Finding a “Lower, Deeper Power” For Women in Recovery
Psalm 42, verse 1
As a doe longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, the God of my life, where shall I go to see the face of God?
First Commandment
I am thy Lord thy God and thou shalt have no gods before me.
Introduction
In downtown Chicago there is a marvelous building called The Board of Trade Building. It is here that grain and wheat were traded as commodities. Atop the building is a beautiful art deco statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. In her hands are wheat and grain. It is from her we get the name for cereal. The Greeks had the same goddess image, but they called her Demeter. I prefer to use the Greek name Demeter because somehow the name Demeter sounds to me like “da mutter.” Here in Chicago we have da cubs, da bears, and da mudder.
At any rate, when the construction people placed Demeter at the top of this building in the 1930s she could be admired from afar but no one could see that she had no face, that is until recently when taller office buildings began to be constructed around the Board of Trade. Contemporary employees, while looking out from their windows exclaimed, “She has no face!” Indeed, she is senseless. She has no ears, no nose, no eyes and no mouth. I wondered if this statue might be a metaphor for modern women’s lack of connection with a feminine Divine? I asked myself, “When the importance of the goddess vanished and patriarchy took over church and government, did women lose their voices?”
Have we women and men lost our own sense of the divine feminine power and have we bought into a myopic, singular, male power? Just a question I asked myself.
Recovery/Discovery
In a sense all of us are daily in a stage of recovery because of some conflict in our lives. Because we are human we have human foibles. We may drink too much, we may experience bad relations, we lose jobs, we have bad health, we have eating disorders, our foibles are often innumerable, and most of us don’t even want to visit our foibles.
In recovery programs of all stripes, people are encouraged to find a Higher Power. (Personally, I am not fond of the word “recovery.” I prefer the word “discovery,” because anyone who has gone through the pain of coming back from a bad experience has discovered something about themselves. To recover makes me think of covering over again. RE-COVER. Discoverers, on the other hand, uncover things; we learn things about ourselves when we are in discovery.)
Alcoholics Anonymous: An Example of the Absence of the Feminine
Both my spouse Tom Lavin and I are Clinical Psychologists. Tom is a Jungian Analyst as well and he was called upon several years ago to give the keynote talk at a conference on Alcoholism at the New York Open Center. I sat in the audience of counselors and therapists, mostly women, listening to the presentations from an all-male panel describing the heroic journeys of recovering alcoholics. The analogous heroic journeys were those of Christ, Buddha, Moses, Icarus, King Arthur, and others. The journeys of Moses, Christ, Odysseus, Icarus, Parsifal, and all the other male mythological figures are marvelous examples of heroism, but what of the heroic feminine journey? Christ and Moses went up the mountain; Icarus flew high up in the sky. Going up is a male image or motif. I thought to myself, “These speakers are talking about journeys in life but they are describing journeying through a male prism.” My question at the time was, “Don’t women journey? Where are the stories about women’s journeys? Though women psychically accommodate to these male images and the lessons imparted, they often are left unmoved and unable to relate to these images as part of their unique heroic/recovery journeys.
A New Vision for the Next Millennium
After the alcohol conference in New York I returned home feeling pulled to understand feminine spiritual direction. I wondered, “Were there stories that depicted feminine heroism and did the feminine journey in another direction?” I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Stanzas From ‘The Grand Chartreuse,’” in which he wrote:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn (Arnold, 1961, p.187).
Arnold wrote these words around the same time that Nietzsche was grappling with the idea that God was dead. Both Arnold and Nietzsche longed for a new vision of the Divine. The God, as they experienced him, was no longer relevant.
As we enter a new millennium we need to be open and nonjudgemental to new possibilities of envisioning the Divine. For centuries women have adapted, accommodated, and adjusted to directions handed down from a more patriarchal society. Women should be free to accept this more male image if they so like, but they should also be free to develop images and directives of their own if they are not comfortable with the generally prescribed direction. Otherwise, we are caught in that awful curse called Fundamentalism.
Please understand, I am not dismissing the imagery of recovery programs. I am simply suggesting that women may need other images to rely on. A “higher power” may not necessarily be relevant to the feminine way of recovery. Some women may find descending to align with a “lower, deeper power” more relevant.
Jung and the Development of AA
nJung, Alcoholics Anonymous, And Drug Seeking Behaviour - YouTube
Since the 1940s, through the implementation of the 12 steps, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped many recovering persons remain sober and find peace by encouraging them to connect with a “higher power.” The use of the 12 steps has branched out and become useful in many forms of recovery other than just alcohol. The difficulty, as I see it, is that AA is a predominantly male-oriented path to recovery. The tenets of AA are stereotypically geared toward the way men recover. And that is, no doubt, because AA was originally developed by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, both men. You can read all about the history of Roland H,. Dr. Bob, and Bill W. in a book by Ernest Kurtz entitled Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous. There were no women in the embryonic stages of AA during the 1930s. Nor were there any women in the Oxford Movement in England. So the language and ideas and approach to recovery are, by nature, masculine. It could not be anything else.
To get an idea of where the concept of a “High Power” came from let me quickly tell you a story. Roland H., a wealthy businessman from Vermont, who survived the economic depression, worked with Jung in analysis in Zurich. A year after he returned to the United States, Roland relapsed. He is reported to have visited Jung once again in Zurich to go back into analysis. Jung was very forthright with Roland H. and told him that he could do nothing for him. Jung suggested that if he found a group with a spiritual basis, he might find some way of avoiding the desire to drink. Jung had no scientific theories about alcohol or recovery.
However, many of you may know that Carl G. Jung was pivotal in the development of AA. He worked therapeutically with Roland H. and later corresponded with Bill Wilson, the founder of AA. It was Jung’s theory that when we lose our Spirit (uppercase S), we may turn to spirits (lower case s). Jung used the Latin phrase Spiritus Contra Spiritum to explain what he thought about addiction. The English translation is: The spirits against the Spirit. Spirits, with a lower case “s” meaning a mind-altering substance; and Spirit with an upper case “S” meaning inner force or inner Divine. When we lose interest or inspiration in life we may turn to mind-altering substances or ways of behaving to alleviate the pain or loss, but the use of spirits can be counterproductive. There are many addictions both substantive and behavioral such as shopping, sex, eating, and overworking. All of these, if used to excess or used inappropriately, can initially ease pain or loss; they can give a “high” at first, but in the end there is the let down. As most of you know, people who have a drink when they want a “pick me up,” are actually choosing the wrong substance, because alcohol in reality, is a depressant.
In her book Witness to the fire: Creativity and the veil of addiction Jungian analyst and writer Linda Leonard took the word addiction apart. She wrote that the etymology of the word addiction comes from the Latin addicere. Dicere means “word.” We hear it in predict, dictate, dictionary. The Romans called their slaves addictus meaning: “one who has no voice; no vote.” An addict has indeed given over their voting voice to a substance or a way of behavior. The addict is a slave. He or she is not in charge; it is the substance or way of being that has the power over the person. This is perhaps the reason why AA encourages people in recovery to find a “higher power” a real Pick Me Up.
No Second Hand Gods
The following story is from Grapevine magazine (February 1996). It was anonymously written by a woman who experienced negativity when she expressed a desire to go in a direction other than the one prescribed by AA. She was searching for a “lower power.” It shows how one woman experienced her own image of power for her journey toward sobriety and that the image was not necessarily consistent with the conventional “higher power.” She met with harshness but weathered the experience. It is a story about the one-sidedness of an organization, perhaps even an example of the one-sidedness of organized religion today. The article is an outcry against fundamentalist thinking. Permission to publish this article was obtained from Grapevine magazine.
“No Secondhand Gods”
I came to Alcoholics Anonymous beaten by gin and depression, barely clinging to a thin and unhappy belief in God and trying desperately to talk myself back into my childhood faith. It wasn’t working.
I was an ex-nun whose faith had fallen apart in the convent - partly because the order’s strict policy on alcohol had prevented me, for the first sustained period in my adult life, from drinking away troublesome doubts and questions.
The first thing AA people told me about spirituality stopped me cold: they told me if I wanted to live, I needed an honest relationship with an honestly envisioned Higher Power. Ill-fitting secondhand Gods need not apply. I found this both liberating and terrifying. Terrifying because I’d been taught to hang onto my religion like grim death whether I felt honest doing it or not; liberating once I discovered I was genuinely more afraid of drinking again than of going to hell for unbelief.
The ensuing few years were an incredible revelation. My sponsor has an interest in comparative religion, and some of her books introduced me to a marvelous new faith, one that made me exclaim, “So that’s what I’ve been all my life!” I became a practitioner and eventually a clergywoman of this faith, and it has given me the sort of relationship with my Deeper (for me, a better term than Higher) Power I could only have dreamed of.
Nevertheless, I have a solid granite derriere on the subject of keeping religion per se out of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I’ve never gone to meetings and tried to preach my religion to anyone. I’ve seen the damage that can do to groups and the confusion and pain it can cause newcomers.
