Each of the goddess archetypes of wisdom has her particular distinctive wisdom. Metis’s is centered in the experiential and tangible world. For a woman in whom the wisewoman is Metis, what she does with her mind or with her mind and her hands engages her soul. She brings the wisdom she has learned from life to her craft. Metis is a personification of applied ways of knowing and doing. It is an expertise that goes beyond technically mastering a skill or a practice. Metis connotes the ability to intellectually grasp the situation and act wisely and skillfully. When a woman’s work and her deeper wisdom come together, then Metis is the archetype of the wisewoman that she exemplifies. Metis was a pre-Olympian goddess of wisdom, who was pursued by Zeus and became his first wife. She provided Zeus with the means through which he could become the chief god atop Mount Olympus.
In Greek, the word metis, which was derived from the name of the goddess Metis, came to mean “wise counsel” or “practical wisdom.”1 You may call upon metis in running a household easily and well, knowing that what appears to others as mere efficiency is actually creating harmony. In the studio, metis is more than the sum of the skills you have acquired and made your own; it becomes an alchemical process through which inspired work can come. If you are a physician, metis becomes part of your clinical acumen. If you are in business, politics, or law and have metis, your wisdom helps to steer a wise course, to get to the heart of a matter, to settle conflicts through mediation and dialogue, to work out mutually satisfactory outcomes rather than winning at the other’s expense. Metis in this sense is a form of diplomacy that takes a long-range view as to what the best outcome is for all. For a scholar, the wisdom of metis is a discerning and creative way of thinking that makes it possible to see a pattern to the research or find an explanation for the evidence. If the wisdom of Metis grows or deepens in the course of your life, then metis will be a crone-age attribute.
I think of metis in the creative or artistic realm as that quintessential and mysterious divine inspiration that transforms a technically skilled performer into an artist, or the work into art. This is most likely to happen to a craftsperson, artist, actor, or musician who has mastered the medium, the instrument, or craft and draws from an archetypal depth of feeling that touches others. The work or performance then has the power to move people to respond from a corresponding depth in themselves.
METIS THE GODDESS
Metis was the daughter of two Titans: Tethys, the goddess of the moon, and Oceanus, the god whose realm was a vast body of water that encircled the earth. As a Titan, she was part of the ruling older order of divinities that Zeus intended to overthrow. He pursued her and she fled, turning into many shapes in order to escape him. Finally, Zeus caught her and she became his first wife.
For Zeus to defeat Cronus and the mighty Titans, he needed to free his brothers whom Cronus had swallowed. Cronus had previously deposed his own father, Uranus, who had ruled before him, by castrating him and taking his power. Cronus feared that his wife Rhea would bear a son that would do to him what he had done to his father, and to avert this, he had swallowed each of their children as soon as they were born. After he had swallowed their first five newborn infants, and she was pregnant with Zeus, Rhea was determined to save this last child. She hid him in a cave as soon as he was born and, in his place, put a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. This fooled Cronus, who, in his haste, swallowed the stone instead of Zeus.
Years later, it was Metis’s counsel that made it possible for Zeus to succeed. She devised a plan to put an emetic into a honeyed drink for Cronus, who then regurgitated one stone, two sons, and three daughters. They were now full grown, and grateful to Zeus. His brothers Poseidon and Hades were ready to fight with Zeus against the Titans, and after gaining other allies, Zeus defeated the Titans and overthrew Cronus in a ten-year war. Zeus killed his father with a thunderbolt.
When Metis was pregnant with Zeus’s child, an earth oracle told him that this child was a daughter and that if she conceived again, Metis would bear a son with a loving heart who would supplant him. To rid himself of this possibility, he approached Metis with clever words and guile. Metis was charmed and distracted by Zeus, who coaxed her to a couch, tricked her into becoming small, and swallowed her. This was the end of Metis in classical mythology, though Zeus claimed afterward that she could counsel him from his belly. He incorporated her into himself and took her attributes and power as his own, including childbirth. Zeus birthed Athena out of his head, as an adult with no memory of having a mother.
My capsule synopsis of the goddess Metis was told by Hesiod, who lived between the second half of the eighth century B.C.E. and the first quarter of the seventh, in the Theogony, an epic poem about the birth of the gods and a cosmology that tells of the origins of the universe. The overall theme of the Theogony is the establishment of Zeus as supreme god, and yet for most of the poem it is the mother goddesses who matter. Given the fiercely patriarchal character of Hesiod’s own society, the Theogony was a remarkable testimony to the tenacity of myths that persist when earlier history or prior religions are forgotten.
SWALLOWED METIS AS PERSONAL METAPHOR
The story of Zeus and Metis is a recapitulation of the lives of many first wives of successful men. These women provided the means and the strategy through which their particular Zeus reached the top, only to find themselves treated like Metis. In this archetypal situation, the woman is metaphorically a daughter of Titans; socially and economically, a member of the class to which her husband aspires, or even aspires to supplant, if like Zeus, he has dynastic ambitions. She may be better educated, even brighter than he. She may have more money or access to it. She may provide introductions, ideas, and strategy to further his goals. Once his ambitions are realized with her help, and she becomes involved in home and children, her role in his success and her importance to him diminishes considerably. She is thus made small, “tricked” into insignificance, and “swallowed,” as her attributes, ideas, and resources become his. After a divorce and his remarriage, like Metis the goddess, she disappears from sight socially. The invisibility that results is vividly described in the novel A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe through his portrayal of Martha, who became “the superfluous woman” once Charlie Croker divorced her after twenty-nine years to marry a woman half his age.
When a wife’s ideas or creative work are attributed to her husband, it is another version of swallowed Metis. Usually she is given no public credit. Whatever the contribution Albert Einstein’s wife made to his theories remains unknown, yet she was a brilliant physics student when they met. Will and Ariel Durant worked together on The History of Civilization, yet her name did not appear as a coauthor until the seventh volume. When it was impossible for women to have their intellect taken seriously, their ideas had to be attributed to a man, or bear a man’s name.
The same pattern occurs in work environments of all kinds, when a Zeus co-opts the work or ideas of women who are seen as helpmates to the important man. In Molecules of Emotion, Dr. Candace Pert describes how this happened to her.2 Pert had a pivotal role in the discovery of opiate receptors and endorphins for which her mentor and two male researchers received the Lasker Award, second only to the Nobel Prize in prestige. A large percentage of Lasker recipients do go on to win the Nobel, and this might have happened, except that Pert did not remain silent about her crucial contribution and subsequently was also nominated for the Nobel Prize; after a long and heated debate, the award was conferred for another discovery. Pert’s decision was influenced by the experience of Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant scientist who provided the critical link in the chain of reasoning that allowed Francis Crick and John Watson to show that the DNA structure was a double helix, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind Franklin remained silent and died of cancer a few years later. Pert’s research on the connection between emotions and disease gives her grounds for her comment: “I felt that by not speaking up, I would be sacrificing my self-esteem and self-respect, not to mention possibly setting myself up for a nice case of depression and maybe a cancer or two down the line.”3
Yet another instance of Metis-swallowing occurs when an organization that was conceived and nurtured by a woman, who struggled body and soul to keep it going, is taken over for its prestige or profitability by men, once it has gained status. A noted example of this was Physicians for Social Responsibility, founded by Helen Caldicott, M.D. When it won the Nobel Peace Prize, Caldicott was not on stage to receive the honor she so well deserved because she had been made insignificant by internal politics and was not even invited to be in the audience. The male officers of this now huge group accepted the prize.
ATHENA’S IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PATRIARCHY
With the swallowing of Metis and the unusual birth of Athena, Zeus set a standard that Apollo would cite in the first courtroom scene in Western literature. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Orestes has killed his mother to avenge the murder of his father. Apollo, speaking in his defense, denies the primacy of maternal blood ties, arguing that the mother is only the nourisher of the seed planted by the father. As proof that a mother is unimportant, he points to Athena, explaining that she was not even born from the womb of a woman. Arguing on the other side are the avenging Furies who see matricide as the most heinous of crimes. The Furies contend that the younger gods have ruthlessly abrogated the rights of the older generation of divinities by permitting a matricide to escape.
