Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
Among wolves, when the bitch leaves her pups to go hunting, the young ones try to follow her out of the den and down the path. She snarls at them, lunges at them, and scares the bejeezus out of them all they run slipping and sliding back to the den. Their mother knows her pups do not yet know how to weigh and assess other creatures. They do not know who is a predator and who is not But in time she will teach them, both harshly and well.
Like wolf pups, women need a similar initiation, one which teaches that the inner and outer worlds are not always happy-go- lucky places. Many women do not even have the basic teaching about predators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: if it’s threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it’s weaker, see what you want to do; if it’s sick, leave it alone; if it has quills, poison, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; if it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by.
The youngest sister in the story is not only naive about her own mental processes, and totally ignorant about the murdering aspect of her own psyche, but is also able to be lured by pleasures of the ego. And why not? We all want everything to be wonderful. Every woman wants to sit upon a horse dressed in bells and go riding off through the boundless green and sensual forest. All humans want to attain early Paradise here on earth. The problem is that ego desires to feel wonderful but a yen for the paradisical, when combined with
naíveté,
makes us not fulfilled, but food for the predator.
This acquiescence to marrying the monster is actually decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. They are taught to not see, and instead to “make pretty” all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This training is why the youngest sister can say, “Hmmm, his beard isn’t really
that
blue.” This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to “be nice” in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.
In the tale, even the mother colludes. She goes on the picnic, “goes along for the ride.” She doesn’t say a word of caution to any of her daughters. One might say the biological mother or the internal mother is asleep or naive herself, as is often the case in very young girls, or in unmothered women.
Interestingly, in the tale, the older sisters demonstrate some consciousness when they say they do not like Bluebeard even though he has just entertained and regaled them in a very romantic and paradisical manner. There is a sense in the story that some aspects of the psyche, represented by the older sisters, are a little more developed in insight, that they have “knowing” which warns against romanticizing the predator. The initiated woman pays attention to the older sisters’ voices in the psyche; they warn her away from danger. The uninitiated woman does not pay attention; she is as yet too identified with
naiveté.
Say, for instance, a naive woman keeps making poor choices in a mate. Somewhere in her mind she knows this pattern is fruitless, that she should stop and follow a different value. She often even knows how to proceed. But there is something compelling, a son of Bluebeardian mesmerization, about continuing the destructive pattern. In most cases, the woman feels if she just holds on to the old pattern a little longer, why surely the paradisical feeling she seeks will appear in the next heartbeat
At another extreme, a woman involved in a chemical addiction most definitely has at the back of her mind a set of older sisters who are saying, “No! No way! This is bad for the mind and bad for the body. We refuse to continue.” But the desire to find Paradise draws the woman into the marriage to Bluebeard, the drug dealer of psychic highs.
Whatever dilemm
a a woman finds herself in, the
voices of the older sisters in her psyche continue to urge her to consciousness and to be wise in her choices. They represent those voices in the
back of the mind that whisper the truths that a woman may wish to avoid for they end her fantasy of Paradise Found.
So the fateful marriage occurs, the mingling of the sweetly naive and the dastardly unlit. When Bluebeard leaves on his journey, the young woman does not realize that even though she is exhorted to do anything she wishes—except that one thing—she is living less, rather than living more. Many women have literally lived the Bluebeard tale. They marry while they are yet naive about predators, and they choose someone who is destructive to their lives. They are determined to “cure” that person with love. They are in some way “playing house.” One could say they have spent much time saying, “His beard isn't really so blue.”
Eventually a woman thus captured will see her hopes for a decent life for herself and her children diminish more and more. It is to be hoped that she will finally open the door to the room where all the destruction of her life lies. While it may be the woman's actual mate who denigrates and dismantles her life, the innate predator within her own psyche concurs. As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.
When the youthful spirit marries the predator, she is captured or restrained during a time in her life that was meant to be an unfoldment. Instead of living freely, she begins to live falsely. The deceitful promise of the predator is that the woman will become a queen in some way, when in fact her murder is being planned. There is a way out of all of this, but one must have a key.
