Goddesses in Older Women

Archetypes in Women Over Fifty

Jean Shinoda Bolen

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060929237
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061852770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At some point after fifty, every woman crosses a threshold into the third phase of her life. As she enters this uncharted territory -- one that is generally uncelebrated in popular culture -- she can choose to mourn what has gone before, or she can embrace the juicy-crone years.

In this celebration of Act Three, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst and bestselling author of Goddesses in Everywoman, names the powerful new energies and potentials -- or archetypes -- that come into the psyche at this momentous time, suggesting that women getting older have profound and exciting reasons for welcoming the other side of fifty.

PART 1

HER NAME IS WISDOM

What does it mean to be an elder in this culture? What are my new responsibilities? What has to be let go to make room for the transformations of energy that are ready to pour through the body-soul?

—Marion Woodman

Wisdom is a woman, a crone, a goddess, and a feminine archetype. In Greek mythology, she is a barely personified Metis, swallowed by Zeus. In the Bible, she is a hidden Sophia, the goddess who became an abstract and ungendered concept. Wisdom may be found at twilight where the three roads meet as Hecate, or in the hearth fire as Hestia. She may be the invisible Shekinah who enters the Jewish home for the meal that begins the Sabbath. She was once the Celtic goddess Cerridwen. She is Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, and Erda in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. In the world’s mythologies and in the collective unconscious, which are mirrors of each other, wisdom is feminine. Wisdom is usually an attribute of a goddess who is often not seen or personified, and an attribute of a woman in whom wisdom has become a conscious part of her psyche.

The archetype of the wisewoman or wise crone is a generic description for the inner development of soul qualities most associated with the third phase of women’s lives. Because she is a human archetype, she is not exclusively in the psyche of women, but her development is stifled in men and, in general, in patriarchy. Nor does this archetype develop only in adults. In my practice, I hear how children who were neglected or suffered abuse drew solace and wisdom from an inner source. As a result, they did not identify with their oppressors and so did not grow up to become like the adults who neglected or abused them. Drawing from wisdom beyond their years, they could survive such childhoods without a loss of soul. In fairy tales, such solace and wisdom is personified; often by an old woman, either a fairy godmother with a magic wand and wisdom, or a crone who helps a young person interpret a riddle or make the right choice.

More commonly, we become wiser as we grow older, but as we all have observed, a long life itself is no guarantee of wisdom.

There are different kinds of wisdom and therefore different kinds of archetypal wisewomen. Metis’s wisdom is practical, applied wisdom that utilizes intelligence and mastery of a skill, usually with tangible results made evident through her work. I think that this wisdom is what the Japanese are recognizing when they designate artists and craftspersons as “national treasures.” Sophia’s wisdom comes from her quest for spiritual meaning and experiences of mystical insight. Hecate’s intuitive wisdom is honed by observation and enhanced by psychic awareness. Hestia is a wise presence, the inner serenity that translates into outer harmony. Hestia makes a house a home, creates sanctuaries, and quietly aids in transforming a group of strangers into a community.

In this section, “Her Name is Wisdom,” I focus on four goddesses—Metis, Sophia, Hecate, and Hestia—as archetypes of wisdom. None of them are visually familiar to us, their qualities are intangible, and they were either rendered invisible or dimly seen in their mythologies or theology. These goddesses were once part of myth and religion. They are now latent patterns in the collective unconscious that are waiting to be reimagined and made a conscious part of ourselves. I have differentiated one from another and described their attributes, using the research and writing of others in mythology, archeology, theology, and history. I note my main sources in the endnotes. My own expertise as a Jungian analyst guided my selection of these four goddesses as archetypal figures because they correspond to qualities of wisdom that I see emerging in the psyches of older women.

I begin by describing each of these goddesses and what we know of them. You may recognize qualities in yourself in one or more of these, or have an Aha! flash of insight, and intuitively know that a particular “goddess” is part of your psyche. The goddesses of wisdom may represent your growing edge—the direction of your own development after fifty. Or the description may fit a woman you particularly admire, and if so, she might represent the archetype that you are growing toward yourself. If you have a woman companion—a sister traveler—in your dreams, she may represent this growing edge, and be a symbol of your inner wisewoman (or another emerging archetype) who joins you in dreams in which you are on a journey to unfamiliar places.

