Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
moving into the homestretch. It would be so wasteful and even more painful to abandon it now.
The king of our psyches has a stalwartness. He will not keel over at the first blow. He will not shrivel up with hatred and retribution as the Devil hopes. The king, who loves his wife so, is shocked at the skewed message but sends a message back saying to care for the queen and their child in his absence. This is the test of our inner certainty ... can two forces remain connected even if one or the other is held out as abominable and despicable? Can one stand by the other no matter what? Can union continue even when seeds of doubt are strenuously being planted? Thus far the answer is yes. The test of whether there can be a marriage of enduring love between the wild underworld and the earthly psyche is being met, and impressively.
On the way back to the castle, the messenger again falls asleep at the river and the Devil changes the message to “Kill the queen.” Here the predator is hoping the psyche will become polarized and kill itself off, rejecting one entire aspect of itself, that crucial one, the newly awakened one, the knowing woman.
The king’s mother is horrified at this message, and she and the king correspond back and forth many times, each trying to clarify the other's messages, until finally the Devil changes the king's message to read, “Kill the queen and cut out her eyes and tongue for proof.”
Here we already have a maiden without worldly grasp, without hands, for the Devil ordered these cut off. Now he demands further amputations. He wants her now also without true speaking and without true sight as well. This is quite a devil, and yet what he requires gives us tremendous pause. For what he wants to see take place are the very behaviors that have burdened women since time immemorial. He wants the maiden to obey these tenets: “Don’t see life as it is. Don't understand the life and death cycles. Don’t pursue your yearnings. Don’t speak of all these wildish things.”
The old Wild Mother, personified by the king's mother, is angry about the Devil’s command, and says, This is too much to ask. She just simply refuses. In women’s work the psyche says, “This is too much. This I cannot, will not, tolerate.” And the
psyche begins, as a result of its spiritual experience in this initiation of endurance, to act more shrewdly.
The old Wild Mother could have gathered up her skirts, saddled a brace of horses, and charged far afield to find her son and determine what possession had overtaken him that he would wish to murder his lovely queen and his firstborn child, but she does not. Instead, in time-honored fashion, she sends the young initiate off to yet another symbolic initiation site, the woods. In some rites, the initiatory site was in a cave, or under a mountain, but in the underworld, where tree symbolism abounds, it is most often a forest.
Understand what this signifies: Sending the maiden off to another initiatory site would have been the natural course of events anyway, even had not the Devil jumped out and changed the messages. In the descent there are several sites for initiation, one following upon the other, all having their own lessons and comforts. The Devil, you might say, practically insures that we will feel an urgency to get up and hie on to the next one.
Remember, there is a natural time after childbearing when a woman is considered to be of the underworld. She is dusted with its dust, watered by its water, having seen into the mystery of life and death, pain and joy during her labor.
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So, for a time she is “not here” but rather still “there.” It takes time to re-emerge.
The maiden is like a postpartum woman. She rises from the underworld birthing chair where she has given birth to new ideas, a new life view. Now she is veiled, her babe is given to breast, and she goes on. In the Grimm brothers’ version of “The Handless Maiden,” the newborn child is male and is called Sorrowful. But in the Goddess re
ligions, the spiritual child born
from the woman’s venture with the king of the underworld is called Joy. .
Here, another sash from th
e old religion trails across the ground. Following the birth of the maiden’s new self, the king’s mother sends the young queen off
toa
long initiation that, as we shall see, will teach her the definitive cycles of a woman’s life.
The old Wild Mother gives the maiden a dual blessing: she binds the infant to the maiden’s milk-f breast so the childSelf can be nourished no matter what happens next Then, in the tradition of the old Goddess cults, she wraps the maiden in veils, this
being the main apparel a Goddess wears when traveling on sacred pilgrimage, when she wishes not to be recognized or diverted from her intention. In Greece, numerous sculptures and bas-reliefs show the initiate of the Eleusinian rite being veiled and awaiting the next step in initiation.