The Key to Knowing: The Importance of Snuffling
Ah, now this tiny key; it provides entry to the secret all women know and yet do not know. The key represents permission to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche, in this case the something that mindlessly degrades and destroys a woman's potential.
Bluebeard continues his destructive plan by instructing his wife to compromise herself psychically; “Do whatever you like,” he says. He prompts the woman to feel a false sense of freedom. He
implies she is free to nourish herself and to revel in bucolic landscapes, at least within the
confínes
of his territory. But in reality, she is not free, for she is constrained from registering the sinister knowledge about the predator, even though deep in the psyche she already truly comprehends the issue.
The naive woman tacitly agrees to remain “not knowing.” Women who are gullible or those with injured instincts still, like flowers, turn in the direction of whatever sun is offered. The naive or injured woman is then too easily lured with promises of ease, of lilting enjoyment, of various pleasures, be they promises of elevated status in the eyes of her family, her peers, or promises of increased security, eternal love, high adventure, or hot sex.
Bluebeard forbids the young woman to use the one key that would bring her to consciousness. To forbid a woman to use the key to conscious self knowledge strips away her intuitive nature, her natural instinct for curiosity that leads her to discover “what lies underneath” and beyond the obvious. Without this knowing, the woman is without proper protection. If she attempts to obey Bluebeard’s command not to use the key, she chooses death for her spirit. By choosing to open the door to the ghastly secret room, she chooses life.
In the tale her sisters come to visit and “they were, as all souls are, very curious.” The wife gaily tells them, “We can do anything, except for one thing.” The sisters decide to make a game out of finding which door the little key fits. They again have the proper impulse toward consciousness.
Some psychological thinkers, including Freud and Bettelheim, have interpreted episodes such as those found in the Bluebeard tale as psychological punishments for women’s sexual curiosity.
4
Early in the formulation of classical psychology women’s curiosity was given quite a negative connotation, whereas men with the same attribute were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring. In reality, the trivialization of women’s curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women’s insight, hunches, intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her most fundamental powers: differentiation and determination.
So, considering that women who have not yet opened the
forbidden door tend to be the same women who walk right into the Bluebeard’s arms, it is fortuitous that the older sisters have the proper wildish instincts for curiosity intact. These are the shadow- women of the individual woman’s psyche, the tics and nudges in the back of a woman’s mind that re-mind her, put her back in her right mind about what is important. Finding the little door is important, disobeying the predator’s order is important, and finding out what is so special about this one room is essential.
For centuries, doors have been made both of stone and wood. In certain cultures, the spirit of the stone or wood was thought to be retained in the door, and it too was called upon to act as guardian of the room. Long ago there were more doors to tombs than to homes, and the very image of
door
meant something Of spiritual value was within, or that there was something within which must be kept contained.
The door in the tale is portrayed as a psychic barrier, as a kind of sentry that is placed in front of the secret. This guard reminds us again of the predator’s reputation as a mage—a psychic force that twists and tangles us up as though by magic, keeping us from knowing what we know. Women strengthen this barrier or door when they discourage themselves or one another from thinking or diving too deeply, for “you may get more than you bargained for.” In order to breach this barrier, a proper counter-magic must be employed. And the fitting magic is found in the symbol of the key.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation—in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Though the sisters know not whether treasure or travesty lies beyond the door, they summon their goodly instincts to ask
the
precise psychological question,
“Where
do you think that door is, and
what
might lie beyond it?”
It is at this point that the naive nature begins to mature, to question, “What is behind the visible? What is it which causes that shadow to loom upon the wall?” The youthful naive nature begins to understand that if there is a secret something, if there is a
shadow something, if there is a forbidden something, it needs to be looked into. Those who would develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murked window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them.
As we shall see, the ability to stand what one sees enables a woman to return to her deep nature, there to be sustained in all thoughts, feelings, and actions.
