Having read Goddesses in Everywoman , the book by Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen which maps seven feminine archetypes, I have to agree. Bolen uses characters from ancient Greek mythology to explain the different types of women we see in the world. These women are fractures of a whole complete woman; seven varieties of female energy, each with their own unique areas of focus.
I guarantee you will find yourself in at least one of these feminine archetypes. Athena is proactive, focused and intellectual. An Athena woman is curious, seeks information and wants to know how things work. She values rational thinking, and the superiority of will and intellect over instinct. She is highly capable, and is skilled at planning and executing. Athena prizes her intellect and is led by her head rather than her heart.
Women dominant in this energy may lack close women friends. Plus, her values on empathy or compassion are not high. For a modern reference, think of the character Katniss in the Hunger Games. This archetype gives a woman the innate ability to concentrate intensely on whatever is important to her. On the darker side, her emotional distance from others brings on a merciless quality. Artemis is what we are seeing a lot of in the world today. It is a ruthless, competitive, justice-focused energy.
To balance out her fierce competitiveness, Artemis needs to soften up a bit and connect with her vulnerability. She should also try cultivating her inner Aphrodite, helping temper her earthiness and become more creative.
She is much more introverted and her focus goes inward. Think Oracle from the Matrix. Being quieter, she tends to be undervalued.
For women high in this energy, the development is in acquiring assertiveness which gives them the ability to fight for themselves. In other words, Hestia should cultivate her inner Athena and Artemis. Hestia also needs to push herself to leave her sanctuary and go out to the world. Otherwise, she can easily become lonely and isolated. Because she often lacks direction and individual drive, Persephone has the most possible routes for growth among all the goddess archetypes.
Persephone grows when she has nobody around to do things for her or blame. A female archetype who, having never known the mother, identifies with the father! Women with great managerial and organizational skills, very capable of finding the right strategy at the right time. They are able to have no scruples in order to achieve their purpose and to carry out their own project, generally in the workplace.
They have a complex conscience and are capable of adapting to the most demanding work and social needs. They know how to combine manual skills with the strategy of their rational thinking.
Their attitude is sometimes perceived and judged as lack of interest or lack of empathy. But perhaps, can we understand it as excessive discretion? Or, we think they are women used to asking when they need something and to act without hesitation. So, they probably expect the same from others. Very simple! They fail to empathize, much less understand that the other, can have different attitudes and a vision of life not only materialistic, but also emotional and spiritual.
The need to fulfill their expectations becomes, for these women, a force that helps them to give up their family, often and without regrets. They are women who are satisfied with a lifestyle made of routine and everyday life, without renouncing socialization. Era, known by the Romans as Juno, is the bride and sister of Zeus, the king of Olympus.
Her story is characterized by constant betrayals by her husband. In fact, many were the lovers of Zeus both among the female divinities and among the common mortals. Era, with respect to these many betrayals, always reacts by taking revenge on her lovers and never against her husband. This attitude is one of the ways an Era woman could react.
This attitude arises from the deep need not to lose her husband, at the cost of immense psychological suffering made up of repeated disappointments, resulting from the various betrayals. Women who aspire to marriage more than anything else. They live for their husband, always by their side.
Jealousy is an element that distinguishes Era women. It is a jealousy not only of a sexual nature but also for little thing … ending up becoming possessiveness. They will also be jealous of the different interests, sports or friendships that the husband may have. If all goes according to plan, her life unfolds in an orderly fashion.
In midlife, an Athena woman usually takes time to assess her situation. She reconsiders all options, and then makes a fairly orderly transition to the next phase. If work is her primary concern, she is in mid-career, and can now see her trajectory: how high she can rise,.
If she is a mother, as her children have grown she is likely to have taken on projects to which she can devote more time as the children need her less. However, midlife for an Athena woman can unexpectedly turn into a crisis. Emotional chaos may intrude on her orderly life. She may find herself in the midst of a midlife marital crisis, which can shake her equanimity and expose her to deeper feelings. The companionable marriage, which has been a successful alliance for both, may now be unsatisfactory for him.
He may now feel the lack of passion in his marriage, and may feel himself drawn to another woman who stirs him romantic-. If his wife stays true to her Athena nature, her response will be to cope sensibly.
However, at midlife other goddesses are more easily activated, and for the first time in her life she may react unpredictably. Menopause is not a cause for Athena to grieve, because she never defined herself as primarily a mother.
The Athena woman changes very little over the decades. She remains throughout life an energetic, practical woman who pitches in—first at home and work, and then often as a volunteer in the community. She is often a supporter of traditional institutions, most likely fairly conservative ones.
The married Athena woman of the middle and upper classes is the backbone of volunteer charities and churches. She helps to run hospital auxiliaries, United Way charities, and the Red Cross, becoming more prominent as she gets older. When her children grow up and move away, an Athena woman does not mourn an empty nest. Now she has time for more projects, studies, or work that she enjoys.