If you meditate upon a goddess or imagine a dialogue with her, this wise part of yourself becomes more conscious and accessible in ordinary life. What we focus on, we energize. What we imagine becoming precedes our development. The more we want to know a wisewoman archetype, the more likely that archetype will emerge in ourselves; and the more of us who engage in this process, the more certain it will be that the goddess archetype will come back into the culture.

As I write this, I think of the “We’re Back” issue of Ms. magazine, which celebrated its repossession from corporate ownership by feminist women in 1999 with the cover question, “Need Wisdom?” This association of women and wisdom is at once new, due to the aging of the post–women’s movement generation, and very old, that is, prepatriarchal. Even if the wisewoman archetypes and the crone goddesses have been largely forgotten for five or six thousand years, when we awaken to our own wisdom, they return to life through us. As Jung wrote: “Archetypes are like riverbeds, which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed.”¹

When the goddesses and their attributes were assimilated, trivialized, and demonized, women had nothing to identify with. We need to usher in another round of consciousness-raising, this time to challenge negative stereotypes of older women and understand the relationship between the fate of goddesses and the treatment of women, the effect of the absence of a sacred feminine on women’s spirituality, and the theological basis of patriarchy.

Goddess of Practical and Intellectual Wisdom

Metis in the Belly of Zeus

Each of the goddess archetypes of wisdom has her particular distinctive wisdom. Metis’s is centered in the experiential and tangible world. For a woman in whom the wisewoman is Metis, what she does with her mind or with her mind and her hands engages her soul. She brings the wisdom she has learned from life to her craft. Metis is a personification of applied ways of knowing and doing. It is an expertise that goes beyond technically mastering a skill or a practice. Metis connotes the ability to intellectually grasp the situation and act wisely and skillfully. When a woman’s work and her deeper wisdom come together, then Metis is the archetype of the wisewoman that she exemplifies. Metis was a pre-Olympian goddess of wisdom, who was pursued by Zeus and became his first wife. She provided Zeus with the means through which he could become the chief god atop Mount Olympus.

In Greek, the word metis, which was derived from the name of the goddess Metis, came to mean “wise counsel” or “practical wisdom.”¹ You may call upon metis in running a household easily and well, knowing that what appears to others as mere efficiency is actually creating harmony. In the studio, metis is more than the sum of the skills you have acquired and made your own; it becomes an alchemical process through which inspired work can come. If you are a physician, metis becomes part of your clinical acumen. If you are in business, politics, or law and have metis, your wisdom helps to steer a wise course, to get to the heart of a matter, to settle conflicts through mediation and dialogue, to work out mutually satisfactory outcomes rather than winning at the other’s expense. Metis in this sense is a form of diplomacy that takes a long-range view as to what the best outcome is for all. For a scholar, the wisdom of metis is a discerning and creative way of thinking that makes it possible to see a pattern to the research or find an explanation for the evidence. If the wisdom of Metis grows or deepens in the course of your life, then metis will be a crone-age attribute.

I think of metis in the creative or artistic realm as that quintessential and mysterious divine inspiration that transforms a technically skilled performer into an artist, or the work into art. This is most likely to happen to a craftsperson, artist, actor, or musician who has mastered the medium, the instrument, or craft and draws from an archetypal depth of feeling that touches others. The work or performance then has the power to move people to respond from a corresponding depth in themselves.

METIS THE GODDESS

Metis was the daughter of two Titans: Tethys, the goddess of the moon, and Oceanus, the god whose realm was a vast body of water that encircled the earth. As a Titan, she was part of the ruling older order of divinities that Zeus intended to overthrow. He pursued her and she fled, turning into many shapes in order to escape him. Finally, Zeus caught her and she became his first wife.

For Zeus to defeat Cronus and the mighty Titans, he needed to free his brothers whom Cronus had swallowed. Cronus had previously deposed his own father, Uranus, who had ruled before him, by castrating him and taking his power. Cronus feared that his wife Rhea would bear a son that would do to him what he had done to his father, and to avert this, he had swallowed each of their children as soon as they were born. After he had swallowed their first five newborn infants, and she was pregnant with Zeus, Rhea was determined to save this last child. She hid him in a cave as soon as he was born and, in his place, put a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. This fooled Cronus, who, in his haste, swallowed the stone instead of Zeus.

