Life/Death/Life Nature

Estés’s name for the archetypal rhythm of the feminine psyche — the cycle in which creation, dissolution, and re-creation repeat at every scale of a woman’s life. “Energy, feeling, closeness, solitude, desire, ennui, all rise and fall in relatively closely packed cycles. One’s desire for nearness, and for separations, waxes and wanes. The Life/Death/Life nature not only teaches us to dance these, but teaches that the solution for malaise is always the opposite; so new action is the cure for boredom, closeness is the cure for loneliness, solitude is the cure for feeling cramped” (Estés 2017).

The concept is developed through two tales: “Skeleton Woman,” in which the Inuit figure Sedna, reduced to bones and long hair at the bottom of the sea, is the governess of “the intuitive and emotive abilities to complete the life cycles of birthings and endings, grievings and celebrations” (Estés 2017); and “Sealskin, Soulskin,” in which the selkie whose pelt is lost dries out and fades — “first a fog, then a vapor, and finally a wisp of her former wildish self” (Estés 2017) — until she returns to the pelt and the cycle is restored.

The rhythm is the feminine counterpart to the alchemical solve-et-coagula — dissolution and coagulation as the pulse of transformation. It names what the modern woman forgets when she tries “to outrun the death aspect of the Life/Death/Life” (Estés 2017).

Relationships

• solve-et-coagula
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• wild-woman
• katabasis

Primary sources

• estes-women-who-run-with-wolves (Estés 1992)