Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
them to repeat themselves over and over again, in the same cycle and in the same manner. The pattern is this: In all dying there is uselessness that becomes useful as we pick our way through it all. What knowing we will come to reveals itself as we go along. In all livingkind, loss brings a full gain. Our work is to interpret this Life/Death/Life cycle, to live it as gracefully as we know how, to howl like a mad dog when we cannot—and to go on, for ahead lies the loving underworld family
of
the psyche that will embrace and assist us.
The king helps the maiden live more ably in the underworld of her work. And this is good, for sometimes in the descent a woman feels less like an acolyte and more like a poor monster who has accidentally strayed from the mad doctor’s laboratory. From their vantage point, however, the underworld figures see us as a blessed life in struggle. By underworld sights, we are a strong flame beating against a dark glass in order to break it and be freed. And all the helping forces there in the lower home rush to support us.
In olden times, stories of woman's descent to the underworld revealed that such was embarked upon in order to marry the king (in some rites there seemed to be no king, and the acolyte probably married whatever imago of the Wild Woman of the underworld existed), and here in the tale we see a remnant of this when the king takes one look at the maiden and immediately, without faint heart or doubt, loves her as his own. He recognizes her as his own,
not
in spite of her handless, wildish, wandering state, but because of it. The theme of being so without, and yet so sustained, continues. Even though we wander about in an unwashed, forlorn, semi-blinded, and handless state, a great force from the Self can love us, and holds us to its heart
Women in this state often feel a great excitement, the kind a woman feels when she has met a mate who is so much of what she has dreamt of. It is an odd time, a paradoxical time, for we are aboveground, and yet below ground. We are wandering, yet we are loved. We are not rich, yet we are fed. In Jungian terms this state is called the “tension of the opposites,” wherein something from each pole of the psyche is constellated at one time, creating new ground. In Freudian psychology it is called a “bifurcation,” wherein the essential disposition or a
ttitude of the psyche is
divided into two polarities: black and white, good and bad. Among storytellers from my culture, this state is called
nació dos
vesas,
being “twice-born.” It is the time where a second birth occurs through a magical source, and whereafter the soul now lays claim to two bloodlines, one from the physical world, one from the world unseen.
The king says he will protect her and love her. Now the psyche is more conscious; there will be a marriage, a very interesting one, between the living king of the land of the dead and the handless woman from the land of the living. A marriage between two such disparate parties would test the most magnificent love between two people, would it not? Yet this marriage is related to all those picaresque marriages in fairy tales where two energetic but dissimilar lives are joined. The cinder girl and the prince, the woman and the bear, the young girl and the moon, the seal maiden and the fisherman, the desert maiden and the coyote. The soul takes on the knowing of each entity. This is
what is meant by being twice born
.
In fairy-tale marriages, as in those in the topside world, the great love and union between dissimilar entities may last forever, or only until the lesson has been completed. In alchemy, the marriage of opposites means that a death and a birth will soon take place, and we shall see these next in this tale.
The king orders for the maiden a pair of spirit-hands, which will act in her behalf in the underworld. It is in this phase that a woman becomes adroit in the journey ; her submission to it is complete, she has gotten her footing, as they say, and also her “handing.” To have one’s “handing” in the underworld proceeds from learning to summon, direct, comfort, and appeal to the powers of that world, but also to ward off its unwelcome aspects such as sleepiness, and so forth. If the symbol of the hand in the topside world carries a sensory radar with regard to others, the symbolic hand of the underworld can see in the dark and across time.
The idea of replacing lost parts with limbs of silver, gold, or wood has a long, long history through the ages. In fairy tales from Europe and the circumpolar regions, silverwork is the art of the
homunculi,
the hobs,
dvergar,
kobold, gremlins, and elves, which translated into psychological terms are those elemental aspects of spirit that live deep in the psyche and mine it for precious ideas.
These creatures are little psychopomps» that is, messengers who travel between the soul-force and human beings. Since time out of mind, the things fashioned of precious metals are associated with these industrious, often rather grumpy ferreters. It is another example of the psyche at work in our behalf even though we are not present in all workplaces at all times.
