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Moreover, the need to become a choicemaker-heroine is a jolt to many women who mistakenly assumed that they already were. As virgin goddess women, they may have been as psychologically “armored” as Athena, as independent of men’s opinions as Artemis, or as self-sufficient and solitary as Hestia. Their heroic tasks are to risk intimacy or to become vulnerable emotionally. For them, the choice that requires courage is to trust someone else, or need someone else, or be responsible for someone else. Speaking up or taking risks in the world may be easy for such women. For them, marriage and
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I feel that one must deliberate and then act, must scan every life choice with rational thinking but then base the decision on whether one’s heart will be in it. No other person can tell you if your heart is involved, and logic cannot provide an answer.
Very often a woman has to make up her mind and her heart in a pressure cooker created by someone else’s impatience. To be a choicemaker, she needs to insist on making decisions in her own time, knowing that it is her life and she who will live with the consequences.
As a woman proceeds on a heroine’s journey, she confronts tasks, obstacles, and dangers. How she responds and what she does will change her. Along the way, she will find what matters to her and whether she has the courage to act on what she knows. Her character and compassion will be tested. She will encounter the dark, shadowy aspects of her personality, sometimes at the same time that her strengths become more evident and her self-confidence grows, or when fear overtakes her. Grief will probably be known to her, as she experiences loss, limitations, or defeat. The heroine’s trip is a journey
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Whenever women begin to claim their own authority, or make decisions, or become aware of having a new sense of their own political or psychic or personal power, snake dreams are common. The snake seems to represent this new strength. As a symbol, it represents power once held by goddesses, as well as phallic or masculine power, representative of animus qualities. Often the dreamer senses whether it is a male or female snake, which helps to clarify the kind of power the snake symbolizes.
I think of women who gain a sense of their own power and authority as “reclaiming the power of the snake,” which was lost by feminine deities and human women when the patriarchal religions stripped the goddesses of their power and influence, cast the snake as the evil element in the Garden of Eden and made women the lesser sex.
Archetypes exist outside of time, unconcerned with the realities of a woman’s life or her needs. When goddesses exert an influence, the woman as heroine must say yes, or no, or “not now” to the demands. If she does not exercise conscious choice, then an instinctual or an archetypal pattern will take over. A
Looked at psychologically, every enemy or demon faced by a heroine in dream or myth represents something destructive, primitive, undeveloped, distorted, or evil in the human psyche that seeks to overpower and defeat her. The women who dreamed of savage dogs and dangerous snakes saw that as they were struggling with hurtful or hostile acts done to them by others, that they were also equally threatened by what was happening inside of them.
Loss and grieving is another theme in women’s lives and in heroine myths. Somewhere along the way someone dies or must be left behind. Loss of a relationship plays a significant part in women’s lives because most women define themselves by their relationships and not by their accomplishments.
When someone dies, leaves them, moves away, or becomes estranged, it is consequently a double loss: the loss of the relationship itself, and the loss of the relationship as a source of identity.
Will the heroine in the woman emerge or survive the loss? Can she grieve and go on? Or will she give up, become bitter, or overcome by depression, will she stop her journey at this point? If she goes on, she will be choosing the path of the heroine.
Most heroic journeys involve going through a dark place—through mountain caverns, the underworld, or labyrinthine passages to emerge, finally, into the light.
helps to realize that death and rebirth, in myth and dreams, are metaphors for loss, depression, and recovery. In retrospect, many such dark periods turn out to be rites of passage, a time of suffering through which a woman has learned something of value, and has grown.
Whether in myth or life, when a heroine is in a dilemma, all she can do is be herself, true to her principles and loyalties, until something unexpectedly comes to her aid. To stay with the situation, with the expectation that an answer will come, sets the inner stage for what Jung called “the transcendent function.” By this he means something that arises from the unconscious to solve the problem or show the way to an ego (or heroine) who needs help from something beyond itself (or in herself).
When she is in an inner crisis and doesn’t know what to do, she must not give up or act out of fear. To hold the dilemma in consciousness, wait for new insight or changed circumstance, and meditate or pray for clarity all invite a solution from the unconscious that can transcend the impasse.
The function of creative insight is also similar to the transcendent function. In a creative process, when there is as yet no known solution to a problem, the artist-inventor-problem solver has faith that an answer exists, and stays with the situation until the solution comes. The creator is often in a state of heightened tension. Everything that can be done or thought of, has been done. The person then trusts a process of incubation, out of which something new can emerge.
Life presents us with repeated opportunities to face what we fear, what we need to become conscious of, or what we need to master. Each time we cycle around the spiral path to the place that gives us difficulty, hopefully, we gain more consciousness and can respond more wisely the next time; until we can finally pass through that nemesis place at peace and in harmony with our deepest values, and not be negatively affected at all.
Note that after proving her courage and competency, the heroine does not go riding off into the sunset by herself, like the archetypal cowboy hero. Nor is she cast in the mold of the conquering hero.
Union, reunion, and home are where her journey ends.
Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love.
T. S. Eliot, in The Four Quartets, writes,1 We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Jung, C. G. “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1954).
Marija Gimbutas, “Women and Culture in Goddess-Oriented Old Europe,”
Gustaitis, Rasa. “Moving Freely through Nighttime Streets.” Pacific News Service, 1981.
Jung, C. G. “The Spirit Mercurius: Part 2: no. 3, Mercurius as Fire.” CW,
Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: 6500–3500, Myths and Cult Images.