What is this symbol of veiling? It marks the difference between hiding and disguising. This symbol is about keeping private, keeping to oneself, not giving one’s mysterious nature away. It is about preserving the eros and
mysterium
of the wild nature.
Sometimes we have difficulty keeping our new life energy in the transformative pot long enough for something to accrue to us. We must keep it to ourselves without giving it all away to whomever asks, or to whichever stealthy inspiration suddenly happens upon us, telling us it would be good to tip the pot and empty our finest soulfulness out into the mouths of others or onto
the ground.
Putting a veil over something increases its action or feeling. This is known among women far and wide. There was a phrase my grandmother used, “veiling the bowl.” It meant to put a white cloth over a bowl of kneaded dough to cause the bread to rise. The veil for the bread and the veil for the psyche serve the same purpose. There is a potent leavening in the souls of women in descent. There is a powerful fermenting going on. To be behind the veil increases one’s mystical insight From behind the veil, all humans look like mist beings, all events, all objects, are colored as though in a dawn, or in a dream.
In the 1960s women veiled themselves with their hair. They grew it very long, ironed it, and wore it as a curtain, as a way to veil their faces—as though the world was too split open, too naked—as though their hair could seclude and protect their tender selves. There is a Mideastem dance with veils, and of course modem Moslem women wear the veil. The babushka from Eastern Europe, and the
trajes
worn on women’s heads in Central and South America are also mementos of the veil. East Indian women wear veils as a matter of course, and African women do also.
As I looked about the world, I began to feel a little sorry for modem women who did not have veils to wear. For to be a
free woman and use a veil at will is to hold the power of the Mysterious Woman. To behold such a woman veiled is a powerful experience.
I once saw a sight that has held me in the thrall of the veil for life: my cousin Eva, preparing for her night wedding. I, about eight years old, sat on her traveling suitcase with my flower girl headdress askew already, one of my anklets up and the other swallowed by my shoe. First she put on her long white satin gown with forty small satin-covered buttons down the back, and then the long white satin gloves with ten satin-covered buttons each. She drew the floor-length veil down over her lovely face and shoulders. My Aunt
Teréz
fluffed the veil all out, muttering to God to make it perfect. My Uncle
Sebestyén
stopped in the doorway aghast, for
Éva
was no longer a mortal. She was a Goddess. Behind the veil her eyes seemed silvery, her hair starry somehow; her mouth looked like a red flower. She was of only herself, contained and powerful, and just out of reach in a right kind of way.
Some say the hymen is the veil. Others, that illusion is the veil. And none are wrong. But there is more. Ironically, though the veil has been used to hide one’s beauty from the concupiscence of others, it is
siso
femme fatale
equipment. To wear a veil of a certain kind, at a certain time, with a certain lover, and with certain looks, is to exude an intense and smoky erotimine that causes true abated breath. In feminine psychology, the veil is a symbol for women’s ability to take on whatever presence or essence they wish.
There is a striking numinosity to the veiled one. She inspires such awe that all those she encounters stop in their tracks, so struck with reverence for her apparition that they must leave her alone. The maiden in the tale is veiled to set out on her journey, therefore she is untouchable. No one would dare to raise her veil without her permission. After all the invasiveness of the Devil, once again she is protected. Women undergo this transformation also. When they are in this veiled state, sensible persons know better than to invade their psychic space.
So too, after all the false messages in the psyche, and even in exile, we are protected by some superior wisening, some sumptuous and nourishing solitude that originated in our relationship
with the old Wild Mother. We are on the road again, but safeguarded. By wearing the veil we are designated as one who belongs to Wild Woman. We are hers, and though not unreachable, in some ways we are held away from total immersion in mundane life.
The amusements of the upper world do not dazzle us. We are wandering in
order
to find the place, the homeland in the unconscious. As fruit trees in blossom are
referred
to as wearing beautiful veils, we and the maiden are now flowering apple trees on the move, looking for the
forest
to which we belong.
