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

She tries to disregard the condition of the animus. So she throws a little workshop to it here and
drops a little reading time for it there. But in the end, this has no substance. The woman is kidding
no one but herself.
So when this river dies, it is without its flow, without its life force. The Hindus say that
without Shakti, the personified feminine life force, Shiva, who encompasses the ability to act,
becomes a corpse. She is the life energy that animates the male principle, and the male principle
in turn animates action in the world. 11
So we see that the river must be reasonably balanced between its pollutions and its cleansings,
or else all comes to nothing. But in order to cany on in this manner, the immediate environ must be
nutritive and accessible. In matters of survival it is an incontrovertible fact that the less available
the essentials—food and water, safety and shelter—the fewer the options. And the fewer the
options, the less creative life, for creativity thrives on the many, on the endless combinations of all
things.
The destructive hidalgo in the tale is a deep but immediately recognizable part of a wounded
woman. He is her animus, who causes her to struggle, not with creating—often she cannot even get
to that point—but rather with her gaining a clear permission, a solid inner support system to create
at will. A healthy animus is meant to involve himself with the work of the river, and this is as it
should be. Well integrated, he is the helper, watching to see if anything need be done. But in the
La Uorona story, the animus is one-sided; he takes over, prevents vital new life, and insists on
dominating the life of the psyche. When a malignant animus gains such power, a woman may
denigrate her own work, or else, at the other extreme, attempt to fake real work. When any of these
take place, a woman has fewer and fewer creative options. The animus gains power to push the
woman around, denigrates her work, thereby inauthenticating it in one way or another. He does
this by ruining the river.
Let us look first at the parameters of the animus in general, then we can proceed to
understanding how a woman’s creative life deteriorates when there is negative animus influence,
and what she can and must do about it. Creativity is meant to be an act of clear consciousness. Its
actions reflect the clarity of the river. The animus, that which funds outer action, is the man on the
river. He is the steward. He is caregiver and protector of the water.
The Man on the River
Before we can understand what the man in the La Uorona story has done by polluting the river,
we have to see how what he represents is meant to be a positive construct in a woman’s psyche.
By classical Jungian definition, animus is the soul-force in