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Skeleton Woman

Skeleton Woman

Skeleton Woman, the Inuit-rooted tale Estés lyricizes in Women Who Run With the Wolves, personifies the life-death-life archetype as it enters erotic relationship. “In much of western culture, the original character of the Death nature has been covered over by various dogmas and doctrines until it is split off from its other half, Life. We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of the wild nature” (Estés 2017). Skeleton Woman is the corrective image: “the archetypes of Death and Life… must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought.”

The fisherman in the tale hooks her bones from the sea, drags them home in terror, and finally, sleeping, lets her use his heart to flesh herself. Estés reads the heart, not the mind, as the alchemical organ: “this story says otherwise. It suggests that it is the heart that thinks and calls the molecules, atoms, feelings, yearnings, and whatever else need be, into one place to create the matter that fulfills Skeleton Woman’s creation” (Estés 2017). The descent into Skeleton Woman’s territory is “a descent into the feeling realm… it is meant to be drummed through, to bring to full life the Skeleton Woman, to come close to the one who has always been close to us.”

The structural parallel inside the Lineage is the alchemical coniunctio: the lover who can hold the death-face of the beloved is, in Estés’s reading, “twice-born” — and the work bears its proper mortificatio before the new life it incubates. Skeleton Woman is therefore La Loba’s erotic complement: La Loba sings the bones of the soul-self back to flesh; Skeleton Woman is the bone-self the lover must be willing to sing back to flesh in another.

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