Twelve Athenians hear the arguments, deliberate, and the vote is tied. Athena then casts the decisive vote. Since Athens is her city, this is her prerogative. She sides with Apollo’s male Olympian point of view, and frees Orestes. Prior to patriarchy, the mother rather than the father was the significant parent; after patriarchy, father-right dominated. In the play, this trial symbolizes the establishment of male superiority. The Furies are portrayed as black-robed enraged hags, who are transformed after the trial into the purple-robed Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” by Athena. The trilogy ends in a triumphant procession in which the now venerable goddesses are led to their new home, transformed from furies into sweet old ladies.
The goddess Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and the archetypal father’s daughter. Though she was given her mother Metis’s title as Goddess of Wisdom, she had no memory of ever having had a mother. Athena was an armored warrior and strategist, who championed heroes and never lost her head in the heat of battle. She favored Greek heroes, such as Achilles and Perseus, as well as Odysseus, gave them advice or weapons or aided them by deceptions that gave them a strategic advantage.
When Zeus gave birth to Athena, his labor pains took the form of terrible headaches; Hephaestus, the god of the forge, used a double-edged axe to open a way for Athena to emerge out of her father’s head. She was born as a fully grown woman in golden armor, carrying a spear, and announced her arrival with a mighty war cry. Mount Olympus shook when her feet hit the ground. She immediately took her place at the right hand of her father and was his favorite and the only Olympian he trusted with his symbols of power.
Zeus as an archetypal chief executive may “birth” or bring women into an organization. Her war cry may not be audible in contemporary Olympian heights and the golden armor may be her reputation and résumé, but the message is the same: Athena has arrived and Zeus is her mentor.
The last three decades of the twentieth century have provided golden opportunities for women to enter the bastions of corporate, political, academic, or professional power. Women like the goddess Athena, who have an affinity for male mentors in fields where a strategic mind is an advantage, have been the greatest beneficiaries of the women’s movement. Without the women’s movement, there wouldn’t be two women Supreme Court justices or a woman secretary of state. And yet, when the archetype of Athena is the predominant one in a woman, especially a younger one, she is more a father’s daughter than a sister to other women. This stance begins to wear thin as a woman approaches the third stage of her life. If she remembers Metis, she will understand what happened to feminine divinity and to women—and begin to identify herself with them rather than with men. If she acquires Metis, she will be more balanced and whole.
RECOVERING THE MEMORY OF METIS
The return of Metis into the mind of Athena happens when “fathers’ daughters” grow psychologically away from their identification with patriarchal misogynistic attitudes toward women and feminine values. Bright, well-educated, ambitious women with a mind for the field they have entered and an affinity with men in power see themselves as exceptional and often look down on other women who do not have either the aspirations or the ability for achievement that they do. If they are ever to remember Metis, they first will need to develop an affiliation with other women, and lose their identification as their fathers’ daughters and their allegiance to hierarchy. This often comes about only after a major disillusionment with male mentors and colleagues, or with an institution’s principles. The older an Athena woman becomes, the readier she may be for this shift.
An Athena on the fast track to the top may have no inkling of her vulnerability or the tenuousness of her position of power—until she loses her mentor’s support and the authority, influence, and status that came with it. Or the disillusionment may result when an Athena’s positive relationship to a patriarchal institution is undone when she has gotten ahead on her own merits and finds there is a glass ceiling on how far she can advance because she is a woman. Or when she learns that she is paid less than her male counterparts. Or after she overhears male colleagues describe her in locker-room sexual terms, when she thought that she was an accepted equal.
When she learns that the devotion and loyalty that she has had to her work, her mentor, her team or an institution was not a mutual one, she experiences a deep sense of betrayal and disillusionment; it may shake the premise on which she has built her life. Before then, it might not have been possible for her to have an affiliation with women. It may also be the beginning of feminine wisdom.