But I do try to be honest about my Deeper Power, and it isn’t easy. You see, I envision that Power as female, and I call her Goddess, not God. And in some AA meetings, you’d think I’d thrown a stinkbomb into the circle every time I refer to my Deeper Power in this way.
I was careful where I began saying it. For the most part, my home group didn’t mind the new phrasing, so I tried it out at another meeting where I’d heard various people’s Powers referred to as God, Allah, the Tao, the Great Maybe, and Eddie. All had gotten reasonable respect, even Eddie, so I was totally unprepared for the roar of derisive laughter that greeted me when I spoke one evening of “the Goddess as I understand Her.”
I was thunderstruck, and tears came to my eyes. “I nearly died trying to find a Power I could believe in,” I told them. “I would never laugh at yours; please don’t laugh at mine.”
I tried it again at other meetings. At about a third of the meetings, I got either ridicule or after-meeting conversation pitches. I wondered if it was just my area that was unusually closed to the idea, until I began hearing stories from other women of my faith on the Internet. All confirmed my impression that female deity-language is the one kind that routinely elicits laughter or hostility (“You’ll go to hell for that New Age stuff, you know!”) at AA meetings.
For awhile, I tried dancing around the issue with terms like “the Creator” and “the Divine.” I didn’t wear my religion’s symbol around my neck at meetings, even though some Christians and Jews often wore theirs. Eventually, I stopped dancing; that’s one tango not required of the more “mainstream” believers in our ranks, and I truly don’t understand why it should be required of anyone.
I’ve watched for years now as this problem has driven desperately ill newcomers away from the program. They have had to fight the prevailing society so hard for a faith that fits, and it is so hard for them to face being laughed at or scorned for it in what is supposed to be a place of safety when they’re barely out of detox.
Please, next time you’re tempted to have a contemptuous (and audible) reaction to somebody else’s deity, think: if it’s what’s keeping her alive, do you really want to knock it down?
Anonymous, Kentucky (Grapevine, February 1996, pp. 14-15)
Understanding the Direction of the Feminine Through Story
Tell me a fact and I'll learn.
Tell me the truth and I'll believe.
But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.
Indian Proverb
Great art and great literature are often based on ancient myths and stories. “Myths . . . portray a collective image; they tell us about things that are true for all people.” Stories can work at an individual level, or they can be part of the collective understanding. Stories help us to understand and they touch us subtly. By hearing a story we can draw conclusions, we can see parallels in our lives, and we can compare. By listening to stories we thread together legends and mysteries that help us to understand our past, our present, and our future. Stories help us to cope and to relate to a particular mystery in our lives. It’s the stories told and heard at AA meetings and other recovery meetings that make the programs work. When a patient I am working with says he or she does not like to go to meetings, I insist they continue going - not to talk, just to listen to the stories - to be reminded of what others before them have gone through. It’s the stories that heal.
The Greeks and Romans were masters at creating stories. They had no grasp or understanding of science so they supplemented explanations for natural or relational phenomenon with stories using Gods and Goddesses as the main characters. If someone asked, “What is that noise in the sky during a rainstorm?” they’d probably respond, “Oh, that’s just Zeus throwing his thunderbolts in anger.” There were no scientific explanations; just stories. They used stories and myths to explain the complications and natural phenomenon of everyday living such as weather, loving, hating, warring. You name it, the Greeks and Romans had a story for it. If you pay attention to the unfolding story of Jessica Lynch’s experience, you can see why this touches the archetypal core of the American public. Even her homecoming was touching, and it was orchestrated to be that way. She carries the archetype of the wounded hero in feminine form. Notice she is always shown in uniform, never in her drab hospital gear. Today we might call what we read in the newspapers, and hear on the news SPIN, well things haven’t changed much since the Romans and Greeks. The Greeks and Romans did pretty much the same thing. They told stories to explain a phenomenon. They too were spinners.
My Search for Feminine Heroic Stories
In my search for heroic feminine stories of journeying, I found many myths that depicted the feminine direction of the search for meaning to be that of going to a deeper power found in the underworld experience. I found that no stories depicted women traveling upward - except in the patriarchal Roman Catholic story about the Blessed Mother. Mary is said to be the mother of Jesus, and at her death she is depicted as being assumed up into heaven. She did not go there searching for pain relief. She was simply taken up. She did not go up on her own power; she was assumed into heaven by divine power.
What I want you to notice in the stories is that all of the women who go to the underworld are accompanied by someone or something else. They do not go to the underworld alone. They are in a relationship! This is very important to what I am trying to say today, because Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Stone Center in Philadelphia did much research on young women and how they express themselves. The researchers found that young girls are always in relationships. A young woman’s self-esteem, her idea of herself, depends upon her relationships and how she relates. The stories validate Carol Gilligan’s research. Women are relational! Women are sustained by their relationships with others. For those of you who are interested, you can find Gilligan’s marvelous research explained in her popular book In a Different Voice.
As you know, there are also several wonderful stories of men going to the underworld. We find the male theme of descent into the underworld (and the return) occurring in the epic of Gilgamesh, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, however, going to the underworld is not the commonly accepted direction of the hero’s journey. Men are usually depicted as going up. Climbing a mountain is one of the usual archetypal motifs. The Christian Passion includes Christ climbing Calvary, and the laws were given to Moses after he had climbed Mount Sinai. The top of the mountain is a place of revelation, a place where one is closer to the gods and can see more. My goal today is to try to incorporate three ancient stories from mythology that depict the feminine journey of going to the underworld with the hope that these stories of feminine journeys will give us an archetypal basis for a more feminine heroic connection with the Divine at a deeper level. It would be interesting to speak with Jessica Lynch today and have her tell her stories of depression; about how important her relationships are to her to carry her through her underground experiences.
Our first story is the ancient myth of Inanna found etched on a slab excavated in the 1920’s in ruins near Turkey and Sumeria, the area we refer to as Mesopotamia or more recently Iraq. It is located near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It is from this same location that the wonderful Gilgamesh epic was uncovered - also a wonderful story of going to the underworld, but the Gilgamesh epic is a male’s journey.
The next two myths we will discuss are probably more familiar to you. They the stories of Persephone and Psyche. It is from Psyche that we get our word for Psychology. Psyche was Eros’ anima or soulmate. If you take the word apart - psyche means soul and ology means “study of.” Therefore Psychology is “the study of soul.”
Although the Greeks and the Romans had similar stories, I have chosen the Greek version of these myths. The archetype is the same whether told as a Greek myth or told as a Roman myth.
The Underworld Journey
In ancient times, stories of journeys to the underworld were common. The underworld was not necessarily a place for the dead. It was not hell, as we know it in our culture today. Rather it was a laboratory, a place of learning, a cauldron for rebirth. Rather than fearing the darkness, ancient people held a profound respect and appreciation for its primal importance. They wisely understood that without the dark watery uterus of a woman’s body, an embryo could not develop. They understood that a seed could not germinate in the soil; a compost pile could not recreate itself into fertile soil. Staying for a long time in a dark, damp environment provides a place for early growth. The underworld supplied this place in the imaginations of the ancients. Going to the underworld was an important part of life. Today we try to avoid pain. We have pills and spas all decked out for painkilling. Staying with the pain often times educates a person about themselves and who they really, really are. Pain is not easy but it is an education. Think about the personal pain you have experienced and what you learned from it and what you learned about yourself?
Inanna
The descent into the underworld is a letting go of upperworld concerns. Nowhere is this more clear than in one of the world’s oldest surviving myths, the Sumerian story of Queen Inanna’s descent to the underworld, a story that dates from the third millennium Before the Common Era (BCE). Inanna is an ancient myth about going into the underworld, doing certain tasks, dying, and resurrecting - all with the help and provocation of others. She does not go to the underworld alone but in relationship with others. Before going, she makes serious arrangements with her family and friends.
The Inanna tale dates back to a time when the world was more matrifocal. The root of the word matrifocal is mater meaning mother. In ancient times, it was not unusual for women to have been in places of authority and leadership.
The word anna in the ancient Sumer language, means “mother of all.” The ancient name for the land where this myth originated is Anatolia which means “land of the mothers.” The land and time was very matrifocal, indeed. Interestingly, it is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where we are fighting today. It is the cradle of civilization.
In our story, there are several characters but the two main players are Inanna, Queen Mother of the Upperworld, and her sister Ereshkigal, Queen Mother of the Underworld. So we have upper and lower world queens.
We are told, Inanna decided to journey to meet and console her dark sister Ereshkigal because Ereshkigal was pregnant though she had recently been widowed. Her’s was a life and death existence. Though Inanna had never traveled to the underworld, she was aware that the underworld was the sacred realm of her sister Ereshkigal. Inanna therefore made conscious preparations. She told her female aide Ninshubar to seek help if she did not return in three days. Three is an interesting number. It appears in a lot of fairytales and nursery rhymes. It’s a number of incompleteness. It appears in the story of Christ’s burial and resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. Four is the number of completeness and wholeness as in the four directions and the four seasons.
