Nina Lois Turtledove

The Handless Maiden

“The poor ego is always looking for the easy way out.”

From Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Runs with the Wolves:

In mythos, the teaching of endurance is one of the great rites of the Great Wild Mother, the Wild Woman archetype. It is her timeless ritual to make her offspring strong. It is she who toughens us up, makes us potent and enduring, and where does this learning take place? La Selva Subterrenea, the underground forest, the underworld of feminine knowing. It is a wild world that lives under this one, under the world perceived by the ego. While there, we are infused with instinctive language and knowledge. From that vantage point we understand what can not be so easily understood from the point of view of the topside world

The first part of the story “the Handless Maiden” evokes much reflection and discussion on my part. It deals with the poor bargain that is made with the Devil during a period of slumber of the soul.

The story begins with a miller who is out of work, with nothing left but his millstone and a flowering apple tree behind his mill. He sets out into the forest to chop some wood. A man appears from behind a tree, and says, “There is no need to torture yourself by cleaving wood. I shall dress you in riches in you will but give me what stands behind your mill.” The miller, not knowing that his daughter was back there sweeping, agrees, and is devastated when he learns that it is the Devil and that he has lost his daughter to him in a poor, poor bargain.

Estes speaks of a time in a little girl’s life around age 11, that is a period of “endarkenment.” I looked back to that time in my life, and saw for myself what occurred and how bits of my soul were still traded in very ill-made bargains, and how my parents participated. I, as others do, must spot where we have lost little bits of our soul, and the connections there-to. We sell ourselves out. we take shortcuts to win affections, feel whole. We lose connection to the depth of belonging of our souls.

Here is the deal with the Devil– that which “needs, wants, and sucks up the light.” The ego, always looking for a short-cut, and is influenced by dualistic forces that ask us to rationalize, discriminate, and dominate. Like for the miller, for instead of chopping wood to feed our inner fire, our hearths go dark, ad lose connection to the sacred feminine. The feminine, wild and free, and the fruit of knowledge of the self, is traded away.

In this state there arise tendencies to want to look for a fix to the sadness from outside. Drugs, alcohol, relationships, whatever distractions and what one thinks they need, come up to plug the hole inside. Then one day, when we are waking up, we realize that those things just don’t solve anything that’s amiss. In the story, when the Devil comes to get the maiden, she has bathed, dressed in white, and has drawn a circle of chalk around her. The Devil can’t lay claim on her, and instructs her to not bathe. When she is filthy from un-washing, she still cries and cries, crying the dirt off of her hands. The Devil, infuriated, demands that her hands be chopped off. She continues to cry the dirt off of her arms, and the Devil, frustrated, leaves empty-handed. There is much to be said for the healing power of tears, but the point I found most profound, is that when one is setting oneself free, there can be simply nothing to hold on to.

The maiden then sets off to wander in the world, and is what followed in my life as well. In the years that follow, after the mists of endarkenment began to recede, we enter on course to recover the connection that we have lost. Here I am today, recovering the wild, fertile, flowering spirit and the Soul.

Mythology, Psychology, Reflection | 23.03.2006 13:50 | 3 Comments