In Greek mythology, the goddess Athena never disobeyed or fell out of favor with Zeus. She is an eternal image of the archetype of the father’s daughter. The fate of an Athena who disobeys is vividly portrayed by Richard Wagner in The Valkyrie, the second of the four operas that comprise The Ring of the Nibelung. Brünnhilde is the Valkyrie, who, like Athena, is a divinity and a young woman warrior goddess who wears armor and is her father Wotan’s favorite child.* In the Ring cycle, Brünnhilde is moved by compassion to go against his orders, and his punishment of her is appalling. He takes her immortality away and plans to leave her unconscious on a rock, to be awakened, sexually claimed, and possessed by the first man who finds her. She pleads with her father to at least let the man who takes her be a hero. At first, he refuses. Then, relenting, he surrounds her unconscious body with a ring of fire that only a hero could cross.
Once Brünnhilde was no longer an obedient extention of Wotan’s will and an adoring mirror in which he could see his reflection, he was deeply angered (and narcissistically wounded). Because she disobeyed him, she lost her relationship to him, her armor and weapons, and her immortality; she ceased to be an archetypal warrior goddess and a favored father’s daughter, and became a very vulnerable woman. Brünnhilde’s mother was Erda, who (like Metis) had been a goddess of wisdom. After she had been seduced and overpowered by Wotan, Erda lost her powers and receded into the earth, where she slept, her wisdom clouded and her foresight lost. Whether wisdom is in the belly of Zeus or buried in the earth, the essential story is the same. The most powerful divinity is a sky god who reigns from the top of a mountain, and a once important goddess of wisdom disappears from sight.
Through her banishment and punishment, Brünnhilde becomes a mortal woman. A metaphorically similar fate occurs to a disillusioned and betrayed father’s daughter, who loses her identification with the Athena archetype and finds she is vulnerable and emotional. Only then does she leave the lofty mental and masculine realm of Mount Olympus/Valhalla. Betrayal of a daughter of the patriarchy by the patriarchy is often an initiation into feminism; an Athena gains a firsthand understanding of women’s issues that she had previously dismissed, and sees the pattern.
FINDING METIS IN THE BELLY OF ZEUS; RECOVERING THE HISTORY OF THE GODDESS
When what we have been taught as objective history turns out to be lies and omissions, it is both disillusioning and illuminating. Every woman who has had an academic education has had to develop a linear and logical Athena mind, beginning with the assumption that scholarship is objective. Advanced scholarship brings in an awareness of bias and complexity, but until a feminist consciousness emerges, it is easy to be blind to misogyny and its far-reaching implications. Just as Athena was born out of Zeus’s head, an Athena mind is the offspring of male authority and bias, until she remembers Metis. Patriarchal history and theology omit information about the conquest of the goddess and the destruction of the culture that had thrived before. Just as Metis was swallowed and forgotten, the history of such times had been buried and covered over, only to emerge in the last half of the twentieth century.
“The History of Western Civilization” was a required freshman course at my college as it commonly was in most liberal-arts colleges and universities. I was taught that civilization began with the Greeks, and that Athens was the cradle of democracy. Not until I read Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, did I begin my education in how history is written (or distorted and denied) by the victors. In her introduction to this book, she wrote:
“Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture, when written language was in use and great cities were built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps more important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the “pagan” religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles, and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess?”4
In The Civilization of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas documents the existence and destruction of the goddess culture in what she describes as “Old Europe,” Europe’s first civilization, which preceded the establishment of patriarchy. It dates back at least five thousand, perhaps even twenty-five thousand years. From ancient Crete to Celtic Ireland, goddess worship was universal. Archaeological evidence gleaned from ancient sites show that this was an unstratified, egalitarian society that was destroyed by an infiltration of invading semi-nomadic, horse-riding Indo-European peoples from the distant north and east. These invaders were patrifocal, mobile, warlike, ideologically sky-oriented.