When Inanna descended into the underworld, Ereshkigal grew furious that her upperworld sister Inanna would dare enter her realm. So, Ereshkigal made her pay and pay dearly to enter.
Inanna chose to descend to the underworld, but she didn’t realize that her sister, Ereshkigal, the dread Queen of the Underworld, would demand that she totally divest herself of all her upperworld identity and dignity. At each of the seven gates leading into the underworld, Neti, the gatekeeper, refused to let Inanna pass until she had stripped off each of her seven precious attributes and relinquished them. First she lost her crown, then her necklace of lapis, then her beads, her breastplate, her bracelet, her scepter, and finally, her royal robe. Only when naked and defenseless, unprotected by her royal persona, is Inanna allowed to appear before the Queen of the Dead. No uniforms here.
Naked and humbled Inanna was judged unfit to live. Ereshkigal stared at her with the eyes of death. She then left Inanna’s corpse to hang upon a peg until it became a piece of rotting flesh. In reference to alcoholism or drug addiction, I cannot help but think of Inanna as being hung out to dry or just simply hung over. In Linda Leonard’s wonderful book Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, she makes just such an analogy. This must be how women feel when they are in the throws of their addiction - hanging like rotting meat. Something cannot rot unless it has had life in the first place,
When Inanna did not return after three days, her female aide Ninshubar sought help from the father gods but most of the father gods were already angry that Inanna had even dared venture to the underworld in the first place and refused to help her, saying, “She went to the Dark City, let her stay there.” Only kind Enki, god of the waters, grieved her absence and responded. From the dirt underneath his finger nails he fashioned two small asexual creatures who slipped into the underworld unnoticed and grieved sympathetically with Ereshkigal, who was by now in labor and about to give birth. Ereshkigal was grateful for their empathy, and in return gave them Inanna’s corpse which they revived with the food and water of life that Enki had given them.
Inanna was then told: “No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.” When we have experienced a bad situation, of any sort, it marks us for the rest of our lives. Demons from the underworld clung to her side, and she was required to send back a substitute to take her place. Refusing to send her faithful feminine aide Ninshubar, she chose instead her husband, Dumuzi, who had been lounging on his throne in comfort. Dumuzi tried to escape the demons, but they found and bound him, stripped him naked, and took him to the underworld. Finally, Dumuzi’s sister agreed to share his fate, and from then on, each spent half the year in the underworld.
This reads like an afternoon soap opera, doesn’t it? Actually, soaps are based on archetypal images.
In a sense, Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal are opposites sides of the same person. Inanna is the queen of the upperworld and Ereshkigal is queen of the underworld. Inanna is representative of consciousness, and Ereshkigal is representative of unconsciousness. They cannot operate alone. They need each other to create wholeness. They need to be in relationship.
Though Ereshkigal has lost her spouse through death, she is pregnant. Pregnancy is a symbol of new life and hope. Perhaps this signifies that Inanna who has died to the conscious world above will also give birth to a new Self. But first she must go through the birthing pains of being stripped naked and hung on a hook to rot.
Persephone
Let’s leave the matrifocal world of ancient Sumeria and enter the more patriarchal world of the Greeks and Romans where women have less power and men are in charge.
In our story of Persephone, as in Inanna, you will notice a similar motif of the need to return to the underworld for part of the year. As we said earlier, going into the underworld need not be a negative time. It can be a time of rejuvenation; a time of quiet and catching one’s breath; a retreat or re-treat. Right now our earth is approaching autumn. Things will be dying, leaves will be falling from the trees. The earth will be going into its rest period getting prepared for the freezing cold and eventual spring thaw. The earth’s cycle is very much like a woman’s body. Women are circuitous. We have our menstrual cycles. The moon has a twenty-eight day cycle just as our bodies do. That is why the moon is a feminine symbol and the sun is a masculine symbol. The moon waxes and wanes every twenty eight days, while the sun is ever bright and shining.
In the story of Persephone we are told that one day the beautiful, fair-haired maiden Persephone was romping on the plains picking flowers with her girlfriends when suddenly, and with no warning, the earth began to tremble. A fissure opened at the place where Persephone stood and a horse-drawn chariot came up from the dark earth. Hades, the god of the underworld leaned over, swooped Persephone into his arms, and took her to the underworld as his new bride and queen. In this story, Persephone had no time to prepare as Inanna had. However, Persephone was not abandoned from above. Her mother Demeter was in close relationship complaining loudly and mournfully about the loss of her daughter as any mother would.
When Persephone’s mother Demeter learned of the abduction, she ragefully appeared before Zeus, the heavenly brother of Hades, demanding the return of her daughter. Stubborn Zeus had struck a bargain with his dark brother Hades allowing him to take Persephone, and Zeus would not relent on his agreement.
In Greek mythology the world is divided into three realms each governed by a patriarchal figure. Zeus governed the heavens; Poseidon governed the waters as you all well know; and Hades governed the underworld. They were in charge of their domains and they worked in tandem to make the world operate to their satisfaction.
In sorrow and mourning, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, roamed the earth grieving the loss of her daughter. In her sorrow, she knew of only one way to persuade Zeus to give Persephone back. So Demeter played her card. Demeter ordered the earth to cease producing. This greatly bothered Zeus because as a result of the earth remaining fallow, there were no sacrifices made to him nor to the other gods. Finally, Zeus gave in and spoke with his dark brother Hades, and they agreed to allow Persephone to return to her mother on one condition. Persephone was to eat nothing as she left the underworld.
Persephone was a young adolescent and, as we know, food often plays a major role in the development of young people. As she waited to reenter the realm of the upper world, we are told she reached over and took the sweet juice from a pomegranate for refreshment. As a result, Persephone’s release now had a stipulation. She would be allowed to return to earth as promised, but she would need to return to the underworld one third of each year to visit her spouse Hades. The Greeks used this story, or spin on a story, to explain the seasons. When spring returns to earth, we are told that Persephone is coming up from the underworld. I used to tell first graders when the tulips and daffodils were sticking up, that was Persephone’s nose poking through the earth.
While in the underworld Persephone learned to be at home and actually fell in love with Hades. She moved about comfortably and settled into a sedate, slow pace of rest and resuscitation. She was queen of the underworld, the bride and companion of Hades. She had fallen in love with her captor.
The phenomenon of falling in love with one’s captor is not unusual even in today’s world. We saw what occurred when Patty Hearst was abducted. She took her captor as her lover. Then when released, and under police protection, she later married her body guard. We remember in the 1950s how employees abducted in a Stockholm bank were kept captive for many days and when released, spoke highly of their captors. In fact, the captive women were angry with the police for their so called mistreatment of the captors. This is often referred to in the study of psychology as the Stockholm Syndrome. It is not unusual that women abused by their partners often defend those very persons when the authorities step in. The abused become partners in an underworld experience. I was once told by Patrick Carnes, a psychologist who works in a famous Arizona recovery program, that ten of the fourteen female abductees married their captors later. It’s one of the unusual things about women when they are in an abusive situation. They find it difficult to extricate themselves from their abuser for many reasons - financial fears, more abuse, what will happen to me and my children? They think, for them, t might be easier to just stay in this abusive situation. On the other hand, often when they leave an abusive relationship, they turn around and marry someone just like the first abuser.
Psyche
Our next story is the story of Psyche another example of a feminine journey to the underworld.
Notice as I tell the story of Psyche that she is in constant relationship with someone. Particularly notice how she navigates her journey to the underworld, not alone, but with the help of others.
The tale of Eros and Psyche is probably one of the most frequently emulated stories in the world. Movies, poetry, operas, plays, literature, and daytime soap operas are based on the archetypal image of lovers separated, rejoined, and then returned to a state of bliss. Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful rendition of the archetype of Eros and Psyche, as is Westside Story, as is the Irish tale of Tristan and Iseult. Eros is also known as Cupid, and we celebrate the myth of Eros and Psyche on Valentine’s Day. Often times, you will see paintings of Eros and Psyche in Art Museums, and in the corner of the canvas will be a small angel with a blindfold on his eyes. This is to show that Love Is Blind. Eros is the god who makes us fall madly in love. The story relates that Eros has a potent substance on the tip of his arrows. When we fall madly in love, we have been struck by his arrow, and the substance has entered our systems. Think about when you have fallen in love. Don’t you do crazy things? Aren’t you obsessed with the beloved? Love is a drug. It does things to the chemistry in our brain. You’ve been struck by the arrow of Eros.
The story of Psyche tells us that she is the last daughter born to a poor family with two older sisters. Sounds like Cinderella. As Psyche matures she becomes absolutely beautiful, beautiful to the point that a whole cult evolves around her. Human worshippers changed their allegiance from the goddess of love Aphrodite, also known in Roman mythology as Venus, to this mere mortal beauty, Psyche. Aphrodite’s temples fell into neglect. Shy Psyche is taunted by all this adulation. Though Psyche is worshipped for her beauty, she is never chosen for a marriage partner. We see this happen in high school where the prettiest girl is not asked to the prom. She is so pretty that the guys are afraid that she will reject them, so no one asks her out
Psyche’s family is concerned about the marital future of their daughter, and her father consults an oracle, a fortune teller, who prophesizes that this youngest daughter will some day marry a monster. Fearful, the father sends Psyche to the top of a mountain where the gods will protect her. Doesn’t that make sense that her father should send her to a mountain top? Find a higher power, honey.
One day while the god Eros, son of Aphrodite, is wandering about the mountain he spots Psyche, and because he has accidentally wounded himself with one of his own potent arrows, he falls deeply in love with her, and asks her to marry him. This of course angers Aphrodite because not only has Aphrodite lost her following to this mortal woman named Psyche, but now Aphrodite’s own son has fallen in love with this beautiful young woman. Aphrodite doesn’t know about the marriage yet.
Psyche’s father agrees to allow his daughter to marry the god Eros but Eros creates a prenuptial agreement, and this is it: Psyche may lay with him during the night, but in the morning she must leave their marriage bed, returning only in the dark of the evening. She may not look upon his face. Why, you ask? Because he is a god and any mortal who looks upon the face of a god will die.
Psyche lives comfortably with this agreement and sees nothing wrong. However, after a time, she grows lonely and bored in her opulent lifestyle and invites her two sisters to visit. They see what she has, and how she lives, and are very jealous of the love she tells them she feels. They tell her that Eros must be a monster because he will not allow her to see his face. They encourage Psyche to steal into the bedroom while Eros is asleep, and with a lighted oil lamp, she is encouraged to pull the covers back and gaze upon his face.
Early the next evening, Psyche enters Eros’s bedchamber. In her hand is a lamp to help her get a better glimpse of him. She leans over his sleeping body and in doing so is wounded by one of his arrows. At the same time, a drop of oil drips from the lamp and lands on the shoulder of Eros. Surprised by this sudden intrusion, Eros leaps up in all his god glory and runs home to his mother Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is furious with Eros for secretly marrying Psyche, and she is still more angry with Psyche because of her beauty. In retaliation for Psyche’s poor judgment and disobedience to the marriage agreement, Aphrodite metes out four severe and near impossible tasks which Psyche must perform. If Psyche can be strong through these trials, she may win back the favor of Aphrodite and the love of Eros. If not, death will be her punishment.
The number four is a repeated motif in this story. Psyche has four tasks, she has four helpers, she carries four things into the underworld, and she meets four individuals on her journey to the underworld.
As a symbolic number, four is closely associated with the square and the cross. It is the number of the four cardinal directions (north south east and west); the four seasons (winter, spring, summer and autumn); the elements (air, earth, fire, water); the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); the four stages of life (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). Generally, four is considered a symbol of wholeness.
In the story of Psyche, if you listen closely, you will hear reference to the four elements of earth, water, wind and fire.
In the first of her four tasks, Psyche is required to sift and organize a large pile of seeds by morning. She is assisted by ants. Ants are bodies from the earth.
The second task requires her to gather fleece from grazing rams. Reeds that grow along the banks of the river talk to her and tell her how to get the fleece by waiting until the rams have retired to their barn. She can then gather the loosened wool from the brambles and the fence.
The third task requires Psyche to scoop up water from the river Styx. An eagle flies to her aid and gathers the water for her. The eagle depends on the wind for its survival.
Lastly, Psyche is to get a box of beauty ointment from Persephone in Hades. A tower talks her through the fiery process. Psyche is on a journey toward wholeness, if she can survive.
When Psyche has suffered enough and accomplished these four tasks with the kind help of others, she leaves the underworld to find Eros waiting for her. They reunite and Zeus changes her from a mere mortal into a Divine goddess. Eros and Psyche have a daughter they name Bliss and they live happily ever after.
Summary
What strikes me about the three feminine mythological journeys is the fact that all of the main characters were in need of the kind support of others to help them survive their ordeals. With reference to those who participate in recovery programs, a person initially can find it hard to fight the battle of their addiction alone. That is why a new member of any recovery program is encouraged to find a sponsor (from the Latin sponsa), someone who can partner the recovering person in their heroic journey through the underworld.
Why Differentiate Between Masculine and Feminine Spirituality?
Is there a difference in the way men and women develop spiritually? Is there a need to honor the feminine way? As mentioned earlier, Carol Gilligan and her researchers have shown us, through their research, that women tend to approach relationships in a circuitous fashion. Men tend to think and speak in a more linear fashion. Both men and women get to the same destination but with different modes of approach. If a relationship approach with human beings can be different for women and men, might then a relationship with a Divine be just as different?
Several years ago, my spouse, Tom Lavin, and I were giving a talk to a group of spiritual seekers in Ireland. I began the talk with images of going in the direction of the dark, chthonic underworld. Tom then talked about the hero’s journey above. Our purpose was to balance and make inclusive the archetypal image of journeying from both a male and a female perspective. Our aim was to help the audience understand the need to go in both directions - to the upper world and to the underworld. After our presentations, a gentleman in the audience, who obviously was not listening to me, asked a question of my spouse. He said, “I belong to a men’s study group and, recently, we have found ourselves stuck in the dark. Could you shed some light on our dilemma?” Those were his exact words! Tom turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and said he would defer the question to me. I simply responded, “What’s wrong with the dark? If you stay there, you may learn some very valuable lessons.” Men tend to want to get out of the dark, they want to be “enlightened”; women, though they do not necessarily like the dark, are able to navigate a dark situation longer. Perhaps this has something to do with the symbolism of the moon and sun that I spoke of earlier. The moon waxes and wanes, but the sun is forever shining. The male may need to always be in the light, while the moon is satisfied with being in the dark sometimes. Jungian analyst, Betty Meador (1992) explained this in her book Uncursing the Darkness. She wrote:
Our own American culture, built on Judeo-Christian monotheism, carries a strong bias against the dark, against chaos, the dark side of order, against the cyclic which includes waxing and waning, against the feminine as it is related to the dark, and ultimately against the containing of opposites in favor of the light only. (p. 118)
A Vision for the New Millennium
For decades, women have accommodated and adjusted to the direction prescribed by recovery programs and everyone else. The dominant admonition of recovery programs is to find a “higher power.” This may be appropriate and helpful to many people, but some women may be comfortable with their underworld experience and need to be encouraged to sit with it and be as comfortable in it as possible, remembering they can bare the unbearable if they are in relationship with someone else - a therapist, a friend, a lover, a parent, a sponsor. As we enter this new millennium, we as health care providers have the responsibility to be inclusive and open to all venues when escorting those in recovery/discovery. We need to be open to new possibilities and new directions for envisioning the recovery process. It is extremely important to honor individual ways of approaching a spiritual path. There is no right way, nor wrong way, nor only way.
References
Anonymous. (l996, February). No secondhand gods. AA Grapevine: Our Meeting in Print, pp. 14-15.
Arnold, M. (1961). Poetry and criticism of Matthew Arnold. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.
Bauer, J. (1985). Alcoholism and women: The background and the psychology. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Carotenuto, A. (1979). The spiral way: A woman’s healing journey. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Cobb, N. (1992). Archetypal imagination: Glimpses of the gods in life and art. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson, R. A. (1989). She: Understanding feminine psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Jung, C. G., & Wilson. W. ( January 1968) Vol 24 # 8 Bill W./C.G. Jung Letters. Grapevine, pp. 16-21. (Original work published 1963).
Jung, C. G. (1993). Psychology and alchemy, CW 12, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1975). C.G. Jung letters: Vol. 2, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kirkpatrick, J. (1978). Turnabout: Help for a new life. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Kirkpatrick J. (1981). A fresh start, Dubuque: Kendell/Hunt Publishing Company.
Kirkpatrick, J. (1986). Goodbye hangovers, hello life: Self-help for women. New York: Atheneum.
Kirkpatrick J. (1990). On the road to sell recovery. Quakertown, PA: Women for Recovery.
Kurtz, E. (1998). Not God: A history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, MN.: Hazelden.
Lavin, T. P. (1998). Return of the Spirit. Lapis: The Inner Meaning of Contemporary Life, 7, pp. 77-81.
Leonard. L. S. (1990). Witness to the fire: Creativity and the veil of addiction. Boston: Shambhala.
Matthews, B. (1986). The Herder symbol dictionary: Symbols from art, archaeology, mythology, literature and religions. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Meier, C. A. (1989). Healing dream and ritual. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag.
Meador, B. D. (1992). Uncursing the dark: Treasures from the underworld. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Neumann, E. (1956). Amor and Psyche: The psychic development of the feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Hare-Lavin, M.E. (2000). Finding a “lower, deeper power” for women in recovery. Counseling and Values, 44, 198-212.
Osborne, M. P. (1989). Favorite Greek myths. New York: Scholastic Inc.
Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the goddess: A way of initiation for women. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Stevens, A. (1995). Private myths: Dreams and dreaming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Psalm 42, verse 1
As a doe longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, the God of my life, where shall I go to see the face of God?
First Commandment
I am thy Lord thy God and thou shalt have no gods before me.
Introduction
In downtown Chicago there is a marvelous building called The Board of Trade Building. It is here that grain and wheat were traded as commodities. Atop the building is a beautiful art deco statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. In her hands are wheat and grain. It is from her we get the name for cereal. The Greeks had the same goddess image, but they called her Demeter. I prefer to use the Greek name Demeter because somehow the name Demeter sounds to me like “da mutter.” Here in Chicago we have da cubs, da bears, and da mudder.
At any rate, when the construction people placed Demeter at the top of this building in the 1930s she could be admired from afar but no one could see that she had no face, that is until recently when taller office buildings began to be constructed around the Board of Trade. Contemporary employees, while looking out from their windows exclaimed, “She has no face!” Indeed, she is senseless. She has no ears, no nose, no eyes and no mouth. I wondered if this statue might be a metaphor for modern women’s lack of connection with a feminine Divine? I asked myself, “When the importance of the goddess vanished and patriarchy took over church and government, did women lose their voices?”
Have we women and men lost our own sense of the divine feminine power and have we bought into a myopic, singular, male power? Just a question I asked myself.
Recovery/Discovery
In a sense all of us are daily in a stage of recovery because of some conflict in our lives. Because we are human we have human foibles. We may drink too much, we may experience bad relations, we lose jobs, we have bad health, we have eating disorders, our foibles are often innumerable, and most of us don’t even want to visit our foibles.
In recovery programs of all stripes, people are encouraged to find a Higher Power. (Personally, I am not fond of the word “recovery.” I prefer the word “discovery,” because anyone who has gone through the pain of coming back from a bad experience has discovered something about themselves. To recover makes me think of covering over again. RE-COVER. Discoverers, on the other hand, uncover things; we learn things about ourselves when we are in discovery.)
Alcoholics Anonymous: An Example of the Absence of the Feminine
Both my spouse Tom Lavin and I are Clinical Psychologists. Tom is a Jungian Analyst as well and he was called upon several years ago to give the keynote talk at a conference on Alcoholism at the New York Open Center. I sat in the audience of counselors and therapists, mostly women, listening to the presentations from an all-male panel describing the heroic journeys of recovering alcoholics. The analogous heroic journeys were those of Christ, Buddha, Moses, Icarus, King Arthur, and others. The journeys of Moses, Christ, Odysseus, Icarus, Parsifal, and all the other male mythological figures are marvelous examples of heroism, but what of the heroic feminine journey? Christ and Moses went up the mountain; Icarus flew high up in the sky. Going up is a male image or motif. I thought to myself, “These speakers are talking about journeys in life but they are describing journeying through a male prism.” My question at the time was, “Don’t women journey? Where are the stories about women’s journeys? Though women psychically accommodate to these male images and the lessons imparted, they often are left unmoved and unable to relate to these images as part of their unique heroic/recovery journeys.
A New Vision for the Next Millennium
After the alcohol conference in New York I returned home feeling pulled to understand feminine spiritual direction. I wondered, “Were there stories that depicted feminine heroism and did the feminine journey in another direction?” I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Stanzas From ‘The Grand Chartreuse,’” in which he wrote:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn (Arnold, 1961, p.187).
Arnold wrote these words around the same time that Nietzsche was grappling with the idea that God was dead. Both Arnold and Nietzsche longed for a new vision of the Divine. The God, as they experienced him, was no longer relevant.
As we enter a new millennium we need to be open and nonjudgemental to new possibilities of envisioning the Divine. For centuries women have adapted, accommodated, and adjusted to directions handed down from a more patriarchal society. Women should be free to accept this more male image if they so like, but they should also be free to develop images and directives of their own if they are not comfortable with the generally prescribed direction. Otherwise, we are caught in that awful curse called Fundamentalism.
Please understand, I am not dismissing the imagery of recovery programs. I am simply suggesting that women may need other images to rely on. A “higher power” may not necessarily be relevant to the feminine way of recovery. Some women may find descending to align with a “lower, deeper power” more relevant.
Jung and the Development of AA
nJung, Alcoholics Anonymous, And Drug Seeking Behaviour - YouTube
Since the 1940s, through the implementation of the 12 steps, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped many recovering persons remain sober and find peace by encouraging them to connect with a “higher power.” The use of the 12 steps has branched out and become useful in many forms of recovery other than just alcohol. The difficulty, as I see it, is that AA is a predominantly male-oriented path to recovery. The tenets of AA are stereotypically geared toward the way men recover. And that is, no doubt, because AA was originally developed by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, both men. You can read all about the history of Roland H,. Dr. Bob, and Bill W. in a book by Ernest Kurtz entitled Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous. There were no women in the embryonic stages of AA during the 1930s. Nor were there any women in the Oxford Movement in England. So the language and ideas and approach to recovery are, by nature, masculine. It could not be anything else.
To get an idea of where the concept of a “High Power” came from let me quickly tell you a story. Roland H., a wealthy businessman from Vermont, who survived the economic depression, worked with Jung in analysis in Zurich. A year after he returned to the United States, Roland relapsed. He is reported to have visited Jung once again in Zurich to go back into analysis. Jung was very forthright with Roland H. and told him that he could do nothing for him. Jung suggested that if he found a group with a spiritual basis, he might find some way of avoiding the desire to drink. Jung had no scientific theories about alcohol or recovery.
However, many of you may know that Carl G. Jung was pivotal in the development of AA. He worked therapeutically with Roland H. and later corresponded with Bill Wilson, the founder of AA. It was Jung’s theory that when we lose our Spirit (uppercase S), we may turn to spirits (lower case s). Jung used the Latin phrase Spiritus Contra Spiritum to explain what he thought about addiction. The English translation is: The spirits against the Spirit. Spirits, with a lower case “s” meaning a mind-altering substance; and Spirit with an upper case “S” meaning inner force or inner Divine. When we lose interest or inspiration in life we may turn to mind-altering substances or ways of behaving to alleviate the pain or loss, but the use of spirits can be counterproductive. There are many addictions both substantive and behavioral such as shopping, sex, eating, and overworking. All of these, if used to excess or used inappropriately, can initially ease pain or loss; they can give a “high” at first, but in the end there is the let down. As most of you know, people who have a drink when they want a “pick me up,” are actually choosing the wrong substance, because alcohol in reality, is a depressant.
In her book Witness to the fire: Creativity and the veil of addiction Jungian analyst and writer Linda Leonard took the word addiction apart. She wrote that the etymology of the word addiction comes from the Latin addicere. Dicere means “word.” We hear it in predict, dictate, dictionary. The Romans called their slaves addictus meaning: “one who has no voice; no vote.” An addict has indeed given over their voting voice to a substance or a way of behavior. The addict is a slave. He or she is not in charge; it is the substance or way of being that has the power over the person. This is perhaps the reason why AA encourages people in recovery to find a “higher power” a real Pick Me Up.
No Second Hand Gods
The following story is from Grapevine magazine (February 1996). It was anonymously written by a woman who experienced negativity when she expressed a desire to go in a direction other than the one prescribed by AA. She was searching for a “lower power.” It shows how one woman experienced her own image of power for her journey toward sobriety and that the image was not necessarily consistent with the conventional “higher power.” She met with harshness but weathered the experience. It is a story about the one-sidedness of an organization, perhaps even an example of the one-sidedness of organized religion today. The article is an outcry against fundamentalist thinking. Permission to publish this article was obtained from Grapevine magazine.
“No Secondhand Gods”
I came to Alcoholics Anonymous beaten by gin and depression, barely clinging to a thin and unhappy belief in God and trying desperately to talk myself back into my childhood faith. It wasn’t working.
I was an ex-nun whose faith had fallen apart in the convent - partly because the order’s strict policy on alcohol had prevented me, for the first sustained period in my adult life, from drinking away troublesome doubts and questions.
The first thing AA people told me about spirituality stopped me cold: they told me if I wanted to live, I needed an honest relationship with an honestly envisioned Higher Power. Ill-fitting secondhand Gods need not apply. I found this both liberating and terrifying. Terrifying because I’d been taught to hang onto my religion like grim death whether I felt honest doing it or not; liberating once I discovered I was genuinely more afraid of drinking again than of going to hell for unbelief.
The ensuing few years were an incredible revelation. My sponsor has an interest in comparative religion, and some of her books introduced me to a marvelous new faith, one that made me exclaim, “So that’s what I’ve been all my life!” I became a practitioner and eventually a clergywoman of this faith, and it has given me the sort of relationship with my Deeper (for me, a better term than Higher) Power I could only have dreamed of.
Nevertheless, I have a solid granite derriere on the subject of keeping religion per se out of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I’ve never gone to meetings and tried to preach my religion to anyone. I’ve seen the damage that can do to groups and the confusion and pain it can cause newcomers.