As in all things of the spirit, the silver hands carry both history and mystery. There are many myths and tales delineating where magical prostheses originated, who formed them, who cast them, carried them, poured them, cooled them, polished and fit them. Among the classical Greeks, silver is one of the precious metals of Hephaestus’s forge. Like the maiden, the God Hephaestus was maimed in a drama concerning his parents. It is likely that Hephaestus and the king in the tale are interchangeable figures.
Hephaestus and the maiden with silver hands are archetypally brother and sister; they both have parents who are unaware of thei
r value. When Hephaestus was born
, his father, Zeus, demanded he be given away, and his mother, Hera, complied—at least till the child was grown. Then she restored Hephaestus to Olympus. He had become a goldsmith and silversmith of astonishing abilities. An argument ensued between Zeus and Hera, as Zeus was a jealous God. Hephaestus took his mother’s side in the disagreement, and Zeus threw the young man down to the foothills, shattering his legs.
Hephaestus, now crippled, refused to give up and die. He fired his forge with the hottest fire he’d ever built and there formed for himself a pair of legs, made of silver and gold from the knees down. He went on to make all manner of magical things and became a God of love and mystical restoration. He can be said to be the patron of those things and humans that are dismembered, split, sundered, cracked, chipped, and distorted. He has a sp
ecial love for those who are born
crippled and for those whose hearts or dreams are broken.
To all of these he applies remedies that he fashions at his wondrous metal forge, piecing a heart back together with veins of finest goldwork, making a crippled limb strong via gold and silver overlay and investing it with magical function that compensates for the injury.
It is not by accident that the one-eyed, the lame, those with withered limbs or other physical differences have, through time, been sought out as possessing a special knowing. Their injury or difference forces them early on into parts of the psyche normally reserved for the very, very old. And
they are watched over by this loving artisan of the psyche, Hephaestus. At one point he made twelve maidens whose limbs were of silver and gold, and who walked and talked and spoke. Legend says he fell in love with one and petitioned the Gods to make her human, but that is another story in and of itself.
To be given silver hands is to be invested with the skills of spirit hands—the healing touch, the ability to see in the dark, the ability to have powerful knowing through physical sensing. They cany an entire psychic
médica
with which to nurture, remedy, and support. At this stage the maiden is invested with the touch of the wounded healer. These psychic hands will cause her to better grasp the mysteries of the underworld, but they will also be retained as gifts once she completes her work and ascends again.
It is typical of this portion of the descent that uncanny, odd, and healing acts occur that come from outside the will of the ego and that are the result of being given spirit hands—that is, a mystical healing vigor. In olden times, these mystical abilities belonged to the old women of the villages. But they did not gain them at the first gray hair, they were accumulated over the hard and long years of th
is
work, this work of endurance. And that is what we too are about.
The hands of silver, you might say, represent the maiden’s coronation into yet another role. She is thus crowned, not with a crown upon her head but with silver hands at the ends of her arms. This is her coronation as queen of the underworld. To apply just a little more paleo-mythology at this point, let us consider that in Greek mythology, Persephone was not only a mother’s daughter, but also the queen of the land of the dead.
In lesser-known stories about her, she endures various torments such as hanging for three days upon the World Tree in order to redeem the souls who have not enough suffering of their own to deepen their spirits. This female
Cristo/Crista
is echoed in “The Handless Maiden.” The parallel is further amplified by the fact
that Elysium, where Persephone lived in the underworld, means “apple-land
"’—alisier
being a pre-Gallic word for
sorb,
apple— and the Arthurian
Avalon
also meaning the same. The handless maiden is directly associated with the blossoming apple tree.
This is an ancient cryptology. When we learn to read it, we see that Persephone of the apple-land, the handless maiden, and the flowering apple tree are the same sojourner to the wildlands. In all these, we see that fairy tales and mythos have left us a clear map to the knowings and the practices of the past and the way for us to proceed in the present.
Now, here at the end of the fourth labor of the handless maiden, we
could
say the maiden’ s work in the descent is complete, for she is made the queen of life and death. She is the lunar woman who knows what passes in the night, even the sun itself must roll past her underground in order to renew itself for day. But this is still not the
lysis,
the resolution. We are only at the midpoint of transformation, a place of being held in love, yet poised to make a slow dive into another abyss. And so, we continue.
