Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
They puzzled over the last key, the one with the little scrollwork on top. “Maybe this key doesn’t fit anything at all.” As they said this, they heard an odd sound—
“errmrrrrrrr.”
They peeked around the comer, and—lo and behold—there was a small door just closing. When they tried to open it again, it was firmly locked. One cried, “Sister, sister, bring your key. Surely this is the door for that mysterious little key.”
Without a thought one of the sisters put the key in the door and turned it. The lock scolded, the door swung open, but it was so dark inside they could not see.
“Sister, sister, bring a candle.” So a candle was lit and held into the room and all three women screamed at once, for in the room was a mire of blood and the blackened bones of corpses were flung about and skulls were stacked in comers like pyramids of apples.
They slammed the door shut, shook the key out of the lock, and leaned against one another gasping, breasts heaving. My God! My God!
The wife looked down at the key and saw it was stained with blood. Horrified, she used the skirt of her gown to wipe it clean, but the blood prevailed. “Oh, no!” she cried. Each sister took the tiny key in her hands and tried to make it as it once was, but the blood remained.
The wife hid the tiny key in her pocket and ran to the cook’s kitchen. When she arrived, her white dress was stained red from pocket to hem, for the key was slowly weeping drops of dark red blood. She ordered the cook, “Quick, give me some horsehair.” She scoured the key, but it would not stop bleeding. Drop after drop of pure red blood issued from the tiny key.
She took the key outdoors, and from the oven she pressed ashes onto it, and scrubbed some more. She held it to the heat to sear it. She laid cobweb over it to staunch the flow, but nothing could make the weeping blood subside.
“Oh, what am I to do?’ she cried. “I know, I’ll put the little key away. I’ll put it in the wardrobe. I’ll close the door. This is a bad dream. All will be aright.” And this she did do.
Her husband came home the very next morning and he strode
into the castle calling for his wife. “Well? How was it while I was away?”
“It was very fine, sir.”
“And how are my storerooms?” he rumbled.
“Very fine, sir.”
“How are my money rooms?” he growled.
“The money rooms are very fine also, sir.”
“So everything is good, wife?”
“Yes, everything is good.”
“Well,” he whispered, “then you’d best return my keys.”
Within a glance he saw a key was missing. “Where is the smallest key?”
“I...
I lost it
Yes,
I lost it. I was out riding and the key ring fell down and I must have lost a key.”
“What have you done with it woman?”
“
I
... I...
don’t remember.”
“Don’t lie to me! Tell me what you did with that key!”
He put his hand to her face as if to caress her cheek, but instead seized her hair. “You infidel!” he snarled, and threw her to the floor. “You’ve been into the room, haven’t you?”
He threw open her wardrobe and the little key on the top shelf had bled blood red down all the beautiful silks of her gowns hanging there.
“Now it’s your turn, my lady,” he screamed, and dragged her down the hall and into the cellar till they were before the terrible door. Bluebeard merely looked at the door with his fiery eyes and the door opened for him. There lay the skeletons of all his previous wives.
“And now!!!” he roared, but she caught hold of the door flame and would not let go. She pleaded for her life, “Please! Please, allow me to compose myself and prepare for my death. Give me but a quarter hour before you take my life so I can make my peace with God.”
“All right,” he snarled, “you have but a quarter of an hour, but be ready.”
The wife raced up the stairs to her chamber and posted her sisters on the castle ramparts. She knelt to pray, but instead called out to her sisters.
“Sisters, sisters! Do you see our brothers coming?*
“We see nothing, nothing on the open plains.*’
Every few moments she cried up to the ramparts, “Sisters, sisters! Do you see our brothers coming?*
“We see a whirlwind, perhaps a dust devil in the distance.**
Meanwhile Bluebeard roared for his wife to come to the cellar so he could behead her.
Again she called out, “Sisters, sisters! Do you see our brothers coming?*
Bluebeard shouted for his wife again and began to clomp up the stone steps.
Her sisters cried out, “Yes! We see them! Our brothers are here and they have just entered the castle.”
Bluebeard strode down the ha
ll toward his wife’s chamber. “I
am coming to get you,” he bellowed. His footfalls were
denée;
the rocks in the hallway came loose, the sand from the mortar poured onto the floor.
