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

false love, or nourishing life from spoiled life—but she is also asking her to distinguish one medicine from another.
Like dreams, which can be understood on the objective level but still retain a subjective reality, these elements of food/medicines also have symbolic
guidance for us. Like Vasalisa, we have to sort out our psychic healing agents, to sort and sort and sort to understand that food for the psyche is also medicine
for the psyche, and to wring the truth, the essence, out of these elements for our own nourishment.
All these elements and tasks arc teaching Vasalisa about the Life/Death/Life nature, the give-and-take of caring for the wild nature. Sometimes, in order to
bring a woman closer to this nature, I ask her to keep a garden. Let this be a psychic one or one with mud, dirt, green, and all the things that surround and help
and assail. Let it represent the wild psyche. The garden is a concrete connection to life and death. You could even say there is a religion of garden, for it
teaches profound psychological and spiritual lessons. Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche—too much water, too little water,
infestations, heat, storm, flood, invasion, miracles, dying back, coming back, boon, healing, blossoming, bounty, beauty.
During the life of the garden, women keep a diary, recording the signs of life-giving and life-taking. Each entry cooks up a psychic soup. In the garden we
practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, moisten it, support it,
harvest.
The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for
dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature.
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. We have the ability to infuse energy and strengthen life, and to stand out of the
way of what dies.
The Seventh Task—Asking the Mysteries
Afrer the successful completion of her tasks, Vasalisa asks the Yaga some good questions. The tasks of this time are these:
Questioning and trying to learn more about the Life/Death/Life nature and how it functions (Vasalisa asks about the horsemen).
Learning the truth about being able to understand all the elements of the wild nature (“to know too much can make one old too
soon).
Wc all begin with the question “What am I, really? What is my work here?’ The Yaga teaches us that we are Life/Death/Life,
that this is our cycle, this is our special insight into the deep feminine. When I was a child one of my aunts told me our family’s
legend of ‘The Watery Women.” She said that at the edge of every lake there lived a young woman with old hands. Her first job
was to put 'tiiz'—what I can only describe to you as souls or “soul-fire”—into dozens of beautiful porcelain ducks. Her second job was to
wind the wooden keys in the ducks’ backs. When the winding-keys ran out, and the ducks fell over, their bodies shattered, she was to flap her apron at
the souls as they were released and shoo them up into the dry. Her fourth job was to put tiiz into more beautiful porcelain (kicks, wind their keys, and
release them to their lives....
The tiiz story is one of the clearest about exactly what it is the Life/Death/Life Mother does with her time. Psychically, Mother Nyx, Baba Yaga,
the Watery Women, La Que Sabe, and Wild Woman represent different pictures, different ages, moods, and aspects of the Wild Mother God. The
infusion of tiiz into our own ideas, our own lives, the lives of those we touch, that is our work. The shooing of the soul to its home, that is our work.
The releasing of a shower of sparks to fill the day, and creating a light so we can find our way through the night, that is our work.
Vasalisa asks about the men on horseback she has seen while finding her way to Baba Yaga’s hut; the white man on the white
horse, the red man on the red horse, the black man on the black horse The Yaga, like Demeter, is an old horse-mother Goddess, as
vitiated with the power of the mare, and fecundity as well. Baba Yaga's hut is a stable for the many colored horses and their riders.
These pairs pull the sun up and across the sky by day, and pull the cover of darkness over the sky at night. But there is more.
The Mack, red, and white horsemen symbolize the ancient colors connoting birth, life, and death. These colors also represent old ideas of descent, death,
and rebirth—the black for dissolving of one's old values, the red for the sacrifice of one’s preciously held illusions, and the white as the new light, the new
knowing that comes from having experienced the first two.
The old words used in medieval times are nigredo, black; rubedo, red; albedo, white. These describe an alchemy 24 which follows the circuit of the
Wild Woman, the work of the Life/ Death/Life Mother. Without the symbols of daybreak, rising light, and mysterious dark, she would not be who she is.