Río Abajo Río

“The river beneath the river.” Estés’s image for the imaginal ground — the altered-consciousness layer of the psyche in which the wild-woman is accessed. “Each woman has potential access to Río Abajo Río, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts” (Estés 2017).

The image is Estés’s bilingual rendering of what the tradition has named in other idioms: the mundus-imaginalis in Corbin, active-imagination in Jung, the imaginal underworld in Hillman. The Spanish doubling — río abajo río, river under river — is not ornament; it names the way the imaginal is reached by doubling the literal, by letting the surface word fall away into its echo.

The ineffable character of this world is marked in Estés’s prose: “much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them” (Estés 2017).

Relationships

• active-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis
• wild-woman
• creative-imagination

Primary sources

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