As Bluebeard lumbered into her chamber with his hands outstretched to seize her, her brothers on horseback galloped down the castle hallway and charged into her room as well. There they routed Bluebeard out onto the parapet There and then, with swords, they advanced upon him, striking and slashing, cutting and whipping, beating Bluebeard down to the ground, killing him at last and leaving for the buzzards his blood and gristle.
= = =
The Natural Predator of the Psyche
Developing a relationship with the wildish nature is an essential part of women’s individuation. In order to accomplish this, a woman must go into the dark, but at the same time she must not be irreparably trapped, captured, or killed on her way there or back.
The Bluebeard story is about that captor, the dark man who inhabits all women’s psyches, the innate predator. He is a specific and incontrovertible force which must be memorized and restrained. To restrain the natural predator
3
of the psyche it is necessary for women to remain in possession of all their instinctual
powers. Some of these are insight, intuition, endurance, tenacious loving, keen sensing, far vision, acute hearing, singing over the dead, intuitive healing, and tending to their own creative fires.
In psychological interpretation we call on all aspects of the fairy tale to represent the drama within a single woman’s psyche. Bluebeard represents a deeply reclusive complex which lurks at the edge of all women’s lives, watching, waiting for an opportunity to oppose her. Although it may symbolize itself similarly or differently in men’s psyches, it is the ancient and contemporary foe of both genders.
It is difficult to completely comprehend the Bluebeardian force, for it is innate, meaning indigenous to all humans from birth forward, and in that sense is without conscious origin. Yet I believe we have a hint of how its nature developed in the preconscious of humans, for in the story, Bluebeard is called “a failed magician.” In this occupation he is related to figures in other fairy tales which also portray the malignant predator of the psyche as a rather normative-looking but immeasurably destructive mage.
Using this description as an archetypal shard, we compare it to what we know of failed sorcery or failed spiritual power in mytho- history. The Greek Ikaros flew too close to the sun and his waxen wings melted, catapulting him to earth. The Zuni myth “The Boy and the Eagle” tells of a boy who would have become a member of the eagle kingdom but for thinking he could break the rules of Death. As he soared through the sky his borrowed eagle coat was tom from him and he fell to his doom. In Christian myth, Lucifer claimed equality with Yahweh and was driven down to the underworld. In folklore there are any number of sorcerers’ apprentices who foolishly dared to venture beyond their actual skill levels by attempting to contravene Nature. They were punished by injury and cataclysm.
As we examine these leitmotifs, we see the predators in them desire superiority and power over others. They carry a kind of psychological inflation wherein the entity wishes to be loftier than, as big as, and equal to The Ineffable, which traditionally distributes and controls the mysterious forces of Nature, including the systems of Life and Death and the rules of human nature, and so forth.
Inmyth and story we find that the consequence for an entity attempting to break, bend, or alter the operating mode of The Ineffable is to be chastened, either by having to endure diminished ability
in the world of mystery and magic—such as apprentices who are no longer allowed to practice—or lonely exile from the land of the Gods, or a similar loss of grace and power through bumbling, crippling, or death.
If we can understand the Bluebeard as being the internal representative of the
entire
myth of such an outcast, we then may also be
able to comprehend the deep and inexplicable loneliness which sometimes washes over him (us) because he experiences a continuous exile from redemption.
The problem posed in the Bluebeard tale is that rather than empowering the light of the young feminine forces of the psyche, he is instead filled with hatred and desires to kill the lights of the psyche. It is not hard to imagine that in such a malignant formation there is
trapped
one who once wished for surpassing light and fell from Grace because of it. We can understand why thereafter the exiled one maintains a heartless pursuit of the light of others. We can imagine that it hopes that if it could gather enough soul(s) to itself, it
could
make a blaze of light that would finally rescind its darkness and repair its loneliness.
In this sense we have at the beginning of the tale a formidable being in its unredeemed aspect. Yet this fact is one of the central truth
s
the youngest sister in the tale must acknowledge, that all women must acknowledge—that both within and without, there is
a force
which will act in opposition to the instincts of the natural Self, and that that malignant force
is what it is.
