshest environs and one of the most stressed hunting cultures in the world, love does not mean a flirtation or a pursuit for simple ego-pleasure, but a visible bond composed of the psychic sinew of endurance, a union which prevails through bounty and austerity, through the most complicated and most simple days and nights. The union of two beings is seen as
angakok
magic in itself, as a relationship through which “the powers that be” become known to both individuals.
But there are requirements for this kind of union. In order to create this enduring love, one invites a third partner to the union. The third partner I call Skeleton Woman. She could also be called Lady Death, and as such, she is another Life/Death/Life figure in one of its many guises. In this form, Lady Death is not a disease, but a deity.
In a relationship she has the role of the oracle who knows when it is time for cycles to begin and end.
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As such, site is the wildish aspect of relationship, the one of whom men are most terrified... and sometimes women also, for when faith in the transformative has been lost, the natural cycles of increase and attrition are feared as well.
Hunting: When the Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
To create enduring love, Skeleton Woman must be admitted to the relationship and be embraced by both lovers. Here, in an old Inuit setting and amplified into an original literary story from a sh
ort five-line spoken-poem given
me by Mary Uukalat, is the Skeleton Woman. Here, too, are the psychic stages for mastery of her embrace. Let us peer at the images which rise from the smoke of this tale.
=====
Skeleton Woman
She had done something
of which her father disapproved, although: no one any longer remembered what it was. But her father had dragged her to the cliffs and thrown her over and into the sea. There, the fish ate her flesh away and plucked out her eyes. As she lay under the sea, her skeleton turned over and over in the currents.
One day a fisherman came fishing, well, in truth many came to this bay once. But this fisherman had drifted far from his home place, and did not know that the local fishermen stayed away, saying this inlet was haunted.
The fisherman's hook drifted down through the water, and caught, of all places, in the bones of Skeleton Woman’s rib cage. The fisherman thought, “Oh, now I’ve really got a big one! Now I really have one!” In his mind he was thinking of how many people this great fish would feed, how long it would last, how long he might be free from the chore of hunting. And as he struggled with this great weight on the end of the hook, the sea was stirred to a thrashing froth, and his kayak bucked and shook, for she who was beneath struggled to disentangle herself. And the more she struggled, the more she tangled in the line. No matter what she did, she was inexorably dragged upward, tugged up by the bones of her own ribs.
The hunter had turned to scoop up his net, so he did not see her bald head rise above the waves, he did not see the little coral creatures glinting in the orbs of her skull, he did not see the crustaceans on her old ivory teeth. When he turned back with his net, her entire
body, such as it was, had come to the surface and was hanging from the tip of his kayak by her long front teeth.
“Agh!” cried the man, and his heart fell into his knees, his eyes hid in terror on the back of his head, and his ears blazed bright red. “Agh!” he screamed, and knocked her off the prow with his oar and began paddling like a demon toward shoreline. And not realizing she was tangled in his line, he was frightened all the more for she appeared to stand upon her toes while chasing him all the way to shore. No matter which way he zigged his kayak, she stayed right behind, and her breath rolled over the water in clouds of steam, and her arms flailed out as though to snatch him down into the depths.
“Aggggggghhhh!” he wailed as he ran aground. In one leap he was out of his kayak, clutching his Ashing stick and running, and the coral-white corpse of Skeleton Woman, still snagged in the Ashing line, bumpety-bumped behind right after him. Over the rocks he ran, and she followed. Over the frozen tundra he ran and she kept right up. Over the meat laid out to dry he ran, cracking it to pieces as his mukluks bore down.
Throughout it all she kept right up, in fact grabbed some of the frozen Ash as she was dragged behind. This she began to eat, for she had not gorged in a long, long time. Finally, the man reached his snowhouse and dove right into the tunnel and on hands and knees scrabbled his way into the interior. Panting and sobbing he lay there in the dark, his heart a drum, a mighty drum. Safe at last, oh so safe, yes safe, thank the Gods, Raven, yes, thank Raven, yes, and all-bountiful Sedna,
safe... at...
last.
Imagine when he lit his whale oil lamp, there she—it—lay in a tumble upon his snow floor, one heel over her shoulder, one knee inside her rib cage, one foot over her elbow. He could not say later what it was, perhaps the Arelight softened her features, or the fact that he was a lonely man. But a feeling of some kindness came into his breathing, and slowly he reached out his grimy hands and, using words softly like a mother to a child, began to untangle her from the Ashing line.
“Oh, na, na, na.”
First he untangled the toes, then the ankles.
“Oh, na, na,
na.” On and on he worked into the night, until
dressing her in furs to keep her warm, Skeleton Woman’s bones were all in the order a human’s should be.
He felt into his leather cuffs for his flint, and used some of his hair to light a little more lire. He gazed at her from time to time as he oiled the precious wood of his fishing stick and rewound the gut line. And she in the furs uttered not a word—she did not dare— lest this hunter take her out and throw her down to the rocks and break her bones to pieces utterly.
The man became drowsy, slid under his sleeping skins, and soon was dreaming. And sometimes as humans sleep, you know, a tear escapes from the dreamer’s eye; we never know what sort of dream causes this, but we know it is either a dream of sadness or longing. And this is what happened to the man.
The Skeleton Woman saw the tear glisten in the firelight, and she became suddenly soooo thirsty. She tinkled and«clanked and crawled over to the sleeping man and put her mouth to his tear. The single tear was like a river and she drank and drank and drank until her many-years-long thirst was slaked.
