La Loba

La Loba — the Wolf Woman, also called La Huesera (the Bone Woman), La Trapera (the Gatherer), and La Que Sabe (The One Who Knows) — is the central personification of the wild-woman archetype in the work of Estés. She is “an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in their souls but few have ever seen” (Estés 2017). Her sole work is the collection of bones, “and especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world.” When she has assembled an entire skeleton — “her specialty is wolves” — she sings over it until the bones flesh, breathe, leap up, run into the canyon, and somewhere in their running become a laughing woman.

The bones, in this symbolic lexicon, are “the indestructible force… in myth and story, they represent the indestructible soul-spirit” (Estés 2017). To sing over them is to use “the soul-voice… to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration.” La Loba is therefore neither Great Mother nor Devouring Mother but, in Estés’s own phrasing, “the feeder root to an entire instinctual system.” She is the operation by which the dead and dismembered psychic material of women’s lives is re-fleshed.

Estés folds La Loba into Jung’s image of the “two-million-year-old woman” — the archaic stratum of the psyche — and explicitly identifies the locus where she is met as the place “Jung called variously the collective-unconscious, the objective psyche, and the psychoid unconscious” (Estés 2017). La Loba is the feminine, embodied, cantadora-known face of that stratum.

Relationships

• wild-woman
• life-death-life
• skeleton-woman
• neumann-great-mother
• collective-unconscious
• clarissa-pinkola-estes

Primary sources

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