All will be aright. Her husband came home the very next morning and he strode into the castle calling for his wife. How was it while I was away? I lost it Yes, I lost it. I was out riding and the key ring fell down and I must have lost a key. Tell me what you did with that key!
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. 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.
She knelt to pray, but instead called out to her sisters. Do you see our brothers coming? We see them! Our brothers are here and they have just entered the castle. 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.
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. He is a specific and incontrovertible 3 force which must be memorized and restrained. To restrain the natural predator 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 truths 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
At the beginning of our lives our feminine viewpoint is very naive, meaning that emotional understanding of the covert is very faint. 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. 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. 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. This acquiescence to marrying the monster is actually decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. In the tale, even the mother colludes. 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.
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. No way! This is bad for the mind and bad for the body. We refuse to continue. Whatever dilemma 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. 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.
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.
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. He prompts the woman to feel a false sense of freedom. 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 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. Without this knowing, the woman is without proper protection. By choosing to open the door to the ghastly secret room, she chooses life.
They again have the proper impulse toward consciousness. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring.
It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her most fundamental powers: differentiation and determination. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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! Over the years. 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.
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. 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. 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.
The young wife stares at the blood on the key. A whimper rises within her. 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. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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The stories in it really resonate with me. I had stopped reading it for a couple of months after finishing a story when I had a breakdown about my life. The Ugly Duckling is also one of my favorite stories in this book. The way the author takes the symbols and decodes the meaning and themes of these stories is amazing. As adults, they mean so much more. This is the book I return to for wisdom and guidance, that I quote to explain life lessons to friends and grandchildren, that I understand better and differently whatever age I am when I reread it, starting at 38 up til now when I am Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst, and storyteller with a tradition of women storytellers on both sides of her family, tells the original versions of fairy tales and folk tales from around the world and then meticulously, exquisitely exposes the deep hidden archetypal meaning hiding within.
I buy spare copies whenever I find them to have on hand to give out whenever I find a receptive soul.
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