Triple Goddess as Instinctual Substrate

Estés reads a wide cross-cultural cluster of female deities as remnants of “the old Goddess-centered religions of Europe across to Asia. During those times people worshipped a triple-headed Goddess. The triple-headed Goddesses are represented in various systems by Hekate, the Baba Yaga, Mother Holle, Berchta, Artemis, and others” (Estés 2017). In her gloss, the triple-Goddess “carried the female initiation traditions and taught women all the stages of a woman’s life, from maiden through mother through crone.” She extends the cluster across continents: “Mother of Days… Mother Nyx… Durga… Coatlicue… Hekate” — and in the Life/Death/Life chapter adds Hel, Ku’an Yin, the Banshee, La Llorona, and “the Greeks Graeae, the Gray Ladies.”

This cluster is not a comparative-religion catalogue but a structural claim. The named figures together compose what La Loba personifies in singular: the instinctual substrate of the feminine psyche, “older than the oceans… ageless.” Estés positions the cluster against the Devouring Mother reading of Neumann — for Estés the death-face is one of three, and the triple form holds it in cycle rather than in pathology. “Lady Death… in curanderisma… is said to turn the baby in the womb to the headfirst position so it can be born… to guide the hands of the midwife, to open the pathways of the mother’s milk in the breasts” (Estés 2017). The death-aspect is generative; the maiden-mother-crone cycle is the ground of life-death-life and the lateral surface of wild-woman across the world’s mythologies.

Sources

• clarissa-pinkola-estes: “the triple-headed Goddesses… carried the female initiation traditions and taught women all the stages of a woman’s life”
• erich-neumann (referenced as background): the Great Mother as elementary-and-transformative, with the negative pole as Devouring