El Duende

El duende, in Estés’s gloss, is “literally the goblin wind or force behind a person’s actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger” (Estés 2017, endnote). The term, drawn from flamenco and from the curandera lexicon, names “the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one’s own spirit.” The trance-teller “calls on el duende, the wind that blows soul into the faces of listeners.” When duende is present, “one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art… When el duende is not present, one knows that too.”

Estés deploys duende as the operative principle of the cantadora’s craft: the teller becomes “psychically double-jointed through the meditative practice of story, that is, training oneself to undo certain psychic gates and ego apertures in order to let the voice speak, the voice that is older than the stones.” The figure is structurally parallel to the daimon of Plato’s Symposium — a power between the mortal and the divine that animates the work — and to the muses of Hesiod, who breathe song into the singer. It is the embodied, peninsular form of what later traditions named inspiratio. El duende is to the cantadora what active-imagination is to the analytical patient: the practiced opening through which the autonomous psyche speaks.

Relationships

• cantadora-tradition
• daimon
• muses
• active-imagination
• clarissa-pinkola-estes

Primary sources

• estes-women-who-run-with-wolves (Estés 2017, “Singing Over the Bones” and Endnotes)