But I do try to be honest about my Deeper Power, and it isn’t easy. You see, I envision that Power as female, and I call her Goddess, not God. And in some AA meetings, you’d think I’d thrown a stinkbomb into the circle every time I refer to my Deeper Power in this way.
I was careful where I began saying it. For the most part, my home group didn’t mind the new phrasing, so I tried it out at another meeting where I’d heard various people’s Powers referred to as God, Allah, the Tao, the Great Maybe, and Eddie. All had gotten reasonable respect, even Eddie, so I was totally unprepared for the roar of derisive laughter that greeted me when I spoke one evening of “the Goddess as I understand Her.”
I was thunderstruck, and tears came to my eyes. “I nearly died trying to find a Power I could believe in,” I told them. “I would never laugh at yours; please don’t laugh at mine.”
I tried it again at other meetings. At about a third of the meetings, I got either ridicule or after-meeting conversation pitches. I wondered if it was just my area that was unusually closed to the idea, until I began hearing stories from other women of my faith on the Internet. All confirmed my impression that female deity-language is the one kind that routinely elicits laughter or hostility (“You’ll go to hell for that New Age stuff, you know!”) at AA meetings.
For awhile, I tried dancing around the issue with terms like “the Creator” and “the Divine.” I didn’t wear my religion’s symbol around my neck at meetings, even though some Christians and Jews often wore theirs. Eventually, I stopped dancing; that’s one tango not required of the more “mainstream” believers in our ranks, and I truly don’t understand why it should be required of anyone.
I’ve watched for years now as this problem has driven desperately ill newcomers away from the program. They have had to fight the prevailing society so hard for a faith that fits, and it is so hard for them to face being laughed at or scorned for it in what is supposed to be a place of safety when they’re barely out of detox.
Please, next time you’re tempted to have a contemptuous (and audible) reaction to somebody else’s deity, think: if it’s what’s keeping her alive, do you really want to knock it down?
Anonymous, Kentucky (Grapevine, February 1996, pp. 14-15)
Understanding the Direction of the Feminine Through Story
Tell me a fact and I'll learn.
Tell me the truth and I'll believe.
But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.
Indian Proverb
Great art and great literature are often based on ancient myths and stories. “Myths . . . portray a collective image; they tell us about things that are true for all people.” Stories can work at an individual level, or they can be part of the collective understanding. Stories help us to understand and they touch us subtly. By hearing a story we can draw conclusions, we can see parallels in our lives, and we can compare. By listening to stories we thread together legends and mysteries that help us to understand our past, our present, and our future. Stories help us to cope and to relate to a particular mystery in our lives. It’s the stories told and heard at AA meetings and other recovery meetings that make the programs work. When a patient I am working with says he or she does not like to go to meetings, I insist they continue going - not to talk, just to listen to the stories - to be reminded of what others before them have gone through. It’s the stories that heal.
The Greeks and Romans were masters at creating stories. They had no grasp or understanding of science so they supplemented explanations for natural or relational phenomenon with stories using Gods and Goddesses as the main characters. If someone asked, “What is that noise in the sky during a rainstorm?” they’d probably respond, “Oh, that’s just Zeus throwing his thunderbolts in anger.” There were no scientific explanations; just stories. They used stories and myths to explain the complications and natural phenomenon of everyday living such as weather, loving, hating, warring. You name it, the Greeks and Romans had a story for it. If you pay attention to the unfolding story of Jessica Lynch’s experience, you can see why this touches the archetypal core of the American public. Even her homecoming was touching, and it was orchestrated to be that way. She carries the archetype of the wounded hero in feminine form. Notice she is always shown in uniform, never in her drab hospital gear. Today we might call what we read in the newspapers, and hear on the news SPIN, well things haven’t changed much since the Romans and Greeks. The Greeks and Romans did pretty much the same thing. They told stories to explain a phenomenon. They too were spinners.
My Search for Feminine Heroic Stories
In my search for heroic feminine stories of journeying, I found many myths that depicted the feminine direction of the search for meaning to be that of going to a deeper power found in the underworld experience. I found that no stories depicted women traveling upward - except in the patriarchal Roman Catholic story about the Blessed Mother. Mary is said to be the mother of Jesus, and at her death she is depicted as being assumed up into heaven. She did not go there searching for pain relief. She was simply taken up. She did not go up on her own power; she was assumed into heaven by divine power.
What I want you to notice in the stories is that all of the women who go to the underworld are accompanied by someone or something else. They do not go to the underworld alone. They are in a relationship! This is very important to what I am trying to say today, because Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Stone Center in Philadelphia did much research on young women and how they express themselves. The researchers found that young girls are always in relationships. A young woman’s self-esteem, her idea of herself, depends upon her relationships and how she relates. The stories validate Carol Gilligan’s research. Women are relational! Women are sustained by their relationships with others. For those of you who are interested, you can find Gilligan’s marvelous research explained in her popular book In a Different Voice.
As you know, there are also several wonderful stories of men going to the underworld. We find the male theme of descent into the underworld (and the return) occurring in the epic of Gilgamesh, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, however, going to the underworld is not the commonly accepted direction of the hero’s journey. Men are usually depicted as going up. Climbing a mountain is one of the usual archetypal motifs. The Christian Passion includes Christ climbing Calvary, and the laws were given to Moses after he had climbed Mount Sinai. The top of the mountain is a place of revelation, a place where one is closer to the gods and can see more. My goal today is to try to incorporate three ancient stories from mythology that depict the feminine journey of going to the underworld with the hope that these stories of feminine journeys will give us an archetypal basis for a more feminine heroic connection with the Divine at a deeper level. It would be interesting to speak with Jessica Lynch today and have her tell her stories of depression; about how important her relationships are to her to carry her through her underground experiences.
Our first story is the ancient myth of Inanna found etched on a slab excavated in the 1920’s in ruins near Turkey and Sumeria, the area we refer to as Mesopotamia or more recently Iraq. It is located near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It is from this same location that the wonderful Gilgamesh epic was uncovered - also a wonderful story of going to the underworld, but the Gilgamesh epic is a male’s journey.
The next two myths we will discuss are probably more familiar to you. They the stories of Persephone and Psyche. It is from Psyche that we get our word for Psychology. Psyche was Eros’ anima or soulmate. If you take the word apart - psyche means soul and ology means “study of.” Therefore Psychology is “the study of soul.”
Although the Greeks and the Romans had similar stories, I have chosen the Greek version of these myths. The archetype is the same whether told as a Greek myth or told as a Roman myth.
The Underworld Journey
In ancient times, stories of journeys to the underworld were common. The underworld was not necessarily a place for the dead. It was not hell, as we know it in our culture today. Rather it was a laboratory, a place of learning, a cauldron for rebirth. Rather than fearing the darkness, ancient people held a profound respect and appreciation for its primal importance. They wisely understood that without the dark watery uterus of a woman’s body, an embryo could not develop. They understood that a seed could not germinate in the soil; a compost pile could not recreate itself into fertile soil. Staying for a long time in a dark, damp environment provides a place for early growth. The underworld supplied this place in the imaginations of the ancients. Going to the underworld was an important part of life. Today we try to avoid pain. We have pills and spas all decked out for painkilling. Staying with the pain often times educates a person about themselves and who they really, really are. Pain is not easy but it is an education. Think about the personal pain you have experienced and what you learned from it and what you learned about yourself?
Inanna
The descent into the underworld is a letting go of upperworld concerns. Nowhere is this more clear than in one of the world’s oldest surviving myths, the Sumerian story of Queen Inanna’s descent to the underworld, a story that dates from the third millennium Before the Common Era (BCE). Inanna is an ancient myth about going into the underworld, doing certain tasks, dying, and resurrecting - all with the help and provocation of others. She does not go to the underworld alone but in relationship with others. Before going, she makes serious arrangements with her family and friends.
The Inanna tale dates back to a time when the world was more matrifocal. The root of the word matrifocal is mater meaning mother. In ancient times, it was not unusual for women to have been in places of authority and leadership.
The word anna in the ancient Sumer language, means “mother of all.” The ancient name for the land where this myth originated is Anatolia which means “land of the mothers.” The land and time was very matrifocal, indeed. Interestingly, it is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where we are fighting today. It is the cradle of civilization.
In our story, there are several characters but the two main players are Inanna, Queen Mother of the Upperworld, and her sister Ereshkigal, Queen Mother of the Underworld. So we have upper and lower world queens.
We are told, Inanna decided to journey to meet and console her dark sister Ereshkigal because Ereshkigal was pregnant though she had recently been widowed. Her’s was a life and death existence. Though Inanna had never traveled to the underworld, she was aware that the underworld was the sacred realm of her sister Ereshkigal. Inanna therefore made conscious preparations. She told her female aide Ninshubar to seek help if she did not return in three days. Three is an interesting number. It appears in a lot of fairytales and nursery rhymes. It’s a number of incompleteness. It appears in the story of Christ’s burial and resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. Four is the number of completeness and wholeness as in the four directions and the four seasons.
When Inanna descended into the underworld, Ereshkigal grew furious that her upperworld sister Inanna would dare enter her realm. So, Ereshkigal made her pay and pay dearly to enter.
Inanna chose to descend to the underworld, but she didn’t realize that her sister, Ereshkigal, the dread Queen of the Underworld, would demand that she totally divest herself of all her upperworld identity and dignity. At each of the seven gates leading into the underworld, Neti, the gatekeeper, refused to let Inanna pass until she had stripped off each of her seven precious attributes and relinquished them. First she lost her crown, then her necklace of lapis, then her beads, her breastplate, her bracelet, her scepter, and finally, her royal robe. Only when naked and defenseless, unprotected by her royal persona, is Inanna allowed to appear before the Queen of the Dead. No uniforms here.
Naked and humbled Inanna was judged unfit to live. Ereshkigal stared at her with the eyes of death. She then left Inanna’s corpse to hang upon a peg until it became a piece of rotting flesh. In reference to alcoholism or drug addiction, I cannot help but think of Inanna as being hung out to dry or just simply hung over. In Linda Leonard’s wonderful book Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, she makes just such an analogy. This must be how women feel when they are in the throws of their addiction - hanging like rotting meat. Something cannot rot unless it has had life in the first place,
When Inanna did not return after three days, her female aide Ninshubar sought help from the father gods but most of the father gods were already angry that Inanna had even dared venture to the underworld in the first place and refused to help her, saying, “She went to the Dark City, let her stay there.” Only kind Enki, god of the waters, grieved her absence and responded. From the dirt underneath his finger nails he fashioned two small asexual creatures who slipped into the underworld unnoticed and grieved sympathetically with Ereshkigal, who was by now in labor and about to give birth. Ereshkigal was grateful for their empathy, and in return gave them Inanna’s corpse which they revived with the food and water of life that Enki had given them.
Inanna was then told: “No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.” When we have experienced a bad situation, of any sort, it marks us for the rest of our lives. Demons from the underworld clung to her side, and she was required to send back a substitute to take her place. Refusing to send her faithful feminine aide Ninshubar, she chose instead her husband, Dumuzi, who had been lounging on his throne in comfort. Dumuzi tried to escape the demons, but they found and bound him, stripped him naked, and took him to the underworld. Finally, Dumuzi’s sister agreed to share his fate, and from then on, each spent half the year in the underworld.
This reads like an afternoon soap opera, doesn’t it? Actually, soaps are based on archetypal images.
In a sense, Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal are opposites sides of the same person. Inanna is the queen of the upperworld and Ereshkigal is queen of the underworld. Inanna is representative of consciousness, and Ereshkigal is representative of unconsciousness. They cannot operate alone. They need each other to create wholeness. They need to be in relationship.
Though Ereshkigal has lost her spouse through death, she is pregnant. Pregnancy is a symbol of new life and hope. Perhaps this signifies that Inanna who has died to the conscious world above will also give birth to a new Self. But first she must go through the birthing pains of being stripped naked and hung on a hook to rot.
Persephone
Let’s leave the matrifocal world of ancient Sumeria and enter the more patriarchal world of the Greeks and Romans where women have less power and men are in charge.
In our story of Persephone, as in Inanna, you will notice a similar motif of the need to return to the underworld for part of the year. As we said earlier, going into the underworld need not be a negative time. It can be a time of rejuvenation; a time of quiet and catching one’s breath; a retreat or re-treat. Right now our earth is approaching autumn. Things will be dying, leaves will be falling from the trees. The earth will be going into its rest period getting prepared for the freezing cold and eventual spring thaw. The earth’s cycle is very much like a woman’s body. Women are circuitous. We have our menstrual cycles. The moon has a twenty-eight day cycle just as our bodies do. That is why the moon is a feminine symbol and the sun is a masculine symbol. The moon waxes and wanes every twenty eight days, while the sun is ever bright and shining.
In the story of Persephone we are told that one day the beautiful, fair-haired maiden Persephone was romping on the plains picking flowers with her girlfriends when suddenly, and with no warning, the earth began to tremble. A fissure opened at the place where Persephone stood and a horse-drawn chariot came up from the dark earth. Hades, the god of the underworld leaned over, swooped Persephone into his arms, and took her to the underworld as his new bride and queen. In this story, Persephone had no time to prepare as Inanna had. However, Persephone was not abandoned from above. Her mother Demeter was in close relationship complaining loudly and mournfully about the loss of her daughter as any mother would.
When Persephone’s mother Demeter learned of the abduction, she ragefully appeared before Zeus, the heavenly brother of Hades, demanding the return of her daughter. Stubborn Zeus had struck a bargain with his dark brother Hades allowing him to take Persephone, and Zeus would not relent on his agreement.
In Greek mythology the world is divided into three realms each governed by a patriarchal figure. Zeus governed the heavens; Poseidon governed the waters as you all well know; and Hades governed the underworld. They were in charge of their domains and they worked in tandem to make the world operate to their satisfaction.
In sorrow and mourning, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, roamed the earth grieving the loss of her daughter. In her sorrow, she knew of only one way to persuade Zeus to give Persephone back. So Demeter played her card. Demeter ordered the earth to cease producing. This greatly bothered Zeus because as a result of the earth remaining fallow, there were no sacrifices made to him nor to the other gods. Finally, Zeus gave in and spoke with his dark brother Hades, and they agreed to allow Persephone to return to her mother on one condition. Persephone was to eat nothing as she left the underworld.
Persephone was a young adolescent and, as we know, food often plays a major role in the development of young people. As she waited to reenter the realm of the upper world, we are told she reached over and took the sweet juice from a pomegranate for refreshment. As a result, Persephone’s release now had a stipulation. She would be allowed to return to earth as promised, but she would need to return to the underworld one third of each year to visit her spouse Hades. The Greeks used this story, or spin on a story, to explain the seasons. When spring returns to earth, we are told that Persephone is coming up from the underworld. I used to tell first graders when the tulips and daffodils were sticking up, that was Persephone’s nose poking through the earth.
While in the underworld Persephone learned to be at home and actually fell in love with Hades. She moved about comfortably and settled into a sedate, slow pace of rest and resuscitation. She was queen of the underworld, the bride and companion of Hades. She had fallen in love with her captor.
The phenomenon of falling in love with one’s captor is not unusual even in today’s world. We saw what occurred when Patty Hearst was abducted. She took her captor as her lover. Then when released, and under police protection, she later married her body guard. We remember in the 1950s how employees abducted in a Stockholm bank were kept captive for many days and when released, spoke highly of their captors. In fact, the captive women were angry with the police for their so called mistreatment of the captors. This is often referred to in the study of psychology as the Stockholm Syndrome. It is not unusual that women abused by their partners often defend those very persons when the authorities step in. The abused become partners in an underworld experience. I was once told by Patrick Carnes, a psychologist who works in a famous Arizona recovery program, that ten of the fourteen female abductees married their captors later. It’s one of the unusual things about women when they are in an abusive situation. They find it difficult to extricate themselves from their abuser for many reasons - financial fears, more abuse, what will happen to me and my children? They think, for them, t might be easier to just stay in this abusive situation. On the other hand, often when they leave an abusive relationship, they turn around and marry someone just like the first abuser.
Psyche
Our next story is the story of Psyche another example of a feminine journey to the underworld.
Notice as I tell the story of Psyche that she is in constant relationship with someone. Particularly notice how she navigates her journey to the underworld, not alone, but with the help of others.
The tale of Eros and Psyche is probably one of the most frequently emulated stories in the world. Movies, poetry, operas, plays, literature, and daytime soap operas are based on the archetypal image of lovers separated, rejoined, and then returned to a state of bliss. Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful rendition of the archetype of Eros and Psyche, as is Westside Story, as is the Irish tale of Tristan and Iseult. Eros is also known as Cupid, and we celebrate the myth of Eros and Psyche on Valentine’s Day. Often times, you will see paintings of Eros and Psyche in Art Museums, and in the corner of the canvas will be a small angel with a blindfold on his eyes. This is to show that Love Is Blind. Eros is the god who makes us fall madly in love. The story relates that Eros has a potent substance on the tip of his arrows. When we fall madly in love, we have been struck by his arrow, and the substance has entered our systems. Think about when you have fallen in love. Don’t you do crazy things? Aren’t you obsessed with the beloved? Love is a drug. It does things to the chemistry in our brain. You’ve been struck by the arrow of Eros.
The story of Psyche tells us that she is the last daughter born to a poor family with two older sisters. Sounds like Cinderella. As Psyche matures she becomes absolutely beautiful, beautiful to the point that a whole cult evolves around her. Human worshippers changed their allegiance from the goddess of love Aphrodite, also known in Roman mythology as Venus, to this mere mortal beauty, Psyche. Aphrodite’s temples fell into neglect. Shy Psyche is taunted by all this adulation. Though Psyche is worshipped for her beauty, she is never chosen for a marriage partner. We see this happen in high school where the prettiest girl is not asked to the prom. She is so pretty that the guys are afraid that she will reject them, so no one asks her out
Psyche’s family is concerned about the marital future of their daughter, and her father consults an oracle, a fortune teller, who prophesizes that this youngest daughter will some day marry a monster. Fearful, the father sends Psyche to the top of a mountain where the gods will protect her. Doesn’t that make sense that her father should send her to a mountain top? Find a higher power, honey.
One day while the god Eros, son of Aphrodite, is wandering about the mountain he spots Psyche, and because he has accidentally wounded himself with one of his own potent arrows, he falls deeply in love with her, and asks her to marry him. This of course angers Aphrodite because not only has Aphrodite lost her following to this mortal woman named Psyche, but now Aphrodite’s own son has fallen in love with this beautiful young woman. Aphrodite doesn’t know about the marriage yet.
Psyche’s father agrees to allow his daughter to marry the god Eros but Eros creates a prenuptial agreement, and this is it: Psyche may lay with him during the night, but in the morning she must leave their marriage bed, returning only in the dark of the evening. She may not look upon his face. Why, you ask? Because he is a god and any mortal who looks upon the face of a god will die.
Psyche lives comfortably with this agreement and sees nothing wrong. However, after a time, she grows lonely and bored in her opulent lifestyle and invites her two sisters to visit. They see what she has, and how she lives, and are very jealous of the love she tells them she feels. They tell her that Eros must be a monster because he will not allow her to see his face. They encourage Psyche to steal into the bedroom while Eros is asleep, and with a lighted oil lamp, she is encouraged to pull the covers back and gaze upon his face.
Early the next evening, Psyche enters Eros’s bedchamber. In her hand is a lamp to help her get a better glimpse of him. She leans over his sleeping body and in doing so is wounded by one of his arrows. At the same time, a drop of oil drips from the lamp and lands on the shoulder of Eros. Surprised by this sudden intrusion, Eros leaps up in all his god glory and runs home to his mother Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is furious with Eros for secretly marrying Psyche, and she is still more angry with Psyche because of her beauty. In retaliation for Psyche’s poor judgment and disobedience to the marriage agreement, Aphrodite metes out four severe and near impossible tasks which Psyche must perform. If Psyche can be strong through these trials, she may win back the favor of Aphrodite and the love of Eros. If not, death will be her punishment.
The number four is a repeated motif in this story. Psyche has four tasks, she has four helpers, she carries four things into the underworld, and she meets four individuals on her journey to the underworld.
As a symbolic number, four is closely associated with the square and the cross. It is the number of the four cardinal directions (north south east and west); the four seasons (winter, spring, summer and autumn); the elements (air, earth, fire, water); the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); the four stages of life (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). Generally, four is considered a symbol of wholeness.
In the story of Psyche, if you listen closely, you will hear reference to the four elements of earth, water, wind and fire.
In the first of her four tasks, Psyche is required to sift and organize a large pile of seeds by morning. She is assisted by ants. Ants are bodies from the earth.
The second task requires her to gather fleece from grazing rams. Reeds that grow along the banks of the river talk to her and tell her how to get the fleece by waiting until the rams have retired to their barn. She can then gather the loosened wool from the brambles and the fence.
The third task requires Psyche to scoop up water from the river Styx. An eagle flies to her aid and gathers the water for her. The eagle depends on the wind for its survival.
Lastly, Psyche is to get a box of beauty ointment from Persephone in Hades. A tower talks her through the fiery process. Psyche is on a journey toward wholeness, if she can survive.
When Psyche has suffered enough and accomplished these four tasks with the kind help of others, she leaves the underworld to find Eros waiting for her. They reunite and Zeus changes her from a mere mortal into a Divine goddess. Eros and Psyche have a daughter they name Bliss and they live happily ever after.
Summary
What strikes me about the three feminine mythological journeys is the fact that all of the main characters were in need of the kind support of others to help them survive their ordeals. With reference to those who participate in recovery programs, a person initially can find it hard to fight the battle of their addiction alone. That is why a new member of any recovery program is encouraged to find a sponsor (from the Latin sponsa), someone who can partner the recovering person in their heroic journey through the underworld.
Why Differentiate Between Masculine and Feminine Spirituality?
Is there a difference in the way men and women develop spiritually? Is there a need to honor the feminine way? As mentioned earlier, Carol Gilligan and her researchers have shown us, through their research, that women tend to approach relationships in a circuitous fashion. Men tend to think and speak in a more linear fashion. Both men and women get to the same destination but with different modes of approach. If a relationship approach with human beings can be different for women and men, might then a relationship with a Divine be just as different?
Several years ago, my spouse, Tom Lavin, and I were giving a talk to a group of spiritual seekers in Ireland. I began the talk with images of going in the direction of the dark, chthonic underworld. Tom then talked about the hero’s journey above. Our purpose was to balance and make inclusive the archetypal image of journeying from both a male and a female perspective. Our aim was to help the audience understand the need to go in both directions - to the upper world and to the underworld. After our presentations, a gentleman in the audience, who obviously was not listening to me, asked a question of my spouse. He said, “I belong to a men’s study group and, recently, we have found ourselves stuck in the dark. Could you shed some light on our dilemma?” Those were his exact words! Tom turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and said he would defer the question to me. I simply responded, “What’s wrong with the dark? If you stay there, you may learn some very valuable lessons.” Men tend to want to get out of the dark, they want to be “enlightened”; women, though they do not necessarily like the dark, are able to navigate a dark situation longer. Perhaps this has something to do with the symbolism of the moon and sun that I spoke of earlier. The moon waxes and wanes, but the sun is forever shining. The male may need to always be in the light, while the moon is satisfied with being in the dark sometimes. Jungian analyst, Betty Meador (1992) explained this in her book Uncursing the Darkness. She wrote:
Our own American culture, built on Judeo-Christian monotheism, carries a strong bias against the dark, against chaos, the dark side of order, against the cyclic which includes waxing and waning, against the feminine as it is related to the dark, and ultimately against the containing of opposites in favor of the light only. (p. 118)
A Vision for the New Millennium
For decades, women have accommodated and adjusted to the direction prescribed by recovery programs and everyone else. The dominant admonition of recovery programs is to find a “higher power.” This may be appropriate and helpful to many people, but some women may be comfortable with their underworld experience and need to be encouraged to sit with it and be as comfortable in it as possible, remembering they can bare the unbearable if they are in relationship with someone else - a therapist, a friend, a lover, a parent, a sponsor. As we enter this new millennium, we as health care providers have the responsibility to be inclusive and open to all venues when escorting those in recovery/discovery. We need to be open to new possibilities and new directions for envisioning the recovery process. It is extremely important to honor individual ways of approaching a spiritual path. There is no right way, nor wrong way, nor only way.
References
Anonymous. (l996, February). No secondhand gods. AA Grapevine: Our Meeting in Print, pp. 14-15.
Arnold, M. (1961). Poetry and criticism of Matthew Arnold. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.
Bauer, J. (1985). Alcoholism and women: The background and the psychology. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Carotenuto, A. (1979). The spiral way: A woman’s healing journey. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Cobb, N. (1992). Archetypal imagination: Glimpses of the gods in life and art. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson, R. A. (1989). She: Understanding feminine psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Jung, C. G., & Wilson. W. ( January 1968) Vol 24 # 8 Bill W./C.G. Jung Letters. Grapevine, pp. 16-21. (Original work published 1963).
Jung, C. G. (1993). Psychology and alchemy, CW 12, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1975). C.G. Jung letters: Vol. 2, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kirkpatrick, J. (1978). Turnabout: Help for a new life. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Kirkpatrick J. (1981). A fresh start, Dubuque: Kendell/Hunt Publishing Company.
Kirkpatrick, J. (1986). Goodbye hangovers, hello life: Self-help for women. New York: Atheneum.
Kirkpatrick J. (1990). On the road to sell recovery. Quakertown, PA: Women for Recovery.
Kurtz, E. (1998). Not God: A history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, MN.: Hazelden.
Lavin, T. P. (1998). Return of the Spirit. Lapis: The Inner Meaning of Contemporary Life, 7, pp. 77-81.
Leonard. L. S. (1990). Witness to the fire: Creativity and the veil of addiction. Boston: Shambhala.
Matthews, B. (1986). The Herder symbol dictionary: Symbols from art, archaeology, mythology, literature and religions. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Meier, C. A. (1989). Healing dream and ritual. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag.
Meador, B. D. (1992). Uncursing the dark: Treasures from the underworld. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Neumann, E. (1956). Amor and Psyche: The psychic development of the feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Hare-Lavin, M.E. (2000). Finding a “lower, deeper power” for women in recovery. Counseling and Values, 44, 198-212.
Osborne, M. P. (1989). Favorite Greek myths. New York: Scholastic Inc.
Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the goddess: A way of initiation for women. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Inner City Books.
Stevens, A. (1995). Private myths: Dreams and dreaming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.