The Great Goddess was a trinity: maiden, mother, and crone. Immortal and eternal, she was each and all aspects of the feminine. She was many and she was One. She was the Great Goddess with a myriad of names. She was worshiped as the feminine life force; all life came from her body and returned to her. She was an embodiment of nature, as the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of life. She was like the moon in her cycles, and like the earth in her seasons. All living things were her children which meant that all life shared something of her divine essence.
Women were in the image of the goddess because they, too, brought forth new life from their bodies and could sustain that life with milk from their breasts. The fertile earth and fertility of women were valued. Sexuality was a natural instinct and a pleasure. Society was matrifocal and matrilinear because everyone knew who their mother and siblings were, but not necessarily (and not for sure) the identity of their father.
As Robert Graves pointed out in his introduction to The Greek Myths, judging from surviving artifacts and myths, ancient Europe had no gods before the nomadic invaders came from the distant North and East. Until then the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought.
When the invaders came, they viewed themselves as superior because of their ability to conquer the more culturally developed people who had long been settled there. Wherever they settled, they subjugated the people of the goddess. The power and attributes of the goddess were either diminished and made insignificant (as unvalued qualities) or taken over and appropriated (swallowed) by male gods. The once Great Goddess was fragmented into many lesser goddesses and incorporated into the religion. They became subservient consorts or daughters of gods.
From the archaeological evidence, Gimbutas described three waves of invasions into Europe: the first invaders came approximately 4300–4200 B.C.E., the second wave around 3400 B.C.E., and the third and most devastating between 3000 and 2800 B.C.E. Gimbutas called them Kurgans after the Kurgan burial mounds found in the arid area near the Caspian Sea. These people were primarily destroyers of the culture that was there. They deified the power to destroy and dominate, idealized weapons, and glorified heroes. Their burial mounds held the remains of powerful chieftains, their possessions, and members of their households, including wives, children, and slaves. The Indo-European languages of the invaders almost completely replaced earlier known pre—Indo-European languages in ancient Europe: the Etruscan language continued to be spoken in parts of Italy until Roman times; only Basque, which is spoken in and around the Pyrenees, between Spain and France, still survives. When the invaders came, sites that had flourished for several millennia were abandoned, the people of the goddess moved to marginal locations, such as islands, caves, or easily fortified hilltop sites, and the major Neolithic technologies of fine ceramic manufacture and copper metallurgy were diminished and lost.
Far from bringing civilization to Europe as we were taught, Gimbutas comments, the Kurgan proto-Greeks brought the end to a civilization and imposed its warrior elite society, its warrior gods, its values and language upon Europe. The social consequences of the Kurgan invaders, as Riane Eisler describes in The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure, was the triumph of the male dominator culture, which reduced women to property.
Greece reached its peak of intellectual, creative, and political power in the fifth century B.C.E. This was the Age of Pericles, when the Parthenon was built, the time of Hippocrates in medicine, of the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, when the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes were first staged. Classical Greece represented the apex and triumph of a male culture that had its roots in the religion and society that glorified war.
Classical Greece was not a “cradle of democracy” for women. All Athenian women were under the legal guardianship of men who had effective control over their persons and property, so much so that women could not, under Athenian law, dispose of any property above the minimal value of one bushel of barley. The legal position of women and slaves in Athenian society during this period was not all that different, as documented by the classical historian Eva Keuls in The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. A woman had no protection under the law except in so far as she was the property of a man. She was not even considered a person under the law and could not go to court. Respectable women were segregated, barred from secular education, forbidden to speak or even appear in public except on special occasions. A father could sell his daughter into slavery if she lost her virginity before marriage. Many female children were abandoned and exposed soon after birth, or sold. Slave girls were often used as prostitutes, and could be abused, tortured, randomly executed, or sold at any time. Athens was a harsh slave society in which torture was institutionalized. In legal proceedings, a slave’s testimony was admissible in court only if given under torture, and a public torture chamber was maintained for the routine torture of slaves.
