An Athena woman often has depreciated her own mother. She needs to discover her mother’s strengths, often before she can value any similarities to her mother in herself. 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. Christine Downing, author of The Goddess, calls this task “the re-membering of Athene,” which she speaks of as “the rediscovery of her relation to the feminine, to mother, to Metis.”6