Then, while lying beside him, she reached inside the sleeping man and took out his heart, the mighty drum. She sat up and banged on both sides of it:
Bom, BommI
...
Bom, Bomm!
As she drummed, she began to sing out “Flesh, flesh, flesh! Flesh, flesh, flesh!” And the more she sang, the more her body filled out With flesh. She sang for hair and good eyes and nice fat hands. She sang the divide between her legs, and breasts long enough to wrap for warmth, and all the things a woman needs.
And when she was done, she also sang the sleeping man’s clothes off and crept into his bed with him, skin against skin. She returned the great drum, his heart, to his body, and that is how they awakened, wrapped one around the other, tangled from their night together, in another way now, a good and lasting way.
The people who cannot remember how she came to her first ill-fortune say she and the fisherman went away and were consistently well fed by the creatures she had known in her life underwater. The people say that it is true and that is all they know.
Death in the House of Love
Inability to face and untangle the Skeleton Woman is what causes .many love relationships to fail. To love, one must not only be strong, but wise. Strength comes from the spirit. Wisdom comes from experience with Skeleton Woman.
As we see in the tale, if one wishes to be fed for life, one must face and develop a relationship with the Life/Death/Life nature. When we have that, we are no longer bumbling along fishing for fantasies, but are made wise about the necessary deaths and startling births that create true relationship. When we face Skeleton Woman we learn that passion is not something to go “get” but rather something generated in cycles and given out. It is Skeleton Woman who demonstrates that a shared living together through all increase and decrease, through all endings and beginnings, is what creates an unparalleled devotional love.
This story is an apt metaphor for the problem of modem love, the fear of the Life/Death/Life nature, the Death aspect in particular. In much of western culture, the original character of the Death nature has been covered over by various dogmas and doctrines until it is split off from its other half, Life. We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of the wild nature. We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.
Rather than seeing the archetypes of Death and Life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought. It is true that within a single love relationship there are many endings. Yet, somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins.
If one believes that the Life/Death/Life force has no stanza beyond death, it is no wonder that some humans are frightened of commitment. They are terrified to go through even one ending. They cannot bear to pass from the veranda into the inner rooms. They are fearful, for they sense that there in the breakfast room of
the house of love sits Lady Death, tapping her toe, folding and refolding her gloves. Before her is a work list, on one side what is living, on the other, what is dying. She means to cany through. She means to maintain a balance.
The archetype of the Life/Death/Life force is grossly misunderstood throughout many modem cultures. Some no longer understand that Lady Death represents an essential creation pattern. Through her loving ministrations, life is renewed. In many folklores the female figures of death often receive much sensational press: she carries a scythe and “harvests” the unsuspecting, she kisses her victims and leaves their corpses scattered behind her, or she drowns people and then wails long into the night.
But in other cultures, such as East Indian and Mayan, which have preserved teachings about the wheel of life
and
death, Lady Death enfolds the already dying, easing their pain, giving them comfort. In
curanderismo
, she is said to turn the baby in the womb to the hea
dfirst position so it can be born
. She is said to guide the hands of the midwife, to open the pathways of the mother’s milk in the breasts, as well as to comfort anyone who weeps alone. Rather than vilifying her, those who know her in full cycle respect her largess and her lessons.
Archetypally, the Life/Death/Life nature is a basic component of the instinctive nature. This is personified through world myth and folklore as
Dama
del
Muerte
, Lady Death;
Coatlicue
;
Hel; Berchta
;
Ku'an Yin
;
Baba Yaga;
Lady in White; Compassionate Nightshade; and as a group of women called by the Greeks
Graeae,
the Gray Ladies. From the
Banshee
, in her carriage made of night-cloud, to
La Llorona
, the weeping woman at the river, from the dark angel who brushes humans with a wing tip, collapsing them into an ecstasy, to swampfire that appears when death is imminent, stories are filled with these remnants of the old creation Goddess personifications.
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Much of our knowledge of the Life/Death/Life nature is contaminated by our fear of death. Therefore our abilities to move with the cycles of this nature are quite frail. These forces do not “do something” to us. They are not thieves who rob us of the things we cherish. This nature is not a hit-and-run driver who smashes what we value.
No, no, the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, part of an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the aspects of ourselves who know when someth
ing can, should, and must be born
and when must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo.
Rosario
Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death:
...
dadme la muerte que
me
falta
...
...
give me the death I need ...
Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death. Without death there are no lessons, without death there is no dark for the diamond to shine from. While those who are initiated are unafraid of Lady Death, the culture often encourages that we trow Skeleton Woman over the cliffs, for not only is she fearsome, it takes too long to learn her ways. A soul-less world encourages faster, quicker, thrashing about to find the one filament that seems to be
the one
that will bum forever and right now. However, the miracle we are seeking takes time: time to find it, time to bring it to life.
The modem search for a perpetual motion machine rivals the search for a perpetual love machine. It is not surprising that people trying to love become confused and harried, as in the story 'The Red Shoes,” and dance a mad dance, unable to stop the frantic jig, and whirl right past the things they, in their deepest hearts, cherish most.
Yet, there is another way, a better way, which takes into account human foibles, fears, and quirks. And as so often happens in the cycles of individuation, most of us just stumble over it
The First Phases of Love
The Accidental Finding of Treasure
In all tales there is material that can be understood as a minor reflecting the illnesses or the well-being of one’s culture or one’s own inner life. Also in tales there are mythic themes that can be