The subjugation of women was an inevitable result of the conquest of goddess-worshiping peoples by these waves of Kurgan invaders. However, in their mythology, the Greeks retained the memory of what had gone before. Hesiod’s divine genealogy begins with Gaia, the goddess Earth, who was the first parent. She gave birth to the god Uranus, the Sky, and the god Pontus, the Sea. Gaia mated with Uranus and gave birth to the Titans, the first generation of gods and goddesses. Thus even the patriarchal Greeks began their cosmology and creation with the goddess, Gaia, even as Zeus ruled over the Olympians as the chief god in the classical Greek pantheon, and goddesses became lesser images of feminine divinity. While Metis was swallowed, the goddess did not disappear in her entirety into the belly of the patriarchy in Greek and Roman times. It was not until orthodox Judeo-Christian religions triumphed politically that feminine divinity disappeared altogether.
MEDUSA, A DEMONIZED METIS
The fate of feminine wisdom, goddesses, and women under the Greeks and subsequent dominator cultures was to be disempowered and oppressed; which was Metis’s fate. A second fate to befall Metis was to become demonized, a fate which also has been shared, especially by women.
Metis has been equated with Medusa, as both were once revered goddesses of wisdom. Medusa was the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing “female wisdom” (Sanskrit medha; Greek metis, Egyptian met or Maat). Medusa was the destroyer aspect of the triple goddess called Neith in Egypt, Ath-enna or Athene in North Africa. The symbols and attributes of the triple goddess were represented by the three faces or phases or cycles of nature and the moon. Besides maiden, mother, crone, or waxing, full, and waning moon, the divine feminine was seen as creator, sustainer, and destroyer. The Great Goddess was a personification of the Earth. She is the creator from which life comes, the sustainer or nurturer of life, and the grave into which all life returns at the end of its season.
In classical Greek mythology, Medusa was the third and most famous of the Gorgon sisters, who were the once-beautiful daughters of ancient sea deities. Her two sisters were immortal and ageless. Medusa was the only mortal one. They were originally triple moon goddesses, each representing a phase of the moon. In its third phase, the crescent waning moon “dies” as it disappears into the dark, which may be why Medusa as the third aspect of the moon was the mortal one.
Medusa was originally known for her beauty and abundant hair. In mythology, she went from being a goddess to a mortal to a monster with snakes as hair, whose face could turn men to stone. Perseus, a Greek hero armed with Athena’s advice and a sword, cut off Medusa’s head, put it in a magic bag and took it as a trophy to Athena. The head of the Gorgon Medusa became part of the aegis, which was made of goatskin and attached to the breastplate or shield, and worn by Zeus (aegis has come to mean “under the sponsorship of a powerful person”) or Athena. The power to destroy that is part of the cycle of nature and the third aspect of the goddess was now harnessed and used to turn enemies into stone. Medusa’s power, like Metis’s was appropriated.
According to Barbara G. Walker, “A female face surrounded by serpent hair was an ancient, widely recognized symbol of divine female wisdom, and equally of the ‘wise blood’ that supposedly gave women their divine powers.”5
WHEN ATHENA GAINS METIS
When an Athena woman gains metis, she no longer is concerned about achieving power or winning for its own sake; these are the goals of an ego that accepts patriarchal values as her own. Metis the archetype of wise counsel is concerned with using time and energy, talent and resources more judiciously. Metis often comes into the consciousness of women who have acquired power in the world, or whose focus was on furthering their husbands’ careers and their social status but whose drive for success has become tempered by having a child or a life-threatening illness, or suffering a loss, or a betrayal, or a humiliation. Such events and introspection, which may come through meditation, psychotherapy, or a spiritual retreat, provide an opening for Metis to enter.
For you to come to know Metis, you must find space in your life for solitude and reflection, which usually are not found until well into midlife. If you are an Athena, something must happen that slows you down and makes you uncomfortably aware that ambition, achievement, and success are not enough. The physiology of perimenopause lends itself to becoming more inner-directed, and the awareness of how short life is, which midlife brings, may invite Metis into your psyche.