The Animal Groom
So though the young woman attempts to follow the orders of the predator, and agrees to be ignorant about the secret in the cellar, she can only comply for so long. Finally she puts the key, the question, to the door and finds the shocking carnage in some part of her deep life. And that key, that tiny symbol of her life, suddenly will not cease its bleeding, will not cease to give the cry that something is wrong. A woman may try to hide from the devastations of her life, but the bleeding, the loss of life’s energy, will continue until she recognizes the predator for what it is and contains it.
When women open the doors of their own lives and survey the carnage there in those out-of-the-way places, they most often find they have been allowing summary assassinations of their most crucial dreams, goals, and hopes. They find lifeless thoughts and feelings and desires; ones which were once graceful and promising but now are drained of blood. Whether these hopes and dreams be about desire for relationship, desire for an accomplishment, a success, or a work of art, when such a gruesome discovery is made in one’s psyche, we can be sure Jie natural predator, also often symbolized in dreams as the animal groom, has been at work methodically destroying a woman’s most cherished desires, concerns, and aspirations.
In fairy tales, the animal groom character is a common motif that can be understood to represent a malevolent thing disguised as a benevolent thing. This
or
some proximate characterization is always present when a woman carries naive presentiments about
something or someone. When a woman is attempting to avoid the facts of her own devastations, her night dreams are likely to shout warnings to her, warnings and exhortations to wake up! or get help! or flee! or go for the kill!
Over the years. I’ve seen many women’s dreams with this animal groom feature or this things-are-not-as-nice-as-they-seem aura. One woman dreamt of
a
beautiful and charming man, but when she looked down, there was a loop of cruel barbed wire beginning to uncoil from his sleeve. Another woman dreamt that she was helping an old person cross the street and the old person suddenly smiled diabolically and “melted” on her arm, burning her deeply. Yet another woman dreamt of eating with an unknown friend whose fork flew across the table, mortally wounding the dreamer.
This not seeing, not understanding, not perceiving that our internal desires are not concomitant with our external actions; this is the spoor left behind by the animal groom. The presence of this factor in the psyche accounts for why women who say they wish to have a relationship instead do all they can to sabotage a loving one. This is how women who set goals to be here, there, or wherever by such and such time never even begin the first leg of the journey, or abandon it at the first hardship. This is how all the procrastinations which give rise to self-hatred, all the shame-feelings which are pushed down and away to fester, all the new beginnings which are sorely needed, and all the long overdue endings are not met Wherever the predator lurks and works, everything is derailed, demolished, and decapitated.
The animal groom is a widespread symbol in fairy tales, the general story going something like this: A strange man courts a young woman who agrees to be his bride, but before the wedding day she takes a walk in the woods, becomes lost, and as darkness falls, climbs into a tree to be safe from predators. As she waits out the night, along comes her betrothed with a spade over his shoulder. Something about her groom-to-be gives him away as being not truly human. Sometimes it is his strangely formed foot, hand, arm, or hair that is decidedly
outré
and gives him away.
He begins to dig a grave beneath the very tree she sits in, all the while singing and muttering about how he will murder his latest
bride-to-be and bury her in this grave. The terrified girl conceals herself all night long, and in the morning when the groom-to-be is gone, she runs home, reports him to her brothers and father, and the men waylay the animal groom and kill him.
This is a powerful archetypal process in women’s psyches. The woman is adequately perceptive, and though she too at first agrees to marry that natural predator of the psyche, and although she too goes through a period of being lost in the psyche, she wills out at the end, for she is able to see into the truth of it all, and she is able to hold it in consciousness and take action to resolve the matter.
Ah, so then comes the next step, even more difficult yet, and that is to be able to stand what one sees, all one’s self-destruction and deadness.
Blood Scent
In the tale, the sisters slam shut the door to the killing chamber. The young wife stares at the blood on the key. A whimper rises within her. “I must scrub this blood off or he will know!”