Usually her relationships with her adult children are amiable. Because she has encouraged them to be independent and self-sufficient, and has neither been intrusive nor encouraged dependency, most of her children and grandchildren do not have problems with her. They usually respect her and often like her.
Although she often lacks demonstrativeness and does not express much feeling, she maintains family contact and communication about events, as well as keeping up family holidays and traditions. In their later years, many Athena women become respectable pillars of the community.
When widowhood comes, an Athena woman has usually anticipated it. She is a widow who manages her own money, who invests in the stock market, or continues the family business or one of her own. A widowed or spinster Athena woman often lives alone while maintaining an active and busy life.
Her one-in-herself virgin goddess quality serves her well in her last years when she is self-sufficient and active, as it did when she was young. Rational Athena never lost her head, her heart, or her self-control. She lived within the Golden Mean, and was not overwhelmed by emotion or irrational feelings. Most of the other goddesses except Hestia either unleashed their emotions on others and caused suffer-ming, or were victimized and suffered themselves.
The women who are like them likewise have the potential to either cause suffering or to suffer. Athena differed: she was invulnerable, unmoved by irrational or overwhelming emotion, and her actions were deliberate rather than impulsive. Since the woman who resembles Athena shares her attributes, she too is neither a victim of others nor of her own emotions. One-sided development may cut her off from aspects of herself that need to grow. A woman who does so leads a one-sided existence—she lives for her work.
Although she enjoys the companionship of others, she lacks emotional intensity, erotic attraction, intimacy, passion, or ecstasy. She is also spared the deep despair and suffering that may follow bonding with others or needing them. Exclusive identification with rational Athena cuts a woman off from the full range and intensity of human emotion.
Her feelings are well modulated by Athena, limited to the middle range. Living in her head, the Athena woman misses the experience of being fully in her body. She knows little about sensuality and about what it feels like to push her body to its limits. To grow beyond Athena, a woman needs to develop other aspects of herself. She can do so gradually, if she realizes that Athena limits her and if she is receptive to the perspectives of others.
When people talk of emotions and experiences that are deeply meaningful to them and unknown to her, she needs to make an effort to imagine what they are talking about. She needs to recognize that her demands for proof and her skepticism distance her from others and from her as-yet undeveloped potential for spiritual or emotional depth. An Athena woman sometimes grows beyond Athena unexpectedly or traumatically, under the pressure of circumstances that flood her.
For example, her child may be threatened by illness or may be harmed by someone. Or, she may take a psychedelic drug and be plunged into an altered state of consciousness that awes or scares her. An Athena woman has an ability to intimidate others and to take away the spontaneity, vitality, and creativity of people who are not like her. This is her Medusa effect. On her breastplate, the goddess Athena wore a symbol of her.
This was a monster with serpents instead of hair, whose terrifying appearance turned to stone anyone who gazed on it. The Gorgon is also an aspect of the Athena woman. Metaphorically, she too has the power to devitalize experience for others, to take the life out of conversation, to turn a relationship into a static tableau.
Through her focus on facts and details, her need for logical premises and rationality, she can turn a conversation into a dry recital of details. Or she can be devastatingly insensitive and can thus change the atmosphere dramatically from deeply personal to superficial and distant.
She can be unempathetic about spiritual or moral issues that others consider of vital importance, intolerant of the problems people have with their relationships, and critical of any weaknesses. Such lack of empathy is killing. When the occasion is purely social, this devitalizing Medusa effect may merely bore or infuriate.
However, when the Athena woman is in a position of authority and judgment, she may turn on the full power of the Gorgon Medusa to terrify and petrify. For example, she may be conducting a crucial interview with serious consequences. Now, this colleague is a therapist who works very well with seriously disturbed patients. Intuitively able to understand the symbolic meaning and the emotions that lie behind irrational behavior, she does beautifully with patients. And if they are acting as Athena, they may well have a Medusa effect.
Often the Athena woman who is having this Medusa effect is unconscious of her negative power. It is not her intent to intimidate and terrify. She is merely doing her job well, as she sees it—gathering the facts, examining the premises, challenging how the material is structured and supported by the evidence. With her objective attitude and incisive questions, she disregards efforts to create rapport. Thus she kills off the potential of true communication in which the heart of any matter—or the soul of the person—can be shared.
Sometimes I talk with a patient who is purely intellectual in approach, who gives me a factual report about her life, a recital of events without emotion, leaving out the feelings. What is lifeless in her has a numbing effect on me. This is why her life lacks intimacy and is often lonely. Her well-armored usually intellectual defenses are up, and her. If she is dismayed by the Medusa effect she has on others, an Athena woman would do well to remember that the Gorgon breastplate was something Athena put on and could take off.
Her Medusa aegis is gone when she no longer sits in judgment on others, inwardly claiming the authority to validate or invalidate the way other people feel or think or live. When she becomes aware that she has something to learn from.
