Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
this descent is the archetypal core of both “The Handless Maiden” fairy tale and the Demeter/Persephone myth.
So now in the tale, the maiden wanders about for the second time in her unwashed animal state. This is the proper mode of descent—the “I don’t care so much for things of the world” mode. And as we see, her beauty shines regardless. The idea of being unwashed also is from ritual of olden times, the culmination of which is the bathing and putting on of new clothes to represent having crossed into new or renewed relationship with the Self.
We see that the handless maiden has gone through one entire descent and transformation—the one of awakening. In certain alchemical tracts there are three stages described as being necessary to transformation: the
nigredo
, the black or the dark dissolving stage, the
rubedo
, the red or the sacrificial stage, and the
albedo
, the white or the resurgent stage. The bargain with the Devil was the
nigredo
, the darkening; the chopping off of her hands was the
rubedo
, the sacrifice; and the leaving of home wrapped in white, the
albedo
, is the new life. And now, as the wanderer, she is plunged back into the
nigredo
again. But now the old self is gone, and the deep self, the naked self, is the powerful wanderer.
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Now the maiden is not only haggard but hungry. She kneels before an orchard as though it is an altar—and it is—the altar of the wild underground Gods. As we descend to the primary nature, the old, automatic ways of nourishing ourselves are eliminated. Things of the world that used to be food for us lose their taste. Our goals no longer excite us. Our achievements no longer hold interest. Everywhere we look in the topside world, there is no food for us. So, it is one of the purest miracles of the psyche that when we are so defenseless help comes, and right on time.
The vulnerable maiden is visited by an emissary from the soul, the spirit in white. This spirit in white removes the barriers to her being nourished. It empties the moat by adjusting the sluice gate. The moat has hidden meaning. According to the ancient Greeks, in the underworld the river called Styx separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. Its waters are filled with the memories of all past deeds of the dead since the beginning of time. The dead can decipher these memories and keep them in order, for
they have heightened vision that comes from being without material body.
But for the living, the river is poison. Unless the living are accompanied across by a spirit guide, they will drown and sink to another level of the underworld, one that is like a mist, and there they will wander forever. Dante had his Virgil,
Coatlicue
had a living snake who accompanied her to the fire world, and the handless maiden has the spirit in white. So, you see, first a woman escapes from the not-awake mother and the greedy, bumbling father, and then gives herself over to be guided by the wild soul.
In the tale, the spirit guide escorts the handless maiden across to the underworld realm of the trees, the king’s orchard. This, too, is a remnant of the old religion. Spirit guides are always assigned to the young initiates in the old religions. Greek mythos is filled with reports of young women being accompanied by wolf women or lion women or other figures who served as initiators. Even in current religious rites that are concomitant with nature, such as among the
Diñé
(Navajo), the mysterious
yeibecheis
are animal
elementáis
who accompany initiation as well as healing rites.
The psychic idea embodied here is that the underworld, like the unconscious of humans, swirls with many unusual and compelling features, images, archetypes, seductions, threats, treasures, tortures, and tests. It is important for a woman’s individuation journey that she have spiritual good sense, or be assisted by a guide who does, so that she does not fall into the phantasmagoria of the unconscious, so that she does not lose herself in this tantalizing material. As we see in the tale, it is more important to stay with one’s hunger and go forward from there.
Like Persephone before her, and the Life/Death/Life Goddesses before her, the maiden finds her way into a land where there are magical orchards and a king awaits her. The old religion now begins to glow in this tale with more and more intensity. In Greek myths
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there were two trees twined over the door to the underworld, and Elysium, the place where the dead who had been found virtuous were sent, was composed of what?—yes, orchards.
Elysium is described as a place of perpetual day, where souls may elect to be reborn on earth whenever they please. It is the dop
pelgãnger,
the double of the topside world. Difficult things may
occur here, but their meaning and the learning they provide are different from those in the topside world. In the topside world, all is interpreted in the light of simple gains and losses. In the underworld or other world, all is interpreted in light of the mysteries of true sight, right action, and the development of becoming a person of intense inner strength and knowing.
In the tale the action now centers on the fruit tree, which in ancient times was called the Tree of Life, Tree of Knowing, Tree of Life and Death, or Tree of Knowledge. Unlike trees with needles or leaves, the fruit tree is a tree of bountiful food—and not just food, for a tree stores water in its fruit. Water, the primal fluid of growth and continuance, is soaked up by the roots, which feed the tree by capillary action—a network of billions of cell plexuses too small to see—and water arrives in the fruit and plumps it out into a beauteous thing.
Because of this, the fruit is considered to be invested with soul, with a life force that develops from
and
contains some measure of water, air, earth, food, and seed, which on top of it all also tastes divine. Women who are fed by the fruit and water and seed of the work in the underground forests are plumped out psychologically accordingly; their psyches become gravid and carry on a continual ripening;
Like a mother offering the babe her breast, the pear tree in the orchard bends down to give the maiden its fruit This mother’s juice is that of regeneration. Eating the pear nourishes the maiden, but a more poignant action is this: the unconscious, the fruit of it, bends to feed her. In this sense, the unconscious bestows a kiss of itself upon her lips. It gives her a taste of the Self, the breath and the substance of her own wild God, a wild communion.
The hailing of Mary by her kinswoman Elizabeth
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in the New Testament is probably a remnant of this ancient understanding among women: “Blessed be the fruit of thy womb,” she says. In the prior night religions, the woman, just having been initiated and pregnant with knowing, would be welcomed back into the world of the living with a lovely blessing from her kinswomen.
The remarkable idiom of the story is that during the darkest times the feminine unconscious, the uterine unconscious, Nature, feeds a woman’s soul. Women describe that in the midst of their
descent they are in the darkest dark and are touched by the brush of a wing tip and feel lightened. They feel an inner nourishing taking place, a spring of blessed water bursting forth over parched ground ... from where they do not know. This spring does not solve suffering, but rather nourishes when nothing else is forthcoming. It is manna in the desert. It is water from stones. It is food out of thin air. It quells the hunger so we can go on. And that is the whole point... to go on. To go on toward our knowing destiny.
The tale resurrects the memory of a very old promise; the promise is that the descent will nourish even though it is dark, even though one feels one has lost one’s way. Even in the midst of not knowing, not seeing, “wandering blind,” there is a “Something,” an inordinately present “Someone” who keeps pace. We go left, it goes left. We go right, it follows close behind, bearing us up, making a way for us.
Now we are in another
nigredo
of wandering and not knowing what will become of us, and yet in this very raggedy condition we are brought to sup on the Tree of life. To eat of the Tree of Life in the land of the dead is an ancient impregnation metaphor. In the land of the dead, it was believed a soul could invest itself in a fruit, or any edible thing, so that its future mother would eat it, and the soul hidden within the fruit would begin its regeneration in her flesh. So here, at the almost midway point, through the substance of the pear, we are being given the body of the Wild Mother, we are eating that which we will ourselves become.
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The Fourth Stage—Finding Love in the Underworld
The next morning the king comes to count his pears. One is missing and the gardener reveals what he’s seen. “Last night two spirits drained the moat, entered the garden at high moon, and one without hands ate the pear that offered itself to her.”
That night, the king keeps watch with his gardener and with his magician, who knows how to speak with the spirits. At midnight, the maiden comes floating through the forest, her clothes dirty rags, her hair awry, her face streaked, her arms without hands, and with the spirit in white beside her.
Again, another tree gracefully bends itself to her reach and she
sups on, the pear at its bough’s end. The magician comes close, but not too close, and asks, “Are you of this world or not of this world?” The maiden answers, “I was once of
the
world, and yet I am not of
this
world.”
The king questions the magician, “Is she human or spirit?” The magician answers that she is both. The king rushes to her, pledging his loyalty and love: “I shall not forsake you. From this day forward, I shall care for you.” They marry, and he has made for her a pair of silver hands.
The king is a wisening creature in the underworld psyche. He is not just any old king, but one of the chief watchers of a woman’s unconscious. He watches over the botany of the growing soul— his (and his mother’s) orchard is rich with the trees of life and death. He is of the family of the wild Gods. Like the maiden, he is able to endure much. And like the maiden, he has another descent ahead of him. But more of that later.
In a sense, one could say he is trailing the maiden. The psyche always shadows its own process. This is a most sacred premise. It means that if you are wandering, there is another—at least one, and often more—who is seasoned and experienced and who waits for you to knock at the door, rap on stone, eat a pear, or just show up, in order to announce your arrival in the underworld. This loving presence waits and watches for the wandering seeker. Women are well aware of this. They call it a little flicker of light or insight, a presentiment, or a presence.
