Cantadora Tradition

The cantadora is, in Estés’s usage, the keeper of the old stories — heir to the mesemondók, the old Hungarian women who told “while sitting on wooden chairs with their plastic pocketbooks on their laps,” and the cuentistas, “old Latina women who stand, robust of breast, hips wide, and cry out the story ranchera style” (Estés 2017). The cantadora is positioned by Estés as the elder pole of a doubled training: alongside her Zurich-trained Jungian amplification, she insists, “I come to stories as a cantadora, keeper of the old stories… For us, story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.”

The tradition makes a precise methodological claim: the operative unit of psychological work is not the interpreted text but the spoken tale. “Story is far older than the art and science of psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes” (Estés 2017). The cantadora practices “passionate trance state, wherein the teller ‘senses’ the audience… and then enters a state in the ‘world between worlds,’ where a story is ‘attracted’ to the trance-teller and told through her” — calling on el-duende, “the wind that blows soul into the faces of listeners.”

This is an extension of amplification-as-comparative-mythology into the oral, embodied, performative register the textual school had set aside. It places Estés in continuity with Homeric oral performance and the mimetic substrate Havelock reconstructed for archaic Greek thought.

Relationships

Primary sources

estes-women-who-run-with-wolves (Estés 2017)