Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I have heard all the excuses that any woman might knit up: I’m not talented. I’m not important. I’m not educated. I have no ideas. I don’t know how. I don’t know what. I don’t know when. And the most scurrilous of all: I don’t have time. I always want to shake them upside down until they repent and promise to never tell falsehoods again. But I don’t have to shake them up, for the dark man in dreams will do that, and if not he, then another dream actor will.

And so it is common for women to kill off their entirely original, creative, soulful, and wildish natures in response to threats from the predator. That is why the women lie as skeletons and cadavers in Bluebeard’s cellar. They learnt of the trap, but too late.

The cure for both the naive woman and the instinct-injured woman is the same: Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth. They have been covered over, perhaps by years and years of ashes and excrement. This is not the end of the world, for these can be washed away. With some chipping and scraping and practice, your perceptive powers can be brought back to their pristine state again.

That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

the doll represents la vidacita, the little instinctual life force that is both fierce and enduring.

The doll is the symbolic homunculi, little life.8 It is the symbol of what lies buried in humans that is numinous.

Rather than defining intuition as some unreasoned faulty quirk, it is defined as truly the soul-voice speaking. Intuition senses the directions to go in for most benefit. It is self-preserving, has a grasp of underlying motive and intention, and it chooses what will cause the least amount of fragmenting in the psyche.

What does one feed intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environs? One feeds it life—one feeds it life by listening to it.

Respect in the face of great power is a crucial lesson. A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.

To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.

To wash something is a timeless purification ritual. It not only means to purify, it also means—like baptism from the Latin baptiza—to drench, to permeate with a spiritual numen and mystery. In the tale the washing is the first task. It means to make taut again that which has become slackened from the wearing. The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time. The renewal, the revivifying, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.

A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered. She accomplishes such by keeping a clear head, keeping a clear place for her work, working at completing her ideas and projects.18

For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints, tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. For many, psychoanalysis, contemplation, mediation, the taking of solitude, and other experiences of descent and transformation provide this special time and place for the work. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way.

So, it is the cooking up of new and completely original things, of new directions,

of commitments to one’s art and work that continuously nourishes the wild soul.

In the development of women, all these motions of “home-keeping,” the cooking, the washing, the sweeping, quantify something beyond the ordinary. All these metaphors offer ways to think about, to measure, feed, nourish, straighten, cleanse, order the soul-life.

Through this meditation, we acknowledge that the Life/Death/ Life cycle is a natural one. Both life-giving and death-dealing natures are waiting to be befriended, forever loved. In this process, we become like the cyclical wild.

So this letting live, letting die, is very important. It is the basic and natural rhythm which women are meant to understand ... and live. Grasping this rhythm lessens fear, for we anticipate the future, and the ground swells and the emptyings out it will hold.

She has become aware of her own shadowy and inhibitory stepmother and stepsisters and the destruction they mean to do to her.

Each woman who retrieves her intuition and Yaga-like powers reaches a point where she is tempted to throw them away, for what is the use of seeing and knowing all these things? This skull-light is not forgiving. In its light, the old are elderly; the beautiful, lush; the silly, foolish; the drunk are drunken; the unfaithful are infidels; things which are incredible are noted as miracles. Skull-light sees what it sees; it is an eternal light, and right out front, shining ahead of a woman, like a presence which goes a little bit before her and reports back to her what it has found ahead. It is her perpetual reconnaissance.

It is true, I will not lie to you; it is easier to throw away the light and go back to sleep. It is true, it is hard to hold the skull-light out before us sometimes. For with it, we clearly see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between. Yet,

with this light the miracles of deep beauty in the world and in humans come to consciousness. With this penetrating light one can see past the bad action to the good heart, one can espy the sweet spirit crushed beneath hatred, one can understand much instead of being perplexed only. This light can differentiate layers of personality, intention, and motives in others. It can determine consciousness and unconsciousness in self and others. It is the wand of knowing. It is the mirror in which all things are sensed and seen. It is the deep wild nature.

A better sort of lover is one finely wrought of strong psychic muscle and tender flesh. For Wild Woman it also helps if the lover is just a little bit “psychic” too, a person who can “see into” her heart.

When the wildish woman has an idea, the friend or lover will never say “Well, I don’t know ... sounds really dumb [grandiose, undoable, expensive, etc.] to me.” A right friend will never say that. They might say instead ... “I don’t know if I understand. Tell me how you see it. Tell me how it will work.”

One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.

It is not necessarily what we want, but it is interesting, and the longer we gaze at it, the more compelling it becomes.

instead of looking over whatever happens to be on display, we say to ourselves, “What am I hungry for?” Without looking at anything outwardly, we venture inward, and ask, “What do I long for? What do I wish for now?” Alternate phrases are “What do I crave? What do I desire? For what do I yearn?” And the answer usually arrives rapidly: “Oh, I think I want ... you know what would be really good, is some this or that ... ah yes, that’s what I really want.”

one of the most difficult things to learn, for it takes spirit, will, and soulfulness and it often means holding out for what one wants.

A lover cannot be chosen à la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving.

There is very little right/wrong or good/bad in this world. There is, however, useful and not useful. There are also things that are sometimes destructive, as well as things which are engendering.

But as you well know, a garden has to be turned in the fall in order to prepare it for the spring. It cannot bloom all the time.

The Wild Woman is the one who dares, who creates, and who destroys. She is the primitive and inventing soul that makes all creative acts and arts possible. She creates a forest around us and we begin to deal with life from that fresh and original perspective.

letting live what can live, and letting die what must die, is by far the more strenuous, yet so satisfying aim.

The Life/Death/Life Goddess is always also a creator Goddess.

In mythos, as in life, there is no doubt that

Babylonian mythos, the cedar-thighed Inanna calls to her lover, The Bull Plow, “Come cover me with your wildness.” In modern times, even now in the upper Midwest, the Mother and Father of God are still said to roll about in their spring bed, making thunder.

Put your sticks together in bundles of twos and threes. Now, break these bundles in half.” No one can break the sticks when there are two or more in a bundle. The old man smiles. “We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we are with others, we cannot be broken.”

We name these dual temperaments in ourselves in order to marry—ego to spirit. This naming and marrying is called, in human words, self-love. When it occurs between two individual persons, it is called loving another.

Appetites are often charming little forajidos, robbers, dedicated to the theft of time and libido. Yours. Jung remarked that some control must be placed on human appetite. Otherwise, as you can see, one will stop for every bone-hock in the road, every pie on a log.

The momentum of deep work is similar to sexual arousal in that it begins from ground zero, accelerates in plateaus, becomes sustained and intense. If the plateaus are interrupted harshly (imagine a loud and unexpected noise), one must begin all over again.

However, too much or even a little bit of a good thing at the wrong time can cause a gross loss of consciousness.

and although his gut is satisfied, the soul’s work is not.

What is your soul work?

Sometimes it is hard to remind ourselves that we are holding out for the excitement of the light.

She does this by teaching her mate to ask her two deceptively simple questions that will cause her to feel seen, heard, and known. The first question is this: “What do you want?” Almost everyone asks some version of this, just as a matter of course. But there is yet one more essential question, and that is: “What does your deeper self desire?”

The most valued lover, the most valuable parent, the most valued friend, the most valuable “wilderman,” is the one who wishes to learn. Those who are not delighted by learning, those who cannot be enticed into new ideas or experiences,

For instance, some stories from the circumpolar regions describe love as a union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul-world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death.

love does not mean a flirtation or a pursuit for simple ego-pleasure, but a visible bond composed

of the psychic sinew of endurance, a union which prevails through bounty and austerity, through the most complicated and most simple days and nights. The union of two beings is seen as angakok magic in itself, as a relationship through which “the powers that be” become known to both individuals.

It is Skeleton Woman who demonstrates that a shared living together through all increase and decrease, through all endings and beginnings, is what creates an unparalleled devotional love.

death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.