The Devouring Mother; Tracking the Predator in the Female Psyche

I recently wrote a piece about the Predator in the psyche, using the myth of Bluebeard as a model. The question arose, what about the Predator in the female psyche? The part of us that colludes with patriarchy and attacks our sisters and friends? This piece is an exploration of that force, as I currently understand it.

Mapping the Predator in the psyche of women is just as important as recognizing it in the behavior patterns of men. As I wrote in the Bluebeard essay, we have blood on our hands.

The bearers of this archetypal projection of the Predator in women that immediately come to mind are Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and a few women I know who are married to Predators, colluding with their violence and even supplying them victims, to maintain the image of a perfect life that they project. These are women who fight and claw their way to the seats of power and make ritual offerings of innocents to the Predator to maintain their position. Pam Bondi ritually sacrifices young girls in the Epstein cover up. Kristi Noem sacrifices innocent women, children and men to immigration enforcement brutality. And the women I know, sacrifice their own creativity, their children, their sexuality, their emotional lives, to the tyrant in their homes, becoming tyrants themselves.

This collusion with the Predator still centers the male psyche though. What is the part of women’s psyches that causes this sychophantic parastism with the Predator in men and in systems of power? And how can it evolve in its own darkness, without centering masculine pathology?

(I am painfully aware that I am reducing humans to an unnatural gender binary through this exploration. Because my own psyche feels polarized along gender lines, this is what I have to work with. I realize this is not the experience of all or even most humans, and I encourage each of us to explore these energies based on the wild, fertile, diverse gender energies that thrive in our own systems.)

The archetype that seems to drive the female mind toward destruction, in my experience, is the Devouring Mother. Like our Bluebeard exploration, let’s give ourselves a myth to root down into as we explore this energy.

In our myths and faery tales, the Devouring Mother is often portrayed as the evil step mother. This is right and good because it is almost unbearable to admit to ourselves when our own mother is the carrier of this archetypal energy. It is much less threatening to the tender vulnerabilities of the psyche to see this energy expressed only in someone else’s mother.

It also stands to reason that the Devouring Mother awakens within the psyche of the step-mother because she is in competition with the children of another woman for her husband’s affection. Competetion and the ravenous desire for the male gaze, along with the halo effect of feeding off male power and prestige (and living off their wealth), are also at the root of this archetypal emergence and shadow-possession.

A myth that teaches us about the Devouring Mother, also written about by Dr. Estes in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, is Vasalisa the Beautiful. Vasalisa’s mother dies when she is only eight, and leaves her a magical doll as her inheritence. The doll, with a little offering of food and libation, is able to come alive to guide and support Vasalisa through the trials of her life.

Vasalisa’s trials really begin when her father remarries a cold and vengeful woman. Very much like the step-mother in the well known myth of Cinderella, Vasalisa’s daily life becomes an endless toiling and drudgery under the tyrannical reign of her step-mother. Luckily, the magical doll is able to accomplish all of the tasks laid upon Vasalisa with ease, as well as teaching her the best ways to keep the peace in her troubled home.

Vasalisa must parent herself in this hostile environment, after the loss of the good and loving mother. Sometimes this loss is experienced with the birth of a younger sibling, or when the “terrible two’s” evoke a different face of our Good Mother. It is not always a physical death of the Good Mother, but a metaphorical death of the Good Mother as circumstances of life change, and the Devouring Mother emerges suddenly and catastrophically.

However the loss of the Good Mother occurs, the abandoned child must find a source of maternal energy either outside herself in a Granny or Auntie or Teacher, or within herself if she has any hope of survival. In the case of Vasalisa, her magic doll (her poppet?) carries a spark of life and consciousness that serves as her internal parent. The doll carries the projection of nurturer, protector, provider and guide. The non-negotiable needs of the developing child. This typically evolves as a persona that the abandoned child develops as much more mature and “street smart” or capable than she actually is. It is a defense and a protector, but it covers a terrible vulnerability within the psyche. This vulnerability is like catnip for the Devouring Mother-who desires to destroy all innocence, gentleness, beauty and goodness, which she imagines are unfair competition for the absence of these things in herself.

When our heroine comes of age, after a decade or more of suffering under the cruelty and punishment of the step-mother, the sweet poppet is not quite enough to sustain Vasalisa through the initation into womanhood. The projected persona of competence and maturity must be tested against the Devouring Mother in Vasalisa’s own psyche , which has been powerfully awakened by her step-mother. This testing is symbolized by a meeting with the Baba Yaga, the cannabalistic witch grandmother in the wild forest. The Predator.

One of the key features of the Devouring Mother that we see through the Vasalisa story (and also in Cinderella) is that she has very little direct power. She is snide, cruel and punishing, but her most devious acts of sabotage and attempted murder come through cunning manipulation. She never actually takes a knife to Vasalisa’s throat. It is very important to the Devouring Mother that she maintain her reputation, and she is careful to manage her most hideous impulses under a veneer of cold contrivance. In Vasalisa’s story, the step-mother sends her deep into the forest to borrow fire from the hearth of Baba Yaga, sure she will be devoured.

As a nurse, this archetype is very familiar to me through the old adage that nurses “eat their young.” This is true in many fields and professions, sororities and fraternities, military training, and any place where the individual identity is tested and molded to conform to a group psyche. There is a devouring of the individual to feed the collective. In wise socieities this can be a skillful rite of passage, where the gifts of the individual are identified, honed, and offered back into the community in service. This can be part of the healthy maturation of the psyche, when well guided and held in a sacred container. Too often, it becomes a vehicle for the Predator in the psyche to emerge. Hazing turns into sexual assault. Initation turns into alcohol poisoning. “Eating our young,” turns into medication errors and poor patient outcomes. When these psychological forces are not skillfully managed, the Predator, the Devourer, the Killing Force of the psyche, emerges.

There is some question as to whether Baba Yaga may have been the evil step-mother’s true form all along, but that is left to the Mysteries.

As Vasalisa stumbles through the deep dark forest, she is guided by three knights on horseback. One white, one red, and one black. These are the ancient colors of the Goddess in her three phases of Maiden (white), Mother (red) and Crone (black). The masculine energies of the psyche are wedded to the feminine. Our heroine is finding her way through her initiation with the help of not only her magical poppet, but the mysterious and ancient Divine Feminine force that exists within all of us, and the active masculine energies of the psyche that are in Her service. This is reminiscent of Bluebeard’s wife calling out to her brothers for help. The masculine powers of the psyche, and in the world, must be activated in service of the rising feminine power.

The key phrase that Vasalisa utters in the hut of Baba Yaga, when pressed about how she accomplishes so many impossible tasks in the service of the witch is: “The blessing of my dead mother helps me.” With that Baba Yaga roars, “Get thee out of my house this moment! I want no one who bears a blessing to cross my threshold! Get thee gone!” As Vasalisa runs from the hut, Baba Yaga throws a skull with blazing embers for eyes after her, and implores her to take it home to her step-mother and step-sister.

When Vasalisa returns from her trials with the Witch, she finds her step-mother’s cottage cold and dark. No fire would stay lit within the place the whole time she was gone. The Devouring Mother cannot produce light of her own, and she lives off the light and glow of the innocent and good all around her. The fire in the eyes of the skull Vasalisa brings home flares up into a conflagration, and butns alive the step-mother and step-sisters, liberating Vasalisa from their tyranny forevermore.

The power to encounter the full strength of the Devouring Mother comes from Vasalisa’s devoted care and nourishment of the blessing she carries from the Good Mother. The poppet is our symbol for this psychological process in the myth, but in waking life it looks like feeding and protecting a source of blessing, hope, faith and love within ourselves even after the trials of life begin to strip us of our innocence.

Within the hut of Baba Yaga, Vasalisa cultivates the mature feminine psyche that has endured the initation of the Devouring Mother, and survived. The Death Mother, the gaping maw of Darkness, has been encountered in its full brutality, negotiated with, fed and honored, and finally integrated. This is how Vasalisa earns the Fire of Soul to take back to her people. The same Fire of Soul that burns away the forces of darkness, and reveals our true gifts to the world.

Vasalisa, orphaned again, is taken in by a kind old woman who sees Vasalisa’s beauty and incredible skill as a weaver. Through her clarity of vision, and love of Vasalisa, her beautiful woven linen is presented to the ruler of the land, who falls in love with Vasalisa and they live happily ever after. The masculine protector and active force of the psyche is wedded to the feminine skill and well-earned mastery of crafting a life-learned by confronting the Death Mother, in her three faces. First the death of the Good Mother, then the integration of the Devouring Mother within, and finally the death of the relationships that carry the Devouring Mother archetype in our lives. This is how a woman comes into her power, or becomes the Predator.

Vasalisa’s mother had faced this initation and was able to pass on the blessing of her skillful integration of the forces of Death as a blessing to her daughter. Vasalisa spent her most formative years under the loving guidance of the Good Mother. This was enough to create a strong foundation in the psyche (the blessing of her mother), and Vasalisa was ready for the trials of life when they came, as they always do. Her step-mother may have never had a Good Mother. She may have only ever had a Devouring Mother archetype to teach her how to live off the light and goodness of others (or to syphon their power even if there is no goodness involved), rather than develop any positive skills of her own. Or perhaps she had a Good Mother, but did not have the inherent psychological strength to skillfully confront the archetype of the Devouring Mother that emerged as she competed with sisters and peers, and her own mother, for power and attention in the home and community.

Just as we must hunt the Predator in men, and learn to sniff him out in our relationships, board rooms, city councils, etc. we must also sniff out the Devouring Mother in ourselves and all around us. Who are the women that are making willing sacrifices of innocence, creativity, beauty, in order to gain or maintain power and prestige? Who are the women who degrade, criticize, defame, undermine and sabotage other women? Who are the women that turn a blind eye to abuse, assault, open misogyny, brutality, to live inside a system of power that benefits from their collusion? And that they benefit from? Who are the women who are actively abusing, assaulting and brutalizing others? These women are in the grip of the Devouring Mother, and they should never have power. Not ever. Just like our brothers in the grip of the Predator.

We are on a massive collective initation threshold as humans. These archetypes are being held for us collectively in the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and microcosmically in every community on Earth. Will we face this initation with open hearts, clear eyes, and the blessings of Our Mother, and root out the systems of power that feed and elevate the Predators? Or will we continue to feed our children, our creativity, our sensuality and our goodness as ritual sacrifices to their endless hunger?