The slaying of the deer once was a revivification rite, one that would
havè
been led by an old woman like the king’s mother, for
she
would be the designated “knower” of the life and death cycles. In the sacrifice of the doe we see more of the hem of the old religion. The sacrifice of a deer was an ancient rite meant to release the deer’s gentle yet bounding energy.
like
women in descent, this sacred animal was known as a hardy survivor of cold and most despairing winters. Deer were considered wholly efficient at foraging, birthing, and living with the inherent cycles of nature. It is likely that the participants of such a ritual belonged to a clan, and that the idea of the sacrifice was to teach initiates about death, as well as to infuse them with the qualities of the wild creature itself.
Here and again is the sacrifice—a double
rubedo
,
blood
sacrifice, in fact First there is the sacrifice of the deer, the animal sacred to the ancient Wild Woman bloodline. In ancient rite, to kill a deer out of cycle was
to violate
the
old
Wild Mother. The killing of creatures is dangerous work, for various kind and helpful entities travel in the guise of animals. Killing one out
of
cycle was thought to endanger the delicate balances of nature and to cause retribution
of mythic
proportions.
But the larger point is that the sacrifice was one
of
a mother- creature, a doe, which represented the female body of knowing. Then, by consuming the flesh of that creative and by the wearing of its pelt for warmth and in order
to
show clan membership, one
became
that creature. This was a sacred ritual since time and beyond. To keep the eyes, ears, snout, horns, and various viscera was to have the power symbolized by their various functions; far
seeing, sensing from afar, swift motion, hardy body, the timbre to summon one’s own kind, and so forth.
The second
rubedo
transpires when the maiden is separated from both the good old mother and the king. This is a period when we are charged to remember, to persist in spiritual nourishment even though we are separated from those forces that have sustained us in the past. We cannot stay in the ecstasy of perfect union forever. For most of us, it is not our path to do so. Our work is rather to be weaned at some point from these most exciting forces, yet to remain in conscious connection to them and to proceed to the next task.
It is a fact that we can become fixated on a particularly lovely aspect of psychic union and attempt to stay there forever, sucking at the sacred tit. This does not mean nurture is destructive. Quite the contrary, nurture is absolutely essential to the journey, and in substantial amounts. In fact, if it is not present in adequate amounts, the seeker will lose energy, fall into depression, and fade to a whisper. But if we stay at a favorite place in the psyche, such as only in beauty, only in rapture, individuation slows to a slog. The naked truth is that those sacred forces we find within our own psyches someday must be left, at least temporarily, so that the next stage of the process can occur.
As in the tale where the two women tearfully bid each other good-bye, we must say good-bye to precious internal forces that have helped immeasurably. Then, with our new childSelf held to our heart and breast, we step onto the road. The maiden is on her way again, wandering toward a great woods in all great faith-that something will come from that great hall of trees, something soul-making.
The Sixth Stage—The Realm of the Wild Woman
The young queen comes to the largest, wildest forest she’s ever seen. No paths are discernible. She picks her way over and through and around. Near dark, the same white spirit who helped her at the moat earlier guides her to a poor inn run by kindly woodspeople. A woman in white bids her enter and calls her by name. When the young queen asks how she knows her name, the
woman in while
says,
“We who are of the
forest
follow these matters, my
queen.”
So the queen stays seven years at the forest inn, and is happy with her child and her life. Her hands gradually grow back, first as little baby hands, then as little girl hands, and finally as woman's hands.
Though this episode is briefly attended to in the tale, it is truly the longest both in time passed and in terms of bringing the task to fruition. The maiden has wandered again, and comes home, so to speak, for seven years—separated from her husband, it is true, but otherwise experiencing enrichment and restoration.
Her state has again aroused the compassion of a spirit in white—now her guiding spirit—and it leads her to this home in the forest. Such is the infinitely merciful nature of the deep psyche during a woman’s journey. There is always the next helper and the next This spirit who leads and shelters her is of the old Wild Mother, and as such is the instinctual psyche that always knows what comes next and what comes next after that
This large wild forest that the maiden finds is the archetypal sacred initiatory ground. It is like
Leuce
, the wild forest the ancient Greeks said grew in the underworld, filled with the sacred and ancestral trees and full of beasts, both wild and tame. It is here that the handless maiden finds peace for seven years. Because it is a treeland, and because she is symbolized by the flowering apple tree, this is her homeland at last, the place where her fiery and flowering soul
regai
as its roots.
And who is the woman in the deep wood who runs the inn? Like the spirit dressed in glowing white, she is an aspect of the old triple Goddess, and if absolutely every phase of the original fairy tale were hoc, there would also be a kindly/fierce old woman at the inn in some capacity or other. But that passage of this story has been lost, somewhat like a manuscript in which some of the pages have been ripped out The missing element was probably originally suppressed during one of those storms that raged between proponents of the old nature religion and those of the newer religion around which religious belief was to be the dominant But what remains is potent The water of the story is not only deep but clear.
What we see are two women who over seven years’ time come to know one another. The spirit in white is like the telepathic Baba
Yaga in “Vasalisa,” who is a representation of the old Wild Mother. As
tíre
Yaga says to Vasalisa, even though she's ne
ver seen her before, “Oh, yes, I
know your people,” this female spirit who is an innkeeper in the underworld already knows the young queen, for she is also of the sacred One whoknows all.
Again the story breaks significantly. The exact tasks and learnings of those seven years are not alluded to, other than to say that they were restful and revi vifying. Although we might say the story breaks because the learnings of the old nature religion that underlie this story were traditionally kept secret and therefore would not be in such a tale, it is much more likely that there are another seven aspects, tasks, or episodes to this story, one for each year the maiden was in the forest of learning. But, hold fast, nothing is lost in the psyche, remember?
We can remember and resurrect all that occurred during those seven years from little shards we have from other sources on women’s initiation. Woman’s initiation is an archetype, and although an archetype has many variations, its core remains constant. So, here is what we know about initiation from candling other fairy tales and myths, both oral and written.
The maiden stays for seven years, for that is the time of a season of a woman’s life. Seven is the number accorded to the moon’s cycles, and it is the number of other terms of sacred time: seven days of creation, seven days to a week, and so forth. But beyond these mystical understandings is one far greater and it is this:
A woman’s life is divided into phases of seven years each. Every seven-year period stands for a certain set of experiences and learnings. These phases can be understood concretely as terms of adult development, but they may more so be understood as spiritual stages of development that do not necessarily correspond to a woman’s chronological age, although sometimes that is so.
Since the beginning of time, women’s lives have been divided into phases, most having to do with the changing powers of her body. Sequentializing a woman’s physical, spiritual, emotional, and creative life is useful so that she is able to anticipate and prepare for “what comes next.” What comes next is the province of the instinctual Wild Woman. She always knows. Yet, across time, as the old wild initiation rites fell away, the instruction of the younger women by the older women about these inherent womanly stages was also hidden away.
Empirical observation of women's restlessness, yearning, changing, and growing brings the old patterns or phases of women's deep life back to light
.
Though we can put specific titles to the stages, they are all cycles of completion, aging, dying, and new life. The seven years the maiden spends in the forest teach her the details and dramas connected to these phases. Here are cycles of seven years each, stretching across a woman's entire lifetime. Each has its rites and its tasks. It is up to us to fill them in.
I offer the following to you only as metaphors for psychic depth. The ages and stages of a woman's life provide both tasks to accomplish and attitudes in which to root herself. For instance, if according to the following schema we live to be old enough to enter the psychic place and phase of the mist beings, the place where all thought is new as tomorrow and old as the beginning of time, we will find ourselves entering yet another attitude, another manner of seeing, as well as discovering and accomplishing the tasks of consciousness from that vantage point.