The Fifth Stage—The Harrowing of the Soul
The king goes off to war in a faraway kingdom, asking his mother to care for his young queen and requesting that a message be sent to him if his wife has a child. The young queen gives birth to a happy babe and the joyous message is sent. But the messenger falls asleep at the river, and the Devil steps out and changes the message to say “The queen has given birth to a child who is half dog.”
The king is horrified, yet sends back a message saying to love the queen and care for her in this terrible time. The messenger again falls asleep at the river, and the Devil again steps out and changes the message to “Kill the queen and her child.” The old mother, shaken by this request, sends a messenger to confirm, and back and forth the messengers mn, falling asleep at the river each time. The Devil’s changed messages become increasingly vicious, the last being “Keep the tongue and eyes of the queen to prove she has been killed.”
The king’s mother refuses to kill the sweet young queen. Instead
she sacrifices a doe, keeping its tongue and eyes and hiding them away. She helps the young queen bind her infant to her breast, and veiling her, says she must run for her life. The women weep and kiss each other good-bye.
Like Bluebeard, Jason of golden fleece fame, the
hidalgo
in “La
Llorona,”
and other fairy-tale and mythological husbands/lovers, the king marries and is then called away. Why are these mytho- husbands always trotting off so soon after the wedding night? The reason is different in each tale, but the essential psychic fact is the same: The kingly energy of the psyche falls back and recedes so that the next step in the woman’s process can occur, the testing of her newly found psychic stance. In the king’s case, he has riot abandoned her, for his mother watches over her in his absence.
The next step is the formation of the maiden’s relationship to the old Wild Mother and to birthing. There is testing of the love bond between the maiden and the king, and the maiden and the old mother. One has to do with love between opposites, the other has to do with love of the deep female Self.
The departure of the king is a universal leitmotif in fairy tales. When we feel, not a withdrawal of support but a lessening of the nearness of that support, we can be sure that a testing period is about to begin; we will be required to nourish ourselves on soul memory alone till the loved one returns. Then our nightdreams, particularly the most striking, penetrating ones, are the only love we shall have for a time.
Here are some of the dreams women have said sustained them mightily during this next phase.
One gentle and spirited mid-aged woman dreamt she saw in the loam of the earth a pair of lips, and that she lay upon the ground and those lips whispered to her, and then, unexpectedly, they kissed her on the cheek.
Another very hardworking woman dreamt a deceptively simple dream: that she slept one entire night in perfect sleep. When she awoke from the dream, she said she felt rested to perfection, that not a muscle bundle, not a nerve, not a cell was out of place anywhere within her entire system.
Yet another woman dreamt that she had open-heart surgery and that the operating room had no roof so that the overhead operating
light was the sun itself. She could feel the light from the sun touch her exposed heart. She heard the surgeon say no further surgery was necessary.
Dreams like these are experiences of the wild feminine nature and of the One who illumines all. Emotionally and often physically profound, they are feeling states that are like a food cache. We can draw from them when spiritual sustenance is spare.
As the king trots off on some adventure, his psychic contribution to the descent is held in place by love and memory. The maiden understands that the kingly principle of the underworld is committed to her and will not forsake her, as he promised before they married. Often at this time a woman is “full of herSelf.” She is pregnant, meaning filled with a nascent idea about what her life can become if she will only pursue her work. It is a magical and frustrating time, as we shall see, for this is a cycle of descents, so there is yet another around the bend.
It is because of the burst of new life that a woman's life seems again to stumble too near the edge, and jumps right into the abyss again. But this time, the love of the inner masculine and the old Wild Self will sustain her as never before.
The union of the king and queen of the underworld produces a child. A child made in the underworld is a magic child who has all the potential associated with the underworld, such as acute hearing and innate sensing, but here it is in its
anlage
, or “that which shall become," stage. It is at this time that women on the journey have startling ideas, some might call them grandiose, that are the result of having new and youthful eyes and expectations. Among the very young; this may be as straightforward as finding new interests and new friends. For older women, it can mean an entire tragicomedic epiphany of divorce, reconstitution, and a customized happily-ever-after.
The spirit-baby sets sedentary women off climbing the Alps at age forty-five. The spirit-baby causes a woman to throw over her life of floor wax fixation and sign up for university instead. It is the spirit-babe that causes women who are diddling around doing the safe thing to take to the open road bent under their tinker's pack.