Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
560
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
560Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345396815 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/22/1995 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 2,968 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Singing Over the Bones
Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.
Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.
It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.
My life and work as a Jungian psychoanalyst, poet, and cantadora, keeper of the old stories, have taught me that women’s flagging vitality can be restored by extensive “psychic-archeological” digs into the ruins of the female underworld. By these methods we are able to recover the ways of the natural instinctive psyche, and through its personification in the Wild Woman archetype we are able to discern the ways and means of woman’s deepest nature. The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.
The title of this book, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, came from my study of wildlife biology, wolves in particular. The studies of the wolves Canis lupus and Canis rufus are like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails.
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.
So that is where the concept of the Wild Woman archetype first crystallized for me, in the study of wolves. I’ve studied other creatures as well, such as bear, elephant, and the soul-birds—butterflies. The characteristics of each species give abundant metaphoric hints into what is knowable about the feminine instinctual psyche.
The wild nature passed through my spirit twice, once by my birth to a passionate Mexican-Spanish bloodline, and later, through adoption by a family of fiery Hungarians. I was raised up near the Michigan state line, surrounded by woodlands, orchards, and farmland and near the Great Lakes. There, thunder and lightning were my main nutrition. Cornfields creaked and spoke aloud at night. Far up in the north, wolves came to the clearings in moonlight, prancing and praying. We could all drink from the same streams without fear.
Although I did not call her by that name then, my love for Wild Woman began when I was a little child. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
The river always called to be visited after dark, the fields needed to be walked in so they could make their rustle-talk. Fires needed to be built in the forest at night, and stories needed to be told outside the hearing of grown-ups.
I was lucky to be brought up in Nature. There, lightning strikes taught me about sudden death and the evanescence of life. Mice litters showed that death was softened by new life. When I unearthed “Indian beads,” fossils from the loam, I understood that humans have been here a long, long time. I learned about the sacred art of self-decoration with monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
A wolf mother killed one of her mortally injured pups; this taught a hard compassion and the necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. The fuzzy caterpillars which fell from their branches and crawled back up again taught single-mindedness. Their tickle-walking on my arm taught how skin can come alive. Climbing to the tops of trees taught what sex would someday feel like.
My own post-World War II generation grew up in a time when women were infantilized and treated as property. They were kept as fallow gardens . . . but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind. Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrecognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets.
Dancing was barely tolerated, if at all, so they danced in the forest where no one could see them, or in the basement, or on the way out to empty the trash. Self-decoration caused suspicion. Joyful body or dress increased the danger of being harmed or sexually assaulted. The very clothes on one’s shoulders could not be called one’s own.
It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called “strict,” when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as “nervous breakdowns,” when girls and women who were tightly girdled, tightly reined, and tightly muzzled were called “nice,” and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded “bad.”
So like many women before and after me, I lived my life as a disguised criatura, creature. Like my kith and kin before me, I swagger staggered in high heels, and I wore a dress and hat to church. But my fabulous tail often fell below my hemline, and my ears twitched until my hat pitched, at the very least, down over both my eyes, and sometimes clear across the room.
I’ve not forgotten the song of those dark years, hambre del alma, the song of the starved soul. But neither have I forgotten the joyous canto hondo, the deep song, the words of which come back to us when we do the work of soulful reclamation.
Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire. This is what has driven my work on the Wild Woman archetype for over two decades.
A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic forms.
Fairy tales, myths, and stones provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self.
I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy tale knock at the door of the deep female psyche. Llamar o tocar a la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a door. It means using words that summon up the opening of a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.
When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her; we know she belongs to us and we to her.
