Within the depth-psychology corpus, Vasalisa — the eponymous heroine of the old Russian tale known variously as 'Vasalisa the Beautiful' and 'Wassilissa the Wise' — functions primarily as the central figure of a woman's initiatory mythology, receiving sustained analysis almost exclusively in Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run With the Wolves. Estés treats the tale as a psychic map of uncommon precision, tracing the heroine's passage from an over-adapted, too-sweet persona through a descent into the domain of the Wild Mother (Baba Yaga) and back, now carrying the fire of discriminating consciousness. The story's psychological architecture is read as a sequence of initiatory tasks: dissolving the internalized 'good mother,' confronting the negative shadow (the stepfamily complex), performing labor in the underworld of instinct, and finally integrating the fiery skull — a symbol of ancestral intuition and discriminating perception — as a permanent psychic endowment. Estés situates the tale within a pre-classical lineage reaching back to horse-Goddess cults, locating its deeper grammar in the Life/Death/Life nature. The doll bequeathed by the dying mother operates as the most concentrated symbol in the analysis: the inner instinctual voice, the soul-guide that precedes and survives ego-collapse. Vasalisa thus embodies the archetype of the woman who recovers wild knowing through ordeal, emerging not as the sweet child she was, but as a woman whose power precedes her.
In the library
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the old Russian tale 'Vasalisa' is a woman's initiation story with few essential bones astray. It is about the realization that most things are not as they seem... It is about infusing human women with Wild Woman's primary instinctual power, intuition.
Estés identifies the Vasalisa tale as a structurally near-complete initiation narrative whose central function is the transmission of wild, instinctual power — specifically intuition — to human women.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Vasalisa, who used to be a blueberry-eyed sweet-muffin, is now a woman walking with her power preceding her. A fiery light emanates from the eyes, ears and nose, and mouth of the skull.
Estés reads the fiery skull as the emblem of Vasalisa's completed initiation — the transformation from compliant persona into a woman whose discriminating, ancestral intuition now leads her through the world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The doll represents the inner spirit of us as women; the voice of inner reason, inner knowing, and inner consciousness... There is no greater blessing a mother can give her daughter than a reliable sense of the veracity of her own intuition.
Estés argues that the doll in the Vasalisa tale symbolizes the irreducible inner guide — the transmitted maternal blessing of instinctual self-knowledge — that navigates the heroine through the underworld.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Through these chores, Baba Yaga teaches, and Vasalisa learns not to cringe away from the big, the mighty, the cyclical, the unforeseen, the unexpected, the vast and grand scale which is the size of Nature.
Estés reads Vasalisa's labor for Baba Yaga as psychic apprenticeship to the Life/Death/Life nature, conditioning the heroine to sustain encounter with the full amplitude of wild instinctual reality.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Vasalisa began with what we might call a flattened-out mundane personality... Baba Yaga lives in a house squatting on chicken legs... the Yaga's house is of the instinctual world and that Vasalisa needs more of this element in her personality.
Estés uses the symbol of Baba Yaga's dancing house to diagnose Vasalisa's pre-initiatory psychological flatness and to identify the instinctual vitality she lacks and must acquire.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
women who are raised in families that are not accepting of their gifts often set off on tremendously big quests — over and over, and they do not know why... The stepfamily ganglia of course belongs to us by whichever means we received it.
Estés maps the stepfamily complex in the Vasalisa tale onto real developmental wounding, showing how its internalized nay-saying function drives compulsive questing in women seeking validation.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
loosening our hold on the glowing archetype of the ever-sweet and too-good mother of the psyche is the first step. We are off the teat and learning to hunt. There is a wild mother waiting to teach us.
Estés frames Vasalisa's first initiatory task as the psychological weaning from the over-positive maternal imago, a necessary precondition for the turn toward the wild instinctual mother.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Vasalisa advanced closer and closer to home. And as the stepmother and the stepsisters saw it was her, they ran to her... they had been without fire since she'd left, and no matter how hard they had tried to start one.
Estés's narrative rendition depicts the return of Vasalisa bearing the Yaga's skull-fire as the moment when the initiated woman's newly acquired power is confirmed by the destruction of the excluding shadow complex.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Vasalisa consulted her doll and asked, 'Is this the house we seek?' and the doll, in its own way, answered, 'Yes, this is what you seek.' And before she could take another step, Baba Yaga in her cauldron descended on Vasalisa.
Estés stages the doll's confirmatory guidance at the threshold of Baba Yaga's domain as the key moment when inner instinctual knowing overrides fear and directs the heroine into the transformative encounter.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
By washing the Yaga's clothes, the initiate herself will see how the seams of persona are sewn, what patterns the gowns take. Soon she herself will have some measure of these personae to place in her closet.
Estés interprets Vasalisa's task of laundering Baba Yaga's garments as an initiatory lesson in the structure of authoritative persona — learning the pattern of wild feminine power from the inside.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
If men are going to ever learn to stand it, then without a doubt women have to learn to stand it... the dream-making function of the psyche carries the Yaga and all her cohorts right into women's bedrooms at night through the dreamtime.
Estés argues that the Wild Woman archetype encountered by Vasalisa in the tale reaches contemporary women through compensatory dream life, pressing them toward an initiation they may be avoiding.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The Yaga is not repelled by the fact of the blessing, but is rather put off by the fact that the blessing is from the too-good mother; the nice, the sweet, the darling of the psyche.
Estés reads the Yaga's aversion to the 'too-good mother' blessing as marking the structural incompatibility between sweet conformity and the wild underworld that Vasalisa must navigate.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
Red is the color of sacrifice, of rage, of murder, of being tormented and killed. Yet red is also the color of vibrant life, dynamic emotion, arousal, eros, and desire.
Estés elaborates the symbolic register of the three horsemen in the Vasalisa tale — their colors encoding the triple movement of dawn, day, and night that governs Baba Yaga's domain.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside