On the Cusp of a New Moon: Virgo and the Tale of the Red Shoes
The waning crescent moon, on its way to becoming a New Moon in Virgo, September 2026, taken from within the sacred “M” of the Wasatch mountains. On the right, the ever-changing (mutable) rock face of the mountain-cliff (earth).
A dear, dear friend invited me to re-read the “Red Shoes” portion of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves this week (thank you, Vive).
I love this book.
It is one of the first books I read that unlocked my experience of fairy tale, myth, and dream.
Reading it, something deep within recalled the scent of living wildness, long abandoned.
The Tale of the Red Shoes
And one of the stories in the book is The Red Shoes. To Dr. Estes’ telling, a young girl grows up so poor that she has no shoes—an image of psyche’s bareness and impoverishment—until she learns to make her own shoes out of red cloth.
Yes, she learns to make her own.
And she loves her handmade red cloth shoes with all her heart.
The tale unfolds as a tragedy. The girl is beguiled by a "terrible bargain,” a promise of material comfort in exchange for a “too-tame life.”
Her precious handmade shoes are taken from her and destroyed—burned in fire—by a wealthy benefactress promising her belonging. Without her own shoes, she chooses another pair of new red shoes: a store-bought, fancy so-called improvement of her own; made by a “crippled cobbler.”
The girl’s love for her own handmade shoes gets misplaced, obsessively, onto these fancy new red shoes.
Over the course of the tale, the consuming nature of that obsession, born out of disconnect from her innate wildness and capacity to make her own shoes (however “imperfectly”), leads to a tragic end.
The new shoes dance her relentlessly, and she cannot stop. (How often we say yes when our bodies ask us to say no.)
When she wants to dance to the left (the side of the archetypal feminine), the shoes-as-obsession force her to dance to the right (towards the pseudo-masculine).
And when she wants to dance the round (that sacred shape of the cyclic, the lunar, the feminine), the shoes-as-obsession force her to dance in a straight line (the only shape our culture seems capable of imagining of late).
In the tale, her loss of freedom is symbolized, eventually, by the loss of her feet.
Exhausted by the compulsive dancing that she can’t stop by will-power, she begs the town executioner to cut off her feet with his axe after he fails to cut off the shoes.
Her handmade red shoes, in their perceived imperfection, had been necessary for her experience of wholeness.
Where the Archetypal Virgin (Virgo) and the Red Shoes Meet
The story of The Red Shoes, as told by Dr. Estes, can be read as a tale of what happens when we bargain away our connection to our inner archetypal Virgin—our inner Virgo— in exchange for material “security.”
Translated into astrology-speak: it is a tale of exchanging our connection with our inner Virgo for Taurus-literalized (which is very different from Taurus’s living, nourishing, and ancient archetypal energies. Consider the Paleolithic image of the “Venus of Laussel.” So alive. So Taurean. A far-cry from Taurus as obsession with material security. )
Yet these counterfeit mimics of archetypal energies are all-too-familiar to my own experience…
Either way, we are reading a tale of earth-literalized, concretized, as if such literalizing could produce some product that will finally sate our soul’s hunger. So we are left mimicking soul’s hunger by way of urgent consuming.
And we can have so much empathy towards ourselves for why we are trapped in that loop of consuming. In the absence of the real, the soul-full, the resource-full, something in us got trapped in grasping for; our entire culture a food-desert from the perspective of soul.
How could there be anything but an abiding sense of lack? How could we possibly have stayed connected to the part of us that is capable of being complete in herself, our inner archetypal Virgin, our inner Virgo?
Little wonder Virgo seems like such an elusive archetype in so many astrological and mythic writings.
Here is the line from Dr. Estes that leapt out at me this time through the tale, offering clarity around an otherwise ambiguous archetype:
“The handmade shoes are marks of her rising out of a mean psychic existence into a passionate life of her own design. Her shoes represent an enormous and literal step toward integration of her resourceful feminine nature in day-to-day life.” (Estes, 220)
I cannot imagine a more concise description of relating to and with our inner Virgo.
I love the sense, in Dr. Estes’ quote (above), that Virgo is the “resourceful feminine” in each of us.
She is resource-full; so complete in herself that she needs no externals—not even a partner—to gestate new life within. This mystery is depicted clearly in her glyph, to my imagining.
Yes, Virgo can make her own shoes. She crafts her own Mercurial freedom to move about in this world, by shaping earth.
The fact is, exchanging our connection to our inner Virgo for “material security” is doomed to failure.
How could we possibly experience a sense of security without a living bridge to our inner archetypal Virgin?
The question becomes, then, how do we revive or rebuild that living bridge?
Four Keys to Reconnecting with Our Innate Wholeness
Let’s return to Dr. Estes’ quote, and imagine that she may be sharing secrets around the cultivation of our resource-full inner Virgo. Here is the quote again:
“Her shoes represent an enormous and literal step toward integration of her resourceful feminine nature in day-to-day life.”
My sense is that Dr. Estes is gifting us four keys to relating with our inner Virgo, to rebuilding the living bridge to the archetypal Virgin complete in herself, whose potentials live in each of us.
Virgo’s steps are literal. They happen in waking life.
Virgo’s steps lead toward inner integration; an experience of our innate wholeness.
Virgo’s nature is resource-full. She allows us to feel resourced as we face and interact with life in all its variety.
Virgo’s steps lead toward the integration of inner and outer. She represents the threshold between the inner “resourceful feminine” and outer “day-to-day life.”
Let’s take a look at each of these precious keys.
Key #1
Virgo’s steps are literal. Or perhaps we might say they are also-literal (as opposed to only-literal). Her steps are practices that require repetition and consistency in daily life.
Yes, they are also drenched with symbolism—in all its transformative power—but they must be enacted in waking life if we are to to tap into their integrating potentials.
These are the proverbial kitchen tasks or chores of fairy tales.
Neglecting them can lead to dire consequences.
Honoring them allows us to experience integration as we come to know parts of ourselves we have lost touch with.
And, since we are talking about a girl making her very own red cloth shoes, we sense the need within Virgo’s steps to make something, to risk creativity.
Key #2
Virgo’s steps lead toward integration. We know we are engaging Virgoan tasks from a helpful place when we touch into a sense of wholeness in their wake.
That sense wholeness may not last long at first—we might only dare to wear the gown at the ball for a brief time early in our practice of her steps—but we will sense our innate wholeness, however fleetingly at first, and its potential blossoming.
Consider Allerleirauh gradually finding the inner strength to wear the dress of the Moon, of the Sun, and then of the living Cosmos. She comes into a sense of her innate wholeness, symbolized by the nut in which she keeps the dresses.
Key #3
Virgo’s resource-fulness. When we touch into our inner Virgo, we have the capacity to re-source ourselves.
Having stepped into that place of resource, we can see with more soulful eyes, ones that allow wounding and difficulty to be metabolized, transformed, digested, made a part of our wholeness.
I’ll never forget one of my most difficult times, when my own Red Shoes obsessions seemed to be taking over my inner life, and intruding on my outer life, shortly after I had accomplished every goal of my growing up life.
Everything was going “perfectly” on the outside. I had made the terrible bargain. A wedding invitation took me to Vashon Island, off the Pacific coast of the US. I went for a run as my thoughts seemed to grow louder and louder to the point of cacophony.
I came around a bend, and saw a tree that was so beautiful that my thoughts went quiet for the first time in who knows how long.
Looking closer, I noticed that, near the top, there was a section of the trunk that had been wounded, likely for years.
Now, that apparent scarring was part of the beauty of this tree.
Wounding, metabolized, transformed, made a part of the tree’s wholeness.
Key #4
Virgo’s threshold. Virgo is the threshold or interface between our “resourceful feminine nature” and “day-to-day life.” This is a mystery that Liz Greene alludes to as well.
There seems to be something of Virgo-as-connecting-bridge-or-sinew-between inner and outer; the actual point or place of interface and connection between. In other words, to experience our inner Virgo is to sense that the notion of inner vs. outer is a false dichotomy. In the end, they are each other.
If we consistently show up for Virgo’s daily tasks, with curiosity and relatedness, somehow we become aware of and attuned to the inseparable relatedness between our inner and outer lives.
The New Moon: There’s Always a New Beginning
We are approaching a Virgo New Moon this week. The symbolism of this transformational death-and-rebirth, occurring in coniunctio with the Sun, during the Sun’s passage through Virgo, holds special capacity to connect us to our innate wholeness, and to rebirth a newfound sense of living connection between inner and outer.
And though the tale of The Red Shoes is a cautionary one, Clarissa Pinkola Estes reminds us that our lives are different than fairy tales in one essential way:
We are constantly being rebirthed.
And our inner Virgo, so ravaged by our current mainstream culture, may just invite us towards new beginnings this week.
This is good news for those of us who have found ourselves trapped by the obsessive dancing of the red shoes.
If we happen to find ourselves in a place where we have traded away something of our own wildness in exchange for a (false) promise of security and the “too-tame life,” it’s definitely not too late.
We can always return to Virgo’s tasks of creating, one day at a time, our very own red shoes.
However imperfect we may perceive those attempts to be, they are, perhaps ironically, our best hope of wholeness. We might think of it as diamond art.
Those ordinary day-to-day tasks are key to re-membering the wildness that threatens the parts of ourselves who would rather keep us tame.
Maybe, this Virgo New Moon, we can pause to treasure, celebrate, or begin to stitch again our very own ordinary, red cloth shoes.