The Dark Goddess as
Initiator: Reading into
Fairy Tale and Myth
Jane Meredith
In myths and fairy stories, the Dark Goddess and her counterparts—the wicked witch, the evil stepmother, Baba Yaga, or the thirteenth fairy—are terrifying. The Dark Goddess deals in death and fear, in curses and murderous intent. Often her actions and motivations come from a place of illogic; she is not someone who can be outwitted or outmaneuvered. And the focus of her attention is usually a young woman, even a girl, who is immature and has few resources or skills and little support—someone who has drawn her attention, or has crossed her path unwisely, or needs something from her. On the face of it, you’d assume that the young girl has no chance, not even enough to create a story… but that’s not what happens.
Psyche meeting up with Persephone, Inanna meeting up with Ereshkigal, Gretel with the Witch, Gerda with the Snow Queen, Vasalisa with Baba Yaga, Snow White with the Queen, Sleeping Beauty with the thirteenth fairy… they all triumph. They don’t get eaten or destroyed. They do sometimes die, or go through a state very close to death, but then, with some twist in the story, they return to life. How could that be? Even within the realms of illogic and story-making, these dark-goddess figures are immeasurably more powerful than the girl they set out to destroy—unless something else is happening and that’s not their motivation at all.
So there’s a story underneath the story, and we have been misreading it all this time. A young girl and an older, much more powerful feminine force cross paths, and amid threats of death and destruction the young girl emerges wiser, more mature, empowered, and powerful. As Inanna famously repeats on her way down into the Underworld: What is this?
Our fear of this other—the witch, the Dark Goddess—is so strong that it carries us away, and, like a conjuring trick, while our attention is distracted, the important things are happening elsewhere. We rarely view these stories from the perspective of the older, more powerful female figure. Our eyes are usually on the young and innocent one—that is, a representation of ourselves when we meet Death or a powerful goddess, or inexplicable destruction. We know nothing. We are stuck in a mortal body that is under dire threat. And listening to the story, we assume that viewpoint (of the one who knows nothing) is accurate. But clearly, something is missing from that viewpoint—or else those characters wouldn’t make it through the confrontation.
Let’s look more closely at what actually happens in these stories. There’s a girl or a young woman. Sometimes she sets out on a quest. Sometimes it’s just due to the circumstances of her birth, but in one way or another she comes to the attention of an older, very powerful and usually magical feminine force. This version of the Dark Goddess either presents the girl with a challenge or creates a situation in which she will not be able to succeed, because usually she brings to it no magical powers, little knowledge or wisdom, and few skills or resources. Yet she survives, often due to simply having a good heart. Then the really fascinating part happens: she gains power, a level of power that either sets her free from the challenge or places her on an equal level with her challenger. Could this long list of wicked queens, evil witches, and Dark Goddesses be so collectively unlucky or miscalculate so as to fail every time?
Surely not. What we might take to be a simple moral tale of the triumph of good over evil is more complex, for usually the older,
darker feminine is not destroyed. When we look even more closely, we see that in many of these stories the young girl now has potentially sinister powers of her own; to a certain degree, she has become her opponent. These are stories of youth maturing, of girls turning into women, of initiation into the feminine by the feminine. A young girl becomes a woman by confronting darkness and power—you could say, her own darkness and power—and integrating them into herself. In this way, she wins her heart’s desire. But she is no longer innocent. In accepting the challenge, in succeeding, she has become a version of what she battled against. She has been initiated. She is transformed.
Stepping through the Snow White story night by night at a European Reclaiming WitchCamp, I became aware of this dynamic. As we unfolded the story gradually, it became clear to me that the Queen (Snow White’s stepmother or, in older versions, mother) was providing some kind of initiation for Snow White—a severe one, but traditional in its symbolism—a death-and-rebirth experience. Snow White undergoes three near-death experiences, or four if you include her encounter with the hunter who is ordered by the Queen to kill her. This first encounter with near-death can be seen as the call to initiation, or the warning that the process has begun; it is the only one of her encounters with death where Snow White is not directly confronting the Queen.
The next three times Snow White encounters these death threats, her wits and choices count, to a certain extent. However, in the end, she succumbs to the tricks of the Queen, or to the demands of initiation. She bites into the apple—and what a metaphor that is for initiation—and falls into a death-like sleep. The fairy tale ending of a marriage with a prince can be read as just that, or as a Jungian development of the animus and integration of the self, or as an initiatory transition into queendom; for at the end of the story, Snow White has achieved a parallel state with her persecutor, the Queen. The transition in this story is from a helpless child at the mercy of others, to an adult woman with the friendship and loyalty of the dwarves (almost her own court), to queenship.
This completely changed the story for me and began to remind me of other tales where a powerful feminine character—portrayed as negative or even evil—actually provides the catalyst for the younger female character to find freedom, love, and power through rising to the challenge presented to her; in short, to be offered and to accept the initiation into womanhood. This appears to always involve meeting the powerful deathly feminine force on its own terms, changing or rewriting the terms dictated, and—essentially—integrating some of the power that was initially used against her into her own character and actions.
In the fairy tale of the Snow Queen, young Gerda quests through the seasons of the year in order to find her playmate Kay, whom the Snow Queen has stolen away. By the time Gerda rescues him, melting the splinters of ice that are lodged in his eye and heart with her tears of love, the two have matured from children to become lovers. In this story, Gerda is quite specifically told that she cannot be given any gifts to help vanquish the Snow Queen, that what she has herself (or who she is) must be enough. She risks death at several stages in her journey and in the Snow Queen’s palace. Kay himself had not asked to be rescued—in fact, the opposite—and nearly everyone Gerda meets is determined to delay her indefinitely or dissuade her from continuing her quest. But once again, the Queen has provided an initiation for Gerda that has seen her mature from a girl into a woman.
There are other fairy tales where this role is played by a witch; Hansel and Gretel is one. These stories still have the theme of the young girl’s fascination with the older, powerful feminine (evidenced as the compelling magic of the gingerbread cottage) and the necessity for the heroine to accept the witch’s terms, then thwart her, turn the story around, and take that power to free herself. Gretel escapes the witch by tricking her and pushing her into the oven. She saves Hansel and herself and returns home, where her father has gotten rid of the stepmother who forced the children out into the forest.
This repeated theme, of a powerless girl undergoing an apparently impossible challenge and succeeding—and most especially as a transition into adulthood—looks to me like a meeting with the Dark Goddess.
This repeated theme, of a powerless girl undergoing an apparently impossible challenge and succeeding—and most especially as a transition into adulthood—looks to me like a meeting with the Dark Goddess. Add to that the fact that these queens carry all the powers of the Dark Goddess—life and death (for they are often in the position of mothers, and if not mothers, they are powerful magic practitioners)—as well as a lot of the characteristics that are projected, in our world, onto the dark feminine, or sometimes even just the powerful feminine. It seems to me that these queens are just one step removed from the Dark Goddess and are playing out her role of powerful initiator of the feminine.
After the Sumerian Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, has descended to the Underworld and been slain there by her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, she rises again, reborn and with the powers of life and death integrated within her. This is made apparent both by the retinue of demons that she brings with her from the Underworld and by the fact that she now has the power to send others—first her consort and then his sister—to take her place in the Underworld. In other words, she holds the same powers of life and death as her sister.
In Greek mythology, when Psyche finally submits to undergoing Aphrodite’s impossible tasks to win back her lover, Eros, she is eventually changed by the gods into an immortal, as well as being reunited with her love. But earlier in the tale, when Psyche is avoiding Aphrodite and asking for help from other gods and goddesses, it is made clear to her that the only hope she has is to directly approach the terrifying, all-powerful Aphrodite, who wishes her dead. Aphrodite sends Psyche to Persephone. Once you have come to the attention of the Dark Goddess, there is no other way through than by submitting to the tasks she sets before you, by undergoing her initiation, whatever that may be.
Once you have come to the attention of the Dark Goddess, there is no other way through than by submitting to the tasks she sets before you, by undergoing her initiation, whatever that may be.
Persephone—who becomes Queen of the Underworld—is witnessed in her original descent (and possibly kidnapping, depending on which version of the story you follow) by Hecate, a much older dark queen, crone, or Dark Goddess. Persephone’s challenge involves the direct integration of aspects of the Underworld, in the form of the pomegranate seeds, which may represent simply the food of the Underworld, the powers of rebirth, or her pregnancy by Hades. Once that has occurred, she can move between the upper and lower realms, although she is no longer a child or defined only by being her mother’s daughter. She has taken on the challenge of the Dark Goddess and become Goddess of the Dark Realm, a maiden initiated into queen. Often it is asked why Hecate took no action at Persephone’s descent to save her. I think that here is the answer. She was witnessing, or possibly even facilitating, an initiation.
Somehow these queens, with their dark and terrible powers, are creating initiations for girls into maturity and power. These tales, with their split feminine forces (one young, powerless, and “light” or good, and the other older, powerful, and dark or even evil), can be read as a reintegration of the two sides of the feminine. Beyond the faces of the bright goddess and the Dark Goddess is the face of the one goddess. Beyond the helpless young Snow White and her wicked stepmother is the mature Snow White, free, happy, and a queen in her own right. Beyond each of the polarities of these tales—the young girl facing a life-threatening challenge and the queen who seems to threaten her—is the end of these tales: the main character assuming an adult position in the world and an integration of power and the polarities within her.
What good is it to know this? First, we have to understand what the dark feminine forces are in our own lives. I can easily name menarche, childbirth, and menopause as the traditional blood-related life-and-death moments. But perhaps our knowledge of the dark feminine comes from our relationship to our mother, or simply from being a woman or having a woman’s body. In our society, such things are not ritually integrated and acknowledged as powerful initiators.
In this world of economic imperatives, institutional power, and disconnection from the sacred, the dark feminine is just as likely to manifest in ways such as depression, addiction, physical illness, mental or emotional instability, or being a victim of violence, abuse, or circumstance. There are also periods of vulnerability, grief, and trauma that each of us go through in our lives, plummeting us into realms where we are unrecognizable to ourselves and forced to confront our demons, our despair, and our disconnection from the life we have so carefully constructed.
To apply this learning, we have to say that these huge and frightening forces can be, in fact, initiations. They can be the gateway into power. They can be the raw material for our transition into maturity, the integration of the powerful and mature feminine—in other words, the initiation of the Dark Goddess.
As for how to transition through the initiation by the dark feminine, the stories are very clear on this. Look at Gerda, look at Inanna, look at Psyche or Snow White: not one of these characters will succeed if she does not accept the challenge, a challenge that usually appears to be impossible. Not one of them has a chance of success unless she follows her heart, what she knows to be right, although usually there is little or no confirmation of this in the world around her.
The Dark Goddess, or the wicked queen of the fairy tales, is seen as evil only by our eyes that have been taught to condemn the dark feminine—most particularly, the power of the dark feminine. It is hardly surprising that within a patriarchy, these young (uninitiated) female characters are inevitably drawn to their powerful, older counterparts. This is perhaps even why we require this (often fairly rough) initiation/intervention of the “dark forces.” We are not supported to achieve maturity and power; our culture conspires to keep us youthful, innocent, and powerless.
This wicked queen of many fairy tales, as the Dark Goddess in myths, forces her counterpart into a confrontation that she cannot escape. Although the young girl appears to lose everything, by the end she has gained her heart’s desire, or—put another way—her wholeness and maturity.
It seems that there is no choice but to accept the challenge demanded of you by the dark queen and to follow your heart every step of the way. We can treat the Dark Goddess (or even her presentation in our lives as depression, crisis, or grief) as other and frightening. Or we can follow the storyline and recognize her as the force of the feminine that we are disconnected from and must, at any cost, meet and integrate as our own.
Jane Meredith is an Australian author and ritualist. Her latest book, co-authored with Gede Parma, is Magic of the Iron Pentacle: Reclaiming Sex, Pride, Self, Power & Passion. Her previous books include Circle of Eight: Creating Magic for Your Place on Earth and Journey to the Dark Goddess. Jane is passionate about mythology, magic, dark chocolate, rivers, and trees. She teaches in-person and distance courses and also teaches in the Reclaiming Tradition. Her website is www.janemeredith.com.
Illustrator: Jennifer Hewitson