This craftiness was characteristic of the goddess Athena. She deceived Hector into believing that his brother was at his side as his spear carrier when he faced Achilles.
The dark side of an Athena woman is related to this aspect of Athena. It is not part of her thinking nature to be concerned with feeling values such as right and wrong, or good and bad. Thus if she were a student in the s, when her classmates were taking to the streets in protest against the Vietnam War or the Cambodian invasion, or were outraged by the Watergate revelations, she was probably not involved. Instead, she was in the classroom or laboratory, pursuing her own career goals.
Growing beyond the confining limitations of one goddess through the cultivation of others is one possibility that all of the goddess types share. But an Athena woman has several specific directions she can consider following, as well. Most dear to Athena of all the crafts was weaving. It pleases her to use the finest material and to have as a finished product a designer-quality coat or dress that would have cost more than ten times what she paid for the material.
Throwing pots on a wheel is yet another way of getting in touch with this aspect of Athena. In fact, all the crafts offer Athena women an inner balance to an outer-world focus. The goddess Athena was never a child; she was born as an adult. She may need to discover in herself the child she never was, a child who can be confused or delighted by something new. Instead, she needs to approach life as if she were a wide-eyed child and everything were new and to be discovered.
When a child is fascinated by something new, she takes it all in. When someone is speaking about something she has not experienced, an Athena woman must learn to listen and to imagine as best she can both the scene and the feelings being described.
When she is in the midst of an emotional moment, she has to try to stay in it and let others comfort her. To rediscover her lost child, she needs to play and laugh, cry and be hugged. In mythology, the goddess Athena was a motherless daughter who took pride in having only one parent: her father Zeus.
She was unaware of her mother Metis, whom Zeus had swallowed. An Athena woman often has depreciated her own mother. She often lacks connection.
Her intellectual curiosity can lead her from history or psychology toward feminist ideas. From this new perspective, she may begin to think differently about her own mother and other women, and then about herself. In this way, many Athena women have come to be feminists.
Once an Athena woman changes the way she thinks, her relationship to people can change. This website saves cookies to your browser in order to improve your online experience and show you personalized content. Read our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to get more information and learn how to set up your preferences. As an archetype, Athena is the pattern followed by logical women, who are ruled by their heads rather than their hearts.
In the midst of an emotional storm, if a woman can call on Athena as an archetype in herself, rationality will help her to find or keep her bearings.
Diplomacy—which involves strategy, power, and deceptive maneuvers—is a realm in which Athena shines. What subject she studies, teaches, or researches; which campus she settles on; and which department chair or mentor she chooses all play a part in deciding if she will get the grants and positions needed in order to do the work.
Mathematics, science, grammar, research, and writing papers require Athena skills. She favors the students who do well and spends more time with them than with those that fall behind unlike a maternal Demeter teacher, who gives more of herself to those who need help the most.
She also has a business head, and so concerns herself with showing and selling her work, as well as making it. With her logical approach and attention to details, doing experiments or gathering data comes naturally to her. Unlike Artemis, she rarely considers sex a recreational sport or adventure. But communication about feelings may be practically nonexistent, either because, like her, he disregards feelings, or because he has learned that she does not understand feelings.
This lack of understanding may catch her unaware and unprepared when, contrary to her expectations, her husband wants to divorce her and marry the other woman. He moped around the house rather than aggressively seeking work, and she grew increasingly unhappy with and disrespectful of him. CHILDREN As a mother, the Athena woman can hardly wait for her kids to grow up to the age when she can talk to them, do projects with them, and take them to see what there is to see.
If work is her primary concern, she is in mid-career, and can now see her trajectory: how high she can rise, how secure her situation is, where a relationship with a mentor can take her. He may now feel the lack of passion in his marriage, and may feel himself drawn to another woman who stirs him romantic- ally and erotically.
Hence growing older is not a loss for most Athena women. On the contrary, because she is more powerful, useful, or influential in her middle years than as a young adult, her confidence and well-being may even be enhanced during these years, when other women are anxious about looking older and becoming less desirable. An Athena woman sometimes grows beyond Athena unexpectedly or traumatically, under the pressure of circumstances that flood her with feelings from the unconscious.
Her well-armored usually intellectual defenses are up, and her authority and critical gaze keep others at an emotional distance. When she becomes aware that she has something to learn from people and something to share with them, and thus is involved as a peer, she will have shed her Gorgon breastplate and the Medusa effect. She finds making her own clothes is both practical and creative.
She often lacks connection to a maternal archetype personified by the goddess Demeter , a connection she must feel in herself in order to experience maternity and motherhood deeply and instinctually.
The Artemis Women Archetype. The Poseidon Man archetype. The Hermes Man Archetype. Zeus man archetype. Hades man archetype. The Dionysus man archetype. The Apollo Man archetype. Ares Man Archetype.
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