The gardener, the king, and the magician are three mature personifications of the archetypal masculine. They correspond to the sacred trinity of the feminine personified by the maiden, mother, and crone. In this story, the ancient triple Goddesses or the Three- Goddesses-in-One are represented this way: the maiden is portrayed by the handless woman, the mother and crone are both portrayed by the king’s mother, who enters the tale later. The twist in the tale that makes it “modem” is that the devil image portrays a figure that in ancient women’s initiation rites was normally portrayed by the crone in her dual nature as life-bringer and life-taker. In this tale the Devil is portrayed as the life-taker only.
However, back in misty time, it is a good bet that this sort of story originally presented the crone playing the part of the
initiator/tibuble-causer, making things difficult for the sweet young heroine so embarkation from the land of the living to the land of the dead could occur. Psychically, this is cohesive with concepts in Jungian psychology, theology, and the old night religions that the Self, or in our parlance, the Wild Woman, seeds the psyche with perils and challenges in order that the human in despair drives herself back down into her original nature looking for answers and strength, thereby reuniting with the great wild Self and, as much as possible thereafter, moving as one.
In one way this distortion in the tale distorts o
ur
information about the ancient processes of a woman’s return to the underworld. But actually, this replacement of devil for crone is strikingly relevant to us today, for in order to discover the ancient ways of the unconscious, we often find ourselves fighting off the Devil in the form of cultural, familial, or intra-psychic injunctions that devalue the soul-life of the wild feminine. In this sense, the tale works either way, both by leaving enough bones of the old ritual so we can reconstruct it, and by showing us how the natural predator tries to cut us away from our rightful powers, how it tries to take our soulful work from us.
The major agents of transformation present in the orchard at this time are, in the approximate order of their appearance: the maiden, spirit in white, gardener, king, magician, mother/crone, and devil. Traditionally they represent the following intra-psychic forces.
THE MAIDEN
As we have seen, the maiden represents the heartfelt and formerly sleepy psyche. But a warrior-heroine lies beneath her soft exterior. She has the endurance of the lone wolf. She is able to bear the dirt, grime, betrayal, hurt, loneliness, and exile of the initiate. She is able to wander the underworld and return, enriched, to the topside world. Although she may not be able to articulate them when she first descends, she is following the instructions and directions of the old Wild Mother, Wild Woman.
THE SPIRIT IN WHITE
Throughout legend and fairy tales the spirit in white is the guide, the one who has an innate and gentle knowing, who is rather like a trailblazer for the woman’s journey. Among some of the
mese- mondók
, this spirit was thought to be a piece of an old and precious shattered God that still invested itself in each human. By way of dress the spirit in white is closely related to myriad Life/Death/Life Goddesses from various cultures who all dress in radiant white—
La Llorona,
Berchta, Hel, and so on. This implies that the spirit in white is a helper of the mother/crone who, in archetypal psychology, is also a Life/Death/Life Goddess.
THE GARDENER
The gardener is a cultivator of soul, a regenerative keeper of seed, soil, and root. He is similar to the Hopi
Kokopelli
, who is a humpbacked Spirit who comes to the villages each spring and fertilizes the crops as well as the women. The gardener’s function is regeneration. The psyche of a woman must constantly sow, train, and harvest new energy in order to replace what is old and worn out. There is a natural entropy, or wearing down and using up,
of
psychic parts. This is good, this is how the psyche is supposed to work, but one must have energies-in-training ready to backfill. This is the role of the gardener in the psychic work. He keeps track of the need for change and replenishing. Intra-psychically, there is constant living, constant death-dealing, constant replacement of ideas, images, energies.
THE KING
The king
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represents a trove of knowledge in the underworld. He carries the ability to take inner knowing out into the world and put it into practice, without mincing, muttering, or apologizing. The king is the son of the mother queen/crone. Like her, and probably following her lead, he is involved in the mechanisms of vital process of the psyche: the failing, dying, and return of consciousness. Later in the story, when he wanders looking for his lost queen, he will
undergo a kind of death that will transform him from a civilized king to a wild one. He will find his queen and so be reborn. In psychic terms this means that the old central attitudes of the psyche will die as the psyche learns more. The old attitudes will be replaced by either new or renewed viewpoints concerning just