Now the naive self has knowledge about a killing force loose within the psyche. And the blood on the key is women’s blood. If it were only blood from having one’s frivolous fantasies sacrificed, there would be but a nick of blood on the key. But it is so much more serious, for the blood represents a decimation of the deepest and most soulful aspects of one’s creative life.
In this state a woman loses her energy to create, whether it be solutions to mundane matters in her life, such as school, family, friendships, or her concerns with compelling issues in the larger world, or with issues of spirit—her personal development, her art. This is not a mere procrastination, for it continues over weeks and months of time. She seems flattened out, filled with ideas perhaps, but deeply anemic and more and more unable to act upon them.
The blood in this story is not menstrual blood, but arterial blood from the soul. It not only stains the key, it runs down the entire persona. The dress she wears as well as all the gowns in her wardrobe are stained by it. In archetypal psychology, clothing can personify the outer presence. The
persona
is a mask a person shows to the world. It hides much. With proper psyche padding
and disguises, both men and women can present a near-perfect persona, a near-perfect facade.
When the weeping key—the crying question—stains our personas, we cannot any longer hide our travails. We can say what we like, present the most smiling facade, but once we have seen the shocking truth of the killing room, we can no longer pretend it does not exist. And seeing the truth causes us to bleed energy even more. It is painful; it is artery cutting. We must try to immediately correct this terrible state.
So, in this fairy tale, the key also acts as container, it contains the blood which is the memory of what one has seen and now knows. For women, the key always symbolizes
entrée
to a mystery or into knowledge. In other fairy tales, the symbolic key Is often represented by words such as “Open Sesame,” which Ali Baba shouts to a ragged mountain, causing the entire mountain to rumble and crack open .so he can pass through. In a more picaresque manner, at Disney Studios, the fairy godmother in Cinderella chortles “Bibbity-bobbity-boo!” and pumpkins turn into carriages and mice into coachmen.
In the Eleusinian mysteries, the key was hidden on the tongue, meaning the crux of the thing, the clue, the trace, could be found in a special set of words, or key questions. And the words women need most in situations similar to the one described in Bluebeard are: What stands behind? What is not as it appears? What do I know deep in my
ovarios
that I wish I did not know? What of me has been killed, or lays dying?
Any and all of these are keys. And if a woman has been leading a half-dead life, the answers to these four questions are very likely to come up with blood on them. The killing aspect of the psyche, part of whose job it is to see that no consciousness occurs, will continue to assert itself from time to time and twist off or poison any new growth. It is its nature. It is its job.
So, in a positive sense, it is only the insistent blood on this key which causes the psyche to hold on to what it has seen. You see, there is a natural censoring of all negative and painful events that occur in our lives. The censoring ego most certainly wishes to forget it ever saw the room, ever saw the cadavers. This is why Bluebeard’s wife attempts to scour the key with horsehair. She
tries everything she knows, all the remedies for lacerations and deep wounds from women's folk medicine: cobwebs, ash, and fire—all associated with the weaving of life and death by the Fates. But not only does she fail to cauterize the key, neither can she end this process by pretending it is not occurring. She cannot stop the tiny key from weeping blood. Paradoxically, as her old life is dying and even the best remedies will not hide that fact, she is awake to her blood loss and therefore just beginning to live.
The formerly naive woman must face what has occurred. Bluebeard’s killing of all his “curious” wives is the killing of the creative feminine, the potential that develops all manner of new and interesting life. The predator is particularly aggressive in ambushing woman’s wildish nature. At the very least, it seeks to scorn, and at the most to sever a woman’s connection to her own insights, inspirations, follow through, and more.
Another woman I worked with, an intelligent and gifted woman, told me of her grandmother, who lived in the Midwest Her grandmother's idea of a really good time was to board the train to Chicago and wear a big hat and walk down Michigan Avenue looking in all the shop windows and being an elegant lady. By hook or by crook or by fate, she married a farmer. They moved out into the midst of the wheatlands, and she began to rot away in that elegant little farmhouse that was just the right size, with all the right children, and all the right husband. She had no more time for that “frivolous” life she’d once led. Too much “kids.” Too much “women’s work.”