It becomes harder to stay identified with the Athena archetype as you grow older. As Athena women turn fifty or become menopausal, or lose their mentors or illusions, or outgrow an identification with Athena as an eternal father’s daughter seeking approval from male institutions and individual powerful men, Metis as feminine wisdom is ready to emerge. You have to have evolved beyond being a favored daughter of the patriarchy to find Metis, who is the matrilineal half of your psychological lineage.
I think of Metis as representing a discerning combination of intuition, intellect, and experience, a maturity that comes from becoming seasoned by life, by a loss of hubris, and through learning first-hand about humility and vulnerability. Until then, you may see people as chess pieces, as expendable or protected, to be moved around the board. To have the mind of a successful Athena and be a winning strategist or competitive “player” in the corridors of political, academic, corporate, or even social power, you had to develop the ability to perceive, assess, discriminate, plan, and take action. The mottos of power “to the winner go the spoils” and “might makes right” may have been your own until you felt what it is like to be expendable and realized how much people suffer when they become powerless. As a result, a compassionate and wise Metis may emerge into your consciousness. Then power or status over others, the bottom line, and winning the game will cease to enthrall you and you may become more engaged by issues of social justice, gender equality, ethical standards, and accountability. Perhaps for the first time, you may appreciate and develop friendships with women. You might even become an environmentalist or a late-blooming feminist.
Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’s List (an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast—it raises the dough) is an example of a woman with an Athena mind inspired by Metis to make a difference. She saw a need for women to hold political offices (and not just support male candidates) and with a genius for grass-roots organization created a political action committee—that has more monetary clout than the American Medical Association’s—to fund Democratic women candidates who can be counted on to support social programs that look out for women and children and the environment.
To form perceptions that run counter to our hierarchal and patriarchal culture is a symbolic representation of Athena breaking with Zeus. To think intuitively upon the evidence and arrive at a different interpretation of the facts, even if it puts you at odds with a mentor, is another. Brünnhilde was punished for disobedience when she did not follow Wotan’s orders, but much more was involved than this. She had been affected by what she witnessed, thought about her choices, and acted on her own. At that point, she no longer shared the same perceptions or values as Wotan; she stepped out of the archetypal role of a father’s daughter and changed.
It does not always take a personal break with a Zeus/Wotan for this mythic situation to be lived out. It can be a break with patriarchal thought, a break with accepted tradition or traditional values, or a break with accepting the sole authority of (male) logic to arrive at a conclusion.
METIS AS A CRONE-PHASE ARCHETYPE: A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE
Marija Gimbutas, who unearthed buried images of goddesses and evidence of the Goddess culture at archaeological sites, is an exceptionally fitting example of a woman with a fine Athena mind who became a crone with metis in the third phase of her life. She could make connections and draw conclusions from her extensive knowledge of archaeology, comparative religion, mythology, folklore, and linguistics. Gimbutas, who died in 1994 at the age of seventy-three, was a professor of archaeology at UCLA. In 1956, she was the first scholar to link linguistic research (she had a knowledge of twenty languages) and archaeological finds, identifying the homeland of the Indo-European warrior peoples or “Kurgans,” as she called them.
Between 1967 and 1980, she directed five major archaeological excavations of Neolithic settlements in Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece, and began the process of deciphering the engraved and painted symbols that were found at these sites. Gimbutas developed a picture of the prepatriarchal culture that had existed from at least 6500 B.C.E. to 3500 B.C.E., which she described in her last three books, Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974, 1982), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991). The initial academic (Zeus) reaction to her work ranged from apathy to violent opposition, but she persisted, published further findings, and is now taken seriously.
I met Marija Gimbutas in the mid-eighties in a house in Malibu, California. Several of us were being interviewed on film by Tony Joseph, and were houseguests during the filming, which gave the event an aura of a house party in which the main subject of discussion was goddesses and goddess spirituality. Born in Lithuania, Gimbutas was a university student when the Soviets invaded, and became a member of the resistance and later a refugee. She fled to Austria, and got a Ph.D. in archaeology before coming to the United States in 1949. Before she was hired at Harvard, she told us of working as a cleaning lady. She married, divorced, had children, and moved to California in 1963, after securing an academic appointment on the faculty of UCLA, where she became a professor.
