Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
understood as describing stages of and instruction for maintaining balance in both inner and outer worlds.
While the Skeleton Woman could be interpreted as representing the movements
within
a single psyche, I find this tale most valuable when understood as a series of seven tasks that teach one soul to love another deeply and well. These are: discovering another person as a kind of spiritual treasure, even though one may not at first realize what one has found. Next in most love relationships comes the chase and the hiding, a time of hopes and fears for both. Then comes the untangling and understanding of the Life/Death/Life aspects of the relationship and the development of compassion for the task. Next come the relaxing into trust, the ability to rest in the presence and goodwill of the other, and after that, a time of sharing both future dreams and past sadness, these being the beginning of healing archaic wounds with regard to love. Then, the use of the heart to sing up new life, and finally, the intermingling of body and soul.
The first task, the finding of treasure, is found in dozens of tales throughout the world that describe the catching of a creature from beneath the sea. When this occurs in the narrative, we always know that a big struggle will soon take place between what lives in the topside world and what lives or has been repressed into the underworld. In this tale, the fisherman snags more than he ever expected. ““Oh, it’s a big one,” he thinks as he turns to gain his net.
He does not realize that he is bringing up the scariest treasure he will ever know, that he is bringing up more than he can yet handle. He does not know that he will have to come to terms with it, that he is about to have all his powers tested. And worse, he does not know that he does not know. That is the state of all lovers at the beginning; they are blind as bats.
Humans who do not know any better have the proclivity to approach
love
the same way the fisherman in the story approaches the hunt: “Ah, I hope I get a big one, one that will feed me for a long time to come, one that will excite me, make my life easier, one I can brag about to all the other hunters back home.”
This is the
natural progression of the naive or famished hunter. The very young, the uninitiated, the hungry, and the wounded have values that revolve around the finding
and the winning of
trophies. The very young truly do not know what they are seeking yet, the hungry seek sustenance, and the wounded seek consolation for previous losses. Yet all will have treasure “happen upon” them.
When one is in the company of the great powers of the psyche, in this case the Life/Death/Life woman, and one is naive, then one is sure to get more than what one is fishing for. So often we entertain the fantasy of being fed from the deep nature, through a love affair, a job, or by money, and we hope these feedings will last for a long time. We would like not to do any further work. In truth, there are even times when we would like to be fed without doing much work at all. In reality, we know nothing of value ever develops this way. But we wish it anyway.
To lay inert and only dreaming of a perfect love is easy. It is an anesthetization from which we might never recover but for ruthlessly snagging something valuable, yet outside our awareness. For the naive and wounded, the miracle of the psyche’s ways is that even if you are halfhearted, irreverent, didn’t mean to, didn’t really hope to, don’t want to, feel unworthy to, aren’t ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway. Then it is your soul’s work to not overlook what has been brought up, to recognize treasure as treasure no matter how unusual its form, and to consider carefully what to do next.
The fisherman motif shares some archetypal symbolism with that of the hunter, and these two represent, among many things, the psychological elements of humans that seek to know, that strive to nourish self through merging with the instinctual nature. In stories, as in life, the hunter and fisherman begin their quest in one of three ways: in a sacred, or mean-spirited, or bumbling manner. In the Skeleton Woman story, we can see that the fisherman is a little on the bumbling side. He is not mean-spirited but he does not exactly have sacred attitude or intention either.
Sometimes lovers begin this way too. At the beginning of a relationship they are only fishing for a little excitement, or a little “help me make it through the night” antidepressant. Without realizing it, they unwittingly enter a part of their own and the other person’s psyches in which Skeleton Woman resides. While their egos may be fishing for fun, this psychical space is sacred ground
for Skeleton Woman. If we troll these waters, we are guaranteed to hook her for certain.
The fisherman thinks he is pursuing simple nourishment and nurture, when in fact, he is bringing up the entire elemental feminine nature, the neglected Life/Death/Life nature. It cannot be overlooked, for wherever new life begins, the Death Queen shows up. And when this occurs, at least for the moment, people pay rapt and fearful attention.
In the opening motif—that of a woman lying under the ocean— Skeleton Woman is similar to Sedna,
3
a Life/Death/Life figure from Inuit mythology. Sedna is the great deformed creation Goddess who lives in the Inuit underworld. Sedna’s father threw her over the edge of his kayak, for unlike other dutiful daughters of the tribe, she had run off with a dog-man. Like the father in the fairy tale “The Handless Maiden,” Sedna’s father chopped off her hands. Her fingers and limbs sank to the bottom of the sea, where they became fish and seals and other life forms that .sustained the Inuit ever after.
What was left of Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea. There she became all bones and long, long hair. In the Inuit rite, earthbound shamans swim down to her, bringing peace-food to quiet her snarling dog-husband and guardian. The shamans comb her long, long hair while singing to her, begging her to heal the soul or body of a person above, for she is the great
cuigakok,
magician; she is the great northern gate of Life and Death.
Skeleton Woman, who spent an eon lying under the water, can also be understood as a woman’s unused and misused Life/Death/ Life force. In her vital and resurrected form, she governs the intuitive and emotive abilities to complete the life cycles of birthings and endings, grievings and celebrations. She is the one who peers at things. She can tell when it is time for a place, a thing, an act, a group, or a relationship to die. This gift, this psychological sensitivity, awaits those who would lift her to consciousness through the act of loving another.
