Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Bluebeard




I completed my fourth egg tempera painting today and this story of Bluebeard is a powerful one and scary too, but only if you let it scare you. I've known a a number of Bluebeards but thank goodness I know to run the other way now!


The Natural Predator of the Psyche

"Developing a relationship with the wildish nature is an essential part of women's individuation. In order to accomplish this, a woman must go into the dark, but at the same time she must not be irreparably trapped, captured, or killed on her way there or back.

The Bluebeard story is about that captor, the dark man who inhabits all women's psyches, the innate predator. He is a specific and inconvertible force which must be memorized and restrained. To restrain the natural predator of the psyche it is necessary for women to remain in possession of all their instinctual powers. Some of these are insight, intuition, endurance, tenacious loving, keen sensing, far vision, acute hearing, singing over the dead, intuitive healing, and tending to their own creative fires." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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