She was a short, unpretentious, somewhat grandmotherly European woman who spoke with an accent and had a warm smile. Her work was controversial, and support for her hypotheses about the Kurgan invaders was yet to come. With the diversity and depth of her knowledge across several fields, she had the metis to make intuitive connections that made sense of available evidence of a goddess-centered, peaceful culture that had existed for millennia, and the scholarship and authority to offer a radical revision of patriarchal history.
Marija Gimbutas is a particularly elegant example of a woman whose major work and influence occurred in the third phase of her life. Women’s creative or work lives characteristically do not follow a linear course, especially if there are children. There are interruptions, moves, periods in which responsibilities for others take precedence over work. In Silences, Tillie Olson describes how and why a woman’s creative work can lie fallow until she has time for mature creativity in the later part of her life. Mary Catherine Bateson in Composing a Life writes of how the making of a quilt might be an apt metaphor for most women’s lives. It may only be in the third phase of life that the pieces can come together to create a whole, and when you can finally see that there is meaning and purpose to it all.
Both Olson and Bateson had their work lives interrupted by putting marriage or family first. For many women whose education and work lives make them successful daughters of the patriarchy, having children can cause shift in affiliation from the father world of work to the mother world of relationship, and a new respect for ordinary women and the lot of women. The vicissitudes of ordinary life are not as manageable as work, you can’t always maintain a cool head in the midst of ongoing improvisation and adaptation.
Having to make decisions in the emotionally charged moment, trusting instinct or intuition when there isn’t adequate information, coping with the situation and learning as you go from mistakes, and developing confidence and an authentic style of your own go into the process of becoming a mother. This is also so when a commitment is made to a craft, a skill, or work that cannot be done “by the book” or under the direction of someone in authority. When you cease to look to experts for authority and trust your own expertise, you find your own metis. An Athena mind takes you only so far, after which what is called for is the development of Metis’s wisdom.
METIS AS WISE COUNSEL: PRACTICAL AND INTELLIGENT WISDOM
Time passes swiftly and before you know it, you’re fifty. Even if you were childless by choice and enjoyed work, chances are that for a time you will feel a loss for the path of motherhood not taken. If you did stop work you loved or diluted what you were doing to have children, even when this was a desired, consciously made choice, prime career years were sacrificed, and as you enter the third phase of your life, chances are that you will regret the loss of opportunities that have passed you by. With metis as inner wisdom, feelings of regret and loss, even grief, are likely to be transient. With Metis as the inner wise counselor, you will pause to get your bearings, take stock, put feelings of loss behind you, and then bring a combination of intelligence and wisdom to bear upon what you will do with yourself as a new crone.
This is a stage of life when you may decide to pass on what you know or mentor others. Or, drawing upon the accumulated experience that you have, you may be inspired to teach or to write. Or, having mastered a craft, you may find that it is time to express your own originality and creativity. Maturity and experience foster metis.
Metis is practical and intelligent wisdom that you draw upon to make decisions about how to spend the third phase of your life. Metis pays attention to the quality of your life now, to retirement possibilities and to potential disability with age, and plans wisely. Metis is the wise counselor that makes a crone-aged woman a respected elder, someone who others turn to for her perspective and advice. If she is in a position of authority, a CEO, managing partner, or director, and has both Metis and Zeus as her archetypal parents, she uses wisdom and power together in setting goals and the means to achieve them. If she is a craftswoman or a professional and has metis, her skills are combined with wisdom in what she does with materials or with clients.
A woman with metis is likely to find that the third phase of her life has many satisfactions. She does not harbor illusions about herself or others, and wisely takes reality into account without being either cynical or naive. She has found and values a maternal, feminine wisdom that allows her to express the emotional and nurturing side of herself.