Though we might have mercy upon it, our first actions must be to recognize it, to protect ourselves from its devastations, and ultimately to deprive it of its murderous energy.
All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of
naíveté, inexperience
or foolishness.
Like a shrewd tracker, Bluebeard senses the youngest daughter is interested in him, that is, willing to be prey. He asks for her in
marriage and in a moment of youthful exuberance, which is often a combination of folly, pleasure, happiness, and sexual intrigue, she says yes. What woman does not recognize this scenario?
Naive Women as Prey
The youngest sister, the most undeveloped one, plays out the very human story of the naive woman. She will be captured temporarily by her own interior stalker. Yet, she will out in the end, wiser, stronger, and recognizing the wily predator of her own psyche on sight.
The psychological story underlying the tale also applies to the older woman who has not yet completely learned to recognize the innate predator. Perhaps she has begun the process over and over again but, lacking guidance and support, has not yet finished with it
This is why teaching stories are so nourishing; they provide initiatory maps so even work which has hit a snag can be completed. The Bluebeard story is valuable to all women, regardless of whether they are very young and just learning about the predator, or whether they have been hounded and harassed by it for decades and are at last readying for a final and decisive battle with it.
The youngest sister represents a creative potential within the psyche. A something that is going toward exuberant and fashioning life. But there is a detour as she agrees to become the prize of a vicious man because her instincts to notice and do otherwise are not intact.
Psychologically, young girls and young boys are as though asleep about the fact that they themselves are prey. Although sometimes it seems life would be much easier and much less painful if all humans were born totally awake, they are not. We are all born
anlagen,
like the potential at the center of a cell: in biology the
anlage
is the part of a cell characterized as “that which will become.” Within the anlage is the primal substance which in time will develop, causing us to become a complete someone.
So our lives as women are ones of quickening the anlage. The Bluebeard tale speaks to the awakening and education of this psychic center, this glowing cell. In service of this education, the
youngest sister agrees to marry a force which she believes to be very elegant. The fairy-tale marriage represents a new status being sought, a new layer of the psyche about to be unfurled.
However, the young wife has fooled herself. Initially she felt fearful of Bluebeard. She was wary. However, a little pleasure out in the woods causes her to overrule her intuition. Almost all women have had this experience at least once. As a result she persuades herself that Bluebeard is not dangerous, but only idiosyncratic and eccentric. Oh, how silly. Why am I so put off by that little old blue beard? Her wildish nature, however, has already sniffed out the situation and knows the blue-bearded man is lethal, but the naive psyche disallows this inner knowing.
This error of judgment is almost routine in a woman so young that her alarm systems are not yet developed. She is like an orphan wolf pup who rolls and plays in the clearing, heedless of the ninety-pound bobcat approaching from the shadows. In the case of the older woman who is so cut away from the wild that she can barely hear the inner warnings, she too proceeds, smiling naively.
You might well wonder if all this could be avoided. As in the animal world, a young girl learns to see the predator via her mother’s and father’s teachings. Without parents’ loving guidance she will certainly be prey early on. In hindsight, almost all of us have, at least once, experienced a compelling idea or semi- dazzling person crawling in through our psychic windows at night and catching us off guard. Even though they’re wearing a ski mask, have a knife between their teeth, and a sack of money slung over their shoulder, we believe them when they tell us they’re in the banking business.
However, even with wise mothering and fathering, the young female may, especially beginning about age twelve, be seduced away from her own truth by peer groups, cultural forces, or psychic pressures, and so begins a rather reckless risk-taking in order to find out for herself. When I work with older teenage girls who are convinced that the world is good if they only work it right, it always makes me feel like an old gray-haired dog. I want to put my paws over my eyes and groan, for I see what they do not see, and I know, especially if they’re willful and feisty, that they’re
going to insist on becoming involved with the predator at least once before they are shocked awake.
At the beginning of our lives our feminine viewpoint is very naive, meaning that emotional understanding of the covert is very faint. But this is where we all begin as females. We are naive and we talk ourselves into some very confusing situations. To be uninitiated in the ways of these matters means that we are in a time of our life when we are vulnerable to seeing only the overt.