The following metaphors are fragments. But given expansive enough metaphors we can construct, from what is known and from what we sense about the ancient knowing, new insights for ourselves that are both numinous and make sense right now and today. These metaphors are loosely based on empirical experience and observation, developmental psychology, and phenomena found in creation myths, all of which contain many old traces of human psychology.
These phases are not meant to be tied inexorably to chronological age, for some women at eighty are still in developmental young maidenhood, and some women at age forty are in the psychic world of the mist beings, and some twenty year olds are as battle scarred as long-lived crones. The ages are not meant to be hierarchical, but simply belong to women’s consciousness and to the increase of their soul-lives. Each age represents a change in attitude, a change in tasking, and a change in values.
0-7
age of the body and dreaming/socialization, yet
retaining imagination
7-14
age of separating yet weaving together reason and the
imaginal
14-21 age of new body/young maidenhood/unfurling yet
protecting sensuality
21-28
age of new world/new life/exploring the worlds
28-35 age of the mother/leaming to mother others and self 35-42 age of the seeker/leaming to mother self-seeking the self
42-49 age of early crone/finding the far encampment/giving courage to others
49-56 age of the underworld/leaming the words and rites
56-63 age of choice/choosing one’s worid’and the work yet
to
be done
63-70 age of becoming watchwoman/recasting all one has learrned
70-77 age of re-youthanization/more cronedom
77-84 age of the mist beings/finding more big in the small
84-91 age of weaving with the scarlet thread/understanding the
weaving of life
91-98
age of the ethereal/less to saying, more to being
98-105
age of pneuma, the breath
05+
age of timelessness
For many women, the first half of these phases of a woman’s knowing, say to about age forty or so, clearly moves from the substantive body of instinctual infant realizations to the bodily knowing of the deep mother. But in the second round of phases, the body becomes an internal sensing device almost exclusively, and women become more and more subtle.
As a woman transits through these cycles, her layers of defense, protection, density become more and more sheer until her very soul begins to shine through. We can sense and see the movement of the soul within the body-psyche in an astonishing way as we grow older and older.
So, seven is the number of initiation. In archetypal psychology there are literally dozens of references to the symbol of seven. One reference I find most valuable in helping women to differentiate the tasks ahead of them, and in stating their current whereabouts in the underground forest, is from the ancient attributions given to the
seven senses. These symbolic attributes were believed to belong to all humans and seem to have constituted an initiation into the soul through the metaphors and actual systems of the body.
For instance, according to ancient teaching in Nahua healing, the senses represent aspects of soul or the ‘Inward holy body,” and they are to be worked and developed. While the work is too long to lay out here, there are said to be seven senses, therefore seven task areas: animation, feeling, speech, taste, sight, hearing, and smelling.
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Each sense was said to be under the influence of an energy from the heavens. To bring this artfully down to earth now, when women who are working in a group speak of these things, they can describe them, explore them, comb them out by using the following metaphors, from the same ritual, in order to peer into the mysteries of the senses: fire animates, earth gives a sense of feeling, water gives speech, air gives taste, mist gives sight, flowers give hearing, the south wind gives smelling.
My feeling is strong from the little rag left of the old initiatory rite in this part of the tale, mainly the phrase “seven years,” that the stages of a woman’s entire life, and matters such as those of the seven senses and other cycles and events that are traditionally numbered in sevens, were brought to the attention and mixed into the work of the initiate of olden times. One old storytelling fragment that intrigues me greatly came from Cratynana, an old and beloved Swabian teller in our extended family. She said that long ago women used to go away for several years to a place in the mountains, just like men went away for a long time with the army in the king’s service.
So, in this time of the maiden’s learning in the deep woods, there is another miracle. Her hands begin to grow back in phases, first those of a baby. We can take this to mean that her understanding of all that has occurred is at first imitative, like the behavior of a baby. As her hands grow into those of a child, she develops a concrete but not absolute understanding of all things. When finally they become women’s hands, she has a practiced and deeper grasp of the non-concrete, the metaphoric, the sacred path she has been on.
As we practice the deep instinctive knowing about all manner