My interest in Atalanta was renewed the summer before I began writing this book, when I taught at the C. G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht, Switzerland for the first time. Kusnacht is Jung's hometown on the shore of Lake Zurich and, although I did not train there, I think of it as the “mothership” of Jungian institutes. For the first time in over a decade, I told the myth of Atalanta and amplified its meaning to an international student body. It came alive in me and in the room. I remembered why I had become interested in Atalanta in the first place.
Atalanta and Artemis
Atalanta is a famous hunter and runner in the ancient Greek myth of a mortal woman, who was rejected and left to die when she was born. She survived, the ancient storytellers said, because she was “under the protection of Artemis.” Atalanta exemplifies the indomitable spirit in competent, courageous girls and in the women they become. This indomitable spirit refuses to give up on what she knows to be true for herself. These women have grit and the passion and persistence to go the distance, to survive and win.
Girls and women with indomitable spirit are the new protagonists in many of the most-read novels and fictional series of this century. They have emerged in the creative process of authors with a reality that seems to blend invention and active imagination. I believe that these emerging female heroes are captivating readers because of a morphic resonance. Energies and archetypal patterns in the collective unconscious are rising into our individual consciousness and changing assumptions about women and in women.
Katniss Everdeen is an Atalanta in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy; Lisbeth Salander is a darker side of this same spirit in Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I also see Atalanta in Anastasia Steele, the main character in E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey who ventured into the wilderness of emotion and sexuality. These are young women who call upon their intuition, depth of feeling, and courage to go beyond previous limits; who feel fear and outrage and have to adapt and endure and not give in or give up. Each has an inner spirit that is not subdued, a will that is not broken. Each in her own way is a quirky, independent, courageous person who is in uncharted territory—the metaphoric wilderness, the realm of Artemis.
Until the Women's Movement in the 1960s, the enduring fictional character with Atalanta qualities was independent-thinking, hot-tempered tomboy Jo from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Jo is the one sister in the March family who pursues a career and who, when she finally does marry, makes a conscious, personally meaningful choice. In novels, as in real life, it's not what happens to us that counts, but how we respond.
In Greek mythology, Atalanta the mortal and Artemis the goddess have similar sounding names and qualities. Artemis is the goddess with the silver bow and arrows, the hunter with unerring aim. Atalanta is also a renowned hunter. Like Artemis, she is at home in forests and associated with animals, the mother bear in particular. But Atalanta is mortal and, as such, can be affected by Artemis or any of the other divinities in the Greek pantheon. She can also suffer the consequences of being a woman in the cradle of patriarchy.
In the age of feminism, Atalanta became known to several generations of children through Marlo Thomas' Free to Be . . . You and Me, which entered the popular culture as a book, as a recording, and then as a television special. The book became a children's classic. In this version of the mythic tale, the Princess Atalanta is an athlete and astronomer who promises her father that she will marry the man who can beat her in a footrace. Atalanta has also been featured as a hunter and a runner in videogames, in comic books, and on television. She even became a toy action figure following her role as a strong character in the video series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
Goddess Archetypes in Everywoman
Goddesses in Everywoman introduced a new psychology of women based on archetypal patterns personified by eight major goddesses in classical mythology, one of whom was Artemis, archetype of the sister, competitor, goal achiever, and feminist. All archetypes are potentially active in every person—as lived out in us, projected onto others, or recognized when encountered in ancient myths or contemporary films. Just as we come into the world with innate natural gifts and personality traits that may be encouraged or suppressed depending upon expectations of family and society, so it is for the archetype of Artemis that Atalanta personifies.
The Artemis archetype was expressed at Seneca Falls in 1848, in the Declaration of Sentiments that was the beginning of the Women's Suffrage Movement, only one of which was the rallying issue of the right to vote. It took until 1920 for American women to gain this right through a constitutional amendment. Feminists in the mid-1960s through the 1970s emphasized sisterhood. They demanded equal access to education, jobs, and professions; they insisted on opportunities for girls to participate in sports; they demonstrated for reproductive rights. Thanks to their efforts, gains were made that rippled out into the world, but there was not enough support to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
Even with the liberation of Artemis in American culture, there are some who hold to the same assumptions and values prevalent in cultures where a girl belongs to and obeys her father until she marries, after which she becomes her husband's possession. In these cultures, a woman's role is to maintain the household, please her husband, and bear male children. She must maintain her physical virginity before marriage, or at least the appearance of it. Sexuality is not for her own enjoyment, but for her husband's pleasure and the procreation of children. When virginity is the hallmark of value and honor, with bride price or dowry dependent upon it, women do not belong to themselves; they lack sovereignty and independence. When Hillary Clinton addressed the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 with the ringing assertion that “Women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights,” she brought attention to the reality that human rights are not extended to women—that democracy, even where it exists, often can only apply to men.
Artemis embodies the virgin-goddess archetype, a woman who is one-in-herself psychologically. She may or may not be a virgin physically; she may be of any age. The archetypal part of her maintains autonomy in her inner life, even when it is not allowed outward expression. She may need to keep her feelings, thoughts, and imagination of a different life to herself until she is old enough to leave a fundamentalist family headed by an authoritarian father. Or until she can join other women to express or protest, such as the women in India who demonstrated against authorities who disregard rape, those who joined One Billion Rising and danced in streets to end violence against women, or took part in the Arab Spring uprisings.
Stories
In Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), Ayla is an orphaned five-year-old who is tolerated by people who are not like her own in prehistoric Europe. The way Ayla learns through observation and abuse, adapts and survives, and has her own goals is echoed by stories of real children and by women who see in Ayla something of themselves.
In Game of Thrones, Arya Stark is a young Artemis girl on her own in a devastated and dangerous world. Her once peaceful world was brought to an end, not by an earthquake which left Ayla orphaned, as natural disasters can do, but as a consequence of armed conflict. Wherever there are massive natural disasters and few resources, or ongoing fratricidal wars such as those in the Middle East and in central Africa now, and in Europe and Asia in the twentieth century, the psychological situation and dangers faced by these fictional girls are quite real to girls who lose parents, have no home to return to, and have the indomitable spirit and will to survive and not become helpless victims, no matter what. Anonymous to us, are the innumerable real life girls and women who are heroic and ordinary. Maybe you will recognize yourself as one.
The girl who does not give up on herself when others