Years later, it was Metis’s counsel that made it possible for Zeus to succeed. She devised a plan to put an emetic into a honeyed drink for Cronus, who then regurgitated one stone, two sons, and three daughters. They were now full grown, and grateful to Zeus. His brothers Poseidon and Hades were ready to fight with Zeus against the Titans, and after gaining other allies, Zeus defeated the Titans and overthrew Cronus in a ten-year war. Zeus killed his father with a thunderbolt.

When Metis was pregnant with Zeus’s child, an earth oracle told him that this child was a daughter and that if she conceived again, Metis would bear a son with a loving heart who would supplant him. To rid himself of this possibility, he approached Metis with clever words and guile. Metis was charmed and distracted by Zeus, who coaxed her to a couch, tricked her into becoming small, and swallowed her. This was the end of Metis in classical mythology, though Zeus claimed afterward that she could counsel him from his belly. He incorporated her into himself and took her attributes and power as his own, including childbirth. Zeus birthed Athena out of his head, as an adult with no memory of having a mother.

My capsule synopsis of the goddess Metis was told by Hesiod, who lived between the second half of the eighth century B.C.E. and the first quarter of the seventh, in the Theogony, an epic poem about the birth of the gods and a cosmology that tells of the origins of the universe. The overall theme of the Theogony is the establishment of Zeus as supreme god, and yet for most of the poem it is the mother goddesses who matter. Given the fiercely patriarchal character of Hesiod’s own society, the Theogony was a remarkable testimony to the tenacity of myths that persist when earlier history or prior religions are forgotten.

SWALLOWED METIS AS PERSONAL METAPHOR

The story of Zeus and Metis is a recapitulation of the lives of many first wives of successful men. These women provided the means and the strategy through which their particular Zeus reached the top, only to find themselves treated like Metis. In this archetypal situation, the woman is metaphorically a daughter of Titans; socially and economically, a member of the class to which her husband aspires, or even aspires to supplant, if like Zeus, he has dynastic ambitions. She may be better educated, even brighter than he. She may have more money or access to it. She may provide introductions, ideas, and strategy to further his goals. Once his ambitions are realized with her help, and she becomes involved in home and children, her role in his success and her importance to him diminishes considerably. She is thus made small, “tricked” into insignificance, and “swallowed,” as her attributes, ideas, and resources become his. After a divorce and his remarriage, like Metis the goddess, she disappears from sight socially. The invisibility that results is vividly described in the novel A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe through his portrayal of Martha, who became “the superfluous woman” once Charlie Croker divorced her after twenty-nine years to marry a woman half his age.

When a wife’s ideas or creative work are attributed to her husband, it is another version of swallowed Metis. Usually she is given no public credit. Whatever the contribution Albert Einstein’s wife made to his theories remains unknown, yet she was a brilliant physics student when they met. Will and Ariel Durant worked together on The History of Civilization, yet her name did not appear as a coauthor until the seventh volume. When it was impossible for women to have their intellect taken seriously, their ideas had to be attributed to a man, or bear a man’s name.

The same pattern occurs in work environments of all kinds, when a Zeus co-opts the work or ideas of women who are seen as helpmates to the important man. In Molecules of Emotion, Dr. Candace Pert describes how this happened to her.² Pert had a pivotal role in the discovery of opiate receptors and endorphins for which her mentor and two male researchers received the Lasker Award, second only to the Nobel Prize in prestige. A large percentage of Lasker recipients do go on to win the Nobel, and this might have happened, except that Pert did not remain silent about her crucial contribution and subsequently was also nominated for the Nobel Prize; after a long and heated debate, the award was conferred for another discovery. Pert’s decision was influenced by the experience of Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant scientist who provided the critical link in the chain of reasoning that allowed Francis Crick and John Watson to show that the DNA structure was a double helix, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind Franklin remained silent and died of cancer a few years later. Pert’s research on the connection between emotions and disease gives her grounds for her comment: “I felt that by not speaking up, I would be sacrificing my self-esteem and self-respect, not to mention possibly setting myself up for a nice case of depression and maybe a cancer or two down the line.”³

Yet another instance of Metis-swallowing occurs when an organization that was conceived and nurtured by a woman, who struggled body and soul to keep it going, is taken over for its prestige or profitability by men, once it has gained status. A noted example of this was Physicians for Social Responsibility, founded by Helen Caldicott, M.D. Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher