Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and crafts, known to the Romans as Minerva. She was a stately, beautiful warrior goddess, protector of her chosen heroes and namesake city, Athens. She was the only Olympian goddess portrayed wearing armor—the visor of her helmet pushed back to reveal her beauty; a shield over her arm and a spear in her hand. Befitting her role as the goddess who presided over battle strategy in wartime and over domestic arts in peacetime, she sometimes held a spear in one hand and a spindle or bowl in the other. Her symbol was the owl. She was the daughter of Zeus and considered him her sole parent. Her mother was Metis but, as we have seen, Athena had no memory of her. When Metis was pregnant with Athena, Zeus tricked her into becoming small and swallowed her, after which Athena was “born” as a full-grown woman out of Zeus’s head to became Zeus’s favorite child and the only Olympian he trusted with his symbols of power.
Athena’s wisdom was pragmatic and practical. She was the protector of cities, patron of military forces, and goddess of weavers, goldsmiths, potters, and dressmakers. The martial and domestic skills associated with Athena involve planning and execution; activities that require purposeful thinking and action. In the contemporary world, corporate executives, computer program and product designers, legal minds, and marketing strategists would be under her protection. Athena the archetype fosters achievement and ambition, with an astute eye for alliances and a chess mastery of strategic moves in whatever field she is in. Athena is the dominant archetype in logical women who are ruled by their heads rather than their hearts. She predisposes a woman to think clearly, to keep her head in the heat of an emotional situation, and be tactical in the midst of conflict.
Athena is the archetype of “the father’s daughter” in women who naturally gravitate toward men in Zeus-like executive positions, or toward men whose psychology is that of the Greek heroes of mythology whom Athena provided with the strategy to win battles, capture the golden fleece, or take the head of Medusa. The women’s movement opened opportunities for nonfeminist Athenas to enter the male world of power, where they found male mentors, were at ease among male competitors and colleagues, and could achieve a place in the once all-male hierarchy for themselves. Since the women’s movement, individual Athenas have risen to top positions in government, business, academia, and even the military. They are the successful daughters of the patriarchy.
The historical exemplar of a successful Athena was Queen Elizabeth I of England, who was known as the Virgin Queen, the daughter of Henry VIII. With a combination of strategy, diplomacy, and ruthlessness, she forged alliances and outlived her rivals to become queen, and then kept herself and her country out of the clutches of foreign and church powers.
The goddess Athena was a warrior who defended authority and the prerogatives of power, which mortal Athenas are likely to do also—rather than seek truth or justice. Another shadowy aspect of Athena that can also be a problem for some Athenas is the willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve her ends—without considering whether it is unscrupulous or heartless. In the Iliad, for example, when Achilles and Hector were engaged in one-on-one combat, Athena deceived Hector, the Trojan hero, into believing his brother was at his side as his spear carrier. After Hector hurled his spear and missed, he then turned to his “brother” to get another, only to find he was alone and unarmed, which made it easy for Achilles to kill him. Athena’s support not only gave Achilles an unfair advantage, she used deception to destroy his competitor.
Any woman whose dominant archetype is Athena the warrior and strategist can become too involved in school or work to develop other aspects of her life. She is a competitor who strives to win. The battleground can be the marketplace, the political arena, or academia. Success makes it difficult for her to see that it is extracting a high price. By focusing so intently on her career, she may arrest her emotional development and, as a result, she may lack intimates in her personal life, not have much of an inner life, and have few simple pleasures or spontaneous moments—something that she usually does not notice until she does slow down.
CHANGE AND GROWTH
Change and growth come to an Athena if life deals her some blows and they shift her perspective or open her heart. This may be initiated by a painful betrayal and fall from grace as a favored father’s daughter, or by other losses strong enough to penetrate her intellectual armor and reach feelings of grief, vulnerability, and loneliness. Painful as this period can be, the introspection and openness to feelings can be transformative. She may see her past actions in a different light. She may remember the cost to others of her previous winning strategies, and feel remorseful, and be able to feel compassion.
Awareness that life is passing by may be the jolt that causes her to retreat inward and become introspective, or become a late-blooming feminist. This can happen to an Athena whose focus on work has been all-absorbing until she approaches midlife, when she realizes that it may be too late to have a family, feels this as a loss and, for the first time, feels lonely around the holidays. This is when she realizes that her male colleagues did not sacrifice having a family for career advancement, which she did. It is also when she may discover that there is a glass ceiling on advancement for women, and that the feminists she disparaged were right about sexism, after all. Or she has the vague discomfort and depression that can accompany achievement and find herself wondering, “Is this all there is?”
Athena the goddess was impervious to love, but Athena women do fall in love and it is this or an unexpected surge of maternal instinct that brings other archetypal energies into her psyche. This is when a once-focused Athena woman finds herself in conflict over priorities and values, and no longer fully identifies with this archetype. Athena women also marry and have children and yet stay focused on work in the same way that men traditionally have done. It is not whether or not she marries and has a family that makes a difference, but how it affects her.