A part of every woman and every man resists knowing that in all love relationships Death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions about love dying, pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying, pretend we can
progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart, everything. The ego does not want it to be so. Yet it is how it is meant to be, and the person of a deep and wildish nature is undeniably drawn to the task.
What dies? Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only, all this dies. Because love always causes a descent into the Death nature, we can see why it takes abundant selfrpower and soulfulness to make that commitment. When one commits to love, one also commits to the revivification of the essence of Skeleton Woman and all her teachings.
The fisherman in the story is slow to realize the nature of what he has caught. This is true of everyone at first. It is hard to realize what you are doing when you
áre
fishing in the unconscious. If you arc inexperienced, you do not know that down there lives the Death nature. Once you find out what you are dealing with, your impulse is to throw her back. We become like the mythical fathers who throw their wild daughters out of the kayak and into the sea.
We know that relationships sometimes falter when they move from the anticipatory stage to the stage of facing what is really on the end of one’s hook. This is as true of the relationship between a mother and her eighteen-month-old child as it is between parents and their teenager, as between friends, as that between lovers of a lifetime or of just a little time. The relationship begun in all goodwill flaps and sways, and sometimes staggers, when the “sweetheart” stage is over. Then, instead of enacting a fantasy, the more challenging relationship begins in earnest and all one’s craft and wisdom must be called into action.
The Skeleton Woman who lies under the water represents an inert form of deep instinctual life, which knows by heart the creating of Life, the creating of Death. If lovers insist on a life of forced gaiety, perpetual pleasuramas, and other forms of deadening intensity, if they insist on sexual
Donner und Blitz
thunder and lightning all the time, or a torrent of the delectable and no strife at all, there goes the Life/Death/Life nature right over the cliff, drowned in the sea again.
Refusing to allow all the cycles of life and death in the love
relatíonship
causes the Skeleton Woman nature to be ripped from her psychic lodgings and drowned. Then the love relationship takes on a strained .. let us never be sad, let us always have fun” face to be maintained at all costs. The soul of the relationship sinks out of sight, set to drift under water, senseless and useless.
Skeleton Woman is always thrown over the cliff when one or both lovers cannot stand her or understand her. She is thrown over the cliff when we misapprehend the use of transformative cycles: when things must die and be replaced by others. If lovers cannot stand these Life/Death/Life processes, they cannot love one another over and beyond hormonal aspirations.
Throwing this mysterious nature over the cliff always causes the woman lover, and the soulful force in men, to become a skeleton, bereft of a genuine love or nourishment. As a woman often takes keen notice of biological and emotional cycles, the life and death cycles are at the center of her concern. Since there can be little new life without a decline in that which has gone previously, lovers who insist on attempting to keep everything at a psyche-scintillating peak will spend their days in an increasingly ossified relationship. The desire to force love to live on in its most positive form only is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead, and for good.
The fisherman’s challenge is to face Lady Death, her embrace, and her life and death cycles. Unlike other tales in which an underwater creature is captured but then released, thereby granting the fisherman a wish in gratitude, Lady Death is not letting go, Lady Death is not graciously granting any wishes. She surfaces, like it or not, for without her there can be no real knowledge of life, and without that knowing, there can be no fealty, no real love or devotion. Love costs. It costs bravery. It costs going the distance, as we shall see.
I see a phenomenon time and again in lovers regardless of gender. It goes something like this: two people begin a dance to see if they would care to love one another. Suddenly, Skeleton Woman is accidentally hooked. Something in the relationship begins diminishing and slides into entropy. Often the painful pleasure of sexual excitement is abating, or one sees the other’s frail, injured underside, or sees the other as “not quite trophy material,”
and that's when the bald and yellow-toothed old girl rises to the surface.
It seems so gruesome, yet this is the premier time when there is a real opportunity to show courage and to know love. To love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into a world where sustainable love is possible, face to face, bones to bones, a love of devotion. To love means to stay when every cell says “run!”
When lovers are able to tolerate the Life/Death/Life nature, when they are able to understand it as a continuum—as a night between two days—and as
the
force that creates a love that endures a lifetime, they are able to face the Skeleton Woman in the relationship. Then together they are strengthened, and both are called to deeper understanding of the two worlds they live in, one the mundane world, the other, the world of spirit.
During my twenty^plus years of practice, men and women have burrowed into my sofa saying with happy terror, “I met someone—I didn't mean to, I was just minding my own business, I wasn’t looking—and wham! I met this someone with a capital
S. Now
what am I going to do?” As they continue to nurture the new relationship, they begin to cower. They shrink, they worry. Are they having love anxiety over this person? No. They are feeling fearful because they are beginning to glimpse a bald skull rising from beneath the waves of their passion. Ai! What shall they do?
I tell them this is a magic time. It does little to calm them. I tell them we shall now see something wonderful. They have little faith. I tell them to hold on, and this they are able to do, but barely. Before I know it, from the viewpoint of the analysis, the little boat of their love relationship is rowing faster and faster. It careens into shore, and before you can say jackrabbit, they are running for their lives, and as analyst I am running along beside them trying to put a word in, while guess-who bumpety-bumps along behind.
For most, when first confronting Skeleton Woman, the impulse is to run like the wind, and as far away as possible. Even running is part of the process. It is only human to do so, but not for long and not forever.