One less-than-popular girl was thrilled to be included by her girlfriend with an invitation to attend a party. At that party her delight turned to terror as she was raped. Her so-called girlfriend filmed the violation and uploaded the video to the Internet. When the victim arrived at school on Monday, she was taunted by classmates for what they may have thought was consensual sex. The traumatized girl, who had been given Ophelia's Oracle by her grandmother a few months before, said it was the story about the boldness of Artemis in the book that gave her the courage to press charges against the boy who raped her, the girl who filmed the rape, and the mother of one of the teens who bought beer for the kids and then left them alone in her house. She told her grandmother: “Artemis would want me to do this.”
When I wrote Goddesses in Everywoman, I provided exemplars of each of the goddess archetypes that were public figures. Gloria Steinem, as a founder of Ms. magazine and a beautiful spokesperson for feminism, was a natural choice for Artemis. Her concerns for girls and women, her competency and courage to stand for and stand up for equality and empowerment of women, are clearly those of the archetype. However, Gloria—like all women—is more than an embodiment of one archetype. While one archetype may be the strongest, all of the others are potential sources of meaning in every woman. And not every facet of the strongest archetype has to be lived out or felt in each woman. Gloria is like a mother bear in her protectiveness and in responding to appeals for help from women, but she is hardly noted for being a woman in the wilderness.
Julia Butterfly Hill, on the other hand, spent two years living in an ancient redwood tree exposed to the elements in order to prevent the logging of an old-growth forest in Northern California. She is a symbol of an environmental activist who embodies this aspect of the archetype.
While an activist becomes proactive in response to or in protest against something happening in the outer world, the goddess-of-the-moon aspect of the Atalanta archetype explains the capacity for reflection—to draw back from activity, to think about motivation and meaning, to see by moonlight or reflected light. In the wilderness, moonlight illuminates; there is beauty and mystery—a oneness I experienced as a Girl Scout in the wilderness that became the source of later understanding that I drew on in writing The Tao of Psychology (1999). Sleeping outdoors under the nighttime sky with the Milky Way overhead, paying close attention so that I might see a shooting star (probably a comet) to make a wish on—these experiences prepared the way for me to slip into an altered state of consciousness. They prepared me to recognize that I was part of everything out there. They brought me an inner certainty, even before I had words for or knew of the concept of oneness that underlies all visible manifestations. It was mystical insight, and so very Artemis.
To be able to take to the woods, to turn to animals or to books, to have a rich imagination, or to be nourished by solitude are solitary activities that feed self-sufficiency—a quality needed and strengthened in girls who have to raise themselves because of inadequate, absent, disabled, or abusive parents. Artemis can be alive in the inner lives of girls and women when there is no room for autonomy, education, or protest in the world they live in. In the inner world of the imagination, a girl can be heroic; she can have a place in her psyche that identifies with global expressions of feminism that are condemned or ridiculed. She has an archetypal connection with Artemis, even if she must remain obedient or subservient, and is forced to marry young. I suspect that this accounts for the women who demonstrated during the Arab Spring against dictatorship, surprising the world with the fact that they even existed.
The Will to Live and Help to Survive
In my years of medical training, as I observed newborn babies in the nursery, I realized that personality traits show up early. Some newborns are quiet and placid when they are picked up from the bassinette; others protest loudly when disturbed. Most seem to spend their time asleep, but others look around and stay awake more. There are fussy babies who cry a lot and others who rarely do. Levels of passivity and activity differ.
I was taught as a resident in psychiatry that babies are like a tabula raza (blank tablet) on which experience writes character and personality. This theory puts mothers at fault for everything, including sexual orientation and psychiatric illnesses. While pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's concept of the “good-enough mother” (Winnicott Studies, 1994) helped mitigate the impact of this theory and lessened the pressure on mothers, mothers were still held to be the responsible ones; fathers were neither praised nor blamed. The unique personality of the baby itself was hardly ever mentioned, much less emphasized. It took having two babies of my own to learn what mothers have known all along—that, far from being a blank slate upon which we write, babies come with predispositions and train their mothers. They push buttons in their mothers' psyches and draw out aspects and responses—for better or worse.
I also suspect that infant girls and toddlers who survive illnesses that were expected to kill them—or were abandoned shortly after birth and then are found alive, or who survived terrible physical assaults—have an inherent or archetypal will to live. They draw upon an indomitable spirit, a characteristic of Artemis that shows up early when it has to. One amazing true story of survival, found in The Girl with No Name (Chapman, et. al., 2013), tells of a five-year-old toddler who was probably kidnapped and then abandoned in the Colombian jungle. The child stayed on the periphery of a troop of Capuchin monkeys, eating what they ate. She was taken in by the monkeys and grew up feral and walking on all fours until she was found and maltreated by humans, which began another whole saga of survival. The child's birth name was never discovered; she now goes by the name Marina Chapman. Marina made me wonder if Atalanta could have been a real person about whom stories were told—a little girl who became a mythical figure, a girl thought to have been suckled by a bear and found by hunters.
Patriarchal Power
Greek mythology, like Greek society, was patriarchal. Male gods were powerful and territorial. Their use of power to dominate or rule over others was taken for granted, and men made in their image assumed the same rights. In classical Greek mythology, rape was a common theme. Zeus, the chief god of Olympus, tricked, seduced, raped, impregnated, and abandoned the mothers of his many progeny.
Patriarchal systems are always hierarchal, symbolized as a pyramid or mountain, with the most desirable position at the top. Humans, animals, plants, the ocean, and minerals are all exploited and used for the profit and power of those at the top of the mountain. Conflicts and wars are fought over who will occupy the top of the pyramid, with destruction of life, beauty, and hope found in every war zone. Rape is used as a metaphor when applied to cities and to the earth itself; but wherever there is war, women are raped. Today, in the Congo, rape is deliberately used as a means of conducting war. Eve Ensler, returning from the Congo, refers to patriarchy as a “Rape Culture” (In the Body of the World, 2013). This made me think about how Zeus on Mount Olympus, the symbolic progenitor of patriarchy, was a serial rapist.
From archeological evidence, most notably that described by UCLA archeologist Marija Gimbutas (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1982), we know that. Europe's first civilization, from 6,500 to 5,000 BCE, was matrifocal, sedentary, and peaceful. Its members created art and worshipped goddesses. Successive waves of invaders from the distant north and east, referred to as Indo-Europeans or Kurgans, conquered these earlier peoples. The invaders were nomadic, horse-riding, warlike tribes who worshipped sky gods. They regarded themselves as superior to the peaceful and more culturally developed people of Old Europe, whom they easily subjugated. Male gods and male superiority came to be assumed as the natural order. In the historical time when Athens became known as the “cradle of democracy,” the right of citizenship was given only to men. Fathers had the power of life or death over their newborn children, which meant that an unwanted daughter or a defective infant could be disposed of, and a daughter who lost her virginity could be sold into slavery.
Not much has changed in some parts of the world. There are still places where a young daughter can be sold into marriage to a much older man who may already have several wives. The prospective husband and her father merely agree upon a dowry or bride price. Or a daughter may be sold for an agreed price to a human trafficker who takes her to a brothel.