Table of Contents
| The Bounty of Wild Woman | ||
| Foreword | xvii | |
| Introduction: Singing Over the Bones | 1 | |
| The Stories | ||
| 1. | The Howl: Resurrection of the Wild Woman | 21 |
| La Loba, The Wolf Woman | ||
| The Four Rabbinim | ||
| 2. | Stalking the Intruder: the Beginning Initiation | 35 |
| Bluebeard | ||
| The Natural Predator of the Psyche | ||
| Naive Women as Prey | ||
| The Key to Knowing: The Importance of Snuffling | ||
| The Animal Groom | ||
| Blood Scent | ||
| Backtracking and Looping | ||
| Giving the Cry | ||
| The Sin-eaters | ||
| The Dark Man in Women's Dreams | ||
| 3. | Nosing Out the Facts: the Retrieval of Intuition as Initiation | 70 |
| The Doll in Her Pocket: Vasalisa the Wise | ||
| Task 1 | Allowing the Too-Good Mother to Die | |
| Task 2 | Exposing the Crude Shadow | |
| Task 3 | Navigating in the Dark | |
| Task 4 | Facing the Wild Hag | |
| Task 5 | Serving the Non-Rational | |
| Task 6 | Separating This from That | |
| Task 7 | Asking the Mysteries | |
| Task 8 | Standing on All Fours | |
| Task 9 | Recasting the Shadow | |
| 4. | The Mate: Union with the Other | 111 |
| Hymn for the Wild Man: Manawee | ||
| The Dual Nature of Women | ||
| The Power of Two | ||
| The Power of Name | ||
| The Tenacious Dog Nature | ||
| Creeping Seductive Appetite | ||
| Achieving Fierceness | ||
| The Interior Woman | ||
| 5. | Hunting: When the Heart is a Lonely Hunter | 127 |
| Skeleton Woman: Facing the Life/Death/Life Nature of Love | ||
| Death in the House of Love | ||
| The First Phases of Love | ||
| The Accidental Finding of Treasure | ||
| The Chase and the Hiding | ||
| Untangling the Skeleton | ||
| The Sleep of Trust | ||
| Giving the Tear | ||
| The Later Phases of Love | ||
| Heart as Drum and Singing Up | ||
| The Dance of Body and Soul | ||
| 6. | Finding One's Pack: Belonging as Blessing | 164 |
| The Ugly Duckling | ||
| Exile of the Unmatched Child | ||
| Kinds of Mothers | ||
| The Ambivalent Mother | ||
| The Collapsed Mother | ||
| The Child Mother and the Unmothered Mother | ||
| The Strong Mother, The Strong Child | ||
| Bad Company | ||
| Not Looking Right | ||
| Frozen Feeling, Frozen Creativity | ||
| The Passing Stranger | ||
| Exile as Boon | ||
| The Uncombed Cats and Cross-Eyed Hens of the World | ||
| Remembrance and Continuance No Matter What | ||
| Love for the Soul | ||
| The Mistaken Zygote | ||
| 7. | Joyous Body: the Wild Flesh | 197 |
| Body Talk | ||
| The Body in Fairy Tales | ||
| The Power of the Haunches | ||
| La Mariposa, Butterfly Woman | ||
| 8. | Self-Preservation: Identifying Leg Traps, Cages, and Poisoned Batt | 213 |
| The Feral Woman | ||
| The Red Shoes | ||
| Brutal Loss in Fairy Tales | ||
| The Handmade Red Shoes | ||
| The Traps | ||
| Trap #1 | The Gilded Carriage, the Devalued Life | |
| Trap #2 | The Dry Old Woman, the Senescent Force | |
| Trap #3 | Burning the Treasure, Hambre del Alma, Soul Famine | |
| Trap #4 | Injury to Basic Instinct, the Consequence of Capture | |
| Trap #5 | Trying to Sneak a Secret Life, Split in Two | |
| Trap #6 | Cringing Before the Collective, Shadow Rebellion | |
| Trap #7 | Faking It, Trying to be Good, Normalizing the Abnormal | |
| Trap #8 | Dancing Out of Control, Obsession and Addiction | |
| Addiction | ||
| At the Executioner's House | ||
| Trying to Take Shoes Off, Too Late | ||
| Returning to Life Made by Hand, Healing Injured Instincts | ||
| 9. | Homing: Returning to Oneself | 255 |
| Sealskin, Soulskin | ||
| Loss of Sense of Soul as Initiation | ||
| Losing One's Pelt | ||
| The Lonely Man | ||
| The Spirit Child | ||
| Drying Out and Crippling | ||
| Hearing the Old One's Call | ||
| Staying Overlong | ||
| Cutting Loose, Diving In | ||
| The Medial Woman: Breathing Under Water | ||
| Surfacing | ||
| The Practice of Intentional Solitude | ||
| Women's Innate Ecology | ||
| 10. | Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life | 297 |
| La Llorona | ||
| The Pollution of the Wild Soul | ||
| Poison in the River | ||
| Fire on the River | ||
| The Man on the River | ||
| Taking Back the River | ||
| Focus and the Fantasy Mill | ||
| The Little Match Girl | ||
| Staving Off Creative Fantasy | ||
| Renewing the Creative Fire | ||
| The Three Gold Hairs | ||
| 11. | Heat: Retrieving a Sacred Sexuality | 334 |
| The Dirty Goddesses | ||
| Baubo: The Belly Goddess | ||
| Coyote Dick | ||
| A Trip to Rwanda | ||
| 12. | Marking Territory: the Boundaries of Rage and Forgiveness | 346 |
| The Crescent Moon Bear | ||
| Rage as Teacher | ||
| Bringing in the Healer: Climbing the Mountain | ||
| The Spirit Bear | ||
| The Transformative Fire and Right Action | ||
| Righteous Rage | ||
| The Withered Trees | ||
| Descansos | ||
| Injured Instinct and Rage | ||
| Collective Rage | ||
| Stuck in Old Rage | ||
| Four Stages of Forgiveness | ||
| 13. | Battle Scars: Membership in the Scar Clan | 374 |
| Secrets as Slayers | ||
| The Dead Zone | ||
| The Woman With Hair of Gold | ||
| The Scapecoat | ||
| 14. | La Selva Subterranea: Initiation in the Underground Forest | 387 |
| The Handless Maiden | ||
| Stage 1 | The Bargain Without Knowing | |
| Stage 2 | The Dismemberment | |
| Stage 3 | The Wandering | |
| Stage 4 | Finding Love in the Underworld | |
| Stage 5 | The Harrowing of the Soul | |
| Stage 6 | The Realm of the Wild Woman | |
| Stage 7 | The Wild Bride and Bridegroom | |
| 15. | Shadowing: Canto Hondo, the Deep Song | 456 |
| 16. | The Wolf's Eyelash | 462 |
| Afterword: Story as Medicine | 466 | |
| Addendum | 474 | |
| Notes | 479 | |
| Education of a Young Wolf: A Bibliography | 507 | |
| Acknowledgments | 514 | |
| Index | 519 |
