The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine, by Christine Downing

(NY: Crossroad, 1992).

Occasionally I encourage myself (or in this case am encouraged by a friend) to read something outside my interests or specialisms. This book and its subject/s belonged out there, but I have been enriched by it.

It's a book about myths and images and one woman, whose thesis is, 'We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become' (p.2). In our culture, 'we are fed only male images of the divine... we are starved for images which recognize the sacredness of the feminine' (p.4).

The myths and images Downing employs are those of Greek/Roman goddesses. Gods and goddesses (Nietzsche, Freud) 'never really die, they just go underground' (p.17). Each of these goddesses has a powerful presence in her life - including her dreams, her roles, her relationships. They 'bless' her variously, and she has brilliantly invoked those blessings. Because 'what the gods do, they suffer', such 'blessings' are not always pleasant.

Mythology has to do with origins - primary patterns - and epiphanies. Gods and goddesses are not merely 'back there' but 'here/ in here'. Jung's notion of the 'collective unconscious' is invoked to make the historical, personal.

The oldest artifacts teach us that the female is the primal power. She produces life (blood becomes milk), and food (grass becomes bread). But the fertility goddesses are also goddesses of the underworld, of death. Of course, they are projections of human psychology, but they are more: they are 'transhuman forces' (p.19). And the Greek goddesses are not very attractive: back then there was, too, a deep suspicion of feminine power (which is why the classical literature is explicitly patriarchal).

Downing emphasises her multidimensionality ('I am many; I am one', p.29): when you are done with one goddess, another appears. Each plays a key role in the pantheon of gods and goddesses.

First, there is Persephone in Hades: the maiden who has a mother. Maidenhood and motherhood are two phases in most women's lives. Persephone must be raped, but she does not bear Hades any children. In the underworld (not, in Greek mythology, a terrible place, but somewhere 'beyond life'), she is always present. She enables us to discover the power and beauty of the dark moments in our lives.

Ariadne is not raped, but is deserted, and is killed as punishment for having turned from the immortal god to a mortal lover. So Ariadne is the bride of death - but in life she is unafraid of her own sensuality, of her capacity for ecstasy. She dies just prior to giving birth: 'so I am pulled back to Ariadne because it is time to give my devotion to her and to the child born in the realm of death, the child born in the realm of the soul' (anima) (p.66).

Hera is the 'representation of wifeness... the only goddess centrally defined by her marital role' (p.70). But, of course, she is Hera as viewed by men: who is, as M.I.Finley puts it, 'the complete female whom the Greeks feared a little and did not like at all' (p.73). She is a goddess who demands total allegiance: the relationship to her husband takes precedence over all other relationships. But her sexuality is repressed. (There is a tale that she blinded the seer who said women experienced nine times more orgasmic satisfaction than men). And she is pathologically jealous, gynephobic. 'The Hera of Olympus does not like women - or being a woman - at all' (p.83). She is, as Zabriskie puts it, 'a restless matriarch in a patriarchal world' (p.91).

Then, Athene, the adolescent girls' idol - 'self-confident and courageous, clear-eyed and strong, intelligent and accomplished, judicious and fair' (p.100). But later, the relationship is ambiguous, paradoxical. She is soul-giver, soul-maker, but animus-ridden, at ease amongst men. She represents 'the repression of the feminine and the undoing of the repression as a soul task'... 'Fully to understand Athene is to enter deeply into the dark mystery of the father-daughter bond... [she helps us comprehend] 'how our creativity is released, distorted, and inhibited by the power of the father' (pp.110-111). We all know, as Hillman says, that 'fathers create daughters; but daughters create fathers too' (p.114).

Gaia, of course, is the primordial earth goddess - the 'great mother', grandmother, mother of the beginning, mother of infancy, the mother who is there before time. Gaia returns us to our source. But she began as an unmothered daughter. She is earth, reminding us that matter is 'rebellious, alive and eruptive' (p.146). Gaia is 'earth made invisible, earth become metaphor, earth as the realm of the soul'. She is 'nature moving toward emergence in personal form' (p.147) - belonging both in ge-ology and psych-ology. She is primal, the Freudian id, sheer raw instinctual energy, ever fertile, ever giving forth, but who cannot be subdued. She is 'for life but for ever-renewing life and so for life that encompasses death' (p.150). It is her nature to generate, bringing forth variety, heterogeneity: she is the mother of gods and human beings.

Artemis is strange, mysterious, remote, the 'mercurial queen of solitude' (p.162), who expresses 'the male fear of mature femininity' (p.163). She has been the youthful virgin forever, and becomes the wise old woman. She is the wilderness, wild and untamed. She is 'connected to a fear of such radical solitude and of unprotected confrontation with self' (p.169). In her realm (as distinct from Aphrodite's) feelings do not issue in creative expression or sexual involvement. She represents the unique areas of the feminine experience - menstruation, conception, parturition, nursing, menopause, death - and therein embodies a profound denial of the world of patriarchy - a passionate, wild woman who loves women.

'And now you, Aphrodite' (whom Christine Downing addresses in the second person): 'the one hardly spoken of' and viewed with suspicion during childhood; who has, through her physical beauty and unfettered sexuality the power to lure one from one's chosen path; creatrix, life force, source of all reproductive energy in the universe; nurturer of erotic relationship, and feelings; who cannot be brought fully into consciousness until all the repressed aspects are acknowledged; the only goddess willing to be seen unclothed; who has a love that begets life, and a creative energy that far transcends human sexuality; an enchantress who generates love, not progeny.

So these goddesses helped Christine Downing come to terms with relationships - Hera to mother and husband, Athene to father, Ariadne to a lover, Artemis and Aphrodite to sister and closest woman friends. The goddesses, as Nietzsche said, justify life by living it themselves, 'the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented. Each goddess implies a different way of viewing our own childhood - each whole, each very different, each true.' (p.233)

A footnote: Christine Downing hardly mentions her father. He does not appear until p.81. Perhaps the clues are [1] she felt 'abandoned' by her father - a 'child's truth which the adult in me has always denied since it was Hitler's "fault", not my father's' (p.222). So (?) [2] she goes through life willing herself to love and be loved - a 'dangerous' (p.191) experience. Her father deserted her, she and her husband divorced, she seems to have had at least three or four special male lovers/friends, but also many close women friends...

Two of the deepest lessons here are * 'We don't outgrow the child within us' (p.237) and * 'Childhood remains within us as the principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibility of new beginnings... When one dreams in depth one is never finished beginning' (p.244).

Rowland Croucher