One day, years later, after washing the kitchen and living room floors by hand, she slipped into her very best silk blouse, buttoned her long skirt, and pinned on her big hat. She pressed her husband’s shotgun to the roof of her mouth and pulled the trigger. Every woman alive knows why she washed the floors first.
A starved soul can become so filled with pain, a woman can no longer bear it. Because women have a soul-need to express themselves in their own soulful ways, they must develop and blossom in ways that are sensible to them and without molestation from others. In this sense, the key with blood could be said to also represent a woman’s female bloodlines, those who have gone before her. Who among us does not know at least one female loved-one
who lost her instincts to
make
good
choices for herself, and was
forced therefore to
live a marginal life or worse? Perhaps you
yourself are that
woman.
One of the least discussed issues of individuation is that as one shines light into the dark of the psyche as strongly as one can, the shadows, where the light is not, grow even darker. So when we illuminate some part of the psyche, there is a resultant deeper dark to contend with. This dark cannot be let alone. The key, the questions, cannot be hidden or forgotten. They must be asked. They must be answered.
The deepest work is usually the darkest. A brave woman, a wisening woman, will develop the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is. So do not be afraid to investigate the worst.
It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one's life and self anew.
It is in this psychic kind of land development that Wild Woman shines. She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact she can see in the dark. She is not afraid of Offal, refuse, decay, stink, blood, cold bones, dying girls, or murderous husbands. She can see it, she can take it, she can help. And this is what the youngest sister of the Bluebeard tale is learning.
The skeletons in the chamber represent, in the most positive light, the indestructible force of the feminine. Archetypally, bones represent that which can never be destroyed. Stories of bones are essentially about something in the psyche that is difficult to destroy. The only thing that we possess that is difficult to destroy is our soul.
When we talk about the feminine essence, we’re really talking about the feminine soul. When we talk about the bodies scattered in the cellar, we’re saying something has happened to the soul- force and yet, even though its outer vitality has been taken away, even though life has essentially been wrung out of it, it has not been destroyed utterly. It can come back to life.
It comes back to life through the young woman and her sisters, who ultimately are able to break the old patterns of ignorance, by being able to behold a horror and not look away. They are able to see, and to stand what they see.
Here we are again at
La Loba
'
s place, at the archetypal bone woman’s cave. Here we have the remnants of what once was the full woman. However, unlike the cyclical life and death aspects of the Wild Woman archetype who takes the life that is ready to die, incubates it, and hurls it back into the world again, Bluebeard only kills and dismantles a woman until she is nothing but bones. He leaves her no beauty, no love, no self, and therefore no ability to act in her own behalf. To remedy this, we as woman must look to the killing thing that has gained hold of us, see the result of its grisly work, register it all consciously, and retain it in consciousness, and then act in
our,
not its, behalf.
The cellar, dungeon, and cave symbols are all related to one another. They are ancient initiatory environs; places to or through which a woman descends to the murdered one(s), breaks taboos to find the truth, and through wit and/or travail triumphs by banishing, transforming, or exterminating the assassin of the psyche. The Bluebeard tale lays out the work for us with clear instructions: track the bodies, follow instincts, see what you see, call up psychic muscle, dismantle the destructive energy.
If a woman does not look into these issues of her own deadness and murder, she remains obedient to the dictates of the predator. Once she opens the room in the psyche that shows how dead, how slaughtered she is, she sees how various parts of her feminine nature and her instinctual psyche have been killed off and died a lowly death behind a facade of wealth. Now that she sees this, now that she registers how captured she is and how much psychic life is at stake, now she can assert herself in an even more powerful manner.
Backtracking and Looping
Backtracking and looping are terms that describe an animal diving underground to escape, and then popping up behind the predator’s back. This is the psychic maneuver which Bluebeard’s wife effects in order to reestablish her sovereignty over her own life once again.