The need to “remember Metis” is a psychological task for every Athena. Remembering Metis has several meanings, all to do with acknowledging and developing a connection to the feminine—to feelings, nature, instinct, the sacred feminine, or an identification with women and feminism. Metaphorically, it is to become a mother’s daughter as well as a father’s daughter. This potential is being realized by many women who start out as Athenas, become open to emotions, grow in compassion, and then have their consciousness raised about women’s issues.
CRONE-AGED ATHENA
Settling into being a post-menopausal crone-aged woman may be remarkably easy for an Athena. Since moderation, sensible behavior, and planning ahead are Athena traits, she is likely to enter the third phase of her life physically and financially in good shape. She has planned for retirement if it is mandatory, or will probably continue working if she is in a profession or has a business of her own—because she likes to be productive. If she retires or was in the traditional role as a full-time wife and is widowed, she will probably create a routine and a schedule of activities that take her to the meetings, classes, or cultural events that interest her. Many Athenas are active and effective volunteers and board members.
A crone-aged Athena craftswoman may be entering the phase in which she receives recognition for her work, mentors others in her craft, or is at her most creative. If she had a craft as an interest or hobby, she may now be able to pursue this interest more seriously. While she may not be attracted to meditation as an idea, her concentration while weaving or throwing a pot on a wheel—the absorption of craftsmanship, whatever its form—is a meditative experience that can also be alchemical in its effect on the psyche of the artisan and the created work.
Most Athenas like the amenities and cultural events that a city provides its residents. She may see people regularly, have season tickets to lectures, or take emeritus college courses, and have a circle of acquaintances of all ages. If she is married, she usually has a companionable marriage. Her attachment to tradition and pragmatic sense of marriage as an alliance also makes it possible for her to stay married for appearances’ sake to a man whose infidelity would have caused another woman to file for divorce long before. She can maintain form without emotional substance or a depth of meaning. Church, holiday traditions, or family observances then become persona performances, in which she plays her designated role.
A crone-aged Athena with grown children may have an easy, though not likely an intimate relationship with them, especially if they were enough like her to do well and are leading conventional lives. An Athena mother probably had difficulties with an emotional child, or one who did not do well at school, or reacted negatively to the emphasis she placed on performance, or was a dreamer, or rejected her conventional values. It is not in her Athena nature to be empathic, see herself at fault, or understand why what she says could be upsetting when it was common sense. Learning compassion is her biggest challenge, and one that often comes only through painful confrontations with family members. If her grown children have to give up on her being anything other than the rational and conventional person she is, it is they who either stay resentful or have accepted that this is just who she is.
With a proclivity toward discernment and detachment, if a crone-aged Athena turns inward, she most easily finds a connection with Metis’s wisdom or Hestia’s centeredness. Keeping busy and productive is usually the main obstacle in the way of developing these two crone archetypes.
Love, suffering, or unexpected emotional or physical vulnerability may strip an Athena of her defensive and intellectual armor. Becoming wide open to feeling, taken over by pain or grief or love, an Athena woman becomes a woman like other women, without protection. Later, when she is able to grasp the experience with her mind, she may find that her perspective is altered by the compassion of Kuan Yin. She may notice suffering she had not seen before, and feel that enough is enough. Sekhmet’s fierceness in a crone-aged Athena is formidable force for change.
MORE TIME TO BE WITH ATHENA
A woman who has not had time to do the reading she has longed to do, or take the courses that she has eyed and circled, or has drawers filled with material for projects she didn’t have time for, looks forward to having an empty nest as a time to liberate Athena. A pre—women’s movement Athena may have been expected to go to college, but she was not expected to do anything with her education. She was expected to marry well or sensibly, and if she did and had a comfortable and conventional life, the third phase can be a time of rebirth of an academic Athena.
An Athena warrior in the workplace may look forward to the winding down of her career in order to shift into the side of Athena, symbolized by the spindle rather than the spear. In the second phase of her life, she has lacked time to do all of the domestic projects that she has in mind. Martha Stewart with all of her many house, garden, kitchen, and craft projects combined with her business acumen in creating a corporate empire succeeds at both. Most Athenas focus on one during their productive middle phase and look forward to having time for the other when they are older.
LATE-BLOOMING ATHENA
As late as a century ago in the United States and still in parts of the world, most women received little education or none at all. Although this has changed for the most part in America, there are individual situations in which Athena is not allowed much of a place in the first two phases of a woman’s life: you may have married young and had many children, or come from a family or be in a marriage in which girls and women are not expected to be smart or independent, or you may have been limited in what you could do by poverty or a disability. A late-blooming Athena can then flourish only after circumstances change—and by then, you may be a crone-aged woman.
For the first time in your life, you may discover the exciting world of the mind and be able to take courses in subjects that fascinate you, or find that you can hold your own in a discussion group, a classroom, or the Internet. Or as a widow, you may discover that you have a head for business or for investments. Or you may take up a craft and find that you have a natural talent for it, and become absorbed in learning and creating. There is a joy in being able to pursue intellectual interests and learn things for the love of it. A late-blooming Athena archetype is then born, full-grown, out of your own head.